Sounds Like Crazy

by Mahaffey, Shana

  “How was the trip?” I said.

  “Nice, thank you. Now, catch me up,” said Milton. “What have you been doing since we last spoke?”

  Milton had checked in every day at noon. I hadn’t taken his calls and I hadn’t bothered to return them. If Milton really cared, he would have come home the minute he knew I was in trouble.

  “Well, just this morning, I was stalking my boyfriend.At least, that’s what I thought he was last time I checked. But then I saw him with another woman. He’s still coming over to my house a few nights a week. So, I just don’t know. I mean, people come, people go. People go to France.” I arched my eyebrows. Milton’s face remained impassive. He’s not biting. I sighed. “Oh, and I’ve been shopping.” I lifted up my scarred foot, and we both contemplated it for a moment.

  “I’ve never seen you wear a pair of sandals, Holly,” Milton said. Hooked him with a shoe, I thought. Now we could talk about something really important.

  “I haven’t worn a pair of sandals since I was six and a half.” I put my foot back down. “My mother wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Why not?” said Milton.

  “Because, well, it’s a long story,” I said.

  “That is what we are here for,” he said. “Life stories, long or short.”

  “I thought I was catching you up?”

  Milton remained silent.

  “I don’t talk about the past, remember?”

  “And look where that has gotten you,” said Milton.

  “That’s low,” I said.

  “Tell me why your mother never allowed you to wear sandals,” said Milton.

  I couldn’t seem to win anywhere. I sat back with my arms across my chest. “It started with a picnic,” I said.

  Every summer our extended family gathered together for a picnic. The plan was always to leave early so we’d have a day of fun. That morning the car was loaded up, our shoes were on, and my mother was just getting in the shower. So instead of leaving, we sat rigidly in the kitchen, hostages to her sense of timing. I know I prayed that I wouldn’t be the one to break first and show my impatience over waiting.

  My father walked in the kitchen and said,“Come on, let’s go get doughnuts.” Sarah and I looked at each other and I let out a whoop of glee. Doughnuts were the worst kind of contraband in our home. Taking us to eat them was unmitigated disobedience. My father didn’t seem to care.

  The three of us sat, heady with sedition, in the backseat as my father turned into the parking lot of the doughnut shop. He opened his door and got out of the car. We didn’t move. My father laughed when he realized we were too afraid to take that final step over the line. He opened the passenger door and we catapulted into sin and frosted old-fashioneds. After we ate the doughnuts, Sarah inspected each of us for stray crumbs or any other telltale signs.We arrived home just as my mother was putting the finishing touches on her outfit. We were all grateful for my father’s impeccable timing.

  “Where did you go?” my mother asked my father when she got in the car.

  “Kids were restless. I took them for a drive.”

  My mother looked back over the seat at us and smiled as her eyes scanned each of our faces.“Sarah,” she said,“you have something on your face. Lean in.”

  We held our collective breaths. My mother licked her thumb and brushed off whatever dust particle only she could see with her microscopic vision.Then she turned back to the front and commented on the weather. The sky looked gluttonous with black clouds spilling over the waistline of its too-tight blue trousers. I dozed off in the back of the car while watching the cars flash by.

  We arrived late to greetings, hugs, kisses, exclamations of unprecedented growth, and Linda, a friend one of my aunts had brought along, sitting on one of the lawn chairs and clad in a very tiny bikini.The kind my mother wore for sunbathing only in the privacy of our backyard.

  My mother and some of the other women commented under their breath about Linda while the men seemed particularly solicitous—did she need a drink, a towel, lotion? I heard the word divorced. I had heard my mother say this word before. Usually it resulted in the women being mean and the men nice.Today was no exception. All the men, my father in particular, were very accommodating.

  After swimming, the adults prepared food while we kids played freeze tag on the grass. My father volunteered to keep an eye on us.This involved his sitting with his back to us and facing Linda and her lawn chair.

