Sounds Like Crazy

by Mahaffey, Shana

  My working as a waitress bothered my mother almost as much as it did Betty Jane—especially when she compared me to Sarah, who went from high school, to college, to marriage, and to a career in accounting, hitting all the success milestones at just the right time. By age thirty, Sarah had embarked on motherhood, and four years and two perfectly timed children later she was now hitting all the right child-rearing achievements on schedule. From my mother’s perspective, by now I should have a successful career and a husband trying fervently to impregnate me.

  I said to Sarah, “Ask Mom if she’d prefer to tell the bridge club that her NYU honor student can’t seem to find career success outside of the food industry because she has a little problem of five people inhabiting her head.” I smirked.

  My sister sat silent. A few years ago she had decided it was best to remain neutral on the topic of my employment. She could not see the causal link between the fact that my jobs required me to interact with so many people and how often I changed employers. The missing piece I never shared was that I waited tables, and subsequently, it was Betty Jane’s behavior that always got me fired within six to eight months. When Sarah suggested I try to stay put, build stability in my life, I asked her to trust me that this was the best I could do.

  “At least I have a boyfriend,” I said, hoping to direct the conversation to accomplishments my mother did care about.

  “Well, yes,” said Sarah, “she was thrilled until I told her your boyfriend is a graduate student on scholarship. She figured out where the excess charges were coming from pretty quickly after that, Holly.”

  “Is that why you wanted to meet him?” I asked.“Did she tell you to?”

  “She didn’t have to. I see the credit card bill. And—”

  “You’re always going to protect me,” I said. Sarah had told me this so many times over the years, I recognized the specific way her mouth shaped right before the words came out.

  “I am always going to protect you.” Sarah squeezed my hand and my chest ached. Just once I wanted to be the one who protected her. It wasn’t fair that she seemed to walk through life as my bulletproof vest.

  I sighed, then said, “I expected Mom to take comfort in the fact that my mind was not wasting. This seemed to be her chief complaint,” I said. “I addressed it and still she’s not satisfied.”

  “We are now on the avenue called sarcastic,” said Sarah.“Maybe she is right. You do keep working as a waitress to spite her.”

  A few years earlier my mother had asked Sarah how someone with an expensive education could have no ambition other than to serve breakfast. It was an appropriate question for most parents, and had my mother been like most parents, we would have had a credible, albeit misleading answer prepared. My mother so rarely asked questions about me or my life that her query had caught Sarah off guard. Her answer came across as vague and neutral, and my mother immediately interpreted my behavior as a slight against her. I’d never admit it to Sarah, but I did derive a certain pleasure from imagining my mother trying to explain my career to her friends.

  Betty Jane stirred inside my head. I looked at the view out my bedroom window and whispered, “Not her.”

  “What? And why are you whispering?” Sarah raised her voice.

  I reached out my hand to cover her mouth while I pressed my forefinger to mine and shushed. “Betty Jane,” I said softly. “I don’t want to wake her.” If Betty Jane was a mean drunk, she’d definitely be meaner the day after, with a hangover.

  “I’m not going to whisper,” said Sarah.

  “Please, Sarah. You asked that she not appear. Please. You’re leaving tomorrow but I’ll still be here with her.”

  “Oh, all right.” Sarah made a face but her voice had dropped a few decibals. “What did you just say?” she whispered.

  “Nothing.”

  Waiting tables in a diner meant my means were meager, which was the main source of contention between me and Betty Jane. I wanted to work as a waitress until I retired to keep that one tiny corner of control. She was inclined to charm her way into earning every penny possible waiting tables. Explaining to Sarah that my battle was with Betty Jane and not my mother would take us straight out of the valley of whispers and right up the mountain of screams.

  Sarah sat silent, no doubt struggling over whether to push me or let it lie. I bit my lower lip. Please let it lie. I bit harder and tasted blood. Sarah’s face became pained.

  “I can’t keep excusing your working as a waitress,” she said quietly.

