A Girl Named Zippy (17 page)

INTERIOR DESIGN

D
ecoupage hit Mooreland pretty hard, as did antiquing, and hand painting one’s own ceramics. My dad was especially good at decoupage, and made a number of very beautiful things to hang around the house. My personal favorite was the Bill of Rights, which he burned around the edges and affixed to a large flat piece of cherrywood. He screwed a ring into the top and it hung on the wall in the living room. I used to stand and study it. It survived until one afternoon when Dad was trying to repair the wiring in an outlet below it. At that time we had a cat named Abednego who performed no end of evil tasks, and as Dad knelt there, Abednego went scampering right up Dad’s back, using, of course, his claws. Dad raised up in alarm and hit the Bill of Rights, causing it to fall squarely on the back of his head, and before I knew what had happened, Dad had grabbed the plaque and slung it in fury across the room. He missed the cat, but hit the window seat, and the wood cracked in half. Abednego was nowhere to be seen—he was in pursuit of other happinesses, no doubt—so I picked up the wood and tried to fix it, but it was beyond repair.

A few minutes later I heard the cat upstairs in my room, patiently and thoroughly knocking my glass doll collection off my dresser. The dolls came from Avon, and were filled with perfume. The bottom half (which held the cologne) was glass and the top half was plastic, but the two parts were the same color, and made to look like one beautiful, expressive thing. I had a blue girl in a dress holding a basket; an ivory girl in a swing, laughing; a green girl with a lamb; and my personal favorite, a wedding girl.

Dad turned to antiquing, a process by which a new thing was made to look old. In general the technique involved painting an object one color, then putting another coat of paint of a different color over the first and wiping it with a cloth, allowing the first color to show through. His largest project was a heavy ammunition box on wheels that he designed for housing our family photographs. He first painted it a sort of beige color, and followed it with a khaki green. It was very successful. When he was finished, what had originally just been a wooden box now looked like something you might buy at an auction, by accident.

Everyone in town turned on to ceramics at the same time. A local woman opened a little shop in an abandoned gas station at the south end of town, and it became a popular place to spend an evening. My mom liked painting small, pretty things. For her first grandchild, my niece Jenny, Mom made a bowl that looked like a bed; the top was a rabbit, sound asleep. On one side Mom painted Jenny’s name and birth date, and on the other, a quotation from a John Donne poem: “I am a little world made cunningly.” She filled it with chocolates and gave it to Jenny for Easter. It was so pretty I wanted to break it.

My dad liked ceramics, too. He painted a plaque for the wall of the den that stayed there for years. It showed a little cowboy, standing with his legs apart, swinging his two six-shooters. The cowboy’s hat was pulled down all the way over his eyes. The surface of the plaque was pocked with what appeared to be bullet holes, and it read
ANOTHER DAY, SHOT TO HELL.

Debbie Newman was the undisputed master of the hooked rug. She was so advanced that she even designed her own. Over the fireplace in the Newmans’ living room was a hooked-rug picture of Big Dave’s best horse, the late Navajo. I sometimes sat and watched her at work. Her fat little hands just flew over the surface of the mesh. The hooked rug is made with an apparatus that has a wooden handle and a complicated and cruel-looking hook and lip combination. I could never figure it out, even though Debbie tried to teach me, nicely, a half a dozen times. Julie was no slouch herself when it came to hooking a rug, but she had no patience with me, so I gave up. Julie could also draw and paint very well, and as we got older her paintings began showing up around the house. They were all of horses. Sometimes a cowboy.

Joyce, Rose’s mom, could flat-out copy a masterpiece painting. It was shocking. She would set up an easel, get out her oil paints, choose a painting she liked from a book or magazine, and set to it. Voilà. Within a week there that painting would be, and in this way William and Joyce were able to go even one step farther in making their house the most winning and sophisticated in town. She painted Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, an old-timey-looking picture of a boy and girl on either side of a stump, and a young black boy with a bunch of violets. I can’t repeat, for its rudeness, the way Joyce referred to this last picture. There was no harm done in saying this word in Mooreland, however, because there was not a single black person within or even near the town’s borders, and never had been. All the way up until I was born the signs marking the town limits had borne a warning to anyone of color about the sun setting on them in our town. I’m paraphrasing. Saffer’s General Store, which sat empty across Broad Street from our house, had been one of the secret state headquarters for the KKK, back in the 1920s, or so rumor had it. Even so, I was forbidden by my mother from using certain words to designate people of other races. It didn’t occur to me to want to; I’d never met a black person.

