Quiet-Crazy by Joyce Durham Barrett Page B

don’t take ’em away again, don’t you know I can’t seethis way?” Alice wails, flinging and flailing her arms every which way.
    Alice, poor Alice, is sitting right across from me on a green couch exactly like the one I’m sitting on, and I look at her eyes to see if they’re still there, and of course, you know, they are. But it pains me something awful when I see this glazed look come over her brown eyes, like a skim of milky wax, and she is looking everywhere, but seeing nothing.
    â€œLook, Elizabeth. Look here. See? Here.”
    Harold, who’s sitting next to me, acts like there is nothing going on, nothing whatsoever in this world, and looking around, myself, I see that everybody else is acting about the same way. Mavis does stop her guitar playing for the time being, like she’s stopping out of respect, like the way traffic stops when a funeral procession comes poking along down the road.
    I move over a little closer to Harold, within talking distance, and I say, “Harold, whatever is wrong with Alice? What’s going on here?”
    After he gets through sneering at having to talk to me, Harold says, “Aw, she just goes blind every now and then. That’s all.”
    â€œAlice, Alice!” Orange Nurse says. “You don’t want to go back into the lock-up ward, do you now?”
    But Alice isn’t even hearing her, nor hearing the othernurses either, pleading with her to stop the wailing and crying and to settle herself down.
    â€œRemember you said last time you weren’t going to get all upset if it happened again, remember?” says Orange Nurse.
    But Alice has gone beyond their calling, and no amount of talking and pleading can call her back. Poor Alice is definitely “out of control.” I know that when one of the nurses says, “Okay, girls, back in she goes.”
    Lesson number one. Don’t ever scream and wail and cry while you’re here at Nathan. No matter what. No matter if all of a sudden without warning you go blind. What you do in that case, I suppose, is calmly feel your way to the nurses’ station and say in the most controlled way possible, “I thought you all might like to know I just went blind.”
    Mavis starts up her guitar note-chasing again, and that helps to get my mind off Alice. Mavis does have a calming way of playing, I’ll have to admit, even if she does act like she’s better than everybody else here. She must have the “soft touch.” That’s what everybody at church says I have on the piano—“the softest touch of all.” I never knew, though, exactly what they meant until I heard Mavis playing with the soft touch, although I knew they were trying to pay me a compliment. But for some reason, I never do like hearing them tell me about soft touches, especially telling me that I have one, even though they are trying to be nice. I decide, then, to pass along the compliment to Mavis.
    â€œMavis,” I call out, when she has stopped her song, “you have the softest touch of all.”
    Mavis stands up with her guitar, stares at me with those brown eyes clinging to me and piercing into me, as if I’d said something dirty as mud, then strolls out of the rec room, just as casually as she strolled in, not once ever looking back. Maybe she’s like Lot’s wife. Maybe she’s afraid she’d be turned into a pillar of salt, if she looked back, I don’t know. But if anybody asked me, and they probably won’t, I think she is pretty salty already, the way she acts and all.
    I decide that since it’s turned out to be such an outrageous afternoon, what with Alice and all, that I’ll go to my room and take a nap. It’s way past time, considering that napping is all I know lately. So I head on down to Room 807 to crawl in the bed and cover myself up.
    No sooner do I have myself tucked under my cover than here comes in Orange