Quiet-Crazy Read Free

curls for so long, if I fix my hair any other way I look like a stranger, even to myself. So about every three months or so, Mama and I go out to Eunice’s to getall frizzed up. “How sweet,” Mama always says, after I’ve baked under the hair dryer for an hour and Eunice is combing me out. “Now don’t that look sweet?”
    Mama doesn’t look sweet lying there hunched up in bed. She looks anything but sweet. She’s not asleep, I know she’s not. It’s the way her eyes are squinched. Real tight, not loose and natural, and her nostrils are flared, like she’s embarrassed. Embarrassed the way she was when she told Daddy about me going off to Nathan. But if she’s embarrassed, what about me? Carrying around enough embarrassment for me and her and the whole world besides.
    â€œMama,” I say, and her mouth draws up into a wrinkled, tan prune. “Mama.” She turns over onto her back and sighs, the breath coming out of her long and heavy, her eyes still closed.
    Heavy breath it was. And somehow pleasant and exciting at the same time. But scary pleasant. Scary exciting. Don’t even think about it.
    The pendulum of the anniversary clock on her dresser turns around first one way then the other, as if it can’t make up its mind which way to turn. That’s the way I’ve been feeling for months, actually years, but especially this past month, since I started thinking about
it
even if it is for only ten seconds at a time. First, I start trying to be me, whoever that is, then something happens with Mama, an argument or a fussiness that makes her not even speak to me, and Istart back trying to be like Angela. Being like Angela, mat somehow helps with that debt I owe. Don’t ask me how. It just does. Like if I don’t go along with Mama and at least play like I’m Angela, then somebody, somewhere, sometime, somehow is going to come and get me and I’ll have to pay for it in some way. It’s like I’m hiding out. Just waiting. Aunt Lona is glad I’m going to Nathan. I wish Mama were glad.
    Something about the way Mama’s looking makes me not want to touch her, so I pick up the edge of the yellow chenille bedspread and I shake it. “Mama,” I say. “Look, I’m nearly about ready to go.”
    â€œLook, Elizabeth. Look. See? Here it is.” Don’t even think about it.
    Mama opens and closes her eyes as if the lids weigh a hundred pounds apiece. “Don’t that dress look a sight,” she drawls, clutches her stomach, and moans.
    â€œYou need the magnesia, Mama?” I try to say it nice, like Angela would say it, but I can’t help the bit of crankiness that creeps into me, crankiness from knowing deep down inside that Mama would be sick today.
    â€œLord, God, Mama,” I want to say. “I’m sick today, too. Today and every day. And what I’d like to do, Mama, is just puke it all out, every bit of it, right here all over the bed, splatter it all over you, even though you’re my mama and I don’t have a right to be thinking such as this.”
But, Mama,
I’m your daughter, and you had no right, either. Don’t even think about it.
    â€œYou need the magnesia, Mama?” I say again, a little crankier.
    Mama frowns at my crankiness. “Can’t you talk better than that, Elizabeth? That sounds ugly. Can’t you talk better to your mama?”
    I look at the clock pendulum spinning around, and I want to say, “No, Mama, sometimes I want to talk ugly to you.” But I don’t say that because it would hurt Mama bad. And like Mama always says, she’s been hurt enough. Still hurting. After all these years, thirty-four years since Angela died, she’s still hurting.
    â€œI’m sorry, Mama. I’ll get the magnesia.”
    There’s just a tad left in the blue glass bottle, a bottle the blue of the morning glories flowering up Daddy’s