There was a woman in our church named Rose of Sharon who was so crafty that my mom said she probably crocheted her major kitchen appliances out of steel wool. I went to a baby shower at her house one night. All the women and girls from the church were there, and we each, in the spirit of Quakerism, left the party with a gift. There were no winners. I got a purse, which Rose of Sharon had made out of a plastic butter bowl. She punched holes around the top of the bowl and attached a crocheted top with a drawstring. It was a very clever and handy design for a purse. My mom “won” a doll with a hooped skirt that covered up a roll of toilet paper, and my sister took home a hat that was made from smashed soda cans held together with yarn. Rose of Sharon’s entire house was covered with her art, which featured, in addition to knitted things, yards and yards of peach and pink lace attached to the bottom of everything that wasn’t moving. R.O.S. had some condition which caused her eyes to bug out so far one could nearly see her brain; my mom suggested it was probably caused from the shock and horror of waking up in that house every day.

A couple of hippies came to town, and took up residence in the row of apartments the Newmans owned across the alley from the gas station. They were interesting to watch. I had never seen hippies in the flesh before, but I knew what to expect of them from watching
Laugh-In.
The guy hippie had a beautiful young Irish setter dog that he kept on a rope all day. It made me crazy. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking; the dog used to get so agitated it looked like she might hang herself. Finally, about a week before Father’s Day, I walked over and knocked on their door. The girl answered. All behind her was sweet-smelling smoke. I told her I had been noticing her dog, and I thought it was a shame to keep it tied up like that. As I spoke, the dog spun in wild circles and barked at me, in a friendly way. She told me that they didn’t really want the dog, but didn’t know what to do with it.

“I’ll buy it from you,” I said, impulsively.

“I don’t know,” Hippie Girl said, waving her hand vaguely around her face. “I’ll have to ask my boyfriend.” She looked at me a long moment, trying to remember who and where her boyfriend was. He was sitting behind her on the couch.

“Come on in,” she said, and opened the screen door.

Well. That apartment was a sight. One whole wall was covered with a velvet rug that featured bulldogs in a poker game; on the other wall was a poster of bright swirly colors that made my stomach drop. An American flag covered the window, and they had screwed hooks into the ceiling, from which hung twinkly little pieces of glass that would have caught light if any had been allowed in. There were posters of men with guitars, and cartoon women with big, visible breasts. Aside from the sprung sofa and an old television on a rusted, rolling stand, the only furniture was a toilet that was filled with dirt. Plants were growing in it. A little whistle came out through my teeth.

“You want my dog?” The young man on the sofa was hardly visible through the screen of smoke, but his voice was slow and harmless.

“I’d like to take her. Sure,” I said, craning my neck to see into the kitchen.

“How much you give me?”

“I don’t have any money. I’ll have to trade you something.”

“Well, what have you got to trade?”

“What do you need?”

This stopped him. He looked at Hippie Girl, and swaying, she looked back at him.

“We could both use a haircut.”

“Okay. I’ll cut your hair. Then I get the dog free and clear, right?”

“Yep.”

I went home to get some scissors. I’d never cut anybody’s hair before. I wasn’t even the type to cut the hair off my dolls, the way some of my friends seemed compelled to do. I had whacked off chunks of my own hair before, but only because they were bothering me, and certainly not by any design, but a dog is a dog.

When I got back to the hippie apartment, they were sitting outside in the sun, leisurely. Hippie Girl had brought out a bowl of water and a comb. I took them back to my house and had them sit on the little wall around our front yard. I did the girl first, who seemed hypnotized by the sunshine and by my combing her hair. Her hair was pretty clean but she smelled sweet and funny. She wore a thin flowered skirt and a top so small I would have used it as an undershirt. I decided I loved her. I just cut around on her hair, some here, some there, and then told her she was done.

Hippie Guy wasn’t wearing a shirt, and there was hardly anything sticking to his ribs. I thought about offering him some free oatmeal, but his long, long hair distracted me. I combed it, then got it wet, then just cut a straight line along the bottom, taking off about an inch. He had a bushy beard that nearly covered his mouth, making it look like a cave. I asked would he like me to cut off some of his beard and he said sure, so I cut around on that, too, then told him he was done.

