She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  “Do you know what you do with one of these?” Rose asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “You put it in your nose like this,” she said, placing the seed part just inside her nostril so that the petals flared out around her nose. It was beautiful, like nostril jewelry.

  “Give me one,” I said, picking a little blossom off the tree.

  Rose added another to her own face and then she really looked like a flower garden. I was adjusting mine when I forgot what I was doing and inhaled. Up! went the little seed. Up! went the lovely little petals.

  “Jeez O Flip!” I shouted. The little seed was all the way up in my brain part.

  Rose leapt to her feet. “Okay, look, we’ve got to get that out and don’t tell my mom. Or else let’s just leave it in there.” She looked around, furtive as one of the dope fiends onDragnet. “How does it feel, can you breathe?”

  I studied her as I felt around along the side of my nose for the location of the seed. “Youshammed me,” I said. I’d always counted on Rose to be a straight-up, good-grades, book-reading kind of girl, and here she was getting frisky. The little flower had been dusty with pollen. I sneezed.

  “I didn’t exactly sham you,” Rose said as I walked out of her yard.

  I sneezed again. “Oh, yeah? Then why do I have a persimmon up my nose?” I shouted back. I sneezed again. The whole thing was becoming uncomfortable, and I could hardly get any air up my left nose hole.

  On the walk home I sneezed twelve more times. I had read in theGuinness Book of World Records, which had become my favorite book, that a man had spent the last few years of his life sneezing and then his heart wore out. I stopped in front of the Marathon and felt my heart. I sneezed again.

  When I walked in the house, Mom covered the mouthpiece of the telephone. “God bless you,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I headed straight upstairs. I was afraid for Mom to discover the truth, because she only had three rules in the entire world, which doesn’t amount to many, and thus it was improbably rude that I’d broken one in public.

  1.There’s no such thing as a free lunch. (This was patently untrue, since about half my elementary school was on the Free Lunch program.)

  2. Don’t give advice to God. (Secretly I did nothing else, but I didn’t figure Mom needed to know it. I said to God: Find my house slippers. Close school tomorrow. Feed the dogs. Give my mom a car so she can go to the CLEP thing.)

  3. Don’t stick anything up your nose.

  I tried to poke at the seed with a pencil, but it seemed I just pushed it up farther. Disaster loomed. I finally figured out what I needed to do. I fetched the vacuum cleaner out of Mom and Dad’s closet, and disconnected the tube part from the big flat part. I didn’t have much experience with vacuum cleaners, but I had plenty with Taking Apart. I held the tube up to my left nose hole and turned the sweeper on with my foot. There was all manner of dust and cat hair in the tube, and the combination of the dust and the noise the machine made caused me to jump backward and lose control of the hose, which jumped around on the floor. I began sneezing in earnest. No way would my heart survive this one. I gave one big final sneeze and the flower came out, just as Mom turned the corner into her bedroom. I speedy quick put my hand down and let the vacuum cleaner suck up the seed.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked, truly bewildered.

  “Sweepin’,” I answered, pointing to the vacuum cleaner.

  “You’re sitting on the floor. What are you sweeping? What’s all over your nose?” She leaned over, licked her thumb, and threatened me with a spit bath. “Were you vacuuming yourface ?”

  “Ha! Wouldn’t that be ridiculous.” I pulled my T-shirt up and scrubbed hard at my nose, destroying the evidence. “I must have just gotten dusty playing at Rose’s. Whew! That’s a dusty place.”

  Mom looked at me for a minute. “Put the sweeper away, please,” she said as she turned back toward the den.

  “Okay! Not a problem!”

  I looked out the window. There was still an hour or so of daylight left. I left the vacuum cleaner lying in pieces on the floor and ran outside.

  Mom should have been upset about missing her chance to take the CLEP test, but she wasn’t, and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. Then one night, weeks after we saw Abraham Lincoln, I was sitting on the couch with her and coloring in my coloring book, listening to her talk on the phone. She often tucked the phone against her shoulder while she talked, and in that way could continue knitting or reading. I’d never seen a person do so many things at once. And her voice was just a steady murmur, like a voice I sometimes heard as I was falling asleep.

