A Girl Named Zippy (8 page)

And Reed took the time to turn all the way around and wave at me, and Mary called from the glider, “Hello, sweetheart.”

FAVORS FOR FRIENDS

S
ome families had lived in Mooreland since before it had a name; those families lived in their houses the way the rest of us live in our skin. But Minnie Hodson’s house couldn’t seem to hold anyone for very long. The years Petey Scroggs lived there I felt like I walked under a dark cloud, and then the whole rabbit-butchering bunch of them left, and the sun came out in a crazy bright spring, because Andy Hicks and his family became my neighbors. There were eight Hicks children, which was a lot even by Mooreland’s standards, and they were all excellent, but Andy was my favorite.

There are people in this world so perfect that the fact of them feels like a personal gift, and Andy was one of those people. Here are some perfect things about Andy: 1) He could be funny for a whole solid day without ever once being stupid, and one time during lunch he made me laugh so hard a noodle came out my nose. 2) He took me to the park to explain the facts of life to me. We were on the swingset, and what he told me was so graphic and so utterly wrong that I had to stop swinging; get sick; go home and not speak to my parents for three days because I feared they had done a particular thing that was known only by initials. Then I went to my friend Rose’s house and passed the information on to her, and her mother stopped speaking to my mother for three days. 3) Down the street from us lived a redheaded bully named Eddy Lipscomb, who was forever threatening to look at my panties. Andy wrote a song about him:

Eddy Spaghetti with the meatball eyes;

Put him in the oven and make french fries.

4) Andy was tall and blond and soft and kind of girly, and nothing like Eddy Lipscomb. 5) He could sing like the main singer of God’s own singing angel band. He could sing any kind of song, and would sing anytime I asked, even if we were walking down the street. Sometimes he just stood up in Friends Church and started to sing, and it was nothing but religious. His singing almost always made me feel happy and sad at the same time, but sometimes it was so beautiful that I just got mad, like once at the Mooreland Fair Talent Show, when it hit me especially hard and I decided to make him forget the words through mind control so he would stop singing, and he forgot the words and stopped singing and then I wanted to die.

When Andy came over one afternoon in August and asked if I would be willing to take care of the Hickses’ old dog, Jiggers, for a week, while the family went to visit relatives in a holler in Tennessee, I was thrilled to say yes. The last song I had heard Andy sing at church began “Feed my lambs, my son / Feed my sheep.” There was nothing about me that made me deserve a friend like him, and I wanted to feed his sheep.

I STOOD ON THE
sidewalk outside the Hickses’ house, waving to them as they drove away in their massive station wagon. I was generally trying to look responsible. The Hicks parents, Homer and Loverline, had somehow fit all eight of the children and at least a little bit of luggage into that one car, and the rear bumper was so close to the ground that sometimes sparks flew up.

When I turned around, Jiggers was still standing in the yard in exactly the same position she had been ten minutes before, her brown head bowed down by the long-term effects of gravity. It seemed that controlling her bladder was her one, overwhelming priority, because sometimes a little bit of pee would start to come out and she would look sad and shut it off and stand and stand and stand, and then a few minutes later a little bit more pee would come out. It was steambath hot that day, and she couldn’t even muster up the strength to pant, which made me worried, because as I understood it, dogs did all their breathing through their tongues.

I walked over to her and patted her on the head. Her fur was so soft it was like something already leaving this world. “Jiggers, honey, why don’t you just let all your pee out and then go lay down in the shade?” She looked up at me with her filmy eyes, which had once been brown, but were turning a milky blue. She moaned some, then shuffled over to the shade and lay down.

I sat down beside her. I wasn’t at all certain what was required of me as a dog-sitter. I knew I was supposed to give her food and water, but was that all? Obviously we were not going on any brisk walks; we weren’t going to play fetch; she certainly was not going to get me out of any life-threatening scrapes. When she plopped her head down and started to snore I decided to leave her be. I checked her food and water dishes, which were both full, and went on my way.

What with bicycle rodeo and some general town duties, I didn’t get back to check on Jiggers until it was dark, and then I couldn’t find her anywhere. Her dishes were still full, but she didn’t come when I called, and it was too dark for me to do any Indian tracking.

