She Got Up Off the Couch (31 page)

Men become their jobs — this is something probably everyone knew but me. Julie’s dad was a farmer, and he was a farmer all the way through. Rose’s dad sold insurance, and to name only one way that family got it right, they were insured. But my dad worked in a factory and wasn’t a factory worker, and then he was retired more than twenty years before retirement age. As long as I’d known him he had been nothing but himself, an unnameable quantity. My mom and Melinda and I were always trying to label him: we said he was a mountain man. We had a punch line we made up and repeated to each other with resignation:
Well, he’s no John Walton.
Even then we must not have understood much, or else there was a category no one had bothered to explain to me. He was a mountain man but not the sort on Walton’s Mountain; a husband and father but not like
that.
He wasn’t Grizzly Adams or Daniel Boone. He wasn’t anyone on television, as a matter of fact, so I don’t know how I could have been expected to figure him out.

What I did know, what I’d always known, was that at the Father place in our family there was a bright, knotty contradiction. His rules were ironclad, even if they weren’t the same as other Fathers’ rules, and his authority was complete. Secrets couldn’t be kept from him, although he could demand secrecy from us, and he seemed to see through walls. But he himself was lawless. He wouldn’t bend to any man or any code and not
once
did that presiding spirit find my dad on his knees before God. In our house Bob Jarvis was the law and he was also outside it and could do anything he pleased. For the countless millions of things he refrained from, we were grateful. And if he had a God, it sure looked to me like his God was either inside him or
was
him; either way he was an outlaw, which is its own kind of honest. But that uniform changed him.

Dad had found Parchman and his wife and then he found another couple he liked a lot, and he talked about them and Mom listened politely — she was a polite person and so was he — and I ignored the conversation because I didn’t know how many more new people I could take in. When we were invited over to this couple’s house to play cards one night I said no thanks and spent the night with Jeanne Ann. The next day I came home and asked Mom how it had gone with Dad’s new couple friends and she said, “It was fine.”

“Did you like them? Were they fun?”

“They were very nice.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Honey,” Mom asked, putting down her pen, “don’t you have something you need to be doing?”

I looked around. “Are you talking to
me
?”

“Homework? Correspondence? Have you thought about cleaning your room?”

I stared at Mother as if looking at her alien replica. Homework and correspondence? I had never cleaned my room one time in my life as was abundantly clear from walking up the stairs, something Mom didn’t do, hallelujah. That room was beyond hope or help and I’d thought it wise to surrender. “Actually my only plan was to sit and chat with you.”

“Do you remember,” Mom asked, turning a page of the paper she was grading, “what I used to say before napping?”

Of course I did, it was number seven. “ ‘I’ll be asleep if you need me, so try not to need me.’”

“Yes, that’s it.”

We sat a few moments. She finished grading one paper and picked up another.

“Do they have any kids?” I asked, drumming my fingers on my knee.

Mom raised her head, closed her eyes. I had caused her slight pain, which was sometimes necessary for getting her attention. “One,” she answered. “A girl. She’s a year ahead of you in school, I think. I barely saw her — she’s tiny and dark and she moved through the house like a ghost.”

“A ghost, you say.”

“Yes. What if I gave you money?”

I nodded. “That would work.” I took her two dollars and jumped on my bike. It was spring in Indiana and we’d survived the worst blizzard since
Homo sapiens
became farmers. I took the long way to the drugstore, if there could be said to be a long way in Mooreland, just to feel the air. After I got my lemon phosphate and barbecue potato chips, I thought I’d head on over to Melinda’s and check on the babies. Then I’d go home and call Jeanne Ann and I’d ask her to tell me everything she’d done since I’d left her house that morning, and she’d probably start by saying something like, “What about peeing? Do you want the peeing in the story?” We talked on the phone for hours that way.

The next morning I went to church with Mom but only because I had to and also to see Josh and Abby. Now that there were two of them, Melinda was even later than in years past; if the pattern continued she would eventually show up in the late afternoon with her perfectly dressed and unbearably sweet children and they would have the sanctuary all to themselves.

As soon as services ended I was up and out the door, a habit I’d picked up from the Catholics. At St. Anne’s there was no lollygagging. Those people were efficient, which I appreciated. The sacraments had been received, their business was concluded, and they couldn’t see the parking lot soon enough.