  She was talking to one of her women friends; I couldn’t tell who. I heard her say, “I have to be there by ten this Saturday to register. No, it’s okay, it’s all taken care of.” Then she changed the subject, and in a few minutes she hung up. The phone rang a little later and she said the same thing to that friend, and by the time I’d finished coloring Snow White in Her Glass Casket, she’d said it to four or five different people. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, her head tucked down, her knitting needles ticking together in a rhythmic, hypnotic sway. All those years I had thought she was just sitting there, but it turned out she’d been quietly amassing an army, and now they were coming to take her home.

  On Saturday morning, Dad didn’t go anywhere. He puttered in his toolshed; he took a little constitutional around town. He drank coffee and whistled, and in his whistle was something to be devoutly avoided. I stayed around the house. We were all waiting on something. A little after nine a car pulled up behind Dad’s truck. It was Mom’s friend Carol, who was one of my favorites. Carol had peachy-colored skin and wore her hair wrapped around the top of her head like a sticky bun. She had a beautiful smile, and when she had laundry to do she said she had to get to herwarshing. Her Wiener Dog had been the first dog to ever bite me, but I didn’t hold it against either of them.

  “Hey, kiddo!” Carol said when she saw me. She had a big voice.

  “Hi, Carol! Mom’s inside!” I had a big voice, too, when Carol was around.

  We walked in the front door. Mom looked at us. She stood up.

  They left without saying anything to Dad. He came down to the sidewalk and stood with me as we watched them drive away.

  “Time was, a woman wouldn’t have gotten in a man’s marriage that way,” Dad said.

  I wasn’t sure what he expected me to say.Times change? Or did he want me to remember one of Mom’s handy mottoes, likeWe must live while it is day ? I looked up at him. He wasn’t really talking to me.

  My brother’s big green Plymouth was still sitting where he’d parked it when he left for Fort Polk, Louisiana. It hadn’t started in three weeks and the windshield wipers didn’t work. Dad complained once a day that he’d lost the key, and so in addition to having it towed down to the mechanic who worked at the old gas station on the south end of town, he was going to have to have a key made before Dan came home from boot camp.

  The CLEP test was scheduled for a Wednesday, and on Monday afternoon as I walked home from school I saw the most amazing thing. Mom was sitting in Dan’s car, trying to start it. In my entire life I’d never seen my mother sit in the driver’s seat of anything. I walked up and tapped on the window. She was staring straight ahead, and appeared for a moment not to see me. I tapped again. Mom’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh as she opened the door. I watched her slip the lost key into the pocket of her house-dress, then she climbed out of the car and kissed me on the top of my head and started toward the house. I closed the car door. No one ever precisely asked me to, but good Lord if I’d only had a nickel for every secret I was obliged to keep.

  On Wednesday, Lindy and I stayed home from school. Rain was coming down in sheets, hard enough and fast enough that I feared for the little May flowers. Melinda asked Mom what she was going to wear, and Mom produced an enormous orange dress from the back of her closet.

  “Mom Mary lent it to me,” Mom said
, holding it up for inspection.

  Melinda swallowed. “What size is it?”

  “It’s a 24.That should be just about right.”

  Lindy and I didn’t look at each other.

  After we got Mom in the dress, she put on the shoes Mom Mary had given her to go with the dress. “Oh no! They’re too big and I’m running out of time!”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t panic. Sweetheart,” Melinda said, turning to me, “go get today’s newspaper.”

  I ran in the den and grabbed theCourier-Times. Lindy tore the front page in half, wadded it up and stuffed it in the toes of the orange high heels. “Try this.”

  Mom had put her hair, which was thin and baby-fine, in a bun, and when she leaned over to put the shoes on a second time, some of it slid out of the pins and fell around her face. She walked a bit unsteadily into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

  “Dear God. I look like a drunken school bus.”

