by Haven Kimmel
MOM MARY, MY GRANDMA: (Inaudible, from the closet)
DAD: Donita.
DONITA: (Shouts) I know you’re tearing something up in there.
GRANDMA: (Still inaudible)
DAD: Donita, look at this.
MY MOM:What’s she doing?
DONITA: God knows. It sounds like she’s taking down all the winter coats.
DAD: It’s a tape recorder.
DONITA: I see that. It’s very nice.
DAD: I got it for taping Lindy’s speeches. You just push this silver knob around: up for Play, left for Rewind, right for Fast Forward. To record, you press this red button and talk into the microphone.
DONITA: For taping Melinda’s speeches, you say?
DAD:Yeah. This way she can hear what she sounds like. She can time them, too.
MY MOM: Look, she made it out of the closet. Lord, she’s got her vacuum cleaner with her. Is she going to start sweeping?
DONITA: Mom, just turn around and put that vacuum cleaner away —
GRANDMA: (Coming into the room talking, she becomes audible in something like the opposite of the Doppler Effect)…show Bobby my new —
DONITA: — because we’ve got company and you’re not going to start —
GRANDMA: — vacuum cleaner.
DONITA: — sweeping again. This house is as clean as it’s gonna get.
DAD: It’s got pretty good sound. Lindy says she doesn’t sound like herself on tape, but she does. There’s probably a lot we could —
GRANDMA: Bobby?
DAD: — do with it. Record a lot of things.
GRANDMA: Bobby, I want you to look at this.
DONITA:That’s real nice.
MY MOM: Bob, your mother’s trying to show you something.
DAD: I saw it at Grant’s, and I thought, well, I could get that to help Lindy with her speeches. You know she’s going to the state finals in St. Louis in May.
MY MOM: I’ll look at it, Mom.
GRANDMA: Kenneth bought it for me. It’s got this long hose and the cord doesn’t tangle. On my old one the cord was forever getting tangled.
MY MOM:That was very nice of Kenneth.
GRANDMA: I’ll miss that old one —
DONITA:Whereis Melinda?
MY MOM: She’s helping Danny look for an apartment.
GRANDMA: — though. I had it for nearly twenty years.
MY MOM: He’s decided to move to New Castle since he’s working at Anchor Hocking.
DAD:The microphone came with it, I didn’t have to pay extra. I told him he should stay home with us, but no, no, he can’t just listen to his old dad.
GRANDMA: Bobby?
DAD:There’s plenty of room in our house and there’s no need to just rush off —
MY MOM: Danny gets his mind set on something —
DAD: — this way, but you can’t talk to the boy.
MY MOM: — it’s difficult to talk to him.
GRANDMA: Bobby?
DAD:Yep. (Stretching) We’re all going to St. Louis in May. We’re staying in a hotel. I figure Lindy can practice her speech all the way there.
DONITA:You say you’re all going? (Turning to me) You’re awful quiet.
DAD: She’s always quiet. She’s my girl. Whose girl are you? Tell it into the tape recorder.
ME: Daddy’s.
DAD: Whew! She’s still my girl! I was worried you might have changed your mind.
GRANDMA: Bobby? I want you to see something.
MY MOM: Here’s your poor old mother sitting right here and you show no compunction about saying you’re Daddy’s girl. Who nursed you for eighteen months? Who carried you on her hip till you were three?
DAD: (Inhaling his cigarette) St. Louis is a rough place. But we’re all going.
GRANDMA: Did you eat any of this cake, Dee? Have some.
MY MOM: I had a big piece. It was good. No — that’s okay, I don’t want any more.
GRANDMA:Well, give it to that child. She don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive. I never saw a child so skinny.
MY MOM: I don’t think she can eat any more either. She had a big bowl of chicken and noodles, too. You want any more, honey? She can’t eat any more, Mom.
GRANDMA: It’s an applesauce cake.
MY MOM: It’s good.
GRANDMA:You should have some more.
MY MOM: I can’t. See if Bob will have some more. It sure was good, though. Moist.
GRANDMA:That’s the applesauce. Bobby? You want some more cake?
DAD: I had enough cake. You’re always trying to overfeed me.
DONITA: I hope it stops raining soon. I need to mow.
DAD:You mow too much.
MY MOM: Bob doesn’t believe in cutting the grass until little children begin disappearing in it.
GRANDMA: Bobby?
(There are many flurries of noise. Enter Danny and Melinda. Melinda enters talking.)
MELINDA:You could too have turned on A Avenue.
DANNY: (Silence)
MY MOM: Hey, kids. Did you find something?
GRANDMA: Sit down and have some cake. You both look like you don’t eat enough.
DAD: She’s going to try to kill you with cake. For God’s sake, sit down and have a piece so she’ll shut up.
DONITA: Did you find an apartment?
MELINDA:Well, we found something, but it wasn’t big enough for him. Tell them about it. He said it was too small, which was a bunch of crap, because how much room does he need? Enough for his sleeping bag and his fossil collection. That’s about eight square feet. And he needs a kitchen for storing his five-gallon drum of peanut butter. Tell them about the second one. He said it was too expensive, which was also a bunch of crap, because he doesn’t spend his money on anything.
