She Got Up Off the Couch (21 page)

Mom rose slowly, not even pretending she had reserves of dignity. She was bruised and bleeding, her wig was askew, but she took the time to lock up the bicycle, as she had promised. She marched into the Ad Building and up the stairs to the president’s office, limping and trying not to whimper.

Secretary to the Office of the President looked Mother up and down and said, rather faintly, “Are you the two o’clock?”

Mother nodded, gasped.

As the secretary led her into his office, President Pruis rose from behind his vast desk and studied Mom with a cautious expression. His suit was so subtle she almost couldn’t see it. “Won’t you have a seat?” he asked, directing her to a leather armchair the size of Mom’s car, but with more power. She sat, still gasping periodically.

President Pruis began to speak, as a politician will do, to fill the silence, the inexplicable appointment. He told her what a wonderful year it had been for the university, how well the basketball team had done, how much money the alumni committee had raised for a new building. His speech had the comforting rhythm one offers to children, old people, and residents of the Epileptic Village. Finally he asked, “Can you talk?”

“Yes,” Mother whispered.

“Can you tell me why you wanted to see me?”

“I got your letter.”

“What letter would that be?”

Mom took it out of the bookbag; it was dripping with Timeless cologne. Dr. Pruis held it at arm’s length, glanced at it, quickly handed it back. She saw it on his face: it was a form letter. He wasn’t proud of her. He didn’t know and didn’t care that she was being graduated summa cum laude from the Honors College after twenty-three months.

She laughed. She let her body go limp and felt her wig slip just slightly more and knew there was absolutely nothing to do but laugh. “It’s a form letter,” she said, “but that’s okay. It’s okay. I guess what I really came to say is that there were ten lepers who were healed, but only one came back to thank Jesus for healing him.”

Dr. Pruis blanched a bit, as one does when the word “leprosy” pops up in a peculiar conversation.

“I’m saying I want to thank you for all the things Ball State has done for me. I never dreamed I would finally get a college education, and now I have, thanks to you.”

He nodded, asked her what her major was, what classes she had taken. He asked about her scholarships and loans, about the people who had been most helpful to her. At last he asked, gesturing to her, well, everything, “What happened to you?”

She told him the story of the giant bicycle, her perilous journey, the professor who dove into the bushes and would probably sue. President Pruis laughed and laughed, he shook his head and pulled a starched handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “Ah,” he said. “I’m so glad I invited you to visit. May I walk you back to the English Building?”

Mom told Rose’s mother Joyce about Interpersonal Communications and how she had nine days until graduation and had decided just to quit. Joyce was not a woman who abided such nonsense in either word or deed, and she said to Mom, just sharply enough, “You could hang from your damn thumbs for nine days, Delonda, to get that degree.” Then she made Mom talk through the paper she would write for Dr. Reiss, and as soon as she began to explain it to Joyce, it all became clear, and she dashed home as quickly as her torn knees would carry her and wrote it.

She based her argument on a book called
The Prince,
by someone named Machiavelli, who I believed was also a sculptor and a kind of aftershave. She described a certain kind of man, a Prince, a President, a Potentate, whose greatest gift was his ability to ingratiate himself to his enemies with false intimacy. Once the enemy’s weaknesses were exposed, the Prince destroyed him, and thus was power maintained by the amoral and psychologically canny, or so Mother wrote. She quoted W. H. Auden, a poet who had once gotten in a bar fight in Muncie; she quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, someone I would for years believe to be a character in a cartoon strip. Mom said there were true and false vulnerabilities, and that there was “no name under which the false vulnerability should be courted, no value in achieving it.”

On the last day of her college career, Dr. Reiss gave her back the paper; Mom had gotten an A on the assignment and an A in the class. Dr. Reiss suggested they jointly publish it, with her own name as the lead: she was the one with the credentials, after all. But Mom just opened her hands, she made a gesture of emptiness, smiling, and said to her professor, “Just take it. Just take it for yourself, I don’t need it.”