  When Mom picked up her purse and headed for the door, I knew she was going to try Danny’s car again, and I felt Dad’s voice well up in my throat:You’ll never make it. You don’t know how to drive, and that car’s got no windshield wipers. Would you trade your lifefor this? But I didn’t say anything and neither did Melinda. Mom kissed me on the cheek and hugged Lindy, and the two of us girls went to the picture window in the living room and watched her.

  She walked down the steps and out onto the sidewalk, the rain pummeling her plastic rain hat and the old plaid coat she was wearing. She took the key out of her coat pocket and got in the car, then put her head down on the steering wheel, and as she sat that way the rain gradually began to ease, and then she sat up and tried the ignition, and the car started and the rain stopped all at the same time.

  “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” I said, flabbergasted.

  Mom turned and waved at us. Danny’s car lurched into Charles Street; stopped; lurched again, and Mom figured out what she was doing and drove straight on down the street.

  We watched her until she turned onto Broad Street and out of sight. Melinda straightened up. “She didn’t ask for much in the past twenty-seven years.”

  “I guess she didn’t.”

  “She’s got eighty-six cents in her purse, nothing else. I don’t know what will happen to her if the car won’t start when it’s time to come home.”

  I knew I should still be worried, but I suddenly felt that anything was possible, and that most things, though certainly not all, would turn out okay.

  A few weeks later, an envelope came from Ball State. Mom opened it like it was the Academy Awards, and sat for a few minutes studying the results.

  “What’s it say? How’d you do? Did you get a A plus?” I asked, trying to peer over her shoulders.

  “I tested out of forty hours,” Mom said, flipping through a catalog that had come with the letter.

  I counted. Forty hours was not quite two days. But two days out of school was better than nothing.

  “Sorry about that, Mom,” I said. I thought I might ride down to Rose’s house and tell her Mom passed.

  “That’s a whole year, sweetheart,” she said as I headed toward the door. I stopped.

  “A wholeyear ?”

  Mom nodded. And then I saw on her face that she was as shocked as I was; she didn’t know any better than I did what to make of the news. For a few more seconds we were just frozen, and then she shrugged her shoulders —What can you do? — and reached over and picked up the phone.

  I Knew Glen

  Before He Was a Superstar

  Dad called me inside when it started to get dark. He told me that if I’d come in and take a bath without fighting him I could watch the Glen Campbell show. I acted bored with Glen Campbell, but in fact, I thought he was the best singer in the world besides Barry Gibb. Plus his little cap of blond hair always lay on his head as still and soft as a sleeping cat.

  I had an album of his that had on it maybe the best song of the decade, “Where’s the Playground Susie,” which is essentially about a good-looking blond man asking for directions. Dad sometimes called my sister Susie, for vague historical reasons, and Melinda and Glen would have made a very handsome couple, so I was glad they had never met. It was bad enough that my sister had the attentions of Joe Overton who lived down the street and was a friend of my brother. He had, strictly speaking, been my first love, and I was only beginning to recover from him.

  Once I got in the tub I usually had quite a good time. I played an ongoing game that was essentially a bathtub version of Evil Queen, my favorite game to play with Rose and Maggie, reduced to just one player. In this game I was forced to slave away at an Evil Laundromat. Before getting in the tub I collected all the washrags I could find. My job was to wash them in front of me, then swirl them around in the rinse water on my right side, pass them behind me for drying, and fold them on my left side. At a good Laundromat that would have been the end of the game, but because it was Evil, as soon as I got them folded I had to start all over again. The washrags never got clean enough.

  I hated personal hygiene, and yet once I got in the tub it was hard to get me out. Dad used to become convinced that I’d drowned, because I played so quietly. I worried him to no end. The bathroom was connected to our den, where we did all our living, and so Dad kept time on his watch from his favorite chair in front of the television. Every seven minutes he would call out, “Zip? You all right?” and I would yell back, “Playing!”

