“She did,” he says, like it really doesn’t matter one way or the other if I believe him or not. “When they’s born, she stuck them in the oven, turned it on broil, and fried them.”
The thing that bothers me about this story is Hemp doesn’t keep looking at me and checking me out to see if I believe him. And the other thing that bothers me is when I walk by the lock-up ward, sometimes Bonnie will be at the door, clawing at it and crying, “My babies, I want my babies.” No, absolutely no, I tell myself. Nobody would be so crazy they’d put their little babies in the oven and roast them. Nobody. But I stand there at that door for the longest time just watching Bonnie and wanting more than anything to talk with her and let her tell me all about her babies. Even though I’m not one to make over babies, nor even much like the idea of having something so helpless to care for, because isn’t Mama enough, I would like so much to talk with Bonnie and just let her talk it all out about her babies.
More than anything else at Nathan, the sight of Bonnie in the lock-up ward crying about her babies keeps me awake some nights wondering about what the doctors do with people like her, or with any of us, for that matter. As for myself, I know that just talking about anything and anybody I want to talk about, plus talking in any way I want to talk, I know all that talking is doing a world of good for me. And I thought, too, once when I got through talking with Dr. Adams, what a good feeling it must be to sit and listen day after day to someone talk their problems right out of them, so they could be free of them and get on with their life.
And, shoot, finding out why people behave like they do? That would have to be about as hard as figuring out the Book of Revelation, because I think sometimes people get all wrapped up in symbols and signs, and on the surface they don’t look at all like they are really and truly deep down. Some people have just acquired these awful features that don’t really belong on them, just like in Revelation where you read about otherwise pure, white lambs that have ended up with horns and eyes all over their bodies, topped off with six tails. Then some people have been blessed with all normal features, but the features are all mixed up, like on those monsters that have the heads of lambs, the bodies of lions, and the feet of leopards. At least that’s how I see most people. They’ve got stuff that don’t belong on them, or they’re either not really a whole of any one kind of animal. And all these people here at Nathan, they’re just trying to get their own true selves revealed, their whole selves, so they won’t have to live with mixed-up bodies and minds.
Preacher Edwards at church all the time talks about missionaries, and he’s trying to talk me into being one, telling me I have the patience and the understanding and knowledge of the Bible and all such as that. Then he tells me that missionaries have the highest, most noble profession on earth, leading people to the Lord. But, my word, if people are not even straightened out in their own selves and in their own minds, if they don’t even know who they are, how are you going to lead them to anybody, anywhere? If Preacher Edwards were to ask me, and he hasn’t, but if he did, I think that now I’d tell him that good counselors like Dr. Adams should have the first shot at people. Then after folks got themselves more like a whole person, then they could decide for themselves if and when they want to be led to this Lord.
I’ll have to admit I’ve considered it—being a missionary. But mainly I’ve always thought of being one because it would be a good way to get away from Mama, and of course that’s not why people should be missionaries, to get away from their mamas, although some people might do just that. But I’ve found Nathan to be as good a place as any to get away from Mama, at least in the flesh. But in some ways, Mama’s actual presence is here more than if she was here in the flesh, since almost every day I have to confront her again and again with Dr. Adams.
I don’t realize how I truly feel about Mama until I sit down to go over some words with Dr. Adams. He has a long list of words that he reads out, and after he says each word I am supposed to say the first word that comes into my mind, and it all goes okay until we come to the word “Mother.” I shouldn’t have any trouble with it because just a few words back I said “love” just as quick as he said the word “Father.” But on “Mother” I can’t say that word. All I can do is sit there, like frozen, even though the lamplight does seem a little brighter than before, and I wonder if somebody just changed the bulb.
Dr. Adams goes on, then, and I think maybe he’s skipped over that word for good. Then he springs it on me again . . . “Mother.”
And again I just sit there, rolling my eyes around at the walls, the windows with the bars over them, the plastered ceilings, anything I can roll my eyes at. Until he goes on. Then comes back to it again.
