She Got Up Off the Couch (11 page)

I opened the passenger door of her big green Impala and started to get in.

“Don’t even think you’re bringing those rats inside the car with us,” she said, shooing me back out.

“What…didn’t you just tell me you’d drive me to the dump?”

“Yes, but you’re not putting them up here.”

“Well, unlock the trunk for me, then, and I’ll put them back there.”

She opened her door and started to get out, then thought better of it. “No. I don’t want them in the trunk, either. I don’t want them anywhere inside the car.”

I thought maybe she was a little sensitive, because one time she and her friend Terri had set off on a big adventure to Muncie and halfway there the engine started to smoke, and when Melinda pulled over and opened the hood, the source of the smoke was Terri’s cat, Poot, who was permanently affixed to the motor and a couple other hot places onto which he’d leaked.

I threw up my hands. “I give up. How do you suggest we all get to the dump, then?”

In the end we tied the two bags to the door handles, one on her side, one on mine. As we pulled away from my house I noticed Melinda was driving rather gingerly, but after a few miles she sped up, and by the time we got to the dump the bags were flying out beside the car like ears, sometimes twisting around and thumping against the doors.

The man who attended to the dump waved us over as we pulled in.

“Hey, Larry,” Melinda said.

“Hey, Melinda. Got some rats there?”

She nodded.

“Your dad’s been throwing them right over there. You can see there’s a pretty big pile already.”

I got out and untied the bags. Melinda sat motionless during the whole operation. I walked over to the edge of the big pit and looked around. The sights in the county dump could take my breath away. There were refrigerators and tires and broken toys, an old pie safe missing its doors, a kitchen chair, all manner of paper and debris. It looked like a shadow house, turned inside out, a life being lived invisibly. I arced my arm backward as if I were pitching a baseball, and threw the first bag of rats in, and as it was sailing, I threw in the second. They were bottom-heavy. They didn’t go far, even though I’d thrown them as hard as I could.

Another thing every grown-up in my family was obsessed with was conserving heat, a very boring topic, quite clearly. Our house wasn’t insulated, and so my parents were always scheming to keep heat in a room, or move heat around a room, or get heat from one room to another. It was a hopeless task.

Built, apparently, during the period of American history when human height often exceeded ten feet, and no one, ever, cared about conserving heat, our ceilings were twelve feet high. As soon as the trend arrived, in the seventies, of lowering ceilings with a flimsy metal frame and papery sheets of pressed fiberglass, my dad was all over it; he started in the den, where all of our heat began and ended.

When he was finished we were astonished to discover that finally, one single thing in our house looked normal, like the houses of other people. We had a uniform, white ceiling. My mom was so moved by it that she threw caution to the wind and invited her prayer cell over to our house for coffee one afternoon. I don’t think any of the church women had been inside our house before.

By the time they arrived, the house was as respectable as we could make it. Rather than sitting in the living room, which was large and airy and managed to belie what was actually happening in the rest of the house, Mom chose to have everyone sit in the den, under the new, pristine ceiling. My job was to hover, offering more coffee or more sugar cubes.

Even straightened up, the den was shocking. There was almost no light; the furniture was old, unmatched, and beaten to a pulp; cats and dogs lay about coughing and scratching and attacking their dander. Most of the room was taken up with the black enamel coal stove. Beside it, in a strange alcove, stood a tall metal medicine cabinet that wouldn’t fit in our one, tiny bathroom. The doors to the medicine cabinet had long since ceased to close, so from anyplace in the room one could see the stack of thin towels, boxes of sanitary napkins, and various sundries that took up the top shelf. The church women were kind and fond of my mother, but the situation was clearly worse than they had expected. One woman, Betty Hardaway, seemed especially disconcerted by the omnipresence of weapons: above one of the couches my dad’s gun rack loomed, the rifles and shotguns polished to a deadly shine, boxes of ammunition stacked up on the bottom shelf. Hanging next to the gun rack was the bow and quiver of arrows Danny had left. Fishing rods and tackle boxes rested against the wall behind the television, and on Dad’s little table next to his chair, where he kept his brown radio, his ashtray, and his glass for whiskey, was his jar of animal teeth.

At what probably would have been the midway point of the ordeal, the ceiling began to emit a strange sound. I froze, desperately trying to pinpoint the source of it, but my mom continued to talk as though she heard nothing unusual.

It was mice, and from the sound of it, about fifty of them. They were apparently being disgorged from one of the holes in the original ceiling that Dad hadn’t bothered to patch when he hung the new one. It sounded as if they were all getting off a big mouse bus, happy and friendly and looking forward to their vacation. They skittered and dug around a moment in one corner of the room, and then took off running as a herd, right over our heads. When they reached the opposite corner, they turned and ran back. All of our cats leapt up on the backs of the furniture in agitation, staring at the ceiling and making growls deep in their throats. The dogs watched the cats, interested.

