She Got Up Off the Couch (14 page)

When it was time for bed she lent me a pink nightgown that was so big I could have fit in just the sleeve but I took it gratefully. I slipped out of my clothes and folded them in front of the closet door, knowing I’d be wearing them again without a washing and it was hard to say how long. Olive changed on the other side of the room into her own, peach-colored nightgown. We had changed in the same room before, but on this night I accidentally turned too soon and saw her standing there, her girdle removed, her huge gray bra lying on the dresser. She was in just her underpants and was about to slip the nightgown over her head.

I quick snuck under the covers and pretended to be so sleepy I was about to die. My heart was yapping around in my chest hard enough I was sure Olive could hear it, and my stomach was doing an extra weird thing that caused it to sink in on itself in spasms. My feet were freezing and I cursed myself (curses, curses, I said) for having an eye like a camera. I had just added something to the photo album of Things I Wished I’d Never Seen. This one could be cross-referenced under Not Sure What It Was.

Olive’s body had been covered with stretch marks and varicose veins, like a map you turn over and can never make sense of. Dotted all around the silvery stripes and the bright blue raised veins were more and more moles, thousands of them. Her breasts were large and hung to her waist, and everything was sinking in folds — a thick ribbon of skin over the elastic of her underpants; pockets above her knees. The skin that wasn’t blue with veins or black with moles was as white as the belly of a deer, and then there were those bright red hands, so chapped she no longer had fingerprints.

“Did you say your prayers?” Olive asked, climbing in bed beside me.

“Jesus loves me, God is love, good night,” I said, repeating the words my mother made me say before bed every evening.

“God bless
you,
” Olive said, turning over and settling in to sleep.

But I didn’t answer. I let my hands rest on my hip bones, which were so pronounced my dad swore he could hang coffee cups from them. My skin was honey-colored in the late summer and taut as a drum. I traced the line of my neck, my sternum, my elbows. I was swimming in the pink nightgown; there was nothing to me and never had been. But even though it was Olive who could see the future, not me, I shook and blinked in the dark silent room, and I just wanted to keep it, I wanted to keep who I was, for the first time in my life.

“Sweetheart,” Olive whispered.

I buried my head in my pillow, thought
Dear God I just fell asleep and she’s getting me up for church, will there be no end to my punishment.

“Orville says there’s something on television we should see.”

I got out of bed and let Olive wrap me in a big blue robe. I held up the hem as we walked quietly down the steps, over the Turkish runner, into the living room where Orville sat in his starched white pajamas and dark paisley robe. He didn’t say anything, but nodded at the television.

I sat beside Olive and tried to discern what I was seeing. The Farmer’s State Bank president, John Taylor, was speaking to the American public and he was in a sorry state. No, no — it was actually Richard Nixon. I remembered now, because it was Nixon with the jowls and John Taylor who was handsome. Nixon was saying he no longer felt he had the political support to lead the nation and would be resigning that very night. Olive and Orville were motionless, but I was most taken with the blue band crawling across the bottom of the screen, the issuance of a tornado warning for parts of Henry County. A tornado had been spotted…somewhere…I never understood the parts about north/northeast, or six miles west of 375 North, what the heck did any of that mean anyway. My palms began to sweat, and I turned to Olive and said, “I want to go home, I want to call my dad.” She shushed me, seemingly unaware of the possibility of a tornado. Nothing scared me more. Nothing except rats, being kidnapped, or being thrown into black water. Also yellow mustard. But tornadoes were way high on the list of things that terrified me, and since I couldn’t get Olive’s attention I got up and ran to the big plate glass window in the parlor where I could see the sky.

