Quiet-Crazy (20 page)

Even though her arm is in a sling, Mrs. Krieger is the most pleasant person to be sitting and talking with. “Looks like you're getting on with the fox-trot pretty well,” I say, just for starters. “I think it'll take me a little while longer.”

“No, no,” she says, pushing up on the sides of her light brown hair, which is always a little bit messy, but who cares around here. “You'll learn it in no time, you catch on real quick in the dances, I've noticed.”

It's hard to think about other people around here actually
noticing things that you do, because it seems they are all so much tied up in their own worlds that they can't see out.

“You've noticed?” I say, surprised.

“Oh, I think everyone has. You're a good dancer, you know. It seems to come so natural to you. You have such good rhythm.”

“Oh, well, thank you,” I say, even more surprised that it looks like it comes natural and that I have good rhythm. (Is that why Mr. Fleet is always using me for a partner, because I've got rhythm and how could he ask for anything more?)

Since we're into talking about noticing things, I think this a good time to bring up her arm. So I say as casual as possible, “I've noticed, too, that something's wrong with your arm. May I ask what happened, Mrs. Krieger?”

“That's the problem,” she says, sounding puzzled. “We don't know what happened. It started hurting so badly after my son got killed, and it hasn't stopped. We don't know,” she says, shaking her head. “For three months, now, it hasn't stopped hurting.”

“What happened to your son?” I ask, rearranging my purple dress that Daddy had given me money to buy. When we went out shopping on Wednesday after I got back to Nathan from home, when we went to the art museum and to the ice cream parlor, and then to the dress shops, trying to get people's minds off of Hemp, that's when I got the dress. It's solid lavender, a little bit on the light side, and it has a
scoop neck, a full skirt and three-quarter sleeves, and it is just beautiful. Too pretty for Nathan, maybe, but it makes me feel good to wear it, so what the heck. Anyway, Miss Hansom really likes it too, she says, so I'll have to wear it as much as possible for her. Wait. Wait just one dad-gum minute. For her? No, not for her. Not even beautiful Miss Hansom. I've worn enough dresses for another woman to last my whole lifetime. From here on, I am dressing to suit me. Settled.

“He had a wreck, my son,” Mrs. Krieger says. “He was killed instantly. Fifteen. That's all. Fifteen years old.”

She looked like she was going to start into crying, so I change the subject real quick. “How do you like my dress, Mrs. Krieger?” I ask, and she wipes at one of her eyes and says, “Why, it's a new one, isn't it? You get it yesterday?”

About that time Mr. Martin comes around asking us to play bridge with him. He says Miss Hansom is coming, so I think he is heaven-sent to get me out of the near mess that I had gotten myself into. As for going around talking with people about their problems, I figure I have a lot to learn about that, but I like to think and dwell on what's causing them. I think Mrs. Krieger's arms are hurting because she wants so bad to put her arms around her son, and that's what she can never do again. Has anybody talked with her about hugging her son? And what will happen, if she can't use her
arm because she can never hug her son again? Will it indeed never get well again, if she thinks it won't?

That's like me thinking I will never get married. Does that mean I actually won't if I think it? I don't know, but when Dr. Adams brings up the subject again about sex, and if I have ever had it, I think, no I'll never, ever, get married because that's a big part of the package. According to the Worry Column doctor, to have a good marriage, you have to have good sex. And, Lord, I just can't see me having that with anyone but myself. (Unless, of course, it was with someone like Dr. Adams.)

Anyway, Dr. Adams wants to know about how I first learned about sex, was it my mother who told me about it, and no, it sure wasn't Mama, that's for sure. “It was old Lacky Roach,” I say. “He came up to me one day at school when we were in second grade and he said, ‘You know how pigs have little babies?'

“Lacky's brother was in the 4-H Club and he had a couple of big old pigs that was his project, so I guess that's why Lacky was so interested in pigs, never mind that he looked and smelled like he might live in a pigpen.

