A Girl Named Zippy (18 page)

Dad and I ran down the sidewalk to watch her progress. When she got to the corner she turned and headed north, toward the cemetery, which was a very smart move on her part. I also loved riding in the cemetery; the curving lanes were flat and well tended, and there was shade and quiet, and on an autumn day like this one, there was no better place to be.

“Well, she’s lost her mind,” Dad said, crossing his arms.

But I couldn’t answer. All I could see was my mother’s delicate body completely engulfing my new black saddle seat. I watched her back grow smaller and smaller as she pedaled stubbornly down the street with a strength no one knew she had, and I thought, clearly,
it won’t be long now
.

DRIFT AWAY

M
y brother could read before he started first grade. But his first-grade teacher, Agnes Johnson, who hated all children from poor families, told him he was stupid in the first week of school, and afterward he decided he couldn’t read and would never learn. Listening to stories about him, when he was a great big teenager boy and I was a little girl, it seemed to me that all the stories were marked by that same characteristic: a person in his orbit—a teacher, my sister, our parents—said or did something to him and Danny made a lightning-quick judgment about what his response would be and then stuck with it, even if it had been flat-out foolhardy.

“You mean to tell me,” I said, pointing my finger in the rudest way at my mom, “that he went through the second grade and the third grade and the fourth grade,” and then I undoubtedly named every single grade, as my mom sat still and very politely acted as if she were listening, “without knowin’ how to read?”

“Yes, that does seem to be the case,” she answered.

“Hmmmm.” I was thinking maybe I could get through school without learning to do a whole bunch of stuff. “How?”

“Well, sweetheart, he was tall. He started playing basketball in the fourth grade, and I think his teachers would have passed him no matter what he did or didn’t do. I used to spend hours trying to teach him to read, but he would just go stiff and silent, and I could see that I wasn’t getting through.”

“I see. So if a person was to go to school and what she really wanted to do all day was run around outside and then come in for lunch, the teachers would just send her on to the next grade?”

“It depends. Are you going to be a high school basketball star?”

“Probly,” I said, scratching at a scab. “I’m pretty good already.”

WHEN DAN GOT TO HIGH SCHOOL,
he had a single teacher who reached out to him, his science teacher, Mr. McCutcheon. One day after class Mr. McCutcheon said to Dan, very kindly, that perhaps high school would be easier if he learned how to read. Dan came home that night, and while Mom was in the kitchen making dinner, he sat in the den and talked to her over the breakfast bar at which no breakfast was ever eaten. He asked her what was on television that night, which surprised Mom, because one of the ways Dan had compensated for not reading was by memorizing things like schedules very, very quickly, in a nearly photographic way.

She said, “I don’t know what’s on tonight. We all rely on you to tell us.”

“Here,” Danny said, picking up
TV Guide.
“I’ll just check and see.”

And as Mom froze in the kitchen, a package of hamburger clammy in her hands, Dan opened the page to Thursday and read her the night’s options, along with the plot synopses.

When he was finished, Mom said to him, her eyes filled with tears, “Danny?”

“Mr. McCutcheon said school would be easier if I learned to read,” he answered, continuing to flip the pages of the magazine.

“Ah.”

“So I just went ahead and did that.” He looked up and saw her crying. “Mom? Are you mad at me?”

“No. No, I’m not mad.” That was all she said. He wouldn’t have allowed her to say much more. He didn’t hold much with displays or congratulations. But he read a lot after that. He was, as it turned out, a very, very smart boy.

BY THE TIME I KNEW HIM
, everything my brother did required the same ramrod-stiff posture. He sang in a Christian band. He belonged to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes; played drums in the marching band; and was on the varsity basketball team. In photographs of him at seventeen and eighteen he is always at the back of the group (because he was so tall), and whether he was wearing his snare drum or his basketball uniform, his posture belies the truth: he looked like a tree that had grown straight up into the sky without the least impediment.

He was like a tree, but there was also a great deal in him that was stone. With Mr. McCutcheon he started a fossil collection, which eventually took up most of his bedroom. They looked for all the world like gray, dusty rocks to me, but he saw something of a vanished world in them. He had a stony stare. On his basketball team his nickname was “Killer,” and he was often sent in at critical points of the game with the sole purpose of seriously fouling an opponent. By the time he was a junior in high school, it was clear that he had made an intractable commitment to religion, and not really to the God of love, the New Testament God who came to earth as a vulnerable man to love the little sheeps, but to Yahweh, the just and mighty. Heaven help the sinner who stood before a mob that contained my brother; if there’d been a first stone to throw, he’d have thrown it.

