She Got Up Off the Couch (2 page)

The couch in the den was the color the crayon people called Flesh even though it resembled no human or animal flesh on Planet Earth, and the couch fabric was nubbled in a pattern of diamonds. It was best to prevent the nubbles from coming into direct contact with one’s real Flesh, so there was usually a blanket or a towel or clothing spread out as a buffer. Also no one wanted to pick up the blanket, the towel, and the clothing and fold them. Or even pick them up. So it was a fine arrangement.

She had a lamp, a small end table so covered with things — layer upon layer — that the stuff at the bottom was from a different decade than the stuff in the middle. She had a cardboard box in which she kept books from the bookmobile; her favorite afghan for emergency napping; a notebook and pen. There had been years with no telephone but mostly the telephone worked and was often near Mother’s head — often enough, in fact, that Dad referred to it as her Siamese twin. The television was only a few feet away, and there were always animals for company. Five steps in one direction was the kitchen; four steps in the other was the bathroom. In winter the den was the only room in the house with heat, so we all lived there. In summer it was so hot I feared spontaneous combustion, which Dr. Demento reported was happening to Canadian priests with regularity. I popped in and out of the den, I was a very busy person and my responsibilities were numerous which Mother understood. Dad came and went — he also had engagements far and wide and we had long since ceased asking what they were. A man had to protect his mysteries; it was one of the primary Liberties of Manhood in our home. There were many others. My older brother, Dan, was gone to his grown-up life; my sister, Melinda, was on her way, at seventeen.

All my life there had been certain constants, facts so steady I assumed they were like trees or mountains, things you could trust to stay where you left them because they were
mountains
and yes the Bible says faith can move one but the Bible also says a whole lot of stuff that if you tried to make it true you’d end up in the Epileptic Village. My constants were the same as everyone else’s: a house with quite a few rooms and utilities that came and went. Church three times a week. Church so frequently and which I so much couldn’t get out of I considered ripping off my own fingernails in protest, or better yet someone else’s fingernails. My family. And no one as dependable as my mom, burrowed into the corner of that sprung sofa cushion, reading and eating crunchy foods, the television on, the telephone ringing. We’d never said a whole lot to each other, given that I was a citizen of the world and was generally on my way out the door. But she always smiled when I passed her, gave me a wave. And when I got home, there she was.

Something had been on the rise with Mom for a few months. There were many tearful meetings of her prayer cell, and at least half a dozen thrown-down fleeces (bargains made with God) and phone calls and arrangements. One of her fleeces involved a television commercial of Abraham Lincoln in a classroom. He was standing at a podium saying if I was thinking of going back to college, did I know that I could test out of some required courses by signing up for the CLEP Test, which stood for College-Level Examination Program. This was all news to me. I heard Mom talk to her women at church about that commercial, and an agreement was reached: if she saw it on the following Friday, anytime before 6:00
P.M.,
she would call the number on the screen.

On that Friday, although I didn’t know why we were waiting for it or what it would mean if she called, I spent the whole afternoon nervously watching TV with Mom. Dad was gone, so it was just the two of us. Three o’clock came and went, and then four, and five, and Mom sank deeper and deeper into a heavy silence punctuated with heartbroken little sighs, because a fleece thrown down is an unbreakable contract. At 5:55 she got up and went into the kitchen and stood holding on to the sink, as if she might throw up. At 5:57, she bowed her head. At 5:58 she looked up; I thought she had come to a decision, or was constructing a new shelter made of resignation. At 5:59 I felt my own throat swell with empathy, and at 5:59 and 30 seconds, Abraham Lincoln walked across the classroom that would become my mother’s life, and when I looked up at her, she was staring at the television screen with her eyes wide and her mouth open and I knew that what I was witnessing was no less than a miracle.

We had only one vehicle, Dad’s truck, and Dad didn’t plan to be home on the Saturday Mom needed to be in Muncie, thirty miles away, to register for the test. He wasn’t mean about it, but he wasn’t exactly
flexible,
either.

I had to be home by the time the streetlights came on in the evening, and that spring I spent more than one twilight tearing down the street toward home as if the Devil were on my case, trying to beat the specific light that shone on the corner of Charles and Broad. I had taken to spending all my time out of school away from home, because there were changes afoot that couldn’t be named or even described. Walking into my house felt like hitting water belly first; it looked like one thing, but it felt like glass. My dad still sat in his chair and smoked, watching Westerns and drinking whiskey, and my mom still read and talked on the phone and would scratch my back if I asked her. But there was a strange resistance in her, some stubbornness that made her unreachable, and the way Dad kept his jaw set was a fence around him. My older sister, Melinda, Queen of the Fair and all-around pinching machine, still lived at home but barely.

So in the evenings I went to my friend Rose’s house, where all manner of wonder prevailed. For one thing, they had a mint-green kitchen, and they kept Velveeta cheese in their refrigerator, along with fresh milk from actual cows and sometimes Joyce skimmed the cream off the top and let us have some. It was horrible, and an experience I had repeated many times. When Joyce baked a chicken she let me have the skin.

“You can have some of the meat, you crazy kid,” she’d say.

“No thanks.”

Joyce made Autumn Soup, which was some very reliable form of soup with vegetables and hamburger in it, and Rose’s sister Maggie and I had to peel the potatoes, because Rose had some skin disease on her hands and peeling potatoes made them break out in a rash, which seemed like a convenient time for lunatic itching, but it worked. And Rose’s little brother Patrick would sit on a box for
hours
if you told him to wait there for the bus. He’d sit there till Joyce found him, anyway, and then she’d threaten to start smacking, and maybe at that point I’d have to go home, because Joyce was not above smacking — she was a Catholic — but I was a Quaker and smacking wasn’t part of our religion.

