She Got Up Off the Couch (10 page)

We were supposed to learn to sail on the perfectly flat, windless lake, so I volunteered to clean the kitchen instead. During the Nature Walk I offered to straighten our cabin and take Claire’s turn at latrine duty. I had no experience cleaning anything and I
volunteered
— such was the depth of my despondency. Every day I wrote home to Mom, letters more and more bitter and frantic, certain that Josh had forgotten me or that Melinda had shoved his little head through the bars of his crib by forgetting to tie down the bumper pad. “The bumper pad must be TIED SECURLY,” I wrote, “even if it looks like it’s on their fine TIE IT AGAIN.” Josh was blond, blue-eyed, a perfect perfect American angel specimen of rightness. “You know he’s got that little white hat that looks some like Gilligans, a sort of baby fishing hat. Now you should make sure Lindy puts that on him before going out in the sun or else the strawberry mark on his head will get even brighter and maybe sunburn, I very much hope you are not just throwing these letters away but giving them to Melinda who as you know HAS BEEN KNOW TO SET THE HOUSE A FIRE.”

On the second night of chapel I wore the torn panty hose and believed it might shame me forever. All the other girls had brought more than one pair. I did not accept the altar call, and Mrs. Canary began to give me both the bird-eye and the beak. Claire developed such bad cramps from being religious that on the walk back to the cabin, Scott, who bore an unhealthy resemblance to Shawn Cassidy, was allowed to support her, even though it meant breaching the boy camper/girl camper line. Claire was crying and limping a little, and I noticed a small gold cross on a delicate gold chain against her throat. Scott held her tenderly, and back in the cabin all the other girls ministered to her and she was grateful. A Coke even appeared, as if Jesus himself had sent her a gift.

On the third day I asked to use the office telephone, explaining that my family was prone to emergency appendectomies (true) and I believed it was my time. Mom answered the phone and I said, “Well, now I’ve gone and gotten really sick and it’s time for my appendix to come out.”

“Is that right,” she said. I heard her turn the page of a book.

“Yes. I don’t believe I need to remind you that Danny’s
burst
on the
operating table
and had to be removed with a
spoon,
and if you’d waited too long you’d be sonless.”

“Tell me what your symptoms are,” Mom asked, without inflection. My mother could not abide a sick person in any form, not fevers, burns, protruding bones, heaving, headaches, diabetes, or amputations. She had once been a Christian Scientist and it had gotten in her like a virus and even though she had been a Quaker since long before I was born, she still believed the Seven Beautiful Daughters of the Seven Beautiful Kings were Perfectly Healthy Within Us.

“I’ve got an ache in my side.” That’s what I remembered from when Julie had it.

“Where in your side.” Again, this was not a question.

“Over, you know, between my ribs and the rest of me.”

“Which side?”

Blast the woman! Blast her eyeballs! I only had a 50–50 chance and those were not good odds as any daughter of Bob Jarvis would know. I did the only thing I could: I guessed. “The left.”

“I’ll see you at the end of the week, sweetheart,” she said, hanging up.

I would not sing Kum-Bye-Ya around the campfire. I would roast marshmallows but I would not sing. I would not play games of tag in the dark, where the boys and girls were allowed to hunt for one another, and find each other, in ways that made my veins run cold. The air was desperate, scented with blood. I snuck back into the mess hall and washed all the tables with bleach.

During the days we swam. Scott was a lifeguard and wore practically nothing, just trunks, sunglasses, and a whistle around his neck. He looked like he was preparing for a life as an anemic Erik Estrada. The T-shirt Claire wore over her string bikini somehow managed to be more revealing than the suit itself. Every day she would swim languidly out to the dock where Scott was sitting. She’d pull herself up slowly, water streaming off her as if she were a seal, then sit in the chair next to Scott where it was perfectly obvious no one else was allowed to sit. They would talk, and then something frisky would happen and wrestling would commence, and Claire would get thrown in the water, and the whole thing would begin again. I lay on an inner tube not far from the shore, floating around in circles in Melinda’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt, watching.

I did not accept Jesus as my personal savior on Tuesday night, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday. My panty hose were now in shreds. It was Friday night that Claire decided to go, having waited for most everyone else to take their moment up front with Minister Bob. It turned out that when Claire did open her heart it was a wide, wide avenue, because she sobbed and vowed to change all her secret ways, and Bob was so moved he kept his hands on her a long time, and Mrs. Canary bobbed her head so steadily it appeared she might go all the way down and take a drink of water. Nearly everyone wept that night. I stayed on my bruised, abraded knees and imagined the light in Josh’s nursery first thing in the morning, the way he woke up babbling a happy baby language. Claire was so saved, as a matter of fact, that Scott had to walk her back to the cabin, only halfway there they took a turn and disappeared into the woods and I was the only one to see them go.

