Quiet-Crazy (23 page)

“Heavens, no! I've never loved anyone in a sexual sense.”

“Do you want to love a woman?”

“In that sexual way?” Even though I have asked myself that question a million times, and answered it a million times, I still have to stop and think about it. “No, not in the sexual way. I just want to like women and it be okay. And me not have to worry about liking them. And not be afraid to like them.”

“Why is it not okay for you to like them, Elizabeth?”

“Because I just always wonder if they're going to end up wanting me to suck on their breasts, I guess, hell, I don't know.”

A time of silence falls down upon us, and I decide that for
once I, Elizabeth, will be the one to wait 'til Eternity passes before anyone speaks. So I do.

“What about your Aunt Lona? Can you like her okay?”

“Aunt Lona, my goodness. Aunt Lona is my saving grace, if there ever were any grace in my life. I can love Aunt Lona fine, just fine and normal, and it's all right with her. And I do.”

“Does that prove that you can like other women, too, and it's all right?”

“Sure it does,” I say with no hesitation at all. “Sure.” Now, why didn't I think of that? Just once in all these years, why didn't I think of loving Aunt Lona and it being all right?

“Thank you, Dr. Shaver. Thank you. Why, why, hadn't I thought of my normal way of loving Aunt Lona? God, it feels so . . . so . . . what am I trying to say . . . so . . . free! Yes! Free, free, free-e-e-, it's feeling so free, like uh bird in uh tree. Oh, I'm just thinking about my freedom song. You know Elvis? That's my song. You probably think I'm crazy. But I'm not. I'm just feeling free. That's all. But except for one thing . . . those women at the fair with these scanty clothes on, and Mary Jane Payne . . . why do they make me feel excited?”

“I'd say that's a pretty normal feeling. Anyone dressed sexually provocative is trying to do just that—get you to feeling aroused. Aren't they? Mary Jane Payne is your friend, right?”

“Sort of. Well, yes. I always wouldn't let myself admit it, too much, though.”

“Why not?”

“Same old thing. Afraid to like a woman, I guess. But maybe it'll be easier now that she got saved. Maybe she'll be dressing different. For a while anyway. Shoot, maybe I'll be dressing different,” I said, laughing. “Who knows. Maybe I'll wear short shorts and a halter top with my cleavage pushing out. Ha,
what
cleavage, you say? But that's all right for you to be thinking that, because I think it, too, so that's all right.”

“Elizabeth, you've apparently managed to stay quite healthy, sexually, in spite of all you've been through,” and he sweeps his hand away from my chart, as if my whole life is an open book that he's just read.

“Me? Sexually healthy? I've never had healthy sex in my whole life, so how can you say something like that?”

“It's your attitude. You've managed to keep a healthy attitude and a sense of humor, somehow. You have every right to hold your head high. You're a beautiful young woman, you know?”

That, I can't answer. Beautiful? I, Elizabeth, beautiful? I mean, where? How? But I don't press the issue. I just want to relish the thought, I, Elizabeth, beautiful. It makes me almost love Dr. Shaver, even though I still don't like him all that much. But loving him is a long shot. A far long shot. I
just don't think I can love anyone the way I love Dr. Adams, beautiful Dr. Adams.

“I know this has been draining on you, Elizabeth, so we'll close up shop today. But we still will need to talk about this thing with your mother, explore it a little more. Maybe try to get your mother down here, too.”

“Dr. Shaver,” I say firm and true, “I can tell you right now, my mama won't come down, and besides that, I've already done all the exploring on it I care to do. Actually, a little bit more than I care to do, since I went ahead and talked about it anyway. Like I say, I'm ready to put it away and move on. And I mean that. I thought I wasn't to blame; I thought it was okay to like, even love, other women. I just needed to hear it from someone else. That's all. I'm done. It is finished.”

“You sound like you mean that,” Dr. Shaver says, looking at me in a new way, not with the piercing, staring, Mama-eyes that he had before. So, here is the last person in the world I thought I would've told anything to, but I went and told him the one thing I couldn't tell anybody. I start to ask him if he works for the FBI, but I think the real Elizabeth would, or should, be serious about this. But isn't that the real Elizabeth? Being funny, slightly sarcastic at times?

