Breaking Out of Bedlam Read online

  Ivy is the worst. She is the meanest, most stuck-up, most hateful old bag around. Thinks she’s better than everybody else. Why? Don’t ask me. Maybe because she goes to the beauty shop once a week to get her hair fixed into a little gray helmet, or has a bunch of pantsuits to show off how trim (her word) she is, or wears a passel of brooches and bracelets. She has the nerve to comment on everything I do, everything I say, and everything I eat. “Cora, is that on your diet?” and “Cora, with your size you might want to pass on dessert today.” She’s always talking about my size, like it was an extra head sprouting on my shoulders. She goes to that damn exercise class every day, all them old ladies jumping and grunting and bending over. Just the thought of it makes me sick.

  Next there’s Albert Krol. There are hardly any men here, so a lot of people think we’re lucky to have one at our table. The ladies flutter and chirp like sparrows around him. Far as I’m concerned, he’s barely alive. He never talks; I don’t even know if he can. If he ever manages to squawk out a sound, everybody jumps, like the chair or the table just said, “S’cuse me.” Long shanks and a face like a mule. Ass that hangs like an empty flour sack. Whatever he drinks runs down the gullies on either side of his mouth. Try eating with that around.

  Poison Ivy fusses over him like Jesus Christ himself has come down from heaven to eat at our table. She shoos away the other biddies if they hover around too long and acts like she knows all about his life. “He was distinguished,” she says, “a very respected man in his community,” but all I have to do is look at his hands and I know what kind of living he made. His claws are as twisted and hard as a crab’s. Every finger big as my wrist and the little one whacked off at the first knuckle. All the men in my life had hands like that—including my daddy, my brother, and my husband—so he ain’t fooling me.

  Plus he is a Polack.

  The last person is Carolyn Robertson, a colored lady in a wheelchair. They lopped off one of her legs just below the knee on account of sugar diabetes. My ma had the same thing. They nickeled-and-dimed her toes, then her feet, then one leg and finally the other. But I am getting ahead of myself. Aside from the wheelchair and the missing leg, you can’t see nothing wrong with her, but she don’t say a word. She just watches us. There are some other colored people here and she stares over where they’re sitting like it’s paradise and she’s stranded on the wrong side of the river. Go on, then! I want to tell her. You can’t help feeling slighted when she’s silent as a stone around us, but smiles and nods and pats her own kind on the arm, all the while chattering like a parrot.

  You should see Poison Ivy’s face when she looks at Carolyn. It’s like she’s watching a Frankenstein movie. You can tell she just can’t believe she’s sitting there at the table, eating with a n——. You know which word I mean. I won’t say it because I know you’re not supposed to, but that word is thick in the air. You feel it floating right over our table and you can see it all over Ivy’s face like someone wrote it again and again with a grease pencil. The feeling’s mutual, I got to say. You can see that, too. Once in a while when Ivy’s busy yammering, Carolyn sneaks her a look that would curl your toes.

  I’m getting to what Ivy said, but first I got to talk about the food, if you can call it that. Everything tastes the same, like sludge or cardboard. The plates come in two colors: shit brown and puke green. They’re Melmac, that plastic stuff that won’t break. Looks like something they’d make a fake leg out of.

  B Wing people are lined up under the windows in their wheelchairs. Some get their food all ground up in a cup, and they slurp it up through a straw. Doesn’t matter what it is—meat, potatoes, beets, or pudding—they grind it all up together. Others open their mouths like baby birds and the nurses poke food in. When I asked the Filipino girl how we were supposed to eat with that around, she looked at me like I was an ax murderer and said, “Why, Mrs. Sledge, it keeps them more oriented.”

  Figure that one out.

  Well, yesterday Poison Ivy sailed in in full regalia. She had a hat that looked like a bucket clamped on her head, her talons had a fresh coat of red paint, and a skein of necklaces swung on her caved-in chest. She’d hardly sat down when she started gibbering like a chimp.

  I try not to pay her any mind. Just sitting next to her makes my blood pressure go through the roof, and it’s bad enough already. She thinks I’m stupid on account of the way I talk. I’m used to it. Lots of people think anyone with a southern accent is a half-wit.

