Quiet-Crazy (16 page)

S
ince it's Friday evening late, Mama is ready to go out to Eunice's and get her hair fixed for the week. I offer to drive her out so I can go on out to the cemetery for a while and see Caldwell's grave.

Mama doesn't say anything all the way to Eunice's, and I don't either. The clutch keeps sticking on the old Ford, which is rattling like it's going to shake to pieces. It's enough to drive you to frazzles.

“When are we going to get a new car, Mama?” I say, although she's not into talking, and I'm not really either. I'm afraid if I say anything, it might lead to me having to act like Elizabeth again, and I don't know if I can manage that again so soon. But some things need talking about, and right now the blamed old car is one of them.

“Ah, we don't need a new car,” Mama says, “this 'un gets us where we want, don't it?”

I want to say, “Doesn't it, the word is ‘doesn't,' Mama,” but that sure isn't going to win me any favors with Mama right now. We've got plenty in the bank—enough to buy two cars, since Mama and Daddy both are forever hoarding and holding what little money they get from the government. And I put my share in the savings account too, for whatever reasons I don't know, though I'm beginning to wonder. Anyway, I don't know what we're waiting for. For this old gray muley thing to fall apart and stop, I reckon. After ten years, you'd think anybody would want to get a new car, just for the sake of getting a new car, like everybody else in Littleton.

“How's Eunice doing?” I say, as we drive up into the yard of her Beauty Hut, and it isn't much more than a little hut, a little white hut, although where the beauty is I couldn't say.

“Oh, she's as struttin' as ever,” Mama says, “talking about everbody up one side and down the other, her own customers, too.”

Does Mama not realize that she, too, talks about everybody up one side and down the other? That's why I don't usually go to Eunice's with Mama, except when I'm having the curls frizzed into my hair. When they light in to talking about folks, especially poor old Noma Lee Roach, it's awful.

“And did you know Noma Lee had the nerve to come over here asking me if I had any worn-out dresses she could have? After all the permanents I put in for her at half price?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Mama, “and then she comes over asking
me to fix them up for her, you know, and I ain't never seen a dime yet of what she owes me for them.”

“Well, she's got money to spend on that old spitting snuff she chews all the time.”

“Yeah, and what about it,” says Mama. And on and on.

I never did like to hear people talking about somebody else when they're not around, because it's not fair. And it took me a while at Nathan to feel like I wasn't talking about Mama to her back, like I wasn't gossiping about her, but in the name of therapy I guess it's okay. Although now that I think about it, when people gossip about somebody, is that a kind of therapy, too? Are they just talking out what's inside them, and if they didn't would they be more mixed up and confused than they already are, if they didn't talk it out?

“See you in a little while,” I say when Mama gets out of the car at Eunice's. “I'm going out to the cemetery.” But Mama doesn't say nothing. Anything. She didn't say anything. It's funny how I didn't have any trouble at all in school getting grammar right on the tests. But talking it and writing it are two different things altogether. It comes so much more natural talking it the wrong way. Maybe because that's the way I've heard it all my life at home and all around Littleton. Aunt Lona is all the time correcting me, and I appreciate it, more than she knows.

Any other time, I would be going to see Aunt Lona first thing. But right now I just can't. If I go over to Aunt Lona's
while I'm here, Mama will get fighting mad, both at me and Aunt Lona. Then Aunt Lona will have to stand her ground, like always, especially when it comes to what's best for me. Then I'll feel all torn between both of them, and I sure can't take on two women at once. Not right now. I'll just plan to call Aunt Lona tonight and go see her while Mama's at church tomorrow. Anyway, I just have to see Caldwell's grave.

I'm glad to be at the cemetery, because that's one place that's really real. It's all black and white, cut and dried, no two ways about it: either you're dead, or you're not. It's clear as day where Caldwell's grave is, because it's still new enough to have three or four sprays of flowers around it. Plastic of course. Little pink and blue and yellow and purple clumps of bought beauty from the five-and-dime. I always thought cemeteries were supposed to look natural. Leave them to the dandelions and the swaying goldenrod and the little purple asters, that's what I think. Every kind of flower and weed will grow up there in its own way in its own time.

