Like when I go to the recreation room now, I go on over to the piano with no hesitation, sit down and play all the Elvis songs I know. Mama would just about die, I know she would, to hear me playing such as that. The only time I play Elvis songs at home is when she’s gone out to the grocery store or over to Eunice’s on Saturdays to get her hair fixed. Now I play Elvis and rock ’n’ roll all I want, and one time I even played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” rock ’n’ roll style. That was after I got mad at Him for willing that I end up in the crazy house.
Playing the piano is when I fall in love with Dr. Adams. He plays the piano too, something wonderful, and every time I sit down at the piano, I say to this Lord: “Lord, at least if You’re going to put me in a place like this, at least let Dr. Adams come around today and play the piano again with me.”
Dr. Adams has what he calls this “little medley” of songs that he plays, and they’re all about love. He sits on one end of the piano bench and I sit on the other. He’s showed me how to play the soprano part, and he takes the bass, so we sit there together playing songs like “The Way You Look Tonight” and “Heart and Soul” and “My Heart Stood Still,” and I just keep on falling deeper and deeper, and I wonder if he’s feeling anywhere near the same as I am. But I know he’s not, because he’s got a wife and med school besides, so he doesn’t have time to go around falling in love with his patients, no matter how beautiful he is.
So, all I can do is just pretend. Pretend that Dr. Adams is in love with me, even though I do have frizzy hair and wear homemade dresses and am nothing at all to look at. Brand X, that’s what I was in school, while the other girls—the kind like Mavis—came out sparkling, looking like they’d been washed in Tide. But when you’re washed only in the Blood of the Lamb that doesn’t have all those whiteners and brighteners in it, you can’t hardly help it, you come out a little on the dingy side.
I feel anything but dingy, though, on Saturday nights when Mr. Fleet waltzes in from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Mr. Martin, the rec director, gets everybody up and out on the patio in the daytime where we play volleyball and shuffle-board and badminton. But on Saturday nights we dance. Everybody, that is, except Miss Cannon. Miss Cannon just peeks at us through her window, shaking her head and talking about what sinners we are to be carrying on so, and how we’re going straight to hell, every last one of us.
Maybe it is awful to be learning how to do the fox-trot, the rhumba, and the two-step instead of stuck away under some dim lamplight studying your Sunday school lesson, but I decided from the beginning I’ll just have to be awful, because Saturday nights are the closest thing to sparkling I’ve ever been. It beats polishing your Sunday shoes anytime.
Mr. Fleet, tall and thin, is some more whiz at dancing, even if he is a little on the prissy side. He’s tall and skinny and very white, you know the kind of white on a man that looks as if he’s never spent a day working outside in his whole life? But whiteness doesn’t matter when you’re dancing, especially on him. He floats along so easy as if it didn’t take a bit of effort for his body to glide around, as if he has an invisible scooter under his feet sliding him around everywhere.
And there are all of us lesser people, with bodies heavy as lead trying to do the cha-cha to the Four Ladds singing “There’s Only One of You.” I figure Mr. Fleet picked that one out just for us.
Take Tommy, for instance, over there shuffling around with Mrs. Krieger. He’s all the time jerking his head and mumbling something or other, which sounds an awful lot like bad words, and it’s not like he’s doing it on purpose, it’s more like he can’t help it. Saying the bad words, I mean. But every few minutes his head starts in to jerking, usually in a one-two-three, a pattern that I’ve watched carefully, and I’ve learned the jerking flows right along in time to Mr. Fleet’s waltz music, and all this mumbo-jumbo comes rolling out from his mouth, and he covers up his mouth like he’s embarrassed to death because there’s nothing he can do about it.
Maybe it’s mean of me, but I don’t dance with Tommy. And I hate to say this, but I don’t like Tommy. It took a while for me to admit it to myself, because I couldn’t bring myself to say I don’t like someone with such an affliction, because you should be kinder and sympathize with them, but I can’t help it, I plain don’t like Tommy. And, I promise, it’s not because of his affliction. It’s because he’s all the time following me around wanting to talk to me, and I discovered if I talk with him long enough he starts wanting to put his arms around me, and once he does that, then he wants to just look at me square in the face and then he wants to feel me all over, just like the doctors, so I just plain don’t like him. (Besides, he doesn’t use any kind of deodorant.) So if I’m going to find out who I am, then I can’t keep on doing things I don’t want to do, and dancing with Tommy is one of them.
He mostly dances with Alice anyway. Alice will dance with Tommy when she’s not blind. But half the time, you know, she can’t see. Even though I’ve seen her blind spells come on more than once, it’s still hard to believe she can see sometimes and sometimes she can’t. Hemp is the one who told me about Alice’s blind spells. According to Hemp, Alice was once a beauty queen, and she had a wreck one night that cut up her face so bad and that now it’s all scarred up, and now she can’t stand to look at herself in the mirror anymore, but being a person who’s always looked at herself a lot, she can’t all of a sudden stop looking, and when she does look, then soon she just goes blind so she won’t be able to see herself.
It took me a while to figure this out, but I’ve learned you can’t always believe what Hemp is saying. And, too, he might act one way, but really be feeling an entirely opposite way. Like his acting cheerful all the time. Nobody can really feel cheerful all the time, I don’t care who it is, but that’s the way Hemp acts, that and joking around a lot.
Take the first day when I came to Nathan. Hemp was down in the rec room, and just as soon as I walked in the door he started in to saying, “Here, Fido, here boy, come on, Fido,” and whistling at this dog that was nowhere around. Well, he walked his “dog” on over to the game closet, opened the door and put him in there. And there I was wondering what in the world was wrong with him. Or was there something wrong with me, was there really a dog there and I couldn’t see it? Had I really entered into the spirit world with Angela and this invisible dog was positive proof?
When Hemp saw I was good and puzzled, he came over, plopped down on the green plastic sofa beside me, and started laughing. “I do that for all the new ones,” he said. “Make ’em think they’ve come to the right place.”
From then on he acted just as normal as the next person on the street, and I can’t figure out why Hemp is there because he seems so happy and good-natured. But you know yourself you can’t go around asking people if they’re crazy and if so how and why. Some people you can figure out their problem if you stay around long enough, like Alice. The blind spells come on her almost every day and they go away sometimes just about as quick as they come. So there you know her problem, but you don’t know the why. And the why, that’s the magical question around here.
Like why has Delores been so hoarse for so long? For months, Hemp says. If anyone’s the jewel around here, personally, I think it’s Delores, not Mavis. Mavis acts too haughty. But Delores, she’s probably the nicest one around, and it makes you sick to think that such a nice person can’t talk above a whisper.
“It was this guy she was engaged to,” says Hemp. “He’s what done it to her. He didn’t even show up for the wedding, and it just about left her speechless.” You see, when Hemp says something like that, like when he told about Alice, and then Delores, he looks at you like he’s checking you out in some way to see if you believe it or not. He knows why everybody’s here, he says, even Bonnie who’s stuck away in the lock-up ward all by herself all the time.
“She killed her babies,” Hemp tells me one day when we’ve just finished a game of Ping-Pong. I’m getting pretty good at Ping-Pong, though I don’t know what good it will do me because I don’t reckon you can win a blue ribbon at Ping-Pong. Anyway, Hemp says, “I know all about Bonnie. She had twins. Two little girls, and she roasted them.”
“Yeah, roasted them,” I say, “just about like you taking your dog to the game closet.”
“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.