I ran home to my dad. He was sitting in his chair watching
Bonanza
when I burst through the door.

“Dad! I can’t find Jiggers! She’s nowhere to be seen and won’t come when I call!”

“She’s probably sleeping under the porch,” he said, without looking up from the television. “I’d get under the porch if I was Jiggers. It’s hotter than billy-be-doggone bangtree outside.”

“What does that stupid sentence mean, anyway?” I asked, sitting on the floor beside his chair. Everyone in my family said it except for me, because I had some standards.

“How can you say it’s stupid if you don’t know what it means?” he asked, giving me the one eyebrow.

“Okay, what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” He turned back to the television.

“Aaaahh! Then where did you hear it?”

“From Mom Jarvis. I suspect you’d better take it up with her.”

“Mom Jarvis is dead! I never saw her in my whole life!”

“Don’t ask her, then. Ask your mother.”

“Don’t ask me,” my mom said from the corner of the couch.

“Do you even know what we’re talking about?”

“No. Just don’t ask me.” She was reading
Stranger in a Strange Land
for the sixteenth time.

“Now, Zippy: have I ever told you the origin of the saying ‘slicker than snot on a doorknob’?” Dad asked, causing me to fall over laughing. And thus I comfortably forgot about Jiggers, and went to bed without thinking about her again.

THE NEXT MORNING
I looked in on Jiggers and saw nothing, and that afternoon and that night the same, and the third morning following the Hickses’ departure I was feeling a bit fluttery in my stomach, and by that night, when there was still no sign of her, I was basically panicked. When I went home that night Dad asked, incorrectly, if Jiggers had plenty of food and water and I said, honestly enough, that she did.

When Andy had been gone four days a distinctive smell began to hover around his house. On the fifth day it was strong enough to keep me from opening their gate, and on the sixth day customers at Newman’s Marathon began to complain, and gasoline still had
lead
in it.

The truth of the situation was not lost on my dad, and a certain binding sheepishness grew up around us. I didn’t know what to do, and he knew what to do but couldn’t do it, and it became clear that our relationship was simply not forged out of confrontation.

THE HICKSES CAME HOME
late on a Saturday night. I was lurking like a bandit around the gas pump farthest from their house, periodically covering my face with my favorite T-shirt, which had printed on the front a large-mouth bass leaping up out of a lake.

The ten of them got out of their station wagon, one after another, slowly, as if out of a clown car at a very sad circus. Faced with the meeting of the two elements—the actual dead dog and the actual family—I could only smash my face up against the cool glass of the gas pump until my nose hurt. I kept thinking of how long my friends had Jiggers in their life; how she had been their family dog for as long as some of the little Hickses had been alive, and how I would have felt if we had lost Kai this terrible way, because of a stupid little neighbor girl who didn’t even know how to dog-sit.

Homer walked over to me in his exceedingly slow and shambling way and asked in his slow accent what happened.

“I think Jiggers must have tore her stomach on a sharp rock crawling under the porch, Homer, it was hotter than . . . it was so
hot
the whole time you were gone,” my voice was just a wretched little squeaky whisper, and I couldn’t seem to peel my face off the gas pump.

Homer had a high-pitched, breathy mountain voice, as gentle as a time that will never come again, and he turned to his eldest son, Chris, and told him to go fetch a blanket and a flashlight, and then he did the unthinkable. He crawled under the porch where the smell was nearly visible, and wrapped Jiggers’s body in an old blue blanket and dragged her out, and then he and his sons set to silently digging a grave in the backyard, under the shade of the mulberry tree we shared. It seemed to take hours. I stood out by their gate the whole time, fierce tears burning my face. When Jiggers was completely covered, all the Hicks men stood up and leaned on their shovels, and Andy began singing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” His voice was sweeter than grief, and the last note of the song hovered so long I couldn’t bear to leave the front gate, even after all the Hickses had gone inside and begun getting ready for bed. Homer saw me there when he came to turn off the porchlight, and ambled out to me.

He stood before me quiet for a minute, and then his big hand covered the top of my head.

“We all want to thank you for taking such good care of Jiggers. She was an old dog, and it must have been a comfort to her to have you near her at the end.”

