A Girl Named Zippy (14 page)

We walked out into Dana’s side yard, at loose ends.

“What do you want to do now?” Dana asked.

“I don’t care. What do you want to do now?”

“I don’t care.”

We scuffed our feet and looked at the general flatness and order of Dana’s yard.

“We could fight,” Dana said, with a dangerous tone in her voice.

“Pshhh,” I said, with a sigh. “You know I don’t fight, Dana, I’m a Quaker.”

She circled me. “So?”

“So. I can’t. Just drop it.” I looked at the ground.

“Well, I can fight,” she said, pushing me hard in the chest.

I took a few steps backward, unbalanced, then righted myself. Briefly, my eyes met hers, and I saw that her face was suffused with a dark light, and she was smiling. Before I could say anything, she pushed me again, and I stumbled. We continued in this fashion all the way back to her hedgerow, and when she pushed me into a blackberry bush, I snapped, and came out swinging, blindly.

I guess I must have hit her at least once, although I have no memory of anything but the hectic movement of the sky and the trees, my own heart pounding, and the ground suddenly spinning and rising. Dana had hooked her foot behind my leg and knocked me down. All too briefly we rolled, an equal contest, and then she had me pinned.

I hated to look at her, but I had no choice. Her bottom lip was bleeding, and her hair was tangled up with grass, and we were both breathing heavily.

“Get off me, Dana,” I said, furious.

She just continued to stare at me in a fixed and unnerving way.

“
Get off me, Dana
.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, calmly.

For a few heated moments I had no idea how to respond. All I could do was stare at her and imagine how ridiculous we looked from the street (which was Broad Street, I happened to know), and then I became scared and pushed her off me roughly.

She sat up in the grass as if nothing had happened, until it became clear that I was leaving.

“Where are you going?!”

“I’m going home.” I started walking across her yard.

“Oh, really? Well, the next time you’re such a psycho I may just have to kill you!” She was yelling loudly enough for the neighbors to hear.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving her off. “Why don’t you go bite yourself, you little shit.”

It was my first big swear, and as I stomped up the hill and over the railroad tracks, the whole situation made me feel like my stomach was harboring a fugitive. By the time I got home my eyes were burning with tears, and I desperately wanted to go up and just lie down on my bed, but first I had to walk on down to the corner to see if the street my sister lived on had a name, and sure enough, it did: Jefferson.

Dana never apologized, and neither did I, but she was a big enough person to come to my house later that afternoon. I was lying on my bed with my face toward the wall, and I refused to turn over, even after she had said hello.

“Okay, then. I’m just going to sit here on the floor . . . no, no, I’m not going to sit on the floor, because I can’t see it. I’m going to sit on this pile of clothes and books and stare at you until you turn around. I’m going to sit here and stare at you through your fan, even though there’s a dead mouse in the bottom of it that has been there as long as I’ve known you, and now it’s just a dried-up little skeleton.”

I tried not to laugh, and was doing fine until she started to hum. In order to save us both the extreme embarrassment of Dana’s broken voice, I turned over, only to find her sitting in a clothes basket, on top of my dirty laundry, wearing a ratty old Beatles wig she had found in the back of her mother’s closet. As soon as she met my eyes she broke full-throated into “Band on the Run,” her favorite song in the world. To be fair, she probably was no worse a singer than Linda McCartney, though I would never have said that to her face. The day ended with me laughing so hard I thought my appendix would burst. I begged her to stop.

AND THEN ONE DAY
, toward the end of the year, Dana didn’t come to school, and when I stopped at her house on the way home there was no answer when I knocked. My mom was waiting for me at our house, and told me that the rumor in town was that Dana’s parents had had a terrible fight that had escalated into violence, and that Jo had taken Dana and fled town.

“I don’t think they’re coming back, honey,” Mom said, studying my face.

“They have to. This is where Dana lives; it’s where all her friends are. Jo can’t just take her away like this.” I tried to sound reasonable, but my voice was strained.

“I think, actually, that Jo had been planning it for a while. I think that’s what the fight was about.” She paused a moment. “It wasn’t a good home for Dana, sweetheart, and maybe wherever they end up will be better.”

“Wherever they end up? You mean nobody knows?”

Mom shook her head. I stared at her a few more seconds, trying to read her face for clues, but it appeared that she really didn’t know where they’d gone.