We walked back to their apartment and they told me, without checking, that I had done a fabulous job on their hair. They said the dog’s name was Janis, but that I could call her what I wanted. I asked would they keep her till Father’s Day and they said sure.

On Father’s Day morning I went and fetched Janis with a piece of rope. She drug me halfway to the bank before I got her under any kind of control, and even then I was holding on for dear life and all the muscles in my skinny arms were quivering. Dad was in the house, wondering why I wasn’t getting ready for church. I popped my head in the door and yelled for him to come out on the porch and when he did, there we were, Janis leaping up into the air and running up and down the steps, her red feathers flying, and me rag dolling around behind her.

“Happy Father’s Day!” I yelled, just before she slammed me into one of the porch posts.

“Zip?” Dad said in a curious and cautious way, flipping his cigarette into the yard in the expert way he had as he stepped out onto the porch.

“This is your dog! I got her just for you!” I said, sailing past him and landing on my knees in the yard.

He walked out and took the rope from my hands, which were red and raw, and pulled Janis to him gently. As soon as she saw him she sat down and looked him in the eye. Her face was so beautiful and narrow she could have been a red-haired girl, looking at him the way she was. He rubbed the top of her soft head and behind her ears. Janis’s eyes narrowed and nearly closed. She and I were both out of breath.

“Happy Father’s Day,” I said again, but quietly and more worried.

For a moment he didn’t say anything, then he looked up at me. My dad was not a crying man, but his eyes were bright with tears.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, staring at the ground.

“I think I’ll just call her Red, if that’s okay.”

“That’s a really good name,” I said, reaching out to touch the bones on the top of her head. She was so beautifully made I felt like I was touching a newborn baby. They were inseparable for the next fourteen years.

THE WHOLE THING FINALLY GOT
to me and I complained to my mom that I couldn’t do a single, stupid kind of craft. I was the worst. She and Dad conferred and then brought me home a paint-by-numbers set. I went to town on it. In the next few weeks I painted Sad Clown, Bronco Rider, and Lake With Evergreen Trees. They were breathtaking, especially from a distance. We hung them all over the house. I chose to put Sad Clown in the den, right next to my dad’s gun rack. Up against the wood paneling it was nothing but fine art.

CEMETERY

A
t the beginning of my ninth summer it became clear that I had outgrown my bicycle. My body was so long and coltish that my knees had begun to hit the handle bars when I pedaled, and the bike had developed some squeaks and whines that I couldn’t calm, even after spraying nearly the whole thing with WD-40. My dad finally noticed, and mentioned that it might be time to move up to a bigger bike.

“Would you like to build one yourself?” he asked, squatting in the grass beside me, where I was drenching the chain.

“Build a bicycle?” I couldn’t believe such a thing was possible. It seemed as though bicycles just
came
built.

“We could do it, if you want to.”

I put down the oil can and gave him my full attention. “Does this involve tools?” I was all the time trying to finagle a way to get my hands on some tools.

“Maybe quite a few of them,” he said, knowing that I was sold.

We started out with an old frame he picked up somewhere, and it was literally just a skeleton. It had no handle bars, no tires, no seat, no chain, and the paint left on it was a color that has yet to be signified with a name. The metal tubes that made up the frame were large enough to supply water to a major metropolitan area.

“Jeez, Daddy,” I said when I saw it, “this is going to be a big bike.”

“Well, it’s going to be a fat one.”

All the bolts in the frame had to be replaced, and that involved tools. Then we derusted it, cleaned it, and painted it. Paint is almost like a tool. I chose a bright, cobalt blue. If I was going to have a grown-up bike, I wanted a grown-up color. My beloved rodeo bike was lavender, with a purple sparkly banana seat. It was obviously intended for a much younger audience.

The black saddle seat went on with maybe two or three different tools, and then there were the handle bars and the big fat tires. I won’t even begin to describe the application of the chain. I was euphoric.

My one concession to the child I had been were brightly colored streamers from the handle bars, my argument being that without them I couldn’t tell how fast I was going, which my dad thought was slick thinking. We also added an aaa-ooo-ga horn with a big rubber bulb, and an easily removable metal basket on the front.

On the day we finished it, Dad and I stood back and admired our work. It was a beautiful bicycle. I would never be able to lift it, but it was beautiful. I was ready to roll.

NOW EVEN THOUGH
my mother almost never left the couch, she was a woman of many gifts, my favorite being her ability to make anything she was eating crunch. I still don’t know how she did it, and I tried to stump her with a wide variety of foods.

