She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  My breathing was skittery and my right leg shook. I had thought at first it had been a cow, but it wasn’t, and it wasn’t a horse or a stag. I stared at the fields, replaying the image. I knew exactly what I’d seen. I turned around and headed home.

  Dad was waiting on the front porch, his arms crossed, a cigarette burning near his chest. “I’d suggest you get off that bicycle,” he said, full of menace.

  “Now, listen,” I began.

  “No, you listen. If I tell you you’re not riding your bike of a morning because we’re canning tomatoes, what does that mean?”

  “I have to tell —”

  “WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”

  I leaned my bike against a tree and walked up into the yard. “It means I can’t ride my bike.”

  “Correct. And why can’t you?” He never took his eyes off me, which made me have to keep looking down at the scrubby yard.

  “Because you said so.”

  “Get in the house and help your mother.” He drew a last time on his Lucky, flipped it nearly halfway across the street.

  I walked inside, letting the screen door slam. The inside of the house was already so hot I could feel my lungs shriveling up like prunes.Some people, who were more civilized than my dad, built a little canning shedoutside, so they could do it in theopen air, rather than in an old kitchen with exactly one window that could be raised exactly three inches.

  I opened the screen door again and stuck my head out, knowing I was risking life and limb by disobeying him twice. “That’s just fine then, I won’t tell you how I got halfway to the crossroads and a MOOSE ran across the road in front of me, I won’t bother telling you about that.” I quick pulled my head back in and closed the door, then ran into the kitchen where Mom was in her apron boiling tomatoes, her hair undone and frizzed around her face. She, of course, had never known I’d been gone. “Good morning, sweetheart,” she said, with the vaguest of glances.

  I held one side of the pot as we poured the tomatoes into the big colander. Ball jars were lined up on a towel beside us, as if we were in a science lab. Oh, I was suffering all right. Dad walked in, cool as a bread-and-butter pickle. He looked at the tomatoes on the stove, the bushels on the floor. He crossed his left arm over his chest, studied the nails on his right hand.

  “A moose, you say.” He didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at him.

  “That’s what I said. A moose. Ran right across from just past the Thornburgs’, across the road and into a tree clump.”

  “Hasn’t been a moose seen in these parts in” — Dad thought about it a moment — “ever. As far as I can tell.”

  I dropped my oven mitt and put my hands on my hip. “Do you think I don’t know that? I know we don’t have mooses. That’s the whole point, we don’t have mooses and yet I sure as heck-fire saw one.”

  “Don’t yell,” Mom said, handing my mitt back to me.

  “A moose,” Dad said, his head tilted to the left in a way I particularly didn’t like.

  “That’s RIGHT.A MOOSE. Run across the ROAD.”

  Dad nodded as if it all made sense to him. He walked into the den, which was separated from the kitchen by a “breakfast bar” at which no breakfast was ever eaten, and picked up the green telephone. He paused a moment, checking for a number in the back of the thin phone book, then dialed.

  “Hello,” I heard him say, in his molasses voice. “Is this WCTW? This is Bob Jarvis calling from Mooreland, Indiana. I’m fine, thank you. I’m just wondering if you or your listeners have gotten any calls about a moose running wild out near the Messick Road?” His lips moved around squirrelly the way they did when he was trying to keep a poker face against laughing. “Oh no, I’m quite serious. My daughter here —” He put his hand over the phone and asked, “Do you want me to tell them your name?”

  “No, I do not want you to tell them my name! Hang up from that radio station!”

  “My daughter,” he continued, “was out riding her bike early this morning when she wasn’t supposed to, and a moose just crashed across the road right in front of her.” He listened a moment. “Nope, not a deer. Not a cow. She says it was a moose and she’s sticking to it.” He listened, nodded. “You do that. You put the word out and see if you get any calls. I sure appreciate it.”

  He hung up, strolled into the kitchen with his victory walk. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  I was so mad I slipped on the rubber gloves and took up the worst of the tomato jobs: squeezing the boiling blobs out of their skins. I was none too gentle, either. I slammed around a little while, then said, “You could have at least asked them to play ‘One Tin Soldier.’ If you were gonna make a gigantic fuss you could have at least requested my favorite song.”

  Mom and Dad worked beside each other silently. She filled the jars; he sealed them, then wrote the date on the brass lids with a permanent marker. His beautiful handwriting. We’d dated the butcher paper on the side of beef, too, before we put it in the chest freezer. We thought we were doing it for one reason, but it turned out we were doing it for another. Those are the sorts of things you only know later, of course. No one called about the moose. No one else ever saw it.

  Antrobus:

  What? Oh, that’s the storm signal. One of those black disks means bad weather; two means storm; three means hurricane; and four means the end of the world.

  As they watch it a second black disk rolls into place.

  Mrs. Antrobus:

  Goodness! I’m going this very minute to buy you all some raincoats.

  Gladys:

  Putting her cheek against her father’s shoulder.

  Mama, don’t go yet. I like sitting this way. And the ocean coming in and coming in. Papa, don’t you like it?

