The Crazy Lady
When you are a child, the world of
adults is so vague and mysterious that you tend to put particular adults,
especially ones you don’t know that well, into categories that safely define
them. For example, on the block where I grew up, in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, a
suburb of Milwaukee, there was a small, sweet old woman who lived with her
sister – spinsters they were called in those days. We knew nothing about her
(including her first name) except that she told us stories, and hence she was
dubbed, once and for all, the Story Lady. We could go to the door of her
cream-colored brick house at any time of the day and be invited in to her dim,
doily-laden living room. She would sit us down on her sagging sofa, pick out a
storybook from the piles scattered about room, and read it to us. Sometimes she
provided milk and cookies, too, but you couldn’t depend on that (or she might
have been dubbed the Cookie Lady, instead), so kids only went there if they
loved to hear stories.
Two
houses closer to mine from the Story Lady’s house lived another unmarried
woman, who was much closer in age to my parents, which somehow made her strangeness
more frightening. I knew no one her age that was single, except for my uncle,
the Catholic priest, which made her peculiar in the first place. But what made
her really strange, and earned her the nickname the Crazy Lady, was the
elaborate process she went through every time she left her house.
First
of all, she never drove anywhere, which was odd enough. And when she set out on
foot, sometimes with just her purse, sometimes pulling her metal grocery
trolley behind her, it took her a good half hour to get away. First, she would
come out the door, lock it, and then turn and walk down the three steps from
her front porch to the sidewalk. There she would pause as if she’d forgotten
something, turn around, go back up the steps, unlock the door, and go back in. But
she would reappear within a few seconds, relock the door, go down the steps,
walk half way out her walk, stop, think, and again return to the house. The
next time, she would make it all the way to the end of her walk before going
back in. The next, she would turn onto the public sidewalk and get to her
driveway before returning. This process would be repeated, with her progressing
ten or twenty yards further each time before returning, all the way around the
block and across the street to the shopping center.
At that point, we
would inevitably tire of watching her, so we never discovered if this process
continued across the shopping center parking lot and into the stores. But until
then, we were perversely fascinated. We had never seen an adult in the grip of
obsessive-compulsive behavior – and, of course, at the time, we had no idea
that that was what we were seeing. To us, she was simply crazy, and that made
her terrifying as well as fascinating. When she appeared outside her front
door, we would stop whatever we were doing – playing Home Run Derby with a Wiffle
ball, or Pickle between two “bases” on the sidewalk, or Kick the Can in the
street – and hide behind our hedge, peaking over or through it to watch her go
through her unvarying routine. Not that she would have been likely to notice
us, even if we had stood out in the open watching her. She was entirely focused
on herself, on whatever it was that was going on in her mind. But we were
afraid to find out what would happen if she did
notice us staring at her.
Paradoxically, her
totally predictable behavior, just because it was so strange, made her seem
totally unpredictable to us. She did
something that no other adult we knew did, so the possibility always existed
that she was capable of other, more threatening behaviors that we’d never
observed in an adult before. We wondered if breaking her routine would make her
violent toward the people – us – who had caused her to break it. But we weren’t
about to risk finding out.
This sense of the
Crazy Lady being off-kilter and threatening made going near her house the focus
of many dares. “I dare you to run up onto the Crazy Lady’s porch and ring her doorbell,”
someone would say. It required at least a “double-dog dare you” to get anyone
to respond, and then it was only the bravest among us – the most foolish, we
thought – who would actually take the dare. The result was anticlimactic by any
objective standard. She would simply open the door, look bewildered, and close
it again. But simply getting the Crazy Lady to respond to our summons was
enough. It connected us to her craziness directly. We were no longer just
observers; we were part of her crazy life, and there was something deliciously
weird about that.
I’ve seen many people with quirks and idiosyncrasies since then, of course – many much stranger and more disturbing than the Crazy Lady’s obsessive-compulsive trips back and forth from her house. But I will never forget the look on her heavily made-up face as she would pause, look inside herself, and find something there that compelled her turn around, once again, and go back. It was from the Crazy Lady that I learned just how deeply each of us is embedded in our own consciousness, and how little insight we have into the consciousness of the individuals who surround us. Though the Crazy Lady may have demonstrated it more dramatically than most of us do, we all have our quirks and idiosyncrasies, our little obsessions, that make no sense to anyone but ourselves.
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