She Got Up Off the Couch (18 page)

“Not a word.”

“Good. All I’m trying to say is heckuva job there, heckuva break. It’s going to take all of my foreign medical training to make it right. Now look,” he said, as an orderly wheeled in a bed.

“We’re taking you to the O.R. right now, why waste time is my motto.”

I was transferred to the other bed and Dr. Linceski talked and talked. My parents were silent and stricken-looking. They both bent down and kissed my forehead as I was wheeled through the double doors into the shocking lights of the operating room. It happened too fast for me to be afraid.

“And here,” Dr. Linceski said, “is my anesthesiologist, Dr. Wang. That is his real name, Dr. Wang, I kid you not. He’s going to make sure you stay asleep.”

Dr. Wang was round, moonfaced, wearing a little hat. He appeared to be Chinese and was wearing flip-flop slippers, not booties. He had a flyswatter in his hand. “Hello,” he said, in a Chinese way, bowing a little and waving at me.

“Is that a flyswatter?” I asked, because when you’re about to be made unconscious by Dr. Wang, it’s best to know.

“Yes, is fly in room.”

Dr. Linceski whistled, scrubbed his arms as if trying to remove a tattoo. He talked to Dr. Wang, who pursued the fly and didn’t answer. I heard a swat somewhere behind me, then the spraying of antiseptic and the eek-eek sound of a squeegee.

“Awwwright, then.” Dr. Wang was suddenly above me. “We place this mask over your face and you breathe very deep. Then you count to ten backward for me. You do that?” He injected something into my IV, still watching my face. He patted my good arm and said, “We take good care, nothing will happen to you.”

I nodded and said ten, and everything went black.

The next day my arm was suspended above me and when Dr. Linceski came in he drew a circle around a place on the cast where I had bled through it in the night. He drew the circle in yellow. The bloodstain was vaguely the shape of Ohio.

“That,” he said, “is where the bones protruded and where we had to add a bit of synthetic bone to hold it all together. Guess who made that synthetic bone?”

I shook my head.

“Phillips 66.”

“The
gas
station?”

“Yep. I’d keep that a secret if I were you.” He tapped on my fingertips. “Can you feel this?”

I couldn’t, but I said I did.

“You’re lying, but that’s okay. I’d lie, too, if I was going to have a scar this big.”

“I’m going to have a scar as big as
Ohio
?”

“No, now
I’m
lying. I actually performed cosmetic surgery on you free of charge, because that’s the kind of guy I am. You’ll have a scar, all right, but it will shrink and shrink as you get older, until someday you won’t be able to see it at all.”

“Thank you,” I said, queasy and wobbly and still somehow back on the ground outside the church, looking at the sky. “Do you know where my mom and dad are?”

“They’re in the cafeteria, where I wish all parents would stay. Do you need something?”

“I just…” I was afraid to tell him. “I just wonder where my sweatshirt is.”

Dr. Linceski pursed his lips as if he understood me completely. “In shreds, I fear. We had to cut you out of it.”

I turned and looked out the window, pressing my teeth together so hard I thought my cheeks might burst.

“It was your favorite, huh.”

“It just only got to fit me.”

He pulled up a chair, straddled it backward. “You know what? I don’t tell people this very often. You almost lost that arm. I had to reconnect nerves and you’ll still have nerve damage for the next year. That’s the worst break I’ve ever seen off a football field. You’re going to be wearing a cast for three months, and we’ll take it off when you come in for a skin graft. Then you’ll wear a new cast for three months. Here’s what saved you: your dad didn’t let anyone pick you up, and you were wearing a sweatshirt that held your arm together until the ambulance got there. So it was a good one, but it’s done for now.”

I stared at the ceiling and wouldn’t answer.

Dr. Linceski stood up, put his chair back against the wall. “I’ve heard all about you, things stuck up your nose and in your ears, a particular little incident where you ran over your own foot with the bicycle you were on.” He patted his pockets. “You overwhelm me with respect. I shall return on the morrow.”

When he was almost out the door I said, “You still shouldn’t have cut it off.”

He shrugged, gave a wave. In the hallway he shouted, “When I am President of these Onion States, I shall make all roller-skating illegal post facto! Pronto!”