  I ate my Salisbury steak and minded my own business while she kept jabbering to the biddies at the table behind her. When she lowered her voice and they started sneaking looks at me, I took notice.

  “What’re you looking at?” I finally asked.

  “Well, Cora. I’m sure you’ve heard what’s happening around here,” Ivy said in her busybody way.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “Things are turning up missing. You must have heard.”

  A rushing started in my ears. Krol just kept shoveling food into his piehole. But Carolyn laid down her fork and watched us like we were her favorite TV show.

  “No, I haven’t.” I picked up my fork and carried on with my meat.

  “Is that right?” Ivy narrowed her eyes and leaned toward me. “You don’t know a thing about it?” she whispered, loud enough for the whole place to hear.

  “No, I don’t!” I slammed down my fork. Even old Krol jumped. “What’re you saying?”

  Ivy shrugged, the simpering she-devil, but her eyes said everything. She picked up her spoon and pretended to suck up her soup.

  “You think I have something to do with it?” Blood banged in my ears. “Are you accusing me of stealing?”

  Now Krol stared at me with his blank blue eyes, while Carolyn suddenly found her plate real interesting.

  “I’m just saying it’s funny,” Ivy said with a twisted smile. “Funny how this all started happening just about the time you came.”

  I wanted to crush her bones like an eggshell. My neck started swelling, my heart pounded. Words snagged in my throat. All I could do was gurgle. Ivy’s friends hunched around their table like vultures over a dead skunk.

  “You got no call to say that, Ivy,” I finally managed to spit out. “You’re talking out your ass.”

  She curled up her nose. “No need to use words like that, Cora. You’re overmedicated. I’m afraid it’s affecting your judgment.”

  “Overmedicated? What in the hell is that supposed to mean?” My heart was pounding so hard I thought I’d drop dead on the spot.

  “Doped up. It’s plain as day. You come in here bleary-eyed, slurring your words. It’s a disgrace. It gives this place a bad name.”

  “I didn’t ask to be here!” I yelled. All the heads in the room spun toward me. “You listen here, Ivy! I don’t know why you’re tormenting me, but you’re going to be sorry! I’m going to show you, and you’ll be eating crow ‘til the cows come home!”

  I don’t remember standing up, but the next thing I knew I was holding on to the edge of the table for dear life. My hands shook, I gasped for breath. Just when I was about to keel over, an aide showed up and took hold of my elbow.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked. “What’s wrong, Mrs. Sledge?”

  “She’s under the influence,” Ivy butted in. “High as a kite.”

  “Get me out of here!” I screamed. “Take me back to my room!”

  And that’s the long and short of it. When I got back to my room I figured I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, so I did take some pills—enough that I didn’t give a shit about anything. I went to bed and—for a little while at least—forgot about this miserable place where I don’t have a friend in the world and everybody’s out to get me.

  THE SPRINGS

  Today’s Wednesday, the day they change my linens, vacuum my room, and swish out the toilet. Big deal. I came down here to what they call the Day Room t
o get away from the noise and get a little writing in before lunch. There’s only one other person, name of Elsa, over on the other side of the room crocheting an afghan. She churns them out like a factory and gives them to the nurses. Maybe she figures they’ll be nicer to her that way. The one she’s working on now’s the color of Pepto-Bismol. She keeps sneaking looks over here, like she never saw a pen or paper before.

  I got to say that I’m starting to get a craving for writing in this book. It’s funny, but I think of it more and more. Now that mess with Ivy is distracting me from the real story. I’m keeping my eyes and ears open, but that’s neither here nor there right now. What I want to say is ready to bust out of me. It’s all fighting to get out at the same time, so I don’t know where to begin. But I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s all got to come out one way or another, so I’ll just start at the beginning.

  I was born on July 18, 1914, near Neosho, Missouri. Neosho is an Indian word that means clear, cold water because there’s a lot of springs back there, and caves, too. Me and my sisters and brother, we’re named after rocks, every one of us. Well, except me, really—but that was a mistake. My daddy was always reading about jewels and minerals, and he worked in the mines there, like a lot of the men. There’s lead around there, and zinc, and a big tripoli mine that’s been there since long before I was born. Tripoli’s grit they use for buffing and scouring. We called it soda ash.

