A Girl Named Zippy Read online

  MY MOM AND I were sitting on the couch early in the morning, winter dark. I was curled up against her as she worked on a sweater. Dan and Melinda were getting ready for school; I didn’t go to school yet and had begun to believe that kindergarten wasn’t in my best interests anyway. When my siblings left in the morning I stood with my nose pressed against the screen door long enough to imprint a little waffle pattern of rust that I would try not to disturb for the rest of the day.

  My brother was a senior in high school and still rode the school bus every morning to the new high school down the highway. I gathered from conversations I overheard that this was some grave form of injustice, especially in light of the fact that my sister, who was only a sophomore, rode to school in a car with a friend, which meant Danny had to leave earlier than Melinda. In addition to having an unfair ride, most days Melinda got into the bathroom first and then wouldn’t come out, even while Danny stood outside the door nervously, watching the clock tick toward the time he had to go.

  The kitchen and the den, in which we did all our living, were actually one long room divided by a “breakfast bar” my dad had built, and at the end of this room was our only bathroom. Danny knocked on the bathroom door, which was wooden, painted vaguely green, and had a tarnished brass doorknob that sometimes turned too far to the right. I had been convinced sixty-four times that I was stuck in the bathroom forever, my only hope of escape being to climb through the window, which was painted shut and led directly out onto the silver fuel-oil tank. Eventually I would remember to turn the knob back to the left and would escape just before I was forced to bellow for the volunteer fire department.

  Inside the door was a little hook-and-loop that served as a lock. My parents never locked the bathroom door, but Melinda and I did even if we were only going in to brush our teeth or look for a towel. I personally believed that the bathroom door should be kept shut at all times, ever since my hamster Skippy had escaped from his little cage and mysteriously drowned in my potty chair. My sister could do a dreadfully accurate imitation of the look on Skippy’s face when we found him, and she preferred to perform it at odd times, just so I would never forget that I was implicated in the death of an innocent rodent.

  Dan knocked on the bathroom door with long and serious pauses in between the knocks. Melinda shouted, “I’ll be out in a minute!” in way that suggested she had no such intentions.

  “Lindy! Let your brother in the bathroom; he has to leave soon,” Mom said, without dropping a stitch.

  Melinda didn’t answer. Dan looked at his watch, which was attached to a two-inch wide, brown leather band, then raised his fist and knocked again, harder this time.

  “I’ll be out soon!” Melinda shouted, with a sort of barely concealed glee.

  “Lindy! Your brother needs to get in the bathroom!”

  Danny sat down. He stood up. He paced, then knocked on the door, then sat down. I was thinking this would be an excellent time to have my little blue tape recorder out, but I didn’t dare get up to find it. There was something about the way Dan stood up for the last time that made me instinctively turn and look at my mom, who stopped knitting. A mighty sound, a sort of giving way, came from the direction of the bathroom, and by the time I looked over, the vaguely green bathroom door was off the hinges and lying on the couch beside me, the little eye still dangling from the little hook lock.

  Melinda was just sitting on the edge of the tub, completely dressed, her hair combed, her makeup on. Danny took one look at her, then raised his left arm and slapped her open-handed hard enough that she fell in the tub. Her wail was instantaneous, but my mom and I continued to sit as silent as stumps, watching the scene unfold. Danny turned to the sink, where he quickly brushed his teeth and ran a comb through his hair. He was out of the bathroom before Melinda was out of the tub. Mom and I watched him shrug into his winter coat and walk out into the dark to wait on the corner for the bus.

  “What are you going to do about this?!” Melinda cried, her hand against her cheek, which was already swelling, and red.

  “Well, Melinda. For heaven’s sake, you provoked him mercilessly.”

  “You love him better than me! He’s your favorite!” Melinda said, as she grabbed her coat and made an angry exit.

  Mom and I looked at each other. “I’d have slapped her, too,” she said. “I would have had to ask someone else to rip the door off the hinges, but then I would have slapped her.”

  AT SCHOOL MELINDA was something of a hero. All of her friends gathered around her to hear the story, then spent the day giving Danny thunderous looks. Even some of his own friends were surprised, but he refused to say anything in his own defense.

