Quiet-Crazy (3 page)

“Daddy, you know and I know, too, she'll just keep on being sick. From now till kingdom come.”

Daddy pulls out another flat from under the table, slaps it down on the tabletop, and starts filling it up with more petunias. Daddy doesn't mind me going to Nathan, no matter what size fit Mama pitched when she told him. “If it'll help her, then, so what?” he told her.

Remembering back on that, I say, “Daddy, can't you make her see it's not a crazy house I'm going off to? Can't you? Can't you make her see that I,
myself,
am not crazy, no matter what folks say about Nathan?”

“You know your mother sees what she wants to see. You know that by now.”

Not “see,” Daddy, no, no, please, not “see.” “Understand.” That's what I want. Not “see,” not “look.”
“See? Look, Elizabeth, baby. See?”

I start to ask Daddy to at least try, try and make her understand, but about that time old Sheriff Tate pulls up in the drive. I look at Daddy, who's peering over the rim of his glasses in puzzlement, and it looks like he's thinking the exact same thing I'm thinking: What in God A'mighty's name is the Littleton County law enforcement car doing in our yard?

M
ama says she hated to have to do it, send for Sheriff Tate, but that she's so sick and besides, she says, it's one of his jobs, carrying people off to Nathan.

Mama is still hunched up under the covers and, looking down at her body, for the first time in weeks my body feels something. I think it's disgust. Pure and simple disgust. And how am I to show this disgust when I can't show anything. But I decide to try.

“Mama,” I say, standing at the foot of her bed and searching all around inside me into every corner of my being to bring out even a tiny bit of this disgust. “Mama, I don't need to be carried off. You didn't have to send for Sheriff Tate.” But there was no disgust anywhere to be heard. Just politeness. Sweetness. Bland as cream gravy and biscuits.

Mama turns over onto her back, stretches, and her arms form a V-shape alongside her head, as if she's about to be
crucified. “Why, I did it for you,” she drawls, “for you, Elizabeth.”

For me. My body goes back to numb, to nothingness. Just like Mama, only she's stretched out on her cross in numb nothingness and I'm up trotting around. I turn to go get Daddy's brown army satchel—of course, Mama wouldn't hear of me going out and buying a real piece of luggage—but Mama stops me before I can get away.

“Elizabeth,” she says, propping up on one arm to look at me squarely. “You know, don't you, what a bad reflection this is gonna be on your daddy and me.”

Just like eleventy-eleven other times with Mama, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, and although right now I feel crying coming on I won't let Mama have the pleasure of seeing it. And it is her pleasure, believe me. When she can keep on torturing me long enough that I set in to crying, it's like she's finished then, the battle's over, and she's satisfied that she's come out on top. So this time, instead of crying, I laugh. Hard. Long. Maybe it's a looney laugh, I don't know, don't care. But I laugh. And when I'm through I say, “Bad reflection, Mama? Bad reflection? So, that's what's bothering you? But just think, Mama, if I'm a reflection, then you have to be looking in a mirror, don't you? And while you're looking, Mama, see if you can figure out just who it was raised this bad reflection?”

Mama rolls over, turns her back on me, and pulls the spread up. She lies buried under the covers, sleeping it off.
Is that why Mama sleeps so much, too? Because of what she did?
So, which is worse, I wonder, being carried off and put away at Nathan, or holing up here in this bedroom? I wish, now, that I had let Aunt Lona take me, like she wanted to do. But when I found out she had a countywide teachers' meeting this afternoon and that she was in charge of it, I said, “No way. Mama can do it.” Besides, I didn't want Mama getting mad at Aunt Lona for having the least thing to do with “putting me away.”

You'd think someone would like their husband's own sister enough to at least be decently friendly to them, but not Mama.

“Your Aunt Lona, she puts on airs, thinks she's better than anyone else around here.” Mama manages to say that at least once a week, just in case I forget.

