A Girl Named Zippy (11 page)

“Lindy, hey. Lindy. Melinda. Would you just please tell me what is wrong with that girl?!” I was trying to whisper, but I was exasperated.

She tightened her grip around my throat and kind of lifted me off the floor. “Tom, we have to be going. I’ll see you on Wednesday night and we’ll work this out.”

In seconds we were out the door and on the sidewalk. My feet had never touched the ground. Melinda had me by the arm and she was
dangerously
mad.

“You are so
rude
! I’ve never in all my life . . . I don’t even want to talk to you! You don’t even care how you make other people feel. You nearly embarrassed me to death in there, and I can’t imagine how that poor child felt. You just walk behind me. I’m not talking to you.”

We walked in silence for a few seconds, but I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Lindy? What was wrong with that girl?”

She turned around lightning quick, grabbing me by the arm and giving me a quick shake. I was a tall child, but only weighed about seven pounds, so when she pulled my left arm east, my right arm, my head, and both my legs went west. By this time we were in front of Roscoe Brown’s house. Roscoe had always been favorably disposed toward me, so I hoped he might be out on his porch and would give my sister the what-for. But no Roscoe.

Now she was dragging me and talking through her clenched teeth at the same time. “I can’t believe all the ways Mom and Dad have gone wrong with you, it just makes me crazy. You act like you don’t even have a heart! This summer you didn’t even cry at
Bambi!
What is wrong with you?!”

I was trying to think of how to tell her why I didn’t cry at Bambi even though my heart was broken, when we turned the corner at Reed and Mary Ball’s house. We were almost home.

“Lindy? What was wrong with that girl?”

Melinda took a deep breath, then let it out in a cold cloud. She reached out for my hand, quick to anger and quick to forgive. “She was just born that way, honey.”

It was an answer I hadn’t really expected. She was born that way? It was as if Melinda had both answered my question and refused to answer it. She looked down at me, waiting for me to devil her even more. It was a still kind of look, like the moment when a seesaw is perfectly straight. I had appeared in her life almost without warning when she was ten years old, when she thought she knew what her life was about, and who she was. What she became was my sister. She led me off the dark street and into our house, gently, like a pro.

CHANCE

N
o. No. Take back this card. Give me a different one,” I said, shaking my head and thrusting the card at my dad.

He sat perfectly still across the dining room table on which no meals were ever taken. “You’re giving me back a card I just dealt you?”

“Yes. That’s the six of clubs and I don’t want it because it’s a boy.”

“The six of clubs is a boy?”

“I would like to only have girls in my hand, please.”

He continued to study me a moment, considering his best tactic.

“Zip: when I deal you a hand of cards you just take what you’re given and then we play the game from there. It’s a game of chance.”

“Well, that’s just stupid. Also I don’t want this three of diamonds, because even though diamonds are girls, threes are boys. How many cards am I supposed to have?”

“You’re supposed to have eleven, but I’ve only dealt five so far and you’ve tried to give back two.”

“Then could I please have one two three four five six seven eight cards, please? All girls?”

Dad tapped his very wide, blunt fingertips on the table top, then reached over and picked up a book. He opened it up to a very nonspecific-looking page in the middle and read aloud: “Players may not refuse to accept cards on the basis of boys or girls. Players must accept hand dealt by their dads.”

“Let me see that,” I said, speedy-quick reaching across the table to grab the book.

“Nope. Only adults can look at this rule book. There’s an age limit. Also, you can’t read.”

“Two days ago I read the words french fries and frozen Coke, ask Mom. We were sitting at the counter at Grant’s in New Castle and I just looked up at the board and read them.”

“Can you spell french fries?” Dad asked in a testing sort of way.

“Nope.”

“Could it be that you happen to know you can get french fries and frozen Coke at Grant’s, and so you said you could read the words on the board because you knew they were up there somewhere?”

“Could be.”

“May I please give you this five of diamonds?”

I shook my head yes.

“Okay. What about a queen of spades?”

That one stopped me. It was a girl all right, but not the kind of girl you’d want to hang on to. I took it anyway.

“I don’t think that book you read from has anything to do with cards.”

