She Got Up Off the Couch

by Haven Kimmel

  It seemed maybe Dad agreed with me, because he didn’t want to go to Olan Mills and have the pictures taken. In fact, he was showing signs of maybe not wishing to have the party at all. For instance, he said to Melinda, when she stopped by to talk to Mom about decorations, “I hope it’s her other husband you have in mind for this event, because I’m not coming.”

  Melinda barely glanced at him. “Yes, you are,” she said, showing Mother a sample napkin.

  In Mooreland all parties were held in churches, either in the big basement of the North Christian Church, or in our Fellowship Room at Mooreland Friends. That was problem one, right there. Dad didn’t like to go in churches; they didn’t work for him. The few times I’d seen him at the Friends Meeting, he looked claustrophobic, or as if his tires had been overinflated and he should NOT be driving on them. I couldn’t watch it. I didn’t like him to go to specials at church, nor weddings, funerals. If it were up to me I’d have kept him away fromanyplace with pews and hymnals. I think even podiums and a certain kind of light were a bad idea.

  Second: he didn’t like to be around Church People, particularly the Friends Church People. He didn’t say it straight out, but I think he felt judged by them, and with good reason. He knew for a fact that Mom had been praying out loud for his salvation for the past twenty-five years; she prayedevery week, three times a week, at church and in her prayer cell, for my dad to be saved and join her in a churchgoing life. She prayed for him to become a different sort of man. Heknew this. He knew that in her out-loud prayers (please see Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews) she maybe told some things about him, about our life, that he wouldn’t want known. It hardly mattered that she was saying them to God when a bunch of other people were listening, too. And then once in a while he was called upon to go stand among those same people, the righteous and the humble alike, and pretend that everything was even between them all when it was sure not.

  He could have had an ally with me on the church question, a powerless one but an ally nonetheless, had it not been for the fact that when it came to churchgoing my dad’s Indian name was Speaks Out of Both Sides of Mouth. He made me go with Mom every Sunday. He would not intervene, even if I begged him to explain to her that I was just like him. It didn’t matter if she made me go once or eighteen hundred thousand times, I was not going to give in and I was not going to join in and I would not be swayed. But all he ever said was “Do what your mother tells you.”

  But Dad must have not been entirely clear on the anniversary party, because one step at a time, Melinda was victorious. The photograph at Olan Mills was taken and ran in the paper. Invitations were issued, napkins purchased, the ingredients for the Universal Punch were gathered and waited in the freezer in the church kitchen. I was told I would have to wear a dress, and before I could really get going on the subject Melinda told me she’d already bought it and also here were new tights that weren’t too small, so the crotch wouldn’t be down holding my knees together. She said Shut up before I’d gotten even one little sound out, so I did.

  Mom asked me with great seriousness if I would do the honor of being Guest Book Girl. She asked me this as if there were something marvelous at the other end, and also an enormous amount at stake. Being in plays at Ball State had not been wasted on her; it brought back her sleeping high school acting career, where she had been the star of every show even if she played a minor role, because when she walked onstage everyone else just disappeared and looked silly.

  I said I wouldcertainly be the Guardian of the Guest Book, even though I knew that the job was the equivalent of being asked to stand next to a pond or a dead tree or a dead person, for that matter. I tried to imagine the responsibility ahead of me, any crises that would require my intervention. The pen could be dropped. That was all I could foresee. I would pick it up if that happened, I told Mother, and we gave one another grave looks and went to get ready.

  It was a beautiful Saturday in late August, a day of rare blueness. It was warm but nothing like the usual August day in Indiana, which felt like the inside of a stomach. My dress looked like a piece of yellow Fruit Stripe gum; it had short sleeves and hung straight to the middle of my thighs. It was made of some fabric (I had no idea what) that was both unwrinkleable and unscratchy, a combination I didn’t know existed. Altogether it was another little miracle on Melinda’s part.

