Quiet-Crazy Read Free Page A

garden. She goes through two or three blue bottles a week, drinks them up like someone on hard liquor. Then she goes and sticks them head-down in the ground out beside the walkway where she’s made a five-inch high fence of blue magnesia bottles. She’s circled the pansy and the petunia beds already with the bottles, and now she’s planning to line the walkway up one side and down the other.
    Me, I wouldn’t be showing off that I’d drunk so much of that stuff. But Mama doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, sometimes she acts almost downright proud of it, like it’s somekind of banner she’s showing off to the world, showing everyone how much she’s suffering. Me, I figure I don’t need to show anybody how I feel. All they have to do is look at me. Look. See? It’s like I’m a piece of clear glass, with just a hint of rose color for the embarrassment part, and all they have to do is look. Look and see straight through me and see it all. Whether I ever tell anybody or not. They know. They know about
it.
    But Mama, it seems, has to show off her suffering. Just like she shows off Angela’s clothes, the ones she was wearing when Mama backed over her in the car. There’s hardly anything left of them but a few tatters of a green dress made from a dyed flour sack, a piece of a white cotton sock and the brown hightop shoes, stiff with the years. But Mama keeps them packed away in a gift box, like it’s her present to the world, and she brings them out every time anybody, it doesn’t matter who—neighbors, relatives, or if it’s her, herself—brings the subject around to Angela.
    And along with the clothes come the pictures. Me sitting in Daddy’s lap. Snap. Me prissing around in a new dress. Snap. Me hugging Daddy’s neck. Snap. Me sprawled out in the flowers. Me with my arms around my head showing off my long, blond curls.
    I used to look at Angela’s clothes, and go on with Mama about the pictures, but not anymore, not after Aunt Lona told me I didn’t always have to do what Mama said.
    â€œAunt Lona,” I said, one day when I was over at her house not too long ago taking my weekly piano lesson, “the last time I took them out and was looking at them with Mama, I couldn’t figure out if it was Angela’s clothes or my clothes I was looking at, and I got the chills up my back something awful. And all those showing off pictures . . . they just make me sick. It’s strange, Aunt Lona, strange.”
    â€œWell, Beth,” she said (when we’re talking, just me and Aunt Lona, she starts everything off with “Well, Beth,” and just those two words, by the way she says them, makes everything else she says after them sound like the truth for sure). “Well, Beth, you just don’t do that, you hear? You need to stop this doing everything your mama says. You’ve got a mind of your own. A bright, intelligent mind, and you need to start using it to think for yourself. ‘Use it or lose it,’ that’s what they say.”
    Aunt Lona’s all the time talking to me that way, because she knows how Mama is, she sees what’s going on. Most things, anyway. And deep down I know she’s right, that I don’t have to cater to Mama’s every whim. Still, it’s hard not to do it sometimes when Mama says, “Go get Angela’s clothes, why don’t you, and let’s look at them” or “let’s look at your pictures, hon.”
    All my life I’ve been going and getting for Mama. And I feel bad, in a way, that I won’t be here for a while to go and get, whether it’s medicine from the cabinet or a spoolof thread up at the five-and-dime. I reckon Daddy will have to take care of her while I’m gone—if he can stay out of his greenhouse long enough. Although I wonder sometimes if maybe he doesn’t stay in his greenhouse just to get away from Mama, if maybe,