A Girl Named Zippy (21 page)

Every year I forgot how short the sunrise service really was; how quickly we were inside the church for coffee and sweet rolls. We would even get to go home for a few hours, then come back for the regular Easter service, the one the normal people attended, including my rotten sister, who with her husband slept right through the sunrise on Jesus’s high holiday.

On the way home, Mom stopped me just as we reached Reed and Mary Ball’s house.

“Look! Do you see those flowers? Those are called crocus. Aren’t they beautiful?”

I couldn’t think of what to say. I’d seen the crocus every year of my life, and they always just looked like fierce little weeds to me. “They sure are purple,” I managed, which caused Mom to nod her head as if that were the whole point of them.

In the afternoon of that day, after she had helped me out of my dress and my tights, Mom walked me down to William and Joyce’s, where the Easter Bunny had come, and Rose and Maggie met me at the door with their brimming baskets of eggs and chocolates and soap, and just like every year before, they told me to take as much as I wanted—they had more than they could ever finish.

THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

I
briefly took up with a little Holiness convert girl named Sissy Bellings. One of Sissy’s front teeth always pointed north, and every day she wore one of her dead Granny’s dresses, which drooped where her Granny used to keep her bosoms, and hung unevenly to the floor. Sissy’s dun-colored braid reached the small of her back, and little wisps of hair slipped free and framed her face. I found Sissy very exotic, not just for the tooth and the dresses, but because of the way she always sat alone with a Holiness look on her face.

Sissy was the half sister (or maybe the whole sister, no one knew for sure) of Sammy Bellings, a mean little girl with a flat face I was quite fond of. We were all in the same grade. Sissy and Sammy and their fifteen siblings lived together in a two-room house next to the diner, and not one of them was anything like the other. There were babies of them, and one girl old enough to have babies of her own. One high school boy called Trick was so pretty he looked like an angel on a postcard, only with a good tan and big muscles. There was a retarded boy who spent all his life riding a tiny bicycle, and another boy, also with scant resources in the brain region, who loved rock’n’roll and refused to bathe. We called him Smarty. He was in the fourth grade for the fourth time. Smarty drove our poor teacher, Mrs. Denver, to bitter distraction. One spring afternoon when it came time for recess, Smarty asked Mrs. Denver if he could stay inside with her for the fifth day in a row. Exasperated, Mrs. Denver stood up and shouted, “Oh, good Lord! Why don’t you just go outside and blow some stink off!” We all laughed so hard that the little epileptic boy peed in his pants and Mrs. Denver started to cry.

Befriending Sissy was not much of a challenge. All I had to do was sit with her at lunch one day, back in the corner where she always sat alone reading her Bible, which had also belonged to Granny, and had a Granny’s Bible look: a cracked black leather cover with the words
Holy Bible
in flaking silver letters. The paper was so thin the letters of one page showed up through another, and when the book was closed the pages formed a solid band of gold so delicate and beautiful it would have made a pirate weep.

I sat down next to Sissy. We were eating exactly the same lunch, for which I had paid fifteen cents and Sissy got for free: chicken and noodles, smooshy peas, rice with brown sugar, white bread and butter, and a carton of milk. She looked up at me questioningly. We’d gone to school together from the beginning and never dined together. I tried not to stare at her tooth, but it drew my gaze against my will.

“Sissy, I want to be a better Christian,” which was a terrible lie, but just for a moment, as I said it, I believed it.

“Ain’t you a Friend?” she asked. I wanted to see what the relationship would be between her tooth and that bread and butter.

“Yep. My whole life.”

“Then why ain’t you a good Christian?”

“I don’t know. I never get the fruits of the spirit. I don’t go to altar call. I don’t think I love the grown-up Jesus enough.”

Sissy pondered my confession with a Holy look, but didn’t pick up her bread.

“Don’t let me interrupt your lunch,” I said, solicitously.

“This is important.” Sissy pushed her tray away. “Do you do good works?”

“Excuse me?”

“Good works. Do you do a good deed every day?”

I thought about it. The only good deeds I performed were acts of self-denial. Earlier that week, for instance, I had stuffed all my schoolbooks in the big trash barrel destined for the incinerator, and then gotten them back out when I realized Tony the janitor had seen me. Tony wasn’t a bit afraid of pointing a finger.

