It seems like things have been changing faster and faster around Nathan since Dr. Adams left the eighth floor. After Miss Cannon left, I got a new roommate, and she is as young and fragile as Miss Cannon is old and tough. Belinda is a pretty little girl, only fourteen, with hair so fine and face so fair, she looks like that thin, breakable crystal you see in the glasswares section of the department store. And that’s the way she acts, too, like she might break at any moment.
I don’t have to ask Belinda what is wrong with her, why she is here, because she’s so full up and running over she talks all the time to anyone who’ll give her half the chance.
“My mother died,” she tells me the first day, “and I’ve been having to look after my two little brothers and my sister.” And then she starts into crying. “I can’t do it all,” she’ll say, “I can’t do it all. It’s too much. I can’t get everything done.”
Belinda makes me feel worse than ever. Even before she came, it seemed like everybody at Nathan had a problem that was ten times worse than mine. All I have to do is let Angela be dead, let things be the way they are, that’s all. And not let what Mama did keep me beholden to her for the rest of my life, even though I can’t take it all away. But look at all the other people—Lenny, who might never talk again he’s so mixed up, Delores, who can’t talk-because she’s so hoarse, Tommy, whose affliction is so bad he just keeps on jumping around all the time whether he wants to or not, Alice, who keeps on going blind, Mrs. Krieger, whose arms won’t ever hold her son again, Harold, who knows nothing but how to sneer at everything, and then there’s them who’re so drawn into themselves that they don’t even notice it when you talk to them, and it doesn’t look like anybody or anything can ever draw them back out again. And Hemp, who was the most natural acting and the most normal, at least I thought, now dead.
Why, why, why hadn’t I talked with Hemp about what was deep down inside him? Why had I thought that just because he was always clowning around and acting goofy that he was okay, that nothing was wrong? What if I had talked with him? Would he still be here? Just knowing how talking it all out is helping me, would I have helped Hemp by listening to him talking it all out? But he was supposed to do that with Dr. Adams. Did he talk, really talk, with Dr. Adams? But why hadn’t I myself found out why Hemp was here? Why couldn’t I see that something was terribly wrong, and wrong enough to make him take his own life? How can I live with myself, knowing I didn’t help somebody to talk it all out, no matter what was wrong with them, to just open up and talk.
Me, I’ve talked so much in the past couple of months, that I feel I don’t have much more talk in me, especially about me and Angela. About Mama and all those times, well, yes, I know I haven’t talked about that, but I’m sorry, I just can’t. No. No, I’m not sorry. I just plain don’t want to talk about it, no apologies made. I am what I am, Mama or no Mama. So, it looks like there comes a time when you have to start doing what you know has to be done, and not just talking and thinking about it all the time. Like, all I have to do now is grow up. That’s all. Grow up into Elizabeth and quit letting Angela and Mama have their way with me. Preacher Edwards is always pleading with us to let the Lord have his way with us. Shoot. All I need is to let Elizabeth have her way with me. If I can be Elizabeth, the Lord can then take me on from there. Mama too. But that’s still even harder, to think about always being Elizabeth around Mama, and it occurs to me for the first time ever that I must have gone through my whole life trying harder to please Mama than to please the Lord. Maybe mamas are harder to please, I don’t know. At least they put up a bigger fuss than the Lord does. Anyway, maybe I should start doing like everyone else in Littleton and saying when I decide something, “It’s the Lord’s will for me.” That way I can be Elizabeth and no apologies about it if I’m doing what the Lord tells me to do. And who knows, when you get right down to it, who really, honestly and truly, ever knows if it’s the Lord telling you or not? You see, maybe it’s the Lord telling me to go to college. At least that’s what I can tell Mama. “Dear Mama and Daddy,” I can write, “I have decided to go to college. It’s the Lord’s will. Please pray for me, that I will do what He wants me to do.” But I can’t say that. Not ever, I think. Because it’s me who’s deciding what to do, not the Lord. Even though the Lord may be looking on, well pleased, it’s still me who’s deciding.
