Preacher Edwards swipes a few times at his slick hair as if that gives him time to think, and he says, “I haven’t done my Christian duty in letting you know that you can come and talk to me anytime you have a burden weighing upon you. We know, of course, you can take your burdens to the Lord and leave them there, but sometimes it helps just to talk to others, and I want you to know that you can come with me and go to the Lord anytime.”
Well, I turn that around in my mind, and I could sooner imagine a camel going through the eye of a needle, taking me besides, than me coming with Preacher Edwards and going to the Lord and talking in the way I had talked at Nathan. But on the other hand, at least Preacher Edwards wouldn’t have pictures of mushrooms and conch shells on his walls, and a curtain in one corner of the room for acting out your little sins, and colored ink-stain drawings that had hidden pictures of your private parts.
Anyway, I have for too long used all this God stuff to work miracles with Mama and me, and I have yet to see any water turned into wine. Finally, I thank Preacher Edwards for his offer and let it go at that. A heavy silence settles in for a good many miles until Mrs. Preacher Edwards says in her little squeaky voice as if she’s prepared for a speech, “You know, people can dwell on their problems so long that it can do them in. I’ve known that to happen. It’s rather much like a conductor of an orchestra, I like to think. The conductor, when he’s directing, has the whole group of musicians to think about, but just consider for instance what would happen if he thought only of his baton and concentrated only on it, watching it every little move it makes, he’d lose his beautiful music, he’d go crazy. That’s exactly what happens when people get to thinking all the time upon the wrong things, don’t you think?”
Not knowing whether she is asking me or Preacher Edwards what we think, I decide I’ll lay low on that one. It astounds me too bad. Or should I say Mrs. Preacher Edwards astounds me too bad. Did she come up with that herself, or did she read it somewhere? Did the Lord send that as a bolt of inspiration? It surely doesn’t sound like anything she’s ever said, or might even think, and it starts me wondering if there is more to Mrs. Preacher Edwards than people know.
I study the back of her head—frizzy curls just like mine, although mine have grown out a bit the past six weeks and are looking smoother—and I am trying to peer into her head like a crystal ball to see what made her come up with that and if she has any more such stuff as that in her, because if she does, I would sooner go through the needle’s eye with Mrs. Preacher Edwards than her husband.
Then she soon reaches into the glove compartment, pulls out her Sunday school book and starts reading. So I reach into my handbag and pull out my Your Life, Your Choice book. That’s the book Dr. Adams recommended that I get at the little bookstore in Nathan. So one Saturday when Mr. Martin took us shopping, I went to the bookstore and snatched it up right away, and now I’m glad I did, for the closer we get to Littleton, the more my anxiety grows, and I know I’m going to need all the understanding I can muster to make it through the weekend.
I flip through reading the sections I have underlined in red ink. For a moment it seems I am in high school again cramming for exams, only this is a real life course, the kind they don’t offer you in school. Going back through the book, I can see plain as day why I have marked the passages. Each one, it seems, answers questions about how I should be behaving with Mama—and with anyone else for that matter, not just Mama—and how I would like to think, if I had the choice. So, since Dr. Adams says I must claim that right to choose my actions, I practice all the rest of the way to Littleton.
First, I say to myself, I wonder what will happen when I first see Mama and Daddy. Will I run to them and throw up my arms around them, or will I just plain throw up, and I know that sounds awful to think that, but here I am feeling happy to see them, but confused and scared at the same time not knowing what they’ll say, how they’ll react to me now. So, what I’ll do first I don’t know, because I don’t know what they’ll do. But maybe they won’t know what to do either, not knowing if they are going to see a wild woman, or the Angela child that Mama is still hanging on to, or if it will be me, Elizabeth, someone they don’t even know, coming back to live with them.
No matter what they do, no matter how they behave, says the little book, it’s coming from within them, and they’ll either be acting real mature like an adult or acting real little like a child. And if I can just remember that their actions are coming from them and are not because of anything I’ve done or haven’t done, then I can be okay.
