She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  Also by Haven Kimmel

  A Girl Named Zippy

  The Solace of Leaving Early

  Orville:A Dog Story

  Something Rising (Light and Swift)

  FREE PRESS

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  Copyright © 2006 by Svarakimmel Industries, LLC

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  including the right of reproduction

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  FREE PRESSand colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Karolina Harris

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kimmel, Haven.

  She got up off the couch : and other heroic acts from Mooreland, Indiana. / Haven Kimmel.

  p. cm.

  1. Kimmel, Haven — Family. 2. Kimmel, Haven — Childhood and youth. 3.Authors, American — Homes and haunts — Indiana — Mooreland. 4.Authors, American — 21st century — Family relationships. 5.Authors, American — 21st century — Biography. 6. Mothers and daughters — Indiana. 7. Mooreland (Ind.) — Social life and customs.

  PS3611.I46 Z474 2006

  813’.6 — dc22 2005051964

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9597-0

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-9597-8

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote fromThe Skin of Our Teeth,by Thornton Wilder. Copyright © 1942 The Wilder Family LLC. Reprinted with permission from Tappan Wilder and The Wilder Family LLC.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  I greatly admire the two-word

  DEDICATION PAGE.

  I am even moved and puzzled by those books which bear no

  Dedication or Acknowledgments page at all,

  As if the book were composed on a rocky knoll

  By the Muse alone.

  MAYBE NEXT TIME.

  This book is dedicated, first and foremost, to my incomparable

  mother, Delonda Hartmann.

  It is also for my brother and sister, Dan Jarvis and Melinda Mullens,

  And in memory of my father, Bob Jarvis, and grandmother Mom Mary.

  It is for Elaine, Rick, Jenny and Jessica, Josh and Abby,

  And Wayne, who got The Girl after all.

  It is for Beth Dalton, brave and true friend of thirty-six years,

  Whose heart has never closed to me, and who allows me

  To stand and consider with her

  The Molly-shaped hole in the world.

  It is the only way I will ever know how to thank

  Julie Newman.

  It is for my beloved Amy Scheibe.

  It is for Christopher Schelling, who read it on the subway

  And in the dead of night and while he had a fever.

  Stars are being hammered onto his crown right this second.

  It is dedicated to the people of Mooreland, Indiana,

  With my abiding gratitude for their support and fine sympathies.

  For my mistakes, misjudgments, and glib unkindnesses,

  I hope to someday be forgiven.

  It is for Ben.

  It is for my children, Kat and Obadiah, who are even now writing the

  story of their own Time and Place.

  And this book is John’s,

  As they all have been and all will be.

  Contents

  Preface

  The Test

  I Knew Glen Before He Was a Superstar

  The Rules of Evil Queen

  Vacuum Cleaner

  Cowboys

  The Love Bug

  Treasure

  A Member of the Wedding

  Brother

  Church Camp

  Hairless Tails

  A Short List of Records My Father Threatened to Break Over My Head If I Played Them One More Time

  A Short List of Records That Vanished from My Collection

  Bull

  August 8, 1974

  Late Summer

  Valediction

  In the Mood

  Fall

  Experience It

  Teeth

  One Leper

  Silver

  Pink Like Me

  Slumber Party, 1977

  Blizzard Baby, 1978

  Gold

  Law Enforcement

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  A few years ago I wrote some essays about the town in which I grew up. Mooreland, Indiana, was paradise for a child — my old friend Rose and I have often said so — small, flat, entirely knowable. When I say it was small I mean the population was three hundred people. I cannot stress this enough. People approach me to say they, too, grew up in small towns and when I ask the size they say, “Oh, six thousand or so.” A town of six thousand people is a wild metropolis. Once a woman told me that she’d grown up in a small town offifteen thousand, and I was forced to turn my head away from her crazy geographic assessment. These people do not know small. Of course there was the elderly woman who told me she was reared in a hamlet with a population of twenty-six. I offered to be her servant for the rest of her life but she was too polite to accept.

  Because the town was so knowable and the times they were a-changin’ (it was the sixties and the seventies), Mooreland was blessed with a cast of characters my family and I found interesting and so we talked about them a lot over the years. There were my parents themselves, of course, and my brother and sister, my most-loved grandmother, Mom Mary, and my aunt Donita. There was the woman who lived across the street from us, Edythe, who daily threatened to kill my cats and who, in fact, was not averse to snuffing out my own life, to hear my sister tell it. There were my best friends, Rose and red-haired Julie, and their parents, who, without a sigh or a complaint where I could hear it, kept me relatively clean and well fed. There were my next-door neighbors, the kind and lovely Hickses, and all the people of the Mooreland Friends Church. But for character nothing rivaled the town itself, the three parallel streets bordered at the north end by a cemetery and at the south by a funeral home. It was the dearest postage stamp of native soil a person could wish for.