  Mom put on the white dress with the fur-fingerlet extra part. Her hair was in a French twist and she put on lipstick from one of the little Avon sample tubes that made me crazy with its shrunkenness. She even clipped on dangly earrings with a pearl at the bottom. Mom didn’t “believe” in pierced ears, a vexation in my life I could tell was only going to get worse. I didn’t want to wear jewelry but I did want holes in my ears. Mom said piercing anything was savage and a form of ritualistic scarring. Melinda went along with Mom because the thought of actually getting her ears pierced, the process part, made her woozy with horror.

  Periodically Mom would say, “Bob? I’ve laid your suit out, you might want to start getting ready,” and there would be no reply. Then she’d say, “Bob, I told Melinda we’d be there at one thirty to help her get set up,” and he wouldn’t answer from his chair. I had on my new white tights and Lindy had polished my saddle oxfords and I was trying to prevent whatever was inevitable from happening to the tights and also I was keeping an eye on Dad but he didn’t give me any eye back. At one point he did call me Barrel of Monkeys and I realized I’d been doing somersaults forward and backward, forward and back, in the doorway to the living room, and my tights were covered with animal hair.But none had stuck to the dress. I couldn’t wait to tell Melinda she’d discovered the future and that when I grew up I wanted my whole house to be made of it, whatever it was.

  Mom and I walked down to the church alone, pretending we hadn’t noticed that Dad wasn’t with us.

  “What a beautiful day for a party!” Mom said, taking a deep breath. “Your sister will be so pleased.”

  I said, “Want to see me hopscotch all the way there?”

  She did, so I did.

  Mom, Melinda, Rick, and I set up the tables and covered each with two tablecloths — yellow underneath, lace on top; we set out the centerpieces Melinda had bought: baskets of flowers in shades of yellow and copper and cream. There were taper candles in short brass candlesticks. Rick set up an easel and propped up a large corkboard on which Melinda had made a collage of the last twenty-five years, wedding pictures and birth announcements and family gatherings. It was amazing. Mom stood in front of it a long time.

  “And I stood up and realized that no fur had stuck to me,” I was saying to Lindy.

  “Well, it isn’t flame-retardant, so don’t get too close to the candles,” she answered, straightening the napkins she was arranging in a design.

  “You saidretardant. ”

  “Don’t make me pinch you.”

  We worked and worked and when everything was ready I couldn’t believe what Melinda had made. I had no idea how she imagined such things in the first place, the colors, everything.

  Mom and Rick kept looking at their watches; soon I would have to go to the front of the church and take my place by the Guest Book. It was possible he wouldn’t come. No one was saying it, no one was even thinking it very loudly. I was thinking it as barely as possible, just as he opened the back door and stepped in. He had skipped the sanctuary, of course.

  He was wearing his chocolate brown suit, the one I liked best, with a pink shirt and a champagne-colored tie. I couldn’t believe it was possible, but he matched the decorations. His hair was freshly cut, he was so closely shaved his face looked smoother than mine, and he smelled like soap and aftershave, cigarettes and breath mints. Melinda went into the kitchen and brought out two boxes: a corsage for Mother, which Dad pinned on her as if they were going to the prom, and a boutonniere for him. It wasn’t until she carried out the cake and put it in the center of the table that Mom understood what Melinda had done, and then I understood it, too, where I’d
seen these colors before.

  Melinda had re-created our parents’ wedding reception from the description in the newspaper and from photographs. She had found their cake top (not a bride and groom but two doves) in a box in the closet and taken it, along with a photograph, to a woman in New Castle who had baked the exact same cake they’d had twenty-five years before. I watched Mom trying to take it in and I waited for her to say something, but at just that moment Aunt Donna came through the door saying, “You know I thought we were going to be late, Kenneth couldn’t find the car keys and I was just beside myself and oh honey don’t you look pretty,” she said to Melinda, “here are Aunt Donna’s mints, you don’t need to do anything but take the foil off, I’ve used the silver platter you asked for, Melinda, the one that’s in the shape of a leaf, Bobby, come here and let me get a look at you.”

  I headed toward the waiting Guest Book, but not before I saw that Mom had a handkerchief out and Dad already had that look.