I didn’t know what to make of him. He wasn’t my friend and he wasn’t my enemy. Dan and Melinda shared a certain wickedness that was often directed at me, and I asked for it, by being so funny-looking and skinny, and by living in the same house with them. One of their favorite activities was placing me in a rocking chair we had that could turn all the way around, and spinning it as fast it would go for a minute or two. Then Danny would lift me out and make me stand up. My eyes would jiggle back and forth in my head in a way that particularly amused them, and when I tried to walk I looked less like a drunk than like a brain-damaged little marionette. Danny had, over the course of my life, lifted me off the floor by my neck, my ears, the straps of my bib-overalls, my feet, my thumbs, my armpits, and my shirt front. If there’d been a scruff to my neck he’d have hauled me up by that, too. In photographs of the three of us, taken before events or at Christmas, I am often looking at him as if I adore him. But I can’t remember now whether I really did, or if I was just trying to keep an eye on him; if I was trying to guess from which direction he was going to swoop, how much it would hurt, and if whatever he had planned for me would finally, as he and Melinda loved to threaten, cause me to swallow my tongue.

I must have loved him; I know he moved me. For a while I had a bed in the room between his and Melinda’s. I was never allowed in Dan’s room, although I was sorely tempted. Everything in there was gray; the wallpaper was faded to gray; there were all those rocks. Above his bed he had an old print of a wolf howling alone on a winter hill, and everything surrounding the wolf, the sky, the ground, had faded to gray. Dan kept all his hunting rifles propped in a row against one wall, and the whole room was laced with traps, including some large enough for a badger. The traps were actually
set,
which meant, I was assured more than once, that they were all just waiting for a skinny little arm or leg. So I never ventured farther than the door.

But at night, during those months my room was next to his, I used to lie with my ear pressed against the wall, listening to him listening to his record player. I loved his taste in music, Glen Campbell, Glenn Yarborough, Roger Miller. But one night he played a record I’d never heard before, and he played it over and over. I’d never heard anything like it—the mournfulness of it that was also thrilling. I got out of bed and lay down in front of his door until I could make out the chorus: “Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul / I want to get lost in the rock and roll, and drift away.” He must have played it four or five times, and then he started to sing with it in his clear, deep baritone I was used to hearing ring out only in church. I lay there on the floor listening until he turned off his lights and went to sleep.

READING LIST

W
hen the generation just before mine was growing up, Mooreland was so small that the elementary, junior high, and high school grades all fit into the same building. By the time I started school, the town’s school-age population had grown so much that we had to hold our kindergarten and fourth grade classes in a little free-standing building, kindergarten on one side and fourth on the other. So I went to kindergarten on the north side of it, then moved into the big, old school for second and third grades, back out to the south side of the shed for fourth grade, into the old school for fifth and sixth grades, and all the way down the highway for junior high and high school.

My fourth-grade teacher was named Mrs. Denver. She collected yogurt cartons for fun and was the most intellectually free of all the teachers I’d had so far. For instance, when the word
caviar
appeared in a story we were reading and she didn’t know what it meant, she didn’t try to hide it or lie. She asked me if I knew and I lied and told her it was a kind of Alaskan cookie that no one knew how to make anymore, and she simply thanked me.

Mrs. Denver made us memorize and recite poetry, another thing I’d never experienced. The first poem I chose was Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and when I stood up to recite it I got through it marvelously, right up until the last line, “and miles to go before I sleep,” repeats itself, and then I got intensely moved and just had to stand there with my throat aching while thirty-seven unsympathetic eyes stared at me. Finally I just ran over to my desk and put my head down, and Mrs. Denver walked over behind my desk and put her hand on my shoulder. The rest of the room stayed blisteringly silent.

“Why does he do that?” I asked in a tight, mad voice, meaning why does he repeat the last line in that devilish way.

“Well, dear, I’m sure it has something to do with poetry, but I don’t know what. Why don’t you ask your mother.” She patted my shoulder for a second, and then asked someone to stand up and repeat their little James Whitcomb Riley gem, and the attention was off me for a while but I felt disgruntled all day.

When I got home I went straight to my mom and asked just what the heck Robert Frost was up to. By this time she had a huge cardboard box next to the couch filled with books from the bookmobile, which she picked up and devoured and tossed back in. If she went through all of them before the bus came back, she just started over.

