She Got Up Off the Couch (32 page)

I had been to one of those houses on the other side of the avenue, with Grandmother Mildred. We’d visited one of her old ladies, a church friend or a distant relative and it had been
tiresome.
The houses on this side were much more modest and small and boring-looking, but the street was still pretty. Cherry trees were dropping blossoms on the well-tended lawns. I slipped on my shoes and followed Dad inside.

The house was nothing like it seemed from the outside. The living room was a sea of dark red, thick carpeting, a color out of time. The room was furnished in antiques, unusual ones. I’d lived with my dad long enough to know that all the pieces were fine and valuable. There was a red velvet horsehair sofa with arms that lowered to make it a bed. Beside the sofa a very old teddy bear sat on a tricycle, surrounded by wooden blocks. A tall china cabinet held an entire collection of ruby ware behind its curved glass doors.

Dad asked Mrs. Friend where Mr. Friend was and she said he’d been called into work.

Against the wall sat a
pump organ.
I couldn’t imagine how old it was. The keyboard was short, only forty keys, and the tones were controlled by knobs you pulled out or pushed in like a throttle. There was a carved wooden stool with a red velvet seat for the person who could figure out how to play it; just looking at the place a foot would go to depress the bellows made me shake my head.

I was introduced to Mrs. Friend and we shook hands; her nails were the longest I’d ever seen, and painted a glittery white. Mrs. Friend had a daughter a year older than me? It was hard to believe. Who knew mothers could be so…not motherly-looking? So young? She was petite (I was many inches taller already), with long black hair. Black eyes. A tan. She wore a finely woven white turtleneck with short sleeves, black pants, black shoes.

“Why don’t you come in and have some coffee anyway?” she said, and Dad said okay.

She went into the kitchen and Dad stood in the kitchen doorway, talking to her. I looked around, not touching anything, just wandered from one lovely thing to another. In the dining room area I saw an
ice chest,
the original refrigerator. The outside appeared to be ash wood — I wondered if Dad had
noticed
this — and there were separate doors that opened with metal handles you pulled toward you. I opened the top one and saw that the wood was a frame built around a dense, gray, unusual substance — not quite marble or metal but like a combination of the two. It felt like a very old ice cube tray, the kind designed by Satan’s little ice cube tray trolls. One Christmas Eve at Rose’s party I’d been trying to crack such an evil thing and couldn’t get the metal handle to give at all. I put it down on the counter and held one end while pulling with all my might. It didn’t move and it didn’t move, and then it slammed backward and pinched a piece of my hand completely off and I still had a scar but who cared, I liked scars.

The top door of the ice chest closed with a smooth click. It was a flawless, amazing thing.

Mrs. Friend came out of the kitchen and gave me a tall glass of Coke filled with ice cubes. I liked both scars and ice cubes very much. I thanked her, and said, “This is beautiful,” resting my hand on the glassy smooth ash of the refrigerator.

“Thank you, I think so, too,” she said, and told me where they’d found it, what luck it had been. She called her daughter, who was behind a closed door listening to music I could hear through the walls. When the door opened I saw that Ghost Girl had with her two small dogs, one with a lot of hanging-down gray fur that made me nervous, and a dachshund, the only breed of dog that ever bit me. The daughter came out and she was even smaller than her mother, and looked emaciated; she seemed to weigh the equivalent of one of my legs. Even so she was striking. Her hair, too, was long and black, but thicker than Mrs. Friend’s, and when she turned her head a certain way it was so black it had a
blue
cast, blacker than Lindy’s, even. Her eyes were a nearly solid black, and I wondered if any light could get through them. We went into her room and it would have been clear to even the most incompetent detective that Ghost Girl was insane for Kiss. There was so much Kiss stuff in that room it looked like a checkerboard. And that was the music playing, too. Ghost put my new Queen devotion to shame, and I could see I was going to have to up the amperage, or whatever that phrase was my dad used. And perhaps — this hurt, but might be necessary — I couldn’t also give my heart to Steve Martin. I had one record of his,
Let’s Get Small,
and my daily music order was
A Night at the Opera,
both sides;
Let’s Get Small. A Day at the Races; Let’s Get Small.
And the just released
News of the World,
which that unpredictable Julie Newman had gotten me for my birthday even though I hadn’t said a word to her about my Queen conversion and never took those records to her house and so she had just reached up into the air and pulled down the best present I’d gotten for a long time.
News of the World,
which was
stunningly
good;
Let’s Get Small.
I had the whole record memorized and could quote from it at any spot, a fact which amazed Mother and caused Melinda to threaten me with violence not even invented yet.

“Do you think it’s possible to be true to two different things, a band and a comedian,” I asked the Ghost Girl, sitting on her bed, “or do I have to pick one?”

She held the nervous little dogs. The gray-haired one shook and I couldn’t figure out where its face was and I hoped they stayed over there with her because my instincts had somehow gotten the idea that all shrunken dogs were wormy and I couldn’t stop thinking it even though the house I was sitting in was immaculate. Mrs. Friend was not in any way the wormy-dog type. And yet.

“I don’t know,” GG said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her. She had the accent, too, the Indiana hillbilly twang my mom had told me a writer named Kurt Vonnegut had compared to the sound of a monkey wrench being thrown into a moving engine. He didn’t like it, was what I read there. My own inflections tended to be less Indiana and more Kentucky, something I’d picked up from Mom Mary and Dad and I don’t know where-all, but I had to pay close attention or I sounded like someone married to her first cousin, both of us the children of first cousins.

“I’ve only got the one,” GG said, and when I realized she was talking she continued, “band.”

“Well, you’re probably right.” Which was true but maybe if I considered the problem while
listening
to Steve Martin that would help me decide.