At breakfast on Saturday morning, which would be our last full day and night at church camp, Mrs. Canary told me that I was the only camper who had not taken the walk to the altar. She had tears in her eyes as she said this, and told me that it was a great pain to Minister Bob and to all the staff but most especially to Jesus himself. Couldn’t I just? she asked me. Couldn’t I just put whatever was stopping me aside and accept eternal salvation? And if I couldn’t, did I realize I wouldn’t be able to attend the going-away sock hop that night? Because I could be an influence, she said, still on the verge of crying. I could be a dark influence on all the beautiful souls who had already said yes.

At chapel Saturday night the moment for the altar call came and I could not move. Because it was the last night, like the last night of a fair, everybody streamed past me, making my stubbornness even more apparent and perverse. There was loud praying and shouting; Claire, I think, came close to fainting, and there I stayed, on my knees. The safety pin in my skirt had come undone and was performing the appendectomy I didn’t yet need. The old bird at the piano watched me with her one black eye, and I watched her back, and when we left the chapel that night everyone else headed to the dining hall for the sock hop and I headed back to the cabin.

I sat on the front stoop in my cutoff shorts, barefoot. My T-shirt and bathing suit and towel were hanging on the line in the moonlight, drying, and for some reason I found the sight very reassuring. No one was around; the crickets were noisy, and I could hear the music from the dance coming up the hill very clearly, but it wasn’t for me and I didn’t want it. I heard footsteps and feared an assault by a ministerial brigade, but it turned out just to be Robin Hicks, my neighbor. He said, “Hey, you.”

I said, “Hey, Robin.”

He smiled at me and there was that broken tooth — I had done that and he still liked me just fine. He was seventeen, and I was eleven. “I came up here to see if you’d like to dance.”

The song that began was “If,” by Bread, a song I already found so painfully beautiful I couldn’t add it to my record collection at home.
If a face could launch a thousand ships, then where am I to go?
I stood up in the leaves and pine twigs, and took a step toward Robin. He very gently put one hand on my waist and one on my right shoulder, and we swayed so slowly I bet to the stars it looked like we weren’t moving at all. When the song was over he kissed the top of my head and walked back down to the dance, and I went inside the cabin to pack. To go home.

Our three faces had seen better days. Rose was sitting in her backyard studiously avoiding bees or any reference to bees, because she had become convinced that she was allergic to them. She no longer walked barefoot because of the premeditated way bees hung about in the grass exactly where her foot might land. Her sting-allergy fear was unrelated (except perhaps at some very deep level) to the fact that the whole left side of her face was swollen and bruised, the result of a dog bite by a Saint Bernard at a family reunion. The dog, a grown male who had been unprovoked, had gone for her eye — her good eye, the one that didn’t wander — and had missed by about a quarter of an inch. She was full-out traumatized, and I feared by the dejected way she was sitting that she might become afraid of anything with teeth, anything with stingers, and eventually, anything with seeds, like a woman in our church who was constantly pointing out the seeds in certain vegetables and fruits.

Three days earlier, Maggie, in an act of derring-do, had twisted the rings on the swing set until they were only about two inches long, then hung on them as they righted themselves. By the end she had looked like a little tornado. Her feet got out of control, and the momentum moved up her body, ending with her head, which smacked against the swing set at about the speed of sound. Remarkably, the soft part of her temple connected exactly with one of the swing set bolts, which entered her head as if it had been made of butter. She had required stitches, and now the side of her head was all a greeny-yellow bruise, and she refused to leave her bandage on, so the stitches were crawling across her temple like a black bug.

After bragging to great excess, and for many years, that I was immune to poison ivy, I had contracted a deadly case of poison sumac while camping the previous weekend. It was, apparently, a rare form of creeping rash, because it had begun in the bend of my elbow, had crawled all the way up my arm, my shoulder, and my neck, and was currently inflaming the left side of my face. I told all the white trash kids in town it was leprosy, which made them run inside to their fat mamas.

Rose was so deeply worried by her dog bite and Maggie’s head injury that I didn’t know what to suggest we do. My boredom and her quietness were both so acute that I started to feel spooked. Maggie was sitting on the swing, not really swinging, because her head insides were still wobbly.

