She Got Up Off the Couch (23 page)

Mom and I walked down to the church alone, pretending we hadn’t noticed that Dad wasn’t with us.

“What a beautiful day for a party!” Mom said, taking a deep breath. “Your sister will be so pleased.”

I said, “Want to see me hopscotch all the way there?”

She did, so I did.

Mom, Melinda, Rick, and I set up the tables and covered each with two tablecloths — yellow underneath, lace on top; we set out the centerpieces Melinda had bought: baskets of flowers in shades of yellow and copper and cream. There were taper candles in short brass candlesticks. Rick set up an easel and propped up a large corkboard on which Melinda had made a collage of the last twenty-five years, wedding pictures and birth announcements and family gatherings. It was amazing. Mom stood in front of it a long time.

“And I stood up and realized that no fur had stuck to me,” I was saying to Lindy.

“Well, it isn’t flame-retardant, so don’t get too close to the candles,” she answered, straightening the napkins she was arranging in a design.

“You said
retardant.
”

“Don’t make me pinch you.”

We worked and worked and when everything was ready I couldn’t believe what Melinda had made. I had no idea how she imagined such things in the first place, the colors, everything.

Mom and Rick kept looking at their watches; soon I would have to go to the front of the church and take my place by the Guest Book. It was possible he wouldn’t come. No one was saying it, no one was even thinking it very loudly. I was thinking it as barely as possible, just as he opened the back door and stepped in. He had skipped the sanctuary, of course.

He was wearing his chocolate brown suit, the one I liked best, with a pink shirt and a champagne-colored tie. I couldn’t believe it was possible, but he matched the decorations. His hair was freshly cut, he was so closely shaved his face looked smoother than mine, and he smelled like soap and aftershave, cigarettes and breath mints. Melinda went into the kitchen and brought out two boxes: a corsage for Mother, which Dad pinned on her as if they were going to the prom, and a boutonniere for him. It wasn’t until she carried out the cake and put it in the center of the table that Mom understood what Melinda had done, and then I understood it, too, where I’d seen these colors before.

Melinda had re-created our parents’ wedding reception from the description in the newspaper and from photographs. She had found their cake top (not a bride and groom but two doves) in a box in the closet and taken it, along with a photograph, to a woman in New Castle who had baked the exact same cake they’d had twenty-five years before. I watched Mom trying to take it in and I waited for her to say something, but at just that moment Aunt Donna came through the door saying, “You know I thought we were going to be late, Kenneth couldn’t find the car keys and I was just beside myself and oh honey don’t you look pretty,” she said to Melinda, “here are Aunt Donna’s mints, you don’t need to do anything but take the foil off, I’ve used the silver platter you asked for, Melinda, the one that’s in the shape of a leaf, Bobby, come here and let me get a look at you.”

I headed toward the waiting Guest Book, but not before I saw that Mom had a handkerchief out and Dad already had that look.

Melinda had asked Jimmy Carnes to take pictures. Jimmy was a great photographer; he had longish blond hair and a blond beard, blue eyes. He drove an Easy Rider sort of motorcycle, was quiet and painfully handsome, shy. Everyone I knew was half in love with him. I was also half in love with his wife, so part of me wanted to marry Jimmy and part of me wanted me to be adopted by him. He stepped into the vestibule where I was standing next to the Guest Book. The camera he had around his neck was so big and impressive this might as well have been a crime scene. I took one look at him and realized I had been wrong in my earlier thinking: I three-quarters wanted to marry him.

“Can I take a picture of you?” he asked.

“I don’t much like to have my picture took. Tooken. Taken.” Where was my helmet? That’s what Melinda would have asked.

“How about just one. I’ll make it painless.”

Part of the reason Jimmy was such a great photographer was: who on earth could ever turn him down? “Okay,” I said. I stood next to the miniature podium on which the Guest Book was displayed, making sure the pen would be in the picture. He didn’t lie — he took only one photograph, and when I saw it later I was surprised by how good it was. In a strange twist, the doors behind me were the same color as my hair, so it was impossible to see what was happening on my head. Camouflage was the single solution Melinda and I had overlooked in the search for what to do about my hair, and Jimmy had figured it out right away.