  The game was in full swing and Sarah was it. She yelled out, “Freeze!” with fierceness. I jumped in the air and landed with a perfect karate-chop pose.

  At that moment, my mother walked over to where we were and said to us while looking directly at my father and Linda, “Sarah, go tell your father we need him to help with the barbecue.”

  “Oh, man,” we said without dropping our poses.We expected Sarah to negotiate or put up at least a bit of resistance.

  She narrowed her eyes but said nothing. I looked at her. I looked at my mother.

  “What!?” my mother snapped at me. I held perfectly still, hoping she would let it go and walk away. “In fact, why don’t all you kids come over and help get the food together.” She turned and stalked off. Stricken, I let down my arms.

  “Thanks a lot, Holly,” I heard from several of my cousins and family friends as they passed. I trailed behind them, feeling desolate. I didn’t know what I’d done to ruin the game.

  Since nobody was being friendly, I made a detour over to my father’s table and arrived just in time to hear Sarah say,“Your wife wants you to come take care of the barbecue.” She emphasized the word wife.Without waiting for him to reply, she took my arm and dragged me away toward the table where all the picnic stuff was laid out.

  “Let go,” I whispered to her, trying to wrench my arm away.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said indignantly.

  “She’s not mad at you. She’s mad at him,” Sarah said, pointing her thumb over her shoulder.

  “Why?” I asked, confused.

  “Because he is probably having an affair with Linda,” Sarah said importantly, “or he wants to.”

  “What’s an affair?”

  “Never mind,” Sarah said, trying to shush me. My aunt approached.

  “My dad wants to have an affair with Linda,” I said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  My aunt’s eyes bulged. “Why would you say something like that?”This wasn’t the reaction I had expected.

  “What did she say?” asked my mother. My aunt turned around. I said again, “Dad wants to have an affair with Linda.” Sarah was suddenly very busy pulling out the paper plates.

  “What?” my mother screamed.Then my father was standing right there and my mother hissed something at him. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew it wasn’t good.

  When she finished, my father came at me with smoldering eyes and a red face. Gripping my elbow, he said through clenched teeth, “You little bitch . . . spreading lies.”

  What’s a bitch? I thought frantically.What did I lie about?

  People looked away, pretending not to listen while they readied their picnic stuff. “You’re causing a scene,” my mother whispered angrily.

  “Sarah told—” My father clamped a hand over my mouth and leaned in close to my ear. I could smell the whiskey and cigarettes on his breath. I went limp, as I’d learned to do when he whispered with whiskey breath.

  “You keep your mouth shut. If I ever hear you say something like that again, you will wish you’d never been born.” He let go. I sat there with saucerlike eyes while invisible hands forced everything I felt down my throat. I didn’t cry. I didn’t speak. I waited until my parents left and then I got up and walked slowly away.

  “Where are you going?” snapped my mother.

  “To the bathroom,” I whispered. I walked across the lawn and then broke into a run, not stopping until I reached the lake, where I broke the buddy-system rule—never swim alone—and went in knowing I would be in
trouble if anyone caught me.When I was waist-deep, I arched my back as I had been taught, and then dropped into the water and floated, waiting for someone to come to get me.

  Nobody did.The longer I waited, the more alone I felt.Anxiety and hunger finally compelled me out of the lake.When I was ankle-deep in the water, I thought maybe nobody had come to get me because they had all left. My foot sank in the sand. Something sharp dragged across the top of it. I broke into a run without stopping to look down. As I neared the picnic tables, I saw my father sitting alone with a cigarette pressed between his lips. He struck the match against the book in his cupped hand, and then waved it back and forth in slow motion while craning his head forward. Using one hand as a visor while the other pinched the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, he inhaled. I felt him watching me and I wanted to run to him, leap into his arms, and have him tell me he wasn’t mad anymore.Tell me he missed me. Ask me where I’d been.

  I ran faster. He turned away.A cloud passed over the sun.The air chilled slightly.

