Quiet-Crazy

by Joyce Durham Barrett

  Orange Nurse squeaks as we walk down the hallway, and I hate that kind of squeaking, her girdle or stockings or some kind of underthing swish-swishing as we go along. She looks straight ahead since she knows where she’s going, and I look every which way. It’s like an old folks’ home, except for two main things: first, no one’s lying in the beds, the beds are all made up, just like a regular home, and second, there’re people of all ages up walking around. They’re not walking with much conviction, but they’re walking. The best thing, though, is that no one is paying attention to what’s going on, so nobody even notices I’m here. Good. Good for that, because having no one looking at me, that frees me up a little bit. I do not want to be looked at. Snap. I do not want to be seen. Snap.

  We arrive at the nurses’ station, which is all glassed in just like the glass divider in the law enforcement car. I am so tired of all the quiet that I finally have to speak and so I say the first thing that pops in my mind. “Is it bullet-proof?” I ask Orange Nurse, who jerks her head around to finally look at me for the first time.

  “Bullet-proof?” she gasps, her hand flying to her chest, her arm flinging the satchel as far away from her squeaking body as possible and holding straight out beside her in midair what she must be certain is a stored-away gun.

  I have alarmed Orange Nurse. She could not be more alarmed if I had yelled “Fire!” It is good. Orange Nurse needs to be alarmed, something to break up her dry, tight face. I am pleased to see Orange Nurse alarmed. I am pleased to see that even way down in the depths of my depression, I can keep a corner, be it ever so small, wherein I can make a joke, no matter that it’s a joke only to myself.

  “Oh, well, uh, bullet-proof, uh, sure . . . yes, yes, of course,” she says, her eyes pleading with the nurses inside the glass for some kind of reassurance, her head and shoulders wriggling and bouncing around like she is Howdy-Doody, that ridiculous TV puppet, and I, Buffalo Bob. Does that mean, then, that I can pull her strings, that all I need do is speak and she will jump? I hold steadfast to that thought in my mind all the time she’s handing over the admitting papers, and the thought gives me immense pleasure, overwhelming pleasure. For I, Sarah Elizabeth Miller, have helped myself for the first time here at Alexander T. Syms Memorial Hospital. I have spoken and someone has jumped. I pulled someone’s strings. Only a thousand moments behind the Great Green Door, and already I have been blessed. Thank you, Green Door, thank you most sincerely from the bottom of my heart, wherever that bottom goes to.

  “Room 807,” the nurse inside the bullet-proof glass finally pronounces, as if a death sentence. No way might she know that I couldn’t be any more dead, and that if anything at all happens to me here, that thing would have to be more lifelike than what I am now. My Lord, the crazy house, if that ain’t life for you, what is? And Orange Nurse, with her orange-gold hair and mint green uniform, adds living color. What more could anybody ask? A guided tour? Oh sure, yes, thank you kindly, Orange Nurse.

  “That way, men’s ward,” she says, pointing left, as we turn right onto the women’s ward. “Women not allowed on men’s ward between eight P.M. and eight A.M. Men not allowed on women’s ward between eight P.M. and eight A.M.”

  So there, Sheriff Tate. Now how do you suppose anybody could do it here, even if they wanted to? And I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do it anyway. All that looking. Like a magnifying glass all over your body. Seeing everything.

  We stop at a door that is almost solid except for a small square glass, a glass solely for the purpose of peeping in, I suppose, for looking. “Lock-up ward,” she recites, “for people who get out of control.”

  I peep into the lock-up ward to see a woman with the prettiest dark blond wavy hair sitting on a cot, rocking back and forth, her arms folded, clutching her sides. She’s crying. I think. Anyway, I see tears, but I don’t hear anything. I feel like an intruder, an invader. She’s private. I shouldn’t be looking. I turn away. Is this what happens if you cry? You get put into the lock-up ward? If you cry, does that mean you’re “out of control?”

  “Why is she in there?” I ask Orange Nurse, but we’re already at Room 807 and Orange Nurse says, “I’ll help you put your things away.” She drops Daddy’s satchel down on a bed. There’re four beds, one in each corner.

