She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  Before I met Mickey I never would have done what I did when she handed me my candy cane guessing paper. Before Mickey I would not have known such a thing was possible. I told her the truth: I shouldn’t be allowed to participate, because I was devilishly good at guessing things and it wouldn’t be fair to the Professors. They didn’t stand a chance with me in the game. I told her about knowing the number of pennies in the big jar at the Mooreland Fair, and how once Lindy and I had been at Grant’s department store and she offered me a penny gumball. She turned the handle on the machine and just as she did so, I said, “It’s red.” We opened the little gate and there was a red gumball. Before we left the store Melinda had cashed in a quarter and I had guessed the gumball color right twenty-three times. And as if that weren’t enough, I got to keep the gumballs for having ESP.When we got home we told Mom about it but she wasn’t the least surprised; she remembered when everybody in our family had ESP.Around our house it was just ESP all the time.

  It wasn’t that Mickey didn’tbelieve me — she certainlybelieved me. But she thought my natural advantage might be tempered by the fact we were talking about the weather, and not just weather but snow in Indiana, which was so unpredictable I always expected to see it coming up from the ground one day, flying heavenward in a reversal of physical laws, just to keep us Hoosiers on our toes.

  I saw Mickey’s point, and accepted my candy cane. I thought a moment, licking the end of my pencil, a habit I’d picked up from my dad. Mickey suggested that licking lead wasn’t perhaps the wisest thing to do, and I wondered if there was a connection between my pencil history and the fact I had absolutely no notion of left and right. I could hardly tell the words apart. And Melinda and I both said “yellow” when we looked at the color pink. We said yellow when we looked at theword pink, and we both suffered from a phenomenon we called Baker Park, after an actual park in New Castle which was a square with streets around it. Every time Melinda and I got near Baker Park we would become completely lost; I don’t mean we didn’t know which way was right or left, of course we didn’t, I meanwe didn’t understand that we were still on Planet Earth.

  I wrote “November 13” and put an exclamation point underneath it. Mickey looked at my prediction and said, “That’s pretty early for snow. Are you trying to give everyone else a fighting chance?” I shook my head. Mickey Danner had gotten in my life and messed me up but good; I didn’t know if I was coming or going, lying or trying not to lie.

  “No,” I said, and then, “What was the question?”

  November 13 was mild, with clear skies. I sat in Mickey’s office while Mom was in class. We talked about things and I read to her from my Judy Blume book. She answered the phone and typed; people came and went and the day passed gently. Neither of us mentioned the contest, and then Mom came up the rickety green steps, panting from her walk across campus, and said, “It’s snowing!” I jumped up and looked out the window and the flakes were so big they could have had faces — I could have given each one a name.

  “Heavens,” Mickey said, her hand over her heart. “I guess I owe you this.” She handed me the box with the Santa statue and shook my hand. I opened the box, moved aside the tissue he was wrapped in. There was the sleeping village inside Santa. If the gift had come from Dr. Mood, I would have thought it meant something very strange and beyond me (the village isin Santa, the village is IN Santa), but as it was from Mickey I thought it was just the sweetest thing, and had no significance at all.

  The year she became a Master, Mom lost another twenty pounds, sold Sabrina to a collector, and wrote thirteen short stories so disorienting and bothersome I memorized one entirely and hid copies of the others in the secret red box in my bedroom. The stories formed the book that would be her thesis. They were all about women; each story was told twice, it seemed to me, or maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe the story I had memorized, “Home Remedy,” wasn’t the same as “Bondage.” In the first a hillbilly woman (I imagined she had my Mom Mary’s Kentucky accent) named Lovey is talking to her husband, Elzy Ezekiel Rogers. She is just talking, telling him little things, like how her bed had come from an auction in a rainstorm — her father had stayed all day, soaked through, to get it for her. As a child Lovey had shared the bed with her sister, and then it became her marriage bed. She’d never told anyone that the knobs at the top of the four posters came off.I used to hide secrets in the posts, like a poem I read one time that made me cry. I copied it off and hid it in the left foot post. And whenever I met you that first time at the church sociable I went home and wrote down your name, Elzy Ezekiel Rogers, and I took off the ball and hid the paper in the post on the top left, nearest to my heart.

