Because it seemed I had known Dr. Adams forever, I don’t even mind it when he puts his finger up me in the examination room. Maybe that’s because his way of doing is one hundred eighty degrees different from what old Dr. Hardy did back home. Dr. Hardy probably didn’t know it, but he was the first full-grown man to ever get his hands on me, and I swore he’d be the last, but there must be something about being crazy that makes nurses and doctors have to look at you all over and feel you out everywhere.
Anyway, I finally went to Dr. Hardy because Aunt Lona made an appointment herself for me to go, whether Mama wanted to go or not. As it turned out, Mama was the one to take me. She wasn’t about to let Aunt Lona take me and, I guess, have me and Aunt Lona know something that she didn’t. Although what she thought we might find out from old Dr. Hardy, I don’t know, because he always seemed to be right in the same category as Mama, just as backwards as they come.
What made me so infernally mad with Mama, though, was when we were on the way to Dr. Hardy’s office she said, “Lizabeth, have you done gone and got yourself in trouble?” Well, not knowing Mama, you wouldn’t know what she meant. But, in Mama language that meant was I pregnant.
“No, Mama. No!” I said, furious that she would even think such a thing. What I really wanted to say was just because she had conceived Angela out of wedlock, that was no sign I had gone and done something like that. But I didn’t have the nerve to say it. Besides, Mama was then wanting to know why I was “acting like it.”
“Acting like what?” I said.
“Acting like you’re in trouble.”
What could I say to this woman? First of all, I didn’t know how pregnant people acted. I didn’t know they laid around in bed all day, fed up with living and just as ready to go on to a new life in the next world, a life with a little more light in it.
Second of all, since I never in my life went out with any man at any time, how in the name of pickle did Mama think I would have gotten pregnant? By divine conception? But “in trouble.” The words landed so heavy in my stomach they might as well have been a child messing up my insides as nauseated as they made me feel.
And of course Mama wasn’t satisfied with me just telling her I wasn’t pregnant. No. “You and Lona, you know something I don’t,” Mama said. “And you know I think she’s right. You do need to go to Dr. Hardy and get yourself straightened out.”
Right at that moment I was terribly glad that Mama had her eyes on the road and not on me. I couldn’t have stood it. Her looking at me. But, you know, it’s entirely pathetic how people can have exactly the same ideas for entirely opposite reasons. Aunt Lona was wanting me to go to Dr. Hardy just to find out if there might be something physically wrong with me that was making me so down and out, and, I suppose, Mama, in a sense, was too. But all Aunt Lona was wanting to do was help, while Mama was all fired up to prove I had done gone out and sinned.
And I think old Mrs. Hardy was on Mama’s side of thinking, the way she kept side-glancing her eyes at me, just like I was something to avoid. “Take off all your clothes and get under this sheet here,” she said.
So, I took off everything except my panties and brassiere, and I was embarrassed to death to be even down to that, plus I saw that these panties had “Sunday” on them, and here it was Tuesday, so I felt kind of ridiculous that I couldn’t even put on the right day’s panties. Of course, it’s ridiculous to even have panties with days of the week on them anyway, but that’s what Mama orders from Sears Roebuck, and just to keep the peace, that’s what I wear. That, or nothing. And I like wearing nothing sometimes. Just for the thrill, you know. Since there’s nobody around Littleton who gives me much in the way of thrills, sometimes I have to make up my own. Not wearing panties is just right sometimes, since nobody knows but me, and isn’t it what you think and how you in your own mind picture yourself when it comes to the thrills of your body that counts after all?
When old Dr. Hardy came in, he got right put out with me—or old Mrs. Hardy one—that I wasn’t stripped down to the bare bones. “When she gets ready, I’ll come back in,” he said, looking from me to her, like he was wondering what was wrong with both of us. He probably didn’t know this, but Lord, I wouldn’t never be ready for him.
Old Dr. Hardy’s name for pregnant was a little different from Mama’s. “Are you with child?” he asked at the same time he stuck his finger up me. Since I couldn’t speak with an old man’s finger ramming all around down there, I didn’t say anything.
“I said, are you with child?” he repeated, once he’d pulled out of me, and turned to take off his gloves. I shook my head, since my throat was too tight to talk, and old Mrs. Hardy relayed the message.
After he was finished with me, I decided old Dr. Hardy was really a rapist going around in the form of a doctor. He had entered me without my permission, and that was definition enough in my book, because what does it matter what somebody enters you with? Breaking and entering is breaking and entering.
Anyway, after he was finished with his raping, we met in his office, me, Mama, and him, where he said I might do good to go off to Nathan, where they could take a look at me and maybe find out what was wrong with me. “They got a special ward there,” he said, “for people like her.”
“You mean Lizabeth’s done gone crazy?” Mama said, raising up on the edge of her chair.
“Not crazy,” Dr. Hardy said, “just what I’d call ‘depressed.’ If she’s stopped working and lays around in bed all the time, and there’s nothing physically wrong with her, that I can find, then I’d say she’s maybe got a bad case of depression.”
