I found myself being pulled into the crowd of regular kids.

A few of the girls circled me in the bathroom. I knew they didn't want to be friends, they just wanted to know Was it true? Did she really? I didn't know what story to tell so I just shrugged my shoulders and said "I don't know."

But a story got told anyway, how before Christmas, Rae's

daddy drove down to the Esso Station and accused those River Junction boys of doing something. Some thing. Some terrible thing. They said he knocked the door right off its hinges. Grabbed Robbie by the throat. Threatened to kill 82

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

somebody. But she wanted to do it, the girls all said. Why else would she have gone off with them? Everybody knew that. Rae told me herself. You don't know shit, Lily.

She started smoking cigarettes on top of the hill behind

the shop class with those boys. I tried to get her attention;

I started hanging out at the bottom of the hill where Mr. Ryals, the shop teacher, tossed splintered boards, dumped piles of pale yellow sawdust. I bummed cigarettes from Sharon Etheridge, puffed hard on them, blew smoke rings

in Rae's direction, but she wouldn't look at me. And when she did, her eyes slid right over me, like water, as if I weren't even there.

83

U

Mrs. Miller disappeared in late March and the

police found her roaming through the pine woods near the Georgia side of Lake Seminole in nothing but a silky white slip covered with beggar's-lice. She told them she was on her way to swim the Living Waters of the Holy Ghost. To get to the other shore where Jesus was waiting for her with a white gown and a pair of gauzy wings. She was going to fly right out of there. I could see her, standing on the shore of Lake Seminole, dressed in white, those big gauzy wings stuck on her back. She'd take one last whiff of that fishy-smelling air and start flapping those wings back and forth till her feet slowly lifted off the sandy shore. She'd be wobbly at firstshe'd roll to one side, then the other—but by the time she

got high enough to see the whole town of Chattahoochee beneath her, she'd have the hang of it and she'd glide on a thermal, smooth as one of those dirty black buzzards I was always seeing way up in the sky. Circling over Chattahoochee like it was a dead thing.

She wasn't the first person to try to escape Chattahoochee. Once a patient snuck out of the hospital and swam clear LU V I C K E RS

across the lake in his pajamas, but the guards were waiting for him on the other shore. And once a boy named Russell drank too many beers and swam halfway across before his legs cramped up. His cousins stood in a warm puddle of

water on the dock and watched as he beat the air with his hands and sunk and drowned. They thought he was waving. There was something about boys; they were supposed

to have a force field around them, protecting them from danger. Everybody expected it to work. And it did, most of the time, I think.

At lunch one day, I sat in a warm stripe of sun in the

cafeteria and listened as the girls talked. A fly buzzed

against the window behind me. The girls drank milk from tiny waxed cartons and choreographed perfect weddings

for faraway June days: pastel bridesmaids and flower girls, sunny getaways in sleek black cars. Janine Atwater hummed I'm going to the chapel and I'm going to get married... " Then the humming stopped. "Not if you're like that girl Rae." I wanted to shout at them, "I was there. She didn't do anything wrong," but I got the message: nice girls and marriage went together and anything else was pine-straw silly. After a while, you could say, "You're gonna end up like that girl Rae," and everybody knew what you meant.

Mama sure knew what it meant—she always let James

go places and do things that she wouldn't dream of letting Maisey and me do, even though he was younger than me. It was like she had it in for us because we were girls. Especially me. Meanwhile, Maisey and I sat home, thumbing through the Sears catalog, One Life to Live playing in the background, while James biked out to the lake with Mama's blessings, where he dove off the dock, his slender body free to slice

86

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

deep water, because he's a boy, because he's a boy, because he's a boy.

They took Mrs. Miller to the women's ward where Mama worked. At dinner she whispered about it to Daddy, leaning over her plate, her hand cupped over the corner of her mouth. Then she sat back in her chair, her voice rising. "It took five of us to hold her down, and then the doctor jammed that pink piece of rubber into her mouth. When they hit the electricity, I swear I felt it surge through my arms. I thought it would kill her."

James's ears pricked up. "What, Mama?" "Nothing. A nervous breakdown," she said. Maisey asked what a nervous breakdown was.

Mama turned around, surprised. "Why, honey, it really isn't anything. It's when your nerves get shot to hell,

when you just can't take it anymore. Something happens. Somebody does something and bang? She slammed her fist

down so hard on the table that the plates rattled. "You have a breakdown."

I stopped eating, tried to picture Mrs. Miller strapped

to a gurney. I'd heard about those shock treatments. Rae had told me how they tied the patients down and clamped wires on their heads like Frankenstein and pulled a switch. I wondered if the electricity entered Mrs. Miller in a flash of light. I wondered if she thought that jolt was the spirit of God and threw herself on the dirty hospital floor the way she had at church that time, jerking her body around in circles, wildly flinging her arms and legs; I wondered if words just foamed out of her mouth like slobber. Did she speak in tongues?

I wondered how Rae felt, how it felt to have a mother who 87

LU V I C K E RS

really let go and went crazy like a dog with rabies, all because of something you did. Or because of something someone did to you. You just took so much, then you fell apart. Like a car rattling down a washboard road in a cloud of red dust near the Apalachicola River, nuts and bolts shaking loose, rusty fenders and muffler dropping into the dirt.