In the old building on campus where Mom had an office as a teaching assistant, everything was either green or going green. She was studying to be a Master of English, and she didn’t mind that even though she was about to be the equivalent of a black belt in literature, her office carpet was squishy and smelled like an aquarium. I felt comfortable there, as I was a Pisces. Mom took me with her nearly every day after my school year ended, and I would sit on the floor in the cramped-up space, between old chairs and stacks of books, and color my fairy tales and superheroes. Students came and went and Mom always introduced me as if I were a full-sized person. Professors popped in. Once I looked up and a man with white hair and a white beard but a very young face was leaning around the door frame; Mom said, “Dr. Koontz, this is my daughter,” and he nodded and said, “Cute kid,” then left without telling her what he had come for. Professors could be that way and no one thought much of it.

The department secretary was named Mickey Danner and she insisted I call her Mickey, not Mrs., and there was this astonishing fact about her: her real first name was
Zilpha
and she was
not
lying. Her husband was called Howard or Howie, and within about five minutes of meeting each other he and I determined that we had the exact same birthday, which made four people so blessed. Mickey was the first old person I ever knew who was beautiful and I didn’t know what to make of it. Howard was old, too, but he was craggled and shambling and his nose looked as if it had melted and been reattached at the School for the Blind. He was what old people were supposed to look like. And Mickey was very very smart; Howard was very very normal. I could tell — anyone could tell — that none of those differences mattered, because Howie and Mickey had already been married so long they’d passed the point of being individuals and instead added up into a single, average human with a nose problem.

College had made me sophisticated, but it was still the case that Mickey Danner’s sweetness was so deep and true and constant she made me want to cry, and she made me want to be a better person, or at least lie about the wretched person I truly was. I had never before met someone without a bit of darkness in her, and maybe Mickey was the only one who ever lived. When we went out to lunch together — and she would do that, she would invite me out for lunch, just the two of us — she would say, “Now, go wash your hands before we eat, dear,” and I would dash into the bathroom and
wash my hands.
If she asked me to look at a catalog and help her pick out new curtains for her guest room I’d take the magazine as if it were sacred and study the curtains as hard as I could, and never once say or even think, “Pick out your own retarded curtains, I’ve got bigger fish to fry,” which is very likely what I would have said to my sister. With Mickey I cursed myself for not knowing more about fabrics. When I told her, “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at this,” she took my hand and said, in her caramelly voice, her old face so beautiful she should have been on a postage stamp, “Oh, I think you’re good at everything you try. You just choose what you think is prettiest and I will take your word for it.”

After we’d been friends for a number of months, Mickey announced a contest to guess the date of the first snowfall. Each person in the department got to write their prediction on a slip of paper shaped like a candy cane, our names carefully inscribed by her beforehand. There was no distance Mickey would not go. The prize was a Santa Claus statue with a snow globe in his belly. In the globe was a village with little houses and streetlights. It was mesmerizing and best not considered too closely, as it was undeniable that the village was in Santa’s
stomach.

Before I met Mickey I never would have done what I did when she handed me my candy cane guessing paper. Before Mickey I would not have known such a thing was possible. I told her the truth: I shouldn’t be allowed to participate, because I was devilishly good at guessing things and it wouldn’t be fair to the Professors. They didn’t stand a chance with me in the game. I told her about knowing the number of pennies in the big jar at the Mooreland Fair, and how once Lindy and I had been at Grant’s department store and she offered me a penny gumball. She turned the handle on the machine and just as she did so, I said, “It’s red.” We opened the little gate and there was a red gumball. Before we left the store Melinda had cashed in a quarter and I had guessed the gumball color right twenty-three times. And as if that weren’t enough, I got to keep the gumballs for having ESP.When we got home we told Mom about it but she wasn’t the least surprised; she remembered when everybody in our family had ESP.Around our house it was just ESP all the time.