“Mother,” he says, as if he’s going to keep saying it until doomsday.
I look straight into his shimmery blue eyes, and he looks so beautiful, so perfect, that I bet he loves his mother in just the right amount; I bet his love for his mother is not too soft and not too hard, but a just-right love, so how can I sit here and tell this man of perfect love what is probably the most unpardonable sin of all.
“You’re not going to make me say ‘hate,’” I tell him. Because I don’t really hate Mama, I just hate the things she has done to me. Still that’s what keeps coming into my mind.
“Why do you think I’m trying to make you say ’hate’?”
“Well, you keep on asking me, don’t you?”
“Does that mean I’m trying to make you say ’hate’?” he asks, and once again I’m trapped.
I don’t know why he keeps on, because I know he’s figured out by now what I’m wanting to say. But once he settles back like he’s prepared to wait until eternity passes, I think what the heck, and the next time he says “Mother,” I say it. “Hate,” I say, and it’s like that one little word says a thousand words, a million words that I’ve been storing up inside me forever. That one word alone comes to be like one of the many horns finally twisted and turned and grinded around on me until it finally pops off my lamb body, and the blood comes spewing out, so much blood there’s no way I can wipe it all away.
Dr. Adams offers me a tissue, and I wish, blowing my nose, that I could blow it all out, all that monster blood in me, or that I could cry it all out, all the Angela in me, and just be done with it forevermore. And just forget all about what we did on the bed every day. I feel so ridiculous sitting here spewing over in front of such a beautiful man, such perfect love, but the beautiful man doesn’t mind that I’m ridiculous. He just hands me another tissue, and another, until I’ve got myself in hand. And he sits, not saying a word, as if he is paying some kind of respect to the broken-off horn, that with his quietness he’s honoring my need to cast it away as the first step in getting me to be one whole animal and not an animal with mixed-up parts.
“I reckon I’m just tired of her, just tired of trying to carry it . . . carry her around.”
“It? Your mother?”
It. Her. Her. It. Mother. Angela. It.
“Angela,” I say. “I guess. Angela. Mother. Whoever.”
“Why are you carrying her around, Elizabeth?”
“Mama can’t stand to lose her again. I think it would kill her.”
“What’s she doing to Elizabeth, though, trying to keep Angela alive?”
“Killing me!” I blurt. “Yes, killing me!” And I halfway laugh, to show I can do something besides cry. “Yeah, she’s killing me all right,” I say again, as if to prove it to my own self. “She’s killing Elizabeth.” It’s something I’ve never thought about before, and I wish I had thought about it earlier because now my visit is over, and I can’t talk about it right now.
But before I leave, I have to know about the lamplight. Is it indeed brighter, or is it just my imagination?
Dr. Adams reaches over, turns the switch, and the light brightens the room completely. “It’s a three-way bulb,” he says, switching it again to completely off, then again, to dimness. “Some people like it darker, some like it lighter,” and
he shrugs.
“I want it all the way bright when I come in to visit,” I say, still halfway laughing, hoping it would in some way make up for all the spewing out I’d done. “Lord knows I’ve had enough dimness in my life.”
I always feel brighter after talking with Dr. Adams anyway, no matter what kind of bulb is in the lamp. But every little bit of light you can get in your life, it helps, no matter if it comes from people or things. And on the way back to my room, where I am going to wash my face and try to get some of the redness out of my eyes, I get a little more brightness.
Mr. Martin is handing out the mail, and I get another letter from Aunt Lona, the third, since she writes to me every week. Mama’s letters come every few days, and if you’ve read one letter from Mama you’ve read them all, because they are about the same things every time: reminders of the all-seeing eye of God upon me, and of how she’s had such a hard time this week, and then a paragraph or two about her stomach pain and suffering. Maybe I’m very wrong in thinking this, but I always believed that, yes, people do have pain, but, no, pain doesn’t mean you have to suffer. Pain just means that you hurt. Suffering means that you’re making your own self, and others around you, miserable. And maybe that’s not what the dictionary says about suffering, but I happen to know a little bit, myself, about words, because I study and think about them so much, the way people use them and all, and I happen to know a little bit about people, too, because I watch them so much. Some things you find out just by looking and listening, and thinking a lot about them, not by looking in the dictionary.
