Quiet-Crazy (6 page)

Harold has hair as yellow and fine as new cornsilks. He also has a face that has been squashed up somehow. Everything is mashed in, his nose, his mouth; his eyes are squinched, and one of his ears is half-missing, reminding me of that van Gogh painting in Aunt Lona's den. He must have been in a wreck or something, or else was born all squashed up. Anyway, when he finally does look up, he sneers at everything—the salt and pepper bottles, sneer, the blue plastic rose sitting in the middle of the table, sneer, the napkin holder, sneer—sniffs them all out just like an old hound dog so he can sneer at them, sneer, sneer, sneer. Maybe that's what happens when your face gets all squashed in: you have to go around sneering at everything.

Mrs. Krieger doesn't seem to see Harold's sneering. She looks too polite to see it. She holds herself so proper that even the sling on her arm seems befitting, as if she just came into the world that way. Mrs. Krieger looks as if nothing ever in this world would disturb her, or if it did, she would eye it momentarily and then go on her calm way.

“And where are you from?” Mrs. Krieger asks just about the time I get my mouth good and full of steak.

I get a gulp of iced tea to help me swallow it down real quick, and then I say, “Littleton.”

“Littleton?” she repeats, as if it's a foreign country.

“It's up in the mountains.”

“You're a long way from home,” she says.

I nod. I can never talk much while I'm eating. I like to concentrate on what's in my mouth, using all my sensibilities to taste the food, to see how, for instance, the country-fried steak chews up into little round pebbles of beef, no bigger than pinheads. And the whole-kernel corn, eat a forkful of it, and it feels like a mouthful of loose teeth you got in there. Then put behind that a swab of mashed potatoes and let them lay on your tongue and they just melt away into nothingness. What all this does is let you get a feel for what your food really tastes like. Sometimes it's a treat for your tastebuds, making them come alive and tingle. Sometimes it's not. Like these tastes today, although the food looks good, it turns out to be nothing special to the tastebuds. But that's just the chance you have to take in chewing on your food real good, like me taking a chance on coming down to Nathan. And I wonder whether I'll come alive and tingle or if I'll just melt away into nothingness.

“I'm from Blacksburg, just a few miles down the road,” Mrs. Krieger says, making polite conversation, the kind I
don't like because it stops dead end with me. I like talk that goes somewhere, the kind Caldwell and I do when I go over to his house next door. Caldwell and me, we talk about everything under the sun and on top of it, too, and although we don't even agree on most things, at least we'll hear each other out.

I'm going to miss Caldwell more than I miss anyone, besides Aunt Lona. Caldwell keeps getting more and more feeble even though he's no older than I am, and sits in a wheelchair all day because he got polio when he was a child. He says it's the Lord's will that he got struck down like this. I say it's because his mama didn't get him a polio shot. Then he just squirms around in his chair and says in his long, drawn-out talk, “Well-1-1, you know, now, that was the Lord's will, too, you know.” I like Caldwell an awful lot, even if he does blame everything on the Lord. He just got that honest, from his parents, like everybody else in Littleton.

Before I'm even halfway finished eating, everyone else is already through and beginning to drift out when I look around and see what must be “the Jewel.” Lord, she's something to behold, with that dark complexion, that kind of skin just like Mama is always looking long and hard at, “admiring,” she says, and there're her brown-black eyes big and round as a heifer's, and her crowning glory—a long, sleek, brown ponytail swishing back and forth, the shiny mane just brushing the top of her rump. Her golden earrings, little
round circles clamped on her ears, look like they came with her when she was born.

The Jewel doesn't look at anyone or anything as she saunters, carrying her tray over to the food wagon. She walks as if she's been trained how to step, just like cattle at a judging show at the county fair. Just like maybe her mother raised her using one of those long sticks with a nail in the end of it, punching at her feet when she veered out of step. She looks as unconcerned as the cattle, too, like there's no one around here except her and she's enough. I wonder if she ever earned any blue ribbons for her mama.