  When I reached the picnic area grass I saw my uncle manning the grill. He smiled and waved the barbecue tongs at me. I waved back. He lowered the tongs slowly, paused for a moment, and then dropped them on the ground as he ran toward me while pulling off his new white T-shirt. The look of panic on his face startled me. I stopped. Looked down and saw my right foot covered in bright red blood. Behind me was a wake of bloody grass.The sight of the blood scared me. I felt dizzy and started to cry. My uncle caught me up in his arms and wrapped his T-shirt around my foot. My mother, who had been holding court in the center of the other mothers, was now at my uncle’s side.

  “You’ll ruin your T-shirt doing that,” she said in a voice just low enough to keep it out of earshot.

  Ignoring the comment about the shirt, my uncle said, “It needs to be looked at, but I don’t think it’s anything too serious. If someone can take over for me at the barbecue, we’ll be back in no time for burned hot dogs.” My mother waved over at my father. Over my uncle’s shoulder, I watched him toss his cigarette to the ground, get up, and walk toward the car, where we met him.

  “Daddy, are you going to go with us?” I whimpered.

  “Are you going to keep your mouth shut from now on?” he said with an edge to his voice that speared me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you promise?” he said, lifting my chin and looking in my eyes.

  “I promise. Daddy. Please. I promise.”

  He got in the car and started the engine. My uncle picked me up and went around to the passenger door.

  “Put her in the back,” said my father through the open window. “I want to see if she can keep her word. If she can, she can ride up front later.”

  I sat in the back holding the T-shirt over my foot. At the hospital, my father reached in the car to get me. I flung myself into his arms. As he carried me inside he said, “Holls, I am sorry about earlier. But you’ve got to watch what you say.”

  In the waiting room, I sat nestled in my father’s lap, watching the blood soak into the T-shirt until it finally started dripping on the floor. I saw through the waiting room window that the clouds had all dissipated and the sun beamed across the face of the sky. My uncle sat mutely beside us. In the exam room, the doctor cleaned the blood off my foot.

  “Looks like she got caught by the top of a beer can.” Then the doctor opened the wound to check how deep it was.The last thing I remembered before passing out was that the inside of the space between my toes looked like the suction cups on an octopus.

  I awoke later in the car. My father held a lit cigarette up to the small opening in the window. The smoke snaked back behind his head and passed across each of us like a cat sniffing and marking and eventually spreading out to settle on the window behind us. The lights from the oncoming traffic outlined my mother’s head. My foot throbbed. It was thickly bandaged. I wondered if it was sewn up. But I could tell by the rigid way my mother held her head and the thickness of the smoke in the car that now was not the time to ask.

  When I finished the story Milton said, “Do you remember how you felt when you were floating in the lake?” I was perplexed by his attention to this particular detail. I expected him to ask about Linda.Turned out my father did have an affair with her. She was not the first and she certainly was not the last. But Milton and I had long since covered the ground of my father’s infidelities and my mother’s complicity, and the funny thing was, I did remember exactly how I felt that day.

  I closed my eyes and imagined I was floating in that lake.“All I could see was the blank and empty sky. I felt so small floating there, and I was afraid, but not in that primordial-fear kind of way,” I said, opening my eyes. “I see that in my cats all the time when I watch them react to something that startles them. They jump a mile high and start moving their legs in the air as if to get a running start when they hit the floor. Where they’re going is beyond me. It’s not like our apartment is large enough for a reaction like that.”

  “Yes,” said Milton, as he leaned back waiting for me to say more. I sat mute. “So you felt anxious?” Milton presented the word to me as if on a platter in his open hands.

  I considered this for a second.“Sort of. But in a way it is like my cats.”

  “How so?”

  “They are simultaneously intrigued and frightened by the possibility that exists beyond the window. Cat Two is satisfied in his minimum-security prison with three hots and a cot.”

  Milton smiled.