The sound of the little mouse claws running over the hollow ceiling was deafening. I looked at Mom, my mouth open in horror, and saw that the prayer cell women were all biting their lips and staring at their coffee cups. Mom continued to speak, seemingly unfazed, about her plans to lead a local boycott against the Nestlé corporation.

Soon enough, one of the women with leadership potential announced that the prayer cell was of one mind on the Nestlé issue, and that they ought to be going. My mom saw them to the door, and then came back in and began picking up the coffee cups and plates.

“Have you
ever
?!” I said, my arms raised in surrender.

“It sounded like they were playing football,” Mom said, carrying dishes into the kitchen.

I flopped down on the couch, sending up a cloud of dust. “Do you think the church ladies will ever come back?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

I looked up at the ceiling where, it suddenly became clear to me, all of the heat in the room would go. The mice had come to a sauna, and there was no doubt in my mind that, as the months grew colder, they would tell every other mouse in the world. The whole flimsy structure trembled under their collective weight.

I grew phobic of mice, just as there were more and more of them to fear. My cat, PeeDink, who my father swore was retarded simply because of a combination of unfortunate physical characteristics, was a terrific mouser, and because of the crazy and abiding love we shared, he naturally wanted to give all of his dead mice to me. My parents walked in on many scenes of PeeDink chasing me around the house, me screaming and waving my arms in the air, the poor captured mouse kicking its hind legs, trying to free itself from PeeDink’s jaws. Like most cats, he wasn’t interested in flat-out killing vermin; he wanted to kill them just a little bit and then play some really fun games which involved the mice trying to get away while he killed them a little bit more. Once when my dad came home from work I was up on the back of the couch and PeeDink had left three dead mice on the floor for me. He had grown so fat on mice that he no longer showed any interest in eating them.

One summer night, after I had moved back upstairs to my bedroom, I awoke from a deep sleep and discovered that the absolute worst thing had happened. Mom was asleep in the bedroom at the bottom of the stairs, and without moving a muscle I began to call for her. She heard me, even over the deafening racket made by the fans running between every room.

When she reached my bed, after tripping and kicking her way through the wreckage on my bedroom floor, she asked me what was wrong, and I told her that there were twenty-seven dead mice on my bed. They were completely surrounding me, so that I couldn’t move any part of my body without touching one. She stood up straight and looked me in the eye. I appeared wide awake and lucid, but was not.

“What should I do?” she asked.

“You need to pick them up and throw them away.”

She looked around the room until she spotted my trash can. It was overflowing, so she just dumped it on the floor, then walked over to me and began picking up the mice.

“Count them, so I know you get every one.”

“Here’s one,” she began. “I’m going to get these ones around your head first, so you can turn it. Here’s two and three.”

And in this way she removed all twenty-seven, picking them up by their phantom tails, the part of a mouse that unnerved me the most. When she was done she bent over and kissed me on the head and told me to go back to sleep.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked, trying not to look right at the trash can.

“What do you want me to do with them?”

“I want you to make them gone.”

She nodded. When I got up in the morning, they were gone.

By the following Christmas, Rose’s face had healed perfectly from her encounter with the rogue and murderous Saint Bernard, and Maggie just had a little zigzaggy scar across her temple. I had completely forgotten about poison sumac, which left no trace of its devastation on my body.

I spent Christmas night with Rose and Maggie, and around midnight we were awakened by a crash and a strange glow. We ran over to the window and saw that right across the alley, directly across from where we stood, the abandoned house was on fire, and in a serious way. It was a beautiful fire, raging but not spreading, and the three of us stood there a long time in our nightgowns, not even thinking about getting Rose’s parents or calling the volunteer fire department. It burned and burned. I knew that there had probably been many rats and mice living in that house, given how cold it was outside. I remembered a time when the death of them would have caused me pain, when I would have considered their suffering, but I couldn’t feel it anymore. All I felt was that warm shot of relief, the kind that comes with breathing when you’ve held your breath too long, as the windows of the kitchen blew out and, somewhere in the distance, a siren began to wail.

1.
“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,”
by Paul Simon. You need only listen to this song once to realize it is the greatest work of genius since
“Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler),”
by the Playmates. Also, it provides a person with the bonus of rewriting the chorus 700 times a day. For instance, a girl might say, “I’m ridin’ my bike, Mike,” or “I’m goin’ to my sister’s, mister.” She could also string together many such sentences, as in, “I’m feelin’ sad, Dad. Maybe you could get me some candy, Randy. Don’t be such a slob, Bob, just listen to me.” If the Dad ever actually held the record in his hands in a threatening way, he could be told that the emergency backup Paul Simon song was
“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,”
which for some reason was even more objectionable.

2.
“Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler),”
by the Playmates. A morality tale about a little car, a Cadillac, and a transmission problem. This song brilliantly gains momentum, and is sung faster and faster right up to the hysterical ending. Could be sung in the truck so frantically the father in question would sometimes have to stick his head out his open window while praying aloud.