GRANDMA: Did you get you some cake, honey?
MELINDA:Thanks, Mom. I don’t know what he wants. He’s impossible.
DAD: Did you see I’ve got your tape recorder out here?
MELINDA: I see that.
DAD: I was just telling Donita how you can tape your speeches on it.
MELINDA:Yep, that’s what he bought it for.
DONITA: He says you’re going to St. Louis.
MELINDA: In May.
DONITA: He says you’re all going.
MELINDA:That’s what he tells me.
GRANDMA:Danny, son, do you want some milk with that cake?
DANNY: (Silence)
MY MOM: I’ll get it, Mom.
GRANDMA: Lord, honey, I’m already up. (She leaves for the kitchen.)
DONITA: If I don’t mow soon, the neighbors will start complaining.
DAD:You mow too much. That grass is barely peeking out of the ground. Give it a chance.
GRANDMA: (Setting down Danny’s milk) Bobby?
MY MOM: Bob?
MELINDA: Dad? Your mother is trying to talk to you.
DAD:We need to hit the road. I’ve got stuff I’ve got to do.
MY MOM and MELINDA (in unison): Places to go, people to see.
DAD:That’s right.
MELINDA:What important stuff do you have to do?
DAD: It’s private. This little one here has to get to her feeding. There’s some starving animals at home.
MY MOM: Bob, we’ve only been gone an hour.
GRANDMA: Bobby?
DAD: Mother, whuu-uu-uut?!
(Brief silence)
GRANDMA: I want you to see my new vacuum cleaner.
DAD: Is that it? That all? It’s real nice.
GRANDMA: Kenneth got it for me.
DAD: (Lighting a cigarette) So I hear. Bully for him.
GRANDMA: The cord doesn’t tangle. I’d had my old one for twenty years. This here’s a Kenmore. I should have it a long time, too.
DAD:Well, that’s real nice, Mom. I’m so glad that Kenneth could buy you a new vacuum cleaner, since he never comes to visit.
GRANDMA: Oh, Bobby, now. He’s just busy with his car lot.
DAD: Hmmmph. You always did love him best.
GRANDMA: I did not! The griefyou’ve caused me, I hardly had time to love anybody else.
DAD: I’m an angel on this earth.
(This causes a generalized uproar of laughter.)
DAD: (Smacks the table) We’ve got to go. Zip, where are your shoes? Did you even wear —
(The recorder is abruptly shut off, and begins in the middle of a speech:)
MELINDA: — do about American apathy towards crime? We can begin by —
(Interrupted by much crackly handling of the microphone, and then Glen Campbell singing “Wichita Lineman” on television. In the background a dog barks.)
Cowboys
Every couple of weeks Julie and I rode our bikes down to the junkyard half a mile from the Newmans’ farm to scour it for treasures. We called it a junkyard, but really it was just a stretch of woods of questionable ownership, where people stopped by the side of the road and threw their trash in.
These things never changed: a wringer washer slowly sinking and two old tractor tires. For a while there was a metal kitchen chair with a yellow plastic seat. Sometimes we sat on it. Eventually Julie got the idea to move it to our tree house, which just left four holes where the legs used to be. We had long ago pulled all the pop bottles out of the dirt and cashed them in at the drugstore, leaving a little minefield of half-buried aluminum cans, their jagged, toothy tops propped open in a parody of dinner. Sometimes live things fell in the cans between our visits. We squatted down to inspect.
“Now, be careful not to touch those can lids, Julie Ann,” I said, ever alert to her tendency to court bad diseases. “My dad says you can get lockjaw from rusty metal.”
“Hmmm,” Julie answered, through her nose.
“If you get lockjaw they just have to straightaway kill you, because there’s no hope of you ever eating again.”
This got her attention. “How do they kill you?”
“They just whomp you in the forehead with a big hammer. I hear it makes your eyes pop out to here,” I said, holding my hand out a foot from my face.
Julie didn’t answer, but just very gently reached down and ran the tip of her finger along one of the rusty lids, causing my heart to skate past a beat. I knew better than to acknowledge my fear, however, because she would just take it as a dare. Once while playing hide-and-seek, Julie had skittered halfway up a giant pine tree. When I saw her red hair through the branches I made one little innocent squeal, causing her to climb all the way to the top. By the time she reached the uppermost branches, the tree was swaying back and forth as if in a windstorm.
I stood up casually, pretending that Julie’s blood was no issue with me, and gave the junkyard an appraising squint. There was a cat hunkered down at the edge of the tree line, watching us.
“Hey, Dumpcat. C’mere, Dumpcat,” I called, holding out my arms and heading toward it at the same time. The cat moved nothing but its eyes, watching me get closer and closer.
I could see that he was junkyard-colored, probably a gray tabby under all the layers of grime, and one of his ears was a hopeless jigsaw. Every cat I’d ever owned had, during some brawl, lost a hunk of ear. It was a standard cat condition. The Dumpcat’s left eye drooped, too, and he appeared to have lost all his whiskers. This stopped me in my tracks, because I knew from my dad that cats used their whiskers to help them see. Dad told me a cat won’t stick his head anywhere his body can’t fit through, and his whiskers tell him how wide his body is.Good Lord, I thought,this cat is headed for disaster.
