She Got Up Off the Couch (33 page)

After my soap operas were over I went into the living room to read, and Dad hung up as fast as a cat, then moved into the den and dialed.

As soon as Mom got home that afternoon he left on urgent business. His business was always urgent and he was always leaving so Mom didn’t notice a thing. She sat down on the couch, sighed with weariness, and took a stack of papers out of her satchel. I waited. I drummed my fingers.

“Mom, Dad is having an affair.” Launching things out of thin air is good, I’ve found. It doesn’t lessen the sting but at least it gets things going.

She stared at me a moment, lowered the paper she was grading. “Why would you say such a thing? Why would you say something like that about your father?”

I swallowed. My throat hurt. “Because it’s true.”

“Why? How do you know it’s true?”

“Because I saw it and I know.”

“You saw what? What evidence do you have?” Her posture was stiff and she was folding a student’s paper in two.

What evidence did I have? I couldn’t put it in words, that it had been a red gumball and couldn’t possibly have been any other color. “He makes lots of phone calls.”

“Your father often talks on the phone. He calls his mother every day.”

“He isn’t calling Mom Mary.”

“Why are you doing this? Have you heard him speaking to someone?”

“No.” I kept my eyes on my lap. “But you
could
believe me.”

“It would be destructive to believe in something like that if it isn’t true.”

I tried swallowing again. “Do you want evidence? Is that it?”

Mom kept her eyes on mine. “Not really.”

“Well. I’ll get it anyway.” I pushed my thumbnail into my leg but stopped as soon as it hurt. “I’m staying home from school tomorrow.”

There were a million reasons I embarked on that particular campaign and not one of them was known to me. My vision was narrowed to the task at hand, and of course I would have made a fine detective as Melinda had many times pointed out. I took one of my mom’s stenographer’s pads and a pen and I sat by the phone and listened as he dialed. It really didn’t take long; figuring out the digits from the number of clicks was no different from relative pitch in music: if this is a one, that must be a four. But it could have taken much longer and I would have been fine — he dialed it all day long.

As soon as I was certain of the sequence, the rest was public record. I just opened the New Castle phone book. There were the New Friends — listed — and there was the phone number. I stared at it. I looked at the stenographer’s pad. I checked the two against each other again and again and they were always exactly the same. The night before I had told Mom something I didn’t fully believe myself, and when she didn’t believe it either I thought we just might be safe. And then I’d gone and devised the most harebrained, elementary school trap — something even Trixie Belden hadn’t done, that’s how stupid it was — and I got it in one.

When Mom arrived home Dad left on urgent business. She came in the den, dropped her satchel, and sat down with a sigh. I was lying on the other couch, watching television with the sound turned down, something only crazy people did as far as I could tell. She asked about my day and I said it had been fine, I told her I was feeling better. I asked about her day and she said it had been busy, then told me a story about how one of her seniors, a cute, muscular boy who drove a hot rod and walked around with his mouth open, had done his demonstration speech that afternoon.

“He walked up to the front of the class without a thing in his hands, it seemed, and announced that he’d really racked his brain trying to figure what was one thing he knew how to do so well he could demonstrate it.”

“I’ll bet.”

“And then he pulled out a box of kitchen matches and said he was going to teach us how he lights matches on the zipper of his fly.”

I turned and looked at her. “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Why wouldn’t he just use the side of the box they’re in?”

“You’d have to ask him that.”

“So what happened?”

“I thought it wasn’t maybe the best thing for him to do in a speech class, but not the worst by any means, and I was sitting there trying to figure out a way to stop him without embarrassing him and before I could say anything he’d lit the match and set his pants on fire.”

I tipped right over and landed on my pillows. I laughed so hard my throat starting hurting again, so I pulled up my knee and bit it until it distracted me. I took a deep breath, wiped my eyes. “That was a good one,” I said.

“Yeah, you should have seen me putting the fire out.”

I lay back and stared at the ceiling awhile, at the television some. I watched the clock on Dad’s little table. In five minutes I’d hand her the piece of paper I had tucked under a couch cushion. When those five minutes passed, I thought I’d give it five minutes more, and when those were up the phone rang and my heart clattered around in my chest like I’d dropped a box of china plates. What were people
thinking,
just calling like that?

It was Sharon, my mom’s best friend at Blue River. I was deeply indebted to Sharon because I was taking her typing class and when she caught me not typing but reading a Stephen King novel she didn’t flunk me, as all my other teachers would have done. Instead she made a deal with me: I could read as much Stephen King as I wanted, if I would also type out what I was reading. She was a smart one, because King’s novels were so maddeningly interesting I learned to type faster and faster, just so I could read faster. She’d shammed me somehow but I couldn’t figure out if it had been for good or ill.

