by Haven Kimmel
Befriending Sissy was not much of a challenge. All I had to do was sit with her at lunch one day, back in the corner where she always sat alone reading her Bible, which had also belonged to Granny, and had a Granny’s Bible look: a cracked black leather cover with the words Holy Bible in flaking silver letters. The paper was so thin the letters of one page showed up through another, and when the book was closed the pages formed a solid band of gold so delicate and beautiful it would have made a pirate weep.
I sat down next to Sissy. We were eating exactly the same lunch, for which I had paid fifteen cents and Sissy got for free: chicken and noodles, smooshy peas, rice with brown sugar, white bread and butter, and a carton of milk. She looked up at me questioningly. We’d gone to school together from the beginning and never dined together. I tried not to stare at her tooth, but it drew my gaze against my will.
“Sissy, I want to be a better Christian,” which was a terrible lie, but just for a moment, as I said it, I believed it.
“Ain’t you a Friend?” she asked. I wanted to see what the relationship would be between her tooth and that bread and butter.
“Yep. My whole life.”
“Then why ain’t you a good Christian?”
“I don’t know. I never get the fruits of the spirit. I don’t go to altar call. I don’t think I love the grown-up Jesus enough.”
Sissy pondered my confession with a Holy look, but didn’t pick up her bread.
“Don’t let me interrupt your lunch,” I said, solicitously.
“This is important.” Sissy pushed her tray away. “Do you do good works?”
“Excuse me?”
“Good works. Do you do a good deed every day?”
I thought about it. The only good deeds I performed were acts of self-denial. Earlier that week, for instance, I had stuffed all my schoolbooks in the big trash barrel destined for the incinerator, and then gotten them back out when I realized Tony the janitor had seen me. Tony wasn’t a bit afraid of pointing a finger.
“Maybe not quite every day.”
“Pastor says we have to do good and be good because His eye is on the sparrow.”
“Your pastor’s eye is on a sparrow?” I couldn’t imagine what the people of Sissy’s church looked like, all gathered up together.
“God. God’s eye.”
“What kind of good deeds? Like Girl Scouts? Because I got kicked out of Brownies and they won’t give me another chance to keep my clothes on at camp. Also all we ever learned was housework. I’m not much for it.”
“I don’t think you have to be in Girl Scouts to do good.” Sissy sat very still, with her hands gathered up humbly in her lap. Children were screaming and spitting milk all around us, but I felt like I was in the quietest place in the world, watching her. “And housework doesn’t count unless you do it because your mama will have a breakdown and move back to Kentucky without you if you don’t.”
I tapped on the table with my fingertips and absent-mindedly began picking at my lunch. “Are you allowed to tell me some? Or do I just have to stand around waiting for one to need me?”
Sissy leaned close to me. Her tooth arrived first. “You have to pray about it. Just ask the Lord and He will hear thee and he will put it in your heart to be good. Do you want to pray with me right now?”
“No, thanks.” I picked up my fork and dug into my chicken and noodles, then skedaddled out of the lunchroom as fast as I could.
IN THE FOURTH GRADE, we were allowed to start studying band instruments with a local man who could play or repair anything that made music. His name was Mr. Sewell, and he drove across town to our school once a week in a station wagon loaded down with clarinets and flutes and trumpets. Mrs. Denver asked all interested children to stay after school one day to talk to him. There were about six of us, and Mr. Sewell went around the circle and asked us what instrument we were interested in playing. Rose wanted to play a flute. He nodded. Margaret wanted to play a trumpet. That was good. Brian really wanted to play a tuba, but would settle for a saxophone. Mr. Sewell looked relieved. Roger, the epileptic boy, had always dreamed of playing the clarinet. Sandy, who was much older than the rest of us and appeared not to have any vocal cords, refused to answer. Mr. Sewell looked at me.
“I’d like to play the drums.”
Mr. Sewell smiled, but shook his head. “Girls don’t play drums. How about a piccolo?”
“I’d rather play the drums.”
“What about a French horn?”
“What about the drums?”
The other kids started to squirm and Rose kicked me lightly under my chair. Mr. Sewell had a look on his face I didn’t like, and I suddenly noticed how big he was, and how he had a mustache, and black bristly hairs growing off the tops of his fingers.
He said, with exaggerated patience, “I’ll let you play a percussion instrument, like the bells or xylophone, but not drums. This is your last chance.”
“Okay. I’ll play the bells.” By this time all I cared about was making him load in that station wagon the heaviest instrument available to me, and I imagined that a set of bells was pretty doggone heavy.
I SPENT EVERY AFTERNOON stalking good works. My first victim was Agnes Johnson who was 164 years old. Her skin, impatient for her to get it over with and die, appeared to be sliding down off her body into a pool around her ankles. She was older than dirt, but feisty. She insisted on cutting her own grass every week with an ancient push mower. For years I’d seen her out there, pushing against the mower as if it were a huge rock, her skinny arms quivering, her lips trembling, a thin film of sweat shining on the place most people had an upper lip. I’d never paid her much mind, but on this particular day I realized I’d hit the jackpot. Ordinarily I’d have rather run naked into a rose bush than cut grass; at my own house I suggested a few times a week that we get a goat or some other furry grazing thing to live in the backyard. (I thought a goat was an especially clever choice because they could also eat our empty tin cans.) So if I mowed Agnes Johnson’s yard, I could probably avoid doing any more good deeds until I myself was flat-out old.
