She Got Up Off the Couch (30 page)

After she became a Master, Mom took her first job teaching English at a high school in Union City, a very fascinating place as anyone from Indiana can tell you. It was either a single town cut in two, or two different towns with the same name that happened to be connected to each other, or. There was probably another way to think about it but I didn’t know what that was. As I understood it you could stand in a particular place and straddle an imaginary line (you couldn’t see it but it was most assuredly real) and one of your legs would be in Union City, Indiana, and the other would be in Union City,
Ohio.
Indiana and Ohio are two very distinct states no matter what people on television may say. The fact that a single town contains both is not the point. What is the point is that Union City was way bigger than Mooreland —
thousands
(three or four) of people lived there — and they took this madness perfectly in stride EVEN THOUGH Indiana doesn’t believe in Daylight Savings Time and Ohio does, and so during half the year one of your legs would be in three o’clock and one would be in four. Oh it was vexing. I became overwhelmed with the desire to find a place directly on the state line and
put my butt on it.
Mom entertained this wish and we looked around until we found a diner we believed would do the trick, and I traced what I believed to be the state line into a booth, and indeed it was rewarding. One buttcheek in Indiana, one in Ohio. Hoosiers, when asked what time it was in Union City, would ask, “Are you on God’s time?” meaning ours.

The high school where Mom taught made me not afraid of high school, because unlike when I’d visited Ball State with her when I was much younger and been called a pygmy, in Union City everyone was nice to me and behaved as if I were human. I was especially in love with two of Mom’s colleagues, Alwin and Ted.

Alwin looked exactly like a periodic character on
The Beverly Hillbillies,
Mr. Fahrquahr. This moved me. He dressed better than anyone I’d ever met and he did so every day. He wore two-tone shoes, and had a different pair to match all of the colors of his pants. When Mom arrived at work each morning Alwin would glide down the hallway like Fred Astaire, singing, “It’s de-light-ful, it’s delect-able, it’s De-lon-da.” Her own song. He had been writing one novel for his whole adult life and it was a
thousand pages long
— a fictionalized history of the canal system in Indiana. Mom brought the first volume home and read it more slowly than her usual pace;she alternated reading with sighing and pressing her fingers hard against her temples. I assumed it must be extraordinarily good. We were once invited to Alwin’s house for tea, and it was an eye-popper. He lived out in the country in an old house he’d turned into a
mansion.
If there were a museum devoted solely to the great acts of beauty on the Indiana/Ohio line, Alwin’s house would be the centerpiece. In just the bathroom — in just one of the bathrooms, for instance, because
there was more than one
— the wall near the ceiling had a niche in it every foot or so, like shadowboxes. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out where one found such a wall. And in each niche was a real statue of a man, sometimes just a head, sometimes a whole body, and one of them was flat naked and appeared to be peeling off a section of his own shoulder. How I stared.

Alwin had many things that made me contemplate the Good Life, including a stuffed great horned owl, but it was what he showed us as we were leaving that struck me speechless. Behind the house was a miniature version of the regular house, a skinny version, bricks and metal roof and everything. Looking at it from the outside I saw an answer to prayer, and tried to imagine such a thing in our own yard: a shrunken Mooreland house covered with vinyl siding and with kitchen plumbing that drained right out onto the sidewalk. It would be mine alone. I could do anything I wanted in there and no one would have any say, and I would have my friends over and we would eat popcorn and campfire fruit sandwiches. I would cover every vertical surface with Queen posters because I had recently decided to devote my life to them, and I and my friends would make crazy noises and…Alwin opened the door and the replica house was really an outhouse. I smacked my forehead.
Even better.

Ted was the drama teacher and he made all the plays happen. He was the cleanest-looking person I’d ever met except for Rose, and like her he had the straightest, whitest teeth on Planet Earth. They looked like a shining white tooth bracelet. And he was also like Rose’s mom, Joyce, in that he could do anything, including making his own suits — entire suits — and also he was a brilliant cook and he, like Alwin, lived in a fine house. But the best thing about Ted was that when he talked everything got MAGNIFIED and I’d never had that feeling before. In my experience if you asked a grown-up Hoosier a question — and it could be about anything — the answer would be “It was all right,” or “It was fine.” There was an unspoken rule (which I didn’t realize until I saw it broken) against
saying
anything or
describing
anything and most especially about
getting worked up
over anything. But Ted was the opposite. The first time we met he told me he had a wall in his house painted with a scene from
Gone With the Wind.
He said the words and I got a loopy feeling just from hearing them. My whole body remembered the movie, how I sat without moving through hour after hour of it, including the commercials. It had made me heartsick and feverish, the colors and clothes and the lostness of it, the way that world was lost and would never come again. And in all those years in school I had never understood one thing, not a single solitary thing, about the Civil War, but after
Gone With the Wind
I felt like I’d been there. History classes hadn’t given me even a smidge of a picture to carry around inside me, not of the people or the houses or anything, just names I forgot as soon as I heard them, and dates, numbers, that added up to nothing and so they too vanished. But once we’d seen the movie on television Rose and I talked about it constantly and she went so far — too far, as she was likely to do — as to get the book and read it, but I wasn’t that crazy.

