She Got Up Off the Couch (17 page)

On the day Dr. Mood gave his first, last, and only handout, Mother sat through his lecture enthralled and enraged. When she got home she was still all nervous and indignant, the way she’d been when she discovered that down at the drugstore, on the newsstand, someone had placed
Philosophy in the Bedroom
by the Marquis de Sade. This at a time when the postmaster refused to deliver her
Time
magazine because he said it was Communist.

That evening I scooched up as close as I could to her on the couch. She ignored me when the phone rang. I heard her say, “I went up to him in the hall before he got on his motorcycle and I shook my finger right in his face. I said, ‘I came here to
learn
something, you have no idea what this is costing me, and all this semester you have grandstanded and entertained and all the while you could
really teach.
How dare you keep this from me, how dare you not teach me everything you could while you had the time?’ I was even shaking the handout in his face.”

Carol must have asked what his answer was.

Mom looked down at her lap, twisted the phone cord. “He stared at me for a good long minute and then said,‘Fat women always did turn me on.’”

At the end of that year he disappeared. He took his rose pants, his Onk, his motorcycle and tuna can and headed west. There were lots of rumors, some believable, some not. The most persistent was that he had taken a job driving an ice cream truck around a town with Santa in the title. That made perfect sense to me. I could just imagine him, his black eyes, his Lucifer face, riding around and around to that sinister music. He understood more about Jesus than anyone I’d ever heard of, and he knew what I knew: that Jesus wasn’t the thin blond angel boy of
Superstar,
not like I used to think of him. He was an outlaw, he would rather die than give in. Jesus would have put the smack-down on the Richmond Arboretum, just like he did with the fig tree. John Mood, I thought, must have been the same in his way. Whatever the college world had asked of him, Dr. Mood had said no thanks, and he’d spread his arms and flown away. He changed my mother permanently, he changed me, and all he left behind was a book of
Other Difficulties
and a single two-page outline, which Mom kept tucked in her Bible and which she and I both took out periodically and studied, like evidence.

At the end of the fourth-grade school year, my first ever boyfriend (from kindergarten), walked up to me in the hallway and asked, not cruelly but with genuine curiosity, “Do you even
own
a different pair of pants?” I looked down and realized I’d been wearing the same blue polyester pants Mom Mary had given me for Christmas the entire school year. I didn’t know how to answer him. Maybe I had another pair of pants, but if I did I didn’t know where they were or what I’d do with them if I found them.

There’d been some decline in the laundry area from
that
plateau since Mother started college, and as a family we hadn’t had a lot further to fall. I missed the days at the Laundromat in New Castle, which smelled of Tide and Downy and had fluffy balls of lint floating in the air. A woman worked there, a manager, I guess, who carried a big apron full of quarters and always looked like she’d heard a joke she didn’t dare repeat. Outside she smoked cigarette after cigarette with my dad when he went with us, but inside the air was linty and pure, and it was possible to climb in the rolling laundry baskets with the IV poles and create great trouble. Plus you could buy individual boxes of detergent and fabric softener, even bleach, and there was nothing that made me grind my teeth with pleasure more than a real thing shrunken down small. The first time my dad showed me a toothache kit from a box of equipment from the Korean War and I saw the tiny cotton balls (the size of very small ball bearings), I nearly swooned. “Let me hold one of those,” I said, almost mad at him. He gave it to me with a tiny pair of tweezers. I let it float in my palm a moment and then made him take it back. Miniaturization was a gift from God, no doubt about it, and there it was, right in a vending machine in the place we used to do our laundry in New Castle, Indiana.

My sister had scrounged up a red polyester shirt for the next school year, and a pair of plaid pants that followed the basic law of my physical deformity. They were long enough, which meant the waist was gigantically too big. I wore them folded over and pinned, just at my belly button. The shirt, the plaid pants, a used pair of shoes. It was a typical year, except for my missing mother.