Mom and Sharon talked about some school things and then Mom said, “Oh, it went
so
well. We read the story in class, and then I told them how Hemingway is suffering a real lashing in the academy; women students are complaining and some are refusing to read him at all, saying he’s a misogynist and a slaughterer, I don’t know what-all. So we talked about those things — the big-game hunting, the bullfights, whether the women characters seem real at all. They said all they had to say and then asked me what I thought, so I told them.” I turned on my side and watched her. “I said Hemingway will break your heart. All that fumbling after manhood; the depth and frozenness of those characters. Jake stumbling around impotent and limping, Francis McComber, any of them, really. Those men are
tragic,
ultimately, don’t you think? And I also reminded them that he was the same man who wrote
Big Two-Hearted River,
and…”

I went back to staring at the ceiling. With every year that passed, more and more of what that woman said made sense to me, which was flat terrifying. She talked on and I half listened, until her voice was just like water flowing past me. She was happy. She sounded happy. I would wait, and tell her tomorrow.

I tried to make a list of all the ways my mother assisted me in the writing of this book, but the result was another chapter. Suffice it to say she allowed me access to her journals, she provided me with photographs, and she listened to me read every day’s work — the entire book — over the phone. I am more grateful to her than I can ever say.

My sister, Melinda, went to great lengths to get photographs and to get them to me; she also listened to essay after essay, adding details I’d forgotten and correcting my errors. It was an unqualified joy to have her at my side through this process.

I want to thank Dan Jarvis for the very helpful time line and for generally being so supportive. He is one of the good Big Brothers.

Thanks to Pam Jarvis for lending me her favorite picture, and to Debby Shively Parks, Sharon Shively, and Terri McKinsey.

I am, as always, so grateful to my children for their sanity, hilarity, and heartbreaking compassion and tenderness. Thank you, Kat Romerill and Obadiah Kimmel.

I could not have made it through the last few months without Dianne Freund and Joe Galas.

Thank you, Jim and Claudia Svara for an infinite number of kindnesses, and to Kevin Svara, Kerrie Lewis, and Susan and Bob Shircliff.

Amy Scheibe is simply the finest editor and friend imaginable; she is the Platonic
ideal
of Editor, and I hope for her sake she never chooses to do anything else with her life because I can’t allow it and will be forced to follow her
pretending
she’s still my editor. I will be merciless. Thank you Carolyn Reidy, Dominick Anfuso, Martha Levin, Carisa Hays, Maris Kreizman, Sybil Pincus, Jolanta Benal (an excellent copy editor), and all the fine people at Free Press.

John Mood is some kind of wonderful. He answered an out-of-the-blue e-mail, sent photographs, and became a friend to my mother and me. Life is quirky and fabulous that way.

For their daily gifts I am grateful to Jody Leonard and Lisa Kelly; Suzanne Finnamore; Don and Meg Kimmel; and of course, as ever and ever, Beth Dalton. All my life I will be indebted to Jim and Judy Pitcher, and to Dave and Debbie Newman. Thanks to Tim Thompson and John MacMullen. And to the Otherwise Most Luscious singer and songwriter in the known world, Dayna Kurtz, and her husband, Jeff Pachman, just tell us where the commune will be and we’ll start packing.

Much belated love and gratitude to Jeanne Ann Duncan.

Every day I find a new way to marvel at the wonder of Ben Kimmel.

Tim Sommer, we love you so. Now that my mother has adopted you, I’ll expect you to begin spinning me around in the rocking chair.

To my beloved Posse (also known as my
Otters
on less grave occasions), Augusten Burroughs, Christopher Schelling, Robert Rodi, Jeffrey Smith:
con amore furioso.
I hope that translates to “I love you all madly.” If it actually pertains to processed fruit pies, it’s still true.

I had a dream of sudden riches and when I awakened, there was my husband, John.

And finally to m’dear Leslie Staub: I concur on the subject of Impermanence, but for one point. I will leave the world only if it is a day before you do, so I never have to live in a world without you in it.

H
AVEN
K
IMMEL
is the author of
Something Rising (Light and Swift), The Solace of Leaving Early, A Girl Named Zippy,
and the children’s book
Orville:A Dog Story.
She studied English and creative writing at Ball State University and North Carolina State University and attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.