I told her about how mad I was about “Stopping by Woods,” and told her what Mrs. Denver said about poetry, and the mystery of the repeating lines.

Mom thought for a moment about how to explain it. “The best answer I can give is that poetry is all about the effect it has on a reader, and Robert Frost was very, very good at that. If you’re asking what it
means
that the line is repeated, I’d have to say I don’t know. It’s stylistic. But the effect is pretty clear.”

“Doggone right the effect is pretty clear! The effect is I looked like an idiot in front of my whole class and I’m never reading poetry again unless it’s by James Whitcomb Riley!” And I went storming out of the house to try and shake off the injury done to me with words.

MRS. O
’
DELL WAS
an assistant teacher at our school even when my brother and sister were little, and by the time I was in the fourth grade it seemed she was as inevitable as the moon. She was so old I was always expecting some record book to come and snatch her and make her a star. Even though we were way too grown up for it, she sometimes still sat us in a circle and read us a book or told us a story, and I always sat as close to her as possible, so that I could pinch her on her knuckles. Her fingers were like little basset hounds—they had about a foot of extra skin—and if I pulled up a small hill of skin it would just stay there for probably five minutes. It hypnotized me. Sometimes she just really nicely let me do it and sometimes she smacked me, but I was always willing to take my chances.

Once in a while I left my house for school really early, not even waiting for Rose to come and walk with me, on the off chance that I might get safely past Edythe’s house before she left on her march to the post office. There were a few places on the way to school that were good for dawdling, but sometimes, if it was cold, I just went on into the classroom and snuck peeks at Mrs. Denver’s poetry books. She had quite a wide variety of collections, all of which had been donated by a library some thirty miles away. I hated them. I wanted to burn them all in the monstrous and terrifying incinerator in the basement of the big school. If I had actually tried to damage a book, however, my very cells would have rebelled, and so I had to content myself with giving the poems scowling looks. Most of Mrs. Denver’s collections were just dreadful, full of poems by the likes of Edgar R. Guest and Helen Steiner Rice, but sometimes I would come across a line like “‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said/The Lady of Shalott,” which would send me reeling. The first time I came across Emily Dickinson it was the poem “I am nobody/who are you?” I thought it was a stupid little nonsense poem like in a Golden Book and I just skipped it and then a few pages later I read the line “Dare you see a soul at the white heat?” which caused my tongue to dry up like an old fish. I decided that Emily Dickinson was a lot like Edythe, and I added her to the list of poets I would never read again because of their evil natures.

One morning I snuck in the school through the empty kindergarten room, and I was just about to open the door to the fourth grade when I heard crying and a low voice on the other side. I stopped and looked around for a spy object, but all I could find was a stack of empty yogurt containers, so I used one of those as a listening cup. It was Mrs. O’Dell, and she was comforting someone who was crying brokenheartedly. I lay down on the floor and tried to get one of my eyeballs under the crack, but all I could see was the indoor/outdoor carpeting my mom said looked like a nasty bruise. Unable to bear it any longer, I opened the door just the tiniest crack, just enough to see Mrs. O’Dell holding the hands of a girl named Polly who had been in my grade since kindergarten, but I didn’t know at all. I believe that the moment I saw Mrs. O’Dell comforting her was the first time I ever noticed that Polly existed. And here she was, not just existing, but weeping her eyes out over something undoubtedly huge and getting patted by the incredibly old hands of Mrs. O’Dell, which I actually and secretly considered my personal property.

I heard Mrs. O. say, “Do you know when the trial will start?”

And Polly answered, with profound amounts of snot, “I don’t know! Soon! And that’s [choke] the worst part! That everyone will read about it in the paper today and be talking about it! It makes me sick!”

I thought: in the paper, which meant the
New Castle Courier-Times.
The story of Polly (whoever she is) will be In The Paper, and all I have to do to solve this mystery is find a newspaper and read it. Then Mrs. Denver arrived and I had to quick go out to her car and help her lug in her big easel so she wouldn’t know I’d been snooping with one of her yogurt containers. She often propped a big notepad on the easel with things she wanted us to write down, and today’s lesson was going to be on Indiana History, a subject she was crazy for. She had written in purple magic marker:

I felt like this was probably the extent of her knowledge of Indiana History, and it was plenty for me. My dad was always trying to tell me about the Delaware Indians, and the Hopewell tribe, and someone called Little Turtle, but all those Indian stories seemed to be about the Indians getting the sham, which seemed ridiculous when I knew from the movies I watched with Julie that Indians were the most excellent creatures anywhere who never got shammed by anybody.

