A Girl Named Zippy (22 page)

Sissy was beside me so quick and quiet she spooked me. Her dress for that day was black with little sprigs of some no-color flower. The bosom parts were down around her waist. She was carrying her Bible, and I noticed for the first time how little her hands were, and how the nails were chewed down to nothing. I wanted, for just a second, to step inside her skin, to know the feeling of carrying a Bible the way she carried it, like a shield or like a baby. I wanted to sleep in a big bed with six sisters whose smell I recognized, and to be different from them, because I was Holy. I wanted to have only one choice and no other, the way she had chosen the dresses and the covenant. And at the same time I wanted to have already done it and be back at my own house, which suddenly looked perfectly reasonable by comparison.

“Have you done your good works yet?” Sissy looked up at me, blinking in the afternoon light.

“Almost. I started to. I about did. No.”

She leaned in close to me, the way she had in the lunch room. Her voice was just above a whisper. “You must stick fast unto the Lord. It is not easy, but His will be done. There will be stones in your path, sin and temptings. Just love the Lord your God with all of your heart and He will show the way, the truth and the life. I have to cook dinner.” She opened the door and slipped back inside before I could say a word. I tried peeking through a window to see the flickering television, but the outside of the window was covered with plastic and the inside with an old sheet. It might as well have been the middle of the night, in that house.

MOM ASKED ME
would I please take two cookie sheets over to my brother’s house. His sweet wife, Elaine, needed to borrow them. I threw my arms up in the air in a gesture of
oh, thank goodness, thank goodness.
My good works had come. And they would be easy. And there would eventually be cookies involved.

Mom had stacked the pans on top of each other, but I separated them. I climbed on top of my bike, and with a pan in each hand, pushed off from the little cement wall that surrounded our front yard. She watched me from the front porch.

“Don’t you think you should use at least one hand to steer?” she asked.

“Pshaw. I can ride this bike all over town with no hands.”

Mom kindly refrained from mentioning my many, many visits to the emergency room. She also kindly refrained mentioning the little incident last summer which had resulted in my losing two toenails, severely abrading the top of my foot, and breaking two toes. At the hospital the nurse had asked how I’d done it, and I had to admit that the injuries were because of my foot being run over while it was upside-down, by a bicycle
I myself was riding
. The nurse clapped, and then went and got all the other nurses who were familiar with me, and they all applauded, too.

I rested the pans on my open palms the way a waiter might carry plates of spaghetti to the Mafia. When I got to the stop sign at Charles and Broad I slowed down just long enough to look for cars, but of course there weren’t any. I rode past the Newmans’ little car wash, and then the house on the corner, and turned. I was doing great. All I had to do was ride straight down this street for a long time, almost two blocks, and then I’d be there.

I suddenly remembered the railroad tracks, and sped up. Some of my best rodeo tricks with Julie had occurred on this very street, because there was a dip just before the tracks, then an immediate hill. If we hit it going fast enough, our bicycles reared up just like vicious stallions. Ever since Dad straightened out the frame, my bike could go straight ahead for miles without me touching the handle bars.

I sped up some more. I was fifty, thirty, ten feet from the dip, then I hit it, and the last sounds I heard were my head hitting the street, my teeth slamming against each other, and the pans falling on the tracks with an angry clatter. I saw a bright light and thought,
Don’t walk toward it, even if dead people you once loved waggle their fingers invitingly!
The light receded, and I saw stars, like in a cartoon. I heard two strange sounds, and gradually made out what they were: the first was a pitiful wheezing coming from my own chest, which signaled the collapse of one of my lungs, and the other was a siren. I was just coherent enough to wonder how it was possible, given that I was ten miles from the nearest hospital, that an ambulance had arrived so soon.

The ambulance skidded to a stop beside me, and the driver jumped off. It was Sissy’s older retarded brother, Levon, on his tiny bicycle. His aaaaah-oooooooh sounds dwindled down to a whine. He hadn’t spoken English in about fifteen years, so I didn’t even try to talk to him. I just let him loop his arms under my armpits and heave me up to my feet. My vision was still swimming. Levon silently brushed the gravel off my back, wiped away the blood that was running down my chin, gathered up the pans, rolled my unscathed bicycle back to me, then climbed on his own bike and pedaled away.