  And bars. On the window. Six of them. Bars. I, Sarah Elizabeth Miller, am behind bars. Locked up and behind bars. Although the bars make me numb, number, numbest, whatever, still there comes this small voice saying something about me being locked up anyway at home with Mama, and that being locked up is being locked up and what difference does it make where I’m locked up?

  Orange Nurse startles me out of my numbness. She’s dumping the things from my satchel onto my bed. Not unpacking. Dumping.

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” I say, “I can put my things in order.”

  Actually, I don’t want someone else going through my personal belongings, going through me, but what I want doesn’t seem to matter. Orange Nurse pays no attention to what I say. Instead, she opens the drawers of the tan metal dresser that sits between the two tan metal beds, and begins filling them up with my clothes. I have the three drawers down the left side, the side next to my bed. One bed and three dresser drawers to my name, my sole possessions, what more do I need?

  Apparently, I don’t need anything glass. “I’ll have to take these,” she says, setting aside my cold cream, my shampoo, my hand lotion, everything that is in glass jars.

  “I need to check your handbag, too,” she says, reaching for it. I hold on tightly to my bag, my last personal possession. I will not give her my bag, but she wrangles it from my hands anyway, rambles through it, and pulls out fingernail clips, a nail file, and my hand mirror.

  “But . . .” I don’t even get to ask why, because Orange Nurse is Godlike. She already knows of my needs before I even ask.

  “We wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself, now would we?”

  With nail clips and a hand mirror? I wouldn’t want to hurt myself, either. Lord knows I’ve been hurting enough, all these years since Angela, even since my own self started, I’ve been hurting. Why would I want to hurt myself more?

  “We’ll keep these in the little closet down by the nurses’ station and you can check them out when you need them, okay, dear?”

  “My name’s Elizabeth,” I say. I hate it when people who don’t know me call me dear. It’s like they’re standing way up taller than me, looking down. Now when Aunt Lona does it, that’s okay, because I know I really am dear to her. But complete strangers don’t know if I’m dear or not. And Orange Nurse does not know me.

  “Now, I need you to go in the bathroom there, dear, and pull off all your clothes for me.”

  For her? Pull off all my clothes for her? Unmoving, I glare at her for some word of explanation, some reason for this drastic thing she asks of me.

  “Don’t worry, dear, it’s just routine.”

  Routine. Every day. Same time, it seemed. After lunch. Lying on the bed. Don’t even think about it.

  Pulling off all my clothes for a stark stranger is not what I’d call routine, Orange Nurse. I stand still as a statue, fingering the thirsty petals on my mum, when an odd, raspy singing voice comes from the ladderback rocker facing the barred window. All I see of the little old woman is a wine-colored sweatered elbow resting on the arm of the rocker.

  “Now, if I had the wee-e-engs of an ain-jul,” she whines more than sings, “over the-e-se prison walls I would fly-y-y.”

  “Miss Cannon,” says Orange Nurse, “I’ve got you a new roommate. Elizabeth Miller. Sarah Elizabeth Miller.”

  “My name is Dear,” I say, holding out my hand to Miss Cannon, who peeks around the back of the rocker to look first up at me, then at my hand. Her head looks much like a walnut with a face painted on it and a black bun on top. She says “Howdy-do” and turns back to renew her singing. “I would fly-y-y to the arms of my darlin’, and there I’d be willin’ to die.”

  “Your other
roommate, Mavis,” says Orange Nurse, nodding to the bed opposite mine, “is a little jewel. She’s around here someplace, probably off playing her guitar.”

  If she’s a jewel, what’s she doing in a place like this? But maybe she’s a fake jewel and not the real thing. Could be. Anyway, I hadn’t counted on having a roommate, least of all two of them. Lying in bed in the same room with an old dried-up woman and a young jewel. I do not know what to do with old women and jewels. Can’t Orange Nurse see that? Can’t she see I don’t fit in this room?

  Just about the time I start to ask if I can’t have another room, one by myself maybe, one where I can have some privacy, she’s guiding me to the bathroom.

  “This won’t take but a minute, dear, uh, Elizabeth. Just slip your clothes off so I can look you over, then you can put them right back on. Okay?”

  “But—” No need to ask why.

  “We just have to make sure you don’t have anything on you that would hurt you. That’s all.”

  Why might I be so much into hurting myself? Isn’t that why I came here, to stop hurting? Why would anybody in their right mind want to hurt themselves more?