I could only nod, and then I took off running for home, wiping my face on my fish shirt as I went, so that no one would ask any questions. But when I ran in the door my dad barely looked up from his program and my mom just waggled her fingers at me from around her book, and I knew Dad would never mention Jiggers again, not her life or her death or her grave.

THE HICKSES DIDN
’
T COME
to church the next day, but Loverline’s two sisters, Ernestine and Deltrice came, and they stood up and spoke about what a blessing it was to visit the home place with all their family gathered around them, and how we only know God through our relationships with his children, and when they sat down we all felt closer to Jesus, except for me, because I thought the whole idea was a bunch of crap.

I didn’t see Andy that whole week, because I mostly hid in my house, and then the following Sunday I wore some gorgeous plastic fingernails to church, and a little ways into the silent time Andy slid into the pew next to me. I couldn’t bear to look at him. He took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote on the church bulletin: “Don’t you have the most beee-yuuuu-ti-ful hands?!” And I wanted to write back so many things, but it was time to start singing, and when Andy opened his mouth, I knew absolutely that this was not one of the mourning days, but one of the rejoicing.

HAUNTED HOUSES

J
ulie and I had pitched a pup tent in my front yard, right next to the fence where we very first met when we were three years old. We were lying on our bellies looking through binoculars at Edythe’s front door; Edythe, the evil old woman who had lived across the street from me my whole life. Edythe, who appeared to be immortal.

My binoculars were from the Mickey Mouse Club, and I knew that they were absolutely, inarguably intended for moral purposes, such as Finding Hurt Or Lost Things, and that the Mouseketeers might be unhappy to find me using them to Spy On An Old Woman, but I had to keep a safe distance from her.

Julie’s binoculars were great big and professional, and came in a crumbling leather case that left brown streaks on our hands. We had swiped them off Julie’s Granny, who was all the time forgetting where she put stuff anyway. If necessary, we were both prepared to swear on the Holy Bible that Granny had given them to us and then forgotten. This was, I very well knew, a shameful use for a Bible.

I don’t know how long we’d been lying there watching Edythe’s door, but it must have been forever. Julie was getting cranky because we’d forgotten to bring candy bars, and I was feeling the beginnings of about six hundred chigger bites in the waistband of my shorts. I was about to give up when Edythe’s front door opened, causing my throat to close so tightly that my breath came out in a little whistle.

We snapped our binoculars into a locked position, and as soon as I stopped wheezing I told Julie what I had learned about Edythe since our last reconnaissance mission.

“My sister says she eats a stew made out of puppies.”

Julie turned and looked at me for just the briefest second. “Nuh uhn,” she said, but in a way that was like she wanted to hear more. Edythe was standing on her front stoop, looking up at the sky and withholding her approval.

“Melinda says she takes the puppies when they’re at their cutest, when they’ve got all that extra skin, and just tosses them in a pot of boiling water with some carrots, and that’s her dinner.”

We watched Edythe in silence for a few moments as she walked imperially down her sidewalk on Broad Street, her hands clasped together behind her back, her massive shelf of a chest thrust forward, her stride that of a field marshal about to bestow a visit on the degraded troops.

“Let me tell you something else, Julie,” I whispered. “I’ve been counting the number of days in a row she wears that same dress, and she’s up to twenty-three.”

“Whoo,” Julie said.

WHEN I TOLD MY MOM
about the puppy stew she just said pshaw. I asked her wasn’t it a fact that Edythe was all the time trying to kill my best cat, PeeDink, and she said Edythe just didn’t like cats in her yard, and that PeeDink always got away safely. I asked her wasn’t it true that at our last church picnic Edythe had brought cookies that appeared to be covered in snot?

“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” Mom said, trying to shoo me outside.

“What were they made of, then?”

“Well. I’m sure I can’t say. But only because I didn’t taste them.”

“Ah ha! You didn’t taste them because they came out of Ede’s nose, that’s why!”

My mom snorted. “You’re shameless. We should feel nothing but pity for that old woman.”

“Pity?!” Now this got my goat, as Mary Ball down the street was fond of saying. “Is it or is it not true that that ‘poor old woman’ tried to kill me in my baby bed?”