Since neither of us is talking, and it seems he is playing the waiting game for me to start, I finally say, “Do you work for the FBI, or something?” And I halfway laugh when I
say it, so he can see I am joking, since he doesn't know me too well.

He halfway laughs, too. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you have this way of making me keep on talking when I tell you I don't want to talk about it. That's real good, you know, for a . . . for a 'shrink' to be able to do that? I hope I can do that someday.”

“You have a good place to start,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“At home.”

“But she won't talk with me. Not like I'd want her to talk with me. She won't say what she really, truly feels.”

“In that case, you just have to do the best you can.”

“And I did. When I was home. I did. But . . . I'll just have to do better, won't I? I'll just have to learn to say to Mama what I really and truly feel and learn, maybe, to say it in a way that will help her say what she feels. But not just her, Dr. Shaver. I have to try to get other people to talking, too. Not just Mama.”

“Then you might enjoy being a shrink,” he says, getting up from his chair, a signal that he is ready to go, that this is all over. “Where are you thinking about going?”

“To the state university,” I say.

“That's a good school,” he says, opening the door, so I can go on out. “I'm sure you'll enjoy it.”

I found out Miss Hansom went to the state university. “If
you like a lot of partying and sororities and the rah-rah-rah of football games, then you should go to a big university,” she says. “But if you don't care for all that, you might want a smaller college.”

Never being one to party and to go to football games in high school, I probably won't be any different in college, but the idea of going to a big university sounds good to me. Big is opposite to Littleton, and anything opposite Littleton is what I want. I won't be partying anyway, I will be studying and working and getting people to talking. So it doesn't matter.

I want so to be telling all this to Dr. Adams. But Dr. Adams is gone for good, except he drops by every now and then to say, “Hello,” or to play a game of Ping-Pong, if he has the time. I'm getting so good at Ping-Pong, I actually beat him sometimes, and I feel ridiculous for feeling good about myself just because I've learned to play Ping-Pong. But I don't feel ridiculous learning all the dances—waltzes and rhumbas and fox-trots and the two-step. Who knows, dancing might come in handy, if I do ever make it to a party in college.

One Saturday night when Dr. Adams is on duty, he joins us for dancing. Mr. Fleet puts on “Hernando's Hideaway,” about a dark, secluded place, a place where no one knows your face, and we start off, Dr. Adams and I—do, doomp . . . do, doomp . . . do, doomp, doomp, doomp! Do, doomp . . . do doomp . . . do doomp, doomp, doomp!
And Dr. Adams can outdance any one of us there, except for Mr. Fleet of course. But ah, dancing with Dr. Adams is like really heavenly, him so smooth and moving around so free and graceful through all the steps, turning me this way and that. I fall in love with him more and more. Even if he is gone from the floor, and even if I am leaving soon, I can't help it. It just makes me feel so . . . I don't know, so alive, moving my body around so carefree and easy. For the first time, ever, I truly feel my heavy body turning light, as if it were about to drop away from the wings of Angela that have weighed me down all these years, and I feel me starting to sprout a new pair of wings and take flight away from all that has been pressing me down forever, so that I am feeling “free, free, free-e-e-e . . . so free . . . like a bird in the tree.”

After dancing with Dr. Adams and feeling so free with him, I can't help wondering what there is about Dr. Shaver that just turns off my lightness in one way, but that in another way just opens me up. Now I know this sounds selfish, but I don't care for him because I can't see myself too good when I am talking with Dr. Shaver. Talking with Dr. Adams is almost like looking into a mirror and seeing Elizabeth reflected back. So I am always looking at myself with Dr. Adams, looking this way and that and deciding if I am being the way I want to be and if not, then I can change the way I am. A mirror. That's what Dr. Adams is for me. A
mirror that reflects the Elizabeth I want to see, and now that my mirror is gone, how will I ever get to see myself again?