Blue-ribbon girl. That was my trademark growing up, I won so many blue ribbons for Mama, mostly on dresses at the county fair, dresses she made from scratch drawing up her own patterns. And if modeling at the fair was not enough, I had to practice prissing around in front of Daddy, too.

“Turn around, Lizabeth, and let your daddy see you in the back,” she'd say. And that was okay up until I was about ten, but when I got to be twelve or thirteen and was still turning around in front of Daddy, I couldn't help it, my shoulders curled around, my bottom squeezed together, my legs turned stiff.

I think even Daddy got to feeling uncomfortable too, taking on over me, or the dress, or Mama, whatever it was he's supposed to be taking on over. So he got to where he
didn't say much of anything, just kind of nodded his head and mumbled, “Um-huh, pretty.”

“Well! Who needs your approval to get a blue ribbon, anyway?” Mama would sass, never once coming anywhere near thinking that maybe Daddy was as embarrassed as much as I was. All Mama was concerned with was adding another ribbon to the wall in the den. At least, I think that was all. Even though sometimes I had this queer feeling that somehow she took some sort of pleasure in showing me off, like maybe, heck, I don't know, like maybe it was like she was showing her own self off, and it did her some kind of good that I couldn't never figure out. Anyway, she liked to get blue ribbons on other things, too, not just me. The wall, it's covered up not only with her ribbons, but mine, too. You see, I had to get blue ribbons on my own projects, too, whether they were canned peaches, crocheted doilies, or lap quilts. I had to because Mama said.

Winning blue ribbons is okay, I guess, but where do you stop once you get started? In school, you have to make all A's, in piano you have to practice so much that you're the one picked to go to district competition, and in church you have to act so God-fearing that you're the young person chosen most Christlike for the year. There's just no end to the competition once you start. It hangs on, following you everywhere, even to Ward Eight, where I'm wondering who
on this floor will turn out better than any other person in this division. If we all stood up on the display shelves at the county fair to be judged, who would receive the blue ribbon for being the least crazy? It's a good thing Mama's not here. She might not fare too well in this contest.

Poor Alice isn't doing too well in this contest, either. Alice, who was just fine during lunch turns into something else altogether along about the middle of the afternoon.

After lunch everybody heads down the hallway toward a room at the end of the hall to something called the “wreck room.” At least I thought it was called that, because, maybe, shoot, I don't know, maybe because it's where wrecks of people go. But then I find out it is really the recreation room, and people are just calling it “rec” room for short. At least it's good to know I'm not a total wreck.

But here we all are, most of us, anyway, some playing Ping-Pong, some huddled around the TV, some looking at magazines, and some playing cards. When that Jewel Mavis comes strolling in on the scene with her guitar, she is walking just like everybody should stop in their tracks and listen to her strum on that thing, so that's what we all do. When she starts up, everybody's eyes and ears are glued to the Jewel.

“Play ‘Amazing Grace,'” Miss Cannon hollers out, even before Mavis gets started good.

Mavis bends her head slightly toward her guitar and begins
to strum, and although it's not “Amazing Grace,” it's amazing, all right. She plucks those strings so soft and light it sounds more like a harp than a guitar, and she looks just like something celestial sitting there among all of us lesser people.

“Play ‘Bringing in the Georgia Mail,'” hollers James Freedman, who's playing a game of checkers with Miss Cannon.

But the Jewel never lets on like she hears a word. She just sits there and keeps playing on and on, her song going on forever, up and down and all around, like one note chasing another and never quite catching up with it. If she were playing that on the piano, it would sound most definitely like Bach. But do guitar players play Bach, too? I don't know. I'll have to be sure and ask Aunt Lona.

“Play something we know,” says Alice, and then it happens. She starts screaming and crying something awful.

“Oh, Lord, God, no!” she wails. “Not again, Jesus Christ, so soon? No, no, please, dear Lord, not again, don't do it to me again!”

And she keeps on wailing and screaming so, that, before long, Orange Nurse and two other nurses besides come running into the rec room.

