Sounds Like Crazy (31 page)

Pam walked over to our little group at that moment and said, “Is Holly entertaining you with her voices?” I looked up at her and I tried to tell her by my bulging eyes not to go there.“Didn’t she tell you who she is?” Pam exclaimed. She wasn’t watching me at all.

I shook my head. The kids looked at Pam and then looked at me.

“Who is she?” asked the one who offered to bring me more chips.

“She’s Holly Miller.”

“We know that,” said one of the kids with a
duh
kind of voice.

“The voice of Violet and Harriet from
The Neighborhood
.” Pam waved her hands about.

“Cool!” was the resounding cry upon hearing the news.This caught the attention of the remaining kids milling around. Next thing, they were all over by us. That instant-appearance thing again.

I sat there on the floor with the girl who was reading
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
by my side, and an audience of what seemed like an angry mob of pushy short people in front of me.

I could hear them whispering, “She’s Violet.” The chips boiled in my stomach.

“Holly,” shrieked Pam, “do the Violet voice for them.” The Argus eyes of those kids shifted over to me, and all the earlier rapport between me and Pam was replaced by my desire to stuff my sweater into her big, fat mouth. I looked around for any quick exit. Didn’t stages have a trapdoor or something?

Pam started clapping and saying, “Vi-o-let, Vi-o-let.” The kids joined her by the third clap. I felt like I had accidentally wandered into the body of a musician onstage at a sold-out concert and I couldn’t sing to save my life. And right now, I needed to be able to sing, as it were.

I peered at their faces. I wanted to snatch those indecent smiles off of them one at a time, starting with Pam. I readied some lines I remembered from my last show, opened my mouth, and the words tumbled out.

One of the kids shook his head. “That’s not Violet.”

I wanted to crawl under a stage prop and disappear.

I didn’t sleep when I got home from the theater that night, and I waited for Milton’s noon call on Wednesday. When he asked how I was doing I told him I ate Ruffles and I couldn’t go back to the theater.

“Holly, it might be time for us to talk again about integration,” said Milton.

“What? Do you know what my days are like in between group therapy? And when I’m there I feel like I’m standing outside on the cold streets looking through a glass window into a warm room with no doors.When the hour is up I have to walk away, once more bereft and deprived because I couldn’t find a way to get in, and now your solution is to just keep walking?”

“Integration is not walking away,” said Milton. “To extend your metaphor, it is more about going into the room and taking it over.”

“Yeah, and the Committee disappears. So it sounds more like erasing five-sixths of me. No, thanks.”

“Holly, at the moment how much do you know about what the Committee is doing when you are outside of therapy?”

I didn’t know what they did when we were not in therapy, which meant they probably didn’t know what was happening in my world—or did they? Either way, I didn’t like the implication of what Milton was saying, so I remained silent.

Never one to miss the dead-end, do-not-pass signs, Milton told me to consider taking the night off from the theater to regroup. I knew he hoped I’d consider the seed he had planted. I did, and because of this I didn’t sleep that night. I had nothing to do the next day while I waited for four o’clock to roll around, so I left the house two hours early and walked in circles around the city. I was still wearing my sandals, and my feet were as blue as my eyes when I reached Milton’s office.

For her check-in, Betty Jane decided to comment on my footwear. “You are wearing sandals,” she said.

“And this relates to how you feel in what way?” I said. She gave me one of her prissy faces in reply.
Not another standoff. I’m missing this?
“Yes, I am,” I said, “even though my mother taught me that it’s not appropriate to show scarred feet in public.”

“Your mother was right,” said Betty Jane.

Before I could retort, Milton said, “Holly, you mentioned yesterday that you ate Ruffles at the theater Tuesday night.”
What’s he up to? We’ve never discussed our speaking in between sessions with the Committee.
Judging by the surprise on Ruffles’s face, and the vitriol on Betty Jane’s, the Committee didn’t know what had happened in my life outside of our sessions.

“I don’t want to talk about—”

“You ate Ruffles?” said Ruffles. Her surprised look now mingled with triumph. My own irritation at Milton for raising this subject was replaced by curiosity.

“I ate Ruffles,” I said.

“Holly, you haven’t eaten Ruffles since you were twelve years old,” said Ruffles. I was immediately time-transported back to the sixth grade and the first day of school.

“Holly?” said Milton.
He doesn’t even bother with the preamble anymore.

“It started with an essay,” I said.

 

The first assignment of the school year was to write an essay about our summer vacation.The topic was “What I accomplished over the summer.” Fresh from my school-clothes-shopping trip with my mother, I knew exactly what to write.The blue-ribbon look on my mother’s face in the Macy’s dressing room remained vivid in its detail even after three days.When her gaze darted over my shoulder, and then dropped, I knew she’d honed in on my ass,
which looked like two misshapen pumpkins stuck to my backside, and my keg-sized legs attached to it. Over the summer, I had managed to gain twenty pounds in about forty days. I also grew about three inches, but my hope that my mother would focus on this milestone instead of the additional pounds disappeared with her scornful gaze.

In my essay, I drew a parallel between my twenty pounds in forty days and the forty days Jesus languished in the desert starving and hallucinating. His accomplishment was fresh in my mind, as I’d studied it in catechism (the training ground for young Catholics) the year before. I wrote that Jesus was led to the waste-land by the spirit and, once there, tempted by the devil. I was led to the kitchen by insatiable hunger and, once there, tempted by the refrigerator and the surrounding cupboards.

Jesus fasted. I ate. A lot.