For just a moment Mom looked like she would acquiesce, then pushed me out the front door instead. “That was a long time ago. You’ve got to learn to let go of things, honey, or at least stop bringing them up. She’s a very troubled person.”

I WAS CONVINCED
Edythe ate puppy stew in order to give her the strength to put spells on people. I thought this because my sister had also mentioned, in passing, that if Edythe got me in a hard-core eye-lock she could draw me right into her house, which was unimaginable. When I pressed for the details of what Edythe would do to me once she had me, Melinda became uncharacteristically silent.

“Tell me! I have to know! I have to know how to protect myself!”

“Well, sweetheart,” she began, while gently trying to press down a clump of my gravity-defying hair, “you know she hates all of us, but especially you. There isn’t really anything you can do.”

I felt the urge to shimmy up my sister’s body like a panicked little monkey. “Why?!” I wailed. “Why does she hate me so much? I’ve never done anything to her!”

“She hates you because she and Mom used to be best friends, and then you came and broke up their friendship by demanding so much attention. Also she just hates little kids. But especially babies. Especially you.”

I sat down in the yard, defeated. Half of my butt was falling into a big earthworm hole I’d dug in the middle of the night. I was excellent at catching earthworms. I had my own grub box and everything, and sometimes when I went fishing with my dad we’d have so many worms left over I’d just toss them out to the fish, like dessert.

“But didn’t she know I was going to get born when Mom was pregnant for me? Couldn’t they have just worked something out then?”

Melinda looked off into the distance, still patting the top of my head.

“What? Lindy. What.”

“I don’t think I should be the one to tell you.”

“Aaaaahhhh! Tell me what?!” I knew from Marcus Welby, M.D., that this could and did sometimes happen, that bad news was followed by more and more bad news, until finally the doctor was telling you that you had to give up coffee, which I knew for a fact would have killed my dad.

“Mom doesn’t want you to know yet, but I think you’re old enough.” She paused for dramatic effect, as my heart leaped around in my chest like a bluegill on a line. “You’re adopted. Mom was never pregnant for you.”

I had to lie straight down in the dirt. Oh, my god. This explained so many things. I couldn’t think of any right off- hand, but I knew my life was about to become tragically clearer to me.

When the sky stopped twirling I jumped up and ran straight in the house to my mother, who was sitting in her corner of the couch, which by this time was a total nest. She was reading Isaac Asimov, the love of her life, and eating popcorn from the night before.

I skidded to a stop in front of her and gave her a look of hardest accusation. Without looking up at me she said, “You should brush that worm stuff off before you come in the house.”

“As if that matters! How could you not tell me I was adopted?! Don’t you think I have a right to know? And who were my real parents anyway?” I was trying to be mature, but periodically spit flew.

“Gypsies, honey.” She had still not looked up from
Isaac Asimov Explains the Whole of Reality and Then Some.

“Gypsies? Really?” This was somewhat compelling. I sat down.

“Yes, I thought we managed a very wise trade.”

“Gypsies? In Mooreland?”

“They were just passing through. We heard them long before they arrived, because their horses and their wagons are all covered with bells. It’s quite lovely. And they were led into town by a pack of wolves, who, during the full moon, stand up and preach.” She looked up for a moment, remembering. “They were such a sight.”

There were at least forty-two questions I needed to ask, but only one that really mattered. “What did you trade for me?”

Mom looked at me lovingly. “A green velvet bag.”

“A velvet bag?! Who wants a stupid bag?”

“Well, it was a very special bag. It had no bottom.”

“Ha! Joke’s on them!” I had to tip over a little for laughing at the retarded gypsies, then straightened back up as I realized I was laughing at my own family.

“Oh, it
looked
like it had a bottom. It looked just like a normal bag, except that you could just keep putting stuff in it. It was like the human heart, sweetie: there was no end to what it could hold.” My mom insisted on saying such things, even though almost no one understood what she meant. My dad sometimes called her Addlebrain because she read so many books.

“If you had such a great bag”—its uses escaping me for the moment—“then why did you trade it for me?”