So Ted told me about the wall in his house and my whole stomach area flopped around like a fish, and then he asked if I’d seen
Gone With the Wind
and I was taken aback to be asked a question by an adult stranger and so well trained in not saying anything that I just nodded, as if he’d asked me about
Fat Albert.
(I loved
Fat Albert
but not in the same way.)

Ted grabbed my hands in his and said, “Didn’t it slay you? Weren’t you happy and sad at the same time? Will you ever forget one single moment of it?”

Yes, yes, and no. I couldn’t answer, but that was all right, because he’d moved on to talking about the costumes — who made them and what the cost was, and how expensive it would be if the movie were made today — and the scandal over casting Vivien Leigh. Mom could talk to Ted just fine, her timing was right and everything, but I seemed to be on a slight delay. I wanted to see Ted every day, at Alwin’s house if possible, and just listen as he retold the whole world to me, everything I’d already done and seen and everything I would see or do, so I could understand, even in reverse, how amazing and gorgeous and fabulous and insane and wretched and perfect perfect perfect it had all been, and would be.

Mom’s commute to Union City was so long she didn’t get home until late in the evening and she had to leave every morning while it was still dark. I would have been happy if she’d stayed at that school forever, but her second year as a teacher she got the job she wanted, teaching at our own school, Blue River. She could drive there in fifteen minutes, and we could ride together and I’d never have to take the bus, and all that was good and I was happy for her, but when she left Union City, left Alwin and Ted and her sweet, funny students and came back to Mooreland, back to a town without two time zones, everything went flat and unspoken again. I missed the way things had been, even briefly, and I know she did, too.

By the time Mooreland was hit with a blizzard and Abby was born, Mom was teaching at Blue River and Dad’s schedule as a deputy sheriff had grown entirely mysterious. Sometimes he had the car,33-55, and sometimes he didn’t. He worked most days but also most evenings, and who would have ever predicted something as horrible as this:one night at a Blue River home basketball game,
a sacred occasion
the details of which I could describe in a novel of a thousand pages and which would take my whole adult life to write, I looked up from where I was sitting with Julie and whom did I see but my father, in uniform. He was the county sheriff’s deputy assigned to patrol the school and the parking lot during the basketball game. I was in a trap and I knew it. Mother taught at the school I attended, which was already going to squash my style something fierce. And here, in my leisure time and at an event where I was supposed to be left ALONE, my dad was walking around carrying a gun.

“Have you
ever
?” I asked Julie, who shook her head no. I closed my eyes and imagined my miniature house with its pies and Queen posters and loud noises, and then remembered that the original had been a toilet. I put my head down on my folded arms and Julie patted me on the back.

If my family could be represented with different-colored blips on a time line, there would be years and years where there were four all huddled up together, although it’s best not to dwell too long on that part because it would have been before I was born and it hardly makes any sense anyway. Following that would be just a few years where there were five, and some of that time we were in a pile but for most of them the brother-colored blip was pulling away. Then he was gone. Back to four, but again, only briefly. The sister blip moved away, if not so far. And for some time during the years there were three of us I didn’t notice a change because it’s difficult to think about what isn’t possible. But one day I woke up and it was clear: my mom had a world she had struggled mightily to obtain, and she was
someone
in it. The people, the books, the students (sure enough, at Blue River there were amazing fabulous wonderful smart funny students, too, and Mom had drawn all of them to her like the Pied Piper), these things added up to something good. And my dad had a world, too, and he was important in it. He had friends I barely knew, and it was increasingly hard to figure where he was at any given time (although if a more true and honest history of the man could be written, say by the spirit who presides over time lines and facts and who never gets things wrong or confused, I think that book would include people and adventures
no one
ever knew about but him). They had worlds, but they weren’t the same one — not even close. So there would be a little piece of this visual aid, a few inches at most, where I thought there were three of us but I was wrong. At best there was Mom and me together, and sometimes — not nearly so often — Dad and me. But most of the time I was sitting there alone, and didn’t realize it. A mercy, that ignorance.