She Got Up Off the Couch (26 page)

One afternoon I was lying on one of the leather sofas holding a rubber boa constrictor, reading a comic I’d gotten that day. It was grim. It was the story of a woman who had been sent to an Insane Asylum because she believed a little goat-footed varmint was after her, and her Doctor was a man who wore eyeglasses but it was dark behind them, not like sunglasses, but like there was nothing behind his glasses, and he suggested she take up the flute. And not just any flute, but a flute made of reeds strapped together, each smaller than the last. A Pan flute, he called it. First he caused her to make the flute in a class with other crazy people, then he taught her to play it, then he made her go out into the garden at night, under a full moon, and play it to a fountain, where there was…a statue of the very goat-boy she feared. I was just getting to the good part when Parchman strolled in from the kitchen and sat down right on the glass coffee table. He tugged on my red braid.

“Zip,” he said, “it’s time we had the talk.”

I glanced up at him. “What talk.”

“The talk about racism. Now here’s how I’m going to start it: you’ve got your chocolate milk, and you’ve got your white milk.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“That’s not going to work.” He thought a minute. “Okay, okay — listen. Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘Some of my best friends are black’?”

I could not abide a lecture, not even from Parchman Williams. “Some of my best friends are white,” I said, looking back down at my comic book.

Parchman slapped his knees with his open palms. “Well. That about takes care of that,” he said, patting me on the shoulder as he left the room. In the kitchen I heard him say, “You’ve got your hands full with that one. Lord, Bobby.”

I heard the wheel of Dad’s lighter, him taking a deep breath. “Yep. She’s my pride and joy.”

Sometimes when the four of them played cards I hung out in the kitchen instead of playing with Tyrell. I liked him just fine, but I could only spend so much time talking about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or lying on that fur bed. The sloshy part made me nervous after a while. I would begin to think,
What’s really in here?
If there’s water and you can’t see into it, there is always something in it. Maybe it has teeth, maybe it has tentacles, maybe it just has dumb fins. I didn’t like thinking about it.

I remembered being four, five, six. I remembered how I was so quiet I was ghostly, and the way I could hide under tables or behind sofas and no one ever knew I was there. I still had the knack, even though I had gotten too tall to hide. Grown-ups still talked as if I weren’t there, and I didn’t understand why. When I was thirty-five I would never, ever let children hear anything I said or thought.

Dad had met his match in Parchman Williams, as far as cards went. They had the same gifts: the quick hands, the mask face, the wit that disguised wild-animal competitiveness. They bluffed and distracted, they told funny, cold jokes, and only bad luck — not lack of skill — could defeat either of them. Mom and Libra played like the wives of master gamblers. They were patient and even; good partners who just kept pace and didn’t make mistakes.

“Libra told me if I want more children I’ll have to have them with my next wife,” Parchman said, taking a drink of beer.

“You heard that right,” Libra said, tapping the dummy hand with one of her fingernails. “I’m done raising anything except my tax bracket.”

Parchman said, “I think I’ll make it diamonds. Diamonds for my dear wife.”

“His next wife can do a lot of things different,” Libra said, and everyone laughed.

“Would you ever remarry?” Parchman asked my mom.

My ears raised up on the sides of my head as if I were a fox listening for the farmer coming up the drive.
Remarry?
This was a word I had never heard spoken in the presence of my parents. It was not a word Rose’s parents would ever use, nor Julie’s parents, either. It was not in the vocabulary of their friends, the Spillmans. It was a word un-uttered in the Mooreland Friends Church. My mother? Parchman was asking this of my mother, who had given one piece of advice to my sister when she married:
Do not ever allow the word “divorce” to be spoken in your home. If you say it once, you let it in.

I watched her. I opened and closed my hands, trying to flex out the panic. I watched my father. His face was blank as the night sky. She studied her cards, blinked patiently behind her old glasses. There had not been one moment I felt that Parchman and Libra and Tyrell were any different from us, really. Not a single moment, regardless of the magnificent house and the snakes. And depending on my mother’s answer, I would know whether they were.