She didn’t talk much and she was very ghosty but I could see that the New Friends’ Daughter was as sweet and genuine as a person can be, if that person also happens to be so sad she wants to die and doesn’t have one single word to explain why it is so. I’d never met a sadder person in my life, not at a funeral, not even at the nursing home where I sometimes played the piano for my brother while he preached and led hymns. Those nursing home people had been the undisputed champions of sad until I met the Ghost Girl, who, like the old ones, stirred a whole lot of confusion into her sadness. She didn’t know how to take even the very next step, it seemed, and I liked her instantly and wished I was smarter and knew something to say. But I didn’t know anything. Neither one of us did, but at least I felt fine about it and assumed I’d know more later.

“I should probably see if Dad’s ready to go,” I said, standing up.

“It was nice meeting you.”

“You, too,” I think she said, but she didn’t move from where she sat huddled with the trembling dogs.

They were sitting at a dining room table in a section of the living room that had been separated by a wall that stopped about four feet off the floor and was connected to the ceiling by black poles and widely spaced lattice, all around and through which ivy and some other plant had woven to make a green wall. I looked down where the two parts met to see where the ivy was planted and it turned out to be in the wall itself, which was hollow and filled with dirt. People thought of the most amazing things.

“Sit down, Zip, and let me finish my coffee.”

I sat down across from Dad. I told Mrs. Friend that the Ghost Girl was very nice, and she agreed that her daughter was nice. She turned back to Dad and they continued what they’d been talking about when I came out, which turned out to be a long story of Dad’s, involving some mayhem he’d gotten into with Parchman and how they’d narrowly escaped it. I was watching Dad talk just as I always had, when something caught my eye — I wasn’t sure even then what it was. For all intents and purposes there was nothing to see. He was wearing one of his favorite three-button sport shirts — it was a silky cotton that clung to his broad shoulders and chest — of the palest seafoam green, which showed off his dark skin and the barely discernible green flecks in his dark eyes. (My father’s eyes were dark brown, my mother’s were an icy green, and it seemed someone was keeping score among their children:Dan’s eyes were dark like Dad’s, Melinda’s were a jewel-like gray/green, and mine — I was unexpected — were an exact cross between the two. Sometimes they were green, sometimes they were brown. It wasn’t right.) There was nothing to see and yet I froze and stared at him. He was completely relaxed — the lion in him was nowhere to be seen. And if there was no lion, there was no cage.

He reached the finale, the great line that had been spoken by Parchman but was even funnier coming from Dad, and Mrs. Friend let her head fall back against her chair and she laughed and laughed the way some ladies do; there wasn’t anything restrained in it, and right at that second
I knew.
I knew absolutely and without a flicker of doubt, just the way I knew how many pennies had been in that jar and when the first snow would fall. I would not have said I doubted it if a demand was made to me at gunpoint. Dad was laughing, too, so hard his eyes were a little teary and I could see that he was
happy,
as he had been with Parchman and Libra. Happiness was not his daily state. Before that day, at his very best he seemed content, or at brief peace. He was a natural man, after all, and nature was always right there, all around us, and he knew to walk right into it.

There was the one critical thing I knew for certain, but there were a world of things I didn’t know at all, and a good thing, too. I didn’t know that I would never again see my father’s footprints in the snow of our backyard, the ones that traced his path away from the house and back again hours before I woke up. His garden and fruit trees would go untended and die; his little tilty toolshed would rarely be entered again. We turned the wooden handle that held the door closed and left it; as long as it stood the smell never disappeared — his smell of beeswax and traps, of leather and rust and oil in a real oilcan like the kind the Tin Man carried. I didn’t know the time would come, and much, much sooner than I would have believed possible, when Mom and I would move the piano over against the wall closest to my parents’ bedroom, and night after night — because she couldn’t sleep, she thought she’d never sleep again — I’d play the piano for an hour, two hours, and she would listen on the other side of the wall. Nobody knows those things in advance, and certainly no one could have predicted that before that very year was through I would be judged a threat to the state of the new union, because among other things, having me anywhere near was no different than having Delonda Jarvis in the house. I looked like him but I sounded like her, and I would be exiled with a vengeance, still thirteen.

We stood to leave and I told the New Friend it had been a pleasure meeting her, I thanked her for the Coke. Dad and I went out and got in the hot squad car. He was still chuckling as he rolled down the windows and flipped the air conditioner on high; we believed, he and I, in having both kinds of air. Still in the spirit of the visit, he asked if I’d like to go past the Trojan Drive-Thru and get a cherry Coke and I said no for the first time in history and so we headed home. I never said a word on the drive but I don’t think he noticed. The dispatcher reported the gossip in short bursts that made me jump.

At home he paced and chain-smoked and drove away again and again, and then the worst thing happened and I got sick and stayed home from school. It was a tough call — do you leave the daughter alone (she’s thirteen, after all) when she’s sick, particularly if all her life you have been the one who cared for her when the Seven Beautiful Princesses of the Seven Beautiful Kings were no longer Healthy Within Her? Okay, so you’re no John Walton but you
are,
or have been to this child, a most excellent good father who is sometimes in a reasonably bad mood. What to do?

He compromised and stayed with me but called her two hundred times. If I walked in the living room he hung up that instant and asked what I was doing. “I’m looking for my book.” As soon I walked back in the den he dialed the phone again, and it wasn’t as if I could miss it, because for some screwball reason when you dialed the phone in the living room, the dial on the phone in the den ticked the numbers’ shadow path. And vice versa. Mom used to say that Mickey Mouse ran our phone company, but it turned out he’d made the phones, too.