After everyone who was going to arrive had arrived, I wandered back to the Fellowship Room to see how the party was going. It was going boring was how. It was just a bunch of adults milling around with plates and napkins, looking at Melinda’s collage of pictures.
Oh my Lord my Lord,
I thought,
I cannot take this for one single second.
Dad was as rigid as a human ironing board, once in a while offering a pretend smile that was
punishing
it was so false. Melinda was busily serving punch and organizing things, and no good could come from being the object of her attention under such circumstances. I walked backward through the doorway I’d just come in, all but invisible, what with my hair matching the woodwork and my dress the same color as the tablecloths. I crept back through the sanctuary and out the front door without a backward glance at the Guest Book.

Our church had a metal handrail on either side of the wide steps; it was a tube, like monkey bars are made of, and at the top of the steps there were about four feet of it across, three or four feet high. Maybe what I’m saying is already clear: either the Friends or God himself had provided me with a little piece of perfect. For years I’d been mastering the handrail, and had worked up some serious moves. My favorite was the simple but impressive Run Across, Hit the Rail at Hip Level, Flip Over, Dismount in Air, Land in the No-Man’s-World Beyond the Steps. But I also liked to just flip over and over and over. August was a good time for it, because there were no coats, no zippers, my skin didn’t stick to the metal and get peeled off in sad little sheets. The miracle dress fabric was the best I’d found so far — it was frictionless.

I flipped over and over many times. I was almost too tall for this game, which just made it more pleasurable. Each time I reached the upside-down-point my head just
barely
brushed the cement steps. I flipped, then stood up and said, Whoooaaaa, and as soon as I could see straight I started flipping again. I was going for a record number of flips but for some reason could
not
count, when I heard a ruckus in the vestibule and knew right away that something bad was going on in the area of the Guest Book; of course it was, because that’s what happens when you think you cannot possibly get caught in your shirking.

I stood up, Whoooaaa, holding the rail for support, just as the big double doors at the front of the church opened and Dad came storming out, my sister right behind him saying, “Please don’t, please, Dad, please don’t go,” in a voice I hadn’t heard her use in…ever. And that she would use that tone with him? Unimaginable.

Dad was down the stairs and across the street before I really realized what was happening. He walked right past me as if I’d ceased to exist, and he moved down the sidewalk with the speed, the gliding grace he’d always had; nothing at all like a man with one leg either shorter or longer than the other. Lindy stood at the top of the steps in the brown dress Mom had made her, looking as if she was going to cry in some huge, alarming way, the kind of crying that, when she’d done it in the past, made me want to slip out of my body, simply leave it behind like a snakeskin. She hadn’t cried that way since she’d grown all the way up and moved away from her blue bedroom at the top of the stairs. I braced myself, but she just turned around and walked back inside, careful to catch the heavy door so it didn’t slam shut.

Time was I would have followed him. It was tempting. By now he was tearing off that champagne tie, his head twisted bitterly to one side, and tossing it on the bed. He would take off the jacket, too, but leave on the pants and the pink shirt, with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up. He would leave on the oxblood wing tips, and check his pockets for his cigarettes, his lighter, his wallet, gather up the silver on the dresser top. All my life he had looked like a man with money, no matter what. If I were there, in the house, I wouldn’t talk and neither would he, and the moment would come when he’d either say, “Get in the truck,” and we’d head out together, or he’d say, “’Bye, Zip,” and I’d watch him go. Either way, I wouldn’t have to face what was waiting at the party.

I thought maybe I’d talk to Mickey Danner. Maybe at lunch one day I’d tell her I had a problem with no name I could think of. I stood in front of the church and imagined the scene, how Mickey’s eyes would go wide with concern, the way she would cover my hand with her own and say, “Dear, I’m sure you’re mistaken. Everyone knows your father loves you
terribly.
” She would invite me to come spend the night with her and Howie, and sleep in the guest room with the curtains I’d chosen. It was a wonderful, clean, cool room. The floorboards were polished, there was a rug with a sunflower in the center, and Mickey had trained an ivy plant to wind through the bed’s brass headboard. Maybe I would tell her. Maybe not.