But she just shook her head. “It’s not something I’ve ever considered,” she said, without looking up, and I knew I should let it out, the terrified breath I was holding, but I didn’t. I stood there at the edge of the room, watching them play the hand out. With men who played that well, it hardly mattered who won. The game itself was the joy.

From kindergarten through fourth grade we had one class at the Mooreland Elementary School; we were all together every year, moving from the first-to the second-grade classroom when the time came. Why this didn’t lead to a Kill the Weakest Member of the Herd type of behavior I don’t know, but no one ever died or was eaten. That’s where the friendships form that go back as far as memory allows:Rose and Julie, Anita and Annette, Kirsten who was beautiful even in kindergarten and never had a bad year. Margaret, Tod, Ronnie, Debby, Tony, Kelly Hicks of the next-door Hickses. I think we would have been happy to stay together through high school and higher education (Rose, Margaret, Ronnie for sure), or light jail time (me), and on out into the world, except that during the summer between fourth and fifth grades the Mount Summit elementary school closed, which I’m thinking must have been a sad thing, and their students moved over and joined us in Mooreland.

Now, I am sorry to say that those Mount Summit kids just weren’t like us in some invisible way, and they kept to themselves and we did the same. The plan was to keep permanent divisions between us so there would be no cross-pollination and I was all for that, except it seemed like only four or five minutes had gone by and I was friends with a girl called Jeanne Ann who was a longtime friend of Anita and Annette because of something, church or 4-H, so it was natural to be with Anita and Annette and there was Jeanne Ann and oh, also she was hilarious and I got along with her dandy. Then there was this girl called Kathy, she was tall like me and I loved her, and strangely enough I knew her dad because he knew my dad. Her dad sold camping trailers on a lot next to the Ramrod Gun and Knife shop, which was just about my favorite store in the history of commerce. If I had to say what would be on a particular avenue in heaven I’d say let’s start with Ramrod Gun and Knife, and yes, absolutely put camping trailers next to it, it’s a natural. There should be a bait shop somewhere, and a store that sells beef jerky and lemon phosphates, and we’re good to go.

I’d visited with her dad already so I went ahead and took up with Kathy, and she was a friend of Jeanne Ann’s anyway, and then I don’t know how it happened but we were all squashed up together, and by the sixth grade it was hard to remember when I didn’t know the Mount Summit kids.

Kathy had a slumber party at her house and let me tell you: when the girl in school with
stuff
is also fun and generous and smart? Yes, you want to go to her slumber parties, and swim in her pool and ride around on her motorbike, which was small and orange and the exhaust pipe or the engine or something heated up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit after about three minutes of riding, and we were constantly yelling to one another, “Don’t let your leg touch anything!” If we wobbled even slightly Kathy would yell, “For God’s sake, don’t fall or the engine will melt your flesh!” We tore around the flat acreage behind her house like bandits, then jumped in the pool again. That night we slept in a camper her dad set up in the backyard. A brilliant idea, and it made me long for my own sales lot from which to choose for entertaining. There was mayhem in the trailer; it involved first s’mores and then raspberry jelly, and at some point Anita announced she’d either forgotten or couldn’t find her pillow and Jeanne Ann sat up with one in her hands. She held it out to Anita and said, in the Kentucky tilt of her church’s minister, “The Lord giveth” — Jeanne Ann pulled the pillow back — “and the Lord taketh away.” I’d never laughed that hard before — it was the kind of laughing that weakens you and makes you exhausted, and then starts all over again. We were trying to stay up all night — that would be the goal at every party — and I was the one, always, who never fell asleep. I could have probably stayed awake for two or three days, really. I didn’t mention it at the parties, especially in front of Annette, who played every sport ever invented (she possibly made up two or three extras) and so was always tired. She’d come to a slumber party straight from some grueling three hours of running up a straight, sheer cliff, at the top of which she was made to heave boulders at wildlife or whatever, and she’d be tired by dinnertime. I loved her and I always wanted to draw her over to the Other Side, the non–organized sports side of life, where there were no coaches (I’d discovered that coaches never liked me and I returned the disdain) or schedules or whistles blowing. I was already figuring out there is no profit in adding pain to a day, but for some girls, sports — the pressure, the physical toll, the group identity — were a
good
thing. I’d have to practice saying it: for them, the agony, self-chosen and self-perpetuated, is a
good
thing. They sure didn’t harass me for lounging around on the front porch all summer, reading books and drinking Mountain Dew, waiting for the moment something would come along and determine the tune of the day. By the time I wandered over to the Coke machine at Newman’s Marathon in my pajamas, Julie and Annette had already been training for
something
for hours. I was, too, it turns out: I was training to lie around reading.