Every day during the hospital visiting hours there was this silent painful thing between my parents: my dad didn’t want my mom to go to school while I was still hospitalized; I wanted her to go. I wanted it for her, and because I wanted to hear more about her professors and the things they said about the dirty parts of books. Then Melinda would arrive and somehow sweep everything out into the hallway, and either Mom would be there or she wouldn’t, but there Dad would be, sitting in the same chair at the foot of the bed, until the nurses asked him to leave. He sat with his arms crossed, his face like a brick.

Melinda made up a slew of occasional jokes that went like this: Q:What do you call a one-armed girl at a flute recital? A: Zippy. Q:What do you call a one-armed girl who can’t get her pants all the way fastened? A: Zippy. On and on, oh you are just
tremendously
funny, I’d say to her, narrowing up my eyes and giving her the what-for.

Eventually I was allowed to go home, wearing a cast with a bloodstain circled in yellow and signed by all the nurses, the cast in a light blue sling with padding at the neck. I also had a stuffed autograph dog and my favorite signature on it was Mom Mary’s, because she had only finished the third grade and I loved it when she wrote something. I had a bag filled with strange hospital accessories — my own vomit tray (never used), a water pitcher with my room number on it, a bottle of lotion, a container of baby powder, a toothbrush, and a tube of Colgate so small I kept it in the palm of my good hand all the way home.

I was taken down to the front door in a wheelchair that wasn’t necessary; I kept saying it, “I don’t need a wheelchair,” but in truth I was diminished, thinner than when I’d arrived and still shaken. When I closed my eyes I saw Dr. Wang leaning over me, telling me to count to ten backward; I remembered the feeling of blackness so complete I knew death had to be something just like it. I wondered what I had looked like (something that had never crossed my mind before), lying there on the pavement under the blue Indiana sky, or in the emergency room, my lights out as surely as those animals I’d seen alive one minute and gone the next.

It was just him and me, he reminded me, and he got to decide when I went back to school. So for the first week he said, “Let’s see if you can ride your bike with one hand.” A breeze. The second week became, “Let’s see if you can bat left-handed, or pitch,” then could I go bowling, could I cast my Shakespeare rod and reel, could I write my name both forward and backward (something he could do with either hand). My blue sling grew grotty but no one thought to wash it.

Some days he disappeared all day and I simply lay on the couch in the den, watching movies and scratching inside my cast with a pencil. Other days he said, “Let’s see what’s new in the world,” so we’d go into New Castle and I’d end up with a milk shake. Every few days Rose or Julie brought my homework assignments to me and I didn’t so much as look in the direction of them. The rest of the house grew cold, and then too cold, and I knew that everything I’d left in my bedroom before I fell would remain just as it was until spring — the record albums, the sheet of paper in the typewriter, where I was trying to improve on my first poem.

Mom came home in the evenings and sat in her corner of the couch with her books spread out around her, talking on the phone with one hand and taking notes with another. Heaven knows what the woman would have accomplished had she been born an octopus. When she was home, Dad was gone, and I stayed on the other couch, facing the TV.

In the wall above the television all manner of things had gone wrong; the plaster and lath had disintegrated and there seemed to be nothing between the old gray wallpaper (some of which was coming apart) and the out-of-doors. One day I heard a sound in the wall and climbed up on a footstool. There was a sparrow trapped in a pocket of wallpaper, cheeping away. I couldn’t see how it got in or how to get it back out, but I realized that the house must be riddled with avenues for coming and going — the mice in the ceiling, the rats in the laundry room, and now a house sparrow right in the den. It cheeped all that day. I told Dad and he said he’d look into it. I told Mom and she said to tell Dad.

Something happened from lying on my back all that time and it involved my kidneys, which I had not until then known existed. By the time I was supposed to go back into the hospital I was feverish, but well enough to call Melinda and say, “Lindy, you better send Rick down here. A bird has moved in.” Even for a person with no standards, the smell coming from my cast was heinous enough to make me slightly proud.

Dr. Linceski said he’d never SEEN such a horror as the inside of my cast; he asked had I been trying to write
Moby Dick
inside there.

I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Look at all this!” He carried my old cast, cut in half, into my hospital room after my second surgery.

It was horrible: dead skin and dried blood, and about seven thousand pencil marks. “Well. I couldn’t very well scratch with the eraser end, could I?”

“Are you some sort of pygmy?” he asked. “Have you never heard of LEAD POISONING?” He was the second person in my life to call me a pygmy, a fact that would require thought when I reached the point of thinking about things.

“I asked Mom for a knitting needle but she said no.”