  I mouthed the words thank you.

  “Holly, your inability to exercise any control over your life . . .” Sarah let the rest of the comment hang suspended. This tired discussion only resulted in my feeling more inadequate, and inadequacy was not exactly a means to motivate me. It was easy to hide under the blanket of anonymity a big city offered, but that just covered my social anxiety and failure to manage many areas of daily life. It didn’t get rid of them.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” I said sadly. “Asking me to lead your version of a normal life is like asking a quadriplegic to get up and walk. Of course he is desperate to stand up and run as fast as he can away from that chair. But he can’t, and neither can I.”

  Sarah frowned and shook her head.“Holly, nobody is asking—”

  I stopped her with the palm of my hand.“I know my inability to lead a normal life, with a normal job, a normal relationship, and normal friends after all these years seems excessive and unreasonable, but I’m not you and I never will be.”

  “You’re spending way too much money, Holly,” said Sarah. “We’re having a hard time explaining the extravagant charges to the Father.”

  I laughed softly. I had started calling my father “the Father” when I was fourteen and his conversion from alcohol to God had failed. I’d never heard Sarah use the moniker. She usually said it was disrespectful. I wondered what the Father had done to overcome Sarah’s deference, but I didn’t ask.

  “Your life is excessive and unreasonable under the circumstances,” she said.

  “Not true. I’m making enough now to cover my rent. Betty Jane is even helping.”

  “How?” said Sarah.

  “Well.” I paused. I realized that I’d just blurted out something I should have left safely unsaid. This was the downside of Betty Jane passed out drunk. She usually prevented me from blurting out Committee secrets.

  “Are you letting her speak?” Sarah sounded ominous.

  I nodded slightly and looked away. By taking over when I worked, Betty Jane managed to turn waitressing straw into gratuity gold. Ruffles helped me in my fight to maintain control by also working through me in the diner. The resulting competition between them had quadrupled the tips. I knew I was playing a dangerous game, but when you’re trying to hang on, the risks seem smaller and the consequences are always too far ahead to notice.

  Sarah said, “Part of the process of integration involves limiting the Committee as much as possible.You know this.Why are you giving them free rein?”

  Your process, I thought. Sarah and Milton’s goal was integration of the Committee, which meant one Holly and no Committee. My goal was to avoid the immobilizing anguish I felt at the thought of losing everyone.“People like it. Besides,” I said indignantly,“it’s only Betty Jane. Well, and Ruffles. But only those two.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Holly. If you let your Committee, as you call them, do everything for you, you’ll never have any control over your life.”

  “It’s only fair that they help.”

  “You can’t do this, Holly,” said Sarah. “I forbid it.” Sarah always “used her words” when she wanted to assert control over me. She should have learned that the phrase made no difference when she forbade me from continuing to see Peter after several charges for expensive restaurants came in on the emergency credit card. She thought he was using me, which was another reason for them not to meet.

  I listened to the sound of Sarah’s breathing. “Holly, I’m very
concerned,” she said. “Does Milton know about this?”

  Yeah, right, I thought. Betty Jane is going to let that conversation happen. I shook my head.

  “No wonder you’ve made absolutely no progress in the last five years.” Sarah paid the bill Milton sent her every month.

  “Making it through the day is progress, Sarah,” I said. “It’s a constant battle, one that requires all my energy to hold the line. You have no idea how exhausting it is to live with her, Sarah. No idea.”

  “Maybe not, but you still place me in a very awkward position, Holly. I have to explain to the Father why there’s no end in sight to the therapy bills.”

  I sat up straighter. “He pays for my therapy?” My father and I hadn’t spoken since the day I graduated from high school. I thought Sarah’s contact with him was limited to a Christmas card and the annual perfunctory birthday call. I realized that for her to get him to cover these costs, the contact had to be a lot more than rare.

  Sarah nodded. “Yes, he’s been paying since you started.”

