A Girl Named Zippy Read online

  Yes, I had beautiful long hair, and yes, I had beautiful slippers, but I was still myself, and there was only one thing I could think to do to keep from bursting. I decided to go play rodeo on my bicycle with the purple banana seat and the sissy bars. It was my stallion, and we had been down a dusty road or two. As I climbed on and started speeding down the street, I could feel my sister’s newfound respect fading like an old star, but I couldn’t stop. I turned the corner of Charles and Jefferson as if nothing could touch me—I rode faster and faster. As I rode past the Kizers’ house, where all the mangy foster children lived, one of them shouted, “Nice wig!” And I yelled back, my face bent close to the handlebars, “It’s my real hair!” And then another block up, Ruth Kennedy shouted did I know I was wearing my slippers, and I yelled, “They’re my actual feet!” And it was a long time before I went back home.

  * * *

  THE LION

  My dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said I’d have to think about it. I questioned some friends, and discovered that these were the options available to me: ice skater, cowboy, teacher of little kids, large animal veterinarian. I didn’t really, in my deepest heart, want to be any of those. I began to fear that I might live my whole life without gainful employment, as most of the rest of my family had.

  Dad told me to think about what I enjoyed doing most, and how I wanted people to see me when I was grown, and I set my mind to that. I was deeply, tragically in love with Telly Savalas at the time, and carried his picture around in an old wallet my grandma, Mom Mary, had given me. My love for him made me dissatisfied with my own life.

  I was in a state all during that career time, and then one night, just before I fell asleep, I realized what I wanted to be. The next morning I jumped down the stairs, skipping every other one, so that my mom called me Herd of Elephants. I went outside, where my dad was puttering in his tool shed, and told him I wanted to belong to the Mafia. He asked what did I mean when I said that, and I said like in the movies, and he nodded.

  A few days later he came home with a framed certificate printed on very genuine yellow paper that said I was an official, lifetime member of the Mafia. Some of it was in Italian and some of it was just in an Italian accent. A man named Leonardo “The Lion” Gravitano Salvatore had signed it with a tall, threatening signature.

  After that my life changed, and I mean for the better. Hardly anyone ever bothered me, except for my sister, who must have belonged to whatever is bigger and meaner than the Mafia. Maybe the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She dared even to lock me out of the house one night when my parents were away, when there was a bat on the front porch that was clearly diseased and looking for hair. My brother came from out of nowhere and unlocked the door, and just in time, too. Back in the house I gave my sister a whole host of menacing, Italian faces, which she pretended to ignore.

  DAD ASKED ME did I want to learn to dance and I said yes. He put the “Theme from a Summer Place” on the record player and then had me stand on top of his feet while he led me in a box step. Mom said we were quite a couple of dancers. It was so nice whirling around the living room to that summery music that for a moment I forgot about Telly Savalas and my own life of crime and was just carried away. Then the song ended and my dad stepped back and gave me a little bow and asked who loves ya, baby, and I laughed out loud and said you do.

  * * *

  QUALITIES OF LIGHT,

  OR DISASTERS

  INVOLVING ANIMALS

  For one whole year I sighed every time I was asked to do anything. I felt incredibly put upon. My parents were patient with it for a few months, and then both began saying, in a rather clipped and hysterical way, don’t sigh, immediately after making some small request.

  For instance, my dad might ask, “Have you done your feeding?” Which meant had I fed the few animals I had begged for and bet my life against, and I would stop what I was doing, which was probably sitting absolutely still watching Gilligan’s Island, and sigh. And he would speedy-quick say don’t sigh, but I was way ahead of him and already done sighing. Sometimes I would rouse myself and go feed the starving animals, but sometimes I would continue just very actively sitting there until he became agitated and got up to do it himself, meaning to shame me, which didn’t work.

  My parents went from reprimanding to giving very thunderous looks, which also didn’t stop me, until finally on one occasion, with the dogs howling for mercy outside, my father snapped. I was standing in the doorway between the living room and the den, and he covered the distance between us so quickly he appeared to levitate. He took me by the shoulders and backed me all the way down the length of the long living room, his face in mine, staring at me like a deranged cow, saying over and over, don’t sigh, through his clenched teeth. So I stopped sighing.

  MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of a wolf in my baby bed. I have made that claim for as long as I can remember, and for years my family treated it as just more evidence of whatever. My mother finally solved the mystery of how a memory can be so hallucinatory and yet be true.

  When I was born we had two dogs: the great, noble, and legendary German shepherd, Kai; and Tiger, who was some sort of beagle-shaped zeppelin with unusual bowel function and tragically short legs. My sister picked Tiger out from the Diseased and Deformed Puppy Room at the animal shelter.

  Kai’s lineage was embarrassingly good. Either my father won him gambling, or else my parents sold a fourth sibling to buy him, because he was magnificent, and had no rival in Mooreland. His father was black and silver and his mother was snow white, and Kai turned out to be the color of coins falling from a winter sky.

  He was mature by the time I was born, and had developed a number of patterns in his work as our guardian. He despised insurance salesmen, trick-or-treaters, and rats in equal measure. When I was learning to walk my mother used to take me out into the yard while she hung up laundry, and Kai paced the sidewalk between me and the street. If I got too close to the edge of the yard, he would simply pick me up by the seat of my pants and move me back into the grass.

