She Got Up Off the Couch (29 page)

When they got home from the hospital, Josh and I were waiting in the kitchen. I’d dressed him in a turtleneck and bib overalls and we held hands as Melinda walked through the door. She seemed tired but otherwise quite cheerful and just like herself, and I really really loved her but I had to stop myself from saying, “Scootch out of the way there, Sister,” because Rick was coming through the door carrying Abby. All I could see was the thick white blanket, but I held out my arms and said, “Give her to me, give her to me,” and they gave me their newborn. I was the person who had fed a bite of mud pie to Laurie’s little brother and made him throw up. I’d helped Rose convince her baby brother Patrick to sit on a box in his bedroom and wait for the bus. I’d helped a girl named Dana write all over her bedroom curtains with an ink pen. But all of that seemed so far away; it was before Josh, before the blizzard, before the moment I lifted the corner of the receiving blanket and saw my perfect, sleeping niece. I smelled her head, her neck. One thing was clear to me all the way in my bones, it was so deep and factual I barely needed to consider it: the more I was trusted, the more trustworthy I became.

“Look, Joshy,” I said, kneeling down. “This is your sister.”

He leaned over and looked at the little face nestled in the blankets, not getting too close. His blue tennis shoes stayed planted on the floor.

“See her?” I said. He nodded. I lowered the edge of the blanket over Abby’s face, lifted it again. “Pee-boo!”

Josh jumped, clapped. He leaned over and took another look.

If the Mount Summit kids hadn’t arrived I never would have had to contemplate how to walk the line between my old life and my new, between my original, steadfast friends and the people suddenly available to me. The originals were doing it, too, and no one made much of a fuss about it. Mom tried to point out to me that the Mount Summit kids had their
own
original friends, people
they’d
started kindergarten with, but there was no percentage in considering such a thing when obviously they had sprung up in fifth grade, fully formed.

Jeanne Ann was new but she didn’t seem to be; she was the easiest friend I’d ever had, and at thirteen I loved her fiercely. The fierceness and ease were tied up together, somehow. Julie, by contrast, was family and like family we owned each other permanently but
oh lord
the way that girl ran me ragged. As if the farm weren’t enough, she was becoming an athlete of epic proportions and it was a flat punishment for me. There we’d be at school and the girl was like a piece of my own self and not only that but we were and had always been
true
to each other — true in a way everyone could see and I knew it was rare. But in gym class I held my breath and said little prayers to a fluctuating cast of Jesuses that our gym teacher didn’t make Julie the student leader because it would mean my certain suffering. And the gym teacher
always
made Julie the student leader because compared to her, Olympic sprinters were fat and lazy. Julie’s will was cast iron and if we were assigned fifty sit-ups she saw no reason we shouldn’t do seventy-five. Quiet as she was the girl could wrangle sit-ups out of us until our stomach muscles were bleeding and as ruined as old rubber bands. And she tormented me, me specifically! during every manner of grotesque exercise! If we were doing leg-lifts she’d make us hold the most vicious one for hours. The overweight girls would give up first and Julie wouldn’t say a word. Then another group would fall and nothing from our leader. But even if the only people left with their legs shaking an inch off the ground were Julie, me, and the three best basketball players on the girls’ team, if I lowered my legs she would bark, “Jarvis! Get those legs up!” and I would do it, which was lunatic and I didn’t even understand it but there you go.

When we chose an opponent for tennis Julie was the student leader so she got to go first and I tried to hide behind other girls but I was quite tall. I prayed, even letting my lips move a little,
Please Jesus who wanted no one to know You were here, make me invisible as would have been excellent in your own case so that Julie may not see me and choose me as her opponent and then wallop me with tennis balls for the next hour, amen.
But it was no use. I would spend the hour going “Whoa! Ow! Ouch, Julie Ann! You’re hitting too hard!” And when things got really desperate I’d try, “I have an idea — ouch! Let’s see if we can
mime
playing tennis.” In response I’d see a blur, which was Julie’s serve traveling 800 miles an hour, and she’d pause just long enough to say, “Seventy-four–love,” or however that goes, and then, “No mimes.”