I heard Mom call my name from the church doorway, a place where she lollygagged with frightening regularity. Oh, she talked to everyone. She squeezed hands and offered her prayers and nodded sagely when told of an aunt’s kidney problems. I couldn’t imagine such patience or what was in it for Mother, it just made no sense at all. In order to behave religiously I would have to be drugged and injected with plastic and even then I’d probably end up dragging myself to my car on my mannequin arms before the last Friend was assured of my ongoing concern.

“Whaaaaaaaat, what what what?” I said, walking back up the church steps.

“Wait for me a minute,” Mom said, turning back to the little clutch of people who could
never let the thing end.

“Why why why? Why?”

“Excuse me,” she said, and then to me, “I have to run to the school to finish my lesson plans. Go home and change your clothes and you can go with me.”

It was tempting. Now that Mom taught at my school I had access to it after hours, when no one was there, not even a janitor. An empty school isn’t even the tiniest bit the same as a school with people in it, don’t let anyone tell you different. Empty schools are vast and hollow and spooky even in broad daylight; an empty gymnasium is terrifying and best avoided. But the miles of hallway, the floors waxed slick as a skating rink? Mom’s wheely chair? Still, it was Sunday and springtime and a school is a school.

“Do I have to?”

“No, your dad said he’d be home today. You can stay with him.”

I jumped down the stairs and headed toward the house. I didn’t quite believe it, that Dad would be home.

It was Sunday and springtime and beautiful outside so of course I was watching television. I wasn’t enjoying it, however, because Dad was pacing like a lion in a cage.

“Do you want me to see what else is on?” I asked.

“Naw no, no.” He waved the question away. He disappeared into other rooms, reappeared wearing something slightly different, as if he couldn’t get comfortable. Even his hair seemed agitated. He was restless by nature and I’d seen the same look on his face hundreds of times in the past. In the evenings he’d come home from work or from wherever he went when he didn’t work anymore and he would seem a little panic-stricken, like how was he going to get through all the coming hours, obligated to be at home with his family but his family was an unreachable and polite woman either reading a book or at school, and a daughter. Me. Eventually he’d give up and sit down in his chair and watch television late into the night. Sometimes he slept; often he was up at three, four in the morning and he’d go outside to pace. The yard and garden were also cages.

Finally I heard him gather up his keys, his wallet, his gun. He couldn’t stay. “I have to run some errands, go get in the squad car,” he said, counting the money in his wallet. He always had money.

Errands? “I’m pretty much dandy right where I am, Bob.”

“Get in the squad car and don’t call me Bob.”

“Can I just call Jeanne Ann fir —?”

“
Zip.
” A warning.

“I’m up, I’m going, sheesh. Do I have to wear shoes?”

He glanced at me, the second warning glance, which is only possible if you have a certain sort of eyeball and he certainly did. “Don’t push me, now.”

“Fine! I’ll wear shoes! I’m not pushing!” I rolled off the couch and couldn’t find my shoes.

“Don’t
tell
me you can’t find your shoes.”

“All right! I found them! I’m heading out the door!” I carried the shoes instead of putting them on. My brother and sister had done it, too, had stuck an arm through the bars just to see what he would do. Would he slap it, would he tear it off, could they retreat in time? The results had not been favorable for them, my brother and sister, on a few occasions, but it appeared I was in a different category. I knew just how far to go and I stopped before he had something to prove. It never crossed my mind to actually make him angry. That wasn’t it. He could be so
oppressive
was the problem, and then he’d gone and had three children who didn’t take to being oppressed. Dan and Melinda had gone about it boldly but I had them to learn from, and I was becoming too wide-eyed and quicksilver to catch. Mostly I just stood outside the cage and waved to him,
Hello, hello,
and he watched me with his lion’s eyes but let me live, because he remembered me.

“Where are we going?” I asked. I had one bare foot on the dashboard of the squad car, which was brazen but I’d gotten used to cruisers. They’d lost their mystique over time, and this one in particular had come to seem like just a car, except it squawked.