  He didn’t allow fighting or tickling among family members, but took great pleasure in watching my mom and sister and me color in our coloring books, and could eat an enormous amount of popcorn, one piece at a time, which he caught in the air.

  His most serious and important work was at night. As soon as Dad turned out the lights, Kai walked upstairs and looked at my brother in his bed, at my sister in hers, then clip, clip, clip down the stairs where he checked on both of my parents. Finally, he would walk over to my baby bed, and putting both paws on the railing, lean his massive head down and look at me. Assured we were all present and accounted for, he lay down at the foot of my parents’ bed, let out a sigh, and slept.

  And one night, when the light was just so, my new mind lit up, and I decided it was time to begin remembering, and out of all the faces I loved so much, I started with Kai’s.

  He died when I was six, of heartworms. They are a terrible danger in Indiana.

  MY BEST FRIEND was Julie Newman, a little red-haired girl. Her parents, Big Dave and Debbie, owned the gas station next to our house, and also the car wash (which sometimes worked and was sometimes frozen), farther down Charles Street, and a row of three apartments behind the hardware store. It was a little empire. But their greatest piece of real estate by far was their 120-acre farm, which sat three miles or so outside Mooreland. Of all the places in the wide world, Julie’s farm was my favorite place, and I learned some very shocking things about life there.

  For instance, when pigs were born, the runt of the litter was almost always just straightaway thrown on the dead baby pig pile, since it was bound to die anyway. This was a practice I had protested so often and so loudly that one day Big Dave allowed Julie and me to take a runt into the house to try to raise it.

  There is hardly a thing in this world as perfectly cute as a baby pig, and even Julie, who was all business in the farrowing house, cou
ldn’t help but rub its little snoot and admire its dark pink color.

  “Let me hold him now. Hey, Julie. You’ve been holding him for a long time. Let me hold him now. Hey.”

  We decided to name him Sam. We had many plans for him. We were going to enter him in the Mooreland Fair Parade on Kiddie Day in the Pets category, with maybe a ruffle around his neck. We were going to teach him to give us rides on his back. We were going to build him an apartment house out of cardboard boxes and keep him with us forever, all the way up till the time Julie and I bought our own farm, where he would be installed as the Main Pig.

  As we got close to the Newmans’ house, the German shepherd who lived in the pen went wild. His name was Biz, and he was kept only to guard their gas station at night. No one but Big Dave had ever touched him. He was deeply and truly Satan’s own, and yet Julie, with her strange diplomacy, always defended him. If I said, for instance, “Isn’t Biz the most evil creature ever?” she would answer, “Naaaahhh,” in that long, eloquent way that was the Newman verbal hallmark.

  Biz threw himself hideously at the fence, snarling and snorting through his big ugly nose.

  “Ugh. I hate that dog,” I said, bending my body around the little pig.

  “Nowww,” Julie answered, her big chastisement.

  Debbie was in the kitchen frying dinner. Dinner at the Newmans’ always, always involved the Fry Daddy. I don’t think they ever actually turned it off. The food groups as represented by Debbie were: Fried, Meat, Bread, Coke, and Ice Cream. She was an excellent cook.

  Debbie was a big fat saucy woman. Some women carry their weight at the top of their bodies, and some at the bottom, but Debbie was perfectly round. One time we were all gathered out in the pig lot trying to catch a stray sow. The sow was notoriously ill tempered and quite large. Big Dave was there, and Julie’s older brother, David Lee, and two or three farmhands and Julie, Debbie, and me. We had formed a circle around the errant sow, and each of us was holding something we could swing, if necessary. We three women each had a barn board plank that we held in front of us like a loose picket fence. I was all in favor of the sow being caught by one of the men, yet another confession of my failure as a farmhand, but Debbie was whooping and hollering for all she was worth. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but there she stood yelling, “SouEEE! PigEEE! Come on, souEEE! PigEEE!”

  No one else was calling with such gusto, and as Debbie got more heated up, a generalized jocularity began to spread among us, which in this case took the form of a long snicker and some foot shuffling.

  The sow was as far from Debbie as she could be and highly agitated, running first toward Dave and then toward Larry, but as we got more quiet and Debbie got louder, the sow slowed down and turned and looked Debbie’s way. Eventually the pig stopped moving altogether and just stood looking at Debbie, who was still souEEEing to beat the band. Just as Dave was about to slip a rope around the sow’s neck, she bent over and started running straight for Debbie. I’m talking about a missile-shaped, one thousand pounds of hard meat. With teeth.

  There was a moment of silence while all of us waited for the dreaded convergence of the twain. The pig was running flat-out, dead on. Debbie bent her fat little knees and held out her plank. She never blinked.

  The pig hit her in such a way that Debbie went flying straight up in the air, belly first, truly like a human weather balloon. She hovered for a second, and then came down, completely stiff, still clutching her barn board out in front of her. She landed in the mud with such force that it nearly buried her.

