Free Quiet-Crazy by Joyce Durham Barrett Page B

nobody!
    â€œWell, where’s the sweetness in it, I’d like to know!” I holler at her, but she doesn’t even let on to hear me, she just looks at me and keeps on in that whiny-pitched voice, “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er.”
    So I get up real close to her this time, so she’ll be sure to hear me, and I holler at her again. “You just keep on trusting Him, sister, ’cause you see where it got you, right smack-dab in the middle of Nathan!” And I find out I may as well be talking to a tree stump for all the reaction I get.
    But more and more I’m seeing that it just doesn’t matter what you say or how you behave here at Nathan. It’s not going to matter much to anybody one way or the other. The patients here, they don’t care, and the nurses and doctors, they act like they’ve seen everything and heard even more, so nothing ever surprises them at all.
    And it’s such a new freeing feeling, this acting in whateverway that comes out of me, it’s getting to be kind of fun waiting and watching and waiting and looking at my own self, just to see, you know, what does happen to come out from way down deep inside me, to see feelings and thoughts and ideas I didn’t even know were in me.

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    L ike when I go to the recreation room now, I go on over to the piano with no hesitation, sit down and play all the Elvis songs I know. Mama would just about die, I know she would, to hear me playing such as that. The only time I play Elvis songs at home is when she’s gone out to the grocery store or over to Eunice’s on Saturdays to get her hair fixed. Now I play Elvis and rock ’n’ roll all I want, and one time I even played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” rock ’n’ roll style. That was after I got mad at Him for willing that I end up in the crazy house.
    Playing the piano is when I fall in love with Dr. Adams. He plays the piano too, something wonderful, and every time I sit down at the piano, I say to this Lord: “Lord, at least if You’re going to put me in a place like this, at least let Dr. Adams come around today and play the piano again with me.”
    Dr. Adams has what he calls this “little medley” of songs that he plays, and they’re all about love. He sits on one end of the piano bench and I sit on the other. He’s showed me how to play the soprano part, and he takes the bass, so we sit there together playing songs like “The Way You Look Tonight” and “Heart and Soul” and “My Heart Stood Still,” and I just keep on falling deeper and deeper, and I wonder if he’s feeling anywhere near the same as I am. But I know he’s not, because he’s got a wife and med school besides, so he doesn’t have time to go around falling in love with his patients, no matter how beautiful he is.
    So, all I can do is just pretend. Pretend that Dr. Adams is in love with me, even though I do have frizzy hair and wear homemade dresses and am nothing at all to look at. Brand X, that’s what I was in school, while the other girls—the kind like Mavis—came out sparkling, looking like they’d been washed in Tide. But when you’re washed only in the Blood of the Lamb that doesn’t have all those whiteners and brighteners in it, you can’t hardly help it, you come out a little on the dingy side.
    I feel anything but dingy, though, on Saturday nights when Mr. Fleet waltzes in from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Mr. Martin, the rec director, gets everybody up and out on the patio in the daytime where we play volleyball and shuffle-board and badminton. But on Saturday nights we dance. Everybody, that is, except Miss Cannon. Miss Cannon justpeeks at us through her window, shaking her head and talking about what sinners we are to be carrying on so, and how we’re going straight to hell, every last