“New Castle,” he said, adjusting the dispatcher’s radio signal. I could see we were going to New Castle but I didn’t say so. And I didn’t ask if we could listen to music because I knew what the answer was. Music was in the past and now we listened to the dispatcher speak in a coded monotone. Dad had loved police scanners all my life — there had always been one in the house. He also went through a period of listening to CB radio chatter, which I finally told Mother I would pay good money to have explained to me.

She didn’t think about it for even a second. “It’s his form of gossip,” she said, and went right on knitting.

Dad would have hated that answer if he’d heard it, but for the life of me I couldn’t see how she was wrong. The times he’d shushed us in order to hear the address of a fire or a domestic disturbance or a public intoxication were countless. As soon as he heard the road and the crossroad he’d say, “That’s a Peckinpaugh,” and he was almost always right. He liked to know things, that’s all.

Dad popped into the jail and shot the breeze for a while. I stayed in the car and listened to the
music
radio until Joe Harris, the sheriff, came out in civilian clothes and ordered me to step out of the car and put my hands on the hood. I hopped out and hugged him, then slugged him. I loved that man like crazy, he was some kind of perfect. Joe was great big and handsome, bluff and kindhearted and funny. I loved his wife and all his kids, especially his daughter Jamie who was one of Melinda’s best friends. I figured there was a lot I didn’t know and yet it seemed
possible
Joe was like John Walton, but with a sense of humor.

Joe issued some orders about changing my behavior, told me he was letting me go with a warning, as Dad had. “Don’t let this happen again,” he said, offering me a handshake.

“You won’t catch me next time,” I said.

Joe lifted me by my armpits one, two, three times into the air as if I weighed nothing, put me down. “You are some kind of trouble,” he said, and headed back into his office. It was a compliment, coming from him.

“Where are we going now?”

“I need to stop and see someone.”

Dad wasn’t so much the sort to do regular errands. He didn’t go to grocery stores or department stores. He wasn’t the bank type, really. Before Mom had a driver’s license he took us everywhere and that seemed to suit him — he was like the captain of a raggedy little army, and we went where he led us, because he did all the driving. And that got passed along, too, because my brother became the driver in his family and so did my sister and it had already started in me. I could tell I was never going to let anyone else drive, even if I married one of Joe Harris’s drop-dead shockingly handsome and masculine sons. Even then I’d hold the keys.

Now Mom was forever attending to something, going to some bank or insurance agent. This was a sentence I was not unaccustomed to hearing: “Honey, do you want to ride with me to the bank?”

Thank goodness I was speedy enough to ask, “Which bank?”

And Mom would say, sort of out of the edge of her mouth and turning away, “The one in Union City.”

“The one in Union City! For the love of the sweet little savior! WHY do you still have an account in Union City?!? It is in another STATE, Delonda!”

Sometimes she hesitated; once in a while she fabricated. But the answer was always the same. “I like those people at that bank. They’re very kind.” She even gave a little ladylike sniff, as if she were dismissing the Help.

I would shake my head, give a click of the tongue to register my disapproval. Banking in another state. It was just the sort of thing Dad wouldn’t have tolerated, if he’d still been the only one with keys.

We were at the house of the New Friends. I figured it out just as we pulled up in front. This was either the New Friends’ house or it belonged to Different New Friends, because I’d never seen it before and had maybe never even been on this street for visiting.

I looked around — that wasn’t quite true. The road we were on was divided by one of the alphabet streets; Parchman lived on I Avenue but this wasn’t I. On the opposite side of the avenue, the road curved and vanished into a tangle of giant old trees. The houses over there were probably the most beautiful in town, and they belonged to that particular kind of money which was what my Grandmother Mildred had and what my mom had come from. It went back generations and its source was foggy. I remembered Mom telling me about lounging around with her wealthy cousin during the summer, how they had planned to join the same sorority at IU-Bloomington; the cousin educated Mother in exactly the right china to own, which sterling pattern, everything such people know. But it hadn’t turned out that way in Mother’s life, married at seventeen to someone she must have thought she knew when in fact she didn’t know him at all. There were a few years when Mom couldn’t face those cousins at all, and then one day she was obligated to attend a family funeral. She walked in with Dan and Melinda — Dan the age Josh was now, Melinda in her arms. I don’t know for sure what Mom was wearing or how she looked but I have a good idea. The cousin looked up and saw her and said, so the whole room could hear, “Why, Delonda, I thought you were dead.”