She Got Up Off the Couch (5 page)

A woman named Bonnie moved into a house on Jefferson Street, and never in my life have I been more tempted to be rude. The very first time I mentioned her to Mom I almost said, “Have you seen that Big Fat Bonnie woman?” And once when I was riding my bike and passed her getting into her car (a totally surprising dark blue VW Beetle, about half the car necessary for such a person), I just about shouted, “Hey, Big Fat Bonnie!” It wasn’t as if I didn’t have experience with plump women, some of it in my own home. But there was something about Bonnie that was
essentially
large. I didn’t know what it was until she and Mom became friends.

I came home from school one day and there she was, sitting in our living room. She was wearing a pink polyester top that zipped up the front, and white polyester pants. The outfit, along with her piled-up blond hair, made her look like an enormous ice cream sundae, with strawberries.

“Well, I’ll be &*@! if I can’t teach you how to drive, and I will, too, you can bet your &*@!” Bonnie was saying. “No man would keep ME from driving a car, forget it! What is this, a Turkish prison? What do you do all day, just sit around watching the %*#^TV?!”

Mom blushed, but also looked a bit sheepish, then noticed me. “Bonnie, this is my daughter.”

I just continued to stand frozen in the doorway. I wanted to raise my hand and wave, but I was afraid I’d break the spell and miss a whole stream of good swears.

“Yeah, I know who you are, you little monkey,” she said, fishing a pack of cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and screwing up her mouth like a truck driver. She was pretty, in a truck driver way.

“You don’t ever do your homework, do you?”

This caught me off guard. I shook my head no.

“Of course you don’t! You’re too &*#@ busy riding around town on that bicycle.”

“Bonnie,” Mom said, quietly. I suddenly realized how very demure and ladylike she could be. “This is actually a Christian household, and we try not to use such language.”

Bonnie tipped her head back and roared with laughter. “Yeah, I hear that.” She wiped her eyes. “I’ll bet your husband is a %*$# Christian, too, isn’t he? And that’s why he keeps you locked up in this little (#%)hole of a town, right?”

“You’d best go outside and play, sweetheart.” Mom only glanced at me. She was embarrassed, but she was smiling.

I turned around and headed back outside. “Dad ain’t a Christian, actually,” I said as I turned the doorknob.

Bonnie blew smoke out through her nose. “I knew that. When you come home look up the definition of sarcasm, you little Ne’er-Do-Well. Now scoot, shoo, out the door with you.”

Just as I stepped outside I heard her say to Mom, “So what about those +&^$ driving lessons? You want ’em, or not?”

I guessed Mom had gotten a taste for the open road, and decided she needed a driver’s license.

When Dad left the next Saturday morning to go wherever he went and do whatever he did, Mom called Bonnie and said she was ready. I went out to wait on the front porch, and from the swing I could hear Bonnie’s blue car start two blocks away. I heard her drive down the alley that ran behind Edythe’s house, and then there she was. She pulled up in front of our house and honked her horn, even though I was sitting right in front of her. The horn sounded like a cat vomiting. Mom walked out and waved at Bonnie, and Bonnie kept honking. Mom opened the passenger door and turned to tell me something, and Bonnie honked again.

“For heaven’s sake,” Mom said, looking in the car.

“Well, speed it up,” Bonnie said. “We haven’t got all day.”

“We do have all day, actually.”

“Act like we don’t.” Bonnie revved the car’s little engine.

Mom waved at me and said she’d be home soon. I walked down and stood in the yard; I couldn’t wait to see the two of them in that one single car. After Mom climbed in, that Volkswagen was literally
stuffed
with women. How they found the gearshift I’ll never know.

I was just leaving the post office parking lot on my bicycle when Mom drove past me in the Bug, its engine making a little
tuck - a - tuck - a - tuck - a - tuck - a
sound. She was driving about a mile an hour. The car died at the four-way stop sign, so I beat her home by about five minutes. But when she stepped out I would have sworn she’d won the Kentucky Derby: her cheeks were pink, her hair was flying, and she and Bonnie were laughing to beat the band. Bonnie climbed out of the car and gave a hoot that sent a flock of starlings flying for cover.

“How’d it go?” I asked when I reached Mom.

“We killed a chicken!” Mom said, with the same tone she might have used to say,
We scaled the north face of Everest!

I peeked under the car and sure enough, there were some feathers stuck to the undercarriage. I whistled through my teeth.

“What’s Dad gonna say about this?” I asked, scratching my head.