“Oh, Lord, God, please give me back my eyes, sweet Jesus, don't take 'em away again, don't you know I can't see
this way?” Alice wails, flinging and flailing her arms every which way.

Alice, poor Alice, is sitting right across from me on a green couch exactly like the one I'm sitting on, and I look at her eyes to see if they're still there, and of course, you know, they are. But it pains me something awful when I see this glazed look come over her brown eyes, like a skim of milky wax, and she is looking everywhere, but seeing nothing.

“Look, Elizabeth. Look here. See? Here.”

Harold, who's sitting next to me, acts like there is nothing going on, nothing whatsoever in this world, and looking around, myself, I see that everybody else is acting about the same way. Mavis does stop her guitar playing for the time being, like she's stopping out of respect, like the way traffic stops when a funeral procession comes poking along down the road.

I move over a little closer to Harold, within talking distance, and I say, “Harold, whatever is wrong with Alice? What's going on here?”

After he gets through sneering at having to talk to me, Harold says, “Aw, she just goes blind every now and then. That's all.”

“Alice, Alice!” Orange Nurse says. “You don't want to go back into the lock-up ward, do you now?”

But Alice isn't even hearing her, nor hearing the other
nurses either, pleading with her to stop the wailing and crying and to settle herself down.

“Remember you said last time you weren't going to get all upset if it happened again, remember?” says Orange Nurse.

But Alice has gone beyond their calling, and no amount of talking and pleading can call her back. Poor Alice is definitely “out of control.” I know that when one of the nurses says, “Okay, girls, back in she goes.”

Lesson number one. Don't ever scream and wail and cry while you're here at Nathan. No matter what. No matter if all of a sudden without warning you go blind. What you do in that case, I suppose, is calmly feel your way to the nurses' station and say in the most controlled way possible, “I thought you all might like to know I just went blind.”

Mavis starts up her guitar note-chasing again, and that helps to get my mind off Alice. Mavis does have a calming way of playing, I'll have to admit, even if she does act like she's better than everybody else here. She must have the “soft touch.” That's what everybody at church says I have on the piano—“the softest touch of all.” I never knew, though, exactly what they meant until I heard Mavis playing with the soft touch, although I knew they were trying to pay me a compliment. But for some reason, I never do like hearing them tell me about soft touches, especially telling me that I have one, even though they are trying to be nice. I decide, then, to pass along the compliment to Mavis.

“Mavis,” I call out, when she has stopped her song, “you have the softest touch of all.”

Mavis stands up with her guitar, stares at me with those brown eyes clinging to me and piercing into me, as if I'd said something dirty as mud, then strolls out of the rec room, just as casually as she strolled in, not once ever looking back. Maybe she's like Lot's wife. Maybe she's afraid she'd be turned into a pillar of salt, if she looked back, I don't know. But if anybody asked me, and they probably won't, I think she is pretty salty already, the way she acts and all.

I decide that since it's turned out to be such an outrageous afternoon, what with Alice and all, that I'll go to my room and take a nap. It's way past time, considering that napping is all I know lately. So I head on down to Room 807 to crawl in the bed and cover myself up.

No sooner do I have myself tucked under my cover than here comes in Orange Nurse.

“Sorry, dear, we can't be lying around in bed in the daytime.”

“But I'm just going to take a short nap,” I say.

“House rules,” says Orange Nurse. “We don't take naps on Ward Eight. Doctors' orders.”

“But I've a headache,” I lie, thinking a head that's in pain would surely entitle one to a short nap.

“You want something for your head?” says Orange Nurse. “I'll ask your doctor if you may have something.”

“No, no,” I say, “it'll be okay after a while. I just need to be by myself for a while.”

“Get out and socialize,” says Orange Nurse. “Interact with people. That's what you're here for.”

“It is?” I say, a little bit surprised that I've come all the way to Nathan just to socialize with folks. Shoot, I could do that back home in Littleton, if I wanted to. Although I never seem to want to.

“Have you been to the other rec room?” she asks, as if there's something I might be missing.

“What other rec room?”