“Aha! Try these
raisins,
” I would say, triumphantly.

And she’d put a couple of raisins in her mouth and crunch, crunch, crunch. She could make them sound like corn nuts.

“Okay, what about this applesauce cake?”

Into her mouth. Crunch.

“Do you have some kind of trick teeth?” I asked her, but she said no, so I made her open her mouth and show me. It appeared that, remarkably, they were normal.

“Your teeth sure are little,” I said, peering in at back teeth that were half the size of mine.

“That’s because I have a very small mouth. My bones are also small; I’m really quite a delicately built person,” she said, tilting her head in a girlish way.

I patted her on the arm, indulgently. My mother’s delicacy was a part of her character she had adamantly clung to over the years, even as her occupation of not moving from the couch softened her and made her, well, motherly. I once heard her tell a friend that she was, in fact, a 120-pound woman, but she kept herself wrapped in fat in order to prevent bruising.

“Have you seen my new bicycle?”

“I did see it. It’s very impressive. I’m wondering what you’re going to do with your old one; I was thinking that maybe we might give it to some less fortunate . . .”

“I’ll tell you the Less Fortunate Child I’m going to donate my bike to, she’s sitting right here on the couch with you, so don’t even start with me,” I said, raising my hand in the universal symbol for stop. “That bike would die without me.”

“Hmmm,” she said, nodding. “Where are you going to put it?”

“I’m going to lean it up against Dad’s tool shed, and I was thinking I might plant some zinnias around it, and maybe I’ll make some little sign I can sit up in front of it so people walking by will know, you know. What kind of a great bike it was.”

“Like a shrine, you mean,” Mom said, blatantly trying to teach me a new word.

“Yes, like a Shrine.” As far as I knew, Shrines wore absurd hats and drove miniature cars in circles during the Mooreland Fair Parade, and were praised, inexplicably, for burning children. Although actually, if I was perfectly honest, I could think of a couple kids who could use a good frying.

MY MOM AND DAD
never fought, not really, which was a good thing, because my dad had a wicked, wicked bad temper, and if he’d married a woman who fought him they probably would have killed each other. There was a great, legendary moment between them, though, which I’d heard about all my life.

One of the architectural marvels that was my house in Moore-land was my parents’ bedroom door, which was solid wood and heavy, and had a porcelain doorknob. It opened into the bedroom. At a forty-five-degree angle from the bedroom door was the closet door, which was solid wood and heavy, and had a porcelain doorknob. It also opened into the bedroom. If the closet door was open, the bedroom door could not be; if they were both halfway open the doorknobs clinked together like little figurines in a rummage sale. It was possible, I had discovered through much trial and error, to get the doorknobs stuck together with neither door open enough to accommodate a grown person. Blocking the door in such a creative way was part of my mental plan for when and if the vampires came.

My mom was nine months pregnant for me, and hugely so, and she and my father were having an actual, vocal argument in their bedroom. My sister’s friend Terri was visiting, and the two of them and my brother were all in the living room. The argument reached some critical phase and Mom walked out of the bedroom at the same moment that Dad decided to go in the closet, which caused the bedroom door to smack my mother in the back. She became so instantly enraged (she claimed it was pregnancy that did it) that she waited just a moment until she was sure Dad was halfway into the closet, and then she threw the bedroom door open, which sent my father flying headfirst into the closet about sixty-four miles an hour, all the way back to where we kept the paint cans. My sister said they could hear him tumbling against the cans, and could actually discern the thick moment when he gathered himself up and prepared to face my mother.

He came out of the bedroom like a bullet, red-faced and with his eyebrows riding up his forehead. Mother was standing in the middle of the living room with her hands on her former hips, waiting for him. Melinda and Danny and Terri fled so quickly, and in so many different directions, that Mom later claimed they must have evaporated into the walls. Dad finally came to a stop right in Mother’s face, nose to nose, panting like a bull, with his fists clenched.

“Are you going to
hit
me?!?” my mother asked, pressing her forehead more aggressively into his. And before he could answer, she arced out her own arm and slapped his right cheek, hard. He pulled away from her slightly, stunned.

“I said, are you going to hit me?!” and she raised her left arm, and got him on the other cheek, like a good Christian.

Miraculously, he walked away from her. Looking no less deranged or murderous, he backed out of the house without taking his eyes off her; got in his truck and drove away.