Behind me Olive and Orville kept their vigil and Richard Nixon got kicked around good, but for the last time. I watched the black sky, trying desperately to hear anything, or the absence of anything, the silence preceding the soul-rumble, the freight train music of a tornado. I stood silent and strained as a dog, watching the sky, waiting for the real disaster to strike. The night was black — nothing like the sickly green that means the end of an entire town — and then there it was, miles above the town and white as the ghost of Jesus who had once appeared in our living room window. A ghost tornado, spinning like a child’s toy through the atmosphere, an innocent phenomenon, all things considered. I watched it pass over Astor Main’s, and the cornfield next door, then ran outside and watched it spin its way down the Wilbur Wright Road toward the Luellen farms. It would not touch down. It would harm no one. It spared us, and on the following Sunday morning I sat next to Olive at church, rubbing her ruined fingertips with my own, which were smooth as glass, young as lambs.

Dad somehow came by a side of beef not approved by the meat-men of the FDA, with the problem that we would have to package it. The hide was gone, most of the bones were gone, but other than that it was like a cow suit and we had to turn it into frozen packages of civilized dinners.

It was determined we’d hold the festivities at Melinda’s house (because Melinda’s house was clean, for one thing), and Dad showed up there with a refrigerated truck and a stack of butcher paper and tape. He hung strips of flypaper from the ceiling, because the man would not
tolerate
flies. The gigantic red meat-thing came inside in four pieces, and while Dad and Rick made the various cuts, Mom, Melinda, and I wrapped and labeled. There was a long moment right there at the beginning where I thought I might not be able to do it, might not be able to pick up the quivering liver and center it on the butcher paper, allowing my hands and clothes to become covered in blood. I saw the look on Melinda’s face, too, and surely Mother was remembering the time Dad had come home with a raccoon for dinner, which he’d skinned and she’d put in the oven to bake, except that naked and pinky and lying in a pan it looked exactly like a human baby and Mom became a bit agitated, which is to say she became hysterical and swore she would need electric shocks to recover.

But there was something else in us that saw weeks and weeks of dinner, and so we just set to it, and before I realized it had happened I was picking up freshly cut meat and wrapping it with quickness and efficiency, and when I looked down at my large-mouth bass T-shirt it was completely red with blood and I didn’t care. The shirt was too small for me anyway; I just couldn’t let it go.

Ididn’t think about it much — but at the end of the day, after the hundreds of pounds of meat had been divided between Rick and Melinda and us, as Dad and I loaded our take into the truck to head for home, I knew, dried blood up to my elbows and in my hair, that it’s possible when necessary to get used to
anything.

The new bike my dad and I built to replace my old one (with the purple sparkly banana seat) weighed about seven hundred pounds, but when I got it going it flew, rendered nearly gravity-free by its momentum. I wanted to ride farther and farther out of town, where the flat streets of Mooreland gave way to some hills. The new bike was far too heavy to jump off the loading dock of the Mooreland post office; it was too bulky to ride along the low walls at the edges of neighbors’ yards. What it was built for was speed and long distances, so I embarked on a campaign for freedom. Requesting freedom from my dad was rather like waiting for Jesus to return to Planet Earth: you could hope all you wanted, but the answer was still no.

I was tall and knew Mooreland better than people who’d been alive three times as long, and Dad still had a little panic about me crossing Broad Street to get to Rose’s house. When I was in the bathtub he still called out “Zip?” every seven minutes to make sure I hadn’t drowned. Before anyone could touch me as an infant, he enforced hand-washing with rubbing alcohol, including by my own human mother.

We went round and round. I cajoled, and stressed my deep innate sense of personal responsibility, which we both knew to be nonexistent. He shook his head and said it was too dangerous. It was too dangerous because people in rural Indiana (and probably in rural Texas and rural Minnesota) drive country roads as if they are both immortal and participating in a stock car event. It seemed that once a year someone flew up and over a blind hill doing ninety, either in the completely wrong lane or dead in the middle, which is where they ended up. Men especially did this, and farm boys in trucks. It wasn’t because they thought they owned the road, as the saying went, it was because they did own the road, and after the fifty-second time you’ve stuck your hand in a jammed thresher and
still
not lost an arm, what’s the Wilbur Wright Road to you?

I won because Dad had other things on his mind, and because I was relentless. He gave in, telling me I could ride as far south as the crossroads at Messick, but then I had to turn around and come back, AND I had to ride with a gigantic flag poking up out of my back fender, a flag six feet tall and colored blaze orange.