“Well, me like a fool, I said, ‘No,' and that's when he whispered in my ear, and it sounded something like ‘They futch.' Since I'd never heard that word before, or didn't understand what he said, or something, I asked him to tell
me again. So, he told me again, ‘They fuck.' Well, you know, I hadn't heard that word before either. So I asked him again, and he said, ‘Ah, forget it.'

“When I asked a couple of people back in the room, what ‘fuck' meant, they started laughing at me, and pointing at me like I'd said something awful. So I figured it was a bad word and that pigs did something bad to make babies. And it took me a long time to figure out how people did it. And Mary Jane Payne didn't help any.”

“What did Mary Jane Payne do?” Dr. Adams asks.

See? Dr. Adams knows just how to talk with people, to get them to say whatever's on their mind, by asking just the right question in just the right voice. And more and more I'm thinking this would be the most wonderful work in the world to do, to sit around all day figuring out what's on people's minds and why and how it got there and how every little thing you ever thought is way back hiding out in your subconscious, and all you do is sit there and ask questions, and repeat what the person says, and by doing that you can get at the root of everything. I mean everything. Well, most things, anyway.

“Mary Jane took me out under a tree one day, when we were in the third grade,” I begin. “The limbs were hanging down quite nice all around, so we had some privacy there. Anyway, it was only me and Mary Jane, and she said, ‘You know what the mama and the daddy do to make babies?' I
said, ‘No,' so she told me. She said, ‘The mama puts something in a can and the daddy puts something in on top of it and it grows into a baby.'

“I asked her what she meant by ‘something' and she said, ‘It's something that comes out from where you pee, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's something that grows into a baby.'

“‘Is that what ‘fuck' means?'” I asked her, and she said, ‘Yeah.'”

All Mary Jane did, I tell Dr. Adams, was confuse the issue right then. But later on that year, she came and told me again what “fuck” really meant, and it didn't sound pretty at all, but it made more sense since I'd seen women's bellies grow big as a cow's belly just before they had a baby.

Dr. Adams then wants to know my first experience with sex or petting, or anything along that line, and I tell him there has been only one experience, except that one with Sheriff Tate, if you could call that “experience.” As you might guess, my one and only was with old Lacky Roach. “Cigarette Butt” as people called him, because he smelled so bad from so much cigarette smoke on his breath, it'd nearly knock you down.

So, what the heck, I think, even though I don't like thinking back on that time, hate it, in fact, I decide it won't hurt anything, will it, to talk about it with Dr. Adams. Maybe it will even help to get it all out in the open.

W
e had all gone down to the state fair in Appleton County on the school bus, a lot of us children from school, when I was in the eighth grade. I didn't think I was going to get to go, because Mama sure didn't want me going off to a place like that, but Daddy was more for it.

“It's just a bunch of school kids, don't you know,” Daddy told Mama, “just going down to have a little fun. What's wrong with that?”

Well, Mama couldn't say what was wrong with that because she had never been to a fair, I don't think, and she didn't have too many ideas of what all it might be like, except it'd be sinful for sure, so she couldn't put up too much of an argument, so Daddy and me won out on that one. Anyway, she said, “Is Jan Banks going?” and I said yeah, Jan was going. So that was the key to my going, because Jan was the one person at church who, if there ever were a saint,
she was it. Jan smiled a lot, and prayed real nice, and acted really more like a grown-up woman than any of us. So, if Jan did something, it was all right in Mama's book.

Jan was going with Freddie Mangrum to the fair. Jan and Freddie were the most ideal couple, Freddie acting about the same as Jan in the saints department, and everybody figured they'd probably end up getting married and being missionaries or something they were so much into the Lord's work.

Actually, somebody had asked me to go to the fair, too, but it was old Lacky Roach, and whoever would want to go with old Cigarette Butt. Now he couldn't help his crossed eyes, and the big old black mole on his cheek, but that didn't do anything for his looks either. So I told him “no” right plain and that I was going by myself to the fair.