Doesn't the Bible say so, that to everything there is a time and season of its own? Anyway, natural beats artificial any day, that's what I've always thought and always will. And that is even more reason to get into the real Elizabeth, so I can get all the ways of my thinking going in one direction and not be thinking one thing and doing another. As far as I
can tell now, that's what tears people up more than anything, going in two ways at once.

But Caldwell, dear Caldwell. What will I do on Saturday afternoons without Caldwell to talk to? I could talk with Caldwell any way I wanted to, and he didn't mind at all. Well, he did think some of the things I thought were kind of awful, but he didn't like me any the less for what I thought or said or did. Like, for instance, we got to talking once about the Lord's will. That was the night he wanted me to take him over to the traveling evangelist's show. That's what it turned out to be, too, just a traveling show in a tent, where the evangelist was lining everybody up at the front of the tent, all the crippled and the downtrodden and the drunks and the infirm, and he walked across in front of them punching them on the forehead, nearly knocking them over and pronouncing them “HEALED” by the grace of God. (It's funny, though, how although I knew healing evangelists couldn't really do a thing for you, I wondered for just one fleeting moment if he could heal folks like me, you know, when their mamas had done things to them as a child that wasn't natural. I guess that made me understand, if only for a little bit, how a person could get so desperate, they'd believe anything.)

I didn't want to go to the traveling show. I told Caldwell I didn't. I told him what it would be like. But Caldwell had faith, he said, and that was all it took. If he had faith even as
tiny as a mustard seed, the traveling healing evangelist could take away his polio-crippled limbs forevermore.

“But it's not natural, Caldwell,” I said. “It's just not going to happen. That man can't undo what you've been stuck with for all your life. If he could, Caldwell, there's something I sure would like for him to undo on me.”

“There is?” he said, somehow surprised. “Why, Elizabeth, you don't seem like you need any undoing. What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, sorry that I had let slip even mention of such a thing. “Nothing at all.”

I was cutting Caldwell's hair that day. That's one of the things I could do for Caldwell was cut his hair. Since he couldn't go anywhere much, except to church, and since he had straight hair with bangs in front like a kid, even though he was forty-eight, and it was straight all around just like you put a bowl over his head and cut around the edges, I could do that kind of cutting. So he had to have his hair cut to go to see the traveling healing evangelist, and that's when we got into this great debate about the Lord's will.

“If I don't get healed, then maybe that's the Lord's will, too,” Caldwell said, sitting so still in his wheelchair and blinking his eyes at the little wisps of dark brown pieces of bangs fluttering down across his eyes and nose and dropping like winged creatures on the towel I had draped around him. Just to think that God has every hair of every person's head
numbered was something too big for me to imagine, so I decided that sometime I was going to have to figure out just what that really meant, and not what it seemed to mean.

“Caldwell,” I said, “you sound just like everybody else in Littleton, blaming everything on the Lord.”

“No, no, no, not blaming,” he said in his drawled out way which is what the polio did for him, drew up his vocal cords so mat everything comes out very slow and with much effort, but it also comes out sounding very convincing since it's so determined. “Not blaming, you know, it's just a part of his plan, that's what the Lord's will means.”

Since I didn't want to go over to the traveling evangelist and see him fooling around with everybody and their feelings, I said maybe it wasn't the Lord's will that we go. But that didn't take with Caldwell. Dear Caldwell. Maybe if I had been sitting in a wheelchair for more than forty years, maybe I'd be grasping at any and every little thing, too, that I thought might even come close to getting me out of it. So, what the heck, I decided. Lord's will or not, sure I'd carry Caldwell over to see the healing evangelist, no matter how depressed he'd be the next week when he found himself still sitting in the wheelchair.

That was the week he got back into his scrapbooks in a big way. I could always tell when Caldwell was feeling low, because he brought out his scrapbooks and started working on them. He had scrapbooks of stamps and scrapbooks of
get-well cards that people had sent him over the years, as if he could get well. And then the saddest of all, I thought, were the scrapbooks of the horses.