Dad couldn’t take a paying job and continue to collect his pension and disability, so he had the very smart idea of
volunteering
as a county sheriff’s deputy. I can’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. The perks for the volunteer were greater than any salary: a car, uniforms, a badge, a nightstick,
a gun.

At night I used to lie in bed and say the number of his squad car, 33-55, over and over like a chant, trying to make sense of it. I’d picture him wearing the standard-issue shoes with white socks, which my mom said made him look like an overgrown Eagle Scout, and then I’d see the brown pants and shirt tucked in; the badge; the tall, astonishing hat with the silver rope braid. And the black belt: gun, nightstick, blackjack, radio. Someone had given my dad a legally authorized holster with a registered weapon and it had bullets in it. This was not a little belt worn around his calf in which he hid a two-shot Derringer. This was of an entirely different order. I’d say 33-55, 33-55, and I’d see him walking out the door in the uniform, and in short, I was afraid.

Dad took to the cruiser, the uniform, the lingo, as if he’d been born to the job. I knew for a fact that while he might lose his temper and toss a drunk against the side of a building until damage was done to the bricks, he would no way stop and touch a sick animal, and he wouldn’t chase anyone on foot because it wasn’t dignified, and it seemed to me that more than just a temper was required of a deputy sheriff, but my mom and sister and I kept our worries to ourselves.

Then he started getting partners. He got his first partner and basically we were all living in 1 Adam-12.The partner, Sam, was tall with thinning blond hair and a smile that not in a million years could you trust, and he’d been on “the force” for a long time. He had a way I got used to after a while: he cozied up, and maybe he would hurt you. Sam and Dad made up their routines: Sam was the bad cop and Dad was the good. Or they took turns. One day they arrested a man who had been writing bad checks (who knew this was a crime? And if so, why hadn’t Sam arrested Dad?), and as they put the man in the back of the cruiser, he began to stuff something in his mouth and chew frantically. Sam was driving, so Dad reached around and thrust his hand in the Bad Check Man’s mouth and pulled out a wad of paper, getting seriously bitten in the process. This caused him to wind up in the emergency room, and when he got home he explained the extreme dangerousness of human saliva, which sounded as toxic as hyena spit. He’d been lucky, he said, that the man was missing most of his front teeth. All in a day’s work, my mom said, not looking up from her book.

I had taken to sucking on gravel, which didn’t go over well with my sister. I couldn’t explain why I wanted to do it, but once a day, when I thought no one was looking, I’d go out and sit by the fence dividing our house from the Newmans’ Marathon station, gather up a handful of gravel, and stick it in my mouth. Sometimes I washed it off with the hose, and sometimes I just rubbed it on my shirt. I’d get it in there, move it around. Pea gravel makes a lot of noise in a mouth. It tasted exactly like rock. I’d see how much I could hold in one cheek, then fill the other, too, a game I had played with popcorn, marshmallows, and BBs. I might spit the rocks out one at a time, like watermelon seeds, or if I saw Melinda coming, I’d drop them all at once. This nearly always left a little trail of gravel dirt on my chin, which vexed Lindy no end.

One afternoon I was sitting by the fence, mouth filled with gravel, when a car pulled up I’d never seen before. It stopped right in front of my house. It wasn’t just a stranger’s car, it was a strange car — long and white and fabulous-looking. The horn honked, and I stood up a little and looked inside. There was my dad, driving.

“Hey, Zip!” he said, happy as could be. “Spit your rocks out and come take a ride with me.”

I left my gravel over by the fence and walked toward the passenger door. I didn’t even try to hide my whistle, or the shock on my face. This was a long, white Cadillac Coupe de Ville if ever I’d seen one, and it had red leather interior, and there was my dad, sitting down low in the driver’s seat, his cigarette arm out the window, wearing his new deputy sheriff aviator sunglasses. I sat down and kept sitting and sitting. I sank into the seat as if it were made of leather-covered Miracle Whip. The car smelled of cigarette smoke and something I’d never met before. I looked around and saw it: a little metal tub of air freshener, like strawberry-scented Vaseline.