“For Pete’s sake,” I muttered, watching Levon speed down the street. Even his old white shirt cresting out behind him looked heroic. I trudged the rest of the way to Dan and Elaine’s house dejectedly, and handed the pans to Elaine without a word. When I got home I climbed up into the hollow of my favorite tree and lay looking at the sky. It seemed there were some things about myself I was going to have to face. I thought about them while I picked out the sharp pieces of gravel still embedded in the heel of my foot.

WHEN I SPENT THE NIGHT
at Rose’s house, which was often, we all slept together in the bed Rose and Maggie shared. Before we went to sleep we almost always played a game called Tickle. Tickle was a noncompetitive game, in which the object was to run your fingers up and down the back of the person lying next to you, through her flannel nightgown. I often ended up in the middle, which was good and bad, because it meant that I always got Tickled, but I also never got to stop Tickling. The people on the ends got at least one shift of just lying still and enjoying it.

I was Tickling Maggie’s back and Rose was Tickling mine. We were mostly not talking, and it seemed that Maggie was nearly asleep, when Rose scooted over closer to me and whispered, “I’m scared of something.”

I whispered back, “What?”

“I don’t want to do private lessons with Mr. Sewell anymore.”

This didn’t surprise me, because I never would have wanted to do it in the first place. “Why? Is it boring and stupid and you’d rather be outside?”

“No.” Rose didn’t say anything for a long time. “I told my mom, but she thinks I’m making it up or being silly.”

“Making what up?”

“I’m just afraid. He . . . never mind. Forget it. It’s time to switch.” She turned over and I turned over but Maggie just stayed where she was.

Rose didn’t say anything more and I didn’t ask any questions. I had no idea what she was talking about, but the more I thought about it, the more it worried me. I pictured Mr. Sewell bending over the back of his station wagon, unloading our instruments; the way his light-blue pants stretched tight across his legs; the black hair on his knuckles. He had an enormous smile. And then I saw Rose sitting up so perfectly straight the way she did, her head tilted in a left-handed way, holding her silver flute. She was always so clean that light seemed to catch her everywhere. It glanced off her cheekbones and off her black hair, it lit up her green eyes. Even her flat, square fingernails shone. Whatever was scaring her scared me, too. I Tickled her back a little extra, until I heard her give up and fall asleep. I was awake a long time.

THE NEXT WEEK
at band practice everything was perfectly normal: there was tooting and spitting, and when Mr. Sewell asked Sandy to play an A she started crying, which she’d also done the week before. Finally, he puffed out his cheeks and blew out a long sigh and said we could go.

The other kids dried off and unscrewed their instruments, placing them lovingly in the velvet-lined cases, but I didn’t move. Rose didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at her; instead, I concentrated on the piece of music in front of me, which was “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” I studied it as if there were movements I couldn’t figure out how to interpret. Mr. Sewell came back from loading the station wagon and saw me sitting there.

“You may go, Miss Jarvis. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the weather is good.”

“I need private lessons,” I said, without meeting his eye.

“What on earth for? If you want to learn to play a scale all you have to do is hit the keys in the order they’re laid out. You already know that.”

“I just want private lessons, is all.”

He looked at me a moment, then crossed his arms. “There’s no reason for you to be here, and you’ll disturb Rose, who is serious about playing the flute. My time is limited.”

“I’m really serious, too. Also my time is limited. I want to be a better bell player. I’ve decided it’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

Mr. Sewell continued to stare at me for quite a while, given how limited his time was. I snuck a glance at Rose, who was looking at her lap. Her cheeks were flushed.

“All right,” he finally said. “I’ll work with you first and then you can go.”

“No, thanks. Actually, I’m supposed to always every single day walk Rose home from school or else. We walk to school together and we walk home together, and if we don’t our parents do bad, bad things to us.”

“That hasn’t seemed to stop you any Wednesday for the past month,” he said, with a feigned patience I sometimes heard in my sister’s voice when she was getting ready to get wicked.

“Well, I can’t take any more punishments. I’ve taken all I can, and now I just have to do what I’m told and wait for Rose. In fact, you don’t even have to private lesson me. I’ll just sit over here in the corner and look at a book.”