On the other hand, I can't go around looking in a mirror for the rest of my life just to make sure I am here. Because now I know that I, Elizabeth, I am here. Or there. Or wherever I am or happen to be. Maybe what I need now are windows to look through and see out of, and maybe Dr. Shaver is more like a window, one that maybe I can even open up and just fly on my new sprouted wings, fly away out through the window, fly, mind you, like a bird, free, like I have those kind of wings that fly, not angel wings, the kind that just float and go nowhere. I, Elizabeth, have to go
somewhere.

Miss Hansom is a little like a mirror, but she is more like a mirror in a woman's compact that she keeps in her purse and pulls out to check her makeup and primp a little bit, whereas Dr. Adams is like a full-length mirror, and I can see almost into any and every corner of me that I want to look at. And I mean every corner, because at night, and I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but at night after I go to bed, I sometimes have these visions in my head of me and Dr. Adams. I'll just take the picture of Sheriff Tate in the cemetery and put Dr. Adams in his place, and I don't mind Dr. Adams feeling around on me; in fact I love it so much I'm soon into loving myself.

So, even though my mirror is gone, I still sometimes need to have these visions of myself. Does that mean I am vain,
that I want so much to see myself in someone else? Does that mean I am such a little person that I need someone else to hold myself up to so I can see that I exist in this world? Why can't I look at my long, slim fingers as they curve around the piano keys and see that at least I have hands, and if hands, then a body, and if a body, then surely I exist. I was who I was. I am who I am. God all over again. Well, if that's good enough for God to have to keep declaring that He is who He is, then it's good enough for me. Next time Dr. Shaver asks who is Elizabeth, Elizabeth's going to be “I am who I am,” me, Elizabeth Miller, pressed down for good measure but running over the brim at the same time. No, full up and running over, except not crying all the time like poor Belinda, but full up with living and just being Elizabeth. I am who I am. Amen.

And I say double amen to Miss Hansom's idea on Saturday morning to take some of us on a “shopping excursion,” as she calls it. “Elizabeth,” she says to me, when we are down at the drugstore, “have you ever thought about using a little touch of makeup on your face?”

“Lord, have I,” I say. “How many times is more the question.”

“Then why don't we get some and fix you up?” she says, as if she is at a banquet table waiting for the feast to begin. “Wouldn't that be fun to see what you look like with a little makeup on?”

What can I say? No, my mama wouldn't like that? Not to peachy Miss Hansom. Not to anyone really. No, I can't say I don't wear any makeup because Mama and the people at Littleton church where I go believe makeup is a temptation of the devil. It sounds so ridiculous for me to be thinking it, that I know I could never say it, and if it sounds so ridiculous thinking it, why I shouldn't even think it at all, should I? So I say, “Sure. Why not?”

My money that Daddy gave me when I went home is about to run out, and I have to save some of it back. Why? Just habit, I guess. You just always save some of your money since you never know when a dire emergency might come up. So, all I can get is a lipstick and a pencil for my eyebrows. But I know Miss Hansom is talking about the whole shebang—powder, blushing stick, fingernail polish—everything. So on Monday she brings some extra makeup she had on hand at home, she says, some that she couldn't use anymore, and before I know it, we are in the bathroom at the mirror drawing me on eyebrows, spreading on clear ivory liquid makeup, pressing on powder, then blush, then some strawberry polka lipstick.

“You look absolutely fetching!” she raves, and even though I like Miss Hansom an awful lot, I know that she can spread on the sugar at times, and this is one of those times. “Well?” she says, as if waiting for me to say something
about my new look. So what can I say when I think I look a little bit clownish. Something safe. That's what Elizabeth would say to someone she likes as much as Miss Hansom, something safe. So I say, “That's really different, isn't it?” And of course she takes it for a compliment on her way of making me up, because she has fixed me the same way she fixes herself, which is thick and heavy.

“That's the fun thing about makeup,” she says, “you can experiment. Do it different anytime you want and anyway you want. So here,” she says, handing over her makeup case to me, “have fun with it.” Then she gets up real close to squinch her eyes at my eyebrows. “I'm trying to decide if you need some plucking, but no, I don't think so. Lucky you. You have hardly any strays, and they're so light, you can't see them anyway. No. I wouldn't pluck, if I were you.”