When I reached Agnes’s house I jumped off my bike while it was still moving. It rolled on a few feet like a headless chicken, then crashed into the hedge at the edge of Agnes’s yard.
Her back was to me. I ran up next to her, but she was concentrating so intently on making the mower move that she didn’t see me. The blades made a quiet snickety snickety snickety sound. Agnes was moving maybe an eighth of an inch an hour—her grass was not so much getting cut as dying from natural causes. In the center of her side yard was a little round flower garden surrounded by stones Agnes had painted white. She was headed straight for it. I figured if I assumed the helm and just cut the grass around the flower bed, that would be enough. I could tell Sissy the next day that I was good and I’d done good, and then I could sit with her at lunch every day and eventually be invited over to her house where I could get a good long look at whatever went on in those two rooms.
“Hey, Agnes,” I said, since it appeared she was never going to notice me. She didn’t turn around. I reached out and touched her on the arm. “Hey, Agnes.” She kept pushing the mower. I called her name one more time, then decided I’d just insinuate myself onto the handles of the mower. I put my right hand next to Agnes’s left hand and gradually started scooting it over. Her grip was surprisingly fierce. I heard her breath stutter, and a little whistle in the back of her throat. She was positively free of lips. I hopscotched over her left hand and gripped the mower handle in the middle, then grasped the edge with my left hand and began pushing Agnes to the side with my hip.
I was almost home free—I had scooted her nearly completely away from the mower when she noticed me. She turned her head slowly; her eyes stopped on every object in the arc between her face and mine.
“Get away!” she shouted, spit flying. I noticed she was wearing a nightgown and old houseslippers covered with little grass carcasses.
“Agnes, I’ve com
e to good-deed you. Let me cut the rest of your yard.” I was pulling on the mower and so was she, and she was winning.
“Shoo! Get away, pesty girl!”
“Agnes! It’s me, the little Jarvis! You taught my brother in the third grade and told him he was stupid, don’t you know me?”
“Let go of my property, villain! I’ll call the Law!”
“I’ve come to help you!”
“This is how I take the air,” she said, shoving me away with her own hip, which I suddenly feared would snap like a dry twig.
I let go of the mower and stepped away, winded. Agnes was a tough nut. She centered herself and leaned into her task. The blades whispered, and stray grasses flew out the sides and stuck to my bare feet.
ONCE A WEEK after school Mr. Sewell came to the fourth-grade building with my orchestra bells, which were in a coffin-shaped box I could barely lift. I played the metal bells with metal mallets. Rose’s silver flute, by comparison, was just a sweet, breathy surprise, and every time I struck a note (at the beginning of every measure) I thought I saw her wince.
Playing the bells or the xylophone was essentially playing a piano with sticks, so there wasn’t much for me to do and not much for Mr. Sewell to teach me. Those instruments that required blowing were a whole different story. It seemed that my classmates would never catch on to how to make a real note come out. A couple of them simply could not pucker and move their fingers at the same time, no matter how patient Mr. Sewell was.
Rose, though, showed promise. Mr. Sewell asked if she’d like to start staying for an hour after band practice to work on scales and she said yes. Rose wanted to do everything well. I wanted to do everything quickly. On the first day she was scheduled to stay, as soon as practice was over I slid the bells off my lap and onto the floor so fast they clanged, then I dropped my mallets on top and went flying out the door. Mr. Sewell yelled, “Come back in here and take care of your . . .” I yelled behind me, “I can’t hear you!” And kept running.
I ran all the way to Sissy’s house, which was a long way, just over a block. The house was squashed between an abandoned building that had once been a grocery store, and the diner, which had once been a house. An onion-ring smell billowed out of the diner perpetually. I couldn’t imagine how Sissy and her brothers and sisters endured it all day—it made me ravenous. Just standing there for thirty seconds contemplating Sissy’s front door and I was chewing on my thumb.
It was a shotgun house, covered with brown, speckled, asbestos shingles, some of which looked like they’d been gnawed. Nothing grew in the few feet of dirt on either side of the front step, but shards of broken bottles sparkled like treasure. I walked up the two cement steps and faced the door. I turned the rusty knob of the screen door, which was just a frame without a trace of a screen, then raised my fist to knock on the splintering storm door. Before I could, Sissy opened it. She didn’t look the least surprised to see me.
An amazing smell waved out around her, a terrifying human smell of diapers and food and old furniture and tooth decay. I had just enough time to pop my head around her before she slipped out and closed the door. The front room was almost completely dark, although the day was brilliant. A black-and-white television flickered on a dozen faces, who seemed to occupy every available space, languidly.