If you go by the Lord’s will on everything, then you have the Lord creating the problems for all these people here, and I don’t think the Lord goes around making problems. Besides, if the Lord were held accountable for everything, how do you explain people like old Sheriff Tate when he was the one trying to have his way with me out in the graveyard? Or Cigarette Butt Lacky Roach? Or what all Mama did, even? I don’t think the Lord planned that for me. I think Sheriff Tate and Lacky Roach planned it in their own dear time in their own un-dear way. Did Mama plan it? Or did it just happen? Like she just couldn’t help it, or something? Sometimes, I like to think that. Like to think that something made her do it, something she had no control over, that she wouldn’t in her right mind do anything like that to any child, least of all her own daughter.
The only way I ever lived through all things like that before was to say, “Poor Angela. Look what they’re doing to Angela.” And I was saving Elizabeth from the pity. But now I can’t do that anymore. It’s got to be Elizabeth that the bad things happen to, as well as the good. And like Dr. Adams was the good that happened to Elizabeth, so Dr. Shaver, the bad, has happened to Elizabeth, too.
Dr. Shaver, the new practicing intern on the eighth floor looks like a weasel. Even worse, he talks and acts like one; like he’s trying to weasel things out of me. And why he’s called Dr. Shaver I couldn’t guess in a million years, because he always has this stubble of fuzz around his face, which looks like he’s forgotten to shave, or never cared to one.
Anyway, Dr. Shaver, I soon discover in my first visit with him, is repeating the same things Dr. Adams said, like they have a question-and-reply list somewhere that someone’s drawn up, maybe Dr. Johnstone, that they’re supposed to go by. (Could I tell Dr. Shaver what Dr. Johnstone tried to get me to do? Since I don’t care one mite for Dr. Shaver, since I’m not in love with him, like I was in love with Dr. Adams, what would I have to lose? But, then, Dr. Johnstone is his own problem, not mine. Shoot, I’ve got enough to deal with, just handling me.)
“And who is Elizabeth?” says Dr. Shaver, breaking my musing, talking as if he’s the only one who’s ever asked that question. It is a little aggravating having to answer the same old questions again about who is Angela, and what she’s like, and how do I feel about my mother and father and men again, “Who is Elizabeth?”
This time around, at least I can tell a little more about Elizabeth. I can at least say “I” am Elizabeth. And I can say that Elizabeth is a young woman who used to work at the pants factory, but who is now thinking real hard and serious about going back to school, if there’s any possible way. I say that to hear myself saying it, to see how it feels coming from Elizabeth. And I’ll have to say it feels pretty good, to think that going off to college is what I am really going to do once I leave Nathan.
“And why are you going to college?” Stubble-Face asks.
Stupid question. From stupid man. Deserves stupid answer. “Oh,” I say, just stalling and playing with my pink fingernails, colored with Miss Hansom’s hot pink fingernail polish, “I’m going to learn how to ask questions, like, ’Why?’”
“So,” he says, rather smartly, “you’re going to be a shrink?”
My head snaps up as suddenly as if he’d tied a string around my neck and jerked on it. Shrink? What’s that? What could I say? What is a ’shrink’? I could ask Dr. Adams easy as pie, “What is a ’shrink’?” but why can’t I ask this man? Why am I so embarrassed that I don’t know what a shrink is? Is it something good, something bad? How do I answer without knowing what it is? How do I answer without making myself appear foolish? Why am I so afraid, now, of appearing foolish with this weasel of a man? Where is that Elizabeth who can say anything to anyone now, at least at Nathan? What would the real, grown-up Elizabeth woman say right now, the Elizabeth mat Dr. Adams worked so hard to bring out?
“I’ve been thinking I’d like to help get people to talking,” I say, “get them to saying what they really and truly think, to help them see it’s all right to just be who they are and not put on any shows, not try to be someone they’re not, and mainly get them to talking to their own families so they don’t have to come talk to stark strangers.”
“Can you talk with your family?” Dr. Shaver asks, his deep brown milky eyes piercing me, looking like Mama eyes.
I squirm. I fidget, probably like a kid. But. . . so, I am uncomfortable. What the heck. “I can talk better,” I finally say. “It’s going to take some time to talk completely in the way I want to talk, but I know now I can do it.”
“Can your family talk with you?” he asks, his eyes not straying one inch from me. Just staring at me. Exposing every bit of me. Leaving nothing, no part of me, covered up.
“Look here, Elizabeth, here, take it. Um-m-m, feels so good, baby. Ain’t it, baby? Ain’t that good?”