“Maybe not quite every day.”

“Pastor says we have to do good and be good because His eye is on the sparrow.”

“Your pastor’s eye is on a sparrow?” I couldn’t imagine what the people of Sissy’s church looked like, all gathered up together.

“God. God’s eye.”

“What kind of good deeds? Like Girl Scouts? Because I got kicked out of Brownies and they won’t give me another chance to keep my clothes on at camp. Also all we ever learned was housework. I’m not much for it.”

“I don’t think you have to be in Girl Scouts to do good.” Sissy sat very still, with her hands gathered up humbly in her lap. Children were screaming and spitting milk all around us, but I felt like I was in the quietest place in the world, watching her. “And housework doesn’t count unless you do it because your mama will have a breakdown and move back to Kentucky without you if you don’t.”

I tapped on the table with my fingertips and absent-mindedly began picking at my lunch. “Are you allowed to tell me some? Or do I just have to stand around waiting for one to need me?”

Sissy leaned close to me. Her tooth arrived first. “You have to pray about it. Just ask the Lord and He will hear thee and he will put it in your heart to be good. Do you want to pray with me right now?”

“No, thanks.” I picked up my fork and dug into my chicken and noodles, then skedaddled out of the lunchroom as fast as I could.

IN THE FOURTH GRADE,
we were allowed to start studying band instruments with a local man who could play or repair anything that made music. His name was Mr. Sewell, and he drove across town to our school once a week in a station wagon loaded down with clarinets and flutes and trumpets. Mrs. Denver asked all interested children to stay after school one day to talk to him. There were about six of us, and Mr. Sewell went around the circle and asked us what instrument we were interested in playing. Rose wanted to play a flute. He nodded. Margaret wanted to play a trumpet. That was good. Brian really wanted to play a tuba, but would settle for a saxophone. Mr. Sewell looked relieved. Roger, the epileptic boy, had always dreamed of playing the clarinet. Sandy, who was much older than the rest of us and appeared not to have any vocal cords, refused to answer. Mr. Sewell looked at me.

“I’d like to play the drums.”

Mr. Sewell smiled, but shook his head. “Girls don’t play drums. How about a piccolo?”

“I’d rather play the drums.”

“What about a French horn?”

“What about the drums?”

The other kids started to squirm and Rose kicked me lightly under my chair. Mr. Sewell had a look on his face I didn’t like, and I suddenly noticed how big he was, and how he had a mustache, and black bristly hairs growing off the tops of his fingers.

He said, with exaggerated patience, “I’ll let you play a percussion instrument, like the bells or xylophone, but not drums. This is your last chance.”

“Okay. I’ll play the bells.” By this time all I cared about was making him load in that station wagon the heaviest instrument available to me, and I imagined that a set of bells was pretty doggone heavy.

I SPENT EVERY AFTERNOON
stalking good works. My first victim was Agnes Johnson who was 164 years old. Her skin, impatient for her to get it over with and die, appeared to be sliding down off her body into a pool around her ankles. She was older than dirt, but feisty. She insisted on cutting her own grass every week with an ancient push mower. For years I’d seen her out there, pushing against the mower as if it were a huge rock, her skinny arms quivering, her lips trembling, a thin film of sweat shining on the place most people had an upper lip. I’d never paid her much mind, but on this particular day I realized I’d hit the jackpot. Ordinarily I’d have rather run naked into a rose bush than cut grass; at my own house I suggested a few times a week that we get a goat or some other furry grazing thing to live in the backyard. (I thought a goat was an especially clever choice because they could also eat our empty tin cans.) So if I mowed Agnes Johnson’s yard, I could probably avoid doing any more good deeds until I myself was flat-out old.

When I reached Agnes’s house I jumped off my bike while it was still moving. It rolled on a few feet like a headless chicken, then crashed into the hedge at the edge of Agnes’s yard.