If acting proper and with manners and using the English language correctly is putting on airs, then, yes, I guess Aunt Lona puts on airs. But if it weren't for Aunt Lona, I'd probably be worse off than I am. Aunt Lona's the one who suggested I go for a checkup in the first place. Ever since that Saturday night a couple of months back, when she told me about this little girl at her school who had to be taken away from her parents and put in a foster home because the daddy
was abusing her, I've felt the worst I ever felt in my whole life. I could tell after that night that something was coming over me, because I kept getting these pictures in my mind of back when all that was going on, but I could only see one or two pictures in my mind, like my mind wouldn't let me see any more, or maybe, I thought in the beginning, I didn't want to see any more. Anyway, Aunt Lona thought I was getting worse and worse. And she tried, Lord knows she tried, to get me to talk about what was on my mind. But I just couldn't. I tried several times in the past few weeks, I tried to start to tell her about it all, but I just couldn't. So, finally, I reckon because she got so concerned about me getting lower and lower, she went to old Dr. Hardy even before I ever went in to see him, to tell him how things are with Mama and me. Well, as much as she knows anyway.

Of course, Mama hit the ceiling when Aunt Lona came over to tell us she'd set up an appointment for me to see Dr. Hardy.

“Doctor?” Mama shrieked to Aunt Lona. “Why, there ain't nothing wrong with Elizabeth, 'cept she don't go to church anymore, and you know what happens when folks leave out the Lord, all that does is make room for the Devil.”

“Vera, if something weren't bad wrong with Beth, she wouldn't be lying in this bed day after day,” Aunt Lona said.

Talk about ridiculous. That was me. There I was, supposed
to be a grown-up woman, hiding under the covers, listening to my mama and my aunt going back and forth, debating on whether something was wrong with me. If I could have talked, I would have said, “Yes, Mama, can't you see something's wrong, terribly wrong?” And I would have said to Aunt Lona, “Yes, there's something wrong, terribly wrong, and thank you so much for looking out for me when I can't look out for myself.”

Of course, Mama said there'd be no going to Dr. Hardy. But Aunt Lona, bless her heart, just said, “Well, I'll come and take her myself, if I have to. But Beth is going to the doctor.”

That's when Mama told Aunt Lona she wasn't about to let anybody talk to her that way and in her own house besides, and just to get out of her house and never come back. And Aunt Lona said, “Don't worry, Vera. I won't be back. Unless it's to get Beth.”

I know Mama is jealous in every way of Aunt Lona because she's so . . . well, normal, I suppose that's it. I think she must be the most normal person I know. You see, she takes care of herself so good in every way. Plus, she looks a sight better than Mama. She has this long, flaming red hair that she wraps around her head, and she wears makeup, which Mama says is of the Devil and won't have any part of, nor allow me to either. Aunt Lona also has a man friend. Not
from here in Littleton, but from over in Mabley. He's not somebody she would marry. She's not into marrying. But he is someone to have “good times” with, she says.

Going to Aunt Lona's for my piano lesson is the highlight of my week, although she says I know about as much as she does by now, and she doesn't know what else she can teach me. But there's a whole lot to learn besides piano lessons, and Aunt Lona knows that too. She's always telling me I should go on to college, no matter my age, no matter what Mama says about needing me at home. She confirmed, too, what I thought I had figured out about Angela's birth date and Mama and Daddy's marriage date. According to the dates in the family Bible, Angela was born only six months after Mama and Daddy got married.

“Was she premature?” I asked Aunt Lona, back when I got old enough to talk about such things.

“Beth,” she said, “it's probably none of my business to be telling you this, but no, she wasn't. She weighed a full six pounds, then some.”

A few months back, I brought the subject up again, just after I'd finished the long version of “Moonlight Sonata.” We were sitting in Aunt Lona's den that's got wall-to-wall books, and we started talking, again, about why Mama is the way she is.

“Well, Beth,” said Aunt Lona, “you know, I think your mama feels it was a great sin, getting pregnant before marrying
and, knowing the way your mama thinks about things, I've just often wondered if she feels that God took Angela away from her because of that and she thinks she has to suffer in repentance from now on. Maybe I'm wrong, but I sometimes wonder that, anyway.”

“But Aunt Lona, it wasn't God who took her away. It was an accident. Sure, Mama couldn't see her behind the car, so maybe Mama thinks she was careless in backing out of the garage, and it was all her fault, but it was still an accident.”

