She Got Up Off the Couch (6 page)

George went back in the house to have some popcorn with us before bedtime. He sat on the couch with Mom and I sat on the floor.

“Hey! Do you know any jokes?” I asked him.

He pondered a minute. “I do know a pretty good joke. Okay: Why do ducks have flat feet, Zippy?”

“Why?”

“To stamp out forest fires.”

I gasped, then nearly fell over laughing. It was the funniest joke I’d
ever
heard, and I’d been collecting jokes for a while.

“No, wait! There’s more. Why do elephants have flat feet?”

I couldn’t speak, so Mom asked why.

“To stamp out burning ducks.”

I just collapsed face-first onto my coloring book. I rolled around in a little ball until tears were running down my face.

George made a sound like a fire truck. “Emergency! We’ve got a burning duck down over here!”

Even Dad had to laugh. “George, you’re gonna kill her.”

I finally stretched out on my back and begged for mercy. Hitchhikers. Good Lord.

I slept in my clothes all summer, so I could just hop up in the morning and go. I was working on simplifying my life, which I had discovered could be done very easily if I ceased to do the following: wash my face, brush my hair, brush my teeth, wear shoes. The morning after George arrived I got up with the first light and tiptoed down the stairs. Mom was still asleep, but the living room and den smelled like coffee, and I could hear Dad in the bathroom, shaving. I slipped out the front door, careful to catch the screen before it slammed.

And there it was, sitting right in the middle of our backyard. A yellow tent with a man in it. I crept across the dewy grass, silent as an Injun. I studied the tent from every angle. It seemed to be made out of canvas, and had seen better days. I didn’t have much experience with tents, but God knows I wanted some. When we went camping we always stayed in a trailer. I’d had one brief tent experience with the Brownies, before I’d gotten kicked out for streaking. But this one was entirely professional. I was standing in front of the zippered flaps, imagining how I could live all the rest of my life in a tent, when a deep voice said, “Is that a BAR sneaking around my cabin door? Because I believe I hear a BAR outside.”

I jumped backward probably three feet, slipped on the wet grass, and fell straight down. “No! Hitchhiker Man, don’t shoot! It’s just me!”

George quick unzipped the tent and stuck his head out. “Oh, hello.”

“Hello.”

“I don’t have a gun, actually.”

This was puzzling. “You better get one. There’s danger everywhere.”

George shook his head. “Listen, you’re by far the most dangerous person I’ve met on this trip.”

“Psshht. You should meet my sister.” Lindy had spent the night at her friend Cheryl’s and had not yet received the news of the hitchhiker.

George parted the flaps, then climbed out of his tent and stretched. He, too, had slept in his clothes. He even still had his
boots
on. If someone had spoken the words “soul mate” to me right then, I would not have considered it out of the question. There was no doubt in my mind that George Christy was living my real life.

“And this is where Rose and Maggie live,” I said, on our walking tour of Mooreland. “Rose is left-handed and has a canopy bed with a white canopy and matching white dressers, plus a little brother, a box collection, and a miniature ironing board and iron. Oh, and a little record player of her very own with a record that has these songs on it:‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’‘Little Nash Rambler’ the ‘Monster Mash’ and one that says, ‘Makin’ love under shady apple trees.’ Rose wants to know what ‘makin’ love’ means.”

“Hmmm,” George said.

“Do you know?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, it’s a mystery.”

We walked past Dana’s house. “This is where Dana lives. She’s at camp right now. She has a Ping-Pong table and a very fancy pair of roller skates, and yellow curtains in her bedroom made out of sheets. Her picture got taken for the Mooreland Fair Princess contest and she’s dead serious in it.”

Back at our house, George asked what sorts of things I had. I only had two things I could show him. One was my little office in the corner of the living room. I’d been building it for weeks. The office had a table in it and a stool, and I had taken a big cardboard box and cut off one side of it, so it formed walls around the table.

