She Got Up Off the Couch Page 14

  “So did Danny,” I said, remembering my brother’s struggles.

  “Yep,” Melinda said, reaching for a bowl. “We’re just defective.”

  “Oooh, now there’s something that interests me, being a detective. Wouldn’t I be good at that?”

  Melinda thought about it. “We could start our own agency,” she said, “I would be the brains and you could do all the gross stuff.”

  I sighed. She had just named my dream life.

  When Mom was registering for classes her first quarter at Ball State, the dean of the Honors College, Dr. Warren Vanderhill, took a look at her SAT scores and told her she should take the Humanities Sequence, a series of three classes over three quarters. You chose a professor and stayed with him or her for the whole year. Dr. Vanderhill recommended Dr. John Mood. “He’ll be perfect for you,” Dr. Vanderhill said, with a shine in his eye Mom didn’t quite understand.

  The first class Mom had with Dr. John Mood, on her second day at Ball State, she came home looking as if she had just spent the day being chased by a wild-eyed cow. It was evening time when she wandered in and I was sitting on the couch with my “homework” on my lap and on top of it the Superman coloring book I was steadily making my way through.

  “Hey,” I said, scooting down and turning my body just slightly, so she couldn’t see what I was doing. Not that she would have cared. I don’t believe Mom ever asked me one single time if I did my homework, and she sure wasn’t suggesting we toodle over to the Richmond Arboretum.

  Mom let her backpack fall to the floor, where the dogs began to sniff it; she dropped herself into her hollowed-out place in the corner of the couch. “Ohhh,” she said, sighing and closing her eyes. “Where’s your father?” she asked, without looking at me.

  “Gone.”

  “Did your sister feed you?”

  “Yes, listen, we’ve started this game where we see who can eat the rawest steak. She thaws them out and then puts them in a pan and flips them over. After about a minute she says,‘Think you can eat it like this?’ and I say,‘You bet I can,’ and I do, so she has to. That was last week. Tonight she barely cooked it at all, there was just some little brown streaks on the outside, she said to a pretend waiter who had pretend asked us how we wanted our meat prepared,‘Just make itsuffer a little. ’”

  “That’s nice.” Mom still hadn’t moved. Even her hands were limp. We both jumped when the phone rang, although I don’t know why, as it rang about 700 times a day.

  She said hello and then turned her body slightly away from me, as if she didn’t want me to hear what she had to say. However, it was indisputably the case that one of the reasons I would be a good detective was that I had incredible powers of both observation and hearing, but could pretend to be uninterested in my surroundings. Mostly Iwas uninterested in my surroundings, so I’d had lots of practice.

  “I did,” I heard her say, “I had my first class with him today. Carol, he said that ninety percent,” and here she lowered her voice even more, “of farm boys have their first sexual experience with an animal.”

  My ears lifted up on my head like little Martian antennae.What??? I knew some very rudimentary things about what my formerly pious mother was so blithely referring to as “sexual experience,” and they were not pretty. They were bizarre and wrong and no one actually did them. But adding the word “animal” opened a whole new can of worms.

  “I know!” Mom said, her face bright red. “An English class. Dr. Mood,” she said, opening her satchel to look for a notebook. “Yes, that’s his real name.”

  Mom had classes with Dr. Mood Tuesday through Thursday, and suddenly I couldn’t be anywhere else when she got home. I didn’t dare ask questions outright; I just hovered around and waited for her to start talking about him. Here were the things I had learned by either listening or hiding my blue tape recorder behind a pillow on the couch.

  1. Dr. Mood was the world’s great expert on someone called Raining Maria Rilkuh. This sounded to me like a real live Injun, although I doubted seriously that Tonto would write poetry, nor would a real Indian have a woman’s middle name. Curiously, Raining Rilkuh’s poems were all in German, and Dr. Mood could speak it and translate it, and had even translated a book of Raining’s poems calledRilkuh: Love and Other Difficulties. German Indians? I would have to ask Rose.

