She Got Up Off the Couch (13 page)

“Huh,” I said, looking back. And there they were, stuck like bones in a tar pit, sinking. A pig walked over and picked up one of the socks, carried it away like a to-go order.

We ran to the mudroom door, where Debbie was hoisting a saddle onto a sawhorse. “Where have you been?” she yelled. “Where’s your doggone brother? You wash those feet off, Jarvis, before you come in my house, and then Julie Ann there are potatoes that don’t know how to peel themselves.”

David Lee ran up behind us, his shirt back on, his cap back on his head.

“Aren’t you supposed to be helping your dad?” Debbie said.

“Get on, you buncha lazies.”

That night Julie and I practiced doing backward somersaults while watching cowboy movies, and when our necks started to hurt we ate a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream right out of its box. While we were sleeping David Lee walked into Julie’s bedroom with a blanket wrapped around him, his hair standing straight up as if he’d just pulled his hat off, his eyes unfocused. Julie said, “You’re sleepwalking, go back to bed,” and he turned around and disappeared.

In the morning we were called for breakfast and it was beef brains. “I’m not eating this,” I always said, every time Debbie fixed it, and she would answer, “You’ll eat it or you’ll go hungry,” so I’d pile my plate high because in truth I thought it was delicious. Scrambled beef brains. They tasted like wild mushrooms, like something strange and dangerous you could only find by accident.

She knew me before I was born. Her hands would trace the span of my mother’s stomach and Olive saw me whole but wouldn’t tell what she knew, only that I had decisions yet to make. When I was born I became so ill I nearly died from a staph infection in my inner ear, and Olive told Mom to let go of me, that I belonged to God and I wasn’t at all certain whether I should stay on this earth. So Mother rocked me that day, falling asleep as she did so, and as she slept she let me go. The infection burst and my heart turned outward, or so Olive said, and some part of me came to believe I could survive the world.

If Quakers had saints, then Olive Overton would have been one. She had narrow eyes that in a mean woman would have been threatening but in her were like a laugh happening no one else could hear. Her lips were thin and she had moles everywhere — sometimes I sat behind her in church and counted them but it was like counting rows of corn and I always gave up. She kept her gray-and-black hair cut short and springy with little curls she made with bobby pins, and she always wore a dress and sensible shoes and often an apron. She understood the old ways, where you had your two sons and then you were a matron with a round belly and hands bright red from bleach water. I don’t believe a puff of powder or a trace of lipstick ever touched her face, nor so much as an earring, because life was about everything but adornments. Life was about really hot Constant Comment tea in chipped mugs, it was about Chinese checkers and doing right at all times. It was about keeping your ironing done and your flowers planted, and your little curls springy from their pins. If I named a thousand perfect things about her, one would have to be her son, Joe, whom I loved so much I wrote letters to him in crayon when he was at the Vietnam situation. I hated writing letters and it was a flat waste of crayon, but he was handsome like a movie star and Olive was his mother. Joe and my brother ran together and sometimes they would come home in their dark blue hooded sweatshirts and even for one such as I, whose heart belonged to Telly Savalas and Glen Campbell, those two were a sight that started a clock keeping time.

Olive lived with a man named Orville, an old bachelor with suspiciously good taste in furniture. He owned a house that didn’t belong in Mooreland, with a glassed-in sitting porch and rattan furniture. Inside was a museum of dark velvets and curved legs, breakfronts sitting on the backs of gargoyles, Oriental rugs he’d acquired on journeys to places the rest of Mooreland would never hear of; even if a spinning globe stopped dead on that country and someone asked, “What does that say?” the answer would be “I don’t know.” Olive “lived in” with Orville, which was about as weird as life could get if you asked me, living with an old man who kept to himself and had an unnatural affection for antiques. ([a-z]+) had her own bedroom and bathroom and they were plain in the Quaker way, with just two photographs on her dresser, one of her late husband and one of her sons, Charlie and Joe. All through the rest of the house was flocked wallpaper and Turkish runners, glass-front cabinets filled with porcelain. There were so many doilies it was best just to not even look, but when you stepped into Olive’s bedroom there was nothing and that was much more intimidating. I closed my mouth good when I entered Olive’s bedroom and I didn’t touch anything, either, or even rest my fingers on her closet door the way I
might have
at someone else’s house. Because Olive knew me, and that is both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the moment.