“Is that to keep me from getting shot by hunters?” I asked as he installed the thingy the flag slipped into. “Because you know there’s not a lot of hunting out in that tomato field, Bobby.”

“Stop calling me Bobby.”

“Not a lot of deer just hanging around in the wide open four months before hunting season. In the tomatoes.”

“Do you understand what orange shows up against?” he asked, giving me a hard eyebrow. “Nature. You ride with the flag on the bike or you stay home and swing from your toes, it’s your choice.”

“Fine,” I said, stomping halfway to the front door. I stomped back. “But I just want you to know I think that flag is ugly on my bike and also it doesn’t seem so
aerodynamically sound.
”

“Huh,” Dad said, tightening a bolt. “You hear that on a commercial?”

I nodded. “The Porsche 911, you know that one with the tunnels?” I sat down on the sidewalk beside him and recounted the entire speedy plot of the advertisement.

The idea was that I could be in a little dip or cresting a hill and an oncoming car would see the flag long before they saw me. I got it. I went out the first day and worked my way up to speed, which near about tore my hamstrings, and by the time I got to the house my sister coveted with all her heart I was pretty much airborne. I was riding on the correct side of the road, flag whistling and flapping and slowing me down, when a car came up over a hill in
entirely the wrong lane
and had to swerve to miss me. A local woman with such beautiful straight blond hair that she refused to roll down her windows passed by, tooted, waved. I had to climb off my bike, sit down in the gravel of the shoulder and hang my head between my knees to keep from hyperventilating. I would never, ever tell Dad about this. I turned around and went home, and the next day went a little farther.

There are horrible tortures in this world, like going to church and that moment your sister notices you have never once in your entire life washed behind your ears. Dinner is routinely late and homework is a given. There are mean boys who talk about underwear, and mean girls, but the only one I knew (Dana) I really liked. There is the torture of the dead baby pig pile at your best friend’s house, a pile which is frozen in the winter but in the summer must be faced squarely. Your hamster, Skippy, drowns in your potty chair and your sister and brother WILL NEVER LET YOU FORGET, even though Skippy was a biter, and indeed was found with his mouth wide open and his teeth as long and dangerous as those of a saber-toothed rodent. There is the cruelty of being made to wear shoes; there is the fact of an unheated house in the wintertime; there is a critical lack of plumbing for months at a time.

But no torture I knew as a child compared with canning season, which seems to have been devised by Satan to reproduce the environs of Hell long before we get there. Imagine a kitchen at the height of summer, pans boiling and pressure cookers steaming, Ball jars being sterilized (and not by something
cold
), Dad running the operation like a band director with a grudge and a twitching baton. We put up apple butter, we put up snap beans. We boiled corn on the cob then sliced it off in strips with a sharp knife. There were bread-and-butter pickles, chowchow, yellow squash. But nothing matched the sheer, violent hatefulness of canning tomatoes.

They had to be picked, for one thing, then destemmed, boiled, dumped into the sink, and slipped from their skins while still at a temperature of 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The larva part, once denuded, was dropped quickly into jars, plop plop plop, until the jar was full, at which time Dad got the job of the paraffin and the lid, which seemed to me to perhaps be the least of the evils, but of course he was in charge. And if I complained, he’d tell me to stand in front of the fan, which was blowing the whole shebang around like the broiling wind in Death Valley.

On the night before the first tomato canning day I told Dad I was going to get up early because I was going to ride all the way to the end, to the limit. I would stop at the crossroads, have a moment, then turn around and come home. Maybe I’d do it a second time, if I was feeling sprightly.

Dad said no, absolutely not, we were getting an early start. This was a man who went fishing at three in the morning, and each year when Blue River’s band marched in the State Fair parade, we left at five
A.M.
in order to get a good parking spot. He was routinely
up for the day
at four, news blaring by six. So I knew when he said early he meant it, and if I was going to sneak out of the house it might mean doing so in the dead of night, never having slept.