I kept all my work in a cigar box. “I write up the bills like this right here, then I scoot them over to this side of the table and stamp them with this stamper. Then fold ’em. Then they go underneath the desk to get mailed, and when I pick them up on the other side they’re all finished and go in this box.”

“I see,” said George. “What are they bills for?”

“Well, this one is for six hamburgers. This is for a tractor and disc. This one is for ‘services rendered,’ I don’t know what that means. Mom told me to write it. This one’s for a statue my sister stole out of my rightful possession. I’m charging her $4.72 for it. That’s with tax.”

“She’ll never pay it,” George said, shaking his head.

“Darn tootin’ she’ll pay it, or I’ll contact the Law!”

“Did you hear that in a movie?”

“I guess so.”

“What’s this hanging on the walls of your office?” George asked, pointing to my messages. They were hung up with Scotch tape I stole from Mom.

“I wrote those out myself. That’s my handwriting, there. My sister says it’s shameful. That one is the birth-of-Jesus story that starts,‘For lo unto you this day a child is born in Bethlehem.’ This here’s a part of a Trixie Belden book,
The Red Trailer Mystery.
I’ll read it to you:

“What do you like so much about that?” George asked.

“Oh,” I said. “There’s plenty to like in there.”

I went upstairs to get the only other interesting thing I owned. I had to fish it out from under my sister’s bed, where I had hidden it. It was a puzzle in a can. My parents had gotten it for me in a fit of complete madness. I’ll never know what they were thinking. The puzzle showed a dark street in a very old and exotic city, like London. The moon was high in the sky, and tearing down the street, running right toward me, was Dracula, and he was in a state. His cape was flying out behind him, he was furious about something, and there was blood running down his chin.

I held the puzzle can out in front of me so I couldn’t see Dracula. George took it and shuddered.

“That’s horrible,” he said.

“I think so, too,” I said, pushing it under the couch, “but it’s about all I’ve got in the way of treasure. I’ve dug around in the backyard some, but I can’t find anything. Dad let me use his metal detector out there, but all I found were bottle caps. I reckon my life is never gonna get any better.”

“Hmmm,” George said, thinking. “Looks to me like you’ve got it made. If you closed up your office, everything you owned you could carry on your back. I think that’s the only way to live.”

I studied him a minute. What he’d said sounded suspiciously like something my dad might have said. There was a lesson aspect to it I didn’t like one bit.

“Yeah, well. If I had an orange backpack to put it in, maybe.”

On George’s last night with us we had my favorite meal: corn bread, tomatoes, and hot dogs, all cooked up together in the oven in a cast-iron skillet. Melinda came home and she and George got along fine. He told her a couple jokes that almost made my heart stop.

The next morning we all gathered on the porch to say good-bye to him. He shook my dad’s hand and declared him a Good Man. He hugged Mom and made her a little teary. They had apparently had some conversations about the nature of College, which she would be starting in the fall, if, as she said, the Good Lord was willing and the creek didn’t rise. Then he took my hand and asked if I’d walk him to the corner.

“Zip, it was a pleasure.”

“Thanks,” I said, scuffling my foot.

“I’m heading that direction. What’s over there?”

I looked. “The cemetery. The highway.”

“And then what? What’s way past all that?”

What a vexer. “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.

“Well, that’s what you need to ask yourself.”

I looked up at him. His clothes still looked clean, and his black hair was shining in the early sun the way Rose’s did. That big mustache was something to see. He hitched up his pack and fastened a belt around his waist, then messed up my hair with his open palm, as if my hair needed more trouble.

“I thought of something you have no one else does,” he said, walking backward away from me.

“What’s that?” I yelled, even though he was still close.

“Your own hitchhiker,” George said, then turned around and walked away.