Her back was to me. I ran up next to her, but she was concentrating so intently on making the mower move that she didn’t see me. The blades made a quiet snickety snickety snickety sound. Agnes was moving maybe an eighth of an inch an hour—her grass was not so much getting cut as dying from natural causes. In the center of her side yard was a little round flower garden surrounded by stones Agnes had painted white. She was headed straight for it. I figured if I assumed the helm and just cut the grass around the flower bed, that would be enough. I could tell Sissy the next day that I
was
good and I’d
done
good, and then I could sit with her at lunch every day and eventually be invited over to her house where I could get a good long look at whatever went on in those two rooms.

“Hey, Agnes,” I said, since it appeared she was never going to notice me. She didn’t turn around. I reached out and touched her on the arm. “Hey, Agnes.” She kept pushing the mower. I called her name one more time, then decided I’d just insinuate myself onto the handles of the mower. I put my right hand next to Agnes’s left hand and gradually started scooting it over. Her grip was surprisingly fierce. I heard her breath stutter, and a little whistle in the back of her throat. She was positively free of lips. I hopscotched over her left hand and gripped the mower handle in the middle, then grasped the edge with my left hand and began pushing Agnes to the side with my hip.

I was almost home free—I had scooted her nearly completely away from the mower when she noticed me. She turned her head slowly; her eyes stopped on every object in the arc between her face and mine.

“Get away!” she shouted, spit flying. I noticed she was wearing a nightgown and old houseslippers covered with little grass carcasses.

“Agnes, I’ve come to good-deed you. Let me cut the rest of your yard.” I was pulling on the mower and so was she, and she was winning.

“Shoo! Get away, pesty girl!”

“Agnes! It’s me, the little Jarvis! You taught my brother in the third grade and told him he was stupid, don’t you know me?”

“Let go of my property, villain! I’ll call the Law!”

“I’ve come to help you!”

“This is how I take the air,” she said, shoving me away with her own hip, which I suddenly feared would snap like a dry twig.

I let go of the mower and stepped away, winded. Agnes was a tough nut. She centered herself and leaned into her task. The blades whispered, and stray grasses flew out the sides and stuck to my bare feet.

ONCE A WEEK
after school Mr. Sewell came to the fourth-grade building with my orchestra bells, which were in a coffin-shaped box I could barely lift. I played the metal bells with metal mallets. Rose’s silver flute, by comparison, was just a sweet, breathy surprise, and every time I struck a note (at the beginning of every measure) I thought I saw her wince.

Playing the bells or the xylophone was essentially playing a piano with sticks, so there wasn’t much for me to do and not much for Mr. Sewell to teach me. Those instruments that required blowing were a whole different story. It seemed that my classmates would never catch on to how to make a real note come out. A couple of them simply could not pucker and move their fingers at the same time, no matter how patient Mr. Sewell was.

Rose, though, showed promise. Mr. Sewell asked if she’d like to start staying for an hour after band practice to work on scales and she said yes. Rose wanted to do everything well. I wanted to do everything quickly. On the first day she was scheduled to stay, as soon as practice was over I slid the bells off my lap and onto the floor so fast they clanged, then I dropped my mallets on top and went flying out the door. Mr. Sewell yelled, “Come back in here and take care of your . . .” I yelled behind me, “I can’t hear you!” And kept running.

I ran all the way to Sissy’s house, which was a long way, just over a block. The house was squashed between an abandoned building that had once been a grocery store, and the diner, which had once been a house. An onion-ring smell billowed out of the diner perpetually. I couldn’t imagine how Sissy and her brothers and sisters endured it all day—it made me ravenous. Just standing there for thirty seconds contemplating Sissy’s front door and I was chewing on my thumb.

It was a shotgun house, covered with brown, speckled, asbestos shingles, some of which looked like they’d been gnawed. Nothing grew in the few feet of dirt on either side of the front step, but shards of broken bottles sparkled like treasure. I walked up the two cement steps and faced the door. I turned the rusty knob of the screen door, which was just a frame without a trace of a screen, then raised my fist to knock on the splintering storm door. Before I could, Sissy opened it. She didn’t look the least surprised to see me.

An amazing smell waved out around her, a terrifying human smell of diapers and food and old furniture and tooth decay. I had just enough time to pop my head around her before she slipped out and closed the door. The front room was almost completely dark, although the day was brilliant. A black-and-white television flickered on a dozen faces, who seemed to occupy every available space, languidly.