  I finally got out of the tub only a few minutes before Glen Campbell was supposed to begin. I was hot and thirsty from sitting in the water so long. We had our own well, which had the coldest, most sharply metallic water in town. All other water tasted like soap to me. Rose’s water, for instance, passed through a softener and an aerator as it came out the tap, so it was foul-tastingand full of holes. On the bathroom sink was a plastic coffee cup Blue Bonnet margarine came in. We had a million of them. I stood naked in front of the sink, drinking cup after cup of cold water. I probably drank eight cups before I felt better. Once I put the cup down I realized that my belly was sticking out like an orphan’s and that I couldn’t very easily bend down to pick up my pajamas. I took a step toward the bathtub and heard water sloshing around in my stomach as if in a jar. I stopped. I took a step. Water was most definitely making a noise in my stomach.

  I threw open the bathroom door and ran stark naked into the den. My dad turned and looked at me without any discernible surprise. Mom looked up from her corner of the couch, where she was knitting.

  “Listen, listen! No, wait — turn down the TV!”

  Dad stood up and turned down the sound. My parents gathered close to me, and I swung my suddenly fat little belly back and forth, and there it was, the sound of the sea.

  “Well, listen to that,” Dad said, wide-eyed.

  “Now, what do you suppose is in there?” Mom asked, looking at my dad.

  “It’s water! I drank about a hundred cups of water and it’s all sloshing around!” Before they could express any more wonder at my trick, the Glen Campbell show started.

  “Okay, that’s enough, everybody sit down for the show,” I said, directing them to their standard locations.

  “Aren’t you going to get dressed?” Dad asked, turning up the volume on the TV, by which time I was already curled up on the couch next to Mom.

  “She can sit here like this for a little while, Bob. Let her get dressed during a commercial.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let her get dressed during a commercial.”

  Mom pulled the end of the afghan she was knitting over my legs. It was soft and warm, even though it had so many holes in it. Dad handed me my best coloring book, “Sleeping Beauty,” and my crayons. I had to have my own because I pressed down so hard that Mom and Melinda refused to share with me anymore. And all through Glen Campbell no one reminded me that I had to get dressed, and so I got to spend the rest of the evening happily working on my coloring book, naked.

  The Rules of Evil Queen


  Object of the Game: Evil Queen has no objective other than complaining and the avoidance of beheading.

  The Players: Rose, Maggie, and Zippy. Patrick plays only by contributing his cloth diapers. (Note: Always use clean diapers. The game can take a disastrous turn if the diapers have been used even a little.)

  The Rules: Player One stands at the baby washtub and washes the stack of cloth diapers by hand. She then hands them to Player Two, who is stationed at the canopy bed. Player Two removes the canopy pegs and hangs up the just-washed diapers, holding them in place with the canopy pegs. They dry immediately. Player Two hands the diapers to Player Three, who is stationed at the miniature ironing board, which Zippy secretly covets for its smallness. Player Three irons the diapers and hands them back to Player One, who washes them and hands them to Player Two, etc.

  Restrictions: Players may not, at any time, discuss anything but their own downtroddenness and the shocking fertility of the Evil Queen, who has 137 children. Players may occasionally note the suffering of the other serfs, such as those working in the Evil Bread Shoppe and the Evil Forge, wherein are made the Evil Breads and Evil Horseshoes, but Players must endlessly remind one another that no one works harder or under worse conditions than the Evil Diaper Service. (Note: Restrictions apply to all variations of the game, including Evil Laundromat — washcloths — and Evil Shoeshine.)

  Conclusion of Play: Often corresponds to dinnertime or the sudden, uncontrollable sleepiness of Player Three.

  Vacuum Cleaner

  The following is a transcript of an actual tape made on my blue tape recorder. The setting is my Mom Mary’s house on Shoppe Avenue, in New Castle.

  DAD: Donita, look at this.

  DONITA, MY DAD’S SISTER: (Shouts) Mother, what are you doing in the closet?