She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  “What about the possibility of NOT SCRATCHING?”

  “Are you always so loud?”

  “You had anopen wound in there. You arescarred for life. I cannot get through to you; it’s like talking to one of my fish.”

  I stared at him.

  “I shall return in one moon,” he said, turning toward the door, rubbing his flashlight up and down on his forehead, like a bear scratching his back against a tree. “And I shall hope you have changed in the meantime.”

  Antibiotics cleared up my infection and I started to regain feeling in two of my fingers. By the time I got back home, the bird was gone and winter had fully arrived.

  By the spring my second cast was removed and what was revealed was an arm the size of a chicken wing, gray-skinned, with a pink puckered scar where my bones had EXTRUDED. Dr. Linceski assured me the arm would become stronger, but it was curved just slightly, and I had grown accustomed to holding it against my side like a kitten. I had missed forty-one days of school that year, with one thing and another, and while the doctor said the arm would return to normal he also said, “You must never throw a bowling ball with it; you must never hit a volleyball or a tetherball; you must never, ever break it again, or even land on it with your hand bent backward.” So it seemed as if he meant one thing by normal and I understood another.

  Sometimes I caught myself actually carrying my arm around, resting my right wrist in my left hand as I walked. I carried it up the stairs when the house was once again warm enough to venture into. I passed the piano I hadn’t played for six months and touched the keys; the hammers sounded damp, bereft. I walked into my parents’ bedroom, where the mountain of dirty clothes still held the winter’s chill, and up the stairs to my bedroom. I kicked my way through the debris and opened my window with the left hand, and Dad had been correct — that arm had grown very competent. I sat in the open window and looked out at the backyard of the Hickses and at the buds on the trees, the new green, the new daffodils, everything so new.

  Experience It

  During Mom’s first year at Ball State, having given my brother’s car back to him, she rode to and from Muncie with seventeen different people. Sometimes they would remember to pick her up but forget to bring her home, and in the way of things a different someone would arrive and sayHop in, I was going that way — though no one is everreally going the direction of Mooreland.

  Roger was her longest connection, and they rode to and from Muncie with Roger’s stereo playing so loudly Mom had to wear earplugs just to survive the onslaught. Even then the music got up in her rib cage and rattled some things loose. Roger dropped out of school after three weeks, and Mom was certain it was because he was stone-deaf and hadn’t heard a single lecture in their time together.

  Then Mom read in the paper about a Volkswagen Beetle for sale in Mount Summit for $200, which was both good and bad — good because she could afford $200 out of the National Defense Loan she’d taken out for tuition, and bad because, well, it was a car for $200 — so she went to see it. There was also a bit of destiny in the find, she thought, because it had been a Beetle she’d first learned to drive with Big Fat Bonnie.

  The seller, a man named Pete, said he’d meet us at the edge of a gravel pit near Mount Summit. Melinda drove us over to see it. We pulled in, and there she sat. I could only whistle and shake my head as proxy for my dad, who was neither there nor did he know we were. But he was there in spirit, certainly, a man who loved a new car, a new truck, a husband and father who had nearly bankrupted us more than once by showing up in an unexpected vehicle more shiny and immaculate than a surgical floor.

  The doors of the VW only locked from the outside, so if you wanted to be secure inside you had to roll down the windows, lean out, and lock yourself in with the key. The process had to be reversed to get out. I started to explain that this seemed a wicked bad idea to me, as periodically a person is called to make a swift and dramatic exit from a car, as when one stalls on a train track, or when the Cavalry is charging, or when you go flying off a bridge into dark water. Mom shushed me.

  We opened the doors and there was that very particular VW smell, which I guess was the decay of German rubber and efficiency. Also something about the sixties, which had passed away. Mom wedged herself in and put the key in the ignition; the car started, but barely. It sounded like a barnyard animal down and not soon to rise.

  “Oh boy,” Melinda said.

  There was a switch for the windshield wipers and there were windshield wipers but the two had no relationship. “How do you get these to work?” Mom asked Pete.

  He rubbed his nose, looked at the ground. “My daughter used a string, I think.”

  “A string?”

  “Yep.”

  Mom sat and Melinda and I stood in puzzlement.

  “Where did she put the string?” Mom asked, finally.