Next, I’m supposed to remember, said Dr. Evans, not to expect any great change from Mama and Daddy. The change, he said, will be in me. He sure has a lot of trust that all his talking has taken, that it’s been like some kind of vaccination that he’s injected in me and I’ll be immune to Mama’s ways of doing forevermore. But it won’t be that simple, I know, for he’s kept reminding me.
The thing I like about the Your Life, Your Choice is it says although you have this child person still in you, you have to learn to be the parent to it and guide and direct it. I like the notion of being a parent. That’s how I’ll be this whole weekend, I decide. I’ll be a parent to my child and guide it and direct it and train it up in the right way it should go so that when it is old it will not depart from the ways I have shown it.
And the absolutely worst thing I read in my book is that all along when I was growing up, I carried along with me Mama and Daddy’s attitudes and feelings toward me, not my feelings. I guess that is the worst thing I’ve read because I know it is true for a fact. But there’s a good side, too, to that, because according to the book, and to Dr. Adams, too, if I realize the attitudes are not mine, then I can start forming my own attitudes toward myself and not all the time be depending upon someone else to tell me how I am or am not. Now, if I can only do that, that will really be like holding the keys to the Kingdom of God, that song that Preacher Edwards keeps on humming just loud enough for me to hear. Then he starts in to singing a little bit of it like this: “You wear the keys to the doorway of God. Choose just one key, and when you begin, choose the key that will unlock your heart. Open up and let the Lord come on in.”
Well, that’s fine for Preacher Edwards, maybe. But when I unlock my heart, I’m wanting to see Sarah Elizabeth Miller taking up residence in there, because I don’t even know the whole Sarah Elizabeth Miller yet, just learning parts of her, and until I know her, how can I feel at home with a stranger inside me, much less such a perfect one as Jesus is said to be.
When we get about fifty miles from Littleton, I’m starting to get homesick for Nathan or at least wishing Dr. Adams was with me, sort of to hold my hand, you know. And there’s that child in me, when I’m supposed to be acting adult, so I talk to my child and tell it to behave itself, that it’s going to be just fine, no matter what has happened to it in the past, no matter how much I feel sometimes it’s all my own fault, it’s all going to be okay, and that makes me feel a lot better.
I feel better, that is, until we get twenty miles from Littleton, and it’s finally hitting me like the big times that in about fifteen minutes I’ll be home, not knowing what Mama or Daddy will say or how they’ll behave. Mama might be in bed sick. I hope she is. Not really sick, you know, but maybe pretending. But, no, that’s child, too, not adult. Now, I hope Mama’s feeling well enough just to be neutral, if she can’t be any other way. Neutral is better than sick or worried about me and looking at me like I’ve done committed some sin. Looking, just looking at me. But according to the Bible, neutral is not better. People who are neutral toward God are worse than if they were sinners. So, no, I don’t want Mama to be neutral. I want more than anything for Mama to be just right, to feel just right, to feel not so burdened, and when we reach ten miles from Littleton, I wonder if I’m going to start into crying again, so that I left home crying and will be going back crying, but, no, that’s child, and I’ve got to be adult, got to take off my child-seeing glasses and put on my adu
lt-seeing glasses so I can look at things the way they really are, not the way my child wants to look at them.
What would Hemp do, in a case like this, I ask myself. Hemp. Why am I missing Hemp already? Just a few hours gone, and I’m missing Hemp, as if I’ll never see him again. But all of a sudden, I realize that when I leave Nathan for good, or when Hemp leaves for good, I’ll probably never see him again, anyway. Hemp, who has been so much fun, with never a dull moment, always carrying on, always the nice guy on the ward (though a little bit weird), Hemp I will probably never see again, after Nathan. So there is Hemp. How would Hemp, who seems to have nothing at all in this world wrong with him—and I’m wondering now, why did we never once talk about what’s wrong with us, just the other people there—how would he be acting about now if he were in my place? Well, I know Hemp wouldn’t be letting it bother him that he’s finally going home. Hemp would just sit rared back smoking on his Camel and think nothing about it. So, that’s what I’ll do, I think, I’ll just rare back and pretend I’ve got a Camel hanging on my lips and that nothing or no one can bother me at all and nothing that anybody says can make the child in me act up, that’s what I’ll do, I decide, as we top the hill where the church is sitting like always, like it’s the most important building around, and we go down over the hill past the rows of little white shoebox houses, into the valley where lies the grammar school, post office, the barbecue hut and the pants factory and up another house-lined hillstreet, climaxed at the top with the little shoebox house with all the dahlias and roses and pansies and petunias. And all the blue magnesia bottles circling the walkway.