“And why would you say that?”

“Because there’s a hoot owl on the front of it.”

“Good point. What about the seven of hearts?”

Seven was a boy, but the seven of hearts was a very, very sweet boy. I took it.

“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked my dad, studying my cards carefully.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

I eventually accepted an ace of diamonds, because all aces were girls, even the ace of spades. The two of clubs came next, which I debated, but accepted. Dad went right past the nine of spades—no way. The other red five I took; another queen (although the queens made me nervous); a lonely four that could have been a boy at another time, and finally, the eight of spades. Eights were completely girls, but the black eights were girls who were maybe a little too good at sports.

Dad then dealt his own hand face down, as if he didn’t care a lick what he got. He picked up his cards and studied them in his straight-backed way. His face was as blank as the face of a wild Injun.

“What do I do now?” I asked.

“The object of the game is to put together sets of threes, three cards that match. Do you have three cards that match, like three aces?”

I stared at him.

“No. You don’t. Okay, then. What we’re going to do is take turns getting cards from this pile right here. You decide on a card you don’t want anymore and discard it, then take a new one, and try to put together three sets of three. When you have three sets of three, you put your extra card on the pile when it’s your turn and you win the hand.”

“Who goes first at discharging?”

“You do, because I dealt to you. You actually have eleven cards, so when you discharge you’ll have ten.”

“I’d rather not.”

He looked at me blankly for a moment. “You’d rather not what?”

“I’d rather not go first.”

Some more sitting around saying nothing followed, then Dad carefully studied his hand, and chose one to discard. He placed it on top of the spare cards with a little snap.

“Zippy? What’s the name of this game?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Gin,” he said, and spread his cards out on the table. The winning hand was all boys, in sets of three: three kings, three jacks, and three ugly tens, lined up like war veterans in front of the drugstore. He stood up, slid his cigarettes and silver lighter across the table and into his breast pocket, and headed for the door.

“I’ll see you later,” he said as he stepped out onto the front porch. “Good game.”

“Thanks,” I called after him. I continued to sit at the table for quite a while, sorting out the girls and putting them in a little girl pile where they’d be safe. For good measure I put all the boys back in the box with the Joker, where they belonged.

A SHORT LIST OF THINGS MY FATHER LOST GAMBLING

1.
My pony, Tim. He was excellently small and nice, and lived in the meadow behind the Mooreland Friends Church, with no one’s permission. One day I came home from school, and poof. If it were not for a photograph I have of me astride the little horse, with his name and mine written on the back by my mother, I would for certain think I’d made him up.

2.
A small motorcycle. It appeared on the front porch one morning; no one learned to drive it; shortly thereafter, it was gone.

3.
My mother’s engagement and wedding rings. The wedding band was heavy gold, with a little cluster of shooting stars that even had tails. In the center of each star was a diamond chip. In my imagination she just looked down one day, and they had vanished.

4.
A boat. Like the motorcycle, it simply appeared. We lived nowhere near water, but every day I went out and pretended to drive it at abnormal speeds across choppy waters. For a brief time it took the place of rodeo as my favorite sport.

5.
My twenty-five-dollar savings bond. I won it at the Mooreland Fair in a game of intense skill and concentration called Guess How Many Pennies Are in This Huge Jar. I guessed 468 and
got it exactly right
. My name was announced just before the Grand Champion pull at the Horse and Pony Pull, the zenith of the Mooreland social season. Twenty-five dollars was an unheard of amount of money at the time, and my father volunteered to deposit it in my “savings account” for me, which I had never heard of before that moment. Over the next few years I probably asked him for the money 736 times, and he always assured me we were just waiting for it to mature.

6. A wide variety of excellent hunting beagles.

A SHORT LIST OF THINGS MY FATHER WON GAMBLING

1.
A wide variety of excellent hunting beagles.

2.
A stuffed monkey, which became my most beloved toy. His arms and legs were red and his torso was white, as if he were wearing a long-sleeved union suit. His face and hands and feet were rubber, and he was holding a partially peeled banana that fit superbly in his mouth. He had a jaunty look on his face, and his feet were molded like little tennis shoes. I can’t say enough about how fabulous he was.

