A Girl Named Zippy Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Baby Book

  Hair

  The Lion

  Qualities of Light, or Disasters Involving Animals

  Julie Hit Me Three Times

  Daniel

  There She Is

  Blood of the Lamb

  Unexpected Injuries

  The Kindness of Strangers

  Favors for Friends

  Haunted Houses

  Professionals

  Chance

  A Short List of Things My Father Lost Gambling

  The World of Ideas

  Location

  Diner

  Slumber Party

  ESP

  Interior Design

  Cemetery

  Drift Away

  Reading List

  Arisen

  The Social Gospel

  The Letter

  Acknowledgments

  A Guide for Reading Groups

  About the Author

  Also by Haven Kimmel

  Praise for A Girl Named Zippy

  Copyright Page

  For my mother

  and

  my sister

  For absent friends

  So is there no fact, no event, in our private history,

  which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive,

  inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our

  body into the empyrean? Cradle and infancy,

  school and playground, the fear of boys, and

  dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and

  berries, and many another fact that once filled

  the whole sky, are gone already; friend and

  relative, profession and party, town and

  country, nation and world, must also soar

  and sing.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

  The American Scholar

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  If you look at an atlas of the United States, one published around, say, 1940, there is, in the state of Indiana, north of New Castle and east of the Epileptic Village, a small town called Mooreland. In 1940 the population of Mooreland was about three hundred people; in 1950 the population was three hundred, and in 1960, and 1970, and 1980, and so on. One must assume that the number three hundred, while sacred, did not represent the same persons decade after decade. A mysterious and powerful mathematical principle was at work, one by which I and my family were eventually governed. Old people died and new people were added, and thus what was shifting remained constant.

  I got to be new there. I was added and shortly afterward the barber named Tony was taken away. This was in 1965. The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it. Sociologists and students of history imagine they know something of the United States in the sixties and seventies because they are familiar with the prevailing trends; if they drew assumptions about Mooreland based on that knowledge, they would get everything wrong. Strangely, there has never been a definitive source of information about Mooreland during a certain fifteen-year period, perhaps because there are so few people left who can reliably tell it. Many have been added since then. Many have moved on.

  Not long ago my sister Melinda shocked me by saying she had always assumed that the book on Mooreland had yet to be written because no one sane would be interested in reading it. “No, no, wait,” she said. “I know who might read such a book. A person lying in a hospital bed with no television and no roommate. Just lying there. Maybe waiting for a physical therapist. And then here comes a candy striper with a squeaky library cart and on that cart there is only one book—or maybe two books: yours, and Cooking with Pork. I can see how a person would be grateful for Mooreland then.”

  Everyone familiar with my childhood in Mooreland agreed with Melinda’s position. One woman even said that Mooreland “is a long way to go not to be anywhere when you get there,” and yet I persisted. I felt that there was so much more to the town than its trappings. There was one main street, Broad Street, which was actually not so broad, and was the site of the town’s only four-way stop sign. There were three churches: the North Christian Church and the South Christian Church, which sat at opposite ends of Broad Street like sentinels, and the Mooreland Friends Church, which was kind of in the middle of town, but tucked back on Jefferson Street at the edge of a meadow. There were no taverns, no theaters, no department stores. If a man was interested in drinking, he had to travel to Mt. Summit, to the aptly named Dog House, or to the Package Liquor Store in New Castle, about ten miles away. New Castle was, in fact, the hub of all our commercial activity, and it had everything: a fabric store, Grant’s Department Store, the Castle Theater (which showed a single movie at a time, second-run, the same movie for weeks running), Becker Brothers Grocery. In Mooreland we had our own gas station and our own drugstore, where we could buy a fountain soda but no drugs. (For a while Mooreland had an actual doctor, and we could buy drugs from him, but the police eventually came and took him away.) When I was little there was a hardware store, and off and on there was a diner in what used to be somebody’s house. These days it’s a house again. We had a veterinarian, who could treat little animals, like cats and dogs, and big ones, like horses and cows. Mooreland was bordered at the north end by a cemetery and at the south by a funeral home. The spirit of the place, if such spirits can be said to exist, was the carnival, Poor Jack Amusements, that arrived at the end of the harvest season every August. Most people took their vacations during the week of the fair, and were there morning to night, working in a food tent or organizing one of the events, like the Horse and Pony Pull, or the Most Beautiful Baby Contest. Everyone in Mooreland believed in God (except my dad). There was no such thing as multiculturalism—no people of color, no exotic religions, no one openly homosexual (there was one old bachelor who had suspiciously good taste in furniture, but we didn’t question his private life).

  My parents moved to Mooreland with my brother and sister in 1955, five years after they married. (Prior to living in Mooreland they had lived in the very, very big town of Muncie; I assume those were The Dark Years.) I wasn’t born until 1965, when my brother was thirteen and my sister nearly ten. My mother always cheerfully refers to me as “an afterthought,” which I consider a term of immense respect and affection, in spite of Melinda’s attempts to convince me otherwise.