  By the time Dan and Melinda got home from school, I had studied that bathroom door long and hard. I kept imagining the moment my dad came home from work and saw it lying there on the couch, as strange as a tooth disconnected from a head. My impulse was to take both of Danny’s hands in mine and say, “Good-bye, brother.”

  Melinda had been thinking the same thing. As we all sat in the den waiting for Dad’s truck to hit the two big holes filled with icy, muddy water in front of the house, she kept saying to Dan, “Any minute now! Hmmmm. I wonder what Dad’s going to say about this one. You pulled off the bathroom door and slapped your sister in the face. What time do you have there, Daniel?”

  Dan sat stone silent, staring at the wall, flexing his jaw muscles, which were already more developed than other men’s biceps.

  Mooreland was so quiet we could hear Dad’s truck at the four-way stop at the corner. We heard him turn onto Charles Street; the dreaded splashing into the puddles; the pause while he put the truck in park, then gathered up his wallet, his lighter, his gun. The closing of the truck door, muffled in the cold. And then he was in the house and putting his things down on the dining room table. He parted the heavy curtains that separated the den from the living room.

  No one said a word. He glanced at our faces and then saw the door on the couch.

  “Somebody want to tell me what happened here?” Dad’s voice was so deep we felt it before we heard it.

  “Well, Bob,” Mom began. “Melinda was in the bathroom getting ready for school and Dan needed to get in there, and she . . . procrastinated a bit, and Dan, well, forcibly removed the door and found Melinda sitting on the edge of the tub, so he slapped her, then got ready for school and left.”

  Dad nodded. “He knocked a few times, did he?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He knocked a few times.”

  “Then he just tore the door off, found Lindy sitting on the tub, completely ready? So he slapped her? Did he hurt her?”

  Mom looked at Melinda, who appeared to have been injured in a variety of ways, none of them precisely physical. Melinda nodded vigorously, and started to say, “I fell into the tub!” but Mom interrupted her. “No, he didn’t really hurt her.”

  Dad had yet to move from the position he was in when he first saw the detached door. He bit his bottom lip a moment and studied Dan, who wouldn’t meet his eye.

  “Son? You think you could help me put this door back up?”

  And so they set about it. Melinda stormed out of the den and stomped upstairs to her bedroom, which was so cold, I knew, she could see her breath. My mom fetched my coloring book and I sat on the couch pretending I was deeply engaged in making Maleficent look so scary she could actually put a lovely, innocent princess to sleep for a hundred years. In fact I was keeping one eye firmly on my dad and brother, who were working together without any visible tension. It seemed to me that Dan should have shown some sign that he had won, but he didn’t. Whatever battle he was fighting was so complicated it couldn’t be described in terms as simple as victory, or loss.

  * * *

  THERE SHE IS

  No event was more important than the Mooreland Fair, and no one was more honored than the Queen, so the year my sister ran for Fair Queen, 1972, I broke open my piggy bank to put all my money in the decorated coff
ee can that sat in front of her picture in the Big Tent at the entrance to the fair. The queen was decided by a process called “a-penny-a-vote,” which was modeled on democracy but confused with capitalism, and thus was successful, as processes go. Farmers who came from out of town to watch the horse or tractor pulls had to first pass the display of the Queen candidates’ pictures, and on many evenings I would see a group of them standing thoughtfully in the small booth, hands in their pockets, their pants on fire with small change.

  I lurked around the Queen’s booth all fair week, sending out my most powerful ESP beams to everyone who entered: pick Melinda, pick Melinda, pick Melinda. This worked about half the time, but was useless against the thick-skulled, such as a dairy farmer named James who walked in every day and put a nickel in every can, causing me to slap my forehead in frustration. I couldn’t imagine how a man who consistently canceled his own vote was able to manage a bunch of cows.