  But they aren’t just talking, this woman with the soft, mountain accent and her husband. He isn’t talking at all, because he is tied to the bedposts, bound and gagged. There are things Lovey must make clear to him: they involve a daughter, Carrie Bell, who is fifteen, a beautiful, innocent child. There is a tray by the bed, and on it a rag soaked with ether; a scalpel; catgut thread and a curved needle. These details added up like numbers, but even memorized I wasn’t sure to what sum.Sometimes I think about those first fifteen years and they’re light and golden, like fairy children dancing around a maypole. These last fifteen years are like goblins in a circle, one more added each year that passes. Now the light and the dark are even, but before long another year will make sixteen dark and only fifteen light, dancing, dancing, and soon the darkness will win. It scares me to think on it.

  In “Bondage” the husband’s name is Buck; he’s a truck-driving bully, and the wife, Claire, is a nurse, so it wasn’t the same at all, really, except for the sutures, the needle, the handcuffs. And a daughter named Carrie who is injured. She is talked about but never seen; all through the story her bedroom is quiet, her bed made. There is an old stuffed bear on her pillow, and I wondered about that a lot, that bear.

  I didn’t understand the stories but I couldn’t put them down, wouldn’t let them go. Lovey’s voice was in my head as sure as my own, and the other women, too: the elementary school teacher, Veronica, found dead in her closet, her secrets spilled all over her apartment. The kitchen floor is covered with coffee and sugar, black against white, stains on white walls, and the policeman who is telling the story knows there is only one body but two dead women:Veronica, the woman the world saw, and Ronnie, the self she despised.

  “Alma Mater,” about a woman in the cabin in the woods, who presides over a small town’s harvest festival. It is she who chooses the Harvest King, and the contest is between two cousins, Michael and Malachi. A middle-aged man, a college recruiter, comes to town to beg her to let his university have Michael, who is a genius; in truth he wants them both. The woman is called Mother; she takes the man into her rose-scented parlor and he is lost an entire day. When he comes to his senses he sees the Mother is old, and he is horrified: her face changes with every shift of light, and she tells him Michael is Chosen and there is no undoing it. “You may take Malachi,” she says, slipping into the shadows of her own house, pushing the recruiter out into the blinding daylight and locking the door behind him.

  “Michael was Chosen,” I would say, lying in bed at night, or sitting on the floor in Mickey Danner’s office. At a carnival in the springtime, where he wrestled with his cousin, and won.

  “You may take Malachi,” Mickey would answer, handing me a stack of letters she needed me to fold.

  I knew the Wedding stories, the Mothers-in-law Coming to Visit stories, the Left Turn on Maple. And the woman who had come to believe in the undead; she wore a silver cross she clutched throughout an evening spent with an old friend — a cold evening, a cold conversation over chilled wine, and upstairs in her immaculate house the perfectly preserved room of a four-year-old boy, who had been dead for years.

  A woman in Mount Summit named Wilhelmina opened a dress shop in the basement of her house. The dresses were of a mysterious origin: some were very expensive and new; some were expensive and on consignment
. Most had come from Somewhere and been marked down many times as they traveled to Mount Summit, the way anything passed from hand to hand dims.

  Mother loved it there. She loved to go and visit with Wilhelmina, even if she never bought anything. Wilhelmina was tiny, built like a dancer, and she wore scarves and excessive amounts of jewelry. She smoked and gossiped and complimented every woman who came through the door. After leaving the shop empty-handed many times, Mom walked in one afternoon and told Wilhelmina she was ready to try something on. She was about to celebrate her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and she wanted a new dress.