On a particular day in August, I was invited to spend the afternoon and night at Orville’s as I sometimes was, and staying with Olive got inside me and saved those parts of my life that were still maybe fence-sitting on the whole staying alive business. I didn’t have to tell her anything; no one did. She was my mother’s best friend and I don’t have one memory of them talking out loud. Olive understood that I was born an outcast in an ancient and subtle way; I was conceived out of some grief or darkness and would be made to pay a price for it. Once she took my hand in church and pressed into it a sleeping doll she knew how to make out of a handkerchief, and I held the doll but saw myself that small. Not sick — I wasn’t sick in what I saw, I had been
left
to die. I stroked the little cotton hanky-head. Olive was on one side of me, my mother on the other. In the next row up was my evil sister. I don’t know what I thought, I don’t know how I saw it, but I knew that world, the world where I had been abandoned in a forest or on a hill, had been one possibility and it had passed away, and instead I had arrived where these women were: my gentle mother, who let me go and so I lived; Olive, who smelled of cough drops and mothballs and was a maid to a man none of us would ever know; and Melinda, who if I’d dared try to take my leave of this life would have jerked a knot in my tail, then pinched me in that soft place under my arm.

On my way to Orville’s I crossed the street so as not to run into Edythe, who was pacing the sidewalk with her hands behind her back, whistling. I took a peek in Saffer’s store, long since abandoned, and gave myself a jungle case of shivers thinking of the hundreds of pairs of shoes still stored in the upstairs, lined up like soldiers, some of them the kind that required a buttonhook. At night those shoes marched, I knew for absolutely certain, but during the day they kept their peace and for that I was grateful. I skipped down Broad Street past houses where I knew people and houses I was shy of. I skipped past the South Christian Church parsonage, which always smelled of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and where my sister’s beautiful friend Cheryl lived. Here was the house of the man who sold a certain kind of corn seed and I thought his name was Todd’s Hybrids. I called him Mr. Hybrid when we happened to meet. There was the Farmer’s State Bank of Mooreland, where kindly red-haired Joyce Dick worked, who gave me lollipops every time I happened to stroll past the drive-through window even though I never had one single penny to give in return. The bank president, John Taylor, looked exactly like Richard Nixon, and I believed the picture of the President that hung in the post office was actually that of John Taylor, and wondered why our mail was to be in honor of him. Parking lot. Tony’s barbershop; the drugstore where all good things waited. The railroad tracks and the grain elevator, then the house where the smart, tough girl Dana lived. I loved her and she was hard as nails. The home of Monk Elliott who charmed me for no particular reason. House after house, all heading out of town, including the big black and white one with the wraparound porch where the two unmarried sisters sat every day as if waiting for their 133, one of them, Peggy, wearing lipstick so bright red it could give a person a headache just to see it. I passed my elementary school, then Astor Main’s Funeral Home, and there was Orville’s house, right at the town limits. Another half a block beyond was nothing but fields.

I went into the glassed-in porch, which had a very particular smell of potting soil (no potting soil to be seen), then rang the doorbell. Olive appeared, her finger to her lips to indicate Orville was napping or doing whatever Orville did, which was nobody knew what. I crept in like a cat and followed Olive to the kitchen where she proceeded to strip me completely naked and put all my clothes in the washing machine, as she did every time I entered the house. I just held out my arms and legs and let her do it. She ran a bath and scrubbed me so hard I lost the top two layers of my skin, even the gray ring around my neck my sister swore was permanent and marked me as a future juvenile delinquent. Olive’s fingernails were cut down short but she dug them into my head, shampooing me with some devilish concoction of tar and lye, which would leave my hair so huge and unmanageable I was surely the first child to wear a Quaker-fro, although I did it without pride or any power to my people. I sat in a big towel on the edge of the tub until my clothes were dry and then I was allowed to come back downstairs and have a cup of Constant Comment so hot I burned my lip, and play Chinese checkers with Olive who beat me every time. I never could remember what color my marbles were or what the object was, so I just moved around hither and yon and Olive let me but she also let me lose.