Now, Aunt Lona’s letters would win a blue ribbon, if ribbons were given for letters, because she uses words really smooth. Usually after I read one of her letters, I feel a world better. But this one is different.
7
. . . . . .
Aunt Lona had been telling me she wanted to come down and see me, after I was settled in good, and I had been so much looking forward to her coming. But in her usual polite way, she had called Mama and asked her if she’d like to come down with her. And Mama, instead of feeling thankful to Aunt Lona for the invitation, got fighting mad at her instead.
She told me I had no business going to see you, that I should stay away from you, and that I was the reason you were down there in the first place. And, Elizabeth, I felt so bad, just to think that she is still harboring thoughts such as that.
Anyway, I just wanted you to know why I haven’t been down. I don’t want to do anything that will upset your mother more. And I certainly don’t want to do anything that will interfere with your therapy. I am so sorry that I won’t be coming down. But do you have access to a telephone, so that I may call you sometime? Or, if you want, you may, of course, call me collect. And please do call, dear, anytime.
After I finish the letter, I get fighting mad, too. At Mama. But before long I wonder if when I get fighting mad at Mama, then wasn’t I being just like her, and I decide that I can do a little better than that. So I turn my madness down a notch or two and I can see things a little more clearly then, and I think the best thing to do is talk with Dr. Adams and see if it isn’t all right for Aunt Lona to come down and see me, no matter what Mama thinks.
Since I just saw Dr. Adams yesterday, I knew I wouldn’t see him again until tomorrow, as he comes around every other day. So, I do the next best thing. I go to see Lenny, who, more than anyone else besides Dr. Adams, makes me glad I came to Nathan.
Lenny doesn’t talk. I don’t mean like Delores, who could talk but only in a whisper. I mean Lenny doesn’t talk at all. Never a word. And there is something in that little fellow’s face—Lenny is only fifteen—that tugs at my heart the way nothing else in this world ever has.
How can I say what that something is when I don’t know. All I know it is a look of pain, never-ending pain. Not the body kind, but the mind kind where it shows up like puzzlement, confusion, fear, and hurt, all rolled into one. All this on a little-boy face that looks five more than it looks fifteen.
Before I came to Nathan, one of the nurses or Mr. Martin had to walk Lenny from his room to the dining room. That’s the only place he ever goes, to eat and back to his room. He doesn’t even sit in the recreation room and watch TV all day. Watching TV—that’s what those people who seem most hopeless do all day, they sit around and watch every program. Even though Mr. Martin comes through and turns it off from time to time to try to encourage them to get up and do something, they just turn it back on when he leaves.
TV watching all the time, I’ve learned, is the second most sure thing at Nathan to mean you are the sickest. The first is not talking, so Lenny is pure sick. And, of course, Hemp knows why.
“His mama and daddy got blowed up in a plane crash,” Hemp says one day while we’re playing some gin rummy. (Lord, I am getting decadent. Dancing on Saturday nights, honking out rock ’n’ roll on the piano Sunday mornings while other people go to chapel, and playing cards through the week. It sure feels good.) “Yeah, his folks got blowed up in a plane crash, and when the little boy found out, it just pure-tee blowed the breath right out of him. So,” he says, tilting his chin and puffing out a stream of smoke, “so, if you don’t have any breath left in you, you can’t talk, now, can you?”
“Hemp,” I say kind of aggravated, “how do you know so much about people around here?” You see, in Littleton you know everything about everybody, you know the way they are now, the way they were in the past, and you can even, based on the Bible, predict their future. And here living with a bunch of people I know nothing about, only what Hemp says, it kind of gets next to me sometimes.