According to the nuns, Jesus relied on grace and fortitude instead of human strength to survive.When tempted by the devil, Jesus didn’t fight.When tempted by Ruffles, I didn’t either. I had no doubt that all that eating required a certain amount of stamina and perseverance, but I felt that ultimately it was grace and fortitude that helped me endure. I embraced potato chips just like Jesus embraced the cross.

After a summer of snacking, I weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. My upper body remained passably normal. But from the navel down, it appeared as if someone had stuck an air pump in me and forgot to shut off the airflow. Maybe my new look would have gone unnoticed for a few more days, or perhaps for the whole school year, had I not been standing with my back to the mirror in that dressing room. But I barely topped five feet. Between her adult height and heels, my mother had enough lift for a full view. The result of her inspection was a pink plastic hairbrush with stiff bristles across my back and several hair shirts
in the form of brightly colored, supersized parachute tracksuits. Sending a twelve-year-old to school dressed like that is the same as nailing her to the cruel cross.

In the end, though, I thought my essay exceptional and my accomplishment well argued. I expected to receive an A. My teacher sent me to the school counselor instead. She read my file while I sat in her office. Then she asked me a couple of questions. When I left I thought everyone was satisfied and I forgot about it.

 

On Thursday night, Sarah, my mother, and I were all at the dinner table. My father’s place sat empty. We ate in silence save for the intermittent scraping of forks on plates and the sound of chewing. Our weekly menu had strayed from the standard tuna surprise, which was no surprise, because we’d eaten it every Thursday from time immemorial. Instead, my mother offered a green salad with bitter dressing.

When we sat down, I said, “Where’s Dad?” My mother responded by grabbing a pile of salad with a spoon resembling a forklift and dropping it onto my outstretched plate.

I speared a cherry tomato and popped it into my mouth. I looked wide-eyed over at Sarah. Her fork paused halfway to her mouth as she shook her head. I narrowed my eyebrows in a questioning frown. My mother shot me a look. She’d told me many times that if I continued to frown, I’d have a valley between my eyes before age twenty.

I relaxed my face.The front door slammed.We could always discern the type of mood that would accompany my father into the kitchen by the sound of the door. My mother’s attention retreated as she calmly ate her salad. I tried to swallow the masticated tomato.The tidal wave of fear welling in my throat was too great an obstacle to push it over. I held it in my mouth. My father
walked into the kitchen, tossed his keys on the counter, went over to the wet bar, and retrieved a bottle of Jameson and a glass. He sat down, opened the bottle, and poured a drink. The salty pulp of the tomato I couldn’t swallow made my eyes water. Sarah put her fork down.

My father sipped his whiskey, then removed a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket. He held a cigarette in his teeth as he struck a match. I tried to swallow again but the tomato caught in my throat. I choked and spit it out on my plate.

My father laughed and extinguished the match by waving it in the air. “Well, I see you inherited your mother’s gag reflexes.”

My mother’s eyes smoldered. My parents fixed on each other. My eyes burned.Tears rushed over the bank of my lower eyelids and spilled down my cheeks.

My father dropped his cigarette into the ashtray, held up his palms, and said innocently, “What?”

“Sarah, serve your father dinner, please.” My mother pushed the salad bowl in front of Sarah. She filled his plate and handed it to him.

“Yum,” he said,“I love salad.” He took a mouthful, looked at us, and said, “Eat.” My mother calmly forked another bite into her mouth as if she were attending a pleasant family dinner.

We could never gauge my father’s mood.A nice voice meant nothing. He might continue joking and make dinner fun, or he could take offense at the blink of an eye and dinner plates would fly. Sarah nodded slightly at me. If we did what he said, we might make it through dinner unscathed.

Somehow I managed to get some salad down my throat. I wished we had a dog that would happily eat anything coming over the side of the table. Would dogs actually eat lettuce and tomatoes, anyway? Then my father started telling jokes. Within moments, I was laughing with him. Sarah stayed cool for a few
more minutes before she capitulated and we enjoyed the rest of our meal.

When everyone was done, Sarah and I cleared the plates while my father sat smoking quietly. Usually, he left the kitchen after dinner.

“Holly”—my father inhaled—“your mother said you are making a name for yourself with your essay writing at school?” His voice remained playful. I set the plate I was carrying on the counter.

My mother hadn’t said a word. My father seemed to be in a good mood, so I said indignantly, “I thought it was a great essay, but my teacher wouldn’t grade it.”

Sarah turned on the faucet.

“Elizabeth,” my father said in a cloud of smoke,“where is that essay?”

“On the counter,” was my mother’s dead response.

“Holly”—he pointed at the counter—“could you bring it to me? I want to read it.”

Sarah slowly turned the same plate under the water.Anxiety tickled my stomach. My father sat smoking. His gaze didn’t leave me as I retrieved the essay and walked over to him.

“Sit down,” said my father. I hesitated.“Sit down,” he repeated, slapping the table with his hand. I looked over at Sarah. She continued turning that same plate under the water.

My father glanced at the essay, then rolled it up like a baton and stood over me, waving it in my face.“You think this is funny?” he screamed.

I felt dizzy. “I . . . uh . . .”

“Do you?” My father slapped my face with the rolled-up essay. Sarge pulled me back and took control. I sat rigidly inside my head, watching as Sarge received a few more slaps from the paper essay. It looked like a toothpick from so far away.

“You think this is funny?” My father screamed this over and over, hitting my face again and again until the essay was ragged and shredded.

Finally, Sarge balled up my fists and hit at my father’s chest. Because it came from my body, the punch probably felt like a gnat stinging an elephant. He didn’t react, just kept waving his tattered paper club in my face. Then he turned and disappeared. I sat in the back of my head holding the Boy’s hand. We both whimpered. Sarge had my body in a crouch.We waited.