“Aw, #*$& him if he can’t take a joke,” Bonnie said, wrapping her big arm around Mom. And the two of them lumbered up the sidewalk and into our Christian household.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how long a person had to live, or how good she had to be, to get her hands on some treasure. My mom, for instance, spent all her time sitting on the couch eating pork rinds and reading books from the bookmobile, and yet she had some valuables that tempted me sorely, things so fabulous I wanted to steal them and then destroy them so I wouldn’t have to think about them anymore. She had a trick box, for instance, that had belonged to her dead daddy. It was a normal box shape, except it was formed out of thin strips of wood, and no way would the lid open. It couldn’t be pried or prayed open. The trick was to press two of the strips of wood at the same time, which caused the
end
to slide out like a drawer. Oh, it vexed me. Mom refused to teach me how to open it, and with good cause. But she did let me see what was inside: a token from the 1929 World’s Fair. A little naked plastic baby doll. A driver’s license issued to her father, Edward A. Bartuska, of Whiting, Indiana. Long deceased. A beautiful watch that didn’t run. A picture of my mom as a little girl, with the expression she always wore as a child: comical and worried. (It turned out she’d needed glasses.) A Masonic lodge pin, in the center of which was a fabulous and genuine red stone. Mom would let me paw through the box maybe once a year, taking every single thing out and asking her what it was and where it came from, and then I had to put it all back nicely and she would put the box away.

My father! My father had a whole jar of teeth. They once belonged inside the mouths of strange and exotic animals. He had a shark’s tooth, the incisor of a grizzly bear, a little molar from a coon dog, the two yellowed front teeth of a horse. He had a watch on a steel band that was quite odd-looking, and it was the only watch he could wear. He shut off all other watches when he got near them. When I asked him why he said it was because his body was magnetized, and after that I was afraid of him getting stuck to the refrigerator. He had a bottle of liquid mercury. I didn’t ask. Once, he let me pour a drop of it out on a tray; he said, “Don’t touch it!” and I didn’t touch it, but I wanted to put my whole finger in it. The mercury remained a perfect, crazy globe, and rolled around on the tray like a marble.

My sister had a long, long chain made out of gum wrappers, which were precisely folded into little triangles. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and smelled like nothing but good news. Juicy Fruit and Teaberry. She also had three statues of a little naked boy and girl (who didn’t have any parts); each statue described a different rule about love. My favorite was Love Is…Never Having to Say You’re Sorry. This was, the good Lord knew, a dream of mine. But every time I refused to apologize for something, Love seemed to just fly out the window. I stole the little statue for two whole days and took it with me everywhere I went. I was going to flash it like a badge if I got in trouble. But Lindy found me out and gave me a hard pinch, and then I said sorry and she didn’t.

My brother had, and this hardly seems possible, an actual bow-and-arrow set. He took them deer hunting. There were some parts of the bow that attracted me, like the very shiny wooden grip, and the knots at the end of the bowstring. It was a delicate operation on the whole, and yet very powerful and strong. But what I really wanted were the arrows, especially the little hairy parts on the end. The arrow tips were sharp as a razor and just cold steel, and then right down on the other end of the shaft were some colored parts that looked like the head of a woodpecker, and you could only rub them one way; if pushed the wrong way they would have been ruined, and so would I. Danny hung the bow and the bag of arrows off a hook at the end of Dad’s gun rack, and sometimes in the evening I would stand on the back of the couch and rub my fingers over the colored parts until I was nearly hypnotized, and then my dad would notice what I was doing and thunder,
Zip!
Which meant Did I think for a moment it was all right to play with a deadly arrow, and I’d get down, but my fingertips would feel smooth as silk, like I’d rubbed my own fingerprints off.

I myself owned nothing good and could not imagine the day I ever would. When I complained to my mom about it, she pointed out that I had not one but two stuffed things I loved, both of which she had made for me: my baby doll, Suzy Sleepyhead, and a little brown velveteen bear with crossed eyes named, naturally, Gladly (the Cross-Eyed Bear).Yeah, yeah, I’d say. What the heck good were those? I wanted something so excellent and strange that when I showed it to my friends their bellies would start to ache with covetousness, the way mine ached a whole bunch of the time, almost every time I took a look at the world and saw how little of it belonged to me.

Another great thing my mom owned and took for granted was a collection of rain hats that came folded up inside their own little suitcases. The suitcases were plastic, in various pastel colors, smaller than an egg. Some of them had their own little handles, and on the top of each lid was a bunch of plastic flowers, and I’m not talking about painted-on flowers, these were flowers sitting in a little bouquet right on top of a little suitcase, and inside was an actual rain hat. The rain hats were folded like the most complicated map in the world, forward/back, forward/back, maybe 7,000 times, until the whole thing was skinnier than a ruler, and then the length of it was folded over and over into a one-inch square. I can’t think of a greater moment than the one in which Mom popped open the lid, took out the folded-up square, and shook out the clear plastic hat, which would tie under her chin. I wanted to find all the little suitcases in the world and open them all at once, and take out all the rain hats and shake them like the stars coming out. After that I was unclear what would happen, because no one in the free world could figure out how to get the hats back into a square.

Sometimes Mom would let me wear a rain hat if I’d been particularly good. They were too big for me, and often slipped down over my eyes.

“Ah! I’m suffocating! Keep away from children!”

“Sweetheart, just scoot it back on your head.”

“Oh.”

Dad was late coming home from work at Delco Remy, which was entirely usual. I was sitting on the floor coloring in my Disney Princesses coloring book when I heard his truck pull up outside. My rain hat was down over my eyes, and I could see through it just enough to know which page I was on, but not enough to know where the lines were, so I was just coloring randomly.