  Ruby was the oldest, the boss and the brain. She ruled the three of us kids, and half the others in those parts for miles around. She called the shots, organized the games, told everybody what to do and where to go. Nothing changed when she grew up. She was like a locomotive saying Do This and Do That, and if you knew what was good for you, you did it. She married a big lug called Calvin Roberts and she wore the pants in that marriage long before anybody ever heard of such things. Later she got to be a big wheel around Neosho, what she called a pillar of society, and if anybody seen Ruby Roberts coming down the street in her big black Lincoln, they bowed and scraped; they practically got down on their knees and groveled on the sidewalk. She had a hand in everything—buying and selling property, construction, even the town council—and she could make or break people. She had a fur coat, a house with a den and a living room, a set of silver that filled a mahogany hutch, and, like I said, that Lincoln that Calvin kept shining like glass. Far as I could see, that’s the only work he ever did. Ruby bought him a cabin out there on the lake so he could fish whenever the mood struck him. Don’t ask me why, but she was crazy about that man.

  Ruby died seven or eight years ago in the old folks home there in Neosho. She went nuts in the end, screaming and bawling like a little baby. They had to tie her up and she got mean, too, giving anybody who rubbed her the wrong way a knock upside the head with her cane. Calvin, he was long gone from cancer. It rotted him from the inside out like a bad potato.

  Next was Crystal. She was the pretty one. Curls the color of maple syrup, the reddest lips and the greenest eyes. Everybody fawned and fussed over her. My daddy doted on her. Boys trailed her like lovesick dogs and even I got to say that Crystal was a lot of fun, always laughing and telling stories. You’d think she had a wonderful life ahead of her, but that just shows looks aren’t everything. She got married when she was eighteen, moved up to St. Louis, and the next time she came through town—about two years later—she was a falling-down drunk. That took everybody by surprise because we were Baptists from way back, and we weren’t supposed to cuss or drink or play cards. I never saw my ma or daddy touch a drop of liquor.

  Crystal could not stop drinking. She went through six husbands, and each and every one of them loved her to death, but they couldn’t do a thing to help her. The last one, Bill, came around sobbing and saying she was killing herself. Half the time he didn’t even know where she was. She’d go on a bender and be gone days and sometimes weeks. He’d find her in some fleabag hotel laying in her own mess.

  The last time I saw her was 1951, when I was back home visiting. Bill had found her holed up in some dive down near Pea Ridge, Arkansas. They drove through Neosho on their way back to Joplin, where they were living. Bill idled the car outside my ma’s house, didn’t even shut off the engine. I went out and leaned in the window. I’ll never forget how Crystal looked sitting there in the passenger seat, like a little old woman, nothing more than a skeleton clutching the dashboard with fingers that looked like claws on some poor bird. She turned her head toward me and smiled, and I almost fell down right there and died. She looked like a mummy, her skin shrunk up and yellow, and her lips drawn back from her teeth. Even the whites of her eyes were yellow and, skinny as she was, her belly was swollen up like she was nine months pregnant.

  “Toad,” she said. “How you doing, little sister?” She smiled and I thought of that beautiful girl. She died a couple of months later, thirty-nine years old.

  It’s hard to talk about my third sister. I swear, sometimes I think it’s the reason for Crystal’s drinking, and for the feeling in my heart, which is a loneliness I’ve had since I was the smallest child. It’s the very same feeling I have now, here in this place, like I’m all alone in the world, different from everybody else with not a hint of hope in sight. It’s been like that all my life. People have called me lazy, but it’s the God’s honest truth that a lot of the time I just could not get out of bed. Like I said when I started this book, I’m here to tell the truth. I’m sick and tired of pretending I’m happy.