“Or a tumor beginning to form on my brain, like Annie Lou Parsons,” I said, although nobody seemed to hear. They just looked at me. Both of them. Like I was something to just look at, to see and not hear. Like Mama was always saying, “Children should be seen, not heard.” And she always follows it with some reference to some verse in the Bible that I don’t even care about, even though I looked it up one time just to see if it really did say anything like that at all, and since it didn’t even appear to resemble anything like what Mama was always saying, I just passed it off as another one of Mama’s own self-made commandments. But I do believe that there should be another commandment to go along with it. Something like, “Children should be heard and not seen.” And that would take care of things from the children’s side. But who cares what I think anyway?
“But Nathan’s for crazy folks,” Mama said, disbelieving her ears. Disbelieving her eyes, too, it looked like. And I know this sounds weird, but when she looked at me in Dr. Hardy’s office, even though she was thinking I was crazy, it was still like she was somehow in some way seeing an Elizabeth she had never seen before. It’s just the way she looked at me, like, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before in my whole life. Who are you?”
But that’s not what she said. She just said, very quietly, “Nathan? Are you sure? Nathan?”
“Like I said, they’ve got a special ward there for people who are not exactly crazy, they just need some help.”
“Nathan,” Mama said, almost breathless, staring off into nowhere, and not even pretending to hear.
What bothered me nearly as much as the idea of going off to Nathan was hearing Dr. Hardy and Mama talk about me like I was nowhere around. And that made me wonder more than ever, was I, Elizabeth Miller, really here and alive in this world, or was I just this shadow of Angela floating along that people could see and talk about, but when I talked back it was like I didn’t even count.
From the first time I ever talked with Dr. Adams, I got the feeling he wouldn’t ever do that: talk about me in my very own presence as if I’m not there. Dr. Adams, I learn from the beginning, comes straight out and talks with me like I am a person in my own right mind and body, although he does make me a little nervous. And I know this sounds strange, but I do believe that I get nervous because he is so calm. It doesn’t make sense, does it? But he’s just so calm, my Lord, if a big, black bull came charging into his office and balked right between us, Dr. Adams wouldn’t even budge. He’d just likely say something such as, “And, what, Elizabeth, do you think of this big, black bull here?” I can tell you for sure, if anyone ever wanted to take a picture of calm certainty and absolute correctness, just strike Dr. Adams and they’d have them one.
But I figure the nervousness is my problem, not his. Not used to being around truly real and peaceful people, I plain don’t know how to act. It’s awfully easy acting around people in Littleton, since everybody there is putting on a show, and you just get in there and put on a show too—“Hey, how are you? Fine, and you? Oh, I’m fine, too, and how about Hank? Well, he’s fine, too, suffering a little with his arthritis, you know, but he’s fine.” Everybody is just so fine I can’t stand it.
Dr. Adams doesn’t stand for shows. He reminds me of Aunt Lona in that way. He stands for what you’re really and truly feeling, no matter if it makes you sound good or bad, and I’m not used to letting myself sound bad, not even with Aunt Lona, at least not all the way bad.
And now that the examination is over here he is asking me the very same question he asked me at the beginning of our visit. That’s what he called it, a visit.
“May I visit with you for a while, Elizabeth?” he says, his shimmery, blue eyes just inviting me on into him, not forcing me, not making me look at him, but leaving me alone for myself to decide that Lord, he could visit with me any old time he wanted.
But the question. “Why are you here, Elizabeth?” And I figure I didn’t give him the right answer the first time when I told him I was here “because something’s wrong with me,” because if I had answered him right, he wouldn’t be asking again so soon, would he? So I look around at the bare, green walls, and when I get tired of that, I rub my fingers around the gold base of the table lamp right beside me that puts out a morbid dim light, just stalling, you know. Then I try again.
“I’m here because I’m crazy,” I say.
“Elizabeth,” he says, “people who are really crazy don’t talk about it.” He says it like it is the gospel truth, firm and final, and I’ll have to admit it’s something I’ve never thought about before. The best part of all, though, is that it makes sense, and I feel a world better.
When we get one question settled, though, he asks another one too hard to answer. It grows to be a little bit fun and a little bit scary at the same time, trying to figure out what he would have me say.
“Who are you?” he says, kind of sudden.
And I really think by now he should know my name, everybody else around here surely does, but my name, it turns out, is not who I am.
“Elizabeth Miller,” I tell him. And when that doesn’t seem answer enough, I add Sarah to it. “Sarah Elizabeth Miller.”
“So who is Sarah Elizabeth Miller?”
For a while I just sit, trying to smooth the apple green jumper-dress that Mama won first prize on last year, wondering for the first time if she is okay and how she’s made it so far without me around to look after her. The room gets so quiet for so long that I feel I have to say something, so I say, “I’m Dock and Vera Miller’s girl.”
