She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “You need to pick them up and throw them away.”

  She looked around the room until she spotted my trash can. It was overflowing, so she just dumped it on the floor, then walked over to me and began picking up the mice.

  “Count them, so I know you get every one.”

  “Here’s one,” she began. “I’m going to get these ones around your head first, so you can turn it. Here’s two and three.”

  And in this way she removed all twenty-seven, picking them up by their phantom tails, the part of a mouse that unnerved me the most. When she was done she bent over and kissed me on the head and told me to go back to sleep.

  “What are you going to do with them?” I asked, trying not to look right at the trash can.

  “What do you want me to do with them?”

  “I want you to make them gone.”

  She nodded. When I got up in the morning, they were gone.

  By the following Christmas, Rose’s face had healed perfectly from her encounter with the rogue and murderous Saint Bernard, and Maggie just had a little zigzaggy scar across her temple. I had completely forgotten about poison sumac, which left no trace of its devastation on my body.

  I spent Christmas night with Rose and Maggie, and around midnight we were awakened by a crash and a strange glow. We ran over to the window and saw that right across the alley, directly across from where we stood, the abandoned house was on fire, and in a serious way. It was a beautiful fire, raging but not spreading, and the three of us stood there a long time in our nightgowns, not even thinking about getting Rose’s parents or calling the volunteer fire department. It burned and burned. I knew that there had probably been many rats and mice living in that house, given how cold it was outside. I remembered a time when the death of them would have caused me pain, when I would have considered their suffering, but I couldn’t feel it anymore. All I felt was that warm shot of relief, the kind that comes with breathing when you’ve held your breath too long, as the windows of the kitchen blew out and, somewhere in the distance, a siren began to wail.

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

  1.“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” by Paul Simon. You need only listen to this song once to realize it is the greatest work of genius since“Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler),” by the Playmates. Also, it provides a person with the bonus of rewriting the chorus 700 times a day. For instance, a girl might say, “I’m ridin’ my bike, Mike,” or “I’m goin’ to my sister’s, mister.” She could also string together many such sentences, as in, “I’m feelin’ sad, Dad. Maybe you could get me some candy, Randy. Don’t be such a slob, Bob, just listen to me.” If the Dad ever actually held the record in his hands in a threatening way, he could be told that the emergency backup Paul Simon song was“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” which for some reason was even more objectionable.

  2.“Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler),” by the Playmates. A morality tale about a little car, a Cadillac, and a transmission problem. This song brilliantly gains momentum, and is sung faster and faster right up to the hysterical ending. Could be sung in the truck so frantically the father in question would sometimes have to stick his head out his open window while praying aloud.

  3.“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” by Elton John. I understood only one line of this song: “And butterflies are free to fly, fly away.” The rest was completely lost on me. I assumed the British did not speak English, which was a puzzle as they were sometimes referred to as the English. Not understanding the lyrics required me to listen to the song hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, filling in with nonsense words, which my sister said made me look oxygen deprived and sad.

  4.“Somewhere They Can’t Find Me,” by Simon & Garfunkel. In addition to“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” this was probably my most obvious theme song. It could have been written for me. The singer has done something terrible and now his only option is to sneak away: “Before they come to get me I’ll be gone, somewhere they can’t find me.” Oh indeed. How very very true.

  5.“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” by the Osmonds, featuring Donny Osmond. A lie, as anyone who knew my brother could attest. But if it was sung by Donny Osmond I could try to believe. I wanted to believe. This was a favorite to play not at top volume in my bedroom, but downstairs on the stereo that was shaped, improbably, like a Colonial desk. I liked to sing along with Donny (we had the same voice) while simultaneously pretending to draft a version of the Bill of Rights, using a fake quill pen. (In truth, a turkey feather.) This was a combination of activities my father found interesting, blasphemous, and wrong.