  2. He wore clothes of wild colors, including pants with flowers embroidered up the side. He wore jewelry, a large necklace of something my mom called Onk. With hissandals he wore electric-blue socks. This was unspeakably curious. He had long black hair and long fingernails, and he used said fingernails to tuck said hair behind his ears.

  3. Dr. Mood could have been a stand-in for the Devil himself. Mom showed me a picture of him that had been in the paper and I could only whistle and back away. In addition to his long hair he had a beard like a goat; he was thin and black-eyed, and it appeared he was leading a group of students into some rabble-rousing. Behind him there were students all much, much younger than Mother and when I asked Mom what Dr. Mood was doing she said he was reading poems out loud. They were by someone named Allen Ginsberg and who knew a crowd would turn up to hear poems. Probablyafter the reading there was mischief.

  4. Before he took up with Raining Rilkuh and became a professor, he had been an evangelical minister. He was anordained minister who had abandoned God for the shadow world of college. He was no longer even a little bit of a Christian, something I secretly loved in a person. I was always looking around for nonbelievers, just to see how they got by without being put in prison. For a while, my dream was to find an atheist midget and then light out for a ghost town in the Wild West with him, but when I mentioned this to Julie she said you didn’t really want to put a midget on a horse.

  5. Dr. Mood was not an actual medical doctor but Mom called him Dr. anyway.

  6.He never actually taught anything. He declaimed some things, and then he read aloud the naughty parts of books. I never once captured Mother on tape describing any of these naughty parts, or even what the books were, a failure as a detective, I admit.

  7. Dr. Mood rode a motorcycle to work and rather than park it, he simply drove it straight into the building where he taught his classes and parked it outside the classroom door.

  8. Each day he carried an empty tuna fish can into class with him, which he would gradually fill up with ashes and cigarette butts. Fortunately my mom was accustomed to living with my dad, so chain-smoking was fine with her.

  9. One day a young man asked Dr. Mood if the papers they turned in had to be in plastic folders. EvenI could have guessed the answer to that one. Dr. Mood was likeme, he was not the type to stomach such trivialities. He said, lighting a cigarette, “I don’t care if you turn it in on toilet paper, as long as it’s good.” My eyes lit up like Christmas when I heard this. Schoolwork on toilet paper — now there was a piece of brilliance if ever I’d heard one. The first paper Mom wrote for him she typed up in her normal way but she let me make a cover for it using paper towels. I wrote the title and drew a nature scene. When she got it back, she let me see what he’d written: “A.Close reading, great ideas. Cool flowers.”

  I went right on hating school as much as any vegetable left in vinegar, but Lord I loved college. I didn’t want the semesters to ever end. Such scandalous things happened there. The Bible was taught in amythology class; Mom was forced to read books by a group of people called the Existentialists, including an entire book about nothing but vomiting. She read poems byhomosexuals, and once that concept made its way into my brain a whole lot of things became clear to me about some people I knew whose names I wouldn’t mention even to Rose.

  Once in the car with Mom, when she’d forgotten something at the library and took me with her to find it, I was thiiiiis close to asking her was it the same forhomosexual farm boys as the others. Ninety percent? Closer to fifty? But I kept my mouth closed. If she knew half of what I’d overheard she’d have sent me, those dear evenings, into the living room to freeze to death
.

  Every day with Dr. Mood was a surprise, I gathered, and not only because of the naughty parts but because, as Mom put it, he had a friendly relationship with a variety of chemicals. A lot of professors were part-time chemists, it seemed, including one man who was consistently declared “a genius” but spent his evenings in working-class bars getting his teeth knocked out. Said genius’s teeth were missing the weekend he hosted a poet on campus named W. H. Auden. In fact, as I heard later, Genius managed to get Auden in a bar fight, too. I loved these men and wanted to go to college with Mom instead of elementary school with Rose but Mom would have no part of it. And that one time I’d been in the big library with her, a student had joined us in the elevator and called me a pygmy so it was probably for the best.

  It was at the end of her first semester with him that Dr. Mood shocked Mom hardest. He came to class with a handout, the first, last, and only time he would do something so traditional.