“Can your family talk with you?” he asks again, drawing out every ounce of anger, disgust, and hate I could have from any corner of my insides. On one hand I don’t want this weasel seeing all this in me, but on the other hand, since I don’t care for him, nor him for me, there wouldn’t be any love lost, even if I did rail out at him. But I don’t rail, because I know I’d start in to crying and couldn’t stop, and I sure don’t want to do that in front of this man. So I just choose to tell him matter of fact and shock him to pieces.
“Sure,” I say, “my family can talk. Mama can say, ’Here, Elizabeth, honey, take my breast.’”
Since those words had been churning in my head for all my life, I thought that I would be used to it, but that Dr. Shaver wouldn’t and that it would somehow put him in his place by shocking him speechless. But all he does is look at me more, this time in a different way, like he is awfully curious. Since he doesn’t act shocked, I go on.
“And Mama can say, ’Hm-m-m, feels so good, you sucking on it. Don’t it feel good, baby?’”
Still the weasel keeps on staring at me. He crosses his leg, then he uncrosses it. “And what does your daddy say?” he asks.
“You leave my daddy out of this!” I tell him right quick. “My daddy wouldn’t never do nothing like that. Never!”
The weasel just nods his head, slips out his pen from his shirt pocket and starts to write in the silver-backed chart. Like some kind of pouncing cat, I jump at him, snatch the pen, and I hold it right in his face.
“You write a single word of this down in that damn chart and I’ll cram this down your throat!”
I am trembling so, I feel for a minute I’m getting out of control, until I notice that at least the weasel is shocked, but it isn’t exactly the kind of shock I had intended to inflict upon him. Frankly, I’m shocked, too. I haven’t never done anything like that, and it scares me so bad that just as quickly as I pounce, I as quickly sit back down. Just to get my bearings, you know. And, of course, I’m worried he might put me in the lock-up ward for being out of control, and that would be terrible anytime, but especially right here when I am thinking about and talking about going home and getting on with my life, whatever my life is going to be.
“Look,” I say, offering the pen back to him. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I . . . I can’t imagine what came on me.” Then realizing that this man knows nothing about how I act in person, only what he has read in my chart, I decide to explain more. “I haven’t ever done or said anything like that to anyone at any time ever in my life. I am so sorry.” And I am. I am truly sorry.
“No problem,” he says, and he says it sounding pretty cool for someone who has just been pounced on by a wild woman.
We both are very quiet for a while, until he slips his pen back into his shirt pocket and he says, “Why don’t you want me to write in your chart, Elizabeth? You understand, don’t you, that everything you say is confidential?”
“I know that. I understand that. But I just plain don’t want that in my chart. Would you? If your mama did something like that to you, would you want it written down anywhere?”
“Does she do it now?”
“Of course not. I realize you don’t know me, but I’ve got better sense than that. Besides, I don’t want to talk about it. Would you want to talk about something like that?”
“When did she do it?”
“When I was little. But I don’t want to talk about it, I said.”
“How little?”
“I don’t know how little. Anyway, I told you I don’t want to talk about it. All I know is after I started school, she stopped.”
“Is that all she did, ask you to suck at her breast?”
“My God, isn’t that enough? With me six years old? And her enjoying it?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t say what I meant. What I mean is, did she ask you to do anything else?”
I shake my head. “That was enough, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry. I know this is painful for you, Elizabeth. But how did you feel?”
How did I feel. A million-dollar question. What the heck. He’ll write it all down when I leave anyway. And I’ll be going soon, anyway. And I’ll never see Dr. Adams nor nobody down here ever again, anyway. What the heck. “Frankly, I felt all kinds of ways,” I tell him. “First, I felt scared, then mad, then guilty, then . . . a little bit excited, but scared excited, a little bit fun, but scared fun. All kinds of ways. And Dr. Weas . . . uh, Dr. Shaver, you’re right in a way. All this has been painful in the past, for all my years on this earth. But right now, you know I just don’t give a shit about it anymore.”
“Why, Elizabeth, why don’t you give a shit?”
When Dr. Shaver says that, suddenly, this feeling comes over me that I don’t hate him anymore. It’s like he is on my side, really, after all. That he can’t help it if he doesn’t look so hot, and he’s not as much fun as Dr. Adams, and even though he isn’t Dr. Adams, he seems to know, too, just what to say and how to act, even if I don’t care all that much for him.