I lay in bed on my daisy sheets, which had been on the bed as long as I could remember, in front of the box fan with the little mouse skeleton still in the bottom. I’d long since stopped staring at it. I tried not to sleep. I imagined Dracula running down the streets of Old London, running right at me, and that got my heart going for a while. I remembered the dream I’d had that a troll was eating my hair, and the time Melinda’s clown doll had talked to me from a wicker chair. Those things — terrifying at the time — had worn down, had become just What Happened. The clown doll talked, that’s just how it was. The troll was chewing on my hair but when I woke up it was PeeDink, my retarded cat.

So what was really scary? The day my sister got married and left home; that one still stung. The love I felt for my nephew, Josh, and how it felt when I thought he might have stopped breathing. Tornadoes, nuclear bombs, being stranded on a mountaintop in a blizzard, any event that caused me to have to slice off the fatty part of other people’s bottoms and eat them because I was starving to death. Mannequins, obviously, and my father’s temper — the time he went after Melinda with a belt because he’d gotten her a pair of shoes that didn’t fit her and she said so. And something about my mom. Something about my family. I lay on my back in the sweltering night, wide awake and sick with fear, and that line of thought sure worked. That one worked like magic.

Dad got up and went out to his little shed. I turned off the fan and could hear him out there with his beeswax and his traps, his tools and chains, whistling and drinking a cup of coffee. I slipped out of bed, still in yesterday’s clothes, and made my way down the creaky steps by sliding on the banister. No one barked, no one saw me. I managed to keep the screen door from slamming, and I wheeled my bike off the porch so quietly I knew I had special powers I would eventually need to investigate.

At the edge of town I pulled the blaze flag out of its slot and left it in front of Astor Main’s funeral home. The flag was a prime irritant. I took off, the fields around me just beginning to glow with dawn, a scent in the air and a density of light that
almost
made me understand why Dad got up so ridiculously early. I went up the first hill, past Melinda’s Covet Thy Neighbor’s House, and sailing down; the tree lines ended and the fields opened up before me, thousands of acres. And I had an image, the way I sometimes thought about being sick just before I got sick, of a time out at Julie’s when a fox had streaked across the road in front of us. I remembered the fox and just like
that,
something crashed out of a ravine on the left side of the road and galloped across to the right, maybe a couple hundred feet from me — just close enough for me to see the shape but not the face. I stopped my bike and watched the thing lumber across the field and disappear into a clump of trees.

My breathing was skittery and my right leg shook. I had thought at first it had been a cow, but it wasn’t, and it wasn’t a horse or a stag. I stared at the fields, replaying the image. I knew exactly what I’d seen. I turned around and headed home.

Dad was waiting on the front porch, his arms crossed, a cigarette burning near his chest. “I’d suggest you get off that bicycle,” he said, full of menace.

“Now, listen,” I began.

“No, you listen. If I tell you you’re not riding your bike of a morning because we’re canning tomatoes, what does that mean?”

“I have to tell —”

“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”

I leaned my bike against a tree and walked up into the yard. “It means I can’t ride my bike.”

“Correct. And why can’t you?” He never took his eyes off me, which made me have to keep looking down at the scrubby yard.

“Because you said so.”

“Get in the house and help your mother.” He drew a last time on his Lucky, flipped it nearly halfway across the street.

I walked inside, letting the screen door slam. The inside of the house was already so hot I could feel my lungs shriveling up like prunes.
Some
people, who were more civilized than my dad, built a little canning shed
outside,
so they could do it in the
open air,
rather than in an old kitchen with exactly one window that could be raised exactly three inches.

I opened the screen door again and stuck my head out, knowing I was risking life and limb by disobeying him twice. “That’s just fine then, I won’t tell you how I got halfway to the crossroads and a MOOSE ran across the road in front of me, I won’t bother telling you about that.” I quick pulled my head back in and closed the door, then ran into the kitchen where Mom was in her apron boiling tomatoes, her hair undone and frizzed around her face. She, of course, had never known I’d been gone. “Good morning, sweetheart,” she said, with the vaguest of glances.