  — THORNTONWILDER,The Skin of Our Teeth,ACTII

  Valediction

  For her first day at college my mom wore a voluminous purple shirt with black poodles dancing about, made of polyester, and black polyester pants with a forgiving elastic waistline. She had made the poodle suit herself. She also wore Indian moccasins, because they were the only shoes she had that still fit.

  By the time she came home that first day I was hanging around on the front porch, sometimes making the porch swing smack against the house, sometimes spinning around and around in the yard until I fell down. I checked for earthworms but it was a dry September day. I hopped up and down on one foot, chipped some paint off a porch post, tried to get my old imaginary friends, Picky and Bogey, who lived in the house siding, to talk to me again. But they were long gone and I could just imagine what sort of idiot I looked like, standing there with my nose pressed against the gritty vinyl.

  Mom drove up in Danny’s car, parking it back a ways, leaving room directly in front of the house, the place with the big hole always filled with water, for Dad. She made her way out of the car with unusual weariness, pausing periodically to look around as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was. I ignored her, some. I studied her alittle, but not so she could tell.

  She trudged up the sidewalk and stairs, her worn Army surplus backpack heavy on her shoulders. “Hello,” she said to me, almost as an afterthought.

  “Hey,” I said, studying Saffer’s store.

  As soon as the screen door closed behind her I opened it sneaky and slipped in. Mom headed directly for the den, where she dropped her backpack in a pile of knitting and flopped down on the couch. She sat staring forward, not blinking or speaking.

  I dove onto the other couch, arms out like Superman. I landed hard, with a whoomph, and felt a shiver of worry that perhaps my most recent long-lost hamster, Merle, was still somewhere in the sofa where he’d disappeared a few weeks ago. Each day I stuffed crackers or popcorn down between the cushions, just in case, but he’d yet to make an appearance. He was a bit stupid really, as hamsters go. He’d been given to me by a girl down the street who didn’t like rodents, and the very first time I took him out of his cage he sank his gigantic curved teeth into my thumb
so hard I saw spots. Then I got so mad I grabbed him by the throat to try to make him let go, and his little beady eyes popped out some and the top teeth came free but the ones at the bottom were like the size of elephant tusks and I had to actually pull them out of my own thumb flesh, which was something I tried not to remember when falling asleep at night. I dropped him, naturally, and he skittered down between the couch cushions, and even though I took the thing apart, wearing thick leather gloves, he was never seen again. Dad told me later that once when he was napping on that very sofa, he had felt ascritch scritch scritch against his blue jeans. He ignored it. He felt it again: little tiny fingernails frantically scratchingtickatickaticka against his butt, and consciousness swept over him and he was first horizontal and then he was vertical and standing in another room.

  Mom still had not moved or spoken, so I broke the silence.

  “Well?” I said, throwing my arms out at her in frustration.

  “Well?” She asked, looking at me.

  “Well, didja LEARN anything today?”

  She looked back at the blank spot on the wall, considered it a moment. “I don’t know. Ask me later.”

  This was no good. I could see what was happening, so I went upstairs and got my Scooby-Doo coloring book and Ray Bradbury’sTwice 22, a book I’d read so many times it should have been calledTwelve 22, and came and sat down at the end of Mom’s couch, very casual-like, as if she and I just happened to be sitting in the same place even though it was still light outside and I had oh plenty to be doing. There was a hill, for instance, over by the railroad tracks that someone had seen fit to mow for the first time in my life and it was wicked steep for Mooreland. All things being equal. For weeks I’d been riding my bike down it with no hands, causing the bike to shake and very often spin out of control in the soft dirt at the bottom. It was heaven.

  Fine, though, fine, I’d just sit in the dim clammy den with Mom in her poodle suit until she picked up the phone and called someone, and then I’d color so quietly she’d forget I was there and pretty soon I’d know what this was all about, this thing she was doing called college.

  Soon enough I heard her dialing the green telephone. She was calling Carol, which was good, because she’d tell Carol everything.

  Her first class of the day had been American Literature 240, a survey class, which meant nothing to me as I had seen surveyors a thousand times and the thought of them with their instruments trained on a big fat anthology made about as much sense as a house made of hair. Mom sat in the back of the classroom, embarrassed to be among the thin, lovely nineteen-year-olds who rightly deserved to be there. The Professor came in exactly on the hour. He wore a blue suit, a dark tie, and a watch on a chain, which he took out of his pocket and placed on the podium in front of him. There was a decided tremor among the students as he introduced himself: Dr. Satterwhite. He explained that he would not be taking attendance, as there was no need to familiarize himself with people who would, in a matter of days, simply be dropping the class out of fear and laziness anyway. He said, “At least half of you will vanish during drop/add,” a term Mom wrote down in her spiral notebook. Drop/add. Like the instructions in a recipe.

  Dr. Satterwhite, according to Mom, looked either presidential or like a member of the John Birch Society. I didn’t know what the John Birch Society was, but there was a hand-painted sign not so far out in the boondocks past Mount Summit that advertised the club with the message GET U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.! He looked like one of those, but wasn’t.

