Free Quiet-Crazy by Joyce Durham Barrett

he’s fine, too, suffering a little with his arthritis, you know, but he’s fine.” Everybody is just so fine I can’t stand it.
    Dr. Adams doesn’t stand for shows. He reminds me of Aunt Lona in that way. He stands for what you’re really and truly feeling, no matter if it makes you sound good or bad, and I’m not used to letting myself sound bad, not even with Aunt Lona, at least not all the way bad.
    And now that the examination is over here he is asking me the very same question he asked me at the beginning of our visit. That’s what he called it, a visit.
    â€œMay I visit with you for a while, Elizabeth?” he says, his shimmery, blue eyes just inviting me on into him, not forcing me, not making me look at him, but leaving me alone for myself to decide that Lord, he could visit with me any old time he wanted.
    But the question. “Why are you here, Elizabeth?” And I figure I didn’t give him the right answer the first time when I told him I was here “because something’s wrong with me,” because if I had answered him right, he wouldn’t be asking again so soon, would he? So I look around at the bare, green walls, and when I get tired of that, I rub my fingers around the gold base of the table lamp right beside me that puts out a morbid dim light, just stalling, you know. Then I try again.
    â€œI’m here because I’m crazy,” I say.
    â€œElizabeth,” he says, “people who are really crazy don’t talk about it.” He says it like it is the gospel truth, firm and final, and I’ll have to admit it’s something I’ve never thought about before. The best part of all, though, is that it makes sense, and I feel a world better.
    When we get one question settled, though, he asks another one too hard to answer. It grows to be a little bit fun and a little bit scary at the same time, trying to figure out what he would have me say.
    â€œWho are you?” he says, kind of sudden.
    And I really think by now he should know my name, everybody else around here surely does, but my name, it turns out, is not who I am.
    â€œElizabeth Miller,” I tell him. And when that doesn’t seem answer enough, I add Sarah to it. “Sarah Elizabeth Miller.”
    â€œSo who is Sarah Elizabeth Miller?”
    For a while I just sit, trying to smooth the apple green jumper-dress that Mama won first prize on last year, wondering for the first time if she is okay and how she’s made it so far without me around to look after her. The room gets so quiet for so long that I feel I have to say something, so I say, “I’m Dock and Vera Miller’s girl.”
    â€œYou’re Dock and Vera Miller’s girl,” he says, and the words sound so ridiculous coming from him. And that’sanother thing about Dr. Adams. He can repeat exactly the same thing I say, and it sounds like something else entirely, so different sometimes that it’s like some other person said it, not me. That’s one of his favorite things, I find out real quick, is repeating stuff. It’s like he takes my words and stretches them out in a banner in front of me holding them up for me to see. Most of the time I don’t like what I see on that banner because it makes me look foolish. At the same time, it feels kind of good to look foolish and have it be all right with Dr. Adams. Anyway I want to be, or anything I want to say is all right with him. He’ll take me just the way I am.
    Of course, God’s supposed to take me just the way I am, too, that’s what I’ve always heard. But I always got the feeling, and I may be wrong, but I always felt that God would take me just the way I am, as long as it’s His way. But here I get the feeling that Dr. Adams will take me just the way I am, as long as I’m MY way, no matter the way that happens to be.
    But how am I? Who am I? “Maybe I’m really Angela,” I tell Dr.