I went out and sat on the porch swing. The street that ran in front of my house was called Charles. If anyone were to ask, I could say that I lived on the corner of Charles and Broad, or else I could say that I lived behind Newman’s Marathon, whichever made more sense. At least I had some choices.

Dana’s father and brothers stayed in the house for the rest of the year. No one ever really saw them. One Saturday, a few months after she left, I walked down to Dana’s house and knocked on the door. I couldn’t bear not knowing anything about her. Lou answered the door after what seemed a long time, bleary-eyed and thick with smoke. He just looked at me, unable to imagine what I was doing on his porch. I finally scrumbled up the courage to ask if I could look in Dana’s room, to see if I had left an overdue library book there. He stepped back and let me pass by him without a word.

The house was painfully still. Nothing waited on the stairs. When I turned the corner into Dana’s room, my throat was so tight I reached up and touched it. The afternoon sun slanted through the big west window, lighting up the dust motes that filled the air.

Her bed was neatly made. In the corner lay the old Beatles wig, and a pair of shoes she had outgrown. A single picture of Shawn Cassidy, cut from a magazine, was still pinned to the wall, but otherwise the room was empty, and rather gray, and looked very like it had when she lived in it. I lay down on the bed a moment, feeling stupid, then got up and went home.

THERE ARE TWO PHOTOGRAPHS
, taken at a slumber party at Julie’s house, just before Dana disappeared forever. In the first we are trying to form a human pyramid, like cheerleaders. Dana, Anita, Annette, and I are on the bottom, being always the tallest. On top are Rose and Julie and Kirsten. We are laughing wildly into the camera. In the second the pyramid has toppled and we are lying in a heap on the floor, and the expression on our faces is quite different. We are all, in various ways, trying to keep our tender and budding chests from touching the person in front of us, for fear of the sharp knock of pain that accompanied every touch. The days of hard wrestling were already over, although we were just beginning to realize it. From then on, we would spend our lives as girls trying to maintain that flat, sad distance. Some people moved so far away that we never, ever saw them again.

DINER

T
here are a finite number of times one can safely climb the same tree in a single day; after that point the whole venture becomes meaningless, and potentially dangerous. I had climbed my favorite tree, an oak that had a perfect bottom-shaped well where the big limbs began, about five times. I was getting casual with gravity, and had begun dismounting higher and higher, when I realized that I was aware of my stomach.

I was hungry. I walked into the house, which was so surprisingly empty. My sister had married only a few months before and was now living down the street; my brother was not a person I would consider in such a situation; my father had gone to one of the many mysterious places he had to be; and my mother, who we all trusted for so many years to remain faithfully in her place on the couch, was working.

She had taken a job waitressing at the little restaurant on Broad Street that sat diagonally from the drugstore. From the outside it just looked like a shotgun house. There were even checkered curtains in the window and a front stoop for sitting. Mom had only been working there a few days, and only the lunch shift, but her absence was alarming.

Our kitchen was really a part of our den—separated only by a “breakfast bar” at which no breakfast was ever taken—and I stood in the strange nether world between the den and the kitchen, staring. I never entered the kitchen if I could avoid it, and even as I stood there, deeply worried, I could hear mice skittering around in the oven.

I ran back outside and stood on the front porch, bark dangling from my sweatshirt and my hair. Oh, I was so hungry. I was hungry, hungry, and at what appeared to be a desperate time: the Newmans were not at the gas station, Rose and her family were out of town, and my sister had gone to New Castle. I had no money. I couldn’t think of how to steal any. My mom was completely gone.

I sat on the porch steps and contemplated, my stomach growling and grumbling. If I went back in the house I would have to face the kitchen, and if I stayed outside I would surely expire.

I went inside, and slowly, fearfully, walked across the sticky kitchen floor to the refrigerator. The inside of the refrigerator was no better than any other part of the kitchen, but I was able to locate a bag of carrots, which I grabbed, slamming the door behind me. I took them outside and whittled off the grubby outsides with my pocket knife and set to eating them. They were pretty good, for vegetables. I ate one, and then another, and probably a third and fourth, distractedly, until I noticed the whole bag was empty and I wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact, my stomach felt like a little carrot rock.

I tried lying down in the yard and moaning out loud, which seemed to comfort the people who died on soap operas. The leaves and twigs snapped and poked in an unfriendly way. When I stood up to head for the house, I found that I felt even worse. I realized I needed my mother.

