Miss Hansom turns back to give some prescriptions to Miss Cannon, and I am still releving? not releving, reveling. I think that’s what I am doing, reveling in the way she had greeted me. I’m not used to such as that. Especially from a person made up with makeup as nice and pretty and smooth as Miss Hansom. Most nurses around here sort of grunt and make you feel you’re holing up with a bunch of swine, but here is a real pearl cast into the mess of swine, and I wonder how she can keep her worth in a place like this, considering the Bible says do not cast such treasure in the pigpen.
Instead of calling a nurse’s aid to help Miss Cannon with her bags, Miss Hansom lifts one under one arm, and picks up another one, and out they go. If only for a moment, she had gotten my mind off Hemp, and as soon as they leave, he comes back again and I can see him plain as day, sitting down in the rec room, his Camel hanging on the tip edge of his lips like it is going to fall off any minute. Then he might get up and go drape a piece of newspaper over one of the green plants—just for spite—or he might go over and bang on the piano too loud—just for spite—or he might throw his cigarette butt down on the floor—just for spite. At least he always said he was doing all such things as that just for spite, but now I wonder, did he, and if he did, did he kill himself, too, just for spite?
And then the most awful thought comes into my head—what if I can kill the Angela in me? Just the Angela? What if I can get a razor and slash a vein somewhere, one of Angela’s veins, and the Angela in me would die and be dead forever. So simple. But how would I know which vein was Angela’s? Besides, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t kill off Angela like that. Not my little sister. And then a bigger thought pops into my head: why Angela is dead already. Why don’t I allow her to be dead? That’s all I have to do, and it’s much easier, no blood, no mess, no shaking anybody up. Just let Angela be dead.
The more I see Miss Hansom, the more I am willing to allow Angela to be dead, and the more I want to be Elizabeth and Elizabeth only, and maybe a little bit like Miss Hansom at the same time. For one thing, besides being almost beautiful to look at, Miss Hansom is plain old down-to-earth with the patients. She doesn’t consider herself above us. For another, she talks right and proper and she acts right and proper, with manners. And every little single thing she does, it seems she knows exactly the right way to do it. She reminds me of a very young Aunt Lona, except her hair is black, whereas Aunt Lona’s is red.
Miss Hansom even plays games with us when she has the time. She especially likes bridge. I have never before played cards in my life, lest hell descend upon me, but I learn real fast to play bridge with Mr. Martin, the rec leader, and anybody else we can round up for a fourth hand. So knowing that Miss Hansom likes bridge, makes me like it even better.
I guess the best thing about Miss Hansom is I can tell she likes me. How someone so polished and perfect could like me, almost for a friend, I don’t know. But it makes me prouder of myself, prouder to be me, because if Miss Hansom likes me, and if Dr. Adams likes me, then there must be something to me after all.
The first time I see Dr. Adams after I get back, he is all anxious to know about how Elizabeth fared at home. And when I get through telling him about every little thing, he seems real pleased with me, and that makes me even prouder of myself.
Then Dr. Adams pulls a surprise on me. “I think you’re ready for some group therapy,” he says, writing in his silver-backed chart. “I’m going to recommend that to Dr. Johnstone.” And the next thing I know, I’m going to group therapy twice a week. We all sit around in a half-circle—me and the warden and Lenny and Harold and Mrs. Krieger and Tommy and Delores and Alice.
Aha, now’s the time to find out something about all these people: why they’re here, what’s their secret. But then it dawns on me that I might have to tell something about myself, too, and what in the world will I tell? That I want to be me? That I want to be Elizabeth and not Angela? Folks sure will think I’m crazy if I say something like that. And I sure won’t tell about the thing I can’t tell anybody.
I’ve never seen the leader before—a Mr. Gray, who always wears a gray suit with these tiny little whitish stripes down it, or a plain gray suit, or a gray suit with blue flecks in it. Most of his hair, which had once been dark, is gray, too, so I guess he thinks since he’s named Mr. Gray, he has to act the part, because he is dry and droll at the same time.