But the most interesting thing Rose had was a persimmon tree, another Catholic delicacy. It grew between her house and the house that served as a parsonage for the North Christian Church, and sometimes it was the cause of feuding. Almost invariably after the persimmons got ripe a big windstorm came up and caused them to fly through the air and splatter on the parsonage like little balloons filled with orange paint. The North Christians were against it, and sometimes threatened William and Joyce with the Law. But William and Joyce just went merrily on their way, eating steaks, drinking cocktails, and smoking cigarettes.

Just a glance at persimmons reveals them to be suspicious fruits and yet we ate them constantly. Joyce put them in jams and pies, she even made something with the word “pudding” in the title although of course it was not real pudding because it wasn’t chocolate and it hadn’t come from a box. I was too polite to point the truth out.

When we weren’t eating persimmons we were finding other uses for them. One day that spring Rose and I were sitting under the persimmon tree just as it was blooming. Rose picked one of the blossoms off and held it on the tip of her finger. At the center was a seed and all around the edges were white petals. I looked at it.

“Do you know what you do with one of these?” Rose asked me.

I shook my head.

“You put it in your nose like this,” she said, placing the seed part just inside her nostril so that the petals flared out around her nose. It was beautiful, like nostril jewelry.

“Give me one,” I said, picking a little blossom off the tree.

Rose added another to her own face and then she really looked like a flower garden. I was adjusting mine when I forgot what I was doing and inhaled. Up! went the little seed. Up! went the lovely little petals.

“Jeez O Flip!” I shouted. The little seed was all the way up in my brain part.

Rose leapt to her feet. “Okay, look, we’ve got to get that out and don’t tell my mom. Or else let’s just leave it in there.” She looked around, furtive as one of the dope fiends on
Dragnet.
“How does it feel, can you breathe?”

I studied her as I felt around along the side of my nose for the location of the seed. “You
shammed
me,” I said. I’d always counted on Rose to be a straight-up, good-grades, book-reading kind of girl, and here she was getting frisky. The little flower had been dusty with pollen. I sneezed.

“I didn’t exactly sham you,” Rose said as I walked out of her yard.

I sneezed again. “Oh, yeah? Then why do I have a persimmon up my nose?” I shouted back. I sneezed again. The whole thing was becoming uncomfortable, and I could hardly get any air up my left nose hole.

On the walk home I sneezed twelve more times. I had read in the
Guinness Book of World Records,
which had become my favorite book, that a man had spent the last few years of his life sneezing and then his heart wore out. I stopped in front of the Marathon and felt my heart. I sneezed again.

When I walked in the house, Mom covered the mouthpiece of the telephone. “God bless you,” she said.

“Thanks.” I headed straight upstairs. I was afraid for Mom to discover the truth, because she only had three rules in the entire world, which doesn’t amount to many, and thus it was improbably rude that I’d broken one in public.

1.There’s no such thing as a free lunch. (This was patently untrue, since about half my elementary school was on the Free Lunch program.)

2. Don’t give advice to God. (Secretly I did nothing else, but I didn’t figure Mom needed to know it. I said to God: Find my house slippers. Close school tomorrow. Feed the dogs. Give my mom a car so she can go to the CLEP thing.)

3. Don’t stick anything up your nose.

I tried to poke at the seed with a pencil, but it seemed I just pushed it up farther. Disaster loomed. I finally figured out what I needed to do. I fetched the vacuum cleaner out of Mom and Dad’s closet, and disconnected the tube part from the big flat part. I didn’t have much experience with vacuum cleaners, but I had plenty with Taking Apart. I held the tube up to my left nose hole and turned the sweeper on with my foot. There was all manner of dust and cat hair in the tube, and the combination of the dust and the noise the machine made caused me to jump backward and lose control of the hose, which jumped around on the floor. I began sneezing in earnest. No way would my heart survive this one. I gave one big final sneeze and the flower came out, just as Mom turned the corner into her bedroom. I speedy quick put my hand down and let the vacuum cleaner suck up the seed.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked, truly bewildered.

“Sweepin’,” I answered, pointing to the vacuum cleaner.

“You’re sitting on the floor. What are you sweeping? What’s all over your nose?” She leaned over, licked her thumb, and threatened me with a spit bath. “Were you vacuuming your
face
?”

“Ha! Wouldn’t that be ridiculous.” I pulled my T-shirt up and scrubbed hard at my nose, destroying the evidence. “I must have just gotten dusty playing at Rose’s. Whew! That’s a dusty place.”

Mom looked at me for a minute. “Put the sweeper away, please,” she said as she turned back toward the den.

“Okay! Not a problem!”

I looked out the window. There was still an hour or so of daylight left. I left the vacuum cleaner lying in pieces on the floor and ran outside.

Mom should have been upset about missing her chance to take the CLEP test, but she wasn’t, and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. Then one night, weeks after we saw Abraham Lincoln, I was sitting on the couch with her and coloring in my coloring book, listening to her talk on the phone. She often tucked the phone against her shoulder while she talked, and in that way could continue knitting or reading. I’d never seen a person do so many things at once. And her voice was just a steady murmur, like a voice I sometimes heard as I was falling asleep.

She was talking to one of her women friends; I couldn’t tell who. I heard her say, “I have to be there by ten this Saturday to register. No, it’s okay, it’s all taken care of.” Then she changed the subject, and in a few minutes she hung up. The phone rang a little later and she said the same thing to that friend, and by the time I’d finished coloring Snow White in Her Glass Casket, she’d said it to four or five different people. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, her head tucked down, her knitting needles ticking together in a rhythmic, hypnotic sway. All those years I had thought she was just sitting there, but it turned out she’d been quietly amassing an army, and now they were coming to take her home.