The front door opened and I could hear Dad talking to someone. No one ever came to visit us. I stared at the doorway to the den. My dad appeared, rainy-shaped, and beside him was a rain-shaped stranger. I dropped my crayon and looked at Mom. She was a blur. I pushed up the hat.

In earlier years I had been terribly shy, but I was coming out of it. I jumped up and ran over to Dad and whoever was with him in the doorway.

“Dad! Hey! Who’s this guy with you?” And then, to the stranger, “Who are you? Whatcha doin’ here? What’s your name?”

“Zip! Slow down, sit down.” Dad turned to Mom, who was looking at him in an interested way. There, in fact, was the same face as in the magic box: funny. A bit alarmed. “Dee, this is George Christy. He’s going to be staying with us a few days.”

George could see immediately that some charm was in order, so he crossed the den in a single stride, stepping over my coloring book, a stack of Mom’s library books, a pair of Dad’s shoes, my empty lemon phosphate cup, a bowl of popcorn seeds, a sleeping cat, a basket full of unfolded laundry, and a disassembled 12-gauge shotgun on an opened newspaper, which Dad was in the process of cleaning.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Dee,” George said.

I studied him pretty hard. He was wearing a blue work shirt that appeared to have been around a long time, with the sleeves rolled up; a pair of khaki walking shorts; a wide leather belt; woolly socks that most people would have worn in winter — and it was June — and hiking boots. He was tall and broad and muscular, like my dad, only younger. He had very dark hair and eyes and a big bushy mustache. I gave a little astonished whistle.

Mom shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, George. How did…where did…”

Dad cleared his throat and picked up a pile of blankets at the end of the couch, so George could sit down. “Actually, I just met George a few minutes ago. He was sitting at the side of the road in front of the Shively Homeplace, and I stopped and asked him if he needed a ride.”

Mom swallowed. “So you’re a hitchhiker, George?”

“Hey!” I said, bombarded with information. “Wait a second. You were sittin’ at the side of the road? Across from the Mount Summit
cemetery
? What was you doin’ there? What’s a hitchhiker? Where’s your car? Where’s your house?”

“Sweetheart, that’s enough,” Mom said.

“No, ma’am, I’m not precisely a hitchhiker,” George began.

“What’s a hitchhiker?”

“I’m actually walking across the United States,” he said to Mom. “I just graduated from college, and I started out in California at the beginning of May. I’ve walked twenty-four hundred miles so far. Your husband here” — George smiled at Dad — “offered me a place to camp for a couple days, since I didn’t actually need a ride. If that’s okay with you, that is. Because I can just head on, if you’d like.”

“No!” I shouted. “It’s okay with her, it’s just fine. We have hitchhikers all the time. She loves them.”

“Bob, can I talk to you just a minute?” Mom asked.

I took George out to the porch swing. Something huge and orange was propped up against the house. “What the heck?”

“That’s my pack. I carry it on my back by these straps, and this bar unfolds so it can stand up on its own, see? Do you want to try to lift it?”

I slid my arms inside the straps. I had an old Army backpack that was big enough for a canteen, a pocket knife, some beef jerky, and a comic book, so I thought I’d do fine. But George’s pack weighed about 482 pounds, and was as tall as my shoulders, and when I tried to lift it my legs started wobbling and my face turned purple, and he laughed and said, “Whoa, there. Don’t blow a gasket.”

“Are you really a hitchhiker, and what’s a hitchhiker?”

“No — hey, is your head screwed on tight? Because didn’t I just say I’m not a hitchhiker? Do you ever stop talking? A hitchhiker’s a person who stands at the side of the road with his thumb out like this. You try. Excellent. You were born to hitchhike. And he tries to get strangers to give him rides. It’s a way of traveling.”

“But you don’t do that? You just sit at the side of the road with your thumbs tucked in?”

George threw his head back and laughed. We sat down on the swing.

“What all’s in that bag? You think maybe you could show me tomorrow?”

“Sure. There’s a sleeping bag, and a tent, and some rain gear.”

“I’ve got this rain hat.”

“Yes, I see.”

“What else?”

“There’s food and some dishes, a can opener, a couple of books, my journal. Postcards and stamps. Clean clothes.”

I was so flabbergasted I could hardly speak. George Christy owned more stuff than I did,
and
he carried it around in a huge orange bag on his back.

“I’ll tell you what I don’t have, though,” he said, studying me. “I don’t have a shirt with a big fish on the front.”

I looked down. “Yeah. I’ve got the only one.”

Dad walked out and joined us on the porch. He smoked a little, flipped his cigarette toward the sidewalk.

“Nice night,” he said.

“It’s beautiful,” George answered.

“Dee says you’re welcome to stay, as long as you camp in the yard. She says it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to stay in the house, since we’ve got these two girls, Zip here and our older daughter, Melinda.” Dad seemed more than a little miserable to be making such a speech.

“Oh, of course, I wouldn’t have…I don’t really stay in houses. It’s against my rules.”

Dad took a deep breath. “You’re a lucky man.”

George smiled. He smelled like pine needles.