It became one of the touchstone moments of their marriage, and afterward, there was never a threat of violence between them again. Mom told me, when I was old enough to ask, that she had learned the lesson from Mom Mary, Dad’s mother, who took her future daughter-in-law aside and told her that a woman has got to make herself absolutely clear, and early on. In Mom Mary’s own case, she waited until she and my grandfather Anthel were just home from their honeymoon, and then sat him down and told him this: “Honey, I know you like to take a drink, and that’s all right, but be forewarned that I ain’t your maid and I ain’t your punching-bag, and if you ever raise your hand to me you’d best kill me. Because otherwise I’ll wait till you’re asleep; sew you into the bed; and beat you to death with a frying pan.” Until he died, I am told, my grandfather was a gentle man.

SOMETHING HAD BEEN ON THE RISE
with my mom for a few months. There were many tearful meetings of her prayer cell, and at least half a dozen thrown-down fleeces (bargains made with God) and phone calls and arrangements. One of her fleeces involved a television commercial of Abraham Lincoln in a classroom. He was standing at a podium saying if I was thinking of going back to college, did I know that I could test out of some required courses by signing up for the CLEP Test, which stood for College Level Entrance Placement. This was all news to me. I heard Mom talk to her women at church about that commercial, and an agreement was reached: if she saw it on the following Friday, anytime before 6:00
P.M.
, she would call the number on the screen.

On that Friday, although I didn’t know why we were waiting for it or what it would mean if she called, I spent the whole afternoon nervously watching TV with Mom. Dad was gone, so it was just the two of us. Three o’clock came and went, and then four, and five, and mom sunk deeper and deeper into a heavy silence punctuated with heartbroken little sighs, because a fleece thrown down is an unbreakable contract. At 5:55 she got up and went into the kitchen and stood holding onto the sink, as if she might throw up. At 5:57, she bowed her head. At 5:58 she looked up, as if she had come to a decision, or was constructing a new shelter made of resignation. At 5:59 I felt my own throat swell with empathy, and at 5:59 and 30 seconds, Abraham Lincoln walked across the classroom that would become my mother’s life, and when I looked up at her, she was staring at the television screen with her eyes wide and her mouth open and I knew that what I was witnessing was no less than a miracle.

THE SHRINE TO MY
first bike was progressing well. Dad had given me a nice piece of wood on which I’d painted in white “Good Old Bicycle.” I was out planting zinnia seeds in a half circle around it when I heard a small commotion in the house. I dropped my spade and ran in to investigate.

Dad was stalking through the house, slamming doors, and my mom was opening every one he shut, following behind him, saying insistently, “But you
promised
you’d build them,” and “You promised six months ago,” and more variations on what I knew immediately was the Closet Crisis.

Contrary to popular opinion, my dad was not a lazy man. He was not lazy at all, for instance, when it came to Going Places In His Truck. He was also very industrious about Preparing To Go Camping. And if something really interested him, he would work on it all day. He was not, however, interested in working on our house, and so there were, hypothetically, some promises that got made but didn’t get kept. Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had successfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

For some mysterious reason, she had risen from the couch and taken a stand about the double closet he promised her he would build in the bedroom, and Dad was not a man one took a stand against.

I stood in the doorway, watching him slamming around looking dangerous, and Mom following him looking stubborn. There was nowhere for this to go but worse. I thought we were all saved when he reached for the pile of Dad Stuff that always lay on the dining table off of which no one ever ate: keys, gun, cigarettes, Chap Stick, breath mints. He was going to leave (“Don’t go away mad!” my mom used to say cheerfully, one of the many aphorisms that guided her life) in a fury, spinning his tires and throwing dirt up onto the trees, and then come home many hours later as if nothing had happened. But Mom, with some kind of Quaker death wish, stopped him.

“Oh, no. No, you don’t. You always, always get to walk out on me, but not this time.” She spun around and headed for the door. I scooted out of the way, trying to figure out how on earth she was going to make a dramatic exit when she didn’t have either a driver’s license or a car.

She stalked past me as if she couldn’t see me, down the front walk and onto the sidewalk, where she stopped only long enough to climb onto my new bicycle.

“Um. Mom? That’s my new bike? I’ve hardly ridden it?” But she was already figuring out the pedals. I could see her mind and her body synchronizing in the way that is the ultimate truth about remembering, the way we carry our memories all through us.