It wasn’t that Mickey didn’t
believe me
— she certainly
believed me.
But she thought my natural advantage might be tempered by the fact we were talking about the weather, and not just weather but snow in Indiana, which was so unpredictable I always expected to see it coming up from the ground one day, flying heavenward in a reversal of physical laws, just to keep us Hoosiers on our toes.

I saw Mickey’s point, and accepted my candy cane. I thought a moment, licking the end of my pencil, a habit I’d picked up from my dad. Mickey suggested that licking lead wasn’t perhaps the wisest thing to do, and I wondered if there was a connection between my pencil history and the fact I had absolutely no notion of left and right. I could hardly tell the words apart. And Melinda and I both said “yellow” when we looked at the color pink. We said yellow when we looked at the
word
pink, and we both suffered from a phenomenon we called Baker Park, after an actual park in New Castle which was a square with streets around it. Every time Melinda and I got near Baker Park we would become completely lost; I don’t mean we didn’t know which way was right or left, of course we didn’t, I mean
we didn’t understand that we were still on Planet Earth.

I wrote “November 13” and put an exclamation point underneath it. Mickey looked at my prediction and said, “That’s pretty early for snow. Are you trying to give everyone else a fighting chance?” I shook my head. Mickey Danner had gotten in my life and messed me up but good; I didn’t know if I was coming or going, lying or trying not to lie.

“No,” I said, and then, “What was the question?”

November 13 was mild, with clear skies. I sat in Mickey’s office while Mom was in class. We talked about things and I read to her from my Judy Blume book. She answered the phone and typed; people came and went and the day passed gently. Neither of us mentioned the contest, and then Mom came up the rickety green steps, panting from her walk across campus, and said, “It’s snowing!” I jumped up and looked out the window and the flakes were so big they could have had faces — I could have given each one a name.

“Heavens,” Mickey said, her hand over her heart. “I guess I owe you this.” She handed me the box with the Santa statue and shook my hand. I opened the box, moved aside the tissue he was wrapped in. There was the sleeping village inside Santa. If the gift had come from Dr. Mood, I would have thought it meant something very strange and beyond me (the village is
in
Santa, the village is IN Santa), but as it was from Mickey I thought it was just the sweetest thing, and had no significance at all.

The year she became a Master, Mom lost another twenty pounds, sold Sabrina to a collector, and wrote thirteen short stories so disorienting and bothersome I memorized one entirely and hid copies of the others in the secret red box in my bedroom. The stories formed the book that would be her thesis. They were all about women; each story was told twice, it seemed to me, or maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe the story I had memorized, “Home Remedy,” wasn’t the same as “Bondage.” In the first a hillbilly woman (I imagined she had my Mom Mary’s Kentucky accent) named Lovey is talking to her husband, Elzy Ezekiel Rogers. She is just talking, telling him little things, like how her bed had come from an auction in a rainstorm — her father had stayed all day, soaked through, to get it for her. As a child Lovey had shared the bed with her sister, and then it became her marriage bed. She’d never told anyone that the knobs at the top of the four posters came off.
I used to hide secrets in the posts, like a poem I read one time that made me cry. I copied it off and hid it in the left foot post. And whenever I met you that first time at the church sociable I went home and wrote down your name, Elzy Ezekiel Rogers, and I took off the ball and hid the paper in the post on the top left, nearest to my heart.

But they aren’t just talking, this woman with the soft, mountain accent and her husband. He isn’t talking at all, because he is tied to the bedposts, bound and gagged. There are things Lovey must make clear to him: they involve a daughter, Carrie Bell, who is fifteen, a beautiful, innocent child. There is a tray by the bed, and on it a rag soaked with ether; a scalpel; catgut thread and a curved needle. These details added up like numbers, but even memorized I wasn’t sure to what sum.
Sometimes I think about those first fifteen years and they’re light and golden, like fairy children dancing around a maypole. These last fifteen years are like goblins in a circle, one more added each year that passes. Now the light and the dark are even, but before long another year will make sixteen dark and only fifteen light, dancing, dancing, and soon the darkness will win. It scares me to think on it.