“I’m just tired of the whole mess. Tired of carrying it around all these years. I just want to forget about it. Well, as best I can, and not let it keep me from being a real live person and not some spooky version of Angela floating around, half-dead. That’s it, that’s all. I just want to put it away and bury it. As much as I can, anyway.”
“Have you talked about this with anyone?”
I shake my head. “Unless you count the Lord.”
“Why don’t you want to talk about it, Elizabeth?”
“Because it . . . it . . .” I turn my head and rest my closed-up mouth on my fist. Sitting and waiting for him to stop. Or for me to get up and just go, get on out of here and never once look back. But I can’t move. And I can’t talk.
“I want to help you talk about it, Elizabeth,” Dr. Shaver says. “You need to talk about it. But you realize the importance of that.”
“I know,” I say finally. “I know. But it makes me feel so . . . so dirty . . . so . . . ugly.” I astound myself something awful that I can say this and not even start into crying. Maybe that is because for the past month, since Aunt Lona told me about the abused child at her school, I’ve cried and cried probably until I cried it out. Plus, I’ve thought it over and over from every possible angle, until I couldn’t see any more ways to think about it. But I’ll have to admit, it felt good, telling just one person, even though he couldn’t change a thing about it.
“But you’re not dirty, Elizabeth, you’re not ugly,” Dr. Shaver says, and I know he is just trying to keep me going on.
“But I’ve felt that way forever, and isn’t that what counts, after all, how you, yourself, feel about yourself? Besides, in some crazy way I feel like it was my fault, too. But deep down I know it couldn’t have been. Could it?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Elizabeth.”
“And, somehow, I want to think that it isn’t even Mama’s fault. That she couldn’t help it. That she was just doing what she had to do.”
Dr. Shaver looks at me, as if to say, “Yes, and go on.” But I don’t.
“Why wouldn’t it be your mama’s fault?” he finally says, when he sees I’m not going on.
“If she’s hanging on to Angela so much and making me out of Angela. . . oh, I don’t know. . . maybe that somehow brought some comfort in some way, I don’t know.”
“Was it comforting to you, Elizabeth?”
“Oh, why, why, did I ever start into this? I don’t know. No. Yes, maybe. No. Not comforting. Especially when I was so big. Maybe when I was smaller and thought it was right and okay. But, no, not when I was five and six. No, absolutely not. Scary.”
“How was it scary, Elizabeth?”
“Well, my God, wouldn’t something like that be scary to you?”
“Then you should know how it was scary. Scary because you get to thinking that it’s getting to be more exciting, and you get to somehow liking it and hating it at the same time. And you get confused. Terrible confusion. Especially when . . .”
I cannot believe I am sitting here telling all this out. What will this man think of me? But then, I really don’t care what he thinks. But what will he think?
“When what, Elizabeth?”
“When you think about other women, when you get older. It’s scary then. Very scary.”
“Can you tell me more about that? Or had you rather wait until another time?”
“Oh, what the hell. No. I want to get it all out now, and not talk about it ever again, okay?”
“Whatever you say.”
“Okay. Like when you see women with hardly no clothes on, and it makes you feel excited; and seeing Mary Jane Payne with her breasts pushing out of her halter top and her rear pushing out of her short shorts; and the way I admired Mavis, the Jewel. . . well, you don’t know Mavis, but she was something to behold. And, shoot, it even carries over to Miss Hansom. Nice, sweet Miss Hansom. Even though I like her so much, I still feel it’s somehow ugly and dirty to like her.”
“I don’t know why. But somehow it all goes back to Mama in some way. Like it’s wrong of me to like any woman, or admire any woman for their beautiful way of looking. But there’s nothing, you know, really wrong with that, is there? I tell myself that, anyway, that there’s nothing wrong with that. Still it makes me wonder.”
“What do you wonder, Elizabeth?”
“You know what I’m getting at.”
“What, Elizabeth, what are you getting at?”
“If I’m queer, damn it. If I’m a damn queer.”
“Have you ever loved a woman? In the sexual sense, I mean.”
“Heavens, no! I’ve never loved anyone in a sexual sense.”
“Do you want to love a woman?”
“In that sexual way?” Even though I have asked myself that question a million times, and answered it a million times, I still have to stop and think about it. “No, not in the sexual way. I just want to like women and it be okay. And me not have to worry about liking them. And not be afraid to like them.”