  Knowing my father covered the costs of my treatment and Sarah had had a hand in getting him to do it made me happy in a sick sort of way. I thought everyone in our family should make restitution in some form or another for what had happened. Everyone including me.We were all guilty. Some of us more than others.

  After I blew out the candles, Sarah said, “Holly, I really want you to have a good life. I want you to have everything you deserve.” When she said it, a heavy wash of sadness pressed in on my chest. “You have to forgive yourself, Holly. You have to forgive yourself. It’s the only way through it.”

  “Have you forgiven yourself, Sarah?” I said.

  “A long time ago.” She sighed and squeezed my hand.

  I couldn’t tell her that even when you decide you’ve paid in full, if what you’ve paid for has become part of the framework of your life, you can’t let it go that easily. But if Sarah had forgiven herself, maybe it was time for me to try.

  { 2 }

  I awoke NewYear’s Day with a commitment to make changes in my life. When Sarah told me commitments mean more when they’re written down, I said, “Hey, I left California to get away from crunchy granola crap.”

  “You left California to get away from yourself,” said Sarah. I set my mouth in a straight line. “And how’s that working for you?” I pressed my lips together, creating dimples on either side in response to her obviously rhetorical question.

  Sarah handed me a pad and a pen. “‘Forgive yourself ’ goes on top.”

  I thought about what she’d said the night before and for one heartbeat, I allowed myself a glimpse of a different life. In it, I walked down a beautiful country road with green poplar trees on either side. The kind of road we used to drive down in the summers when we met our extended family for picnics. Then I remembered I hadn’t been on a picnic since I was six and a half, and my body became hollow and two-dimensional. I sighed and still wrote down forgiveness, but I knew it was just a word, a word that had nothing to offer me.

  “Here’s my list.” I handed it to Sarah. 1. Forgiveness 2. Punctuality 3. Staying within my budget.

  “Smoking?”

  “I give that up every day.”

  All I can say is, the minute Sarah’s taxi disappeared around the corner, I bolstered my flagging spirit by telling myself I needed to learn the meaning of forgiveness before I could even consider the act. Then I asked myself, Who keeps resolutions anyway? I’d read that the resolve behind New Year’s resolutions usually falters after twenty-four hours.The fact that I couldn’t keep this particular resolution for twenty-four minutes didn’t mean anything. I still had punctuality and budget. Keeping two out of three resolutions was something I could hang my hat on.

  Two weeks later, I had managed to arrive late to work every day, charge more than five hundred dollars for unnecessary items, and smoke a carton of cigarettes. On the morning of January 15, when I realized I had ten minutes to get to work, and the diner was four subway stops away and another five minutes on foot if I ran, I threw in the towel on resolutions. Then I wondered if I could use this as an excuse for my tardiness.

  I pushed through the turnstile at the Broadway and Houston subway station, hoping I didn’t have to wait long for the F train.

  “Back by popular demand,” said Ruffles inside my head,“the ‘sorry, I don’t wear a watch’ excuse.”

  “Do you have to be so cheerful in the morning?” I said loudly. Nobody even glanced at me. I was just another woman in New York City talking to herself.

  I rode the subway with a keen awareness of the hard plastic seat, even though my coat, uniform, tights, and underwear were between it and me. My chest ached with that feeling you get when you’ve been defeated by your own fear and failed to push past something really difficult because the effort requires you to cross over something you’ve spent your life avoiding: something you’ve avoided for so long you can no longer name it. But you can’t escape it either, because it floats just outside your awareness like a frightening ghost from a bad dream you had as a child. The kind of dream where the images fade but the feeling becomes more vivid as the years pass. The kind of dream you know is shielding you from the real nightmare, the true nightmare. The stuff you couldn’t change.The words you couldn’t take back.The choice you couldn’t unmake.The resolutions you couldn’t keep.

  I hated empty early-morning subway rides because they invited all kinds of unwanted thoughts, feelings, ghosts. I wondered if I’d be sitting here next year fighting the same battle. The idea felt as cold as the plastic I sat on.