Miss Slocum, our fifth-grade teacher, belonged to one of the many religions that gave women bun-head and made them wear dresses every day. She was pale and spoke through what appeared to be someone else’s nose. That year she read aloud to us every day, starting with
Where the Red Fern Grows,
and I cried so hard at the end I had to go to the principal’s office and apologize. He was quite kind about it, given that I’d been in his office for far worse infractions on multiple occasions. Miss Slocum also made us write our own poems and read them aloud to the class, which was for me as torturous and exquisite as a miniature cotton ball. I worked and worked on my poem, which was called “If I Could,” and it was in four stanzas. The poem concerned what I would do if I could be four different things — a bird, a lion, an antelope, or a cloud. I wasn’t dreamy about it; I was quite, quite practical. I practiced reading it aloud many times, and when the day came to perform it I finally got something right and Miss Slocum liked it and gave me an A, perhaps the only A I ever got in thirteen years of public school. Other kids read their poems and some were I’m sorry just obviously stupid, and then a boy most of the girls had a crush on, a tall jock-ish boy called Tommy, stood up and read aloud a John Denver song, “The Eagle and the Hawk.” My chest flushed red and then my face. I turned and looked at Rose, but she’d yet to catch up to the sublimity of John Denver, although in time I would force enough of him on her that she would beg for mercy and demand we return to Paul Simon. Tommy read the whole thing, two perfect stanzas, no chorus, no bridge. It was John at his finest, I thought.
“I am the Hawk and there’s blood on my feathers.”
Miss Slocum sat perfectly gullible and smiling, because of course the Nazarenes or whoever would not have been studying on John Denver so she just thought Tommy was a genius.

I made fists and popped my jaw muscles like my brother always did and waited for the bell to ring. We were barely out the door to the playground when I turned to Julie and said, spitting mad, “He stole that poem, he didn’t write it. He stole it from John Denver, it’s one of John’s best songs and I can stand right here and tell you the whole thing, every word. And I’ll tell you what that makes Mr. Basketball, Julie Ann, it makes him a common thief and a liar.”

Julie kept walking.

“I’m going over there, right up to his face, and tell him I know what he did even if no one else does. And then I’m going to Miss Slocum and Mr. Davis and I’m going to tell them what he did, too, because I don’t know exactly
what
kind of crime this is, but it is A. Crime. For. Certain.”

Julie walked.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“Are you gonna go with me in case he gets mean?”

Julie stopped, shoved me slightly. “Let it go, Jarvis. Just stop talking.”

I stomped over mad as a hen and played tetherball with her even though I should have made her play with a boy named Jeff who was short and tough. Instead Julie beat the crap out of me nine times in a row which I think she thought would make me forget about Tommy but it didn’t. I didn’t say anything to him or to Miss Slocum, but that evening I rode my bike down to Rose’s and while we listened to Dr. Demento on the radio I told her what Tommy had done and Rose got a look on her face like she’d just stepped in something foul. “What a pig,” she said, and all that evening, of my two best friends, I loved her most of all.

It was autumn and I’d finally grown into a sweatshirt my sister had passed down to me; it was blue, with our school’s name and logo, the Viking head in profile, in red. I loved that sweatshirt and thanked the elements for every day that was cold enough to wear it. In addition there was the roller-skates craze. I think it began with a pretty, new girl called Christina, who lived behind Rose and could sign her name in the shape of a swan. She was an exotically colored person and mysterious. Once she had skates we all had to have them. Mine arrived in much the same way I got my saddle oxfords: I don’t know how. The skates were likewise used — bunged up on the plastic wheels and gray at the top and on the sides of the white boots.

Rose and I took to practicing not on the toothy, dangerous sidewalks, but on the paved parking lot next to the North Christian Church. We skated forward and back, forward and back, nothing too fancy. I wanted to skate faster, but there wasn’t a single hill in Mooreland that wasn’t covered with either gravel or railroad tracks, so I made do with the new church asphalt.

Christina started showing up, and Dana, and even Julie got in on the skate business. Pretty soon she and Dana were better than everyone else, to the point they probably should have just moved out of Mooreland and joined the Olympics. It was Dana who had the idea to form a whip, with me at the front because I was the tallest, pulling the others behind me. By this time the other girls were wearing light jackets, and Rose hung on to my sweatshirt, Christina to Rose’s corduroy jacket, then Julie, with Dana at the rear. We started out and the people at the back whipped back and forth and it was really quite hysterical until some force of either momentum or karma caused a domino at the back to fall, and that girl fell on the next, and she on the next, one two three four five girls. I fell forward and tried to catch myself with my arms out straight and my wrists curved outward and in turn each girl fell on top of me.