Like Dr. Adams said, it hasn’t changed a bit.
13
. . . . . .
Daddy is sitting out on the front porch, just waiting, it appears, for me to get home. But what he is mostly waiting for is to press a rolled-up bill into Preacher Edwards’s hand, you know the way some people roll up their money before they put it into the collection plate on Sunday morning so people sitting beside them can’t see how much or how little they’re giving to the Lord.
Preacher Edwards doesn’t even pretend to refuse the money; he just sets Daddy’s army duffel bag down on the sidewalk, the bag that holds my weekend clothes, and slips the money into his pocket as easy as if the bills were made of silk sow’s ears. He tells Daddy how pretty the chrysanthemums are, that he’ll see him Sunday, and then he is off, Mrs. Edwards waving at Daddy through the rolled-up window.
“I picked you a flower, Elizabeth,” Daddy says, looking, like me, like he doesn’t know what to say. He rubs the sides of his khaki pants, then his hands come together and he rubs them, like he doesn’t know what to do with them. “It’s on your dresser. Your mama’s in the kitchen fixing you up a cake.”
Daddy. Poor Daddy. My throat is aching and burning so to see him, and I want to throw my arms around him and hold on to him forever. But I just stand there instead, glad to see him and embarrassed at the same time, asking myself what would Elizabeth do at a time like this? Elizabeth would just go right ahead and hug her daddy, wouldn’t she, if she wanted to? But Daddy has already picked up the duffel bag and is walking ahead of me carrying it on into the house where lemon cheese is all you can smell.
Lemon cheese. That means Mama has been in the kitchen about all afternoon, making me a lemon cheese cake. The only time she makes lemon cheese cake is on my birthday because she knows I love it so. My throat started swelling tight like rubber bands when I first saw Daddy, but now the rubber bands are so tight, it’s hard to talk. But after swallowing a few times, I can say a little something.
“Hey, Mama,” I say, glad she has her arms all busy with mixing and stirring and her eyes upon the frosting. That way I don’t have to decide whether to go and hug her or not. She doesn’t hardly look up, anyway, just keeps on smearing the frosting around on the cake, that and pushing back her hair out of her face, until finally she says, “Good to see you, Sarah Elizabeth.”
I feel bad that Elizabeth isn’t doing too well. Angela is acting about like always, quiet and shy and saying nothing to show how she is feeling about being home and about seeing her mama and daddy after almost two months away. But maybe Elizabeth isn’t talking because she just plain out doesn’t know how she is feeling, or what she’s supposed to say, nor how to say it. She’s confused and glad to be home and missing Nathan and worried about how she’s going to act all at the same time, and when you’re feeling so many different ways at once, you can’t say any of them.
“The cake smells good, Mama,” I say, and go on to my room. Even my room looks like a strange land to me, a land where I’ve never been before and don’t want to go to ever again. Daddy had put the Snow White mum with the red flecks on it in a mason jar, and it just screams out its loveliness. I pick it up and press my whole face into it, letting its sweet perfume fill me up. Mama laughs when he puts flowers in a mason jar, saying there’s fifty vases around the house for putting flowers in, but I think the mason jar is just right, ’cause it doesn’t take a thing away from the flower. It’s so simple, and plain and unadorned, you see, that you don’t look at the container, you look at what’s in it. That’s how Elizabeth is, simple and plain and unadorned, and oh, but what she needs awfully is something pretty to fill her up so that you see what’s in her and not her container. And there’s no use trying to fill up Elizabeth with Angela, because you can’t see Angela. Elizabeth has to be filled up with Elizabeth. And wouldn’t it be nice if whatever Elizabeth turns out to be, wouldn’t it be nice if that something could be pretty. Pretty as Daddy’s Snow White flowers. Pretty as the late afternoon sun rays streaming in across my bed and lighting up one little slice of the bedspread, its patchwork designs glowing in the spotlight of the sun.