Rose’s house was bordered at the back and on one side by alleys; across the side alley sat an abandoned house. It was a good-looking house, as far as I was concerned, although it had occurred to me that I coveted nearly every house in town, and spent a fair amount of time imagining living in them. This one was large, wooden, and had a variety of shapes, like a house a witch would live in. At the back was an enclosed sitting porch that had floor-to-ceiling windows with so many small panes that they had probably been cleaned once in the past century, and then by someone conscripted, as atonement for acts of public indecency. The sitting porch was the only part of the house I had explored — the rest was too frightful even for someone as intrepid and with such low standards as myself. What stopped me in the living room, in addition to the general metric ton of detritus, was a pair of men’s overalls, lying spread out in the doorway as if their occupant had simply vanished while crawling into the house. Something had eaten a hole clear through the bottom and into the crotch, and I was deeply afraid, not of the hole or the crotch but of the Something. The sitting porch, however, was about as civilized as some parts of my own house. There were some metal chairs still arranged, by accident, as if to accommodate a long conversation over lemonade. The floor was covered with broken Ball jars. Walking on them created a noise that was akin to a whole, dreadful lifetime of tooth grinding. I enjoyed it. There were some intact jars in there too, blue ones and green ones that had bubbles right in the glass, and old whiskey bottles. I considered telling my dad about them, but it was a private place, as far as such things went.

Sitting in Rose’s yard that day, I could see her cat Snowball coming and going from the house, sometimes languorous and sometimes agitated. He went in through a broken basement window and came out through a hole in the back door. He sat on the porch licking one paw and rubbing his eyes with it like a sleepy baby; looked up at the sky as if he had just remembered the single most important event in his life, then turned his attention to his butt. I lost track of him for a few moments while looking at Rose, and then heard a scuffle coming from the basement. Snowball made furious hissing and screaming noises, followed by what sounded like a football being thrown against the door of a clothes dryer. Rose and Maggie and I ran out the gate and into the alley as quickly as our plagues and punctures and sutures would allow, just as Snowball emerged from the basement carrying in his mouth the broken body of a yellowish-white rat fully half his size.

The three of us skidded to a stop a few feet from the cat. Snowball was making a low moaning sound in his throat that was half pleasure and half revulsion. The rat hung upside down as if its bones had all just given up hope. Taking a few more steps toward us, Snowball dropped the rat in the gravel, inviting us to inspect it. We all squatted down around it, our hands tucked protectively against our legs.

I guessed it to be a male rat, by its general fierce hideousness. He was so menacing he could have been the leader of some outlaw rat posse. His front two teeth were yellowed and long and protruded down over his bottom lip like something prehistoric, and his claws were still engaged in a fighting position. I picked up a stick and turned him over on his belly, so that he was looking at us. Even in death, his eyes were grotesquely intelligent, and they continued to emit a kind of brightness that made my stomach clench. His long tail, a pink cable, lay stretched out behind him, the end of it curved in an imitation of grace.

I stood up, light-headed. Snowball had gone back to grooming himself. He was, obviously, a solid white cat, and very clean. I guessed he kept himself so beautiful in order to compensate for his deafness. Rose and Maggie continued to poke at the rat as I started home. The afternoon sun was blinding, and I felt like I either needed to eat or had gotten too full. There was no place I was fully safe. My whole life was infested.

I am sure the mice were always there and I wasn’t aware of them, but as I grew older there were more and more, until finally my life was punctuated by encounters with them.

For instance, one afternoon I was walking through my parents’ bedroom, on my way upstairs, and as I passed their bed I stepped on something, and the way the stepping on it felt made me lift my leg up slowly, without looking down, and remove my sock, and turn around and walk out of the bedroom as if I was sidling up to a trance state, and go call my sister on the phone.

“I’ve stepped on something,” I said, clearing my throat to get all the words out.

“Good for you,” Melinda said. I could hear her stirring her husband’s lunch.

“I don’t know what it was.”

She stopped stirring. “Are you hurt?”

“I think you better send Rick over here.”

It was my favorite pair of socks, too, white tube socks with a blue stripe between two bright yellow stripes. I considered them my dressy socks, and often wore them to church. They had grown very soft with wearing. I feared, rightly, that I would never see them again.

When Rick and Melinda arrived, I was sitting on the couch staring straight ahead, my hand still resting on the phone. I pointed to the scene of the disaster, and Rick went straight in and squatted down and lifted up my sock. Melinda was standing a few feet outside the doorway, close enough to gossip with but far enough away not to see.

