Quiet-Crazy (17 page)

Mama walls her eyes at me as if I've made the cross of the devil over the place. “You mean you ain't gone curl your hair any? Not at all?”

I think of Mavis's long straight ponytail sweeping back and forth, brushing the top of her rump, and I think of Aunt Lona's long red hair all done up in braids and wrapped around her head, and although I will probably never have anything to equal those two, I still say, “No, no thanks.”

Eunice looks at me and seems relieved that she doesn't have to “work me in” around her other customers, but she seems insulted, too, that I'm not accepting her gracious offer. Then I have to remember that she didn't say that she was insulted, that I am thinking that. I really don't know
what she was thinking. So I have to act according to what I actually hear, not what I make up in my mind. So since Eunice didn't say anything, I act as neutral as possible.

But I'm sure not making up stuff in my mind when Mama and I get in the car and she lights into me. “What are people going to think, you going to church with straight hair—and it needing cutting besides? What's come over you, Elizabeth? You'll end up looking like Mary Jane Payne, that's what'll happen.”

Now I can practice being Elizabeth, so that's what I do. “Mama, you know, I just don't care what people are going to think. And, besides, I don't know if I'm going to church Sunday anyway.” Actually, I do know—I plain out am not going, because it had felt too good being away, and I plain don't want to go and have old Sheriff Tate looking down at me nodding for me to come on and play the piano. But I think that breaking the news gradually to Mama would be better and that's why I say I don't know if I'm going.

As for looking like Mary Jane Payne, “No,” I tell Mama, “I'm sure not going to start looking nor acting like Mary Jane, because I don't care for getting drunk and going out with a lot of men and hanging out at the Frostee-Burg all the time.”

Mama turns her head and stares out the window all the way home, not saying a word, and that's all right by me. At least she isn't looking at me. And, besides, as it turns
out the less Mama says, the better. We've had enough of the real and true Elizabeth for one afternoon anyway, so we turn back into the Janus god, me looking forward and Mama backward. But I feel one of us, I don't know if it's Mama or me, loosening our attachment to the other, so that we aren't stuck together on one body quite as tight as before. And that sticking, it has loosened itself even a little bit more by Sunday morning.

I
t's the same old kind of Sunday morning, waking up to gospel music blaring from the radio, and I mean blaring. Mama turns the volume up so loud you'd think everyone could hear it from here to Kingdom come.

First thing I hear is the Herby Family shouting out about them having a little talk with Jesus and telling Him about their troubles, then it's the Happy Brotherhood Boys singing about how they saw the light and were no more in darkness, no more in night and they were praising the Lord about that. And although I always liked the light songs, I know now that even though it's good to be walking in the light, that too much light is not good for you, even as in the darkness you can get too much rubbed the wrong way.

Rubbing around on me. Fitting the dresses on. Patting. Feeling. “That's sopre-e-tty, Elizabeth. Ain't thatpre-e-ty?”

Then after the singing, it's Preacher Edwards coming on
for an hour of ministry and music. As if we didn't hear enough of him at church, we have to listen to Preacher Edwards's Gospel Hour while we're having breakfast and getting ready for church, then after going to church in the morning we go to church again that night to hear Preacher Edwards again, like he's some kind of appetizer, main course, and dessert all rolled into one. But my Lord, too much of a good thing is enough, not to speak of Preacher Edwards, mind you.

This morning, however, I'm not getting ready for church, even though Mama keeps urging me on. “We're gonna be late, child, if you don't get a move on. What you waiting on, say?”

Since Mama hadn't seen fit to buy any cornflakes, I get a biscuit and cut off a slab of cheese from the hunk of hoop cheese sitting in the saucer on the table, and I have a cup of coffee with it. Then I listen to Daddy read out from the editorial page from Dr. Fred Allen's column.