He loved horses so much, so he subscribed to these horse magazines and cut the pictures out and pasted them into the books, as if that were the only kind of mounting of horses he'd ever get to do. Then he had scrapbooks of movie stars and some of flowers and some of people. Not relative people, but just interesting kinds of faces from magazines, sad and happy and puzzled and angry and loving and kind, all kinds. These he had labeled in alphabetical order from A to Z, according to the emotion he thought was on their faces.

Caldwell, dear Caldwell, I wonder what happened to your scrapbooks. I wonder what happened to you, where you are now, besides a little part of you hanging on inside of me forever, what will happen to you besides that? Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this, but I sometimes wondered how it would be to be married to Caldwell. We got along well enough to be married, I sometimes thought. He wasn't much to look at and neither am I. But maybe we could have taken care of each other.

No sooner had I thought about being married to him than up pops sex. Would we have that, and him all crippled? How could we, if he had to get all strung up in this contraption in bed at night. And the thought of having sex with him was
a bit scary. Actually, the thought of having sex with anyone was a bit scary. (With anyone but maybe Dr. Adams, that is. Now him, I wouldn't mind.) I couldn't ever see me marrying anyway. (Unless he were someone like Dr. Adams, that is.)

Standing at Caldwell's grave, I say a prayer for him, because that's what people do at graves sometimes. My prayers aren't asking prayers, never have been, because I don't believe in all the time begging God for stuff, for rain, or for it to stop raining, for money enough to build a new church and for people to come and fill the church up and stuff like that. I also don't believe in saying like Preacher Edwards does at church, “And we pray for the sick and the shut-ins and we pray for the prisoners and our boys in service.” What good does that do, just saying that you pray for them? Doesn't God know already that you're praying? Anyway I think prayers should be more praise and thankfulness and that's what mine are, when I feel so inclined. So I thank God for all the good times I had with Caldwell, and I thank Him for letting me know Caldwell and I thank Him for life and for death, death which I happen to think must be the most exciting part of life because, just think, when a person dies, then you at last get to find out what living was all about.

After I say good-bye to Caldwell, I go out to Angela's grave for a minute. Mama's dried-up daisies make a good picture for her grave and the yellow parts of the daisies go
well with the words on her tombstone: “She was the sunshine of our home.”

It never dawned on me until now, but like a rock it hits me that this must be why I've always liked the sun and the light so much, even though I've been more in the shadows. But I know I can't never be the sunshine in our home that Angela was, so why do I keep on trying? Why, indeed, trying to live up to someone who's probably an angel off floating somewhere around the heavens. But then I may have a little bit of sunshine somewhere in me, surely everybody has a little, but I have the darkness in me, too, just like everybody else, and it's time I get unashamed to let the darkness come out of me.

That's the kind of stuff I get to thinking on when I go to the cemetery. And maybe that's why people go back again and again, to keep them thinking of what they're really supposed to be doing and about the things that really matter in the world, not just what they think matters. And a cemetery is a good sitting and thinking place for such as that, I'll have to say.

She was the sunshine of our home. That plays over and over in my mind as I drive back to the Beauty Hut to pick up Mama. It plays like a broken record every time I go to Angela's grave. The sunshine of our home, the sunshine of our home. She, Angela, was the sunshine of our home. Not
Elizabeth. Elizabeth is something else entirely. Although the sun is pleasant and warm and wonderful big as a piepan beaming down from the heavens, Elizabeth is not the sunshine. Elizabeth is sunshine and shadows and good and bad and pleasant and unkind and nice and awful and everything that's wonderful, she's also the opposite.

And I am that—the opposite—when I get to Eunice's and Mama says, “Eunice says she can work you in this afternoon for a permanent wave, ain't that nice?” And I say, “Yeah, that's very nice, but I don't want a permanent wave, thank you. I'm letting my hair grow straight out. I don't like curls all that much.”