I very busily set up the easel and the Indiana History. Polly had locked herself in the bathroom, and I could hear her making very upset and dramatic post-crying sounds. Mrs. O’Dell was conferring with Mrs. Denver in a loud whisper. Mrs. O’Dell’s dentures weren’t the most seamless fit, and sometimes she looked like she was grimacing when in fact she just couldn’t get her lips all the way down, and sometimes when she talked it looked like the left side of her dentures were about to get away. Plus when she got excited she thrust her head forward like a turtle, and today everything was going wrong at once. She was spitting and her dentures were flapping and her head was bobbing around at about the level of her chest, and the total effect of it caused me to forget to listen to what she was saying. Soon other students began to arrive, and it was time to start another day of fourth grade.

That afternoon I went flying home to read the paper, but my mom had put it down for the dogs, who had already seen fit to employ it. I tried to read it anyway, until Mom caught me and made me go wash my hands. I asked her from the bathroom if she knew any story about Polly or Polly’s family, but she said she didn’t. I asked her to think a little harder. I asked her to tell me what was on every single page of the paper, but she claimed to only remember one comic and a pattern for a sweater vest, which I knew to be false, because she never read the comics.

I went into the living room and practiced headstands. I tried and tried to think of who might have a paper. The Newmans didn’t take a newspaper. They were not so much a reading family, so there was no use heading over to the gas station. Rose’s parents took some weird newspaper that wasn’t local, which didn’t make a lick of sense to me, because they couldn’t even check the basketball scores. Rose herself was completely moony over a book called
Jane Eyre
. Even the cover of it was a powerful irritant, and every time she brought it up I left the room, feigning nausea. My dad read only
Walden
and the
Foxfire
books. My mother read anything she could see, but mostly put the newspaper to some practical use. My brother was strict about reading only the Old Testament and
TV Guide
. The last book I could remember my sister reading was
Macbeth,
her senior year in high school.

I thought maybe the drugstore might have a newspaper, so I went flying down there on my bicycle. The front door of the drugstore was very tall and heavy, and where the top of the door met the frame Doc Holiday had hung some sleigh bells which rang festively anytime someone entered. No one was getting the draw on Doc.

When I burst in he was wiping up a milkshake puddle off the counter.

“Doc!” I yelled, closing the door too hard behind me. “I need a
Courier-Times
!”

He turned vaguely in my direction but continued looking at the counter. When Doc shouted the yell came up from his belly and just kind of burst out of his mouth. “Sold out! Don’t walk in here yelling! And if you’re not going to buy anything, go home!”

I sat down dejectedly at the counter. “Doc, did you happen to read the paper?”

“Nope,” he barked, washing out some glasses.

“Because I kind of need to know about something that was in the paper today.”

“Well, what are you telling me for?! Do you want anything or not?” This was one of the longest conversations I’d ever had with Doc, and it was obviously testing his patience, so I ordered a lemon phosphate.

I rode around town for a while, surreptitiously checking yards for stray papers, but the only one I found and successfully stole was two days old and soggy, so I put it back and headed on home.

Dad was just getting out of his truck when I rode up. My dad! Of course. He knew everything that happened around Mooreland, so even if he hadn’t seen the paper he’d know the story.

“Dad, Dad, Dad, hey. I need to ask you something. Did you read the
Courier
today and do you know Polly who’s in my grade and what happened to her that would be in the paper and make her cry? I’m just asking.” He was straightening up his front seat and getting ready to flip his cigarette at Edythe’s house.

“‘Hello, Father,’” he said, “‘I’m so glad you’re home.’”

“Yeah, yeah. Did you read the paper or not? Because Mom put ours down for the dogs.”

“Yes, I read the paper. It’s not Polly, it’s her older brother, and no, I’m not going to tell you about it because it’s not a story intended for your ears. Put your bicycle on the porch if you’re done with it.”

I rode my bike around and left it on the sidewalk. “Not a story for my ears?! Now what kind of a story is that? I know about the time you and your buddies got drunk at Delco and hid in those big barrels and then accidentally fell asleep clear into the next shift.” I had my hands on my hips, giving him the what-for.

“I didn’t know you were listening when I was telling that story.”

The truth was I wasn’t just listening, I was hiding behind the couch and recording it on my little blue tape recorder, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.