Julie had spent our whole lives together trying to make me a better person and many times she came darned close to succeeding. She was both good and good at everything she turned her mind to, which was the opposite of me, there was no sense in denying it even from our earliest times. In track she ran the hardest races and God above she
flew.
She wouldn’t tie her hair back and no one made her so it sailed out behind her, part solid, part liquid, like silk caught in the wind and pulled from your hand. One moment it was mahogany, dazzling; the next it was red-wine dark. On the basketball team she was so quick and ferocious she intimidated everyone — taller girls, girls who outweighed her, players who would cheat and hurt someone. And volleyball, and
golf
for the love of Heaven, since when did farm girls master GOLF? Julie was a brilliant painter and she wrote beautiful letters and she always did her homework even in the subjects she didn’t like, and most often without a word she tried to take me with her to that land where she lived, a place of grace and power and rightness. She tried to teach me
pride,
the kind you earn, the kind that arrives when brutal effort is transformed into magnificence. Julie was magnificent, I was proud of her with every breath I drew, and freely so. But I didn’t need that pride for myself. I was better at giving it away. All those years we’d faced each other, that beloved red-haired girl and I, with our palms wide open — a minor miracle is what it was. If I had anything Julie could share it, I begrudged her nothing. Much more often, maybe all the times that mattered, it was she who had what I needed and it passed from her hands to mine, year after year this was so, and all she asked in return was that
I try just a little harder.
Not as hard as she did, but some. I was
exhausted.

There was Rose, of course, who was nothing at all like Julie and still we hadn’t had it easy. We had to work to keep from breaking each other’s noses. We had put up our dukes on more than one occasion and also we’d taken oaths against each other and stomped home in a fit; well, I’m talking about myself here because it was always me having the fit and doing the stomping and it was always me going home from Rose’s house not the other way around. I’d march into the den and pointing at the sky I’d say to Mom, “Mark my words! That Rose and I are finished, done, kaput.” Maybe Mom would ask what the trouble was this time or maybe she’d skip right ahead to Delonda’s Laws of Life, which were repeated so often my sister and I had assigned them numbers. We asked that in the future she simply hold up two fingers if she wanted to remind us not to smoke; one if we’d forgotten there ain’t no free lunch. Number four was the one that most often applied to my friendship with Rose:
Is this the hill you’re going to die on?
I would shake my head because number five was
There is never the right hill to die on.
Mom was nice about it but left little room for argument. If I clomped down to Melinda’s and made my case to her, she was even less sympathetic. She adored Rose and Maggie and Patrick, she’d been their babysitter at a critical time in their development, just like you have to hold puppies close to you for the first six weeks or else they turn to curs. Rose was
not
a cur. If there was a cur in the mix I preferred she not be singled out or called by name. I’d point toward the sky and declare, “Lindy! I am done with Rose as of today,” and Melinda would say, not even looking up from her sewing machine or feeding Abby, whatever she was doing, “Lucky Rose. God knows why she ever loved you in the first place.”

And that was the holy truth. As soon as I heard it, every time I heard it I turned around and went back to Rose’s house and wouldn’t you know she acted as if nothing had ever gone wrong and so did I.If beanbags had been involved I just set to cleaning up the beans. I swept up, or Rose did, and then we’d put a Broadway musical on the record player and sing and sing. We’d dream out loud of having straight hair, what it would be like to not break all the family combs, who was to blame for how our hair was anyway.

She was my talking friend, the best girl in the world. We were often mistaken for twins, we loved all the same things, we were absolutely nothing alike. I was an expert on that Rose, I could have testified in court as to her character without fear of perjury. But even though I watched her every move and lived in her house and was raised in no small measure by her parents, something eluded me, I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t understand how she did it —
it
being everything, life itself. If our teachers said, “This is the assignment and this is when it’s due,” Rose simply did it and she wasn’t angry about it and she did not fuss. Her answers were correct, her handwriting was neat though tragically left-handed. She never got in trouble and the teachers always liked her (how that would feel I’d never know), and it seemed that for Rose school was a set of stairs she truly enjoyed climbing; she was always happy to see what was on the sixth floor and then the seventh.

If it had only been school I could have shrugged it off, having long since adjusted to both my idiocy and my status, and also I was not prone to being haunted by failure. Fortunately. But Rose was also good at going to
church
and being religious — she made it seem effortless — she enjoyed it, she meant it. And she was Catholic! Her church wasn’t even in Mooreland, they had to get up and get dressed and wear panty hose (just the females) and then drive all the way to New Castle in all manner of weather and turbulence in order to sit through a Catholic Mass, which what was all
that
about anyway, and she enjoyed it! I went to church with her every chance I got, I studied on her and on the whole thing and it was indescribably weird, at least for a faithless but nonetheless Quaker girl. I couldn’t keep up with the choreography of it, the standing and kneeling, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be saying at any given time. I could never seem to memorize the Apollo’s Creed, as many times as Rose tried to teach it to me. Quakerism had gotten in me, blast it, and so for me for all time church meant a silent, empty room and the hope of an empty mind into which the Spirit might pour. If there was speaking out of that silence, no one, not even God himself, could predict what would be said. I sat in St. Anne’s and I loved it, I loved it, who could not love such beauty and drama, what my mother called the Church’s
march across Time
? Marching I understood. Mom’s longing I understood, the way she never really got over being expelled from the catechism for asking too many questions. She was ten years old. No matter how I loved it, I knew in an instant I couldn’t do it, I never would have been able to do it; silence was my familiar, and even if I didn’t admit it I knew that the Meeting I was fleeing from had authority over me, silence had authority over me though I swore I wouldn’t allow it. But
obedience
was out of the question. Obedience was quite possibly the hill I would die on, which I didn’t mention to Mom and assumed Dad already knew. It was his hill, too.