  I started writing the essays as a way to amuse my mom and sister. I’d write something, call, and read it to them. I had no ambitions for the essays and one need only read the above paragraphs to understand why. Indiana is not the state our national eye turns toward for fascinating narratives, strangely enough. Mooreland is definitely not a mecca for the literary arts, although it is rich with crafts. Andno one cares about the reminiscences of one more child with one more set of parents and neighbors and friends. I myself have been known to wince as if stabbed with wide-bore needles when faced with yet another coming-of-age memoir.

  So I wrote my essays with nothing much in mind and eventually there were so many essays about nothing they made a book and then I don’t know what happened. I turned around one day and the book was taken on by a publisher and then it had a cover — and I am talking about the most unfortunate cover imaginable: me as a six-month-old baby, wearing a dress my mother made. I was a tragic little monkey child: bald, with the kind of ears that look fine on woodland creatures but in human culture tend to be corrected surgically. I was holding Mom’s watch, which was dripping with drool, as I was teething. I’m sorry, I need to say this all again.On the cover of the book was my cross-eyed monkey baby picture, holding a drool-drenched watch. I nearly fainted the first time I saw it. I called my editor and asked if she was serious and she said yes. Thus didA Girl Named Zippy skitter out into the world, and thus was my self-respect laid to rest.

  I didn’t expect much from that little book. I was a
nd remain surprised that some people bought it and liked it. But even though it was kindly received in some quarters, I swore I’d never write a sequel. I don’t like sequels, by and large, although sometimes they are welcome. The most important reason to forgo a follow-up was that I’d already sent strangers uninvited into the town and the lives of people I love and respect and I could not imagine doing so again.

  A strange thing happened, though, on the many book tours that supported the publication ofZippy and of my two novels. In every city I was asked what became of the people I’d drawn — according to my own lights and in keeping with my memory of them — where they were now and if they were happy. That was to be expected. But I was alsoalways asked this: “What about your mom? Did she ever get up off the couch?” The first time I heard the question a little bell rang on a faraway hill, and I knew if I ever did (and I wouldn’t) write a follow-up (which I absolutelywould not do ), that would be the subject and that would be the title.

  Of course I gave in to the six or seven people clamoring for a sequel. In the beginning I didn’t intend to write anything but a continuing portrait of my family, in particular of my mother. Toward the end ofZippy my father and I watched Mom pedal away on my new bicycle, riding toward points unknown; we knew something was afoot but we didn’t know what.She Got Up Off the Couch begins at that point — it seemed an appropriate jumping-off place for a book about an individual woman in a very particular place. But when Rose read the final draft she pointed out that Mother’s evolution, personal as it was, is also the story of a generation of women who stood up and rocked the foundations of life in America. They didn’t know they were doing so — they were trying to save their own lives, I think — but in the process they took it on the chin for everyone who followed. I know my own mother did.

  I will never do anything half so grand or important. I couldn’t tell this story any way except through my own eyes, but that doesn’t make me the star of the show. AsZippy was a bow to Mooreland, Indiana, this is a love letter, humbly conceived and even more modestly written, to my father, my brother, the sister who is my very breath of life, and most of all to the woman who stood up, brushed away the pork rind crumbs, and escaped by the skin of her teeth. It is a letter to all such women, wherever they may be.

  Mr. Antrobus:

  Well, how’s the whole crooked family?

  — THORNTONWILDER,

  The Skin of Our Teeth,ACTI

  The Test

  The couch in the den was the color the crayon people called Flesh even though it resembled no human or animal flesh on Planet Earth, and the couch fabric was nubbled in a pattern of diamonds. It was best to prevent the nubbles from coming into direct contact with one’s real Flesh, so there was usually a blanket or a towel or clothing spread out as a buffer. Also no one wanted to pick up the blanket, the towel, and the clothing and fold them. Or even pick them up. So it was a fine arrangement.

  She had a lamp, a small end table so covered with things — layer upon layer — that the stuff at the bottom was from a different decade than the stuff in the middle. She had a cardboard box in which she kept books from the bookmobile; her favorite afghan for emergency napping; a notebook and pen. There had been years with no telephone but mostly the telephone worked and was often near Mother’s head — often enough, in fact, that Dad referred to it as her Siamese twin. The television was only a few feet away, and there were always animals for company. Five steps in one direction was the kitchen; four steps in the other was the bathroom. In winter the den was the only room in the house with heat, so we all lived there. In summer it was so hot I feared spontaneous combustion, which Dr. Demento reported was happening to Canadian priests with regularity. I popped in and out of the den, I was a very busy person and my responsibilities were numerous which Mother understood. Dad came and went — he also had engagements far and wide and we had long since ceased asking what they were. A man had to protect his mysteries; it was one of the primary Liberties of Manhood in our home. There were many others. My older brother, Dan, was gone to his grown-up life; my sister, Melinda, was on her way, at seventeen.