Then Jeanne Ann had a slumber party and it was different from Kathy’s because she was an only child of Older Parents who were practical and didn’t have a pool or a flaming motorbike. She lived in the cleanest, squarest house I’ve ever been in and it turned out we didn’t need the other stuff because have
mercy
it was outrageously fun. Jeanne Ann was in gymnastics and could do strange things, like a backbend and then spider walk across the floor. She was so flexible it was unholy and we all tried to imitate her, to much screaming hilarity and permanent damage to our cartilage. Hours were spent trying to teach me to belch, an impossibility as I’d made clear from the beginning. I didn’t have the proper mechanism, I was missing a flap or something. I’d never in my whole life so much as burped. It was shameful but I’d adjusted. Jeanne Ann endeared herself to me forever by getting out a tape recorder as we practiced belching, or as she belched in various eloquent ways and I did what she told me and opened my mouth and nothing came out: a little silence on the tape. She fried bologna and we watched Sammy Terry on television, and the worst came when we realized Annette was asleep and someone, I won’t say who, made a little fart very near her ear to try and wake her up. That was it for me. I thought I would have to be hospitalized.

I’d never had a slumber party at my house for the obvious reasons — in fact, I never had anyone over at all. I visited my friends; they didn’t visit me. I noticed this, but it was rather like belching — I just didn’t have the equipment. My sister decided she would host a slumber party for me at her little house where there was barely room for Melinda, Rick, and Josh, not to mention I was there pretty much all the time. The solution was we would have the slumber party in the backyard, and Melinda would put up a tent for us to sleep in.

We had a great time, it was quite shockingly fun, but I noticed Melinda becoming slightly more frazzled with every hour that passed. She was pregnant with a New Baby and I wasn’t even thinking about that as I wanted no part of it. When we trooped in through the back door, past the laundry room, down the hallway that sloped to one side, past the bathroom, and into the kitchen for Kool-Aid, Lindy was fine, she didn’t make any threats or anything. She decided to bring the popcorn to us which I understood, but it wasn’t as if we were going to pee in the
garden,
we weren’t
savages.
In fact we preferred to pee as a group, the opposite of savagery I believe, so we did that. We used up all the toilet paper but that was okay because there was a box of tissues so we used it instead.

I got out the sandwich maker from when we used to go camping. Julie and I built a fire and we took bread, buttered on the outside, and scoops of fruit pie filling (blueberry being the obvious first choice) and closed the cast-iron sandwich shape around it, cut off the crusts. Some of the other girls were amateurs and didn’t want to wait for the bread to toast — a disaster in the culinary arts, impatience. What you have without toast is nothing. It’s goo. We were all licking our fingers and contemplating our third-degree burns from the boiling fruit filling when Melinda opened the back screen door and stepped out onto the dark step, the light of the laundry room behind her.

“Uh-oh,” Jeanne Ann said as I forced myself to stand and face it, whatever it was.

I walked toward my sister slowly. I’d be having a cigarette and a blindfold, please. She was completely still, an awful sign, as Melinda usually went frozen just before she struck. I was reminded of the vipers in Africa I’d read about, the largest and most powerful of all venomous snakes, who could move from a coiled position and strike at fifty-five miles an hour, probably the speed limit for most things. They could shatter the glass of moving safari vehicles. I remembered everything I could about vipers as I walked, step by step, toward the light of the back door, but none of it was good.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Melinda asked, in the quiet way that was the way of the viper.

