She Got Up Off the Couch (19 page)

They were quite a pair after that, Mom and Carol Johnson, Herbal Essencing off to Ball State to study psychology and public speaking and English. One morning Dad and I were sitting on the front porch as Mom left to pick up Carol. Sabrina still sputtered, was still fickle at stop signs and climbing hills. Dad watched Mom make the turn onto Broad Street with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Nothing stops her,” he said, shaking his head and flipping his cigarette out into the street.

“Nope,” I said, unsure how to measure the word. There was a lot he meant to tell me, and I could feel it all in the pit of my stomach like the approach of a flu. Nothing, he meant, as in no money, no driver’s license, no teeth, no job, no support, no supplies, no safe car. And
nothing,
he meant, as in himself. Or me. I knew he was right, in a dark sad corner of my bones, and still. Still, I was proud of her. Still, it was a
beautiful
car.

Mrs. Schaeffer was a wonderful music teacher and because of her I knew plenty about the world of theater. In the second grade she’d allowed me to sing a solo in class, “Feed the Birds,” from
Mary Poppins,
and told me I had a lovely soprano. At Halloween time every year she showed us a filmstrip called
Danse Macabre,
accompanied by a record on her portable turntable; in each scene a corpse or a pumpkin or a tree in a dark cemetery danced to classical music. That was the closest I’d ever come to great art, and I wished we could watch it every day. But Mrs. Schaeffer was right to hold on to it and let us see it only during Halloween.

In the fifth grade we were old enough to start putting on shows for the public, and Mrs. Schaeffer decided we would do not a play, but a medley of songs from the all-time perfect musicals, performed in the gym. The problem was how to avoid giving all the songs to Rose, who not only had the most beautiful singing voice but also knew how to stand just so and look a little ways up and into the distance, her head thrust just slightly forward. Her mother helped her put on lipstick for special occasions, something my own mother would have eaten a toad before doing. Rose was in all ways more prepared for a life onstage, and everyone could see it.

In the end she was given “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” sung with a group of other girls, and “Some Enchanted Evening,” from
South Pacific.
Her “Enchanted Evening” was so professional that my sister turned to me in the audience and said, “A shame you have to follow that.” Rose had even remembered to enunciate, as Mrs. Schaeffer taught her, “you may meet a strang-ooor.” Jock-ish Tommy, who was feet taller than anyone else in the class, got to sing “Old Man River,” and shockingly, he had a flat-out bass voice.
Fifth
grade. I sang “Edelweiss” and was part of the chorus for the song “Oklahoma!” which meant I had to do a little two-step I found demeaning and hoped my sister would somehow sleep through. She did not.

Once the theater bug was awakened in us, Rose and I couldn’t stop. We stole her mother’s two-album soundtrack to
Jesus Christ Superstar
and played it over and over in Rose’s room, wearing old diapers on our heads so we would like look the Blessed Virgin Mary. Well, Rose looked like the BVM and I looked like Mary Magdalene, but that was fine because that meant I got the greatest song in the whole play, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” Certainly that had been true of Jesus and me my whole life, so I felt justified in claiming the part. Eventually Rose got tired of singing “Hosanna” and said she wanted to be Mary Magdalene (casting against type, I tried to explain), although her younger sister Maggie was always happy to be Herod. Maggie had a preternaturally deep voice for a third-grader, and pulled off the Herod role with great aplomb. We sang with the record for a long time, then began singing into my blue tape recorder, listening to ourselves critically and trying to imagine how Mrs. Schaeffer would have us say certain words differently. I was convinced that M. Magdalene would say, “He’s a mahn, he’s just a mahn,” sort of like the bald man in the 7-Up commercials who put the lime in the coconut. (No coconut in 7-Up as far as I could tell, but I adored bald men.)

Mom said she had a surprise for me. She was going to take me to Ball State, just the two of us, to see a play.

“I already know a lot about plays,” I said.

“I’m sure you do.”

“I’ve been in…gosh,
Sound of Music, Oklahoma!,
I had that bit in
Music Man.
”

“This isn’t a musical,” Mom said, looking for the tickets in the satchel that had replaced her Army surplus backpack. “Here we go. Friday night — a date?”