“What about the possibility of NOT SCRATCHING?”

“Are you always so loud?”

“You had an
open wound
in there. You are
scarred for life.
I cannot get through to you; it’s like talking to one of my fish.”

I stared at him.

“I shall return in one moon,” he said, turning toward the door, rubbing his flashlight up and down on his forehead, like a bear scratching his back against a tree. “And I shall hope you have changed in the meantime.”

Antibiotics cleared up my infection and I started to regain feeling in two of my fingers. By the time I got back home, the bird was gone and winter had fully arrived.

By the spring my second cast was removed and what was revealed was an arm the size of a chicken wing, gray-skinned, with a pink puckered scar where my bones had EXTRUDED. Dr. Linceski assured me the arm would become stronger, but it was curved just slightly, and I had grown accustomed to holding it against my side like a kitten. I had missed forty-one days of school that year, with one thing and another, and while the doctor said the arm would return to normal he also said, “You must never throw a bowling ball with it; you must never hit a volleyball or a tetherball; you must never, ever break it again, or even land on it with your hand bent backward.” So it seemed as if he meant one thing by normal and I understood another.

Sometimes I caught myself actually carrying my arm around, resting my right wrist in my left hand as I walked. I carried it up the stairs when the house was once again warm enough to venture into. I passed the piano I hadn’t played for six months and touched the keys; the hammers sounded damp, bereft. I walked into my parents’ bedroom, where the mountain of dirty clothes still held the winter’s chill, and up the stairs to my bedroom. I kicked my way through the debris and opened my window with the left hand, and Dad had been correct — that arm had grown very competent. I sat in the open window and looked out at the backyard of the Hickses and at the buds on the trees, the new green, the new daffodils, everything so new.

During Mom’s first year at Ball State, having given my brother’s car back to him, she rode to and from Muncie with seventeen different people. Sometimes they would remember to pick her up but forget to bring her home, and in the way of things a different someone would arrive and say
Hop in, I was going that way
— though no one is ever
really
going the direction of Mooreland.

Roger was her longest connection, and they rode to and from Muncie with Roger’s stereo playing so loudly Mom had to wear earplugs just to survive the onslaught. Even then the music got up in her rib cage and rattled some things loose. Roger dropped out of school after three weeks, and Mom was certain it was because he was stone-deaf and hadn’t heard a single lecture in their time together.

Then Mom read in the paper about a Volkswagen Beetle for sale in Mount Summit for $200, which was both good and bad — good because she could afford $200 out of the National Defense Loan she’d taken out for tuition, and bad because, well, it was a car for $200 — so she went to see it. There was also a bit of destiny in the find, she thought, because it had been a Beetle she’d first learned to drive with Big Fat Bonnie.

The seller, a man named Pete, said he’d meet us at the edge of a gravel pit near Mount Summit. Melinda drove us over to see it. We pulled in, and there she sat. I could only whistle and shake my head as proxy for my dad, who was neither there nor did he know we were. But he was there in spirit, certainly, a man who loved a new car, a new truck, a husband and father who had nearly bankrupted us more than once by showing up in an unexpected vehicle more shiny and immaculate than a surgical floor.

The doors of the VW only locked from the outside, so if you wanted to be secure inside you had to roll down the windows, lean out, and lock yourself in with the key. The process had to be reversed to get out. I started to explain that this seemed a wicked bad idea to me, as periodically a person is called to make a swift and dramatic exit from a car, as when one stalls on a train track, or when the Cavalry is charging, or when you go flying off a bridge into dark water. Mom shushed me.

We opened the doors and there was that very particular VW smell, which I guess was the decay of German rubber and efficiency. Also something about the sixties, which had passed away. Mom wedged herself in and put the key in the ignition; the car started, but barely. It sounded like a barnyard animal down and not soon to rise.

“Oh boy,” Melinda said.

There was a switch for the windshield wipers and there were windshield wipers but the two had no relationship. “How do you get these to work?” Mom asked Pete.

He rubbed his nose, looked at the ground. “My daughter used a string, I think.”

“A string?”

“Yep.”

Mom sat and Melinda and I stood in puzzlement.

“Where did she put the string?” Mom asked, finally.

“Awww, you know,” Pete said, looking out at the horizon. “She held one end on her side and her boyfriend held the other on his side, and they moved it up and down the windshield, like this.” He made a teeter-totter motion with his arms.