  “Awww, you know,” Pete said, looking out at the horizon. “She held one end on her side and her boyfriend held the other on his side, and they moved it up and down the windshield, like this.” He made a teeter-totter motion with his arms.

  I nodded. We’d done that before out on the Newmans’ farm. I already knew the implications, but it took a second before they settled on Mom and Lindy.

  “So in essence,” Mom began, “your left arm is out the window in the rainstorm? And you’re steering and shifting gears with your right at the same time?”

  “That’s about it,” he agreed.

  “Isn’t that…” Mom might have said “futile” but chose “…dangerous?”

  Pete nodded. “She done had one wreck in it, that place I showed you on the front quarter panel. I dinged it out fine.” The place on the front quarter panel looked like a piece of aluminum foil used and saved and used and saved by some old woman who remembered World War I.

  “Does the heat work?” Melinda asked. She had a Bug of her own and knew that the Germans considered heaters a demand of the weak.

  The man scratched his head. “Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘work.’The car will eventually get warm because the engine will eventually get warm, if you see what I mean.”

  Melinda just flat-out laughed. “So it works in the summer really well, huh?”

  “Yep,” he said. “That’s for sure.”

  “How are the brakes?” Mom asked, pulling up on the emergency brake and discovering it offered no resistance.

  Pete teeter-tottered his hand again. “Nyeh. But it don’t hardly go faster than thirty miles an hour so it don’t hardly make a difference.” He scuffed his foot in the dirt, spat. “You’ll notice it’s got a sunroof. That’s an extry.”

  “Well, yes,” Mom said, looking above her. “I see it has a sunroof, but does it close?”

  He shrugged. “Almost.”

  Melinda wandered over and sat down under the lone tree in the dusty lot. “Tell me when this over,” she said, “or after someone is killed.”

  I circled the car, counting rust spots. I kicked a rear tire for good measure.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Pete said.

  “You’resupposed to kick tires,” I said, giving him the eye.

  “Yeah, well. I wouldn’t, is all.”

  Melinda called out from the under the tree, where her eyes were closed, “Mom, ask does it come with bicycle pedals, or squirrels on a wheel, something like that.”

  “Squirrels, Mom,” I explained, “like on Fred Flintstone’s car.”

  Mom sighed, put her head down on the wheel. “I’ll take it,” she said, reaching for the checkbook, an account that had, for the first time in her life, only her name on it.

  On the drive back to Mooreland Melinda followed us, certain Mom’s new car was going to give out any second and we’d have to push it off Highway 36 into a ditch like a dead deer. Even after we reached our top cruising speed of thirty, Melinda continued to drive very closely and flash her headlights. I’d turn around and wave and Melinda would wave back, her gleeful, evil smile perfectly visible in the sunny day.
Sometimes Melinda would honk and even that sounded as if she were enjoying the whole thing very very much.

  “Honk back,” I said.

  “I can’t, I’m concentrating.”

  “Mom, we’re coasting straight downhill.”

  “You honk, then.”

  I poked around on the steering wheel where a proper horn would be but nothing happened. I pushed on some very rudimentary-looking sticks, things that ought to have been turn signals, but nothing happened. Finally my hand landed on something (we never could find it again), and a terrible little sound emerged, like a boot on the neck of a mallard duck. Melinda must have heard it, because she tooted back and flashed her lights and was in all ways a menace.

  We pulled up in front of the house and Mom got out, looking as if she’d run a very cruel obstacle course. When she tried to close the driver’s door it swung shut and then open again. She closed it; it opened. She gave up and rested the door against the frame, then put both hands on the roof, like a circuit preacher performing a healing. “I’m naming her Sabrina,” she said, her eyes closed.

  Melinda nodded. “Optimistic.”

  Mom had always had Carol Hoopingarner, whom I loved for a thousand different reasons, and then she found a second Carol, Carol Johnson, who lived in New Castle and needed a ride to Ball State every day. They hooked up together and Carol paid Mom $1 a day, which gave Mom just enough to get something, even a small thing, for lunch. Carol was studying psychology and was loud, she saidexactly what was on her mind, and if it hurt your feelings all the better because probably it was something you were in denial about and needed to hear. I adored her even though she hurt my feelings approximately every time I saw her. I had grown up with the quietest, most polite Quaker women, with only Rose’s mother Joyce and Julie’s mom Debbie to show me any other way. But Carol J. was in a class all her own, and we had the same birthday. That was two people I shared it with, my cousin Mike Jarvis and now Carol. I secretly believed we formed a little tribunal and would eventually be called upon to make judgments upon the world, something both Carol and I seemed more than prepared to do.