  6.“Along Comes Mary,” by the Association. A wordy song. A wordy, psychedelic song, the meaning of which has never been determined by humans. Tailor-made for me. From the beginning, the song is just one long puzzle. “Every time I think that I’m the only one who’s lonely someone calls on me.” Who? (Mary, my sister would explain, through clenched teeth. Yes, but Mary who?) What follows is so unusual it doesn’t bear repeating, although I most assuredly could.

  7.“I Started a Joke,” by the Bee Gees. Again, a world-class head-scratcher. He started a joke, and it started the whole world crying. I sensed astonishing depth in the Bee Gees’ lyrics, and also were they all boys? Including the one with the Bugs Bunny teeth? Was she truly never funny and that’s why the world wept? I knew people like that. Later in the song one of them, a Bee or a Gee, begins to cry and that gets the whole world laughing, so everything turns out fine in the end. (An additional work of genius is “The Lights Went Out in Massachusetts.” Massachusetts: A state? A prison? Dad was silent on the issue.)

  8.“Swamp Girl,” by Frankie Laine. One of the great pieces of poetry in the civilized world, and flat-out terrifying. Frankie Laine is sick, or tired, or both, and a bad woman (the kind with narrow eyes, I’m guessing) is calling him from the yuck of a swamp where she lives. “Where the water’s black as the Devil’s track — that’s where my Swamp Girl dwells.” How simple it was to secretly change the lyric to “where the water’s black as the Devil’s crack,” never ever letting anyone hear me do it because this is a dead serious song and also one doesn’t rhyme lightly about the Devil. Particularly where there’s a Swamp Girl involved, her hair floating on the water. Frankie Laine was famous for other songs about rawhide or jerky or wagon trains, something like that, and all along his masterpiece was known only to me and my family. A shame.

  9.“The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” by Vicki Lawrence. Woe to the person who believed Vicki Lawrence was merely Carol Burnett’s separated-at-birth twin and game sidekick! No! She also performed this stunner, a song about…wait. Bad things in a bad place. The night “they” hung an innocent man, and not trusting your soul to some hmmm hmmm something lawyer. Wherever all this happened, someplace in Georgia, was about as ugly as it gets. People had blood all over them and essentially no one was to be trusted, which made for a chorus I could singfor days.

  10.The Best of Ed Ames, by Ed Ames. A member of the Ames brothers, Ed also played Daniel Boone’s faithful Indian companion on television. This was because, I was quite certain, he was a real live Indian. My mother insisted he was Lebanese, whatever that meant, as if a Lebanese would look that good in Indian clothes and as if his name wasn’t Ames, as in “aims a bow and arrow like a real live Indian.” In truth, Ed Ames was more shockingly handsome than any man I’d loved before him, including Glen Campbell and my brother’s friend Joe Overton. Ed was in a different category of attractive, I was discovering. He also had a voice that defied description; it was big and deep and pure, all those things, but it was also sad in some songs — heartbroken — and angry in others. He sang the way men would talk about things if they ever talked about things.The Best of was primarily show tunes and new songs that were flat philosophical, like “Windmills of Your Mind” and “Who Will Answer? (Aleluya No. 1).” What was this about? Who put a
“No.” in a song title? It was the unmatched wonder of Ed Ames to combine such groundbreaking effects with songs that moved my mother to tears, and made me imagine life on the frontier, where buckskin stayed soclean. I was willing to share the record with my mom, as a matter of fact, right up until she heard me repeating a phrase from “Who Will Answer” — “in our stars or in ourselves” — and she needlessly told me that Shakespeare wrote those words. I waved her off and from that point on Ed stayed in my bedroom where he belonged.

  A Short List of Records That Vanished from My Collection

  “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,”by Paul Simon

  “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,”ditto

  “Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler),”by the Playmates

  “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,”by Elton John, also“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” probably for good measure

  All Simon & Garfunkel records

  The Association’s Greatest Hits,but it just went to my sister’s house because I’d stolen it from her earlier and she’d stolen it back

  Ditto with all the Bee Gees records

  “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,”by Vicki Lawrence, met a particularly ghastly fate in our trash barrel. I eventually found only the charred label.