  The book that follows is about a child from Mooreland, Indiana, written by one of the three hundred. It’s a memoir, and a sigh of gratitude, a way of returning. I no longer live there; I can’t speak for the town or its people as they are now. Someone has taken my place. Whoever she is, her stories are her own.

  * * *

  BABY BOOK

  The following was recorded by my mother in my baby book, under the heading MILESTONES:

  FIRST STEPS: Nine months! Precocious!

  FIRST TEETH: Bottom two, at eight months. Still nursing her, but she doesn’t bite, thank goodness!

  FIRST SAYS “MOMMY”: (blank)

  FIRST SAYS “DADDY”: (blank)

  FIRST WAVES BYE-BYE: As of her first birthday, she is not much interested in waving bye-bye.

  At age eighteen mon
ths, the baby book provided a space for FURTHER MILESTONES, in which my mother wrote:

  She’s still very active and energetic. Her daddy calls her “Zippy,” after a little chimpanzee he saw roller-skating on television. The monkey was first in one place and then zip! in another. Has twelve teeth. I’m still nursing her—she’s a thin baby, and it can’t hurt—but I’m thinking of weaning her to a bottle. There’s no sense in trying to get her to drink from a cup. Still not talking. Dr. Heilman says she has perfectly good vocal cords, and to give it time.

  On my second birthday:

  Still no words from our little Zippy. She is otherwise a delight and a very sweet baby. I have turned her life over to God, to do with as He sees fit. I believe He must have a very special plan for her, because I’m sure that terrible staph infection in her ear that nearly killed her when she was a newborn must have, as the doctors feared, reached her brain. She is so quiet we hardly know she is here, and so unlike many of our friends, we can speak freely in front of her without fear she will repeat us. Little Becky Dawson walked up to Agnes Johnson in church last Sunday and called her Broad As A Barn. You know she heard that at home. We are very grateful for our little angel on her second birthday.

  This entry was made on a separate piece of paper:

  I’ve been thinking about first words, and so before I forget, here are some other important ones:

  Melinda: Mama

  Danny: No

  Bob: Me (Mom Mary thought this was so cute; she says she first thought he was saying ma ma ma but really he was saying me me me)

  My first word, of course, was Magazine.

  The other day I overheard Melinda saying her night-time prayers, and she was asking that someday her little sister be able to tie her shoes. Bless her heart. We all hope as much.

  Under FAVORITE ACTIVITIES, Mom recorded:

  God’s Own Special Angel: Our Miracle Baby!

  Far and away her favorite activity is rocking. She has her own rocking chair, and Bob rocks her to sleep every night. She is now refusing to take naps in her baby bed; if I try putting her down she doesn’t cry or make any noise, but holds on to the rail and bounces so hard and for so long that I fear for her little spinal cord. She is not content until I put her on her rocking horse, where she bounces hard enough to cause it to hop across the floor. Eventually she grows weary and begins rocking, and then the rocking slows down, and finally she puts her head down on the hard, plastic mane and falls asleep, and I am able to move her to her bed.

  Dr. Heilman is finally recognizing that all of this might be due to the fact that her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck three times when she was born. I’m not sure why that has caused her not to grow any hair, however. She does have a few precious wisps, which I slick together with baby oil in order to put in a barrette or a ribbon.

  Also she loves to go camping. Went fishing for the first time when she was only three weeks old! Her daddy is starting early! She carries a bottle with her everywhere she goes (which is everywhere). Everyone thinks I should have weaned her (she is now 30 months), but I just don’t have the heart to take anything away from her.

  This letter, written in my mom’s tiny, precise script, was placed haphazardly in the middle of the book:

  Dearest Little One: I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to read this, but there’s a story I think you should know. When you were only five weeks old, just a tiny, tiny baby, you became very ill. You ran a terribly high fever, and would not stop crying, night and day. The doctors said you had a staph infection in your ear, and that there was nothing they could do. Dr. Heilman was out of town, and we were sent to his replacement. He told us you could die at home or in the hospital. We took you home, and I didn’t sleep for days. In desperation your father called our dear friends Ruth and Roland Wiser, and they drove down to Mooreland from Gary. Gary, Indiana, sweetheart, which is hours and hours away! Your father locked me in the Driftwood, our little camper, and Ruth and Roland stayed up all night, taking turns walking you so I could sleep. The next day I took you back to the doctor. He told us there was a new kind of medicine, an antibiotic, that might possibly help you, but he was not reassuring. He said there were twenty-six varieties of this medicine (the same as the alphabet); that probably only one would do you any good, and that he couldn’t possibly know which one to prescribe, because they were so new. He showed me a sample case of them, little vials lined up along a spectrum, and then he just reached in and plucked one out and told me to try it. I could tell he knew it was hopeless.

