She Got Up Off the Couch (22 page)

“Honey!” The New Mother, missing 120 pounds of the Old, was standing in the doorway of the dress shop, waving to me. “Come see what I found!”

Even I had to admit the dresses were amazing. They were identical, one black (coffee), the other white (sugar), a finely spun something or other — I knew
nothing
about fabric — that felt as if it were just about to escape your hand. She was wearing the white one, which was fitted but not tight, and made her look like someone who had once had a figure so dangerous she could only hint at it now that she was a grandmother. It was a dress that
concealed,
and in the concealment told a story which seemed to be the one Mom was working on; the fourteenth narrative in her collection of women’s faces.

“Look at this,” she said, handing me a…what was it? Not a belt, but something like that. It was made of the same material, but on each end were three fingerlets of fur. I don’t believe “fingerlet” was the technical term. It was fur in three finger-shaped tubes, not long scary fingers, more like little stumps of fur. The belt, or whatever it was, and the fur stumps were so hopelessly glamorous I hoped Mom would buy the dress just so I could steal this part. “You tie it on like this,” she said, executing a knot, a little turn in the dressing room mirror. The last of the world as I knew it vanished with a whisper. “Do you think your dad will like it?” she asked, still looking in the mirror.

I once overheard Mom refer to a man as someone who Had Accidents for a Living. I was fairly certain this was my vocation, too, and I wished I could interview the man to figure out how one got paid for what came naturally to me.

My father took some professional falls, too, at his job at Delco Remy. I was always unclear on the details, but I remember the last one, because he never went back to work. There was talk that one of his legs was shorter than the other (or maybe it was longer); it was said that his spine was disintegrating. He told us he would be one hundred percent crippled within the next five years. In the meantime, he was on disability and collecting a pension, and all day every day he got to do whatever he wanted.

My mind wobbled with fear and grief when I considered Dad’s future in a wheelchair as a one hundred percent cripple. It would be the worst thing that could happen to him; it would be like putting him in prison. He was meant to
go,
he was built to stand in his garden just before sunrise and study his fruit trees and think his private thoughts, but on his
legs,
not on wheels. A wheelchair would be a mess after rototilling; it would be a disaster in the woods. When I thought too hard about it I’d have to run outside and prop a ladder up against my favorite tree, then climb up and hide in the perfect basket made where the first big limbs parted ways. I could never understand how he always found me, but he did, and I’d pop my head up, then climb down the ladder and never even think about putting it away.

The summer my parents had been married twenty-five years, I had another problem with my dad. It had no name and I couldn’t talk about it with anyone, and even thinking about it made me feel like I might throw up or faint. I couldn’t tell Mom or Melinda and surely not Rose or Julie. I couldn’t write it in the journal I’d started keeping. (The journal had been an assignment at school and I’d hated it like leeches for about five minutes and the next thing I knew I was writing in it all the time and then keeping a different one at home that didn’t have anything to do with school. This, too, was private.)

It had happened in June or early July. I’d been upstairs in my room, listening to music and I heard Dad’s truck pull up in front of the house. It was late, and I should have been in bed. Mom was asleep on the couch. I quick turned down the music and changed into a nightgown so he’d think I’d been about to go to bed, and then I actually got in bed and rolled around so as to give myself pillow hair. I walked down the steps, casual, yawning. By the time I reached the den he was sitting in his chair as if he’d been there for hours.

“Hey, Daddy,” I said, giving him a little wave.

“Zip.” Dad nodded, lit a cigarette. “What are you doing up?”

“Oh, nothing. I
was
sleeping but I heard you come in and I just came down to say good night.” I stepped over animals and books and a Crockpot that had taken up residence in the middle of the floor of the den; no one could say precisely why and no one would move it. I sat down in Dad’s lap and leaned against his chest, as I had done millions upon millions of times before. I breathed in the smell that was the essence of him, a smell that lived in the hollow of his throat, and which when I had been a really little girl I used to try to smell on his pillow when he left for work each day, because I was afraid I wouldn’t live until he got home again. The scent was impossible to describe but it never changed and it was intoxicating. Mom could smell it, too; I’d heard her say to Mom Mary that she would have married Dad for that alone.

All those millions of times I’d climbed into his lap. It was routine, so often rehearsed and fully memorized I’d never given it any thought. I was, in some critical way,
a part of Dad’s lap,
and I fit inside the curve of his arm like a puzzle piece. There was a hollow place just below his collarbone that had been designed for my head. We were like Howie and Mickey; we were just going about our business, Dad somewhere, me somewhere else, but at the end of the day or when I fell asleep in the car or when I was sick, he picked me up and we were that other person. Just one person.

This time he didn’t move, he didn’t make the right adjustments or use his arm to pull me up closer and settle me in a position so he could see over my hair. His whole body was stiff; he seemed
angry.

“Hop up now,” he said, his eyes fixed on the television. “You should be in bed.” He might as well have hit me. It would have been better if he had hit me. For a moment I just stood by his chair, but he didn’t look at me or say anything else, so I stepped back over the Crockpot, the books, the animals. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I made it to the doorway without tripping. I was about to cross into the dark living room when he said, “You’re a big girl now, too big to sit on my lap.” I stopped but didn’t turn around. “And listen to me.” His voice took on the tone he used when he was about to name a cardinal law, the defiance of which would result in punishment so dire it had no name and had never yet been employed. “
You are not to sit on anyone else’s lap, either.
Do you hear me?” I didn’t have to look at him to know what his face was doing, the flame of him, his absolute authority. “I
said,
Do you hear me?” I nodded, my back still turned to him, and took off running. I ran past the piano, through the doorway into my parents’ bedroom (where they never slept anymore), up the stairs. I nearly flew across the room that had been my sister’s and onto my bed, where I lay on my stomach and buried my face in my pillow and hoped I would suffocate, a trick that never worked.

I didn’t know what I had done; I could never ask and he wouldn’t tell me anyway. But somehow, through a failure of attention — or maybe it had been a series of small crimes added together — I had made him stop loving me. I had lost my father.

Here are the things Melinda was really good at: 1. Having great babies. 2. Undercooking meat. 3. Painting things on walls. 4. Getting impatient and losing her temper and then apologizing for it and maybe buying a present to make up for it. 5. Setting her house on fire. 6. Remembering birthdays and holidays and getting a card for someone and signing it from someone else. The “someone” was usually my mother and the “someone else” was Dad. And she was really excellent at planning things and making unusual decisions and causing good things to appear where they hadn’t been before. So when she said there needed to be a party to celebrate Mom and Dad’s silver wedding anniversary, everyone knew there would be one and she would make it happen.

Melinda said there should be a photograph taken, a formal portrait that would run in the paper alongside a picture from their wedding. This was a tradition I was highly against, because it was
disturbing.
There were such pictures in the newspaper
every day,
and I didn’t understand why other people weren’t bothered by them. Oh, here we are when we were young and still had our own hair and both of our arms! And here we are now — the only thing keeping us upright for this picture is the fear we will land on our colostomy bags! (Another thing Melinda was good at: jokes involving colostomy bags. I had no idea what they were for or where one kept them but my
word
they were funny. She could also build a story around the word “tapeworm” like nobody else.) So what if two people had been married sixty-eight years? You’d think the further away you got from having your face
still attached to your head
the more privacy you might crave.

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 from
anyplace
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 prayed
every 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. He
knew
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 would
certainly
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.