  I was left with Frankie Laine and Ed Ames, who were hidden in my closet. Life might have taken a vicious turn here, but my brother-in-law Rick gave me his old eight-track tape player, along with two John Denver tapes. John Denver became the only good-hearted naturalist my father ever threatened with a lynching.

  Bull

  I didn’t know why everyone was always going on so about shoes shoes shoes — what was the point when we had been given perfectly adequate feet for getting around on? Same with hairbrushes and toothbrushes and washcloths. Absolutely no use. But I reached the conclusion that I’d lost a fight and was going to keep on losing it, so I might as well decide on what kind of meanness was going to get put on my feet. I chose the dignified saddle oxford, white and black with the liver-colored sole. I don’t know the reason for this choice, particularly as the soles were slick as snot and I could often be found sailing down the highly waxed stairs of my elementary school, clinging to the handrail and hoping for something other than another head injury upon landing.

  I have no memory of shopping for the saddle oxfords; they simply appeared year after year, and never new. They had come from some other person’s feet, the soles worn down to a glassy smoothness. My mom would hand them over and I’d utter minor addresses to the infant Jesus who as far as I could tell had done nothing so far but forsake me, and then I’d put the blasted things on.

  They were supposed to be saved for school and generally I did that, because if I wasn’t in school and I wasn’t in church I had no need for footwear anyway, but on one great Saturday late in the summer Debbie Newman was leaving the Marathon station and she said grab some shoes and hop in and come on home with me and those were the shoes I grabbed. I also pulled a pair of white bobby socks out of the laundry pile in my parents’ bedroom, a pile in a shape I later recognized inClose Encounters of the Third Kind. If aliens had come to Mooreland they would have landed on that laundry mountain, and what a shock for them. The socks didn’t match and they weren’t the same shade of “white,” but they were generally shaped the same and who cared anyway.

  The Newmans always had a nice car, a big boaty silver car with maroon interior, and even though their cars were nice and newer than anything we drove they still smelled flat like the barnyard and sometimes bits of straw waggled in the air vents. In fact, corn dust and fertilizer and manure covered the dashboard and the windows, and once in a while there’d be a trace of anhydrous that I found pleasing. Not as delicious as leaded gasoline, but close. I wasn’t singing on the ride out to the Newmans’, or even making any sound, as my talking drove Debbie to distraction and she would often have to tell me so in ways that were directly to the point. Julie was in the backseat beside me in her jeans and cowboy boots and a white T-shirt with a big red Viking head on it. That was the thing about Julie; she always looked exactly right for whatever she was doing, whereas I always looked like I’d walked through the wrong door into a story that had nothing to do with me. I believe I was wearing shorts with my unmatched bobby socks and used saddle oxfords, and some inappropriate upper-wear, like a discarded short-sleeved dress shirt belonging to my father.

  “What are we gonna do today?” I asked Julie.

  She shrugged. That could mean a lot of things. It could mean she had 62,000 chores and I was going to help with every one. It could mean we were going to ride horses or else take her new moped out around the countryside. It could mean her bedroom needed painting and if I didn’t work fast enough she’d give the raised middle-finger punch on the upper arm that left a bruise for days. Or her shrug could mean nothing. It could mean she didn’t know and since we were only going to the best place on the Earth, where every single minute of every day was different and filled with promise, what the heck difference did it make what we were gonna do.