  It was an outline of the Book of Mark — interestingly enough, the only book of the Bible I either liked or trusted. The rest seemed like a bunch of hooey. He began with an outline of Healings, detailing the Exorcisms, Cleansings, and Restorations, citing chapter and verse for each. They added up, he believed, to a Restoration of the Reader.

  Part two was Bread Imagery, and Dr. Mood argued that citations of food (bread, fish, etc.) gradually build to present Jesus as the Bread of Life, preparing the way for the Last Supper.(Although he pointed out that the textual reference to the Last Supper was potentially “spurious,” a word that got in me and wouldn’t let go. I had no idea what it meant, but it seemed to turn Jesus into a cowboy and there was not one thing better on this earth than that.)

  The third section was Numbers in Mark: five sacred loaves of bread, four disciples called, four healings, etc. Dr. Mood knew every single place a number was mentioned in Mark and they seemed to add up to something. Well, they addedup — to twelve disciples, anddown, to one loaf of bread (Jesus). Every time I snuck this handout from Mom’s Bible I studied hard on the numbers and would have made better sense of it if I’d had even a nodding relationship with math.

  The last part was my favorite, because I thought only I had noticed it. Dr. Mood called it Secrecy. There was Implicit Secrecy and Explicit Secrecy, two words I had to actually look up in the dictionary. I hated dictionaries but this was worth it. Because all my life I’d been burning my butt up in church, three times a week sitting there in agony, and we’d read from Mark and I’d see it as if written in neon:Tell no one I was here. Now why, I wondered, was it right to say,Jesus said Blah and so that’s what we must do, andJesus said Whatever and so that’s what we must do, but we could just go ahead and ignore the fact that the real betrayal of him was by the multitudes who couldn’t keep their stupid mouths shut. Dr. Mood cited all the places Jesus asked, “Do you understand?” “Do you not understand?” “Do you not yet understand?” and “They did not understand,” and it seemed to me that there was something gigantic going on and it was near to me and also very far away.

  On the day Dr. Mood gave his first, last, and only handout, Mother sat through his lecture enthralled and enraged. When she got home she was still all nervous and indignant, the way she’d been when she discovered that down at the drugstore, on the newsstand, someone had placedPhilosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade. This at a time when the postmaster refused to deliver herTime magazine because he said it was Communist.

  That evening I scooched up as close as I could to her on the couch. She ignored me when the phone rang. I heard her say, “I went up to him in the hall before he got on his motorcycle and I shook my finger right in his face. I said, ‘I came here tolearn something, you have no idea what this is costing me, and all this semester you have grandstanded and entertained and all the while you couldreally teach. How dare you keep this from me, how dare you not teach me everything you could while you had the time?’ I was even shaking the handout in his face.”

  Carol must have asked what his answer was.

  Mom looked down at her lap, twisted the phone cord. “He stared at me for a good long minute and then said,‘Fat women always did turn me on.’”

  At the end of that year he disappeared. He took his rose pants, his Onk, his motorcycle and tuna can and headed west. There were lots of rumors, some believable, some not. The most persistent was that he had taken a job driving an ice cream truck around a town with Santa in the title. That made perfect sense to me. I could just imagine him, his black eyes, his Lucifer face, riding around and around to that sinister music. He understood more about Jesus than anyone I’d ever heard of, and he knew what I knew: that Jesus wasn’t the thin blond angel boy ofSuperstar, not like I used to think of him. He was an outlaw, he would rather die than give in. Jesus would have put the smack-down on the Richmond Arboretum, just like he did with the fig tree. John Mood, I thought, must have been the same in his way. Whatever the college world had asked of him, Dr. Mood had said no thanks, and he’d spread his arms and flown away. He changed my mother permanently, he changed me, and all he left behind was a book ofOther Difficulties and a single two-page outline, which Mom kept tucked in her Bible and which she and I both took out periodically and studied, like evidence.