88 15

Step on a crack, break your mothers back; Step in a hole, break your mother's sugar bowl.

After Mrs. Miller had her breakdown, I could see that people were lined up like black-and-white dominoes stood on end. Sometimes all it took to topple the whole thing was the slightest touch. When I was six, I found a baby cardinal sitting in the grass under the Japanese plum tree in our backyard, and Mama told me not to touch it; Its mama won't want it anymore ifyou touch it, she said.

But the cat, I wanted to say. I couldn't imagine what would happen to the baby bird if we just left it there. How would it get back into the nest? Pink petals were scattered in the blades of grass beneath the tree. I knelt down to look closer. The bird's heartbeat was visible beneath its thin wrinkly skin. Its feathers were still damp and curled, its eyes tiny gray slits. I laced my hands together to keep myself from picking it up. Then it opened its paper-colored beak and made a thin cheep. I couldn't help it. When Mama wasn't looking, I reached out one finger and touched its feathers.

L U V I C K E RS

The next day the bird was dead, tipped over in the grass, its body crawling with shiny black ants, its legs stiff as

sticks. I knew I had to dig a hole quick and bury the bird before Mama saw it. She'd know I touched it, that I made its mother leave it to die. I wondered if Rae s mama didn't want her anymore once those boys touched her. I wondered if she'd headed to the water to ask God to forgive her for not wanting her own daughter. I wondered if that might've happened to me.

"As soon as you were born," Mama'd told me once, "the nurses saw you were blue and wrapped you in a rough gray blanket and rubbed your skin hard, and it bothered me, someone else's hands touching your body before mine." I could see her propped up on pillows in a hospital bed, her hands laced together across her belly, watching the nurses work me over.

Why'dyou let them touch me ifyou knew it'd make you

not want me anymore? I wanted to ask her. Then, as if she'd heard my question, she said, "I begged them to let me have you, but they ignored me and ran their fat pink palms all over your arms and legs, kneading the blue away. It wasn't until you were pink as a shrimp that they handed you over and I could see that you were all right."

But I wasn't. We weren't. I wasn't even a minute old and I'd already done something to make Mama crazy. I felt like a mistake had been made. Maybe it happened when those nurses rubbed me pink. For a long time after Mama told me that story, I thought being born blue meant I'd been a boy, and that the nurses had turned me into a girl by rubbing

me pink. I should've been a little boy blue. Mama would've liked me as much as she liked James. She wouldn't be so 90

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

mad at me all the time for not wanting to do girl things if I were a boy.

At Easter I went to the hospital auditorium with a group of sixth-graders to sing to the patients. We sang "Up from the Grave He Arose" in rumbling, low-pitched voices. The patients wanted to sing along, and some did, jumping on the words as if they were jumping on a merry-go-round that was already moving. Others sort of hummed or yowled along like dogs whimpering at a painful sound. I sang along, too, but couldn't hear the words; I was all eyes. These people were crazy. They were wearing their pajamas, their hair uncombed. They were slouched in wheelchairs or sitting stiffly on metal fold-up chairs. Some were smiling, some were blank-faced, droop-mouthed, drooling; some rocked back and forth.

Suddenly, a solitary white-haired woman rose to her feet

in the back of the room and began dancing, twirling slowly, her pale blue nightgown trailing behind her. She was smiling; she was beautiful. Later, when the hospital staff served us refreshments, I went near her. The skin on her hands and arms was crinkly as wax paper, etched with tiny white stars. She smelled faintly of marigolds and urine. She caught my eye, leaned close to me, and whispered, "My fiance will be here any minute." I just stared at her. Someone told me later that the woman had been in the hospital most of her life.

In 1934, the same year that Bonnie and Clyde died, she'd poured gas on her husband, set him on fire.

That night as I watched Mama fix her hair, I could see

how she'd fit in with that audience, see how she'd look in one of those chairs, in one of those nightgowns, telling anyone who came near, "Would you like some orange juice? I was 91

LU V I C K E RS

Miss Florida." You could say anything if you were crazy. Be whoever you wanted to be. Mama knew a patient who thought she was Grace Kelly. And the funny thing, Mama said, was that she was more like Grace Kelly than Grace Kelly was.

Later, when I went to bed, I dreamed I was lying in a

grassy field kissing Rae beneath a blue, blue sky. A shadow passed over us like a cloud. It was Mama, towering above us like a giant, blocking out the sun. Then, in the crazy way of dreams, it was night and I was asleep in my room at home and Mama glided in and stood at the foot of my bed in her frowsy cotton nightgown, her body dusted completely white with baby powder, her mouth crammed so full of bobby pins that they fell to the floor like broken teeth when she tried

to speak. She just stood there stony-eyed, grinding metal in her mouth.

The next morning, after Daddy left for work, Mama got

me and James up to go to school. While she scrambled eggs, I stared at her again, looking for evidence that she'd been eating bobby pins. But she just looked bored, pushing those eggs around the pan with a spatula. After breakfast I got ready to go to school.