3.
Guns: rifles, handguns, muzzle loaders, etc. His favorite shotguns he kept on a rack above the couch in the den; in the drawer of the rack was a small glass tube with a rubber stopper in which he kept my baby teeth.

4.
A strange friend named Burns. He had two daughters who appeared to me to be stolen from their rightful owners, and a profitable little enterprise called the Holiday Cleaners. The gambling group met in the hidden basement of this business. Burns was eventually found dead, shot through the alleged cranium; he was found in the aforementioned basement. No charges were ever filed. (I should probably also list him in the Lost category.)

5.
Money. When he came home with any, regardless of whether our lights were about to be turned off again, we jumped in his truck and went out to dinner, then often to the Dusk to Dawn movies at the Sky-Hi Drive-In. I saw all of the Planet of the Apes movies this way, back to back. It was heaven.

THE WORLD OF IDEAS

M
y grandmother Mildred, who adopted my mom when she was a baby, called our house one Sunday afternoon. Mom answered.

“Hello?”

“Dee Dee?” Mildred’s voice could sharpen pencils. “Where are you?”

“Mother, where did you call?”

“How come you’re not in church?”

Dad could hear Mildred’s voice eking out the edges of the receiver, which caused him to grimace involuntarily.

“Church got out a little while ago. Now I’m home.”

“I’ve got a question for you. Mabel Simpkins told me today that the Jesus who died at Easter was the same one who was born at Christmas. Is that true?” Mildred was a proper medium-well Methodist, as befitted her standing as a moneyed old woman in a small, depressed city. Dad used to say that half the population of New Castle, Indiana, came in on the back of a flatbed truck from Kentucky, all related.

Before Mom could answer, Mildred continued. “I just laughed at Mabel and told her she sure wasn’t making a fool of me. I know Easter comes before Christmas.”

Mom closed her eyes, as if in prayer. Her expression was that of a person being poked with a straight pin, but enduring it, stoically.

“We don’t choose our relatives,” she always said.

“Damn shame,” was my dad’s reply.

MY MOM WAS A
PERSON
who had some ideas, and she’d been having them for a long time. For instance, her birth mother left only one request at the orphanage where she dropped off my mom, when she was nine months old: that she be raised Catholic.
Her new parents gave it an honest shot, but Mom consistently got in bad trouble during catechism for asking questions. She couldn’t stop herself. Finally, when she was ten years old, the nuns were discussing the candles that signified the presence of God in the church, and before Mom could stop herself her hand shot in the air and the sister called her name,
Delonda?
rather despondently, and my mom asked if the candles went out did God leave? And that was it. They asked
her
to leave. My mother is the only person I’ve ever met who was excommunicated before puberty.

Then she got to junior high and she and one of her best friends, Marjorie, got in an argument and Marjorie got permanently mad at her, which caused Mom no end of heartache, since everyone else flat-out loved her. Mom was extremely popular, by design. Realizing at a young age (with assistance from Mildred, who often told her she was ugly) that she would not be petite or blond or conventionally pretty, she set out to be the funniest and kindest person in her school, a friend to everyone, and she succeeded. That she could alienate a friend she truly loved was a grievous thing, and in her desperation she went to Marjorie’s house and when Marjorie asked what she wanted Mom said, “I just wanted to tell you I’m dying of a brain tumor.” Marjorie immediately put aside the slight, and then proceeded to tell everyone else in the school, and everyone became astronomically fond of Mother for a long time, in preparation for the grief of losing her. Later she was cured by a miracle, and it was a terrific relief to her many, many friends.

THE FIRST TIME
I ever truly grasped the concept of chromosomes, and the transmission of DNA, I was sitting in the truck with Dad, giving him some sideways looks. Earlier that day I had walked into a bait shop, and before I could say anything, the old man behind the counter had said, “You must be Bob Jarvis’s daughter.” I was unaccustomed to looking in mirrors, with good reason, but after that comment, all the way to the lake, I peeked into the big side mirror on Dad’s truck, trying to see what the old man saw. I looked at myself. I looked at my dad. My suspicion that I hadn’t actually been purchased from gypsies, as my family insisted, seemed to be confirmed.