  I didn’t want to go to Wilhelmina’s. I tried staying in the car, but the interior was black and it was August, and even with every window down I felt all my wickedness melting. I got out of the car and stomped around and that made me hotter. Dresses. My mother was shopping for dresses. Where was ye olde Delonda, I was beginning to wonder, the one who wore Mom Mary’s hand-me-downs year after year and never left the house, the person who was somehowtoo good for a place like Wilhelmina’s? I sat down under a tree, fanned myself, kicked at some dust to make a point. Never mind the lights being turned off, the lack of plumbing, the cold, humid haze in which Mom slept away the days, year after year, a silent, unmoving, unmovable mountain under blankets and afghans. What need didshe have for trivialities and costume jewelry? Rising up on Sunday mornings, making do with virtually nothing (and even that nothing had to be pinned together and was so frayed it barely held), she had not seemed embarrassed or concerned. My cheerful, obese, popcorn-eating, science-fiction-reading holy Mother: her eye had been on God. I missed that woman fiercely, but I barely knew why. All I knew is that as long as she was trapped I knew exactly where to find her.

  “Honey!” The New Mother, missing 120 pounds of the Old, was standing in the doorway of the dress shop, waving to me. “Come see what I found!”

  Even I had to admit the dresses were amazing. They were identical, one black (coffee), the other white (sugar), a finely spun something or other — I knewnothing about fabric — that felt as if it were just about to escape your hand. She was wearing the white one, which was fitted but not tight, and made her look like someone who had once had a figure so dangerous she could only hint at it now that she was a grandmother. It was a dress thatconcealed, and in the concealment told a story which seemed to be the one Mom was working on; the fourteenth narrative in her collection of women’s faces.

  “Look at this,” she said, handing me a…what was it? Not a belt, but something like that. It was made of the same material, but on each end were three fingerlets of fur. I don’t believe “fingerlet” was the technical term. It was fur in three finger-shaped tubes, not long scary fingers, more like little stumps of fur. The belt, or whatever it was, and the fur stumps were so hopelessly glamorous I hoped Mom would buy the dress just so I could steal this part. “You tie it on like this,” she said, executing a knot, a little turn in the dressing room mirror. The last of the world as I knew it vanished with a whisper. “Do you think your dad will like it?” she asked, still looking in the mirror.

  I once overheard Mom refer to a man as someone who Had Accidents for a Living. I was fairly certain this was my vocation, too, and I wished I could interview the man to figure out how one got paid for what came naturally to me.

  My father took some professional falls, too, at his job at Delco Remy. I was always unclear on the details, but I remember the last one, because he never went back to work. There was talk that one of his legs was shorter than the other (or maybe it was longer); it was said that his spine was disintegrating. He told us he would be one hundred percent crippled within the next five years. In the meantime, he was on disability and collecting a pension, and all day every day he got to do whatever he wanted.

  My mind wobbled with fear and grief when I considered Dad’s future in a wheelchair as a one hundred percent cripple. It would be the worst thing that could happen to him; it would be like putting him in prison. He was meant togo, he was built to stand in his garden just before sunrise and study his fruit trees and think his private thoughts, but on hislegs, not on wheels. A wheelchair would be a mess after rototilling; it would be a disaster in the woods. When I thought too hard about it I’d have to run outside and prop a ladder up against my favorite tree, then climb up and hide in the perfect basket made where the first big limbs parted ways. I could never understand how he always found me, but he did, and I’d pop my head up, then climb down the ladder and never even think about putting it away.

  The summer my parents had been married twenty-five years, I had another problem with my dad. It had no name and I couldn’t talk about it with anyone, and even thinking about it made me feel like I might throw up or faint. I couldn’t tell Mom or Melinda and surely not Rose or Julie. I couldn’t write it in the journal I’d started keeping. (The journal had been an assignment at school and I’d hated it like leeches for about five minutes and the next thing I knew I was writing in it all the time and then keeping a different one at home that didn’t have anything to do with school. This, too, was private.)

  It had happened in June or early July. I’d been upstairs in my room, listening to music and I heard Dad’s truck pull up in front of the house. It was late, and I should have been in bed. Mom was asleep on the couch. I quick turned down the music and changed into a nightgown so he’d think I’d been about to go to bed, and then I actually got in bed and rolled around so as to give myself pillow hair. I walked down the steps, casual, yawning. By the time I reached the den he was sitting in his chair as if he’d been there for hours.