“A date,” I said, looking away. It had been a long time since I’d spent any time with just my mom, and I was thrilled and also horrified and what if the actors were terrible? Would I be able to sit through it? I wished that Rose could go with me, so we could hold hands and criticize.

We took off, Sabrina sputtering and threatening to stall every time Mom touched the brake.

“It’s freezing in here,” I said, tucking my hands under my armpits.

“It’ll warm up.”

I waited a minute. Maybe half. “It’s freezing in here.”

“The heat comes off the engine, so the engine has to get warm first. I keep a blanket in the backseat; spread it over your legs.”

“Let’s listen to the radio,” I reached for the strange, foreign-looking knobs.

“You know the radio doesn’t work.”

“How about turning on the heat then?”

“It’ll warm up.”

“What does this button do?” I asked, pointing to a black, rubbery knob that appeared part chewed by rodents.

“I think it’s the — I don’t know,” Mom said, struggling to get the little foreign gearshift into third.

“I know a song about a gearshift called ‘Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler).’Would you like to hear it?”

Mom nodded. “I know that song.”

I took off singing it in the self-important voice of the man in the Cadillac who looks in his rearview mirror and is surprised to find the silly Rambler following him. Mom didn’t know the words so well, and got lost, especially when the song sped up to its desperately fast conclusion.

“Whew!” she said, as if I’d worn her out.

“No kidding. It took me years to be able to sing that whole thing. What is this play called again?”

“
The Skin of Our Teeth.
It’s by Thornton Wilder.”

“
The Skin of Our Teeth
?! Do teeth
have
skin?” It was a gruesome concept.

“Not literally, no.”

“Then is it a
stupid
play?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you know this man, Thorn Wild?”

“Thornton Wilder.” Mom leaned toward the windshield as if she could make the car go faster. “No, he’s a famous playwright, he’s not from around here. He wrote the play
Our Town.
” Mother had seriously taken up with the drama department. She was all the time reading plays and talking about them and had even
written
one.

“
Our Town,
hmmm,” I said, scrubbing frost off the inside of the windshield. “You could write a play called that.”

“Not nearly as well, I’m afraid.” She scrubbed at the frost on the windshield. “But maybe you could.”

I thought about it. “Maybe so. I did write that one good poem.” We reached Highway 3 and headed toward Muncie. Mom drove this route every day, it occurred to me. She did things every day that had nothing to do with me. I swallowed, feeling homesick, but I wasn’t sure what for. Our house was so cold we’d had to put a rollaway bed right next to the coal stove and that’s where I slept at night. And it wasn’t as if Dad was there, anyway, sitting in his brown chair with his glass of water and his pint of whiskey. It wasn’t as if he was staring in his fixed way at the television, the rifle rack behind him, his brown radio set to the Emergency Channel, his collection of animal teeth in a jar on the table beside him. It wasn’t as if I knew where he was. The house was just back there, empty and freezing except for the animals, who slept curled up against each other in little knots, cat indistinguishable from dog. “This play doesn’t even have any
music
in it?” I asked, aggrieved.

“Not like you mean, sweetheart.” Mom leaned forward, looking out the one square of window Sabrina’s defroster had managed to defrost. She kept her eye on the space available to her.

Mom knew exactly how to get to the parking garage, which was possibly my first parking garage. She knew how to walk down Riverside Avenue to Emens Auditorium and up the circular drive into the bright space of the lobby, where hundreds of people were milling around talking, drinking what appeared to be apple cider out of plastic cups. The lobby was bright and loud as if some great excitement had taken over everyone, something bigger than a basketball tournament or the Fair Queen contest at the Mooreland Fair, where the trick was to look as if you didn’t care at all. Here people laughed loudly and shouted to discover yet another acquaintance, and there were women dressed in ways I’d never seen before, men in suits of strange colors, men with
ponytails.
Oh dear oh dear, I thought, imagining if Dad could see this what he would say. It would not be Christian (though neither was he) or repeatable. There were some Vietnam veterans out in the far reaches of the county and some of them had ponytails, but I was not to speak to them even though my dad was dead patriotic.
These
ponytailed men were employed — they were ticket holders to the theater — not gun-toting hair triggers hooked on skunkweed. (I was unclear what that last part meant, but it got said often enough.)