  We took you home and gave you the medicine. You cried yourself to sleep, and I, too, fell asleep rocking you. Just before I nodded off I told God plainly that I was letting you go, that I was delivering you into His hands. When I woke up you were silent, and I knew you were gone. I felt something damp against my arm, and when I pulled back your baby blanket, I saw that the infection had broken and run out your ear. Your skin was cool and covered with sweat, and you were sleeping deeply.

  When Dr. Heilman came home he told us that the resident had been right—there was only one medicine that would have saved you, and he plucked it blindly out of the case. Dr. Heilman calls you his “Miracle Baby” now. Olive Overton, my dear friend from church, says that she knew you before you were born, and that it took you some time to decide whether or not you wanted to stay in this world.

  I thought you ought to know about Ruth and Roland. What they did was what it means to love someone. We are all so grateful you decided to stay.

  The last entry is dated four months before my third birthday:

  This weekend we went camping. After dinner little Zippy was running in circles around the campfire, drinking from her bottle, and Bob decided she’d had it long enough. He walked over to her and said, “Sweetheart, you’re a big girl now, and it’s time for you to give up that bottle. I want you to just give it to me, and we’re going to throw it in the fire. Okay?” This was met with many protests from Danny and Melinda and me; we all felt that there was no call to take something away from one who has so little. The baby looked at us; back at her dad, and then pulled the bottle out of her mouth with an audible pop, and said, clear as daylight, “I’ll make a deal with you.” Her first words! Bob didn’t hesitate. “What’s the deal?” She said, “If you let me keep it, I’ll hide it when company comes and I won’t tell no-body.” He thought about it for just a moment, then shook his head. “Nope. No deal.” So she handed over the bottle, and we all stood together while Bob threw it in the fire. It was a little pink bottle, made of plastic. It melted into a pool.

  Now that we know she can talk, all I can say is: dear God. Please give that child some hair. Amen.

  * * *

  HAIR

  Somehow my first wig and my first really excellent pair of slippers arrived simultaneously.

  Now my hair, my actual human hair which grows out of my head, was slow in coming. I was bald until I was nearly three. My head was also strangely crooked, and it happened that the little patches of wispy bird hair I did have grew only in the dents. Also my eyes were excessively large and decidedly close together. When my mother first saw me in the hospital she looked up with tears in her eyes and said to my father, “I’ll love her and protect her anyway.”

  When my hair finally did come in, when I was three, it did so with a vengeance: thick and sprouty and curly. And not those lovely loopy curls only ungrateful men get; it was more like fourteen thousand cowlicks. In fact, left to its own devices, my head looks like a big hair alarm going off.

  We tried a variety of hairstyles in those early years. The really short haircut (the Pixie, as it was then called) was my favorite, and coincidentally, the most hideous. Many large, predatory birds believed I was asking for a date. I especially liked that style because I imagined it excused me from any form of personal hygiene, which I detested. I was so opposed to bathing that I used to have a little laughing reaction every
time a certain man in town walked by and said hello to me and I had to respond with “Hi, Gene.”

  After a year as a Pixie, my sister decided what my hair needed was “weight.” Melinda executed all the haircutting ideas in our house and, in fact, cut off the tip of my earlobe one summer afternoon because she was distracted by As the World Turns.

  The weight we added to my hair made me look like a fuzzy bush, a bush gone vague. I decided to take the scissors to it myself, and had just gotten started when my dad brought home my new wig, which he had won in a card game. I can imagine that some eight-year-olds would see an implied message in the gift of a wig; all I saw was hair, long and straight and mahogany colored, like the tail of a horse. It wasn’t actually a wig—it was called a “fall,” and it attached to the middle of my head by a comb, and then fell down my back.

  Now because it was a fall and not a wig, there was a problem with all that front part, like the bang part, and those side areas that swooped up into little points, but I decided to take what I could get. I had never before shown any interest in my physical self—my sister swore I had no pride—so when I asked her for bobby pins to help hold my new hair on, she gave them to me without so much as a snicker.

  I was admiring myself in the bathroom mirror when Melinda came in and asked me, a bit sheepishly, if I wanted her old house slippers. She had outgrown them, and had never really liked them anyway. I turned and looked at her suspiciously, thinking this was surely a trap, but she was genuine.

  I wore my new hair into her bedroom. Her room was painted the color of the best sky, and next to her bed she had a wicker chair and on the chair was a homemade, stuffed clown. It was a very benevolent-looking thing, but once when she was away at a friend’s house I snuck into her bed and it began talking to me in the dark, so I kept a wide berth.

  Without ceremony, she gave me the slippers. They were made of the most fabulous, long, fake fur, and when worn, made the human foot look like a pink, oval biscuit. The fur kind of sprouted up off the top of the slippers and hung down to the floor. They made a delicious little snicking sound as I walked, too. I remember no house slippers before or after this pair.