The first thing I was planning to do when I got home was go and sit down at the piano and play Elvis songs and hymns in rock ’n’ roll style for about an hour, so Mama could see how much I had changed. That way I wouldn’t have to go explaining. But seeing Daddy’s flower of loveliness and Mama’s lemon cheese cake she’s spent so much time working on, that wouldn’t be very nice. And it isn’t like I am trying to be sweet Angela. Not that kind of nice. It’s just that playing Elvis songs so suddenly might shock Mama to pieces, and that wouldn’t be filling up my container in a pretty way. I decide I’ll have to ease into playing Elvis songs.
So, I go back into the kitchen and I say, “Can I help you, Mama?” And that isn’t Angela niceness either, that’s just plain anyone niceness. The reason I’m having to ask about everything I do—if it’s Angela or if it’s Elizabeth—is because that’s what Dr. Adams said to do. That way, he said, I could start finding out what’s the real and true Elizabeth and what’s just acting like Angela. And this weekend, he said, would be a supreme test. Well, it’s a supreme test all right. Especially when Mama says, “It’s been two weeks since we heard from you, Elizabeth.”
At first I don’t say anything. She hasn’t asked me a question has she? She just made a comment. But then when she says, “Why, Sarah Elizabeth, couldn’t you have written? You knew, didn’t you, that we’d be worried about you, wondering what was going on down there?”
Wasn’t it just you, Mama, worrying? You worrying about what they might find out? I, Elizabeth, could’ve said that, couldn’t I? But that would’ve been too mean. So here is my first question to answer in the way a polite Elizabeth would answer and not a spiteful Elizabeth; but at the same time I don’t want to answer it like a sweet Angela. First off, Angela would have written, probably nearly every day, just so Mama wouldn’t be worried. But since it was Elizabeth down there the past two weeks and not Angela, why didn’t Elizabeth write?
“I really don’t know, Mama,” I say, swiping at the frosting that has spilled down on the rim of the cake plate. “Maybe because I knew and you and Daddy knew I’d be coming home before long. Maybe that’s why.”
“Well, that didn’t keep us from worrying. And your Daddy, poor man, going to the mailbox every day, coming back,
saying, ‘No letter today.’”
“Well, I was real busy, Mama, you know they keep you busy all the time down there.”
“Busy?” she says. “What in the world do crazy folks have to do all day?”
First, I have to press in on my stomach real hard, to keep the Angela from spewing forth. Then I have to get up enough nerve to act Elizabeth. For once, I am terribly glad that Dr. Adams drilled me on the fact I’m not crazy.
“I am not crazy, Mama,” I finally say, “and I do believe it’s about time you’re seeing that. Just because I don’t happen to think like you do anymore, that doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” Now, Elizabeth is opening up real good, so I just let her go. “You’ve got to see, Mama, that everybody in this world, in this family even, don’t necessarily think like you do about everything. And I know it’s easier to just say somebody’s crazy than to try to see that they have a right to think different than you do. That’s real easy, ain’t it, just say ‘they’re crazy’ and be done with it. Keeps you from having to think about whether what you believe is right or not. As for me, Mama, I haven’t met one crazy person on that floor I’m on. I’ve met some people who are confused about who they are and what life’s all about and what they’re supposed to be doing, and I’ve met some people who are awfully mixed up about exactly what is true and what is phony in this world, and if you want to call that crazy, well, then, Mama, I guess, they’re crazy. But I don’t call them crazy. I call them honest because they don’t know what everything is all about and they’re honest enough to admit it.”
Quiet-Crazy Page 11