I slid the bells off my lap and they crashed to the floor. I carefully put my mallets in the back of the box, then closed the lid and fastened it. Rose didn’t say anything and neither did Mr. Sewell, and when I got to the bookshelf I heard him sigh and say, “Okay, let’s start where we left off last week.”

When the hour was up Rose cleaned her flute and began putting it away. I helped Mr. Sewell carry my bells out to the car. He offered us a ride, but we turned it down, even though we had a long, long walk ahead of us.

IN THE LUNCHROOM
I slipped into the seat next to Sissy. Her hamburger, fried potatoes, creamed corn, and cling peaches sat untouched. She was carefully reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which was another yawner, as far as I was concerned.

She looked up at me, her eyes bright. Sometimes she chewed on her hair, which made me queasy. Today, fortunately, all of her hair was in her braid.

“Have you done it?” she asked anxiously. I could tell she was afraid I was one who might never be saved.

“Sissy, honestly. Sheesh. You know, no. I can’t. Good works just aren’t for me. Also I can’t pray and I can’t go to the altar and I can’t say out loud that Jesus is my Lord and Savior and I can’t cry in church.”

She nodded. It occurred to me that she had seen into my heart from the beginning. She looked at her lap for a moment, then said, “Knock and the door shall be opened; ask and ye shall receive. It is never too late for the humble and broken in spirit.” She looked back at Galatians with a kind of finality.

I sat there for a few more minutes, testing out my lunch. I was almost constantly hungry. Sissy would never take me in her house, and while she would always be nice to me, just the way she had been nice to me through my recent failures, there was something about her that couldn’t be touched. For the rest of that year, when I saw her on the playground or passed her on the sidewalk, she would smile at me with her enormous tooth and then go on about her business, which was God’s business, and had nothing to do with me.

THE LETTER

T
here never was a town more beautiful at Christmas than Mooreland, Indiana. We didn’t hang decorations on every telephone pole, the way some towns do, and we didn’t have a community Christmas tree. Instead, Shorty Gard, whose wife, Kathleen, played the piano at our church, used to cover their entire house with colored bulbs. It was a small house—in fact, I think it had formerly been a garage—but still. Sitting in the middle of a field the way it did, and shining out of the darkness, it was a little revelation. Three times a week during the holiday season my dad would say, “Let’s go drive past Shorty’s house,” and we’d put on layers and layers of clothes and pile in the truck and drive a block down Jefferson Street, where the town ended and the country began.

Every year our church went caroling, and I would walk down the cold, dark streets next to my mom. The elm trees that lined Broad Street, meeting in the middle to form a canopy of leaves in the summer, were now just bare branches through which I could see the winter sky, sometimes bright with stars like ice, and sometimes dense and heavy with coming snow. It seemed there was someone home at every house, and as we stood in the street or on the porch, the men gathered in the back with their deep and smooth voices, the altos assembled behind my thin soprano, I would be washed in the heat that escaped through the front doors of all my fellow townspeople. Inside I would see the delicate decorations most people chose: candles, a wreath on the mantle, poinsettias on the windowsills. No one else went as far as Shorty; it was his role to please us so much. There was something perfect about the barest flicker of a candle in an upstairs window, there was something so lovely and restrained about the smallest changes. There was a suggestion in every house, just behind every door, that something miraculous was about to happen.

I WAS PROBABLY SIX YEARS OLD
before I realized that most Christmas trees are green. Our tree, which my parents had for countless years, was made out of silver tinsel. When assembled, it looked like something a resourceful housewife might whip together out of old aluminum foil.

Now one would think that a tree made out of tinsel would last forever, that indeed, even if discarded it would have a twinkly landfill life of a few thousand years, but in fact, as the years passed the tree vanished before our eyes. Every year when we took it down we slid the fluffy silver arms into paper sleeves, to protect it in its box, and every year a few more tinsels fell off and were eaten by the dogs.

When my sister was sixteen she was finally, finally asked on a date by the cute Christian boy she had liked for years. He came to pick her up on a fairly balmy spring evening late in March. She brought him in the house to introduce him to my parents, and he was promptly greeted by the leprous family Christmas tree, all the lights flashing, all the ornaments dusty. Later in the evening, when he asked her why the tree was still up, she told him the truth: because Mom wanted to take a picture of it, and was just waiting to get some film.