“You buy this car?” I asked, as we sped off down Charles Street. The engine made absolutely no noise, and I was thrown back against the seat as if a team of carburetors had spooked. I was trying to imagine the look on my mother’s face when she discovered he’d purchased another vehicle, as he periodically did, and always to great surprise and peril.

“Nah, it belongs to my new partner.”

I glanced over at him but he was not the sort of deputy who gave anything away. I knew for a dead fact that this was a pimp car, and I couldn’t see how Dad was going to get by with it. The sheriff of Henry County, Joe Harris, a man I loved like the Great and Powerful Oz, did not cut anyone a piece of slack. He had once stopped a woman for speeding and noticed on her driver’s license that she was supposed to be wearing glasses. He reprimanded her and she said, “I have contacts.” He shouted, “I don’t care who you know, you get your glasses on!”

“Your new partner?” The car had electric everything, and in the midst of pressing buttons I ended lying completely down in the backseat.

“Yep.”

“Where’s Sam?” I’d been rather fond of Sam, because he was slick and a liar and always gave me presents.

“Gone undercover. Vice.” This was how Dad talked now.

“So who’s this guy?”

“Fella named Parchman.”

I raised the eyebrow. “Parchman?”

“Parchman Williams. Goes by Willy. Want to use the car phone?” He pointed to the floorboard. Sure enough, there was an old almond-colored phone sitting there. No cords attached to anything.

I picked it up and pushed some numbers.

“Who’d you call?”

“Julie.”

“What’d she say?”

“Same as ever.”

We drove out onto Highway 36 and sped up. I leaned back against the seat, watched the speedometer climb past 60, 70, 80,95.The wind rocketed through the open windows and I wanted to laugh out loud but that wasn’t really deputy behavior. My hair got all in my face and poked me in my eyes. I’d forgotten I had hair and vowed to do something about it.

“Got any scissors in this car?” I shouted over the wind noise.

“Nope. There’s a bowie knife under the seat,” he yelled back.

I shook my head. I’d taken knives to my hair before and it was nothing but a bunch of sawing.

We passed a county cruiser and my first thought was,
This is it, we are finally going to jail,
but the cop just flashed his lights and drove on by. Then we came up on a little old man in a Buick driving about forty miles an hour, and Dad slowed down, relaxed even further in the seat. I’d begun to think of old men as Raisins, and their wives as Raisinettes.

“You could pass this Raisin in about two seconds,” I said, wishing we were back to driving so fast it felt like space travel.

“Nah,” Dad said, tossing his cigarette onto the road. “We’re just cruising on a lovely afternoon.” He turned off the highway and headed back toward Mooreland.

“I won’t tell Mom about the ninety-five miles an hour,” I said, sticking one of my bare feet out the window.

“Your mom couldn’t care less about where you are or what you’re doing,” Dad said, just stating the facts. “She’s Mrs. College now.”

I didn’t say anything. We passed the house at the edge of town that set up a hard longing in me, but I couldn’t say why. My sister had such a house, too, at the other end of town. I turned and looked away from the house, at a field of beans just shooting up bright green, like a carpet you could walk and walk across. We passed the house where my sister’s friend Janet had grown up, and the patch of field with the lucky horse, then turned at the Masonic Lodge on Broad Street and Dad drove extra slow, as if hoping for someone to notice us.

When we pulled up in front of our house I saw that he was right — my mom’s little Volkswagen wasn’t there, and wouldn’t be there.

“You staying?” I asked Dad.

“Nope. Gotta return the car.”

It looked to me like a car that more than once had not been returned, but I didn’t say so.

Dad winked at me, pointed to the phone on the floor. “Call if you need me,” he said, then drove away.

I walked over and sat down, put the rocks in my mouth one by one. There was always the question of who would feed me, and somehow it always got answered. Rose’s mom, Julie’s mom, my sister. 33-55.