“What is it?” she asked, leaning just slightly toward the mess.

“I don’t know,” Rick said slowly, “but it had an eyeball.”

Melinda had a way of stifling a hoot that involved quick putting her hand over her mouth and letting it just come out of her nose like a sneeze. It made her eyes get really big like maybe her whole head was going to explode. Her method of unlaughing was actually worse than if she’d just let it come out.

I pulled my legs up and put my head down on my knees.

“Lindy, you’d better get me some kind of a bag,” Rick said, “and a spoon.”

I moaned out loud and Melinda had to turn her back to me to keep me from seeing the devilish transformations of glee her face was undergoing.

When she came out of the kitchen with a trash bag and a tablespoon, Lindy asked if I wanted to go sit on the porch, but I just stayed where I was. It couldn’t possibly get any worse. I would carry with me forever the feeling of my weight coming down on my heel, and the something underneath it giving way, and the sound it made.

“What do you want me to do with this sock?” Rick called.

“Just, Rick, just” — Melinda waved her hands at him — “just put it in the bag.”

She walked over to me and knelt down. “Let’s take this other one off, sweetie,” she said, peeling it off and tossing it in toward Rick.

“Those were my best socks,” I said, from between my knees.

“Well, honey, they were there when you needed them.”

We kept a fifty-pound bag of dog food on the back porch, and one evening my dad reached in with the dog’s pan, and a rat ran up his arm. Dad threw the pan so hard it broke the light fixture above the door, and in trying to shake the rat off, spun himself around in a circle and smacked his face against the door frame. There wasn’t just one rat, either, there were three, which I believe qualifies as a pod of rats, and the two who had not assaulted my dad became agitated and began to eat their way frantically through the waxy paper of the dog food bag. Dad took off running in the wrong direction, and ended up sprawled over the old wringer washer. All of this happened in just a few terrible seconds, and then he was back in the house, battered and wild-eyed.

The method of extermination my dad chose was to put out so much poison in the basement, where the dogs and cats couldn’t get to it, that my mom feared it would seep into the ground and kill everyone in Mooreland. He had, apparently, discovered quite a nest down there, and he was having trouble sleeping at night for fear the rats would come up the basement stairs, use a credit card and unhook the latch on the basement door, creep into the den past the dogs and the cats, and climb into our beds and eat off our noses.

“A rat will eat off your
nose
?” I asked, horrified.

“They’re especially fond of noses, as I understand it,” he said, mixing some toxic rat cocktail that was filling up the whole downstairs with mustard gas.

“What is that you’re mixing?”

“I don’t know. I found it down at the hardware store. Roscoe said it’s so deadly it was banned about thirty years ago. He had a case of it in the back room.”

I picked up the papery gray box the powder had come in. Thirty years ago packaging was not so sophisticated, and the distributors had chosen as their brand name Poison. Under the name was a convincing skull and crossbones, and a warning label that stated the contents included arsenic, and that a potential ingestor stood absolutely no chance of survival.

“This ought to do the trick,” I said, putting the box down and wiping my hands on my jeans.

The rat carcasses began piling up. At first we just put them in the barrel where we burned our trash, but on the first Wednesday we attempted a rat pyre, a bird flew too close to the smoke and died. We had to find an alternative plan. We couldn’t really bury them, because of what it would have done to the grass. Mom was growing weary of the whole mess, and told Dad she didn’t care where they ended up as long as their wretched bloatedness was out of the house and she didn’t have to smell them anymore. We all had headaches, and my dad had developed a nervous jerk of the shoulders.

The only option left to us was the county dump, and Dad started driving them there. One day, however, he left for work without the day’s allotment, and when I went outside for the first time I saw two plastic bags sitting on the front steps, the handles tied up tight. I knew if I left them there I would be deviled by them all day, the shapes in the bottom that were just barely discernible, and the fumes rising up out of them like heat off a highway. I was so reluctant to pick them up that my mouth began to water, as if I had to spit, but I grasped the knotted handles and headed for my bike. Just as I was climbing on, my sister pulled up in front of the house and said she was heading for Grant’s department store, in New Castle, and wanted to know if I’d like to ride along. Grant’s meant one thing and one thing only — a frozen cherry Coke, for which I would have compromised any principle — but I had my rats to worry about.

“I was just gonna ride these rats over and toss them in the gravel pit,” I said, raising the bags enough that she could see them.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Why didn’t Dad take them?”

“He forgot, I reckon. Anyway, I can’t just leave them sitting there all day.”

“Well, come on. I’ll go past the dump on the way.”