  Of course my sister was the most beautiful girl anywhere, but as Saturday, the last day of the fair approached, I became sick with worry. What if there was cheating? (I didn’t stop to consider that if any cheating had been done it would have been orchestrated by my father, so I had nothing to fear.) What if some other family had emptied a bank account into their daughter’s can? It was a tough decision, but by noon I knew I had to do it. I broke open the yellow, plastic pig with the words Farmer’s State Bank of Mooreland on the side and counted my loot. I’d been saving a long time. I had $1.61. I dropped the pennies into a burlap bank bag my dad had stolen and marched down to the fairgrounds.

  Most of the cans were nearly full. The girl whose picture stood next to my sister’s was fairly brimming. I took the lid off Melinda’s can and poured in the whole of my liquid assets.

  ON SATURDAY EVENING the gymnasium was teeming with excitement. All the girls sat on the stage in their lovely dresses, wearing corsages or carrying bouquets. The stage was decorated with lime-green Kleenex flowers, and a big square of poster board stuck to the front of the stage declared the title of the pageantry in words spelled out in glue and glitter. As her name was called, each contestant walked to the front of the stage, where Darryl Radford, the perennial emcee, asked her one question. For obvious reasons the questions were kept brief and manageable, like “What is your name?” and “Who is your sponsor this evening?”

  Then my sister was called, and she walked up to Darryl in her white dress and black satin belt. She had made the dress herself. Her long, black, wavy hair shone in the stage lights, and her gray eyes were as round and lively as those of a cartoon princess. She and Darryl had known each other all their lives, and were fond of each other.

  “Good evening, miss. Could you tell the audience your name?”

  And all she said was “Melinda Kay Jarvis,” but somehow her clear mind and her bright wit came through in her voice, and there was a very subtle little wavy shift in the audience, as if they had felt it. I sat in the front row, seven years old and beaming. Nobody deserved to win more than my sister. Nobody was as perfect and charming and irresistible. Nobody was as generous and true blue and good with stray animals. Nobody was as funny and sarcastic and miserable at home, scared of her father, desperate to get away, misused, overburdened, on the edge of tears all the time.

  I crossed my fingers, prayed, tapped my foot, stuck my finger in my ear. I loved my sister so much I had even worn a dress for the occasion, which was making me perverse. The skirt was lined with some itchy netting, the collar was too tight, it was a pukey yellow color and smelled like mildew and wet coon hound. I had dragged the dress out of the back of the closet where it had formerly served as a bed for my cat Smokey and her five kittens. I was simultaneously regretting my insane loyalty and wishing I had also combed my hair and worn shoes when my sister was named first- runner-up.

  Mary Murray began playing “There She Is” on the tuneless school piano and Darryl sang into the popping portable microphone as Carolyn, the girl whose picture stood next to my sister’s in the judging booth, rose from her chair and walked unsteadily to the front of the stage, crying and clutching her heart. My sister stood next to her, graciously offering her congratulations.

  The audience clapped heartily for Carolyn, whose blond hair and blue eyes were real crowd pleasers. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. My sister was denied her title. An unworthy girl had won. The farmers liked Carolyn better than Melinda, and I had lost a dollar and sixty-one cents, the most money I’d ever had at one time in my life.

  I don’t remember much of what happened afterward until later in the evening, when someone came and found me near the merry-go-round, where I had just finished ripping the lining out of my dress and was desperately trying to stuff it in a trash barrel. There was a flurry of activity around the Band Boosters Food Tent. I could see my sister through the crowd, laughing with Astor Main, the Fair Board president and local undertaker, as he placed the gorgeous, much-coveted Fair Queen tiara on her head. For just a moment I had a chilling vision of my father taking the entire Fair Board hostage with his hunting rifle, which quickly evolved into him demanding a recount, during which it was discovered that Melinda had actually won by a hundred and sixty-one votes.

  The truth was that just after the original crowning ceremonies, Carolyn admitted to one of her fellow contestants that she was three months pregnant, and was getting married in two weeks. Word spread like a field fire. With very little deliberation it was decided that Melinda, a girl of indisputable virginity, would hold the Fair Queen title.