Mom had our tickets out and we passed through a series of doors, older men and women in bright red blazers handing us a little book about the play and directing us to our seats. We were led to the left bank of seats, close to the front and near the aisle, where I could see everything very clearly.

Emens Auditorium was so enormous I would have guessed it sat one hundred thousand people. My mom said actually two. Two thousand. And there was something going on everywhere, more people milling around and ushers studying ticket stubs and an orchestra somewhere unseen tuning up. This could not have been more different from the gym in the Mooreland Elementary School, where our musicals had been held. We didn’t have actual sets, for one thing; we just dressed in costumes (whatever we could find at home) and came out on stage and sang. The gym was so old everything had faded to a uniform shade of gray. There were enormous metal support poles in the buckled floor that ran up to the ceiling, and they’d been wrapped in thick padding — obviously to prevent traumatic brain injury — and the padding had gone gray and shreddy. The walls above and behind the bleachers were faded to the color of rock. A wooden board still bore Big Dave Newman’s scoring record from the late 1950s, when Mooreland had its own basketball team, the Bobcats, before all the county schools incorporated and the Bobcats became ghosts. And Emens Auditorium was very different from the Blue River High School cafetorium where plays were held, called as such because there was a stage at the end of the cafeteria. An economical design. Despite the discrepancy, a jangle was set up inside me, remembering a traumatic moment in my way past.

Years earlier we’d gone, Mom and Dad and me, to the cafetorium to see my sister perform in a play called
Up the Down Staircase.
I was a really stupid little girl, maybe only six years old, and the set looked like the outside of a school building, three stories high. Characters opened the windows and spoke. There was no way to know Lindy was behind one of those windows until the cardboard shutters opened and she spoke her lines, and I was very shocked to see her there and also she was quite convincing and the whole thing upset me. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just kept watching, and then came the worst part: one of Melinda’s oldest friends, Debby Shively, who was a real actress — she was such a real actress she was at Ball State right this minute studying acting as I sat in Emens — had the most important part and she got in a fight with her teacher. It was just the two of them in the classroom. The teacher was reading from a letter Debby had written, reading in a mean way, as Debby crossed her arms and looked miserable. The teacher said something like, “‘I love you’ is a cliché.” It wasn’t just the way he said it, or the words themselves, but that Debby’s eyes very subtly filled with tears, the way they would if you were a bad girl, or maybe a good girl having a very bad day. My stomach flew up into my throat and I thought I was going to burst out crying, too, and I couldn’t put it together that this was a
play,
Debby was
acting,
all I saw was my sister’s old friend, someone I’d known my whole life, her arms crossed and an expression on her face like loss, or doom.

And then the house lights dimmed. I glanced over at Mom for reassurance and she smiled at me from behind her old cat’s-eye glasses, and the Thorn Wild play began. On the black velvet curtain, which seemed to stretch a city block, a grainy newsreel ran with the words NEWS EVENTS OF THE WORLD.There was a picture of a sunrise and an announcer telling us, deep-voiced and authoritative, that the sun had risen that morning and so the world had once again not ended. There was a picture of a glacier, and the announcer said the unexpected summer freeze had pushed some piece of world I didn’t recognize the name of to some other piece of world far away. The tone was funny, menacing. I squirmed in my chair, decided to take up nail-biting, one of the only bad habits I’d never been interested in before.

The curtain opened on a domestic scene, but one off-kilter. There were four walls but periodically one would tilt and a maid (or whatever she was) would have to push it back into place. She was worried the man of the house wouldn’t make it home, and get this: there was a dinosaur in the house, and a mastodon. Not real, unfortunately, as that would have made for quite a play.

I leaned over to Mom. “When is this happening, this play?”

Mom whispered, “Pretty much right now. In the 1940s, I think.”