  Melinda had asked Jimmy Carnes to take pictures. Jimmy was a great photographer; he had longish blond hair and a blond beard, blue eyes. He drove an Easy Rider sort of motorcycle, was quiet and painfully handsome, shy. Everyone I knew was half in love with him. I was also half in love with his wife, so part of me wanted to marry Jimmy and part of me wanted me to be adopted by him. He stepped into the vestibule where I was standing next to the Guest Book. The camera he had around his neck was so big and impressive this might as well have been a crime scene. I took one look at him and realized I had been wrong in my earlier thinking: I three-quarters wanted to marry him.

  “Can I take a picture of you?” he asked.

  “I don’t much like to have my picture took. Tooken. Taken.” Where was my helmet? That’s what Melinda would have asked.

  “How about just one. I’ll make it painless.”

  Part of the reason Jimmy was such a great photographer was: who on earth could ever turn him down? “Okay,” I said. I stood next to the miniature podium on which the Guest Book was displayed, making sure the pen would be in the picture. He didn’t lie — he took only one photograph, and when I saw it later I was surprised by how good it was. In a strange twist, the doors behind me were the same color as my hair, so it was impossible to see what was happening on my head. Camouflage was the single solution Melinda and I had overlooked in the search for what to do about my hair, and Jimmy had figured it out right away.

  After everyone who was going to arrive had arrived, I wandered back to the Fellowship Room to see how the party was going. It was going boring was how. It was just a bunch of adults milling around with plates and napkins, looking at Melinda’s collage of pictures.Oh my Lord my Lord, I thought,I cannot take this for one single second. Dad was as rigid as a human ironing board, once in a while offering a pretend smile that waspunishing it was so false. Melinda was busily serving punch and organizing things, and no good could come from being the object of her attention under such circumstances. I walked backward through the doorway I’d just come in, all but invisible, what with my hair matching the woodwork and my dress the same color as the tablecloths. I crept back through the sanctuary and out the front door without a backward glance at the Guest Book.

  Our church had a metal handrail on either side of the wide steps; it was a tube, like monkey bars are made of, and at the top of the steps there were about four feet of it across, three or four feet high. Maybe what I’m saying is already clear: either the Friends or God himself had provided me with a little piece of perfect. For years I’d been mastering the handrail, and had worked up some serious moves. My favorite was the simple but impressive Run Across, Hit the Rail at Hip Level, Flip Over, Dismount in Air, Land in the No-Man’s-World Beyond the Steps. But I also liked to just flip over and over and over. August was a good time for it, because there were no coats, no zippers, my skin didn’t stick to the metal and get peeled off in sad little sheets. The miracle dress fabric was the best I’d found so far — it was frictionless.

  I flipped over and over many times. I was almost too tall for this game, which just made it more pleasurable. Each time I reached the upside-down-point my head justbarely brushed the cement steps. I flipped, then stood up and said, Whoooaaaa, and as soon as I could see straight I started flipping again. I was going for a record number of flips but for some reason couldnot count, when I heard a ruckus in the vestibule and knew right away that something bad was going on in the area of the Guest Book; of course it was, because that’s what happens when you think you cannot possibly get caught in your shirking.

  I stood up, Whoooaaa, holding the rail for support, just as the big double doors at the front of the church opened and Dad came storming out, my sister right behind him saying, “Please don’t, please, Dad, please don’t go,” in a voice I hadn’t heard her use in…ever. And that she would use that tone with him? Unimaginable.

  Dad was down the stairs and across the street before I really realized what was happening. He walked right past me as if I’d ceased to exist, and he moved down the sidewalk with the speed, the gliding grace he’d always had; nothing at all like a man with one leg either shorter or longer than the other. Lindy stood at the top of the steps in the brown dress Mom had made her, looking as if she was going to cry in some huge, alarming way, the kind of crying that, when she’d done it in the past, made me want to slip out of my body, simply leave it behind like a snakeskin. She hadn’t cried that way since she’d grown all the way up and moved away from her blue bedroom at the top of the stairs. I braced myself, but she just turned around and walked back inside, careful to catch the heavy door so it didn’t slam shut.