  Carol had a deep, husky laugh like a smoker and a husband situation I never could get straight. She said things about my dad I prayed to the sleeping infant Jesus Dad would never hear. She was more than willing to pull the windshield screen on rainy days, and, like many people who arrive unbidden, she was yet another form of salvation for my mother.

  It was interesting, I’d hear Mom say at church or to her friends on the phone, how long a person can make a car last relying only on gravity and Good Samaritans. Every day Mom parked Sabrina on a hill in a parking garage, and spent the entire curly route down power-clutching her into ignition. But it was only a matter of time before her luck ran out, and we all knew it.

  One evening she came home with an ad she’d found in the Ball StateDaily News for a corporation called Beetleboards of America. Beetleboards was based in Los Angeles, and they’d had the very bright idea of using Volkswagen Bugs as rolling billboards, marketing the campaign directly at college students. The ad stated that Beetleboards would pay students $20 a month to allow their cars to be repainted with graphics advertising a variety of things, but primarily cigarettes, blue jeans, stereos, and beer. The graphics were matched to the driver; for instance, blue jeans companies preferred clean-cut, athletic young men. It seemed, in fact, that all of the products favored young men of one stripe or another. Mother remained overweight, middle-aged, and missing teeth.

  We studied and studied the ad. It seemed a bit hopeless, but Mom couldn’t get over the idea of the $20 a month, which would pay for both gas and parking, and the car would get repainted in the process.

  It was Carol Johnson who finally convinced her there was no harm in calling. She could justcall, for heaven’s sake, how many other decorated Bugs were there at Ball State? How much money was Beetleboards making off somebody else’s behind in Muncie, she asked, using decidedly different language? So Mom nervously called Los Angeles, this at a time when one simply did not make long-distance phone calls, and California was as much a concept, and as far away, as a Bangladeshi prison. Mom spoke to someone, explaining the situation, and he kindly called her back to spare her the bill. She usedthe voice, a voice that would cause her to be a hit in speech classes and in theater classes and in radio — anywhere, in fact, that voices matter. It was unassuming, melodic, and intimate, and gave away nothing of the actual facts of her life. She used the phone in the living room and I paced in the den, eavesdropping but hearing only sounds, no words. I knew what Mr. Beetleboards was going to say: there was no advertisement appropriate to her condition, particularly not in Mooreland, Indiana. And if by chance she got him so far as to be convinced she was a long-haired athletic young man in athletic young blue jeans, and then he saw THE CAR — oh, all was lost.

  But somehow none of that happened. The man in California suggested that Mom and Sabrina might be perfect for a new campaign — Miss Clairol, specifically the Herbal Essence Girl, who was a blond cartoon waif with long flowing hair rising up out of a tropical pool. (She was the opposite of the Swamp Girl, in other words.)

  Mom drove the car slowly and with painful deliberation all the way to Indianapolis, to a dealership owned by Earl Scheib, where Sabrina was painted the requisite seafoam green. While there it seems she was tinkered with just a bit, just enough to make the ride home feel slightly more luxurious and less like a careening disaster at a two-bit carnival operated by convicts. Then a young man flew all the way from Los Angeles to apply the decals, and when he was done what was sitting in front of our house was something the likes of which Mooreland, Indiana, had never seen.

  The Herbal Essence Girl rose up and covered each door panel. Her face was impassive; her hair fell in sheets of silken crème. One of her hands was turned palm up and sitting on it was a bottle of bright green Herbal Essence shampoo, so lifelike you could nearly smell it. The hood and trunk of the car were covered with exotic butterflies, and a banner across the rear window read “Experience It.”