“You’re Dock and Vera Miller’s girl,” he says, and the words sound so ridiculous coming from him. And that’s another thing about Dr. Adams. He can repeat exactly the same thing I say, and it sounds like something else entirely, so different sometimes that it’s like some other person said it, not me. That’s one of his favorite things, I find out real quick, is repeating stuff. It’s like he takes my words and stretches them out in a banner in front of me holding them up for me to see. Most of the time I don’t like what I see on that banner because it makes me look foolish. At the same time, it feels kind of good to look foolish and have it be all right with Dr. Adams. Anyway I want to be, or anything I want to say is all right with him. He’ll take me just the way I am.
Of course, God’s supposed to take me just the way I am, too, that’s what I’ve always heard. But I always got the feeling, and I may be wrong, but I always felt that God would take me just the way I am, as long as it’s His way. But here I get the feeling that Dr. Adams will take me just the way I am, as long as I’m MY way, no matter the way that happens to be.
But how am I? Who am I? “Maybe I’m really Angela,” I tell Dr. Adams on our next visit. “Maybe I’m really Angela come back from the dead.”
Then, of course, I have to get into telling all about Angela, and for some reason it’s easier telling about Angela than it is telling about myself. Maybe I don’t know me, but I sure do know Angela frontwards and backwards, and for some reason I feel there’s some saving grace in that.
“Okay then, pretend you are Angela,” he says. “Then who are you?”
“I am Angela, a little girl about four years old, an angel now, but I got run over thirty-two years ago when I ran out behind the car when Mama was backing it out of the garage. I am the prettiest and the best little girl in the world. I made my parents very happy when I was alive, but now I make them very sad, and it makes me feel sad, too. I try very hard to make them happy, but it doesn’t work because they’re still sad most of the time, and it makes me sad, too.”
“Why does it make you sad?” Dr. Adams says, writing in the silver-backed notebook, which he won’t let me see, although I’ve asked him nearly every time I’ve visited him, I’ve asked him to let me see it. Why I want to see in that notebook so bad I don’t know. But it’s like he’s writing things down about me that I don’t know about myself, and if I knew it, maybe I could figure out who I am. If I could just peek into that notebook, then maybe I would find Elizabeth Miller in there somewhere all written up in a nice, neat summary so I could read it and say, “Oh, so this is who I am.”
“Why does it make you sad?” I say. You see, I’ve found that trying to answer the questions is easier if I repeat what Dr. Adams repeats. So I repeat him repeating me. It’s real catchy, this repeating stuff. “Because,” I say, “because Mama just keeps on thinking it’s all her fault about me getting behind the car when she was backing out of the garage, but it’s not, it’s the Lord’s will. At least that’s what everybody says.”
“It’s the Lord’s will,” he says, looking at me as if he’s looking deep into me, puzzling over me. And I’m feeling ridiculous again.
“Oh, you know,” I say, “like everything that happens is supposed to be the Lord’s doing, that kind of Lord’s will.”
He’s writing in the silver chart again, and then he says, “Is your coming here, Elizabeth, is that the Lord’s will?”
Another stumper. But after I think about it for a minute, I decide sure, if the Lord’s the cause of everything, then sure, that’s why I’m here. And for the first time ever I feel myself getting really put out with this Lord who’s supposed to notice every sparrow’s fall. As I leave Dr. Adams, the more I think, the more I decide that’s all this Lord did, He just watched this sparrow’s fall, just watched it, and didn’t do one solitary thing about it. He just looks, like Mama always looks. Looks and you don’t know what she’s thinking. But then remembering back on that little verse in the Bible, it didn’t really say, did it, that He would do something about the sparrows falling. No, I think it just says that He watches them fall. But that makes me even madder. What’s the purpose in having a Lord, if He’s just going to stand by and watch the sparrows fall and not even make a move to do anything about it?
When I get back to my room and hear Miss Cannon singing, “’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at His word,” I feel myself start in to trembling with anger, and I wonder if this is what it means to go crazy, standing here listening to some old woman singing about trusting in a Lord who just stands back and watches everything and everybody and doesn’t ever do nothing about nobody none of the time. Mama, nor me, nor nobody!
“Well, where’s the sweetness in it, I’d like to know!” I holler at her, but she doesn’t even let on to hear me, she just looks at me and keeps on in that whiny-pitched voice, “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er.”
So I get up real close to her this time, so she’ll be sure to hear me, and I holler at her again. “You just keep on trusting Him, sister, ’cause you see where it got you, right smack-dab in the middle of Nathan!” And I find out I may as well be talking to a tree stump for all the reaction I get.
But more and more I’m seeing that it just doesn’t matter what you say or how you behave here at Nathan. It’s not going to matter much to anybody one way or the other. The patients here, they don’t care, and the nurses and doctors, they act like they’ve seen everything and heard even more, so nothing ever surprises them at all.
And it’s such a new freeing feeling, this acting in whatever way that comes out of me, it’s getting to be kind of fun waiting and watching and waiting and looking at my own self, just to see, you know, what does happen to come out from way down deep inside me, to see feelings and thoughts and ideas I didn’t even know were in me.