“Why is it not okay for you to like them, Elizabeth?”
“Because I just always wonder if they’re going to end up wanting me to suck on their breasts, I guess, hell, I don’t know.”
A time of silence falls down upon us, and I decide that for once I, Elizabeth, will be the one to wait ’til Eternity passes before anyone speaks. So I do.
“What about your Aunt Lona? Can you like her okay?”
“Aunt Lona, my goodness. Aunt Lona is my saving grace, if there ever were any grace in my life. I can love Aunt Lona fine, just fine and normal, and it’s all right with her. And I do.”
“Does that prove that you can like other women, too, and it’s all right?”
“Sure it does,” I say with no hesitation at all. “Sure.” Now, why didn’t I think of that? Just once in all these years, why didn’t I think of loving Aunt Lona and it being all right?
“Thank you, Dr. Shaver. Thank you. Why, why, hadn’t I thought of my normal way of loving Aunt Lona? God, it feels so . . . so . . . what am I trying to say . . . so . . . free! Yes! Free, free, free-e-e-, it’s feeling so free, like uh bird in uh tree. Oh, I’m just thinking about my freedom song. You know Elvis? That’s my song. You probably think I’m crazy. But I’m not. I’m just feeling free. That’s all. But except for one thing . . . those women at the fair with these scanty clothes on, and Mary Jane Payne . . . why do they make me feel excited?”
“I’d say that’s a pretty normal feeling. Anyone dressed sexually provocative is trying to do just that—get you to feeling aroused. Aren’t they? Mary Jane Payne is your friend, right?”
“Sort of. Well, yes. I always wouldn’t let myself admit it, too much, though.”
“Why not?”
“Same old thing. Afraid to like a woman, I guess. But maybe it’ll be easier now that she got saved. Maybe she’ll be dressing different. For a while anyway. Shoot, maybe I’ll be dressing different,” I said, laughing. “Who knows. Maybe I’ll wear short shorts and a halter top with my cleavage pushing out. Ha, what cleavage, you say? But that’s all right for you to be thinking that, because I think it, too, so that’s all right.”
“Elizabeth, you’ve apparently managed to stay quite healthy, sexually, in spite of all you’ve been through,” and he sweeps his hand away from my chart, as if my whole life is an open book that he’s just read.
“Me? Sexually healthy? I’ve never had healthy sex in my whole life, so how can you say something like that?”
“It’s your attitude. You’ve managed to keep a healthy attitude and a sense of humor, somehow. You have every right to hold your head high. You’re a beautiful young woman, you know?”
That, I can’t answer. Beautiful? I, Elizabeth, beautiful? I mean, where? How? But I don’t press the issue. I just want to relish the thought, I, Elizabeth, beautiful. It makes me almost love Dr. Shaver, even though I still don’t like him all that much. But loving him is a long shot. A far long shot. I just don’t think I can love anyone the way I love Dr. Adams, beautiful Dr. Adams.
“I know this has been draining on you, Elizabeth, so we’ll close up shop today. But we still will need to talk about this thing with your mother, explore it a little more. Maybe try to get your mother down here, too.”
“Dr. Shaver,” I say firm and true, “I can tell you right now, my mama won’t come down, and besides that, I’ve already done all the exploring on it I care to do. Actually, a little bit more than I care to do, since I went ahead and talked about it anyway. Like I say, I’m ready to put it away and move on. And I mean that. I thought I wasn’t to blame; I thought it was okay to like, even love, other women. I just needed to hear it from someone else. That’s all. I’m done. It is finished.”
“You sound like you mean that,” Dr. Shaver says, looking at me in a new way, not with the piercing, staring, Mama-eyes that he had before. So, here is the last person in the world I thought I would’ve told anything to, but I went and told him the one thing I couldn’t tell anybody. I start to ask him if he works for the FBI, but I think the real Elizabeth would, or should, be serious about this. But isn’t that the real Elizabeth? Being funny, slightly sarcastic at times?
Since neither of us is talking, and it seems he is playing the waiting game for me to start, I finally say, “Do you work for the FBI, or something?” And I halfway laugh when I say it, so he can see I am joking, since he doesn’t know me too well.
He halfway laughs, too. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you have this way of making me keep on talking when I tell you I don’t want to talk about it. That’s real good, you know, for a . . . for a ’shrink’ to be able to do that? I hope I can do that someday.”