The way group therapy works is this: someone says something, just any little old thing, and we take it from there. The first day I go in, everybody’s thinking is on Hemp, and Mrs. Krieger is the first to speak and say what a shame, and that it is so hard on the family for a person to kill himself and how she hopes none of us will never give a thought to it. Mr. Gray asks how her arm is doing, and she says, “Better some days, and other days not so good. It’s so depressing, to think it will never get well.”
All that does is make me wonder all the more what had happened to her arm, and why, and if that is the only reason she is here because something is wrong with her arm.
Harold, as usual, sits sneering at everything anybody says. He looks like he hasn’t combed his blond straw hair in weeks, and he doesn’t say anything, just like Lenny. They merely sit, both of them. I don’t say too much other than that I will miss Hemp so because he was so easy to talk with.
“And what did you talk about?” Mr. Gray asks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “What does anyone talk about?” And that comes out a little more snappy than I had meant, but this is Nathan, and you can say anything any way you want to say it, so I guess that is okay. “We mostly chatted, about any little old thing,” I say. “But sometimes we talked about what we would do when we got out of Nathan.”
“And what was that?” Mr. Gray says. He seems to want to keep me talking about Hemp, maybe so he can learn something about him, I don’t know.
“We talked sometimes about not going back home but going someplace else,” I say.
“Where would you go?” he asks.
“Hemp?”
“You, Elizabeth. Where would you go?”
So, it’s me he’s wanting to know about, not Hemp after all.
I am almost embarrassed to say it, because I, myself, think it a wild idea, but here you can be wild, so I say, “To college. I think it would be nice to go to college.”
“Why don’t you?”
I look at everyone looking at me, all except Alice who is blind again today, but even she is turned in my direction, though she can’t see me. What if Mama had been blind all this time and couldn’t have seen me all these years? I look at Lenny, who wouldn’t talk if a big bull moose came rushing through the door, and I think about how Delores would give a pretty nickel if she could talk above a whisper, and I look at Tommy whose head is still jerking after all this time. And I think here I can talk okay, and so many can’t, or won’t, talk at all, so why don’t I?
So I answer Mr. Gray. I say, “I can’t go to college now, because I’m too old. I should have gone back when I finished high school, but I didn’t. Now, it’s too late.”
Then Delores, who is twenty-five, says she was in college before she came here. And Mrs. Krieger shakes her head “No, no,” she says, “you’re never too old to go to school. Never. If that’s what you want to do, then do it.”
Well, I’ve only thought about it, you see, with the urging from Aunt Lona, of course. It isn’t like I have this burning desire to go off to college, but now with all these people saying “Go, go, go,” I wonder if I shouldn’t think more seriously about it. It would be a way not to go back home. It would be a way to get out from Mama. But what Hemp and I were talking about was going off to California, or Florida, or New York, someplace where all the exciting things happen that you never get in on, We weren’t exactly talking about going to college.
Hemp said, for instance, he’d like to go to Las Vegas and win a pot of money in all those gambling machines out there. That didn’t appeal to me at all, but there were days I would have gone most anyplace to t
ry to leave myself behind and find maybe a new person inhabiting this old shell of mine.
Group therapy. I have heard people talk about it, and I’ve always wanted to go, but now that I’ve been a couple of times, I see it is not all that hot. No great mysteries are solved. But I think maybe it’s because Mr. Gray just doesn’t care too much about what we think, and what’s on our minds, and what’s the best way to get us to talking about what’s deep inside. If it were me leading group therapy, I’d be finding out more about these people. So, I decide one day, why I’ll just go and ask them. Ever since Hemp killed himself, I’ve had this weight on me, this great heavy feeling that I need to start talking with people about their problems. If I had talked with Hemp about his, instead of all the time joking around with him, would he still be here today? Maybe. But who ever knows about anything like that. Still, I have to start talking with people, have to start now, no waiting. So I start with Mrs. Krieger, who I think will be the easiest person of all to get to talking about what all is inside her.