  Time was I would have followed him. It was tempting. By now he was tearing off that champagne tie, his head twisted bitterly to one side, and tossing it on the bed. He would take off the jacket, too, but leave on the pants and the pink shirt, with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up. He would leave on the oxblood wing tips, and check his pockets for his cigarettes, his lighter, his wallet, gather up the silver on the dresser top. All my life he had looked like a man with money, no matter what. If I were there, in the house, I wouldn’t talk and neither would he, and the moment would come when he’d either say, “Get in the truck,” and we’d head out together, or he’d say, “’Bye, Zip,” and I’d watch him go. Either way, I wouldn’t have to face what was waiting at the party.

  I thought maybe I’d talk to Mickey Danner. Maybe at lunch one day I’d tell her I had a problem with no name I could think of. I stood in front of the church and imagined the scene, how Mickey’s eyes would go wide with concern, the way she would cover my hand with her own and say, “Dear, I’m sure you’re mistaken. Everyone knows your father loves youterribly. ” She would invite me to come spend the night with her and Howie, and sleep in the guest room with the curtains I’d chosen. It was a wonderful, clean, cool room. The floorboards were polished, there was a rug with a sunflower in the center, and Mickey had trained an ivy plant to wind through the bed’s brass headboard. Maybe I would tell her. Maybe not.

  Sabina:

  Oh, oh, oh. Six o’clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River. But I wouldn’t be surprised. The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.

  She comes down to the footlights.

  This is where you came in. We have to go on for ages and ages yet.

  You go home.

  The end of this play isn’t written yet.

  — THORNTONWILDER,

  The Skin of Our Teeth,ACTIII

  Pink Like Me

  Dad couldn’t take a paying job and continue to collect his pension and disability, so he had the very smart idea ofvolunteering as a county sheriff’s deputy. I can’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. The perks for the volunteer were greater than any salary: a car, uniforms, a badge, a nightstick,a gun.

  At night I used to lie in bed and say the number of his squad car, 33-55, o
ver and over like a chant, trying to make sense of it. I’d picture him wearing the standard-issue shoes with white socks, which my mom said made him look like an overgrown Eagle Scout, and then I’d see the brown pants and shirt tucked in; the badge; the tall, astonishing hat with the silver rope braid. And the black belt: gun, nightstick, blackjack, radio. Someone had given my dad a legally authorized holster with a registered weapon and it had bullets in it. This was not a little belt worn around his calf in which he hid a two-shot Derringer. This was of an entirely different order. I’d say 33-55, 33-55, and I’d see him walking out the door in the uniform, and in short, I was afraid.

  Dad took to the cruiser, the uniform, the lingo, as if he’d been born to the job. I knew for a fact that while he might lose his temper and toss a drunk against the side of a building until damage was done to the bricks, he would no way stop and touch a sick animal, and he wouldn’t chase anyone on foot because it wasn’t dignified, and it seemed to me that more than just a temper was required of a deputy sheriff, but my mom and sister and I kept our worries to ourselves.

  Then he started getting partners. He got his first partner and basically we were all living in 1 Adam-12.The partner, Sam, was tall with thinning blond hair and a smile that not in a million years could you trust, and he’d been on “the force” for a long time. He had a way I got used to after a while: he cozied up, and maybe he would hurt you. Sam and Dad made up their routines: Sam was the bad cop and Dad was the good. Or they took turns. One day they arrested a man who had been writing bad checks (who knew this was a crime? And if so, why hadn’t Sam arrested Dad?), and as they put the man in the back of the cruiser, he began to stuff something in his mouth and chew frantically. Sam was driving, so Dad reached around and thrust his hand in the Bad Check Man’s mouth and pulled out a wad of paper, getting seriously bitten in the process. This caused him to wind up in the emergency room, and when he got home he explained the extreme dangerousness of human saliva, which sounded as toxic as hyena spit. He’d been lucky, he said, that the man was missing most of his front teeth. All in a day’s work, my mom said, not looking up from her book.