I never could get what was the big deal about being pretty, it all seemed like a bunch of hokum to me. Who had time to think about such things, and who would bother? I knew girls who even had those life-sized decapitated Barbie heads, and they would very concentratedly paint Barbie’s eyelids a shade of blue not seen on a human face since Mooreland’s too brief acquaintance with a town slut (or as my mother called her, man-dependent). And Barbie’s lips would get painted a cheap crayony pink, with lumps and streaks, and it was not many hours after Christmas morning that my toiletry-leaning friends discovered that no matter what one did with Barbie’s hair it turned out creepy and couldn’t be undone. Then there she sat, gathering dust on her cheerful, ruined face and chopped-up vinyl hair and I don’t know why my friends didn’t just get themselves a talking evil clown doll and be done with it.

But my sister was a different story. Rose said Lindy was the prettiest girl she’d ever seen, the prettiest of all their babysitters. I would have liked to say the same but I’d never had a babysitter in my life except Melinda herself, and generally our time together involved pinching (her) and being spun around in the rocking chair (me) until my eyes shook back and forth and I stumbled around the living room like a little drunk.

“Someday,” my brother commented, after seeing me walk directly into a doorframe, “we’re going to shake something permanently loose in there.”

“That’s the hope,” Melinda replied.

Melinda was pretty without meaning to be and without trying. She just couldn’t help it. Her hair was blue-black and her eyes were gray-green with long black lashes and she had the sweetest smile in the world. Never mind that she was made of pure Satan and that our family never had the money for clothes or makeup or Barbie skulls on which to practice. Melinda just was what she was, and the same went for me. (Actually, Melinda was what she was and I was not what I used to be, before she and my brother figured out that if they spun the rocker hard and fast enough, I
couldn’t
get out because of centrifugal force. But I was making the best of what was left of me, which wasn’t much.)

Both Dan and Melinda were in the marching band with the director who they called Mr. M. Mr. M. was in all ways the model of a band director, and by that I mean he could have led an assault on an innocent nation, enslaved its peoples, and had them marching in pinwheels, all in the course of one profoundly hot afternoon. Dan was a drummer — he marched with a snare, but could also play a kit — and Melinda played the clarinet. Dan had a genetic sense of rhythm (so did Dad, so did I) and marched in time as if his feet were machines. In this way the family was divided, as Mom could not keep time if there were a pistol held to the head of one of her beloveds, and Melinda was little better. Lindy couldn’t play the clarinet and march at the same time at all, so she had to choose. Mr. M. helped her choose by smacking the backs of her thighs with his baton when she fell out of step, which meant that for the four years she was in marching band, she fingered the notes and pursed her lips and never made a sound. And still sometimes she got smacked. I tried to feel sorry for her but mostly I just wanted to steal her clarinet case. I didn’t care about the instrument, but the purple velvet inside the case made me crazed with longing, as did the tiny music stand she could clip onto the clarinet. And also that yellow cleaning cloth, which was so soft I didn’t understand why everything wasn’t made of it. Mr. M. smacked Lindy for losing hers and later she smacked me.

In the fiefdom of Mr. M. there were many crimes. One could talk in class. One could fail to memorize a piece, forget new reeds, raise or lower one’s music stand too quickly or too slowly. M. himself could play every instrument with such grace he might well have been Paul McCartney and shucked the rest of the Beatles. He was eight feet tall, incredibly handsome, charismatic, and unyielding. During the basketball season the band assembled in the bleachers in a tight rectangle, and no game was complete without its flawless rendition of the Vikings fight song and the various works Mr. M. used to somehow make Indiana high school basketball
even more exciting than it already was,
which was nearly unbearable.

During the summer marching season, Mr. M. stood atop a wooden platform some fifteen feet in the air at the end of the practice field, wearing aviator sunglasses and white shorts and shirts so bright he seemed a rogue planet, or an eclipse that threatened blindness. He blasted his whistle three times for the band to begin and begin they did, on time, in step, so mathematically perfect the lines of each section could have been connected by invisible electric threads. If he saw something that didn’t satisfy him from the platform, he’d come down the scaffold twitching his conductor’s baton, very often at my sister, who was marching along in the punishing heat, not making a sound with her clarinet.