Even though her arm is in a sling, Mrs. Krieger is the most pleasant person to be sitting and talking with. “Looks like you’re getting on with the fox-trot pretty well,” I say, just for starters. “I think it’ll take me a little while longer.”
“No, no,” she says, pushing up on the sides of her light brown hair, which is always a little bit messy, but who cares around here. “You’ll learn it in no time, you catch on real quick in the dances, I’ve noticed.”
It’s hard to think about other people around here actually noticing things that you do, because it seems they are all so much tied up in their own worlds that they can’t see out.
“You’ve noticed?” I say, surprised.
“Oh, I think everyone has. You’re a good dancer, you know. It seems to come so natural to you. You have such good rhythm.”
“Oh, well, thank you,” I say, even more surprised that it looks like it comes natural and that I have good rhythm. (Is that why Mr. Fleet is always using me for a partner, because I’ve got rhythm and how could he ask for anything more?)
Since we’re into talking about noticing things, I think this a good time to bring up her arm. So I say as casual as possible, “I’ve noticed, too, that something’s wrong with your arm. May I ask what happened, Mrs. Krieger?”
“That’s the problem,” she says, sounding puzzled. “We don’t know what happened. It started hurting so badly after my son got killed, and it hasn’t stopped. We don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “For three months, now, it hasn’t stopped hurting.”
“What happened to your son?” I ask, rearranging my purple dress that Daddy had given me money to buy. When we went out shopping on Wednesday after I got back to Nathan from home, when we went to the art museum and to the ice cream parlor, and then to the dress shops, trying to get people’s minds off of Hemp, that’s when I got the dress. It’s solid lavender, a little bit on the light side, and it has a scoop neck, a full skirt and three-quarter sleeves, and it is just beautiful. Too pretty for Nathan, maybe, but it makes me feel good to wear it, so what the heck. Anyway, Miss Hansom really likes it too, she says, so I’ll have to wear it as much as possible for her. Wait. Wait just one dad-gum minute. For her? No, not for her. Not even beautiful Miss Hansom. I’ve worn enough dresses for another woman to last my whole lifetime. From here on, I am dressing to suit me. Settled.
“He had a wreck, my son,” Mrs. Krieger says. “He was killed instantly. Fifteen. That’s all. Fifteen years old.”
She looked like she was going to start into crying, so I change the subject real quick. “How do you like my dress, Mrs. Krieger?” I ask, and she wipes at one of her eyes and says, “Why, it’s a new one, isn’t it? You get it yesterday?”
About that time Mr. Martin comes around asking us to play bridge with him. He says Miss Hansom is coming, so I think he is heaven-sent to get me out of the near mess that I had gotten myself into. As for going around talking with people about their problems, I figure I have a lot to learn about that, but I like to think and dwell on what’s causing them. I think Mrs. Krieger’s arms are hurting because she wants so bad to put her arms around her son, and that’s what she can never do again. Has anybody talked with her about hugging her son? And what will happen, if she can’t use her arm because she can never hug her son again? Will it indeed never get well again, if she thinks it won’t?
That’s like me thinking I will never get married. Does that mean I actually won’t if I think it? I don’t know, but when Dr. Adams brings up the subject again about sex, and if I have ever had it, I think, no I’ll never, ever, get married because that’s a big part of the package. According to the Worry Column doctor, to have a good marriage, you have to have good sex. And, Lord, I just can’t see me having that with anyone but myself. (Unless, of course, it was with someone like Dr. Adams.)
Anyway, Dr. Adams wants to know about how I first learned about sex, was it my mother who told me about it, and no, it sure wasn’t Mama, that’s for sure. “It was old Lacky Roach,” I say. “He came up to me one day at school when we were in second grade and he said, ‘You know how pigs have little babies?’
“Lacky’s brother was in the 4-H Club and he had a couple of big old pigs that was his project, so I guess that’s why Lacky was so interested in pigs, never mind that he looked and smelled like he might live in a pigpen.