I nodded. We’d done that before out on the Newmans’ farm. I already knew the implications, but it took a second before they settled on Mom and Lindy.

“So in essence,” Mom began, “your left arm is out the window in the rainstorm? And you’re steering and shifting gears with your right at the same time?”

“That’s about it,” he agreed.

“Isn’t that…” Mom might have said “futile” but chose “…dangerous?”

Pete nodded. “She done had one wreck in it, that place I showed you on the front quarter panel. I dinged it out fine.” The place on the front quarter panel looked like a piece of aluminum foil used and saved and used and saved by some old woman who remembered World War I.

“Does the heat work?” Melinda asked. She had a Bug of her own and knew that the Germans considered heaters a demand of the weak.

The man scratched his head. “Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘work.’The car will eventually get warm because the engine will eventually get warm, if you see what I mean.”

Melinda just flat-out laughed. “So it works in the summer really well, huh?”

“Yep,” he said. “That’s for sure.”

“How are the brakes?” Mom asked, pulling up on the emergency brake and discovering it offered no resistance.

Pete teeter-tottered his hand again. “Nyeh. But it don’t hardly go faster than thirty miles an hour so it don’t hardly make a difference.” He scuffed his foot in the dirt, spat. “You’ll notice it’s got a sunroof. That’s an extry.”

“Well, yes,” Mom said, looking above her. “I see it has a sunroof, but does it close?”

He shrugged. “Almost.”

Melinda wandered over and sat down under the lone tree in the dusty lot. “Tell me when this over,” she said, “or after someone is killed.”

I circled the car, counting rust spots. I kicked a rear tire for good measure.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Pete said.

“You’re
supposed
to kick tires,” I said, giving him the eye.

“Yeah, well. I wouldn’t, is all.”

Melinda called out from the under the tree, where her eyes were closed, “Mom, ask does it come with bicycle pedals, or squirrels on a wheel, something like that.”

“Squirrels, Mom,” I explained, “like on Fred Flintstone’s car.”

Mom sighed, put her head down on the wheel. “I’ll take it,” she said, reaching for the checkbook, an account that had, for the first time in her life, only her name on it.

On the drive back to Mooreland Melinda followed us, certain Mom’s new car was going to give out any second and we’d have to push it off Highway 36 into a ditch like a dead deer. Even after we reached our top cruising speed of thirty, Melinda continued to drive very closely and flash her headlights. I’d turn around and wave and Melinda would wave back, her gleeful, evil smile perfectly visible in the sunny day. Sometimes Melinda would honk and even that sounded as if she were enjoying the whole thing very very much.

“Honk back,” I said.

“I can’t, I’m concentrating.”

“Mom, we’re coasting straight downhill.”

“You honk, then.”

I poked around on the steering wheel where a proper horn would be but nothing happened. I pushed on some very rudimentary-looking sticks, things that ought to have been turn signals, but nothing happened. Finally my hand landed on something (we never could find it again), and a terrible little sound emerged, like a boot on the neck of a mallard duck. Melinda must have heard it, because she tooted back and flashed her lights and was in all ways a menace.

We pulled up in front of the house and Mom got out, looking as if she’d run a very cruel obstacle course. When she tried to close the driver’s door it swung shut and then open again. She closed it; it opened. She gave up and rested the door against the frame, then put both hands on the roof, like a circuit preacher performing a healing. “I’m naming her Sabrina,” she said, her eyes closed.

Melinda nodded. “Optimistic.”

Mom had always had Carol Hoopingarner, whom I loved for a thousand different reasons, and then she found a second Carol, Carol Johnson, who lived in New Castle and needed a ride to Ball State every day. They hooked up together and Carol paid Mom $1 a day, which gave Mom just enough to get something, even a small thing, for lunch. Carol was studying psychology and was loud, she said
exactly
what was on her mind, and if it hurt your feelings all the better because probably it was something you were in denial about and needed to hear. I adored her even though she hurt my feelings approximately every time I saw her. I had grown up with the quietest, most polite Quaker women, with only Rose’s mother Joyce and Julie’s mom Debbie to show me any other way. But Carol J. was in a class all her own, and we had the same birthday. That was two people I shared it with, my cousin Mike Jarvis and now Carol. I secretly believed we formed a little tribunal and would eventually be called upon to make judgments upon the world, something both Carol and I seemed more than prepared to do.