  I have never heard grown men laugh that hard. One by one they dropped to their knees, peeling off their seed caps and wiping their eyes of tears. All the while Debbie lay spread-eagled and stuck like an artifact, yelling, “You goddamned worthless idiots! Get over here and help! And where’d the goddamned pig go?!”

  The sow, completely forgotten, stood placid and perplexed in the middle of the barn lot, next to the old Marathon Jeep the chickens used to roost in. David Lee just walked over and roped her, all the while holding his side and repeating, “Oh, Lord. Whoo. Oh, man. Whooeee.”

  WE CARRIED LITTLE SAM in through the mud room, which was the size of most living rooms. It held two deep freezers and four or five saddles on saw horses, fourteen tons of strange farm implements, beautiful leather tack, and mud. On the wall was an old, poster-size photograph of Geronimo.

  We stole a clean towel in the laundry room, and had just laid Sam down on top of the heating grate when Debbie came in out of the kitchen.

  “What do you think you’re doing, bringing that pig into my house?” Her head was cocked to the side, and she had her fists balled up where her hips would have been.

  “We’re gonna save it from the dead baby pig pile, Debbie, and enter it in the Fair Parade, and take it to the farm we buy when we’re older.”

  “That pig better not shit on my clean towel, do you hear me, Julie Ann?”

  I looked up at Debbie with my most sincere Have A Heart face, but Julie just kept rubbing the piglet’s side. Finally she said, quietly, “Nowwww, Mom.” Debbie harummphed, and went back to the kitchen.

  Julie and I sat by the pig until late into the night, feeding it water from an eye dropper and keeping it warm. I told Julie many times how impressed I was by her compassion, which was not always in evidence, and how good and right I thought it was to try to save the Poor and Unfortunate Sam.

  “Mmm hmmm,” she said, with just the slightest upturn on the last syllable to let me know she agreed with me.

  Toward morning, exhausted by our lifesaving efforts, we fell into bed. We woke at the same time, and sprang up to check on our little charge. He was just as we had left him, but when Julie pulled back the receiving blanket it became clear, alas, that he was not breathing.

  I sat down hard with disappointment. “Oh, no,” I said, tearfully, rubbing his little pink belly.

  Julie said nothing, just picked him up and headed for the mud room door. I was grabbing my hat in preparation for the funeral when I saw her step outside and sling Sam by the back leg into Biz’s pen.

  I froze, aghast, my hat dangling from my hand.

  “Julie Ann Newman!” I said, nearly whispering with indignation.

  Julie stopped me with her hand on my arm. I have never in my life seen kinder or more sparkly eyes than hers, and every time she gave me the silencing look I realized how much she knew that I would never know. The arc of that piglet through the air into the dog pen contained more comedy than I will ever see again in my life, but my heart still ached. She didn’t laugh, and I didn’t cry.

  WHEN IT BECAME completely impossible for me to live without a pet chicken, my dad took me out to Tinker Jones’s, where there was fowl of every variety. Going to Tink’s was good and bad: there were chicks and truly excellent things, and there was also our Driftwood trailer.

  The Driftwood was a little teardrop-shaped camper my parents had for many years. It was perfectly compact and nicely appointed; it slept six comfortably. In all the camping pictures, before and after I was born, the Driftwood is sitting there sweetly. My mom made little curtains for it, and my dad, in his relentless quest for organization, had it packed in such a way that we could have survived a nuclear winter without going hungry or running out of propane. My parents sold it for god knows what reason, and they sold it to Tinker Jones, who parked it in a turnaround in his driveway and never moved it again. It sat there for years and years, and eventually a tree fell on it and Tink never moved the tree, either, so it came to resemble a piece of found sculpture. Going to the Jones’s was like visiting one’s children in a loveless and ill-run orphanage.

  I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad’s truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasol
ine. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly.

  Later still I will ask for the smell of Tinker Jones’s backyard. He had a small pond, on which floated white ducks and mallards and geese, and a big barn where the chickens roosted. There were guinea hens and shy quail hiding in the bushes at the edge of the woods. The air was permeated with the smell of the birds. It was lovely.

  I made a deal with my dad—we were big on deals. I had promised that if he would let me have my own chicken I would take care of her promptly every day, and spend time with her, and never sigh when he reminded me to claim her eggs. In return he would build her a nice big cage, which he did, and a roosting box filled with fresh straw. My other part of the bargain, the tricky part, was that I had exactly the distance between Tinker’s house and our house, about eleven miles, to tame her.

  I could choose from any of the young chickens in the barn, but it wasn’t hard. I wasn’t swept away by the cute chicks, and I didn’t covet any of the elaborately colored or fluffy-legged ones. The minute I saw my chicken I knew.

  She was a young banty hen, a junior-sized chicken, and her feathers were black-and-white speckled. I named her Speckles. Tink put her in a box for me, and she and I climbed into the back of Dad’s truck, which had a camper shell on it at the time, and we headed for home.

  I opened her box with no chicken-taming technique at my disposal, just my utter good will. I don’t remember what actually transpired between us, but by the time we got home and Dad opened the tailgate, Speckles was sitting on my shoulder, and if I made kissing sounds at her she turned and pecked me lightly on the lips.