It appeared that I had been split down the middle by my parents, genetically, to my misfortune. I had my dad’s curly hair and his long face and his very big, round eyes, but my eyes were close set, like my mom’s. I had Mom’s nose and her little square chin and her tiny mouth, with Dad’s huge teeth in them. I had Dad’s giraffe neck and his hands and feet and Mom’s short torso and long legs. On the whole, I couldn’t imagine a worse outcome. I slumped against the truck door.

There was a great deal I didn’t understand about chromosomes, to be perfectly honest. I’d need to go to Rose’s and ask her. I started thinking about what it meant that I had Dad’s eyes, and I came to this conclusion: if I inherited what made his eyes his, wouldn’t it follow that I also inherited what his eyes had seen—what they knew? And if I had his hands, wouldn’t my hands know how to do some things that he taught them a long time ago, skills his hands had learned from those that came before his? It was an idea that made me bigger than I had been and smaller than I might be later: my mother was good at reading books (reading them out loud, too), making cinnamon biscuits, and coloring in a coloring book. Also she was a good eater of popcorn and knitter of sweaters with my initials right in them. She could sit really still. She knew how to believe in God and sing really loudly. When she sneezed our whole house rocked. My father was a great smoker and driver of vehicles. Also he could whistle like a bird and could perform any task with either his left or right hand, a condition he taught me was called “ambisexual.” (When I told my teacher about this skill, she quick put her hand over my mouth and told me some things were best kept in the family.) He could hold a full coffee cup while driving and never spill a drop, even going over bumps. He lost his temper faster than anyone.

Looked at this way, it appeared that the rest of my life would be remarkably like the present, only I would get bigger and have to take up smoking.

MILDRED LIVED IN THE FIRST-FLOOR
apartment of a beautiful old house in New Castle. The house had a driveway that started at the street and went up a hill right into the middle of the side yard, missing her garage by a good fifteen feet. It was a puzzle. I always assumed it was a design flaw, or a whim, but my mom finally told me it was the result of a tornado that had picked the whole house up and moved it over twenty or so feet, plopping it down directly over the family graveyard. And she was right; standing on Mildred’s front porch you could see half a dozen old tombstones flattened and sticking out from under the foundation of the house like the legs of the Wicked Witch. One of the tombstones had been leveled face up, so that the words were legible. It had marked the grave of a boy named Daniel, who died young of unnamed causes. I asked my mom if that was where she had gotten my brother’s name and she said, gracious, I hope not.

Inside, Mildred’s house was beautiful and genteel, without a false note. A spotless white carpet covered the hardwood floors. The antiques were expensive pieces in pristine condition; on her marble-faced fireplace was a clock that never lost time and a bust of Apollo that Mildred called Clark Gable. Mom once tried to tell her who Apollo was, but Mildred just waved her hands, irritated. She would have no part of explanations.

I was especially taken with the bathroom. The tin ceiling was unusually high, and the walls were covered with pink tile. The floor was tile, too, so that the whole room felt cold and echoey. It looked pink, but it didn’t feel pink. Some of the tiles had designs which, upon closer inspection, were revealed to be flamingoes. The man who lived in the apartment before my grandmother had been a bachelor doctor, and he had hung himself in this very bathroom, from a large hook that had been designed to hold a fern. The hook was still there.

I watched Mildred carefully for signs that she might be affected, which is not to say haunted, by the fact that her house 1) had been moved twenty feet by a tornado; 2) was sitting on top of a graveyard; 3) bore the mark of a terrible death scene. When I mentioned it to her she simply said pshaw and went on about her business, which was usually cleaning. She was the only person I ever knew who dusted her lightbulbs.

Mildred’s idea of a joke was a cup that had printed on the side
YOU SAID HALF A CUP!
It was a cup cut in half. Her idea of dessert was large-pearl tapioca, a culinary item that appears to be on the endangered list. Biting into those pearls, which were approximately the size of adult peas, provided the same little thrill of a soft giving-way and then a crunch that one ordinarily only got from the cartilage in a chicken breast. I loved it, and ate every pearl separately, which drove Mildred to distraction.