Nevertheless, he found a place right behind me on the bus, and aggravated me to death all the way down, reaching beside the seat to tickle me under the arm and using his old comb that probably had lice in it to rake through my hair, and all the time he was blowing smoke in my face. Aggravation pure and simple—that about summed up Lacky Roach.

But I didn't know what aggravation was until that afternoon when I had gone out to the bus to sit down and rest awhile. The fair was such a big place, and you had to walk around all the time because there was no place to sit down. The only place you could get any rest was on the bus, so I headed on out there where all the school buses were parked,
and it looked like about a hundred of them out there and you could hardly tell one from the other.

When I finally found ours, I nearly about died from shock because there was Jan and Freddie sitting in the back seat kissing up a storm. If Mama had seen that, Jan wouldn't have been my key to going anywhere else, that was for sure. Although there wasn't exactly anything wrong with kissing, I got the idea from Mama when she saw people doing it on TV that it wasn't exactly the most proper thing in the world to do before other folks, because she'd start wriggling around in her chair and humming and hawing and finally saying, “E-gad, get on with the story, folks.”

It always made me wonder if she and Daddy ever kissed when they were young. Surely they did. But I know they didn't now, not ever, at least not where I could see them. No hugging, nor nothing.

But getting back to the school bus. Besides Jan and Freddie sitting in the back seat just a going at it, there were a few other people scattered about on the bus, most of them resting, like I wanted to do, some of them stretched out on the seat lying down, even. I took a seat up front as far away as I could get from the live action in the back, and I set in to drink my lemonade, about the fifth cup I'd had that day.

No sooner did I get settled in than here came Lacky Roach, first sitting down across the aisle from me, then asking if he could sit with me and when I said, “No,” then he
came on over anyway, sitting down, his old rump pushing at me and sliding me on over whether I wanted him to or not. At first I was mad at him, but then when he started to putting his arm around the back of the seat, I started to grow scared. What was he going to do? I hadn't ever before put on any show like Jan and Freddie, and I sure didn't want to do it right here in front of other people.

From the back of the seat, Lacky's old arm soon flopped down across my shoulder, and I slid on over into the side of the bus as hard as I could, hoping he'd get the idea I didn't want no part of that. But he slid on over, too, and the next thing I knew he was trying to put his hand on where I peed, and I was just about to cry I was so embarrassed.

I tried getting up, but his arm across my shoulder was stronger than I was, and I couldn't even hardly budge an inch, much less climb out over him, which I was trying to do. I thought about hollering at him and making a big fuss, but I was too scared about what was happening to me to do that. Besides, I didn't want to get people to looking at me, if they weren't already. I finally managed to stand up, and old Lacky pulled me back down, felt around on me down there a little while longer, then laughed at me, got up and stalked on off the bus.

Although I felt relieved at him being gone, I didn't feel relieved at what I was thinking. Besides being scared at what
he had done to me, I was a little bit excited on the pleasant side, and that was confusing. Too, I was thinking about what I had just seen earlier, some grown women standing up on a stage with nothing on them but red and blue bras and panties like, with glitter all over them and silver and gold shoes with heels high as the sky and glitter all over them too, three women dressed just about alike, with all that slinky stuff on, and that was what I was thinking about, wondering what it would be like to be up there on the stage like that, and wondering what went on inside the tent where you couldn't see in unless you paid five dollars to go in, and it was mostly men going in anyway. But still that's what I was thinking about, and it was all so puzzling to me, why I was thinking so much on that, while I was mad and scared at Lacky Roach at the same time. So mad I didn't want to see him ever again, when I hadn't even wanted to see him in the first place.

It sure helps getting all this out of me to Dr. Adams, because stuff like this can grind on you and make you heartsick, so I feel a ton of relief at getting Lacky Roach out of myself. Not that it made me feel any the better or anxious to run out and get married so I could have sex with someone.

“Elizabeth, how did it make you feel to be excited about seeing the women on the stage?”

“Like I said, kind of scared.”