“Now he makes sense, Elizabeth.” I'll bet Daddy's said that a hundred times to me. And today is no different. “Now he makes sense,” Daddy says, and starts in. “Now this is what he says, Elizabeth, listen to this. ‘Everyone feels himself a mixture of good and evil. We see and approve the better things of life, but too often the worse things of life we follow. Sometimes the wants of the body and the desires of the soul are contrary, so that one sometimes feels he is driving a team
of horses, with one horse pulling in one direction, the other horse pulling in the other direction.'

“Now, isn't that something Elizabeth? Now, what do you think of that?”

I say yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me, but I am far understating the case, for it really makes so much sense to me it's scary. And that's one thing about Daddy that puzzles me. I think sometimes he knows exactly what all is going on inside me and with Mama and all, but he won't come right out and say it, but instead he kind of hints around that he knows all about what I'm going through, just like him reading things like this to me. It's like he's saying, “Elizabeth, I know what you're going through, but I can't come right out and talk with you about it, but I can read you this instead.” Does he know everything, somehow? All of what she did?

Or he might tell me about a book to read, and if it's not on his shelf of books that he kept from the little college that he went to, it'll usually be at the library. And it's usually something like
Life is What You Make It,
or
You Can Overcome Anything,
or
The Power of Common Sense Thinking.
And although sometimes they have some corny stuff in them, there have been some things in them that've helped through it all.

What puzzles me even more is that Daddy sort of comes to my rescue when Mama finally outright asks me if I'm getting ready to go to church, and I say, with pictures of
Saturday-night dance time and aggravating old Tommy flashing through my mind, “No, I think I'll just sit this one out today.”

“You mean you ain't going to the Lord's house, and it Sunday morning?” she says, looking from me to Daddy, but mostly at me, just looking. Staring. I don't know if I'll ever be able to feel Mama's eyes lying comfortable upon me. I just don't know. Anyway, since neither of us is saying anything, in fact not knowing what to say, Mama goes on just like she has everything figured out. “Oh, well, it's Lona, I should've known that. Should've known all along you'd go see her instead.”

It's easier to look at Daddy, not Mama, so that's where I look, although I am talking to Mama. “Well, Mama, I called her last night. And, yes, I would like to go and visit with her today. Yes.”

“But why can't you visit her after church?”

I sigh and look at Daddy to see if he can help muster up some courage in me. But he is studying the paper. So I dip way down in the pit of my being, and I say, “Mama, I'd just rather not go to church today, okay?”

“Sure,” she says, “sure, I knew it. You and Lona, you're gonna side up together against me. Don't think I don't know what you're up to, Sarah Elizabeth. I know, all right.”

I start to say, “How, Mama, how are we planning to side up against you?” But I decided that wouldn't help anything.

“See?” she says. “You won't deny it, will you? You know it's so. Y'all making some kind of plans. Don't think I don't know. But on the other hand, maybe I don't. Nobody tells me nothing no way.”

No, they don't, Mama, I thought, they sure don't. And I want so much to come right out and make up some plans, even though we aren't planning anything. Something like, yeah, Mama, I'm planning to come back and live with Aunt Lona from now on. Something like that. But that would be the little child in me acting up. So, I just clam up, not saying anything at all, just letting Mama run on and on about anything she wanted to and any way she wanted to.

Mama soon puts Aunt Lona aside. She's rushing around trying to cook up some dinner at the same time she's running back and forth from the kitchen to the bathroom to get dressed. She has on a new dress—bought, not made. It's navy with little white dots all over it, and it has a bunch of slick red plastic cherries at the neck. It looks different for Mama. Makes her look a little more slick herself, though the plastic is still shining through big as ever.

Poor Mama. She keeps glancing at me sitting in my chenille bathrobe, while it's getting on toward ten o'clock Sunday school time. She looks like I have insulted her to the nth degree. But she doesn't say that. She says, “I don't know what everyone will think, you here at home and not at the Lord's house.”

Daddy speaks up real quick. “Vera, I think Elizabeth wants to hear something when she goes to church, and you'll have to agree we're not hearing much these days.”

Well. If Daddy had gone over and slapped Mama in the face, it wouldn't have gone any harder with her. “Hear something,” she says. “Hear something? As if Preacher Edwards ain't something? May God strike some sense into both of you!”