We didn’t say on that afternoon or any other that maybe it was unusual how she had to wash my clothes and give me a bath; Rose’s mother did it, too, and she never said anything. Melinda did it year in and year out. Olive didn’t mention that I had two grandmothers who were my real grandmothers and I had never once been asked to spend the night with them. A big thing, a gigantic winged thing, hovered where that conversation might have been, and only my sister would speak of it, how we loved my Mom Mary and Donita with all our hearts and souls, but she and my aunt and uncles kept to themselves and loved my cousins and took them places. They went to every school function and came and went from one another’s homes, but there was something about us that kept us out and made us other. Mom Mary was good to us when we were there but it was my cousins she saw every day, and my uncle Kenny’s wife Aunt Donna loved me but it was the rest of the family that clung together like a unit while Bobby’s children, my father’s children, watched from a distance and took it in. My sister would say with her teeth closed tight that she wouldn’t stand outside the door like a war orphan, begging for admittance, but I didn’t know what a war orphan was (although I was compared to one often enough, given my sense of fashion) and I’d never begged for a thing in my life. So I was fine. I was happy enough. Olive’s house was silent but for the ticking of a clock, just like in our Quaker Meeting House, and the clicking of her pale blue marbles as she jumped, jumped, jumped over my little mess of red ones, trying in her way to teach me something I simply couldn’t get around to learning.

Orville’s great-niece and nephews were coming for a visit; that was part of the reason I’d been invited. They were coming from another state, the children of a niece or nephew who had never visited Mooreland before (and like many others, would never return). The children were around my age but strange and talkative; they were dressed as if for church and they seemed to take everything for granted. Orville’s porch meant nothing to them, nor the skreaky leather chair or rugs with the birds of paradise. I followed them around unsure of what to do. They asked me questions that made no sense and they wouldn’t settle down and play anything good and they wouldn’t go outside. I was prepared to take them to the part of the railroad tracks where hoboes camped, or to the gravel pit where we could each risk drowning. If all else failed there was the teeter-totter filled with splinters that would take up a good part of the afternoon.

Instead, they wanted to open the china case in the parlor and take out Orville’s collection of glass animals. Such a thing would not have crossed my mind in 879 years, but as soon as the doors were opened and the chattery niece had removed a delicate swan with a red bill and dots of black glass for eyes, my hand reached out as if I’d lost my scant bit of mind. I held it in the palm of my hand and it weighed nothing; it was impossible and beautiful.

“Look at this one,” the niece said, taking out a sheep with tiny black hooves.

“I want the horse,” a nephew said, his clumsy hand reaching in for what looked to be an underfed quarter horse, brown with a black mane. In reaching for the horse, he knocked over a family of ducks and a polar bear, and in that tinkling moment, Olive came around the corner where I stood, the palm of my hand flat out and the swan resting there as if on a placid lake.

“What are you doing?” she hissed at all of us, in a voice I’d never heard before.

“We wanted to look at Uncle Orville’s animals,” the niece said blandly, and without a glance at Olive.

“Put them back immediately,” Olive said, growing, it seemed, even angrier.

The children casually put the animals back in no order, leaving the ducks on their sides. Olive snatched the swan from my hand and put it back, then grabbed me hard around my upper arm. “How dare you,” she whispered in my ear, her eyes so narrow now they were difficult to see.

I couldn’t swallow — I was barely breathing — but I managed to say, “They did it, they opened the cabinet.”

Olive squeezed my arm even harder and said, “You are supposed to be better than them. You are
better
than them and I
trusted
you.” She let go of my arm and I felt the loosening of the pressure like a bullet in my chest. For a moment I thought I might faint, but instead ran out of the room and up the steps and into Olive’s room, where nothing was out of place and there was no sound or dust or confusion. I lay facedown on her bed and cried so hard my eyes swelled shut and my nose stuffed up and I might as well have just gotten pneumonia and died like girls sometimes did in the gothic comic books I kept tucked under my bed at home. I fell asleep that way, and stayed asleep until the niece and nephews were long gone.

Olive called me down for tea and toast. I sat in the bright yellow kitchen with the high ceilings and listened with Olive to Lawrence Welk on the radio as she ironed Orville’s white shirts. They were piled in a basket and there were about a million of them. I don’t know where he wore them as I don’t believe he worked or if he did it was in a secret place. Olive sprinkled starch on the shirts, sprayed them with water, lowered the old iron that weighed as much as a Buick. The steam rose up and made mayhem of her pincurls, and sometimes she took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her brow. Everything Lawrence Welk said and did was plain stupid, but I ate my toast and drank my tea and let my legs swing under the table. Olive’s kitchen was the cleanest place on God’s acre, and I was clean and my clothes were clean, and mostly Olive and I sat in silence.