  He launched into a lecture without benefit of a book or a note. He lectured for exactly forty-five minutes, during which time Mom took frantic notes in her precise, feminine handwriting. He then led them through the most terrifying syllabus (not the sort of vehicle my sister would put me in, apparently, but a schedule of reading) Mom could imagine. Many students folded it, preparing to leave it in the trash can as they made their way to drop/add. At the end of the hour Dr. Satterwhite snapped his watch closed and asked, “In valediction of today’s lesson, does anyone have anything to add?”

  No one spoke. “Carol,” Mom said into the phone, both laughing and beginning to cry, “I burst into tears.”

  When the other students had fled the room he asked Mom in his brisk, military tone, “Madam, may I ask what’s the matter with you?”

  Mom said, “I live in Mooreland, and I’ve never heard anyone say ‘in valediction’ of anything before. I think you’re wonderful!”

  Dr. Satterwhite flushed, cleared his throat, and left the room abruptly.

  Mom called Mom Mary and told her about her next adventure, a psychology class that was held in a big room with 250 students. Mom didn’t like it, because the textbook had been expensive and one of the studies they read about described how psychologists had spent $90,000 trying to determine whether babies preferred to be rocked back and forth or side to side. Mom Mary said something and my mom laughed her big laugh, leaning her head back against the couch. When she hung up I said, “What did Mom Mary have to say?”

  “She said” — Mom prepared for her perfect imitation of my grandmother — “‘Laws, I coulda told them that for fifteen dollars. Everbody knows it ain’t natural to rock side to side; front to back is the way rockers is built.’”

  I nodded. Mom Mary may have only gotten through the third grade, but you couldn’t put much past her.

  Mom also had a class that day with Dr. Reiss, a thin woman who wore a watch too big for her so it spun around on her wrist, making her look even smaller. Dr. Reiss taught Speech 210, and her Ph.D. was in Interpersonal Communications, a phrase that set my teeth on edge but I didn’t say so. I could tell from the way Mom talked to Jodelle from church that Speech was maybe the place she was really going to shine, even though shining was all she’d done so far. She mentioned other classes she might take, like After Dinner Speaking, which was not something done very often in our house so it was hard to picture. I could have gotten an A+ in After Dinner Television Watching, but of course I wasn’t the college student.

  Mom told Jodelle a little about Dr. Satterwhite, and as she spoke she got out the dreaded syllabus. “Our first assignment,” Mom said, “is to write a paper onOf Plymouth Plantation, and listen to this: he said it has to be coherent and brilliant andperfect. ” Mom’s eyes filled with tears again. It was possible that she was going to cry all through her years of higher education.

  Mom wrote her paper first in longhand, then typed it on the old Smith Corona on which she’d written her scary stories, including “Away Game,” a story that bothered me so much I knew I would never recover from it. When she got the paper back, Dr. Satterwhite had written, “Concise, well-written, you type splendidly. A.”

  Dad came in late, the evening of Mom’s first day of school. Mom was surrounded by books and sillybuses, her glasses a little crooked. I was watching television and PeeDink was dozing on my chest, drooling. I heard Dad take off his holster, which made enormous leather noises, and hang it on the back of one of the chairs in the living room. He ran a small comb through his hair. He took his cigarettes and lighter out of his pocket and walked through the curtain that divided the two rooms.

  “Zip,” he said, sitting down in his brown chair, pulling his purple ashtray onto the arm.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  “Delonda,” he said, staring straight at the television.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, turning the page of a handout. “How was your day?”

  “Just fine.” Dad flicked the wheel of his lighter, lit his Lucky Strike, snapped the lighter closed.

  In the Mood

  Oh I hated school, it wasmean to make me go, my fingers got all crampy around a pencil and my sister said I had the handwriting of a psycho murderer. I didn’t understand one thing about math, not one, or science either; Go ahead! I would say to my teachers. Make me draw and color another cell! You might as well make me draw and color a picture of your dead aunt Ethel for all it means to me! And then theleaf collections, everybody has to have a le
af collection, it’s so very very important to collect leaves for some reason, and if I’m not studying leaves why not make me write over and over that the primary export of Gambia is the cocoa bean or whatever, becausethat matters.

  We would get to school, on the days my dad made me go to school, and there would be Rose with every single thing perfectly done, including her leaf collection (for which she had to make a trip to the Richmond Arboretum) and her math and spelling and little stories and cells — she never got one single thing wrong nor did she ever skip anything and she wasleft-handed. It was an epic puzzle to me. I could barely make it through the day, I felt like I was being poked with hot sticks, I felt like there were spiders crawling in my clothes. On many an occasion I had to sit on my hands to keep from jumping up and screaming like a hyena. Why was it like this, I would say to Melinda, why?

  “Rose is much smarter than you, for one thing,” she answered, stirring Cream of Wheat in a little pan on her stove.

  “Well, that’s for sure. Rose is smarter than anyone except for Ronnie Lewis.” Our class always had the Super Smart Girl category as separate from the Super Smart Boy category. “But how does sheget through the day ?”

  “She’s probably interested in school. There’s a concept.”

  I crossed my arms, kicked the chair legs. “I’m not interested. Ihate it.”

  “I know, so did I.”