FOR YEARS I
was thrilled to receive one present from Santa, although when I was four I discovered that one present doesn’t leave a child much to fall back on. That year my parents bought me a fluffy silver dog that had a music box inside. In the sequence of pictures taken just after we opened our gifts I am holding my dog close to me, obviously thrilled by it; in the next my sister is holding it and I am looking at it with my head cocked, confused; in the last the dog is completely gone and I am playing with the box it came in. I have just finished sneezing, and the fur of the dog, which came off in handfuls when touched, is lying all around me on the floor.

I was always grateful for my present because of something my dad told me. I asked him what he liked to play with when he was a little boy. He managed to look both wistful and brave.

“Oh, honey, we didn’t really have any toys when I was a little boy.” He went on to explain that when he was a child there was A Depression, which I understood perfectly well because sometimes my own mother didn’t get dressed for days at a time, and would only sit in a corner of the couch reading science fiction novels and eating pork rinds.

“Well,” I pursued, flabbergasted, “what about at Christmastime?”

He looked off into the distance, back into his long, long walk to school. “I was happy just to get an orange.”

This was the most insane piece of news I had ever heard in my life. An orange was the
opposite
of a present; it was no different than saying, “I was happy just to get a baked potato,” or “I was happy just to have a floor.”

I felt a little shiver in my shoes. I would never be happy to get an orange. I didn’t want an orange anywhere near me on Christmas morning—not the color or the smell or even anything that began with
o.

I have since discovered that all men of a certain age tell this story, and they give themselves away by always using the same fruit. I have yet to meet the father who will look his child in the eye and say, “I was happy just to get some seedless grapes.” But whatever the motive for this generational fiction, it works. So what if my stuffed dog molted and gave me an upper respiratory illness? At least Santa had remembered me, and at least I didn’t have to eat it.

I HAD SOME DISAPPOINTMENTS
with Santa, but not many. The only clear one I remember is the year I asked for a Skipper doll, who was an early, extra-perky friend of Barbie. Nobody had Barbies in Mooreland, and this could have posed a problem for the social Skipper, which might have been what Santa was thinking. Skipper was not the kind of girl to thrive in solitude. She wasn’t doing much looking
inside.

It’s hard for me to say I didn’t get Skipper, because I spent the whole month before Christmas fantasizing about her day and night: all the ways I would change her clothes, the apartment I would make for her out of a box, etc. She became so real to me that I hardly noticed her absence.

That year my only present was the game of Life, a darkly tedious enterprise whose sole saving grace is the excellent wheel one spins to decide one’s pathetic fate. I continued spinning the wheel long after all the cars and plastic stick people were gone. The dogs became attracted to the small parts, and if history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that one good swipe of a dog’s tongue can take out fifteen sets of boy/girl twins, easy.

IT HAS BEEN MY
tendency to say that Mooreland was behind the times, but it is probably more accurate to say that Mooreland was very confused about the times. For instance, in the 1970s people still referred to my mother as a Communist because she had a subscription to
The Atlantic Monthly,
which no one had ever heard of before. Ralph, our postmaster, refused to allow citizens to subscribe to magazines of their own free will, insisting that they actually go to the drugstore, where we could pick them up in front of our fellow townspeople. In this way he completely eliminated the possibility of objectionable literature entering the town limits.

The only people current with the decade were Rose’s parents, William and Joyce. They were Catholic; they had traveled to Acapulco; Joyce sometimes wore revealing, flowery dresses with hats. The closest any other mother came to a hat was tying a bandanna around her head while sweeping out cobwebs. Joyce even made her daughters wear panty hose to church, at a time when my mother couldn’t get me to wear socks, my argument being that socks interfered with my need to dig at my welter of flea and mosquito bites. I’d never even
looked
squarely at a pair of panty hose. They were terrifying things.

William and Joyce were ostracized most of the year for their brazen ways, but they were the undisputed masters of Christmas. My mother used to refer to them admiringly as the social liege lords of our little province, their power crystallizing with their Christmas Eve Party. To be invited was like grace.

