She Got Up Off the Couch

by Haven Kimmel

  “I should probably see if Dad’s ready to go,” I said, standing up.

  “It was nice meeting you.”

  “You, too,” I think she said, but she didn’t move from where she sat huddled with the trembling dogs.

  They were sitting at a dining room table in a section of the living room that had been separated by a wall that stopped about four feet off the floor and was connected to the ceiling by black poles and widely spaced lattice, all around and through which ivy and some other plant had woven to make a green wall. I looked down where the two parts met to see where the ivy was planted and it turned out to be in the wall itself, which was hollow and filled with dirt. People thought of the most amazing things.

  “Sit down, Zip, and let me finish my coffee.”

  I sat down across from Dad. I told Mrs. Friend that the Ghost Girl was very nice, and she agreed that her daughter was nice. She turned back to Dad and they continued what they’d been talking about when I came out, which turned out to be a long story of Dad’s, involving some mayhem he’d gotten into with Parchman and how they’d narrowly escaped it. I was watching Dad talk just as I always had, when something caught my eye — I wasn’t sure even then what it was. For all intents and purposes there was nothing to see. He was wearing one of his favorite three-button sport shirts — it was a silky cotton that clung to his broad shoulders and chest — of the palest seafoam green, which showed off his dark skin and the barely discernible green flecks in his dark eyes. (My father’s eyes were dark brown, my mother’s were an icy green, and it seemed someone was keeping score among their children:Dan’s eyes were dark like Dad’s, Melinda’s were a jewel-like gray/green, and mine — I was unexpected — were an exact cross between the two. Sometimes they were green, sometimes they were brown. It wasn’t right.) There was nothing to see and yet I froze and stared at him. He was completely relaxed — the lion in him was nowhere to be seen. And if there was no lion, there was no cage.

  He reached the finale, the great line that had been spoken by Parchman but was even funnier coming from Dad, and Mrs. Friend let her head fall back against her chair and she laughed and laughed the way some ladies do; there wasn’t anything restrained in it, and right at that secondI knew. I knew absolutely and without a flicker of doubt, just the way I knew how many pennies had been in that jar and when the first snow would fall. I would not have said I doubted it if a demand was made to me at gunpoint. Dad was laughing, too, so hard his eyes were a little teary and I could see that he washappy, as he had been with Parchman and Libra. Happiness was not his daily state. Before that day, at his very best he seemed content, or at brief peace. He was a natural man, after all, and nature was always right there, all around us, and he knew to walk right into it.

  There was the one critical thing I knew for certain, but there were a world of things I didn’t know at all, and a good thing, too. I didn’t know that I would never again see my father’s footprints in the snow of our backyard, the ones that traced his path away from the house and back again hours before I woke up. His garden and fruit trees would go untended and die; his little tilty toolshed would rarely be entered again. We turned the wooden handle that held the door closed and left it; as long as it stood the smell never disappeared — his smell of beeswax and traps, of leather and rust and oil in a real oilcan like the kind the Tin Man carried. I didn’t know the time would come, and much, much sooner than I would have believed possible, when Mom and I would move the piano over against the wall closest to my parents’ bedroom, and night after night — because she couldn’t sleep, she thought she’d never sleep again — I’d play the piano for an hour, two hours, and she would listen on the other side of the wall. Nobody knows those things in advance, and certainly no one could have predicted that before that very year was through I would be judged a threat to the state of the new union, because among other things, having me anywhere near was no different than having Delonda Jarvis in the house. I looked like him but I sounded like her, and I would be exiled with a vengeance, still thirteen.

  We stood to leave and I told the New Friend it had been a pleasure meeting her, I thanked her for the Coke. Dad and I went out and got in the hot squad car. He was still chuckling as he rolled down the windows and flipped the air conditioner on high; we believed, he and I, in having both kinds of air. Still in the spirit of the visit, he asked if I’d like to go past the Trojan Drive-Thru and get a cherry Coke and I said no for the first time in history and so we headed home. I never said a word on the drive but I don’t think he noticed. The dispatcher reported the gossip in short bursts that made me jump.

  At home he paced and chain-smoked and drove away again and again, and then the worst thing happened and I got sick and stayed home from school. It was a tough call — do you leave the daughter alone (she’s thirteen, after all) when she’s sick, particularly if all her life you have been the one who cared for her when the Seven Beautiful Princesses of the Seven Beautiful Kings were no longer Healthy Within Her? Okay, so you’re no John Walton but youare, or have been to this child, a most excellent good father who is sometimes in a reasonably bad mood. What to do?

  He compromised and stayed with me but called her two hundred times. If I walked in the living room he hung up that instant and asked what I was doing. “I’m looking for my book.” As soon I walked back in the den he dialed the phone again, and it wasn’t as if I could miss it, because for some screwball reason when you dialed the phone in the living room, the dial on the phone in the den ticked the numbers’ shadow path. And vice versa. Mom used to say that Mickey Mouse ran our phone company, but it turned out he’d made the phones, too.

  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 youcould 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 peoplethinking, 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 wentso 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 aretragic, ultimately, don’t you think? And I also reminded them that he was the same man who wroteBig 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.

  Acknowledgments

  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 Platonicideal 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 herpretending 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 myOtters 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.

  About the Author

  HAVENKIMMELis the author ofSomething Rising (Light and Swift), The Solace of Leaving Early, A Girl Named Zippy, and the children’s bookOrville: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.

  About the Author

  HAVENKI
MMELis the author ofSomething Rising (Light and Swift), The Solace of Leaving Early, A Girl Named Zippy, and the children’s bookOrville: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.