  Emerald Grace was the third baby born into my family. She died when she was fourteen months old, one week before I was born. One week! For the life of me, I can’t imagine burying a baby, then having another one a few days later, but that’s what my ma did. It explains a lot, when I look back now. The grief I was born into and the hole in my ma’s heart that—no matter how hard I tried—I couldn’t squeeze into. I think she had a hard time even looking at me. She expected to see that little girl who died and instead there I was, like one of them cowbirds. You know the ones I mean. The mama bird lays her egg in the nest of some cute little bird—a finch or a warbler—then pretty soon there’s a big, fat, dust-colored bird different from all the other ones, with its mouth wide open. The mama bird tries to jam a worm down its throat, but she knows something’s not right. The cowbird gets so big it starves the other babies out, and the mama bird’s stuck with one big ugly-ass baby that isn’t even hers. That’s how I felt. Ma had to settle for me because the baby she really loved, the one that she’d fed and washed and played with for a whole year, was taken away.

  I felt like I knew Emerald Grace, like she was there while I was growing up. A lot of people don’t believe in ghosts, but I think they’re around us all the time. Not the way people say—white things floating in the air, or cold winds, or doors slamming—but a space that nothing can fill. That’s the best way I can describe it. Emerald had a place in our family even though no one ever mentioned her name. We stepped around her as if she was a living body. Her voice was the silence she left when she died, the sorrow in my ma’s heart, and sometimes I think that was the loudest sound around, drowning out the rest of us.

  I was next, the fourth girl, and by that time my folks had it up to the gills with girls. My own mother told me so. She was ashamed. My daddy, he just grit his teeth and shook his head. If that wasn’t bad enough, I was born two weeks late, so big and fat I nearly killed my ma. It was the middle of a scorching summer and her legs swelled up so bad before I was born that she went to the spring and plunked herself down in it for hours at a time. Everybody says that’s why I’ve always loved the water. Ma said I was nearly speaking age when I finally decided to be born, and they half expected me to hop down off the bed, walk on out of the room, and fix myself breakfast.

  They took me to the butcher and weighed me on the meat scale. Eleven pounds! That big, when everyone else in my family was skinny as snakes.

  “She looks like a big old toad!” Ruby said the first time she saw me, and from that m
oment on, that’s what all my kin called me. Even my husband Abel called me Toad ‘til the day he died.

  Coral Lorene Spring. That’s my real name, the one my folks gave me. Like I said, we was all named after rocks. Coral is a powerful stone, and pretty, too—usually red or sometimes white. But whoever wrote out my birth certificate forgot the last letter. Everybody was so busy calling me Toad, nobody noticed ‘til I went to school, and by that time it was too late. So people who weren’t in my family called me Cora, and that’s what I’ve been ever since. My middle name is after my grandmother, my ma’s mother, Lorene LeFlore, who scared the living tar out of me. Far as I was concerned, she was the meanest woman ever to walk the face of the earth. Big as a mountain, arms like a lumberjack, and tiny black eyes that glittered in her big flat face. Some said she was French, others said Cherokee. According to everybody, I am the spitting image of her.

  When I was four years old, my brother Jasper was born and you’ve never seen such thanksgiving and hallelujahs and jumping for joy in your life. It was like the second coming of Christ. Finally, a boy! Jasper was the apple of everybody’s eye, including mine. He was as spoilt as he could be, and us girls waited on him hand and foot. He got married, got a job with Allstate Insurance, and ended up living all over the country.

  So that’s my family. Ruby, the Brains. Crystal, the Beauty. Jasper, the Boy.

  Which one was I?

  I was the Fat One. The pig, the cow, the hippo. The Toad. My weight, or my size—like everybody likes to call it when what they mean is fat—has been the curse of my life. When I was little I didn’t play or run or climb like the other kids, even though I could swim like a fish. If I had my way I’d of spent all my time in that river where I grew up, floating with the current. I loved to feel light as a feather fluttering in the water. Otherwise I wanted to be inside, or up in the loft of the barn reading, or later, when I had my kids, away from those other women yakking and shopping and comparing everything—their clothes and kids and husbands and houses. When someone got a camera out, I wanted to run and hide. I can’t tell you how awful it is to see a picture of yourself big as a house with normal-size people standing around you, like you are some monument they’re posing beside. If it was up to me, I’d tear up every picture that’s ever been taken of me.