Quiet-Crazy

by Joyce Durham Barrett

  “You need the magnesia, Mama?” I say again, a little crankier.

  Mama frowns at my crankiness. “Can’t you talk better than that, Elizabeth? That sounds ugly. Can’t you talk better to your mama?”

  I look at the clock pendulum spinning around, and I want to say, “No, Mama, sometimes I want to talk ugly to you.” But I don’t say that because it would hurt Mama bad. And like Mama always says, she’s been hurt enough. Still hurting. After all these years, thirty-four years since Angela died, she’s still hurting.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I’ll get the magnesia.”

  There’s just a tad left in the blue glass bottle, a bottle the blue of the morning glories flowering up Daddy’s garden. She goes through two or three blue bottles a week, drinks them up like someone on hard liquor. Then she goes and sticks them head-down in the ground out beside the walkway where she’s made a five-inch high fence of blue magnesia bottles. She’s circled the pansy and the petunia beds already with the bottles, and now she’s planning to line the walkway up one side and down the other.

  Me, I wouldn’t be showing off that I’d drunk so much of that stuff. But Mama doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, sometimes she acts almost downright proud of it, like it’s some kind of banner she’s showing off to the world, showing everyone how much she’s suffering. Me, I figure I don’t need to show anybody how I feel. All they have to do is look at me. Look. See? It’s like I’m a piece of clear glass, with just a hint of rose color for the embarrassment part, and all they have to do is look. Look and see straight through me and see it all. Whether I ever tell anybody or not. They know. They know about it.

  But Mama, it seems, has to show off her suffering. Just like she shows off Angela’s clothes, the ones she was wearing when Mama backed over her in the car. There’s hardly anything left of them but a few tatters of a green dress made from a dyed flour sack, a piece of a white cotton sock and the brown hightop shoes, stiff with the years. But Mama keeps them packed away in a gift box, like it’s her present to the world, and she brings them out every time anybody, it doesn’t matter who—neighbors, relatives, or if it’s her, herself—brings the subject around to Angela.

  And along with the clothes come the pictures. Me sitting in Daddy’s lap. Snap. Me prissing around in a new dress. Snap. Me hugging Daddy’s neck. Snap. Me sprawled out in the flowers. Me with my arms around my head showing off my long, blond curls.

  I used to look at Angela’s clothes, and go on with Mama about the pictures, but not anymore, not after Aunt Lona told me I didn’t always have to do what Mama said.

  “Aunt Lona,” I said, one day when I was over at her house not too long ago taking my weekly piano lesson, “the last time I took them out and was looking at them with Mama, I couldn’t figure out if it was Angela’s clothes or my clothes I was looking at, and I got the chills up my back something awful. And all those showing off pictures . . . they just make me sick. It’s strange, Aunt Lona, strange.”

  “Well, Beth,” she said (when we’re talking, just me and Aunt Lona, she starts everything off with “Well, Beth,” and just those two words, by the way she says them, makes everything else she says after them sound like the truth for sure). “Well, Beth, you just don’t do that, you hear? You need to stop this doing everything your mama says. You’ve got a mind of your own. A bright, intelligent mind, and you need to start using it to think for yourself. ‘Use it or lose it,’ that’s what they say.”

  Aunt Lona’s all the time talking to me that way, because she knows how Mama is, she sees what’s going on. Most things, anyway. And deep down I know she’s right, that I don’t have to cater to Mama’s every whim. Still, it’s hard not to do it sometimes when Mama says, “Go get Angela’s clothes, why don’t you, and let’s look at them” or “let’s look at your pictures, hon.”

  All my life I’ve been going and getting for Mama. And I feel bad, in a way, that I won’t be here for a while to go and get, whether it’s medicine from the cabinet or a spool of thread up at the five-and-dime. I reckon Daddy will have to take care of her while I’m gone—if he can stay out of his greenhouse long enough. Although I wonder sometimes if maybe he doesn’t stay in his greenhouse just to get away from Mama, if maybe, he’d rather stay around things that are alive and growing.

  Between the greenhouse and the flower garden, Daddy grows just about every kind of flower you can imagine. He’s grown so many flowers that he looks, himself, kind of rough and ruddy like the earth, like a copper-colored mum, his favorite. But the prettiest of all the mums, I think, are the white ones, those about ten inches across the bloom, every bit of them white except for a few flecks of red splashed across them. They always remind me of Snow White, when she pricks her finger and the three drops of blood spill onto her pure white gown. Snow White flowers. That’s what I call them. Anyway, if there’s anybody wanting to know anything about growing Snow White flowers, or any kind of flower for that matter, they go to Daddy. Everybody, that is, except Mama.

  “Why the little wildflowers beat a greenhouse flower any day,” she always says. And when it’s her turn to carry flowers to the church, she sends me out into the woods behind the house or down the road on the road bank to pick her an “arrangement” just like Daddy and his flowers don’t even exist.

  “Get me some Queen Anne’s Lace, Elizabeth,” she’ll say, “and some Black-eyed Susans . . . and throw in a bit of goldenrod, so I can make me an arrangement.”

  That’s what she calls them, “arrangements,” as if they’re some kind of musical pieces fixed for an orchestra. One time she made her arrangement out of dark pink peach blossoms and some pussy willow, and everyone at church thought the peach blossoms and pussy willow looked grand. She does have a way, I’ll have to admit, of putting the flowers in the right places to look grand. Still, I feel sad for Daddy, that she never does see fit to use what he’s grown, because that’s what he studied when he went to that little college right in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, not far from here. That was before he was called off to the war. He studied horticulture, and Shakespeare and sociology and history. He still has his books in there in the den, and I’ve read them all, but I don’t think Mama even admits they’re in there, much less looks at them. Sometimes it seems Mama and Daddy don’t even look at each other, they just kind of pass through each other’s life here and there, nodding every once and a while as if to say, “Howdy-do.”

  When I go to tell Daddy that I am ready to go to Nathan and Mama is sick, I find him out in his greenhouse potting red and white petunias. Mrs. Minnie Lou, president of the Garden Club, wanted two dozen flats of red and white petunias to put out in the window boxes at the primary school. Daddy is already sweating from the sticky moisture, although it’s still early in the morning.

  “If Mama’s taking magnesia now,” I say, “that means she’s going to be sick all day.”

  “She can’t help that, can she?” Daddy says.

  I hadn’t realized I had said it like I was accusing her of something, but thinking back on my words, I guess it did come out like that. As for if she could help it or not, I hadn’t ever really thought about if Mama could help being sick so much.

  “Then, how am I going to get to Nathan?” I ask.

  Daddy’s hands tremble as they lift the black plastic containers of petunias from the shelves to the flats. Daddy’s shaky all the time, but the shaking grows worse when he gets excited. That’s what the war did for him, blasted his nerves to pieces and relieved him of his left leg so that he had to put on one that’s artificial. That’s why he can’t go to Nathan. He can’t ride that far. Besides, cars make him nervous, so Mama’s the one who usually does the driving. I wish I had a car for myself. But with what little I make putting in zippers at the pants factory, by the time I help pay my share of the bills and put my share in the savings account, I can’t ever seem to scrape up enough for a car payment. But, Lord knows, if I make it back from Nathan in one piece, I’m going to have me a car, one way or another.
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  Daddy rubs his hands on his khaki pants, pushes his wirerimmed glasses up on his nose, and says, “I reckon you’ll just have to wait. Till tomorrow, maybe. Maybe she’ll be better then.”

  “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?

  2

  . . . . . .

  Mama 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 n
eeding 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.”