I shook my head.

“You put an entire box of Kleenex into our septic system.”

What could I say? I believed her, but it was sort of news to me.

“You’ve stopped up our
septic system.
” She said this as if we had brought down the walls of the Alamo. “We’re going to have to call a plumber.”

“I’m sorry.”

Melinda closed the door and went back inside without another word. I went back to my friends and reported the damage. No one understood the big problem, but we did understand we couldn’t go back in the house or we would get our windshields shattered. But where to pee?

“Let’s just pee in the garden!” Jeanne Ann said.

“Yes, let’s just pee in the garden!” It was agreed upon and undertaken with such joy that Melinda popped her head out one more time, around two in the morning, and told me if she heard us, if she heard a single sound again, not to mention if we woke up Josh, whose bedroom window faced the yard, she would do unto us things I could not repeat to my friends. I slunk back to the tent and said we were going to have to be quiet, and that was so funny we all had to bury our faces in our sleeping bags, and then someone announced she had to pee.

In the dense darkness at four we decided to walk around town. We walked all over, up and down most of the streets, down to our own dark and silent elementary school, which spooked us. We walked past Edythe’s house which everyone found unbearable, the knowing she was in there with her bathtub filled with newspapers and her blackened fingernails, the piano, her long hair. What no one said was what scared me most: what was she like
inside
?

We stopped in front of my own house. I stood there in the street with my friends. “Well, this is weird,” I said, so we moved on.

The Mooreland Friends Church, the houses on Jefferson Street — the town was an entirely strange and surreal place at the edge of sleep like this. I couldn’t get my mind around it, that behind every door there were people still in bed, they’d been in bed all night, and some of them, like my dad, were just about to open their eyes and have the world remade for them, as it was remade every day. Only we, who had been on watch through the hours, knew that it hadn’t come undone in the meantime, things had hummed along fairly much as usual, just waiting.

We got in the tent and climbed in our sleeping bags, chilled. There was some crazy talk and it started to rain. The sound of the rain on the tent was enough, and one by one my friends fell asleep. I was shocked that they could do so, that their bodies could let go in such a way. My body did nothing unless I told it to, and even then sometimes coercion was necessary. I had reached an age where it was impossible for me to fall asleep by accident, it did not and could not happen, and I lay in my sleeping bag and imagined the consequences. It would be I, like my father, who could drive all night while the rest of the car slept. I would be the one pacing a hospital floor or working a strange shift in a factory. I didn’t even like coffee; I’d have to figure that one out.

With everyone asleep I imagined Melinda’s relief, the silence from the backyard. Melinda had a child, she was pregnant. It remained a shock. I could remember so clearly the night
she’d
had a slumber party and the whole cast was there, all her friends. They’d had a séance in the living room, gathered in a circle on the floor right next to the couch where I was trying to sleep. In the middle of it I’d looked at one of the tall, narrow windows and seen Jesus floating many feet off the ground, in the arms of the trees. I had seen him — I could not be argued out of it. But I hadn’t seen him since.

It occurred to me that there might be nothing more hysterical in all the world than if I suddenly began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the sun rose. I wouldn’t sing it loudly, but with reverence, as if I’d been waiting all night and this was my job, to comfort the troops. I opened my mouth but it was
too
funny and I began to laugh in that silent, organ-shaking way. I let some moments pass and tried to get ahold of myself, opened my mouth again. I laughed even harder and had to curl up in a little ball inside my sleeping bag and bite my knees. The third time I skipped directly to crying, tears ran down my face in streams, collected in my ears in little pools. I was on the verge of sobbing, so I buried my face in my pillow and held my breath. I waited for it to pass. My friends were so silent, sleeping sound, that with my eyes closed and pressed against my pillow’s dark, I wondered if they were there at all.