  The design contained, as Mom was the first to admit, a fair amount of what she called innuendo. The Clairol Girl was naked after all, rising up out of a pool the temperature of a hot bath. It looked that way. Even the butterflies were slightly obscene, flying all over the place, including on the roof where other drivers couldn’t see them. It was as if the car had just blossomed out of some wildly lively place — the most un-Quaker, un-Mooreland, un-Hoosier spot on an imaginary map. Momadored it. Dad wasstunned. The best part — if there could be said to be any one part better than another — was that the deal included a gigantic box of free samples. I don’t know what we’d used for shampoo before Miss Clairol came to town; indeed, I have no memory of shampoo before her at all. But afterward there was always a little bottle of bright green Herbal Essence in the bathroom, along with a conditioner, and it did in fact smell like Paradise.

  They were quite a pair after that, Mom and Carol Johnson, Herbal Essencing off to Ball State to study psychology and public speaking and English. One morning Dad and I were sitting on the front porch as Mom left to pick up Carol. Sabrina still sputtered, was still fickle at stop signs and climbing hills. Dad watched Mom make the turn onto Broad Street with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Nothing stops her,” he said, shaking his head and flipping his cigarette out into the street.

  “Nope,” I said, unsure how to measure the word. There was a lot he meant to tell me, and I could feel it all in the pit of my stomach like the approach of a flu. Nothing, he meant, as in no money, no driver’s license, no teeth, no job, no support, no supplies, no safe car. Andnothing, he meant, as in himself. Or me. I knew he was right, in a dark sad corner of my bones, and still. Still, I was proud of her. Still, it was abeautiful car.

  Teeth

  Mrs. Schaeffer was a wonderful music teacher and because of her I knew plenty about the world of theater. In the second grade she’d allowed me to sing a solo in class, “Feed the B
irds,” fromMary Poppins, and told me I had a lovely soprano. At Halloween time every year she showed us a filmstrip calledDanse Macabre, accompanied by a record on her portable turntable; in each scene a corpse or a pumpkin or a tree in a dark cemetery danced to classical music. That was the closest I’d ever come to great art, and I wished we could watch it every day. But Mrs. Schaeffer was right to hold on to it and let us see it only during Halloween.

  In the fifth grade we were old enough to start putting on shows for the public, and Mrs. Schaeffer decided we would do not a play, but a medley of songs from the all-time perfect musicals, performed in the gym. The problem was how to avoid giving all the songs to Rose, who not only had the most beautiful singing voice but also knew how to stand just so and look a little ways up and into the distance, her head thrust just slightly forward. Her mother helped her put on lipstick for special occasions, something my own mother would have eaten a toad before doing. Rose was in all ways more prepared for a life onstage, and everyone could see it.

  In the end she was given “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” sung with a group of other girls, and “Some Enchanted Evening,” fromSouth Pacific. Her “Enchanted Evening” was so professional that my sister turned to me in the audience and said, “A shame you have to follow that.” Rose had even remembered to enunciate, as Mrs. Schaeffer taught her, “you may meet a strang-ooor.” Jock-ish Tommy, who was feet taller than anyone else in the class, got to sing “Old Man River,” and shockingly, he had a flat-out bass voice.Fifth grade. I sang “Edelweiss” and was part of the chorus for the song “Oklahoma!” which meant I had to do a little two-step I found demeaning and hoped my sister would somehow sleep through. She did not.

  Once the theater bug was awakened in us, Rose and I couldn’t stop. We stole her mother’s two-album soundtrack toJesus Christ Superstar and played it over and over in Rose’s room, wearing old diapers on our heads so we would like look the Blessed Virgin Mary. Well, Rose looked like the BVM and I looked like Mary Magdalene, but that was fine because that meant I got the greatest song in the whole play, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” Certainly that had been true of Jesus and me my whole life, so I felt justified in claiming the part. Eventually Rose got tired of singing “Hosanna” and said she wanted to be Mary Magdalene (casting against type, I tried to explain), although her younger sister Maggie was always happy to be Herod. Maggie had a preternaturally deep voice for a third-grader, and pulled off the Herod role with great aplomb. We sang with the record for a long time, then began singing into my blue tape recorder, listening to ourselves critically and trying to imagine how Mrs. Schaeffer would have us say certain words differently. I was convinced that M. Magdalene would say, “He’s a mahn, he’s just a mahn,” sort of like the bald man in the 7-Up commercials who put the lime in the coconut. (No coconut in 7-Up as far as I could tell, but I adored bald men.)