I remember walking in the snow, under the muted light of the streetlights, both of my parents dressed up in the best they had. We walked past the Newmans’ gas station; the Hickses’ house; the hardware store; Doc Austerman’s veterinary clinic; the post office; the home of Debbie Clancy, my sister’s deaf friend; the North Christian Church; the parsonage with the persimmon tree; and there it was. A house I was in nearly as often as my own, but one completely changed by lights and the imminent birth of the baby Jesus, which would happen later, at the Midnight Mass Rose and her family attended every year, whatever that was.

Inside it was all warmth and loud adult voices and
let me take your coats—Bob, the eggnog is in the dining room
. Rose and Maggie and their little brother, Patrick, were so jittery with excitement that Rose almost always got a big nosebleed. The table in the dining room was spread with such a feast my eye could barely hold it all. There were all kinds of unrecognizable foods in miniature, and a little gold umbrella-shaped thing that held gold swords for piercing the exotic foods. One crystal bowl held a gray paste that Rose swore to me was made of goose liver; she would not deny it even after I hit her for lying. For the rest of the evening I walked around giving myself the hookey-spooks by repeating the phrase “goose liver, goose liver, goose liver.”

The eggnog was in a crystal bowl with matching crystal cups, and contained more alcohol than was permissible by Indiana law. Even before the adults started drinking there was much whispering and eyebrow-wagging about the fact of the eggnog, as if our parents were all back in high school watching the class clown spike the punch.

And then in the living room I saw the tree. It was enormous and sat directly on the floor, instead of on a table, as ours did. This was a thing with both depth and circumference, and it smelled of pine, rather than like the back of my parents’ closet. Santa had not even come yet, but there were dozens of presents under the tree, including a basket of nuts with a nutcracker, and another with, oh, my God, oranges. I feared for my friends, and I also wanted to be them. I wanted such a tree in my house, and so many presents that they could simply be scattered about. It is an amazing moment, when one goes from being grateful for what one has to longing for what is impossible.

I would have stayed by the tree all night, but Rose wanted to go upstairs and begin playing Evil Queen, our favorite game, so I followed her reluctantly. I knew that sometime after her nosebleed we would all accidently fall asleep and I would wake up being carried home in the cold by my dad, who by that time would be emitting eggnog from his pores. We would get home, stoke the coal stove, and fall asleep on our couches and cots in the den. It was too cold to sleep next to the tree, but Santa came anyway. He was used to the cold.

THE YEAR I GOT THE LETTER
I asked for a piano for Christmas. It was all I could think of: a piano, a piano, a piano. I had no idea what was compelling me in this desire, but it went straight to my heart, and I feared for myself if Santa didn’t comply. This was way worse than the Skipper doll; it was worse, even, than the year I asked for and received my bicycle, which had seemed a miracle. I wanted the piano more than life itself, but I had also asked Santa for a doll with two buttons—one that made it be a real baby and one that turned it back into a doll. I was gambling: if I didn’t get the piano at least I’d get the baby, and then I’d have something to live for.

My piano obsession was written in worry lines all over my parents’ faces. I figured they were worried about where we’d put it. I assured them I’d be happy to give up my cot and sleep inside the piano if necessary, but they said nothing. I told them we could put it in the living room and I would cut all the fingertips out of my gloves and play it in there. Silence.

As Christmas Eve drew closer I also started to feel nervous. It seemed that nobody was holding out any hope for this one, even though I had wished it as hard as I could wish and had even begun praying to Santa instead of Jesus in Meeting on Sundays. After church, when everyone was gone, I took to sneaking up to the piano and quietly touching three keys, C, E, and G, stunned by my ability to make a little song. I couldn’t imagine how I had figured such a difficult thing out all by myself—it was like magic, or fate.

On Christmas Eve, watching my parents get dressed for the party, I felt my stomach turn over with dread. There were a few things I had avoided facing that were now pressing down on me like snow clouds. 1) If Santa actually came down our chimney he would go straight into the coal stove, which had only a little round door in the front, not big enough for half of his fat, rosy face to get out. The larger ramifications of this I decided to avoid until some future date. 2) Even if Santa worked in such mysterious ways that he himself could get out of the red-hot coal stove, he could never get a piano through that hole, no matter how much I implored upon his mighty powers. 3) What if Santa was actually mad at me for asking him to carry such a thing as a piano all the way from the North Pole? What if flying it around caused one of the reindeer to founder, and Santa had to stop and shoot it in the head? How could I ever forgive myself?