  “Look, it’s just routine, no big deal,” Orange Nurse promises.

  I want to keep asking why, but if it’s so routine, maybe I’m supposed to know why, and I decide the less said the better. So, I pull off all my clothes, thanking God for my nylon panties and my dry, wilted Snow White flower. Holding tight onto my mum for dear life, I decide I’m not completely naked. And I look straight ahead into the shower stall, feeling the eyes of Orange Nurse peeling the layers of skin off me as she walks all around me looking up and down, down and up.

  “Fine,” she says, finishing her inspection. “See? Nothing to it. After you get your clothes on, you might want to have some lunch. I think they’re still serving. Miss Cannon,” she says, “did you have your lunch already?”

  “Nome,” drawls Miss Cannon. “Can’t go ’til the warden comes ta get me.”

  Warden? No wonder Miss Cannon is singing about prison walls. Is that what this place really is? A prison?

  “If the warden doesn’t hurry, you’re going to miss lunch again, you hear?” says Orange Nurse. “Looks to me like the warden’s not too reliable.”

  “Yas-em,” says Miss Cannon, “not too reliable. Done forgot me again.”

  “Look,” Orange Nurse persists. “Why don’t you show Elizabeth how to get to the dining room, okay?”

  “Yas-em, I can show her,” she says, pressing down on both arms of the rocker and easing up. “Come on, ’Liza-beth.” She reaches out to take my hand.

  I don’t want to take the hand of this old woman. But I have to be nice, don’t I? But I can’t hardly keep from wondering, is it I who needs to be led, or is it Miss Cannon who needs the hand-holding? Her pale white skin slides slippery over her bones as her wrinkled hand clutches mine. Ambling beside Miss Cannon down the hallway, our hands locked in mutual support, I feel them swell all out of proportion, so that all anyone can see when they look at us, I’m absolutely positive, are a couple of gigantic hands floating along grasping each other for dear life.

  Mama, I wonder, as I’m walking along with this strange pilgrim in this even stranger land . . . Mama? Where in the world are you? Mama?

  4

  . . . . . .

  Miss Cannon drops my hand as we enter the dining room, drops it as suddenly and as surely as if she’s done with me forevermore. I feel somehow betrayed as she leaves me alone to fend for myself.

  “Ah, you done gone and stood me up again,” she grumbles, walking toward a brutish sort of fellow who towers over everyone else at his table. She ambles up to him, shaking her fist right in his face. “Can’t count on the warden no more ta come and get me, no-sir-ee. Reckon he’s going and gettin’ other girls now. Carryin’ them off.”

  Everybody has these little cards with their names printed in fancy green letters sitting on the table in front of them. According to the card, the warden turns out to be James Freedman. Miss Cannon takes her place at his table, the last place, and I turn to find a table, although most of them are filled with four people each, some of them staring at me, some staring into some other place, some other time, it seems, and only God knows but maybe even into some other self.

  The young man behind the food wagon out in the hall comes to my rescue, bearing a plate steaming with vegetables and country-fried steak smothered in gravy.

  “You must be Elizabeth,” he says most graciously, and although he’s not exactly handsome his generous smile makes him look awfully welcome to my eyes. Her eyes. They looked wild. Looking at me. Wild and scary.

  “I’m Elizabeth,” I say, trying to be equally gracious, but I don’t think gracious is quite in my category because at the same time I’m too much wrapped up in myself, wondering how everyone around here already knows my name even before asking. Maybe it is like Mama says. Maybe the all-seeing eye of God is upon you no matter where you go, even at Nathan, too.

  But hey, I know his name, too. I know because of the little white bar on his shirt. It says DAVID LISTER in black letters. David. I wonder if he ever killed any Goliaths, or wrote any wise proverbs, or played on a lute, or sang any psalms. But I don’t dare ask. He might think I’m crazy or something.

  “Here’s your place, right here,” David says, pointing to the little tent-folded card that has my name on it. They must have been expecting me. How nice. “Elizabeth, this is Harold, here, and this is Mrs. Krieger.”

  “How do you do?” I say, and sort of nod my head, like Aunt Lona would do. But neither of them say anything. Mrs. Krieger nods too, and Harold’s head is drawn toward his food, so I don’t know if he even knows I’m here.

  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’l
l 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.