“Well, me like a fool, I said, ‘No,’ and that’s when he whispered in my ear, and it sounded something like ‘They futch.’ Since I’d never heard that word before, or didn’t understand what he said, or something, I asked him to tell me again. So, he told me again, ‘They fuck.’ Well, you know, I hadn’t heard that word before either. So I asked him again, and he said, ‘Ah, forget it.’
“When I asked a couple of people back in the room, what ‘fuck’ meant, they started laughing at me, and pointing at me like I’d said something awful. So I figured it was a bad word and that pigs did something bad to make babies. And it took me a long time to figure out how people did it. And Mary Jane Payne didn’t help any.”
“What did Mary Jane Payne do?” Dr. Adams asks.
See? Dr. Adams knows just how to talk with people, to get them to say whatever’s on their mind, by asking just the right question in just the right voice. And more and more I’m thinking this would be the most wonderful work in the world to do, to sit around all day figuring out what’s on people’s minds and why and how it got there and how every little thing you ever thought is way back hiding out in your subconscious, and all you do is sit there and ask questions, and repeat what the person says, and by doing that you can get at the root of everything. I mean everything. Well, most things, anyway.
“Mary Jane took me out under a tree one day, when we were in the third grade,” I begin. “The limbs were hanging down quite nice all around, so we had some privacy there. Anyway, it was only me and Mary Jane, and she said, ‘You know what the mama and the daddy do to make babies?’ I said, ‘No,’ so she told me. She said, ‘The mama puts something in a can and the daddy puts something in on top of it and it grows into a baby.’
“I asked her what she meant by ‘something’ and she said, ‘It’s something that comes out from where you pee, I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s something that grows into a baby.’
“‘Is that what ‘fuck’ means?’” I asked her, and she said, ‘Yeah.’”
All Mary Jane did, I tell Dr. Adams, was confuse the issue right then. But later on that year, she came and told me again what “fuck” really meant, and it didn’t sound pretty at all, but it made more sense since I’d seen women’s bellies grow big as a cow’s belly just before they had a baby.
Dr. Adams then wants to know my first experience with sex or petting, or anything along that line, and I tell him there has been only one experience, except that one with Sheriff Tate, if you could call that “experience.” As you might guess, my one and only was with old Lacky Roach. “Cigarette Butt” as people called him, because he smel
led so bad from so much cigarette smoke on his breath, it’d nearly knock you down.
So, what the heck, I think, even though I don’t like thinking back on that time, hate it, in fact, I decide it won’t hurt anything, will it, to talk about it with Dr. Adams. Maybe it will even help to get it all out in the open.
17
. . . . . .
We had all gone down to the state fair in Appleton County on the school bus, a lot of us children from school, when I was in the eighth grade. I didn’t think I was going to get to go, because Mama sure didn’t want me going off to a place like that, but Daddy was more for it.
“It’s just a bunch of school kids, don’t you know,” Daddy told Mama, “just going down to have a little fun. What’s wrong with that?”
Well, Mama couldn’t say what was wrong with that because she had never been to a fair, I don’t think, and she didn’t have too many ideas of what all it might be like, except it’d be sinful for sure, so she couldn’t put up too much of an argument, so Daddy and me won out on that one. Anyway, she said, “Is Jan Banks going?” and I said yeah, Jan was going. So that was the key to my going, because Jan was the one person at church who, if there ever were a saint, she was it. Jan smiled a lot, and prayed real nice, and acted really more like a grown-up woman than any of us. So, if Jan did something, it was all right in Mama’s book.
Jan was going with Freddie Mangrum to the fair. Jan and Freddie were the most ideal couple, Freddie acting about the same as Jan in the saints department, and everybody figured they’d probably end up getting married and being missionaries or something they were so much into the Lord’s work.
Actually, somebody had asked me to go to the fair, too, but it was old Lacky Roach, and whoever would want to go with old Cigarette Butt. Now he couldn’t help his crossed eyes, and the big old black mole on his cheek, but that didn’t do anything for his looks either. So I told him “no” right plain and that I was going by myself to the fair.
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