Like every other man I knew, my dad hated all black people and loved Bill Cosby. We had all of Cosby’s records and he was one of the few comedians who could make my dad laugh out loud. For a brief time Dad was also for Sammy Davis, Jr., but then he found out that (a) Sammy had only one eye, and (b) he was a Jew. A one-eyed Jewish black man who hung out with Dean Martin was more like a pet to Dad, so he gave Sammy up.

For a little while, a little
tiny
while, no one said that Parchman Williams was black, not even I said it and I’d seen the strawberry-scented Vaseline. Dad would come home in the evenings, or he would not come home, and he’d tell stories about himself and Willy, and Mom would laugh politely. Now as she read she made notes in the margins of her books, something she hadn’t done before. And she wrote in spiral notebooks, line after line of her beautiful handwriting, so I assumed she was being punished for something. Mom laughed politely and didn’t say anything about how much my dad and every other man in Mooreland hated black people, and I didn’t say it, and then one night it was announced that the coming weekend we were going to Willy’s house for dinner, and I was going to have to wear shoes.

My dad had gone to the special trouble of picking me up a pair of sandals at Grant’s department store. They were just flip-flops, but they were covered with denim, and had a daisy where the two straps met. They confused me. On the one hand they were shoes, my mortal enemy, and on the other, they were covered in denim, my dear dear friend. Then there was the daisy to contend with. I tried pulling it off but it was attached hard. I thought maybe I could ruin the daisy off. I put them on, went outside, and ran the hose over them, then stomped around. I made a mud puddle, stomped around in it, rinsed them off. A terrible thing happened: the flip-flops grew to my feet in a way that reminded me of my old cowboy pajamas, the way I could put them on and they were just cowboy-printed skin. These were shoes, and I loved them. I had to sit down on the swing and try to take the news in. If I could love these shoes, shoes with a flower on top, I was capable of pretty much anything.

That made me think about my hair, so I got on my bike and rode down to Linda’s Beauty Shop, still wearing the shoes. I thought I’d just take my chances. If Linda Lee noticed and said something, I’d not only throw them away, I’d maybe cut my feet off. I’d also give her daughter Laurie, one of my best friends, a chance to mock me, though that wasn’t really Laurie’s way. She was a cousin of the Hickses on her mom’s side (everyone but me was a cousin of Hickses, a sad fact), and she was just naturally funny about everything without being mean. I don’t know how it happened in that family that most everyone was kind and everyone was just flat-out screaming, falling-down funny, but it was. In my family if you inherited something it was bad hair and a big nose, and if you came from that particular holler in Tennessee, you got everything good, including being pretty.

Laurie was walking around outside with her dog, Pooch. Pooch was a little bit bigger than a Chihuahua, with a tail that curled over his back, and he ruled the town. He went where he wanted, when he wanted. He was like a dog with a pocket full of money and a group of powerful friends. Laurie spent half her time with him and half her time looking for him. She had a way of calling him that was a variation on his name — “Beee - ooo - uuuutch! Beee-ooo-uuuutch!” — that was so funny he’d come home against his will. He walked up to me and smelled my shoes, then wagged his curly tail. I thought to myself,
Hmmmm.
But Pooch and I naturally got along, so maybe he was being courteous.

“I gotta get this hair outta my face, Laurie,” I said, scratching Pooch’s head.

“You don’t hardly have any hair to talk about,” she said. I thought about saying, You haven’t seen it in a stolen Cadillac going 95 down the highway, but I kept that to myself. Laurie’s own hair was silky blond, wavy, and long. But that didn’t make me hate her. I didn’t hate her even though she owned one of the single most enviable pieces of stuff I’d ever seen in my human life: a fireplace made out of cardboard (with drawn bricks and everything) that got set up at Christmastime. There were cardboard logs and cardboard flames — pretty big ones — that lit up when it was plugged in. When I’d seen it for the first time last Christmas I couldn’t tear my eyes away until I was offered a bunch of candy.