She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Are you gonna go with me in case he gets mean?”

  Julie stopped, shoved me slightly. “Let it go, Jarvis. Just stop talking.”

  I stomped over mad as a hen and played tetherball with her even though I should have made her play with a boy named Jeff who was short and tough. Instead Julie beat the crap out of me nine times in a row which I think she thought would make me forget about Tommy but it didn’t. I didn’t say anything to him or to Miss Slocum, but that evening I rode my bike down to Rose’s and while we listened to Dr. Demento on the radio I told her what Tommy had done and Rose got a look on her face like she’d just stepped in something foul. “What a pig,” she said, and all that evening, of my two best friends, I loved her most of all.

  It was autumn and I’d finally grown into a sweatshirt my sister had passed down to me; it was blue, with our school’s name and logo, the Viking head in profile, in red. I loved that sweatshirt and thanked the elements for every day that was cold enough to wear it. In addition there was the roller-skates craze. I think it began with a pretty, new girl called Christina, who lived behind Rose and could sign her name in the shape of a swan. She was an exotically colored person and mysterious. Once she had skates we all had to have them. Mine arrived in much the same way I got my saddle oxfords: I don’t know how. The skates were likewise used — bunged up on the plastic wheels and gray at the top and on the sides of the white boots.

  Rose and I took to practicing not on the toothy, dangerous sidewalks, but on the paved parking lot next to the North Christian Church. We skated forward and back, forward and back, nothing too fancy. I wanted to skate faster, but there wasn’t a single hill in Mooreland that wasn’t covered with either gravel or railroad tracks, so I made do with the new church asphalt.

  Christina started showing up, and Dana, and even Julie got in on the skate business. Pretty soon she and Dana were better than everyone else, to the point they probably should have just moved out of Mooreland and joined the Olympics. It was Dana who had the idea to form a whip, with me at the front because I was the tallest, pulling the others behind me. By this time the other girls were wearing light jackets, and Rose hung on to my sweatshirt, Christina to Rose’s corduroy jacket, then Julie, with Dana at the rear. We started out and the people at the back whipped back and forth and it was really quite hysterical until some force of either momentum or karma caused a domino at the back to fall, and that girl fell on the next, and she on the next, one two three four five girls. I fell forward and tried to catch myself with my arms out straight and my wrists curved outward and in turn each girl fell on top of me.

  There was a grindingpop, as if a tooth had been extracted from the gum of a giant. Everyone was on top of me and then gradually clambering off, laughing, and I couldn’t move at all, but somehow I’d made it to my back. There was the sky. None of this was like me. It was veryun like me to lie so perfectly still. It was very unlike Julie to freeze as she did, looking down at me, or for Rose to run off saying, I’m getting my mom. I turned my head and looked at my right arm and what I saw was my shoulder touching the ground and the backs of my fingers touching the ground and everything else like a horseshoe pointing toward the asphalt. My arm was in a heap. Myright arm, which was for all intents and purposes my only arm. Without it I would have to become Catholic and take lessons in Being Good from Rose. I looked back up at the sky and couldn’t think. Rose said, “There’s my mom” as her station wagon drove up beside me, and two things happened at once: I thought,Please don’t touch me, and just as I thought it my dad rode up on his bicycle. It was an autumn afternoon. My father was riding a bicycle. He rode directly to the spot I had just fallen, and he arrived at the exact moment that if Joyce had tried to lift me, she would have left my arm behind.

  “Hey, Zip,” he said, leaning over me.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  “Girls, every one of you give me your jackets, get them off right now.” He piled the jackets on top of me. “You’re in a little bit of shock there, sport,” he said, never taking his eyes off mine.

  “Joyce, if you’d go call an ambulance, and also bring back some blankets.”

  My whip of friends disappeared, although I knew they were there somewhere, on the periphery. I could only see my dad, and the sky.

  “Can you tell me what happened here?”

  “No,” I said, not moving my head.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “I never know what day it is.”

  “It’s Tuesday,” Rose said, helpfully.