There was a grinding
pop,
as if a tooth had been extracted from the gum of a giant. Everyone was on top of me and then gradually clambering off, laughing, and I couldn’t move at all, but somehow I’d made it to my back. There was the sky. None of this was like me. It was very
un
like me to lie so perfectly still. It was very unlike Julie to freeze as she did, looking down at me, or for Rose to run off saying, I’m getting my mom. I turned my head and looked at my right arm and what I saw was my shoulder touching the ground and the backs of my fingers touching the ground and everything else like a horseshoe pointing toward the asphalt. My arm was in a heap. My
right
arm, which was for all intents and purposes my only arm. Without it I would have to become Catholic and take lessons in Being Good from Rose. I looked back up at the sky and couldn’t think. Rose said, “There’s my mom” as her station wagon drove up beside me, and two things happened at once: I thought,
Please don’t touch me,
and just as I thought it my dad rode up on his bicycle. It was an autumn afternoon. My father was riding a bicycle. He rode directly to the spot I had just fallen, and he arrived at the exact moment that if Joyce had tried to lift me, she would have left my arm behind.

“Hey, Zip,” he said, leaning over me.

“Hey, Daddy.”

“Girls, every one of you give me your jackets, get them off right now.” He piled the jackets on top of me. “You’re in a little bit of shock there, sport,” he said, never taking his eyes off mine.

“Joyce, if you’d go call an ambulance, and also bring back some blankets.”

My whip of friends disappeared, although I knew they were there somewhere, on the periphery. I could only see my dad, and the sky.

“Can you tell me what happened here?”

“No,” I said, not moving my head.

“Do you know what day it is?”

“I never know what day it is.”

“It’s Tuesday,” Rose said, helpfully.

Joyce came running around the corner with a blanket, and in the distance I could hear a siren, or maybe someone was crying. Dad tucked the blanket around me and I started to look again at the miraculous problem, my arm in a U-shape, but he took ahold of my chin and said, “Can you hear that siren?”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you listen to that, and try to concentrate on staying warm.”

“I’m not cold,” I said, and realized I was shaking.

The young EMTs paused only a moment, shaking their heads and whistling to let me know they were impressed. They radioed the emergency room to say they were on their way, and slipped an oxygen mask over my face, and an air cast over my arm — I wasn’t allowed to watch, but there was a moment when everything went black and I felt my dad pinch my cheek, just enough to wake me up. The air cast was gradually inflated and placed on a splint, and I was loaded into the ambulance.

Every time the siren wailed as we sped down Highway 36 I jumped, but Dad made me keep looking at him and talking to him.

“You aren’t going to cry, are you?” Dad asked, making a stern face.

I shook my head.

“Because you didn’t cry with the rock in your knee, did you.”

I had not.

“And you didn’t cry with the sixty-six splinters in your butt.”

No, I hadn’t.

“You can cry if you’re sad, but you’re the toughest person I know and this is nothing to cry about.”

An EMT moved between us, taped my fingers together. “You’re a fighter, huh?” he asked me, touching me so gently I wasn’t sure it was happening.

“You bet she’s a fighter.” Dad touched his breast pocket, checking for his cigarettes and lighter. “She can catch or throw anything, I’ve never seen anyone like her. She pulled out her own baby teeth with a string around a doorknob. She’s fallen off her bicycle more times than any living person. I haven’t seen the tumble yet that could make this one cry.”

I had no idea who he was talking about. It was some girl he liked, that was for sure, but it couldn’t be me, because that other girl had bounced off the pavement time and again; I had gone down and stayed. I was broken.

I was well known in the emergency room, but this fussing wasn’t like that other fussing. This time there was no waiting, no flirting with my dad by the nurses, no small talk. There were shots, a falling twilight. I was awakened in a private room, dark but for a single light above my bed, by a very large man dressed in scrubs and with what appeared to be a flashlight on his head. My own doctor was there, Dr. Heilman, and Dad had found Mother and gotten her there, and I was being introduced to this enormous man, an orthopedic surgeon from Indianapolis who had apparently been interrupted at home to come tend me.

“You’ve heard of me, surely,” he said, waggling his flashlight.

“Nope.”

“I’m Dr. Linceski, I’m known the world ’round. I was at home with my maps and my exotic fish when I got your call. I assume you broke your arm on purpose.”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t do this just to meet me?”

“I
still
don’t know who you are.”

“Well, that’s appropriate. We’ve only just met.” He looked at my parents and Dr. Heilman, raised his eyebrows as if to acknowledge that the odds were against me, given the rascal fringe surrounding me. “From what I heard you were cracking the whip, huh? and a bunch of girls fell on you? It’s all a barrel of monkeys, isn’t it, with you crazy types, until SOMEBODY has a double compound fracture that EXTRUDES through the skin with portions of bone SHATTERED by the compatriots who landed on you. Do you know what I mean?”