Right then Mama's red, plastic cherries fall off her dress, and she is so embarrassed that she picks them up, whirls, and goes back to the bathroom.

I look at Daddy and he kind of nods at me, like he's done his part in this whole thing, and I want so bad to say, “Thank you, Daddy, thank you so very much.” But I don't know if that would be appropriate. Should I thank him for making Mama so mad? What would Elizabeth do? In this case, I plain don't know, so I do what is easiest, which is nothing.

I sit there, turning through the family life section of the Sunday paper until I come to the Worry Column, and I am glad that the Worry doctor doesn't talk about sex on Sundays, because I am too flustered right now to take any of that. I'm glad the doctor is talking about positive thinking, so it will get me thinking positive that Elizabeth is going to come out of this whole thing all right and leave Angela as far behind as possible. Not all the way behind, mind you, I don't think I can ever do that, but I can leave her far enough
in the past so that she won't interfere with my being what lam.

I am what I am. I know God said that sometime, somewhere, maybe to Moses, and I wonder if God had to figure out what He was all about too, if He was Him, or if He was someone else. Lord, I hope not. I hope there's at least someone in this whole scheme of things that knows their real self, because somebody's gotta know, so they can help others find their way. I'm not sure at this point, if it's God who's gonna help me find my way, though. But maybe God is what sent me to Nathan in the first place. Maybe, like Caldwell always said, maybe it was his will that I go there. So here I am blaming things on the Lord, so I'd better stop that. Anyway, I guess that things work out like they're supposed to work out. I've finally decided that's all people mean when they say, “It's the Lord's will.” They're saying, “All is as it should be.”

Mama says no more to me nor Daddy until Sunday school time, and that's when she says, “Sarah Elizabeth, all I can say is I've tried. God knows, I've tried to bring you up in the fear and the ammunition of the Lord. And I reckon now, that's all I can do. The rest is up to you. But Elizabeth,” and she looks like she's going to start crying, “Elizabeth, God help you.”

Then I feel like I'm going to start crying. Because for once in my life, in our ongoing battle, Mama hadn't won
and Elizabeth had. What's in that to cry about I don't know. I should have been laughing on the inside, shouting hooray and hallelujah or some equally appropriate exclamation, but I feel sad. Sad for Mama. Why? I guess because she doesn't understand. She just plain doesn't understand that I have to be me, whatever that turns out to be. But even though she doesn't understand, it seems like she's saying, “All right, Elizabeth, I'm not doing anything more to prevent you from being you. I've done my share.” But she really didn't say that, so I have to go by what she said, and she said she was wanting God to help me. But she did say that the rest was up to me. And maybe that's what I really feel sad about. From here on out, I have to go it on my own, and I can't be depending on Mama to tell me how to act or what to do every single moment. I surprise myself thinking that it would be so much easier going back to being the same old Elizabeth, with no choices, no decisions, no say-so in anything. It'd all be really quite easier, wouldn't it, whereas now with the new Elizabeth sprouting out and blooming around, I'll have to start making a lot of decisions, start taking stands. Taking stands is scary stuff.

I don't mind my decision of staying at home, though, at church time on Sunday morning, to go see Aunt Lona. I love it pure and simple. It's like I have been released from some kind of chains, maybe some kind of umbilical cord stretching all the way from me to Mama and the church
and anyplace else she's wanted me to go or anything she's wanted me to do, and I feel for the first time like it says in the Bible, “born again,” only this born again makes sense to me, it's not something some preacher is shouting at me because that's what he's supposed to do. This born again is what Elvis is talking about. . . “I wanna be free. . . free. . . free-e-e-e-e, I wanna be free, like uh bird in thuh tree.” So I go on to the piano after Mama leaves, sit down and play it, all the time thanking Elvis, and God, and Dr. Adams—all of them—that I am becoming indeed free. And I feel way down inside that it is a miracle. Indeed, a miracle.