  Joyce came running around the corner with a blanket, and in the distance I could hear a siren, or maybe someone was crying. Dad tucked the blanket around me and I started to look again at the miraculous problem, my arm in a U-shape, but he took ahold of my chin and said, “Can you hear that siren?”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you listen to that, and try to concentrate on staying warm.”

  “I’m not cold,” I said, and realized I was shaking.

  The young EMTs paused only a moment, shaking their heads and whistling to let me know they were impressed. They radioed the emergency room to say they were on their way, and slipped an oxygen mask over my face, and an air cast over my arm — I wasn’t allowed to watch, but there was a moment when everything went black and I felt my dad pinch my cheek, just enough to wake me up. The air cast was gradually inflated and placed on a splint, and I was loaded into the ambulance.

  Every time the siren wailed as we sped down Highway 36 I jumped, but Dad made me keep looking at him and talking to him.

  “You aren’t going to cry, are you?” Dad asked, making a stern face.

  I shook my head.

  “Because you didn’t cry with the rock in your knee, did you.”

  I had not.

  “And you didn’t cry with the sixty-six splinters in your butt.”

  No, I hadn’t.

  “You can cry if you’re sad, but you’re the toughest person I know and this is nothing to cry about.”

  An EMT moved between us, taped my fingers together. “You’re a fighter, huh?” he asked me, touching me so gently I wasn’t sure it was happening.

  “You bet she’s a fighter.” Dad touched his breast pocket, checking for his cigarettes and lighter. “She can catch or throw anything, I’ve never seen anyone like her. She pulled out her own baby teeth with a string around a doorknob. She’s fallen off her bicycle more times than any living person. I haven’t seen the tumble yet that could make this one cry.”

  I had no idea who he was talking about. It was some girl he liked, that was for sure, but it couldn’t be me, because that other girl had bounced off the pavement time and again; I had gone down and stayed. I was broken.

  I was well known in the emergency room, but this fussing wasn’t like that other fussing. This time there was no waiting, no flirting with my dad by the nurses, no small talk. There were shots, a falling twilight. I was awakened in a private room, dark but for a single light above my bed, by a very large man dressed in scrubs and with what appeared to be a flashlight on his head. My own doctor was there, Dr. Heilman, and Dad had found Mother and gotten her there, and I was being introduced to this enormous man, an orthopedic surgeon from Indianapolis who had apparently been interrupted at home to come tend me.

  “You’ve heard of me, surely,” he said, waggling his flashlight.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m Dr. Linceski, I’m known the world ’round. I was at home with my maps and my exotic fish when I got your call. I assume you broke your arm on purpose.”

  “Nope.”

  “You didn’t do this just to meet me?”

  “Istill don’t know who you are.”

  “Well, that’s appropriate. We’ve only just met.” He looked at my parents and Dr. Heilman, raised his eyebrows as if to acknowledge that the odds were against me, given the rascal fringe surrounding me. “From what I heard you were cracking the whip, huh? and a bunch of
girls fell on you? It’s all a barrel of monkeys, isn’t it, with you crazy types, until SOMEBODY has a double compound fracture that EXTRUDES through the skin with portions of bone SHATTERED by the compatriots who landed on you. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Good. All I’m trying to say is heckuva job there, heckuva break. It’s going to take all of my foreign medical training to make it right. Now look,” he said, as an orderly wheeled in a bed.

  “We’re taking you to the O.R. right now, why waste time is my motto.”

  I was transferred to the other bed and Dr. Linceski talked and talked. My parents were silent and stricken-looking. They both bent down and kissed my forehead as I was wheeled through the double doors into the shocking lights of the operating room. It happened too fast for me to be afraid.

  “And here,” Dr. Linceski said, “is my anesthesiologist, Dr. Wang. That is his real name, Dr. Wang, I kid you not. He’s going to make sure you stay asleep.”

  Dr. Wang was round, moonfaced, wearing a little hat. He appeared to be Chinese and was wearing flip-flop slippers, not booties. He had a flyswatter in his hand. “Hello,” he said, in a Chinese way, bowing a little and waving at me.