“Did he LEAVE?” Melinda shouted, coming inside, the screen door slamming behind her.

I was lying on the couch in the dim den, watching
The Beverly Hillbillies.
One of my favorite games was to try to anticipate the dialogue and change it very subtly, so if Miss Hathaway said of her boss, Mr. Drysdale, “I don’t know; he was here just a moment ago,” I’d second-guess her and say, “I don’t know; he was root beer just a moment ago.”

“Did who leave?” I asked, not looking at her.

“YOUR FATHER. Did he leave without me?”

“I guess. He was root beer just a moment ago.”

“I’m going to KILL HIM. He does this on purpose. Where’s Mom?”

I shrugged.

“Oh God oh God oh God,” Melinda said, pacing. “How am I gonna get there?”

“Where’s Wayne?”

Lindy stopped; let her hands drop to her sides. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I missed her boyfriend, Wayne Mullens, who had been around for a while. I missed him even though he called me Nuisance and sometimes Pesty. I wasn’t sure he even knew my actual name. While Melinda and Wayne were dating, Dad used to make me sit on the porch swing between them so they couldn’t hold hands. Dad also made me go on their dates. During the times I wasn’t being forced to accompany them, I accompanied them because I wanted to.

All I knew was that one day Melinda had Wayne’s class jacket and his gigantic ring and the next day items had been thrown, shouts shouted, and Wayne was gone to another city to do a temporary carpentry job. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed the shouts had concerned another girl, or rumors of another girl. Only one thing was for certain, which was you didn’t want to get my sister that angry or else a class jacket would go airborne.

“I’m running down to Cheryl’s to see if she’ll take me,” Melinda said, grabbing her clarinet case and her purse and flying out the door.

On television Granny said, “I’ve made some possum stew,” which I frankly couldn’t improve. Beverly Hills, wherever that was, looked like the grimmest, most unhappy place in the universe. I would have rather been in
Land of the Lost.

Lindy ran to Cheryl’s but Cheryl was gone, so she headed for the bank to see if anyone was in the parking lot and no one was. Just about that time a young man, someone not from Mooreland, walked out of the drugstore and headed for his car, a green Camaro with a spider painted on the hood. He looked a little seedy, Melinda would report later, or as if he were wearing
a seedy-person costume,
but was in fact as pure as a lamb.

“Hey, whoa!” Melinda said, running up to his car and opening the passenger door. “Where are you going?”

The boy froze. “To work.”

“Great,” Melinda said, climbing in the car. “I need a ride to Blue River right this very second and don’t try any funny stuff; I’ve got at least two inches and forty pounds on you.”

Rick, his name was. He just did as she told him, got in and drove her to band practice. Within a couple weeks he’d given up his nickname, Spider, and stopped hanging with borderline hoodlums, and the next thing I knew he was around our house all the time, quiet, hardworking, gum-chewing, as dependable as the sunrise. He didn’t call me names or tease me in any way, and the fact that I accompanied him and my sister on every date seemed just fine with him. He was willing to take me everywhere, anywhere Melinda said, whatever Melinda wanted. Rick only had one facial expression and I believe if there were a recipe for it you’d mix undying devotion with fortitude and shock. My sister had been the biggest surprise of his life. He was shocked every time he saw her. I was very fond of him, but I still wondered where Wayne had gone.

Suddenly there was to be a wedding. I took this news as if someone had reported that vegetable pods had overcome the whole of humanity and I was the only thinking person left standing. My sister was to be
married
? She was seventeen years old. She was just a senior in high school, still getting stung by a band director’s baton, still getting caught rolling a stolen wheely chair down one of Blue River’s long, waxed hallways. We had just accompanied her to St. Louis, where she
walloped
all the other speakers because she was that good, and she would get better. That was
her
room at the top of the stairs and to the right, painted light blue, and even though I coveted it I hadn’t meant to steal it. That was her corkboard, her long chain made of origami gum wrappers, her little statues of hugging naked people that declared “Love Is…” Those were her records, her bell-bottoms, her stuffed animals won at the Mooreland Fair by boys who could never get near her.