“Well, you know how some people enjoy suffering. It seems they've nothing more exciting in their lives to do, so they play out their role of suffering in a grand way and become martyrs. Maybe it's the only thing they think they can do well.”

“If that's the case,” I said, “if Mama wants to keep on suffering forever, fine and good, but that doesn't mean I have to suffer along with her.”

“Now, you're getting somewhere. Finally!” Aunt Lona said, laughing and raising her hands like she was winning some kind of victory.

So is this, now, the result of the victory? Standing in my bedroom listening to Sheriff Tate honking his horn? Mama's not the only one who needs the magnesia this morning. My insides are rustling, even cramping, so bad that I start just to go back to bed and stay there forever, because I know the minute I step into that law enforcement car, I'll be admitting
guilt not only to Mama, but to everybody else here in Littleton of going wild-crazy. So, I ask myself which is worse, being this wildflower woman, this half-woman, half-child, and trying to please Mama and be like Angela for the rest of my life, or having everybody think I've cracked up. I decide it's six of one and half a dozen of the other.

If it had been any other sheriff in the country besides Sheriff Tate come to get me, maybe I wouldn't dread so that ride. I never have liked him, although Mama thinks he's God's gift to the world, and he thinks he's God's gift to the women. Daddy says the only reason he's in office is because the women in the county voted him in. If they knew, he said, what Sheriff Tate was really like, they would have no part of him. But then, again, he says, maybe the women really do know what he's like and that's why they voted him in.

Mama likes him because he gets up in church on Sunday morning and leads the singing. And that's exactly why I don't like him. One reason anyway, because he always looks real hard at me on Sunday mornings, just looks at me sitting there in the front row and then with a slight nod, as if it's just me and him in the whole church and nobody else is around to see it, he commands me to go play the piano, as if I am at his beck and call. I also don't like the way he sings—slow as cream rising on buttermilk. Me, I like to pick the songs up a little, like we have some spirit about us, but he keeps on walling his eyes around at me after nearly every stanza
and saying, “Now, let's slow this down a bit this time.” So we end up singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow” like God was dipping his blessings out teaspoon by teaspoon instead of letting them flow out like the song says.

I tried a little while back not going when Sheriff Tate called me, no matter if he did look at me for eternity, while I just sat there thinking he could get Mr. Palmer to play, and he did. I thought Mr. Palmer did quite well, considering how old he was and how long it had been since he had played. Anyway, Mr. Palmer plays more in the creep-along style that Sheriff Tate likes. But Mama had one of her fits once we got home.

“What do you mean, child, sitting there like a bump on a log?” she raged. “Don't you never act that way again, you hear? Never! No telling what Sheriff Tate thought of you!”

I wonder now, as I climb into the backseat of the law enforcement car, what Mama would think of Sheriff Tate, if she knew what he had tried to do to me out at the graveyard one Sunday afternoon. I had gone out for Mama to carry a fistful of violets to put on Angela's grave, when he drove up all rared back looking real proud in that shiny, brown car that has
LITTLETON COUNTY SHERIFF
in gold letters on its sides.

All he had wanted to do, he said, after he saw he wasn't getting anywhere with me, after I streaked my fingernails down across his old face, after I kicked him in the shins about four times, all he wanted to do, he said, was to show
me a few things. I told him that nice girls don't go around letting old men claw them all over, but he said, “You ain't no girl, Lizzy-buth. You a woman and it's time you's acting like one. Flittin' 'round here so sweet and childlike, you ain't foolin' nobody, you know, at least not me, you ain't. Why, you're burning hot inside, you know that. You got the fires of a woman eat up with desire.”

Well, I know it's time I was acting like a woman, and I also know I got fires in me, but they're sure as heck not burning for Sheriff Tate, and right now they're fires of a different color, for when the sheriff says to Daddy, “Don't you worry none, I'll take go-o-od care of Lizzy-buth,” the way he says it makes me shudder, and I wonder what else I could have done rather than let Mama run the whole show. That's what I'll be, and I can just see it now, a show that the whole town of Littleton will be talking about. “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, get your tickets here to see the crazy lady. She talks, but not normal, she sings, although looney, she laughs like a wild woman, she cries. . ..”