  “Is that a flyswatter?” I asked, because when you’re about to be made unconscious by Dr. Wang, it’s best to know.

  “Yes, is fly in room.”

  Dr. Linceski whistled, scrubbed his arms as if trying to remove a tattoo. He talked to Dr. Wang, who pursued the fly and didn’t answer. I heard a swat somewhere behind me, then the spraying of antiseptic and the eek-eek sound of a squeegee.

  “Awwwright, then.” Dr. Wang was suddenly above me. “We place this mask over your face and you breathe very deep. Then you count to ten backward for me. You do that?” He injected something into my IV, still watching my face. He patted my good arm and said, “We take good care, nothing will happen to you.”

  I nodded and said ten, and everything went black.

  The next day my arm was suspended above me and when Dr. Linceski came in he drew a circle around a place on the cast where I had bled through it in the night. He drew the circle in yellow. The bloodstain was vaguely the shape of Ohio.

  “That,” he said, “is where the bones protruded and where we had to add a bit of synthetic bone to hold it all together. Guess who made that synthetic bone?”

  I shook my head.

  “Phillips 66.”

  “Thegas station?”

  “Yep. I’d keep that a secret if I were you.” He tapped on my fingertips. “Can you feel this?”

  I couldn’t, but I said I did.

  “You’re lying, but that’s okay. I’d lie, too, if I was going to have a scar this big.”

  “I’m going to have a scar as big asOhio ?”

  “No, nowI’m lying. I actually performed cosmetic surgery on you free of charge, because that’s the kind of guy I am. You’ll have a scar, all right, but it will shrink and shrink as you get older, until someday you won’t be able to see it at all.”

  “Thank you,” I said, queasy and wobbly and still somehow back on the ground outside the church, looking at the sky. “Do you know where my mom and dad are?”

  “They’re in the cafeteria, where I wish all parents would stay. Do you need something?”

  “I just…” I was afraid to tell him. “I just wonder where my sweatshirt is.”

  Dr. Linceski pursed his lips as if he understood me completely. “In shreds, I fear. We had to cut you out of it.”

  I turned and looked out the window, pressing my teeth together so hard I thought my cheeks might burst.

  “It was your favorite, huh.”

  “It just only got to fit me.”

  He pulled up a chair, straddled it backward. “You know what? I don’t tell people this very often. You almost lost that arm. I had to reconnect nerves and you’ll still have nerve damage for the next year. That’s the worst break I’ve ever seen off a football field. You’re going to be wearing a cast for three months, and we’ll take it off when you come in for a skin graft. Then you’ll wear a new cast for three months. Here’s what saved you: your dad didn’t let anyone pick you up, and you were wearing a sweatshirt that held your arm together until the ambulance got there. So it was a good one, but it’s done for now.”

  I stared at the ceiling and wouldn’t answer.

  Dr. Linceski stood up, put his chair back against the wall. “I’ve heard all about you, things stuck up your nose and in your ears, a particular little incident where you ran over your own foot with the bicycle you were on.” He patted his pockets. “You overwhelm me with respect. I shall return on the morrow.”

  When he was almost out the door I said, “You still shouldn’t have cut it off.”

  He shrugged, gave a wave. In the hallway he shouted, “When I am President of these Onion States, I shall make all roller-skating illegal post facto! Pronto!”

  Every day during the hospital visiting hours there was this silent painful thing between my parents: my dad didn’t want my mom to go to school while I was still hospitalized; I wanted her to go. I wanted it for her, and because I wanted to hear more about her professors and the things they said about the dirty parts of books. Then Melinda would arrive and somehow sweep everything out into the hallway, and either Mom would be there or she wouldn’t, but there Dad would be, sitting in the same chair at the foot of the bed, until the nurses asked him to leave. He sat with his arms crossed, his face like a brick.