Carol had a deep, husky laugh like a smoker and a husband situation I never could get straight. She said things about my dad I prayed to the sleeping infant Jesus Dad would never hear. She was more than willing to pull the windshield screen on rainy days, and, like many people who arrive unbidden, she was yet another form of salvation for my mother.

It was interesting, I’d hear Mom say at church or to her friends on the phone, how long a person can make a car last relying only on gravity and Good Samaritans. Every day Mom parked Sabrina on a hill in a parking garage, and spent the entire curly route down power-clutching her into ignition. But it was only a matter of time before her luck ran out, and we all knew it.

One evening she came home with an ad she’d found in the Ball State
Daily News
for a corporation called Beetleboards of America. Beetleboards was based in Los Angeles, and they’d had the very bright idea of using Volkswagen Bugs as rolling billboards, marketing the campaign directly at college students. The ad stated that Beetleboards would pay students $20 a month to allow their cars to be repainted with graphics advertising a variety of things, but primarily cigarettes, blue jeans, stereos, and beer. The graphics were matched to the driver; for instance, blue jeans companies preferred clean-cut, athletic young men. It seemed, in fact, that all of the products favored young men of one stripe or another. Mother remained overweight, middle-aged, and missing teeth.

We studied and studied the ad. It seemed a bit hopeless, but Mom couldn’t get over the idea of the $20 a month, which would pay for both gas and parking, and the car would get repainted in the process.

It was Carol Johnson who finally convinced her there was no harm in calling. She could just
call,
for heaven’s sake, how many other decorated Bugs were there at Ball State? How much money was Beetleboards making off somebody else’s behind in Muncie, she asked, using decidedly different language? So Mom nervously called Los Angeles, this at a time when one simply did not make long-distance phone calls, and California was as much a concept, and as far away, as a Bangladeshi prison. Mom spoke to someone, explaining the situation, and he kindly called her back to spare her the bill. She used
the voice,
a voice that would cause her to be a hit in speech classes and in theater classes and in radio — anywhere, in fact, that voices matter. It was unassuming, melodic, and intimate, and gave away nothing of the actual facts of her life. She used the phone in the living room and I paced in the den, eavesdropping but hearing only sounds, no words. I knew what Mr. Beetleboards was going to say: there was no advertisement appropriate to her condition, particularly not in Mooreland, Indiana. And if by chance she got him so far as to be convinced she was a long-haired athletic young man in athletic young blue jeans, and then he saw THE CAR — oh, all was lost.

But somehow none of that happened. The man in California suggested that Mom and Sabrina might be perfect for a new campaign — Miss Clairol, specifically the Herbal Essence Girl, who was a blond cartoon waif with long flowing hair rising up out of a tropical pool. (She was the opposite of the Swamp Girl, in other words.)

Mom drove the car slowly and with painful deliberation all the way to Indianapolis, to a dealership owned by Earl Scheib, where Sabrina was painted the requisite seafoam green. While there it seems she was tinkered with just a bit, just enough to make the ride home feel slightly more luxurious and less like a careening disaster at a two-bit carnival operated by convicts. Then a young man flew all the way from Los Angeles to apply the decals, and when he was done what was sitting in front of our house was something the likes of which Mooreland, Indiana, had never seen.

The Herbal Essence Girl rose up and covered each door panel. Her face was impassive; her hair fell in sheets of silken crème. One of her hands was turned palm up and sitting on it was a bottle of bright green Herbal Essence shampoo, so lifelike you could nearly smell it. The hood and trunk of the car were covered with exotic butterflies, and a banner across the rear window read “Experience It.”

The design contained, as Mom was the first to admit, a fair amount of what she called innuendo. The Clairol Girl was naked after all, rising up out of a pool the temperature of a hot bath. It looked that way. Even the butterflies were slightly obscene, flying all over the place, including on the roof where other drivers couldn’t see them. It was as if the car had just blossomed out of some wildly lively place — the most un-Quaker, un-Mooreland, un-Hoosier spot on an imaginary map. Mom
adored
it. Dad was
stunned.
The best part — if there could be said to be any one part better than another — was that the deal included a gigantic box of free samples. I don’t know what we’d used for shampoo before Miss Clairol came to town; indeed, I have no memory of shampoo before her at all. But afterward there was always a little bottle of bright green Herbal Essence in the bathroom, along with a conditioner, and it did in fact smell like Paradise.