It all happened so fast: the creamy invitations with an embossed peace cross that read “Our Joy Will Be More Complete If” on the inside. Rose’s mother, Joyce, who was the most frightfully talented woman since…well, ever, had offered to make Melinda’s wedding dress and veil. Joyce was going to
make
them. She might as well have said she was going to make
gravity.

Melinda asked if I would stand up with her. Her friend Cindy would be her maid of honor and I would be her bridesmaid. I nodded, of course, of course, I had no idea what it meant, what I was being asked to do, but Mom was making my dress: pink satin with a wine-velvet sash around the waist. I’d never wanted to be a maidenhead but for Melinda I’d even wear something pink and scratchy.

There was an announcement of the engagement in the
Courier-Times.
There were fittings at Joyce’s house where we could see the lace and beads she’d sewn on by hand, the intricate cuffs of the sleeves. There were photographs taken in the dress ahead of the event by Jimmy Carnes, our local photography genius, and in all of them you can see Melinda’s sweet smile, tears in her eyes.

At night I lay in my bed, clutching my Suzy Sleepyhead doll and sobbing. I wouldn’t let Melinda know. I was terrified to let her know that if she left, if she really got married and moved out of the house, I would have nothing, I would have no one, I might as well be tossed in a river tied up in a sack, like a bag of kittens.

On the day of the wedding, June 23, Melinda just barely graduated from high school, I went limp as a rag doll and allowed myself to be manipulated. I was bathed, my hair was rolled up in curlers, I did as I was told. I moved and felt like a zombie, only without the flesh-eating joy that seems to drive zombies around neighborhoods like Jehovah’s Witnesses. I kept passing Lindy’s little alligator-green night case sitting on a chair by the front door; it made me feel like I was going to throw up. At one point I carried it outside and tried to hide it, as if that would stop the whole mess, but I knew the bag wasn’t the issue so I brought it back inside.

We walked down to the church and got ready in the private place brides go, and Melinda was very shaky. “I don’t want to do this,” she kept saying, and no one would listen. It was nerves, Mom said, and Cindy told her all brides feel this way. But I could feel my heart beating in my face — I couldn’t get near her enough to say “Then
don’t,
you don’t have to.”

Charlie Kurz, a spirited friend of the family, was playing the organ for the ceremony. He’d also driven Melinda in his convertible MG when she was Mooreland Fair Queen, and had dressed in a Styrofoam hat with a red, white, and blue band for the parade. He had an impressive mustache and was not against a drink in the middle of the day. It was, perhaps, the case that he had tipped the bottle a bit before this particular event. We heard him play the songs Melinda had requested (
Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?
) and then something none of us recognized. It turned out to be a slow, waltzing version of “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” When Mom recognized it and stuck her head out, Charlie moved his mustache up and down and gave Mom the wink.

It was time, long before I was ready, to follow Cindy down the red aisle, each pew decorated with a pink bow. Everyone kept reminding me to walk slow, walk to the beat, until I felt like just going on a wild slapping spree —
I
was the one with rhythm, I wasn’t going to speed up what already felt like death. And then just before I took my first step I heard Melinda meet Dad in the vestibule. She hooked her arm through his, that handsome, well-dressed Johnny Cash of a father and the young, gray-eyed girl, the prize of the county, if anyone was really paying attention (Rick was). It should have been a photograph for the ages. There should have been monuments built to the scene. But what I heard her say was “I don’t want to do this, please, please don’t make me do this,” in a voice so shaky I nearly stumbled on the runner. Dad responded, “We’ve paid for this wedding; get moving.”