“The gypsies were camped out down at the school playground, and one night your dad and I were drawn by the preaching wolves. And just before we left, we peeked inside one of the wagons, and there you were, lying on a sheepskin rug in a pool of lantern light. And we took one look at you and it was just like falling in love.”

“Ugh.” I made a little throwing-up face.

She picked up a few pieces of popcorn and looked back down at her book. “Plus, you were born with a tail.”

I looked at her, completely speechless, my mouth hanging open exactly like a creature with a tail.

“We had it removed so your pants would fit. Also we didn’t want you to suffer in school.”

I jumped up and headed for the door. “Okay, thanks, that’s good enough for me, I’m just going to go outside for a minute and . . .”

My sister was rocking back and forth very gently in the porch swing, studying her lines for
Up the Down Staircase.

I stood on the front step for a moment, contemplating the news. Mom and Edythe had been best friends because they both read books and they were both basically insane. I had heard from the Hickses, who had stayed close to both Edythe and mother, that the two of them had had some very interesting conversations before I came along. Okay. And then Mom and Dad picked me up from the gypsies and Mom had to tend to me, plus there was all the trouble of having my tail removed, and Mom and Edythe couldn’t talk as much anymore, and Edythe got really mad and jealous and tried to smother me in my baby bed while Mom was sweeping the front porch, but Mom had a premonition and ran in and caught her and then chased her across the street swinging the broom at her, screaming like a banshee, whatever that was. And Edythe had gone on hating me just as much as the day I arrived in the caravan, and nothing would ever stop it, unless she could lure me into her house with the evil eye and squeeze my thumbs. The story snapped itself clear in my mind, like a mousetrap. The most important thing of all was, of course, that I was a gypsy.

“Did she tell you?” Melinda asked, still looking at her play.

“Oh. Yeah, she told me.” And I stepped off the front porch and headed for the drugstore for a lemon phosphate. I took my gypsy blood and my tail and walked right past Edythe’s house instead of crossing the street like I always did, in order to show my sister a thing or two, but just as I reached the edge of her yard, Edythe stepped out her front door whistling and I had to take off running for my life, even though I was wheezing so hard I saw stars.

THE DRUGSTORE WAS OWNED
and operated by a man named, no kidding, Doc Holiday. It had a tin ceiling that must have been twenty feet high, and old wooden ceiling fans. There was a marble counter and twisty black iron stools and a soda fountain. The candy cases were made of oak and curved glass, and the doors slid open on ball bearings, delicately ticking. In the back of the long, rather narrow store were booths and tables where kids carved their initials and left their old chewing gum, and the west wall was all shelves of medicines and toiletries. My mom said that some of the medicine was so old it had undoubtedly come over on the Ark. There was a magazine stand, and a twirling rack that held comic books.

Many people found Doc Holiday’s personality objectionable, but I appreciated how one always knew where one stood with him, which was too close and making too much noise. He never even looked at people as he shouted at them, which was also reassuring to me, as if he were actually yelling at someone on the other side of the front window, or into the rear bathrooms. Doc dressed like a pharmacist, but asking him for advice was a mistake. I was once in the drugstore when a woman asked if Bag Balm was good for diaper rash.

“I don’t know! What are you asking me for?!” he bellowed, looking north.

Doc was not in the Rx business, nor was he in the business of meddling in other people’s affairs. He didn’t step into fights or defend small children from bullies. The bottom line for me was that I wasn’t safe in his establishment, not from any fate that might befall me, and particularly not from Edythe. At the Marathon station all the Newmans and all of their mechanics were on full alert when I was there, and would tell me exactly where Edythe was if they saw her approaching, and Big Dave had even figured out a way for me to climb into a little filthy tool closet if it looked like she was actually coming into the station. At the post office I had once tried to climb right inside our tiny mailbox when Edythe came in behind me, and from that time on the postmaster, Ralph, had let me hide behind the Dutch door leading to the mail-sorting room when necessary.

But Doc Holiday, who wore bowties and suspenders and had a perfectly round, bald head, and who in all ways appeared to be a gentleman, was a man of no sympathy. Once when Edythe was chasing me I had blindly run behind the counter, and he instantly and unceremoniously picked me up by the back of my shirt and plopped me right back in harm’s way.