  I closed my eyes. Inside my head, Ruffles sat quietly on her pillow. Her sad countenance told me she’d taken everything in. I wanted to ask her if we could have a better life. If change was possible. If hope was a friend that owed us a big favor and today was payday. Instead, I said, “Does my hair look okay?”

  Ruffles sighed. Most people never have to admit when they’ve been beaten by their own fears. I, on the other hand, suffered my defeats in front of the Committee, which would have been all right if not for Betty Jane. She didn’t just bear witness to my defeats; she made sure to repeatedly remind me of them afterward. Nobody can make progress under those circumstances.

  “Why did you try to curl it?” said Ruffles.

  I had dark brown, perfectly straight hair. I held a thick hank of it before my eyes, relieved that Ruffles was willing to focus on a more banal topic. “I don’t know,” I said. Then I noticed the woman sitting opposite, gaping at me. I dropped the hair.

  As the train sped along, I stared at the ads, domestic violence to the left, AIDS to the right, poetry project underneath. I liked poetry on the subway. Maybe I should buy a watch. I willed the subway to go faster. It didn’t.

  Ruffles’s corpulent cheeks jiggled as she crunched her potato chips, adding staccato notes to the whirring sound of the subway moving along the tracks.The devil slept on her California King, her satin sheets pulled just up to her sunflower pin. I shuddered and shifted my inner gaze to the other three, also sleeping, and wished I were as well. The train pulled into West Fourth Street. Two more stops.With any luck, we’d be less than fifteen minutes late.

  When the doors opened at Forty-second Street/Bryant Park, I darted through the crowd, sprinted up the stairs, exited, and ran toward the diner. As I neared it, I noticed the girls who attended the Catholic middle school across the street marching toward a school bus. Slowing to a jog, I thought, Early field trip. Really early. Because I had the morning shift, I usually only saw them after work, when they were beyond the fence on the playground.

  I drifted by the lineup and glanced into their sleepy eyes. I was seven, about their age, when I heard that right before he died, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I’d already experienced the bitterness of denied prayers and had an inkling about how he felt. Knowing God had ignored his only son with his hands and feet nailed to a cross, while he screamed his bloody, crowned-with-thorns he
ad off for some help, strengthened my resolve to keep my back turned on him and everything that smacked of religion. He was one man. What about all the people who were left living with the fact that someone sacrificed himself on their behalf? I’m sure if given the choice, they’d prefer to make the sacrifice rather than to be the one who has to live on the charity of someone else’s act of surrender. I know I would.

  A smile from the girl at the end of the line interrupted my reverie. Maybe she’s already caught on. “Run for your life,” I whispered to her. “Get away while you still can.”

  She tipped her head to one side, her eyes clouded with confusion. With this gesture, she managed to make me instantly feel the lifetime of self-loathing that had started before kids her age teased me because my head tilted to the left.

  “Never mind,” I said, already looking past her to the diner.

  With not one empty seat in the diner, I found myself wondering if everyone in Manhattan had run out of food for breakfast. I mumbled, “Sorry,” to no one, put on my apron, and grabbed a couple of plates without asking, “What table?” I’d just look for empty tabletops and hungry faces and ask until I found the right match.

  By seven fifteen, the sounds of people talking, forks colliding with plates, and sausage and bacon frying had reached a dull roar. I was about to drop a stack of potato pancakes in front of a couple when a man walked in. He stood more than a foot taller than me and wore a blue pin-striped suit accompanied by a red silk tie and a shirt as stiff as his shellacked hair. His stature, raven-colored hair, and emerald green eyes set him apart from the morning diner clientele, who mostly looked like they had just rolled out of something, and it wasn’t bed. We did get the occasional fancy-dressed man (usually the guy looking out for his “lady” around the corner), but this one was different. His clothes reeked of expensiveness, and I knew expensive, because Betty Jane was a connoisseur of fine clothing and footwear, and I generated monthly credit card charges equaling the debt of a small nation to prove it.