The walk to the diner was a long and treacherous one. I periodically had to stop and sit down in the grass to gather enough strength to go on. The sun pounded down on me, so that by the time I reached the front door I was stooped over like the emphysemic old man my grandma was married to, Pappy Catt, and I was clutching my stomach. It took all my willpower to straighten up enough to open the restaurant’s front door.

Mom was walking out of the back where the desserts were kept, carrying a piece of pie to a man who was sitting at the counter drinking coffee and looking at a map. One look at him told me he was from nowhere near Mooreland. He was wearing a suit, which was, as far as I knew, a habit practiced only by men who sold insurance, like Rose’s dad. Mom gestured for me to sit down at the counter, and then she ducked into the kitchen.

Obviously she had not noticed how terribly aggrieved I was. I stooped over to the counter and slid onto the stool right next to the businessman, even though the whole rest of the diner was empty. He looked down at me without speaking or smiling, then turned back to his map.

My stomach just flat-out somersaulted. I called out, “Mom!”

“I’ll be right there!” she yelled back.

I put my head down on my arms and took some deep breaths. When I was able to I shouted again, “Mom! I need some water!”

The man at the counter, perturbed, pushed his water my direction. I sat up straight enough to take a drink, raised the glass to my lips, and vomited, right into the water. What the glass couldn’t hold had just fallen neatly on to the counter, and it was nothing but shredded carrots. After I finished making that one last little heave that concludes a throwing up, I found myself quite interested in the contents of the glass, and turned it toward the window to hold it up to the light.

The man next to me dropped his fork in an unnecessarily dramatic way, then grabbed his map and headed for the door, dropping money on the floor on the way out.

My mom came around the corner and saw me looking into the carrot water.

“Oh, sweetheart! What happened?!”

“There was nothing to eat at our house but carrots!” I said, indignant. “So I ate them and got sick and came down here to try and just get a glass of water, and the man sitting there gave me his and I threw up in it. That’s the throw-up, right there.”

“I see it. Are you feeling better?”

“I feel fine. What kind of pie did I see you carrying earlier?”

Mom felt my head and cleaned up the mess. We both declared that it was one of the more interesting sights we’d ever beheld, and I told her a few more times about how the carrots had just come straight up and so neatly into the glass, like I had planned it. She brought me a piece of warm sugar-cream pie, and it occurred to me that for warm sugar-cream pie I’d throw up every day.

When I stepped out of the restaurant to go home, I noticed that Sammy Bellings was sitting on her front steps next door. I ambled over and sat down next to her. Sammy had blond hair and very slanty cat eyes, and her skin was a brown color. She was one of seventeen kids living in the little house between the diner and an abandoned grocery store; some of the kids belonged only to the father, and some only to the mother, and some had gotten made together, but nobody really knew who was whose. Sammy didn’t often wear any panties, so I was quite familiar with her brown bottom. It was something of a scandal at school.

“Hey,” she said, waving.

“Hey. I just threw up a bunch of carrots in a glass of water,” I told her, pointing toward the restaurant.

“Why did you eat a bunch of carrots?” she asked, wrinkling up her nose.

“Was the only thing I could find. I was starving to death.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding sympathetically. “That happened to me once. I was walking around the house saying I’m so hungry I’m so hungry and my ma kept saying I had to wait until dinner, but she hadn’t even started dinner. We weren’t gonna eat for hours. So I was saying I’m so hungry I’m so hungry and then I found this bag of potato chips and I took them out in the backyard and ate the whole bag and then I puked it all back up and the dog came over and ate it.”

Now I didn’t know what Sammy meant when she said she went out in the backyard, because what they had was a square of dirt that butted up to the alley, but I didn’t say anything. The detail about the dog made the whole story convincing.

“I think moms ought to just feed you when you’re hungry,” I said, as if I were making a declaration.

Sammy snorted. “Tell that to my mom.”

My own mother came out of the front door of the diner, finished with her shift. I saw her and scampered down off Sammy’s stoop.

“See ya later!” I said, waving behind me, and she waved back.

I caught up with my mom, who was still wearing her apron with the big pocket in the front. I snuck my hand into it.

“Got any money in here?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows at her.

“You don’t need any money,” she said, swatting my hands away and pulling me close to her at the same time. “You’ve got all you need already.”

It was an Indian summer afternoon in Indiana, a rare gift. We walked home slowly. I thought Mom might be wrong about me having all I needed, but just at the moment, I had no need to complain.