3.
“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,”
by Elton John. I understood only one line of this song: “And butterflies are free to fly, fly away.” The rest was completely lost on me. I assumed the British did not speak English, which was a puzzle as they were sometimes referred to as the English. Not understanding the lyrics required me to listen to the song hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, filling in with nonsense words, which my sister said made me look oxygen deprived and sad.

4.
“Somewhere They Can’t Find Me,”
by Simon & Garfunkel. In addition to
“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,”
this was probably my most obvious theme song. It could have been written for me. The singer has done something terrible and now his only option is to sneak away: “Before they come to get me I’ll be gone, somewhere they can’t find me.” Oh indeed. How very very true.

5.
“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,”
by the Osmonds, featuring Donny Osmond. A lie, as anyone who knew my brother could attest. But if it was sung by Donny Osmond I could try to believe. I wanted to believe. This was a favorite to play not at top volume in my bedroom, but downstairs on the stereo that was shaped, improbably, like a Colonial desk. I liked to sing along with Donny (we had the same voice) while simultaneously pretending to draft a version of the Bill of Rights, using a fake quill pen. (In truth, a turkey feather.) This was a combination of activities my father found interesting, blasphemous, and wrong.

6.
“Along Comes Mary,”
by the Association. A wordy song. A wordy, psychedelic song, the meaning of which has never been determined by humans. Tailor-made for me. From the beginning, the song is just one long puzzle. “Every time I think that I’m the only one who’s lonely someone calls on me.” Who? (Mary, my sister would explain, through clenched teeth. Yes, but Mary who?) What follows is so unusual it doesn’t bear repeating, although I most assuredly could.

7.
“I Started a Joke,”
by the Bee Gees. Again, a world-class head-scratcher. He started a joke, and it started the whole world crying. I sensed astonishing depth in the Bee Gees’ lyrics, and also were they all boys? Including the one with the Bugs Bunny teeth? Was she truly never funny and that’s why the world wept? I knew people like that. Later in the song one of them, a Bee or a Gee, begins to cry and that gets the whole world laughing, so everything turns out fine in the end. (An additional work of genius is “The Lights Went Out in Massachusetts.” Massachusetts: A state? A prison? Dad was silent on the issue.)

8.
“Swamp Girl,”
by Frankie Laine. One of the great pieces of poetry in the civilized world, and flat-out terrifying. Frankie Laine is sick, or tired, or both, and a bad woman (the kind with narrow eyes, I’m guessing) is calling him from the yuck of a swamp where she lives. “Where the water’s black as the Devil’s track — that’s where my Swamp Girl dwells.” How simple it was to secretly change the lyric to “where the water’s black as the Devil’s crack,” never ever letting anyone hear me do it because this is a dead serious song and also one doesn’t rhyme lightly about the Devil. Particularly where there’s a Swamp Girl involved, her hair floating on the water. Frankie Laine was famous for other songs about rawhide or jerky or wagon trains, something like that, and all along his masterpiece was known only to me and my family. A shame.

9.
“The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,”
by Vicki Lawrence. Woe to the person who believed Vicki Lawrence was merely Carol Burnett’s separated-at-birth twin and game sidekick! No! She also performed this stunner, a song about…wait. Bad things in a bad place. The night “they” hung an innocent man, and not trusting your soul to some hmmm hmmm something lawyer. Wherever all this happened, someplace in Georgia, was about as ugly as it gets. People had blood all over them and essentially no one was to be trusted, which made for a chorus I could sing
for days.

10.
The Best of Ed Ames,
by Ed Ames. A member of the Ames brothers, Ed also played Daniel Boone’s faithful Indian companion on television. This was because, I was quite certain, he was a real live Indian. My mother insisted he was Lebanese, whatever that meant, as if a Lebanese would look that good in Indian clothes and as if his name wasn’t Ames, as in “aims a bow and arrow like a real live Indian.” In truth, Ed Ames was more shockingly handsome than any man I’d loved before him, including Glen Campbell and my brother’s friend Joe Overton. Ed was in a different category of attractive, I was discovering. He also had a voice that defied description; it was big and deep and pure, all those things, but it was also sad in some songs — heartbroken — and angry in others. He sang the way men would talk about things if they ever talked about things.
The Best of
was primarily show tunes and new songs that were flat philosophical, like “Windmills of Your Mind” and “Who Will Answer? (Aleluya No. 1).” What was this about? Who put a “No.” in a song title? It was the unmatched wonder of Ed Ames to combine such groundbreaking effects with songs that moved my mother to tears, and made me imagine life on the frontier, where buckskin stayed so
clean.
I was willing to share the record with my mom, as a matter of fact, right up until she heard me repeating a phrase from “Who Will Answer” — “in our stars or in ourselves” — and she needlessly told me that Shakespeare wrote those words. I waved her off and from that point on Ed stayed in my bedroom where he belonged.