  Melinda made up a slew of occasional jokes that went like this: Q:What do you call a one-armed girl at a flute recital? A: Zippy. Q:What do you call a one-armed girl who can’t get her pants all the way fastened? A: Zippy. On and on, oh you are justtremendously funny, I’d say to her, narrowing up my eyes and giving her the what-for.

  Eventually I was allowed to go home, wearing a cast with a bloodstain circled in yellow and signed by all the nurses, the cast in a light blue sling with padding at the neck. I also had a stuffed autograph dog and my favorite signature on it was Mom Mary’s, because she had only finished the third grade and I loved it when she wrote something. I had a bag filled with strange hospital accessories — my own vomit tray (never used), a water pitcher with my room number on it, a bottle of lotion, a container of baby powder, a toothbrush, and a tube of Colgate so small I kept it in the palm of my good hand all the way home.

  I was taken down to the front door in a wheelchair that wasn’t necessary; I kept saying it, “I don’t need a wheelchair,” but in truth I was diminished, thinner than when I’d arrived and still shaken. When I closed my eyes I saw Dr. Wang leaning over me, telling me to count to ten backward; I remembered the feeling of blackness so complete I knew death had to be something just like it. I wondered what I had looked like (something that had never crossed my mind before), lying there on the pavement under the blue Indiana sky, or in the emergency room, my lights out as surely as those animals I’d seen alive one minute and gone the next.

  It was just him and me, he reminded me, and he got to decide when I went back to school. So for the first week he said, “Let’s see if you can ride your bike with one hand.” A breeze. The second week became, “Let’s see if you can bat left-handed, or pitch,” then could I go bowling, could I cast my Shakespeare rod and reel, could I write my name both forward and backward (something he could do with either hand). My blue sling grew grotty but no one thought to wash it.

  Some days he disappeared all day and I simply lay on the couch in the den, watching movies and scratching inside my cast with a pencil. Other days he said, “Let’s see what’s new in the world,” so we’d go into New Castle and I’d end up with a milk shake. Every few days Rose or Julie brought my homework assignments to me and I didn’t so much as look in the direction of them. The rest of the house grew cold, and then too cold, and I knew that everything I’d left in my bedroom before I fell would remain just as it was until spring — the record albums, the sheet of paper in the typewriter, where I was trying to improve on
my first poem.

  Mom came home in the evenings and sat in her corner of the couch with her books spread out around her, talking on the phone with one hand and taking notes with another. Heaven knows what the woman would have accomplished had she been born an octopus. When she was home, Dad was gone, and I stayed on the other couch, facing the TV.

  In the wall above the television all manner of things had gone wrong; the plaster and lath had disintegrated and there seemed to be nothing between the old gray wallpaper (some of which was coming apart) and the out-of-doors. One day I heard a sound in the wall and climbed up on a footstool. There was a sparrow trapped in a pocket of wallpaper, cheeping away. I couldn’t see how it got in or how to get it back out, but I realized that the house must be riddled with avenues for coming and going — the mice in the ceiling, the rats in the laundry room, and now a house sparrow right in the den. It cheeped all that day. I told Dad and he said he’d look into it. I told Mom and she said to tell Dad.

  Something happened from lying on my back all that time and it involved my kidneys, which I had not until then known existed. By the time I was supposed to go back into the hospital I was feverish, but well enough to call Melinda and say, “Lindy, you better send Rick down here. A bird has moved in.” Even for a person with no standards, the smell coming from my cast was heinous enough to make me slightly proud.

  Dr. Linceski said he’d never SEEN such a horror as the inside of my cast; he asked had I been trying to writeMoby Dick inside there.

  I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Look at all this!” He carried my old cast, cut in half, into my hospital room after my second surgery.

  It was horrible: dead skin and dried blood, and about seven thousand pencil marks. “Well. I couldn’t very well scratch with the eraser end, could I?”

  “Are you some sort of pygmy?” he asked. “Have you never heard of LEAD POISONING?” He was the second person in my life to call me a pygmy, a fact that would require thought when I reached the point of thinking about things.

  “I asked Mom for a knitting needle but she said no.”