In “Bondage” the husband’s name is Buck; he’s a truck-driving bully, and the wife, Claire, is a nurse, so it wasn’t the same at all, really, except for the sutures, the needle, the handcuffs. And a daughter named Carrie who is injured. She is talked about but never seen; all through the story her bedroom is quiet, her bed made. There is an old stuffed bear on her pillow, and I wondered about that a lot, that bear.

I didn’t understand the stories but I couldn’t put them down, wouldn’t let them go. Lovey’s voice was in my head as sure as my own, and the other women, too: the elementary school teacher, Veronica, found dead in her closet, her secrets spilled all over her apartment. The kitchen floor is covered with coffee and sugar, black against white, stains on white walls, and the policeman who is telling the story knows there is only one body but two dead women:Veronica, the woman the world saw, and Ronnie, the self she despised.

“Alma Mater,” about a woman in the cabin in the woods, who presides over a small town’s harvest festival. It is she who chooses the Harvest King, and the contest is between two cousins, Michael and Malachi. A middle-aged man, a college recruiter, comes to town to beg her to let his university have Michael, who is a genius; in truth he wants them both. The woman is called Mother; she takes the man into her rose-scented parlor and he is lost an entire day. When he comes to his senses he sees the Mother is old, and he is horrified: her face changes with every shift of light, and she tells him Michael is Chosen and there is no undoing it. “You may take Malachi,” she says, slipping into the shadows of her own house, pushing the recruiter out into the blinding daylight and locking the door behind him.

“Michael was Chosen,” I would say, lying in bed at night, or sitting on the floor in Mickey Danner’s office. At a carnival in the springtime, where he wrestled with his cousin, and won.

“You may take Malachi,” Mickey would answer, handing me a stack of letters she needed me to fold.

I knew the Wedding stories, the Mothers-in-law Coming to Visit stories, the Left Turn on Maple. And the woman who had come to believe in the undead; she wore a silver cross she clutched throughout an evening spent with an old friend — a cold evening, a cold conversation over chilled wine, and upstairs in her immaculate house the perfectly preserved room of a four-year-old boy, who had been dead for years.

A woman in Mount Summit named Wilhelmina opened a dress shop in the basement of her house. The dresses were of a mysterious origin: some were very expensive and new; some were expensive and on consignment. Most had come from Somewhere and been marked down many times as they traveled to Mount Summit, the way anything passed from hand to hand dims.

Mother loved it there. She loved to go and visit with Wilhelmina, even if she never bought anything. Wilhelmina was tiny, built like a dancer, and she wore scarves and excessive amounts of jewelry. She smoked and gossiped and complimented every woman who came through the door. After leaving the shop empty-handed many times, Mom walked in one afternoon and told Wilhelmina she was ready to try something on. She was about to celebrate her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and she wanted a new dress.

I didn’t want to go to Wilhelmina’s. I tried staying in the car, but the interior was black and it was August, and even with every window down I felt all my wickedness melting. I got out of the car and stomped around and that made me hotter. Dresses. My mother was shopping for dresses. Where was ye olde Delonda, I was beginning to wonder, the one who wore Mom Mary’s hand-me-downs year after year and never left the house, the person who was somehow
too good
for a place like Wilhelmina’s? I sat down under a tree, fanned myself, kicked at some dust to make a point. Never mind the lights being turned off, the lack of plumbing, the cold, humid haze in which Mom slept away the days, year after year, a silent, unmoving, unmovable mountain under blankets and afghans. What need did
she
have for trivialities and costume jewelry? Rising up on Sunday mornings, making do with virtually nothing (and even that nothing had to be pinned together and was so frayed it barely held), she had not seemed embarrassed or concerned. My cheerful, obese, popcorn-eating, science-fiction-reading holy Mother: her eye had been on God. I missed that woman fiercely, but I barely knew why. All I knew is that as long as she was trapped I knew exactly where to find her.