“You have a good place to start,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“At home.”
“But she won’t talk with me. Not like I’d want her to talk with me. She won’t say what she really, truly feels.”
“In that case, you just have to do the best you can.”
“And I did. When I was home. I did. But . . . I’ll just have to do better, won’t I? I’ll just have to learn to say to Mama what I really and truly feel and learn, maybe, to say it in a way that will help her say what she feels. But not just her, Dr. Shaver. I have to try to get other people to talking, too. Not just Mama.”
“Then you might enjoy being a shrink,” he says, getting up from his chair, a signal that he is ready to go, that this is all over. “Where are you thinking about going?”
“To the state university,” I say.
“That’s a good school,” he says, opening the door, so I can go on out. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”
I found out Miss Hansom went to the state university. “If you like a lot of partying and sororities and the rah-rah-rah of football games, then you should go to a big university,” she says. “But if you don’t care for all that, you might want a smaller college.”
Never being one to party and to go to football games in high school, I probably won’t be any different in college, but the idea of going to a big university sounds good to me. Big is opposite to Littleton, and anything opposite Littleton is what I want. I won’t be partying anyway, I will be studying and working and getting people to talking. So it doesn’t matter.
I want so to be telling all this to Dr. Adams. But Dr. Adams is gone for good, except he drops by every now and then to say, “Hello,” or to play a game of Ping-Pong, if he has the time. I’m getting so good at Ping-Pong, I actually beat him sometimes, and I feel ridiculous for feeling good about myself just because I’ve learned to play Ping-Pong. But I don’t feel ridiculous learning all the dances—waltzes and rhumbas and fox-trots and the two-step. Who knows, dancing might come in handy, if I do ever make it to a party in college.
One Saturday night when Dr. Adams is on duty, he joins us for dancing. Mr. Fleet puts on “Hernando’s Hideaway,” about a dark, secluded place, a place where no one knows your face, and we start off, Dr. Adams and I—do, doomp . . . do, doomp . . . do, doomp, doomp, doomp! Do, doomp . . . do doomp . . . do doomp, doomp, doomp! And Dr. Adams can outdance any one of us there, except for Mr. Fleet of course. But ah, dancing with Dr. Adams is like really heavenly, him so smooth and moving around so free and graceful through all the steps, turning me this way and that. I fall in love with him more and more. Even if he is gone from the floor, and even if I am leaving soon, I can’t help it. It just makes me feel so . . . I don’t know, so alive, moving my body around so carefree and easy. For the first time, ever, I truly feel my heavy body turning light, as if it were about to drop away from the wings of Angela that have weighed me down all these years, and I feel me starting to sprout a new pair of wings and take flight away from all that has been pressing me down forever, so that I am feeling “free, free, free-e-e-e . . . so free . . . like a bird in the tree.”
After dancing with Dr. Adams and feeling so free with him, I can’t help wondering what there is about Dr. Shaver that just turns off my lightness in one way, but that in another way just opens me up. Now I know this sounds selfish, but I don’t care for him because I can’t see myself too good when I am talking with Dr. Shaver. Talking with Dr. Adams is almost like looking into a mirror and seeing Elizabeth reflected back. So I am always looking at myself with Dr. Adams, looking this way and that and deciding if I am being the way I want to be and if not, then I can change the way I am. A mirror. That’s what Dr. Adams is for me. A mirror that reflects the Elizabeth I want to see, and now that my mirror is gone, how will I ever get to see myself again?
On the other hand, I can’t go around looking in a mirror for the rest of my life just to make sure I am here. Because now I know that I, Elizabeth, I am here. Or there. Or wherever I am or happen to be. Maybe what I need now are windows to look through and see out of, and maybe Dr. Shaver is more like a window, one that maybe I can even open up and just fly on my new sprouted wings, fly away out through the window, fly, mind you, like a bird, free, like I have those kind of wings that fly, not angel wings, the kind that just float and go nowhere. I, Elizabeth, have to go somewhere.