  We looked at some kittens that got born in the pole barn. They were way little and their eyes were still glued shut. The mama cat hovered around hissing at us — she was feral and would never tame. We shot a little pool on the bumper pool table in the dining room and Julie beat me so hard so many times I put my stick down and told her she was cheating. She ignored this. Julie never cheated. We went out to ride the good horse, Angel, but she had a cut on her foreleg and Big Dave said no. We thought about sneaking off on Mingo, the horse in league with the Devil, but decided against it. Pretty soon we were climbing over the barbed-wire fence and out into the rolling land across the road that wasn’t farmable, wasn’t quite grazable except up by the road. It wasn’t worth much but beauty. There was a steep walk down to a stream, and on horseback the horses would have to walk with small, careful steps as we leaned completely back, almost lying down to accommodate the angle. There was maybe thirty acres over there — the grazing land for some cows, the valley and stream, and the rise up to a stretch of woods where a few times we’d seen a great horned owl.

  We rode that land all summer, me behind Julie on Angel’s wide back. We rode without speaking. I often got thwacked by branches that missed Julie altogether. Julie could set Angel up to a canter that seemed to work fine for Julie but shook all my internal organs loose until I was googly-eyed and begging for mercy, but not very loudly as my lungs had collapsed. Only a month before our current stroll we’d taken Angel around on a slow walk, leading her to the old pump at the edge of the field. We meant to pump water for her, but instead we found a dead cat there. She was a black and gray tabby cat, as pretty as could be, lying on her side with her one green eye staring at the sky. Angel stopped. Julie and I froze. I said, “Is this one of our cats?” Julie said, “Nope. But she could have been.” And Angel wouldn’t drink from the pump so we rode on.

  Today we were just on our own feet and it was hot outside. We passed the cows, stopped to look at some calves, then headed down toward the creek. We knelt at the edge, looking for crawdaddies or snakes or anything really, but it was hot enough outside that all living creatures had departed for shadier places. We crossed the creek on rocks, a leap to the left, the left, the right, the opposite bank, and climbed the hill up toward the stretch of forest. We weren’t saying much, weren’t heading anywhere directly, when both of us heard the same noise and froze.

  “What was that?” I said, looking around.

  “Shhhh.”

  The sound came again and it turned out to be two sounds — a small, lowing cry from one direction, and a deep, bass-note exhalation through what sounded like bovine nostrils. On one side of us, Julie figured out, was a calf, maybe only a day or two old, and on the other was the mama. Sure enough, here came the mama cow pawing at the ground and moving with a swift assurance that cows are typically not permitted.

  “Get up that tree!” Julie said, not quite yelling as that wasn’t her way.

 
; I ran behind her to a gnarled old something, I never bothered finding out the names of trees as what difference did it make, and watched her take the trunk in a single gesture. I don’t know how she did such things; it wasn’t as if she had tentacles or suction cups, she was just a red-haired human girl but nothing had anyforce over her. She was up the tree and out on a fat horizontal branch while I was still holding on to two little branches, my butt out in the air where the cow could eat it, my saddle oxfords sliding down the trunk like they’d been dipped in baby oil.

  “Ummm,” I said, pulling myself up, slipping down.

  “Good Lord,” Julie said, laying herself flat down on the branch and reaching for my hands. She somehow managed to pull me up beside her just as the cow, which I could now see was the size of a mobile home, hit the tree trunk with her flank — she was that mad. Plus her eyes were rolling around in the way that gave rise to the term “Wild-eyed Cow,” a look my dad sometimes got.

  “That is abull, ” I said.

  “Psshh.”

  “I’m telling you that is no cow, Julie Newman.” Whatever it was continued to stare at us and snort out great blasts of fury through its nose, while the baby continued bleating away somewhere beyond the tree line.

  “You saw the bull behind the fence with your own eyes, Dumb.” Julie scanned the area behind us, looking for the baby.

  “A fine thing, letting a bull just run around loose like this, fixing to kill some children.”

  “Hush up.”

  Hours passed. Oh, hours and hours. The bull stared at us and chuffed and pawed at the ground and made a terrible sad sound about his baby, but wouldn’t move. Then the baby would cry out and the whole thing was nearly tragic.