  Fall

  At the end of the fourth-grade school year, my first ever boyfriend (from kindergarten), walked up to me in the hallway and asked, not cruelly but with genuine curiosity, “Do you evenown a different pair of pants?” I looked down and realized I’d been wearing the same blue polyester pants Mom Mary had given me for Christmas the entire school year. I didn’t know how to answer him. Maybe I had another pair of pants, but if I did I didn’t know where they were or what I’d do with them if I found them.

  There’d been some decline in the laundry area fromthat plateau since Mother started college, and as a family we hadn’t had a lot further to fall. I missed the days at the Laundromat in New Castle, which smelled of Tide and Downy and had fluffy balls of lint floating in the air. A woman worked there, a manager, I guess, who carried a big apron full of quarters and always looked like she’d heard a joke she didn’t dare repeat. Outside she smoked cigarette after cigarette with my dad when he went with us, but inside the air was linty and pure, and it was possible to climb in the rolling laundry baskets with the IV poles and create great trouble. Plus you could buy individual boxes of detergent and fabric softener, even bleach, and there was nothing that made me grind my teeth with pleasure more than a real thing shrunken down small. The first time my dad showed me a toothache kit from a box of equipment from the Korean War and I saw the tiny cotton balls (the size of very small ball bearings), I nearly swooned. “Let me hold one of those,” I said, almost mad at him. He gave it to me with a tiny pair of tweezers. I let it float in my palm a moment and then made him take it back. Miniaturization was a gift from God, no doubt about it, and there it was, right in a vending machine in the place we used to do our laundry in New Castle, Indiana.

  My sister had scrounged up a red polyester shirt for the next school year, and a pair of plaid pants that followed the basic law of my physical deformity. They were long enough, which meant the waist was gigantically too big. I wore them folded over and pinned, just at my belly button. The shirt, the plaid pants, a used pair of shoes. It was a typical year, except for my missing mother.

  Miss Slocum, our fifth-grade teacher, belonged to one of the many religions that gave women bun-head and made them wear dresses every day. She was pale and spoke through what appeared to be someone else’s nose. That year she read aloud to us every day, starting withWhere the Red Fern Grows, and I cried so hard at the end I had to go to the principal’s office and apologize. He was quite kind about it, given that I’d been in his office for far worse infractions on multiple occasions. Miss Slocum also made us write our own poems and read them aloud to the class, which was for me as torturous and exquisite as a miniature cotton ball. I worked and worked on my poem, which was called “If I Could,” and it was in four stanzas. The poem con
cerned what I would do if I could be four different things — a bird, a lion, an antelope, or a cloud. I wasn’t dreamy about it; I was quite, quite practical. I practiced reading it aloud many times, and when the day came to perform it I finally got something right and Miss Slocum liked it and gave me an A, perhaps the only A I ever got in thirteen years of public school. Other kids read their poems and some were I’m sorry just obviously stupid, and then a boy most of the girls had a crush on, a tall jock-ish boy called Tommy, stood up and read aloud a John Denver song, “The Eagle and the Hawk.” My chest flushed red and then my face. I turned and looked at Rose, but she’d yet to catch up to the sublimity of John Denver, although in time I would force enough of him on her that she would beg for mercy and demand we return to Paul Simon. Tommy read the whole thing, two perfect stanzas, no chorus, no bridge. It was John at his finest, I thought.“I am the Hawk and there’s blood on my feathers.” Miss Slocum sat perfectly gullible and smiling, because of course the Nazarenes or whoever would not have been studying on John Denver so she just thought Tommy was a genius.

  I made fists and popped my jaw muscles like my brother always did and waited for the bell to ring. We were barely out the door to the playground when I turned to Julie and said, spitting mad, “He stole that poem, he didn’t write it. He stole it from John Denver, it’s one of John’s best songs and I can stand right here and tell you the whole thing, every word. And I’ll tell you what that makes Mr. Basketball, Julie Ann, it makes him a common thief and a liar.”

  Julie kept walking.

  “I’m going over there, right up to his face, and tell him I know what he did even if no one else does. And then I’m going to Miss Slocum and Mr. Davis and I’m going to tell them what he did, too, because I don’t know exactlywhat kind of crime this is, but it is A. Crime. For. Certain.”

  Julie walked.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?”