  “He has no desire to leave.” I raised my eyebrow in a go-figure kind of way. “Cat One always has an eye out for every opportunity of escape.”

  “Where do you think Cat One would go if he could get out?” said Milton.

  “Where he always goes—to the neighbor’s roof garden. And then I have to catch him and bring him back. Usually with him demanding a writ of habeas corpus. I think he enrolled in online law courses.”

  This got another smile from Milton.“Why do you bring him back?” His face went serious again.

  “Because it is not safe out there on the roof.”

  “And?”

  “And because I don’t want to lose him. I don’t want to wake up one day and find him gone. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “The connection severed as if it was never there. All that is left is the fading memories and feelings.”

  We sat for a moment. I contemplated the paneling in his office. It was ugly. Kind of that rough, knotty pine with the holes. It belonged in a cabin somewhere in the woods and not in an office in New York City.Turning back to Milton, I said, “That is how I felt that day. I wanted to stay and I wanted to escape.”

  “But nobody came to get you.”

  “No. And the quiet closed in on me while I waited.”

  “Like now?”

  “Like now,” I whispered. “All my connections severed as if they were never there.”

  “And this is what is frightening you now?”

  “Yes,” I said, taking a pillow and pressing it to my stomach. “You can’t know the quiet, Milton.”

  “Tell me about what I can’t know then.”

  “It is filled with questions I can’t answer.”

  “What are the questions?”

  “Where do we go? What happens to us? I can’t stand not knowing,” I said. I heard a siren. I wondered if it was a fire truck or a police car. “That day was the first time I felt that feeling I have described to you ad nauseam,” I said,“where my body starts to almost recoil inside and I am pushing to get out of it. I feel like if could just cross that big expanse of nothingness, I would have an understanding. So I push at it. But then it becomes a black hole inside me. I try to ignore it but it is always there,” I said, flattening my hands and pressing them into the pillow while my foot did a rat-a-tat-tat on the floor. “Looming over me. Wrapped around me.” I dropped the pillow and slid to the edge of the couch. I breathed rapidly.

  “Stay with this as long as you can,” said Milton.


  “I’m trying.” I jumped up and walked in circles, waving my arms, trying to protect myself from the dread cutting off my air. I thought if I went around fast enough I could get away. But I knew that wasn’t true.This feeling was a constant ride-along.

  “Breathe, Holly,” Milton said, on the edge of his chair now.

  “I can’t talk about this anymore,” I said, facing him. “I can’t talk about this.”

  “Why don’t you sit back down, Holly?” Milton gestured to the couch.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” I sat in the chair with the big pink cushion.

  “That’s fine.”

  Milton gave me a moment and then said,“What do you want to talk about then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Milton paused for a second again and then said, “How do you feel about losing your job?”

  “Relieved.” It rushed out of me, and I realized I did feel oddly relieved. “I feel relieved. I shouldn’t feel relieved because I am one royalty check away from welfare.” Milton gave me the look that said, Continue. “I know I should feel panicked about this right now, but I feel numb. Like the proverbial lamb being led to a slaughter. Why do we say that anyway? It is a sick analogy. I wonder if animals are really numb when being led to the slaughter. I don’t think they are.Today I read about a pig on the way to a slaughterhouse that made a run for it at a red light. It took several people to subdue and catch it. I guess it was pretty fat.”This last word stuck in my throat.

  We were both quiet.

  “You are thinking of your own porcine friend taken against her will?”

  “Ruffles.” As soon as I said her name, grief, the unwelcome visitor, pounded at the door of my chest. Turned out that grief had scheduled the visit days ago and I had conveniently forgotten. Now grief’s arrival was an unwanted surprise and I was caught without the Committee’s house clean or the laundry done or even the guest bed made. And I couldn’t let grief sleep in the Committee’s beds.

  I didn’t answer the door. I sat there willing grief to go away. If I switched off the lights and stereo and crouched on the floor in the Committee’s living room, would grief think nobody was home and go away?