“You’d better eat that faster,” she’d shriek at me after lunch.

“No, thank you,” I’d say, concentrating on catching an especially juicy one.

“That’s just ridiculous, what you’re doing.”

“I like it this way.” Her spindly and antique dining room chairs were tall, and perfect for swinging one’s feet as one ate.

“Hmmmph,” she’d say, picking up her silver cigarette case and her lighter. “Stop swinging your legs.”

Mildred smoked, beautifully, for sixty-five years. Shortly after she turned eighty she called my mom and said she had heard at church that smoking was bad for her health. Was that true? Mom affirmed that it was. Mildred put her cigarettes down and never picked them up again. She claimed they never crossed her mind, a sentence that caused Dad merely to raise his eyebrows.

I WENT TO ROSE
’s
HOUSE
to talk to her about science, and inheritance. I was wearing my old saddle oxfords and, as an experiment, a dress that I had picked up at a rummage sale. It was a few sizes too big, which kept me from feeling it much. Over the top of the dress I was wearing a raincoat Mom Mary had passed along, which was pink and gray and black plaid. I’d never seen an uglier thing. The combination of dress and raincoat made me feel like a new person, a serious and curious person, and I was anxious to show myself off to Rose.

She couldn’t come outside right away, because she and Maggie were cleaning. They did a lot of the cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child’s life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping.

Rose said I could wait outside for her, on the swing set. I swung across the monkey bars for a while, then climbed up on top of them. I decided to jump down from there, because I’d never done it before. I landed so hard that my ankles stung, and my heels felt like they’d been pushed up into the back of my leg. I climbed up and did it again, then finally Rose popped her head out the back door and said if I didn’t stop pretty soon she might see my panties, which was a dress-wearing dilemma I hadn’t considered. She suggested that maybe I could just swing for a few minutes, so I sat down on the swing and looked out over her neighbors’ yard and thought.

I wonder how long it’s going to take Rose to get out here,
was my first thought, and then,
I wonder how long I’ve already been waiting. I’ve already been out here a long time, and my mom says you can never relive a single moment
. I stopped swinging. A single moment. Individual blades of grass became very distinct in my vision, as they sometimes do in the light of thickly clouded days.
I am thinking of a moment—it is gone. Here’s another—gone. Gone. Gone.
One cannot consider, with any real accuracy, the currency of a single moment and its extinction. Those are not the words I thought, but I felt them. The ground spun beneath me, although I was sitting still. I stood up too fast and became light-headed and had to grab ahold of the swing set’s ladder, which was striped like a barber’s pole, I noticed for the first time. I wandered out of Rose’s yard and headed home as if I were sick. It was impossible to stop thinking about time; I couldn’t get it out of my head and the effect was that every step I took was measured in jerky increments that vividly illustrated the arrival of a little unit of time and the death of that unit, until I was nauseous.

The old brass doorknob on our front door was colder and more familiar than anything I’d ever touched. It seemed that my hand was connected to it for a long time, longer than necessary, and then I was inside and the house was dark and nearly humid with the lack of industry inside it. It smelled exactly like the only thing in the world I knew for sure. A lamp burned on the table beside my mother’s end of the couch, and I found her sitting there reading, the television on with the sound low but insistent.

I unbelted Mom Mary’s raincoat and sat down on the couch beside my mother. She asked if I was feeling all right.

“Have you ever thought about something too hard and gotten dizzy?” I asked her.

I could see by the look on her face that she probably, in fact, spent most of her life dizzy. She said, “Do you know anything about astronomy?”

“Yes. I’m a Pisces.”

“That’s astrology. Do you know anything about the stars?”

I shook my head.

“Well, when I was about your age, I learned about the stars and galaxies and planets for the first time. It was all just an idea to me at first, while I was still at school. Then one night I went out into the yard—this was while my daddy was still alive, and we lived in Whiting—and looked up at the stars like I had many times before, but this time I saw them in the context of the
size
of space, and our place in it. I saw that the universe was vast and unknowable, and that we were just tiny little specks that vanished before anything had even taken note of us being here. And you know what happened when I realized that?”