  Thus my sister became Fair Queen by default, and the next year in the Fair Parade I was allowed to ride alongside her in the back of the Queen’s convertible, which bore the legend AN OLD-FASHIONED GIRL WITH AN OLD-FASHIONED SMILE , chosen just for Lindy by our clever mother. The handmade signs were taped to either door and surrounded by the ubiquitous flowers made of pipe cleaners and Kleenex. Melinda and I both wore high-necked Victorian dresses and Quaker bonnets and held parasols. Everything would have been perfect except that I refused to wear shoes, and so I had to sit very still and not swing my dirty, scabbed feet where they might be seen by the adoring crowd.

  * * *

  BLOOD OF THE LAMB

  It wasn’t enough for my mom to make me go to our Quaker church every Sunday; in addition, I had to listen to Batsell Barrett Baxter on television as we were getting ready to go.

  Batsell Barrett Baxter was either an early example of a telepreacher or else an early example of Claymation. He had no live audience and no flashy suits. He sat dead still in a chair and spoke into the camera without ever moving his head or altering his blood pressure. More a scholar than an evangelist, he told his television audience about the Good News of Jesus Christ with the same energy and enthusiasm that doctors generally reserve for discussion of really bad hemorrhoids. My mom loved him. Sometimes he even had “live” guests, other old and suited and clinically depressed men who had devoted their lives to God.

  BBB: So. Dr. Brown.

  DR. BROWN:

  BBB: Your book, New Life in the Old Testament, just came out. Here it is. That’s a nice cover. From Agape Press.

  DR. BROWN: Yes.

  BBB: Have you always been interested in the Old Testament?

  DR. BROWN: Yes.

  BBB: Why is that?

  DR. BROWN: Well. Interesting that you should ask that question. I have always felt that . . . [there follows a pause so terrifying and extended that two corn crops fail] . . . our roots, as it were, as the people of the cross, begin with the Hebrew peoples—their fledgling relationship with . . . God . . . ; their inability to abide by His commandments; their exile into Egypt and eventual passage into the Promised Land . . . Jesus Christ is, as it were, the fulfillment of the promises made to the Hebrew peoples in God’s first covenant.

  BBB: God’s first . . .

  DR. BROWN: That being the Old Testament, of course.

  BBB: Of course.
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br />   My dad would have gotten up long before the rest of us, in order to do his mysterious middle-of-the-night stuff, which seemed to include standing in the yard with the dogs and looking up at the sky while drinking instant coffee so hot his upper lip was always a scalded red. Sometimes he went into his tool shed and moved things around, just a little. He whistled. By the time I got up, miserable and furious, it was still dark outside and his day was half done.

  He watched Batsell Barrett Baxter with his arms crossed, his face lit up with a deep and sardonic amusement.

  “Whoa. Amen,” he’d say after a particularly bland but coherent point. Or my personal favorite, which he reserved for when my mom left the room: “You know, Zip: Batsell Barrett Baxter was born dead.” Dad’s insults made me laugh and groan at the same time, because they were absolutely indicative of the power of being grown up. I not only had to spend countless hours of my life worshipping a God I didn’t believe in, I couldn’t even complain about it, whereas Dad just sat down in his chair and called it as he saw it.

  I HAD A FEW TRICKS to keep from leaving for church on time. I most often used the “I Can’t Find My Other Shoe” tactic, and when that failed, “I’ve Lost My Little Pink New Testament.”

  “We’re leaving!” my mom would call out, standing by the front door in one of the patched and remodeled dresses Mom Mary handed down to her. Sometimes she also wore a coat with three-quarter-length sleeves. Sleeves that stopped in the middle of her forearm! Go figure!

  “I can’t find my other shoe!” I’d shout back. “You go on without me; I’ll be right there!” And then I’d dig around under the couch halfheartedly, surreptitiously pushing the lost shoe further and further out of my reach. Eventually, exhausted, I’d flop down on the couch in a sprawled position that suggested maybe I’d just spend the morning watching fishing shows with my dad, who would turn almost without turning and give me the one raised eyebrow look which contained the whole of his childrearing philosophy: “I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, now get up and do what your mother says.”