But Rose had been given an astonishing gift, one I envied but did not covet, as that would have been stupid and a complete waste of time. She had the gift of piety, and of radiance. It looked to me as if the assignments, the rules, the order of the Mass, and even the getting up and going were for Rose a sort of freedom. She said, “Tell me what you want and when,” and knowing the answer and completing the task were liberties for her, not the death-by-a-thousand-cuts they were for me. She got everything right and she was
still
free.

I know the exact moment I realized it. We were in a World History class and I was seated directly behind her. There was a possibility our teacher was legally insane and so my respect for him was unwavering. That didn’t stop me from passing notes to the people all around me, but not to Rose because that wasn’t her way. The days when it would have rubbed against me like a cat in a sandpaper suit — the fact of that not being her way — just fell from me, I could feel them falling. I looked at the back of her head, at the thick black hair that would never be straight and I thought, “Oh, she is
dear
to me,” and ever after I knew it was true. Never again, never did I imagine my life without Rose in it.

By the time we were thirteen Rose and I had been friends for
nine
years. Nine years is an effort, it requires commitment, and that much history becomes heavy, it has weight. There were all those nosebleeds (Rose was the only person I ever knew with chronic, scary nosebleeds, so I assumed it was a Catholic thing); her strange relationship to “white chocolate,” which was, no doubt about it, a left-handed invention. We knew hundreds of songs that only sounded right if we sang them together. I had modified her canopy bed from four posters to three, by jumping out of bed and swinging to the floor. The poster I was swinging on became a gigantic stick in my hand. I had destroyed Rose’s
furniture.
I was with her the day she learned that the kindergarten-aged boy of their closest family friends had been killed in an accident so freakish it defied all reason, and I was with her in the days that followed. I knew that on one morning her parents woke up and turned to give each other a kiss hello and at just that moment their cat, Snowball, raised his head between them and they ended up kissing his cat cheeks. That story had caused me to
fall down
laughing. The list was infinite, what I knew about Rose, what she knew about me — if called to testify to her character I could have done so for weeks, months, and Knowledge arrived with Responsibility on its back.
My lord
that can make a person tired.

I was spared that weight with Jeanne Ann. She was a joy to me, she was a new way of being, and like oxygen. Night after night she let me go through every single thing she owned, every item in the room she’d lived in all her life, and ask her about it. Where did this come from? I’d ask, and she’d say, I got that in Florida when we went there on vacation, I was seven, I have pictures of myself feeding seagulls, do you want to see them? I did want to see them. Nothing was off-limits to me, either; she never once asked me not to look at something, not to open a box or a letter or a journal. We did that for hours and then we fried bologna and took it in the living room, where Jeanne Ann practiced gymnastics while we watched horror movies and teenagers dancing on TV. It didn’t occur to me that given enough time I’d know her as well as I knew Rose or Julie and that our own history would become a weight we’d either shoulder and carry for life, as Rose and I would, as it would be for Julie and me no matter what. Or else we’d put it down. Who would think of such a thing while watching a movie about a demonic baby called
It’s Alive
? What difference did all that make? Jeanne Ann had long, straight, silky blond hair that puddled on the floor like spilled cream as she did backbends. She was painfully funny and pretty and she loved to eat — I’d never met anyone who stayed so close to pleasure. If she wanted a pizza she made one, and her mom kept all the ingredients on hand for the next one. Same with cakes and brownies and cookies. Jeanne Ann cooked and told me stories and I sat at the kitchen table sick from laughing. I was injured from laughing. We ate at all hours of the day and night. We turned on her disco-ball light in the living room and danced like fools and said outrageous things and gave each other nicknames. We wore matching necklaces and divided a wardrobe between us. There was nothing to it; it was as easy as falling off a bridge. At Jeanne Ann’s house, or going somewhere in the car with her mom, or walking down to her secret place along the creek bed, I was the happiest I’d ever been, ever ever. We never bickered — there was nothing to bicker about. The trick to such a friendship isn’t a trick at all — you just have to have the same goal, and we did: to make the other happy, and to be together. She came out of nowhere, and by that I mean she lived at a crossroads where there were four other houses scattered about and that was it. If she’d told me she didn’t have an address I would have believed her but followed her, because who knows where you end up anyway, taking up with someone new? We were thirteen, and lit up like stars.