  All my life there had been certain constants, facts so steady I assumed they were like trees or mountains, things you could trust to stay where you left them because they weremountains and yes the Bible says faith can move one but the Bible also says a whole lot of stuff that if you tried to make it true you’d end up in the Epileptic Village. My constants were the same as everyone else’s: a house with quite a few rooms and utilities that came and went. Church three times a week. Church so frequently and which I so much couldn’t get out of I considered ripping off my own fingernails in protest, or better yet someone else’s fingernails. My family. And no one as dependable as my mom, burrowed into the corner of that sprung sofa cushion, reading and eating crunchy foods, the television on, the telephone ringing. We’d never said a whole lot to each other, given that I was a citizen of the world and was generally on my way out the door. But she always smiled when I passed her, gave me a wave. And when I got home, there she was.

  Something had been on the rise with Mom for a few months. There were many tearful meetings of her prayer cell, and at least half a dozen thrown-down fleeces (bargains made with God) and phone calls and arrangements. One of her fleeces involved a television commercial of Abraham Lincoln in a classroom. He was standing at a podium saying if I was thinking of going back to college, did I know that I could test out of some required courses by signing up for the CLEP Test, which stood for College-Level Examination Program. This was all news to me. I heard Mom talk to her women at church about that commercial, and an agreement was reached: if she saw it on the following Friday, anytime before 6:00P.M., she would call the number on the screen.

  On that Friday, although I didn’t know why we were waiting for it or what it would mean if she called, I spent the whole afternoon nervously watching TV with Mom. Dad was gone, so it was just the two of us. Three o’clock came and went, and then four, and five, and Mom sank deeper and deeper into a heavy silence punctuated with heartbroken little sighs, because a fleece thrown down is an unbreakable contract. At 5:55 she got up and went into the kitchen and stood holding on to the sink, as if she might throw up. At 5:57, she bowed her head. At 5:58 she looked up; I thought she had come to a decision, or was constructing a new shelter made of resignation. At 5:59 I felt my own throat swell with empathy, and at 5:59 and 30 seconds, Abraham Lincoln walked across the classroom that would become my mother’s life, and when I looked up at her, she was staring at the television screen with her eyes wide and her mouth open and I knew that what I was witnessing was no less than a miracle.

  We had only one vehicle, Dad’s truck, and Dad didn’t plan to be home on the Saturday Mom needed to be in Muncie, thirty miles away, to register for the test. He wasn’t mean about it, but he wasn’t exactlyflexible, either.

  I had to be home by the time the streetlights came on in the evening, and that spring I spent more than one twilight tearing down the street toward home as if the Devil were on my case, trying to beat the specific light that shone on the corner of Charles and Broad. I had taken to spending all my time out of school away from home, because there were changes afoot that couldn’t be named or even described. Walking into my house felt like hitting water belly first; it looked like one thing, but it felt like glass. My dad still sat in his chair and smoked, watching Westerns and drinking whiskey, and my mom still read and talked on the phone and would scratch my back if I asked her. But there was a strange resistance in her, some stubbornness that made her unreachable, and the way Dad kept his jaw set was a fence around him. My older sister, Melinda, Queen of the Fair and all-around pinching machine, still lived at home but barely.

  So in the evenings I went to my friend Rose’s house, where all manner of wonder prevailed. For one thing, they had a mint-green kitchen, and they kept Velveeta cheese in their refrigerator, along with fresh milk from actual cows and sometimes Joyce skimmed the cream off the top and let us have some
. It was horrible, and an experience I had repeated many times. When Joyce baked a chicken she let me have the skin.

  “You can have some of the meat, you crazy kid,” she’d say.

  “No thanks.”

  Joyce made Autumn Soup, which was some very reliable form of soup with vegetables and hamburger in it, and Rose’s sister Maggie and I had to peel the potatoes, because Rose had some skin disease on her hands and peeling potatoes made them break out in a rash, which seemed like a convenient time for lunatic itching, but it worked. And Rose’s little brother Patrick would sit on a box forhours if you told him to wait there for the bus. He’d sit there till Joyce found him, anyway, and then she’d threaten to start smacking, and maybe at that point I’d have to go home, because Joyce was not above smacking — she was a Catholic — but I was a Quaker and smacking wasn’t part of our religion.

  But the most interesting thing Rose had was a persimmon tree, another Catholic delicacy. It grew between her house and the house that served as a parsonage for the North Christian Church, and sometimes it was the cause of feuding. Almost invariably after the persimmons got ripe a big windstorm came up and caused them to fly through the air and splatter on the parsonage like little balloons filled with orange paint. The North Christians were against it, and sometimes threatened William and Joyce with the Law. But William and Joyce just went merrily on their way, eating steaks, drinking cocktails, and smoking cigarettes.

  Just a glance at persimmons reveals them to be suspicious fruits and yet we ate them constantly. Joyce put them in jams and pies, she even made something with the word “pudding” in the title although of course it was not real pudding because it wasn’t chocolate and it hadn’t come from a box. I was too polite to point the truth out.

  When we weren’t eating persimmons we were finding other uses for them. One day that spring Rose and I were sitting under the persimmon tree just as it was blooming. Rose picked one of the blossoms off and held it on the tip of her finger. At the center was a seed and all around the edges were white petals. I looked at it.