Sissy was beside me so quick and quiet she spooked me. Her dress for that day was black with little sprigs of some no-color flower. The bosom parts were down around her waist. She was carrying her Bible, and I noticed for the first time how little her hands were, and how the nails were chewed down to nothing. I wanted, for just a second, to step inside her skin, to know the feeling of carrying a Bible the way she carried it, like a shield or like a baby. I wanted to sleep in a big bed with six sisters whose smell I recognized, and to be different from them, because I was Holy. I wanted to have only one choice and no other, the way she had chosen the dresses and the covenant. And at the same time I wanted to have already done it and be back at my own house, which suddenly looked perfectly reasonable by comparison.
“Have you done your good works yet?” Sissy looked up at me, blinking in the afternoon light.
“Almost. I started to. I about did. No.”
She leaned in close to me, the way she had in the lunch room. Her voice was just above a whisper. “You must stick fast unto the Lord. It is not easy, but His will be done. There will be stones in your path, sin and temptings. Just love the Lord your God with all of your heart and He will show the way, the truth and the life. I have to cook dinner.” She opened the door and slipped back inside before I could say a word. I tried peeking through a window to see the flickering television, but the outside of the window was covered with plastic and the inside with an old sheet. It might as well have been the middle of the night, in that house.
MOM ASKED ME would I please take two cookie sheets over to my brother’s house. His sweet wife, Elaine, needed to borrow them. I threw my arms up in the air in a gesture of oh, thank goodness, thank goodness. My good works had come. And they would be easy. And there would eventually be cookies involved.
Mom had stacked the pans on top of each other, but I separated them. I climbed on top of my bike, and with a pan in each hand, pushed off from the little cement wall that surrounded our front yard. She watched me from the front porch.
“Don’t you think you should use at least one hand to steer?” she asked.
“Pshaw. I can ride this bike all over town with no hands.”
Mom kindly refrained from mentioning my many, many visits to the emergency room. She also kindly refrained mentioning the little incident last summer which had resulted in my losing two toenails, severely abrading the top of my foot, and breaking two toes. At the hospital the nurse had asked how I’d done it, and I had to admit that the injuries were because of my foot being run over while it was upside-down, by a bicycle I myself was riding. The nurse clapped, and then went and got all the other nurses who were familiar with me, and they all applauded, too.
I rested the pans on my open palms the way a waiter might carry plates of spaghetti to the Mafia. When I got to the stop sign at Charles and Broad I slowed down just long enough to look for cars, but of course there weren’t any. I rode past the Newmans’ little car wash, and then the house on the corner, and turned. I was doing great. All I had to do was ride straight down this street for a long time, almost two blocks, and then I’d be there.
I suddenly remembered the railroad tracks, and sped up. Some of my best rodeo tricks with Julie had occurred on this very street, because there was a dip just before the tracks, then an immediate hill. If we hit it going fast enough, our bicycles reared up just like vicious stallions. Ever since Dad straightened out the frame, my bike could go straight ahead for miles without me touching the handle bars.
I sped up some more. I was fifty, thirty, ten feet from the dip, then I hit it, and the last sounds I heard were my head hitting the street, my teeth slamming against each other, and the pans falling on the tracks with an angry clatter. I saw a bright light and thought, Don’t walk toward it, even if dead people you once loved waggle their fingers invitingly! The light receded, and I saw stars, like in a cartoon. I heard two strange sounds, and gradually made out what they were: the first was a pitiful wheezing coming from my own chest, which signaled the collapse of one of my lungs, and the other was a siren. I was just coherent enough to wonder how it was possible, given that I was ten miles from the nearest hospital, that an ambulance had arrived so soon.
The ambulance skidded to a stop beside me, and the driver jumped off. It was Sissy’s older retarded brother, Levon, on his tiny bicycle. His aaaaah-oooooooh sounds dwindled down to a whine. He hadn’t spoken English in about fifteen years, so I didn’t even try to talk to him. I just let him loop his arms under my armpits and heave me up to my feet. My vision was still swimming. Levon silently brushed the gravel off my back, wiped away the blood that was running down my chin, gathered up the pans, rolled my unscathed bicycle back to
me, then climbed on his own bike and pedaled away.
“For Pete’s sake,” I muttered, watching Levon speed down the street. Even his old white shirt cresting out behind him looked heroic. I trudged the rest of the way to Dan and Elaine’s house dejectedly, and handed the pans to Elaine without a word. When I got home I climbed up into the hollow of my favorite tree and lay looking at the sky. It seemed there were some things about myself I was going to have to face. I thought about them while I picked out the sharp pieces of gravel still embedded in the heel of my foot.
WHEN I SPENT THE NIGHT at Rose’s house, which was often, we all slept together in the bed Rose and Maggie shared. Before we went to sleep we almost always played a game called Tickle. Tickle was a noncompetitive game, in which the object was to run your fingers up and down the back of the person lying next to you, through her flannel nightgown. I often ended up in the middle, which was good and bad, because it meant that I always got Tickled, but I also never got to stop Tickling. The people on the ends got at least one shift of just lying still and enjoying it.