“I know,” he says, “believe me.” He takes a drag off his Camel and watches the smoke stream out of both nostrils like he is the most important thing in the world. “I know because of the nurses.”
“You mean they tell you?” I say, anxious that he might know about me too, although I am starting to see that compared with most folks here there isn’t all that much to know about me, except I hate my mama for what she did to me when I couldn’t even help it, plus it feels like there were at least two people inside me trying to get out, and then, of course, I’ve been trying to be someone I’m not, Angela, and I don’t know about other people in the world only Littleton folks, but that’s a common illness around there, only mine had gone a little too far, I think, thanks to help from Mama.
“The nurses they tell each other,” Hemp says, “I just . . .” and he looks across both his shoulders to make sure no one is hearing, and he smiles big as a hyena when he says it, “I just ax-uh-din-uh-ly hear it too.”
“Hemp,” I say, trying to be quiet, but at the same time I am getting more aggravated at him, “Hemp, are you telling me the truth?”
Hemp just throws back his head and laughs like it is the funniest thing in the world, and he won’t say yea or nay, he just keeps on laughing and looking straight at me like I am some kind of fool. So what’s wrong with Lenny, I don’t know, I only know he looks so fragile and innocent and helpless, and all I want to do is protect him from whatever is hurting him so.
It is that feeling—wanting to take care of him—that makes me go into his room a few days later, even though women are not supposed to go into the men’s rooms. No one is in there except Lenny, and he isn’t a man nor I a real woman in the woman sense. He is standing, dressed as spiffy as ever in gray dress pants, blue plaid shirt, and yellow vest, looking out his window at the rows of gray buildings, one just like the other.
I slow down my walking and ease up to Lenny so as not to frighten him.
I stand there beside him for the longest time, just being there. Something about the silence around him makes words seem inappropriate, like speaking would break the part of him that’s become so delicate and defenseless. The nurses and Mr. Martin, when they go to Lenny, start in to talking and it’s like non-stop, so he probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise, even if he wanted to. They remind me of Mama, needing to talk all the time, afraid of the silences, and I wonder if Lenny migh
t not like someone to just be with him, not asking him all sorts of questions and trying to make him talk, but just being there and listening to the quiet.
So that’s what I do with Lenny every time I visit with him. I just stand and listen to his quietness. I look directly at him sometimes, into his face even though I don’t feel comfortable doing that, and when he looks back at me he looks sometimes like he wants so bad to talk, like he is dying to say something to me only he can’t get up the nerve to say it.
One day, I see a flicker of a smile when he looks at me. I want to shout “Hallelujah” or something, throw my arms around him, and do the polka that Mr. Fleet is showing us. But somehow I know I shouldn’t make too big a deal over it, although that little bit of a smile is as good as a thousand words spoken. All I do, then, is kind of smile back and nod in acknowledgment, you know, like you might do to a passing stranger on the street.
Even though Lenny isn’t talking, he feels less and less a stranger. Three times a day he takes my hand and we go to the dining room. Now he even walks with me to the rec room and stands at the piano while I play all the heart and soul songs Dr. Adams has taught me. But he looks around at the TV watchers so much, I know he is uncomfortable, even though they aren’t paying him no mind.
After he’d started smiling at me, I thought that surely some words would follow. But day after day passes, and no words. Until one afternoon after lunch I walk Lenny back to his room and I turn and start to go, and he reaches out to me and mumbles something that sounds like “Don’t,” but I can’t really be sure what he says it is so soft.
This time I can’t contain my excitement. I mean, who in their right mind could? “What, Lenny?” I say. “What did you say?”
Lenny just turns his head and starts his usual helpless frowning.
“What did you say, Lenny?” I beg, feeling powerfully sure that if he can say the word once, he can say it again. “Look, Lenny,” I say, “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t hear what you said. Was it ’don’t’? Do you want me to stay?”
Quiet-Crazy Page 7