As I got closer, he made a little rumble sound deep in his chest and darted away. This kind of cat was a test: one could either lose one’s temper and dive at him or be a good Quaker and keep going at him with gentleness. I pursued him nicely, in a way that would have made my sister proud, with the vague idea that I might catch him and put him in the treehouse with the chair and the dirty magazine we’d found in the barn and couldn’t hardly stand to look at.
During my friendly pursuit, Julie had wandered over silently, like a redheaded Indian, and suddenly she was right at my side, causing me to jump. The cat sat still. Julie leaned over and headed toward him, moving her fingers like she was asking for money. She got closer and closer, and before I could even work up an indignation she was scratching the back of his head and he was all raising up bumping into her hand and making a ratchety purr, like a tractor that hadn’t been started all winter.
“Now, you can just look at that cat andknow he smells,” I said, seemingly involuntarily. “You be careful, Julie Ann, about ringworm. It gets out of their butts and is perfectly round. If you get it on you, they have to cut off that part of your skin, because nothing can kill a ringworm.”
“How do they cut it off?” she asked, scratching the cat’s chin. I could see fleas jumping ship by the dozen.
“With scissors. It hurts like the dickens. And after they cut off the ringworm they pour iodine straight in the open hole. You can beg all you want for Mercurochrome, but forget it. It’s iodine or gangrene, and you don’t want to know about that.”
“I know about gangrene,” she said quietly. The cat had flipped onto his back, and was twisting up like a question mark under Julie’s fingertips.
It was a pretty long sentence for Julie, so I assumed she was drunk with cat love. I had seen her get that way at home, with her calico cat, Tiger. Tiger was square and heavy as a brick, and once those two got going there was cat hair all over the place, and claw marks, dander, you name it. Tiger lost a baby tooth once loving Julie’s shoe too hard.
I turned and headed toward the baby swing, where we used to swing our baby dolls a long time ago. Actually, I swung my baby dolls in it and Julie swung her Lone Ranger doll. She had two outfits for him: a tan one that looked like real leather, and the other a light, light blue with fringe on the sleeves. Julie called it his dress-up suit. The Lone Ranger and Tonto and their many, many horses and their many, many saddles sat on a shelf Julie’s dad had made for her; we didn’t play with them anymore. I didn’t have anything to put in the baby swing.
“Hey!” I said, having a great junkyard idea. “Do you think Rebecca would let us bring her baby down here and swing him? He’d about fit in this thing.”
“Nope,” Julie said. She was not the least bit interested in babies.
I was thinking about trying to fit the Dumpcat in the swing when I saw it: a child’s rocking horse, the big plastic kind on a metal stand with thick springs, completely buried in the dirt. Just its side and head were visible.
“TheLord, ” I whispered, and motioned for Julie to come.
The horse’s head was thrown back, as if someone had pulled too hard on his reins, and his mouth was open, filled with dirt. He wasbiting at the dirt. I could see the rivet that held the plastic reins, but the reins themselves were gone. All of the horse’s colors had faded into one pinky-gold color, and in the black dirt and the shade of the trees it appeared that he was casting out light. His one eye was wild. Both of us stood motionless a moment in the presence of a horse in the dirt, and then Julie knelt down and started to brush at it.
“Be careful; that’s a fossil,” I told her. “You can go to jail for disturbing a fossil. My brother told me all about it.”
In fact, my brother had quite a large fossil collection, many, many pounds of stolen rock. The collection completely surrounded his bed when he lived with us. It seemed that no one in my family had thought it odd that he kept the pointy stones there, even given his propensity to roll out of bed a few times a week. It used to wake us all up, the thump, the moan, the granite scraping across the floor as he made his way back up into his sleeping bag. He’d also set up traps in the doorway to his room, some big enough for a badger, so I don’t know what we would have done if he’d ever gotten really injured falling on a rock. My mom had concluded that his whole bedroom situation had something to do with how hard he’d gotten Jesus. Justremembering Jesus out here in the junkyard made me want to spit.
I spat. Julie spat. Her hand lingered near the chest of the horse. The Du
mpcat watched us silently from deep in the trees. I looked at the horse and just knew he was never coming out of the ground:What’s done is done was the principle in operation. As I stood up I noticed five or six sticker burrs caught in Julie’s blue knit cap, and one actually in her red hair, gathering a tangle up around it like a nest.
“Julie,” I said, standing up. “We better get home and get that sticker burr out before every hair on your head gets caught up in it and we have to whack it all off right down to your scalp. I once heard of a woman who about lost her scalp to a sticker burr. I think peanut butter is the trick for getting them out.”
As we walked toward our bicycles, Julie reached up silently and pulled the burr out of her hair; dozens of flame-colored strands came with it. She tossed the whole mess down in the junkyard, where, for just a moment, it blazed up, and was consumed.
The Love Bug
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 wasessentially 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.