  “Hey, Daddy,” I said, giving him a little wave.

  “Zip.” Dad nodded, lit a cigarette. “What are you doing up?”

  “Oh, nothing. Iwas sleeping but I heard you come in and I just came down to say good night.” I stepped over animals and books and a Crockpot that had taken up residence in the middle of the floor of the den; no one could say precisely why and no one would move it. I sat down in Dad’s lap and leaned against his chest, as I had done millions upon millions of times before. I breathed in the smell that was the essence of him, a smell that lived in the hollow of his throat, and which when I had been a really little girl I used to try to smell on his pillow when he left for work each day, because I was afraid I wouldn’t live until he got home again. The scent was impossible to describe but it never changed and it was intoxicating. Mom could smell it, too; I’d heard her say to Mom Mary that she would have married Dad for that alone.

  All those millions of times I’d climbed into his lap. It was routine, so often rehearsed and fully memorized I’d never given it any thought. I was, in some critical way,a part of Dad’s lap, and I fit inside the curve of his arm like a puzzle piece. There was a hollow place just below his collarbone that had been designed for my head. We were like Howie and Mickey; we were just going about our business, Dad somewhere, me somewhere else, but at the end of the day or when I fell asleep in the car or when I was sick, he picked me up and we were that other person. Just one person.

  This time he didn’t move, he didn’t make the right adjustments or use his arm to pull me up closer and settle me in a position so he could see over my hair. His whole body was stiff; he seemedangry.

  “Hop up now,” he said, his eyes fixed on the television. “You should be in bed.” He might as well have hit me. It would have been better if he had hit me. For a moment I just stood by his chair, but he didn’t look at me or say anything else, so I stepped back over the Crockpot, the books, the animals. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I made it to the doorway without tripping. I was about to cross into the dark living room when he said, “You’re a big girl now, too big to sit on my lap.” I stopped but didn’t turn around. “And listen to me.” His voice took on the tone he used when he was about to name a cardinal law, the defiance of which would result in punishment so dire it had no name and had never yet been employed. “You are not to sit on anyone else’s lap, either.Do you hear me?” I didn’t have
to look at him to know what his face was doing, the flame of him, his absolute authority. “Isaid, Do you hear me?” I nodded, my back still turned to him, and took off running. I ran past the piano, through the doorway into my parents’ bedroom (where they never slept anymore), up the stairs. I nearly flew across the room that had been my sister’s and onto my bed, where I lay on my stomach and buried my face in my pillow and hoped I would suffocate, a trick that never worked.

  I didn’t know what I had done; I could never ask and he wouldn’t tell me anyway. But somehow, through a failure of attention — or maybe it had been a series of small crimes added together — I had made him stop loving me. I had lost my father.

  Here are the things Melinda was really good at: 1. Having great babies. 2. Undercooking meat. 3. Painting things on walls. 4. Getting impatient and losing her temper and then apologizing for it and maybe buying a present to make up for it. 5. Setting her house on fire. 6. Remembering birthdays and holidays and getting a card for someone and signing it from someone else. The “someone” was usually my mother and the “someone else” was Dad. And she was really excellent at planning things and making unusual decisions and causing good things to appear where they hadn’t been before. So when she said there needed to be a party to celebrate Mom and Dad’s silver wedding anniversary, everyone knew there would be one and she would make it happen.

  Melinda said there should be a photograph taken, a formal portrait that would run in the paper alongside a picture from their wedding. This was a tradition I was highly against, because it wasdisturbing. There were such pictures in the newspaperevery day, and I didn’t understand why other people weren’t bothered by them. Oh, here we are when we were young and still had our own hair and both of our arms! And here we are now — the only thing keeping us upright for this picture is the fear we will land on our colostomy bags! (Another thing Melinda was good at: jokes involving colostomy bags. I had no idea what they were for or where one kept them but myword they were funny. She could also build a story around the word “tapeworm” like nobody else.) So what if two people had been married sixty-eight years? You’d think the further away you got from having your facestill attached to your head the more privacy you might crave.