Miss Hansom is a little like a mirror, but she is more like a mirror in a woman’s compact that she keeps in her purse and pulls out to check her makeup and primp a little bit, whereas Dr. Adams is like a full-length mirror, and I can see almost into any and every corner of me that I want to look at. And I mean every corner, because at night, and I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but at night after I go to bed, I sometimes have these visions in my head of me and Dr. Adams. I’ll just take the picture of Sheriff Tate in the cemetery and put Dr. Adams in his place, and I don’t mind Dr. Adams feeling around on me; in fact I love it so much I’m soon into loving myself.
So, even though my mirror is gone, I still sometimes need to have these visions of myself. Does that mean I am vain, that I want so much to see myself in someone else? Does that mean I am such a little person that I need someone else to hold myself up to so I can see that I exist in this world? Why can’t I look at my long, slim fingers as they curve around the piano keys and see that at least I have hands, and if hands, then a body, and if a body, then surely I exist. I was who I was. I am who I am. God all over again. Well, if that’s good enough for God to have to keep declaring that He is who He is, then it’s good enough for me. Next time Dr. Shaver asks who is Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s going to be “I am who I am,” me, Elizabeth Miller, pressed down for good measure but running over the brim at the same time. No, full up and running over, except not crying all the time like poor Belinda, but full up with living and just being Elizabeth. I am who I am. Amen.
And I say double amen to Miss Hansom’s idea on Saturday morning to take some of us on a “shopping excursion,” as she calls it. “Elizabeth,” she says to me, when we are down at the drugstore, “have you ever thought about using a little touch of makeup on your face?”
“Lord, have I,” I say. “How many times is more the question.”
“Then why don’t we get some and fix you up?” she says, as if she is at a banquet table waiting for the feast to begin. “Wouldn’t that be fun to see what you look like with a little makeup on?”
What can I say? No, my mama wouldn’t like that? Not to peachy Miss Hansom. Not to anyone really. No, I can’t say I don’t wear any makeup because Mama and the people at Littleton church where I go believe makeup is a temptation of the devil. It sounds so ridiculous for me to be thinking it, that I know I could never say it, and if it sounds so ridiculous thinking it, why I shouldn’t even think it at all, should I? So I say, “Sure. Why not?”
My money that Daddy gave me when I went home is about to run out, and I have to save some of it back. Why? Just habit, I guess. You just always save some of your money since you never know when a dire emergency might come up. So, all I can get is a lipstick and a pencil for my eyebrows. But I know Miss Hansom is talking about the whole shebang—powder, blushing stick, fingernail polish—everything. So on Monday she brings some extra makeup she had on hand at home, she says, some that she couldn’t use anymore, and before I know it, we are in the bathroom at the mirror drawing me on eyebrows, spreading on clear ivory liquid makeup, pressing on powder, then blush, then some strawberry polka lipstick.
“You look absolutely fetching!” she raves, and even though I like Miss Hansom an awful lot, I know that she can spread on the sugar at times, and this is one of those times. “Well?” she says, as if waiting for me to say something about my new look. So what can I say when I think I look a little bit clownish. Something safe. That’s what Elizabeth would say to someone she likes as much as Miss Hansom, something safe. So I say, “That’s really different, isn’t it?” And of course she takes it for a compliment on her way of making me up, because she has fixed me the same way she fixes herself, which is thick and heavy.
“That’s the fun thing about makeup,” she says, “you can experiment. Do it different anytime you want and anyway you want. So here,” she says, handing over her makeup case to me, “have fun with it.” Then she gets up real close to squinch her eyes at my eyebrows. “I’m trying to decide if you need some plucking, but no, I don’t think so. Lucky you. You have hardly any strays, and they’re so light, you can’t see them anyway. No. I wouldn’t pluck, if I were you.”
It’s good she’s decided that, because I’m not planning to pluck anyway. Mary Jane Payne had tried that once on me, and it hurt too much. I can’t see going through so much pain to get rid of something that you can’t see anyway. And all that liquid stuff, yeah, it’s fun for every now and then, but not every day. It’s just too messy putting it on and taking it off, putting it on and taking it off. So, finally I end up with a little eyebrow pencil and a smidgin of blush and some lipstick. No powder, for it feels like chalk on my cheeks. But what I end up with looks right, I think, for me. It isn’t right for Miss Hansom, but then I’m not Miss Hansom. I am Elizabeth. I am who I am.
That, I decide is what I will tell Mama when she starts into ranting and raving about my makeup: “I am who I am, Mama. Just like God.” But the only problem with that is: Mama is who she is, too.