She Got Up Off the Couch (7 page)

Someone took a photograph of me just as I’d begun the descent, and it’s clear I’m crying those brand-new tears, my face completely solemn and unmoving, just tear after tear streaming down my face. I, who had sat so stoically at the screening of
Bambi
my sister believed me to be a frog spawn of Hell. In the next picture: Melinda and Dad, Lindy still wearing that photographic smile, and it occurred to me later, looking at the album, that really she was smiling at Jimmy Carnes whom she loved dearly, trying to be as brave as possible for him. Not for Dad, who is so dignified as to seem presidential. Maybe he’d had a few with Charlie Kurz out in the parking lot. Drunk men always walk with greater care than the sober.

Beloved Pastor Eddy Cline asked, “Who gives this woman in marriage?” and my dad answered, his deep voice more glorious than the Mooreland Friends Meeting was accustomed to, “Her mother and I.” He lifted Melinda’s veil and kissed her tenderly, handing her over to Rick, this sweet stranger. I stood at the altar just behind Cindy, each of us clutching our single red rose. I stood frozen, listening to the sermon, the exchange of vows, the catch in Melinda’s throat, and might have stood that way forever except that when Rick and Melinda went behind the altar to light the Unity Candle, Melinda turned her head too quickly and her veil caught fire. There is nothing quite like a bride aflame — it really puts a capper on an otherwise ordinary day. Rick, who had, as the sacrament would suggest, already become a husband, put the fire out with his bare hand, and it was only those of us up close who saw the near disaster and stood helpless to prevent it.

The reception in the Fellowship Room, which was really just indoor-outdoor carpeting and sliding plastic doors, was the usual fare. Folding chairs, long tables covered with white paper, streamers. There was the white cake with Crisco roses; the bowls of mixed nuts; the mints made of butter, sugar, and mint flavoring. My aunt Donna made them, and I loved those little leaf-shaped wonders. I had once eaten them until my gallbladder seized. There was no drinking at the reception, no dancing, no music, just the paper plates and people milling around, and then Rick and Melinda opened their wedding gifts and everyone oohed and aahed over the dish towels and crocheted pot holders. I sat in a folding chair in a most unladylike fashion, thinking only of the alligator overnight bag waiting by the front door at home. I felt like Trixie Belden or Nancy Drew, someone trapped in a mine shaft or about to be hit by a saw blade…what to do, what to do? How to prevent this honeymoon in Kentucky? How to prevent her from leaving? How to somehow iron out the spiky thing grown up between her and my father that was making her marry someone in the first place? And then it occurred to me: I would just
say no.
I would just say she could not leave, I wouldn’t allow it, I was her sister and I had my rights.

It was dark by the time we got the church cleaned up, the coffee urn washed and put away, the floors swept, and the sliding plastic doors slid closed. Rick and Melinda stayed to the very end, stacking the folding chairs and placing them on the cart; this is what one did at a wedding at the Mooreland Friends Meeting. The night was gorgeous and fair on the short walk back to our house, and I held Melinda’s hand all the way there. It wasn’t until we were in the door that I said, “You can’t go, you can’t leave me, I can’t let you go without me,” and the look on her face must have been identical to my own, because she turned to Rick — her husband — and said, “I think we ought to take her with us.” And he, whatever he had dreamed of or most fervently wished or even expected, just nodded and said, “Sure, Melinda, whatever you want.” So I ran to the dirty clothes pile in my parents’ bedroom and grabbed what I thought I would need and jumped in Rick’s car and off we went, married now, to Kentucky.

When you have a brother so far away, you will take what you can get; you will steal memories, you will eavesdrop and sneak pictures out of boxes if that’s what you have to do to get near him. I barely knew him. He was the great physical thing in the world, a wonder like Niagara Falls if Niagara Falls was your brother. So tall he ducked in doorways and sat slouched in cars; one of his ears had a bold horizontal scar from the time Doc Austerman wrecked his truck when Dan was working as a veterinary assistant. His arms were muscular, enormous; his hands were my father’s made even more refined. He had one gold tooth, a cap, right in the front on the bottom, and it was the flaw that made him too handsome to take in — a pirate flash in a man of unqualified honor. Before basketball practice he ate cereal out of a giant mixing bowl, and peanut butter from a five-gallon bucket that came, somehow, from the government. On the court he was grace and rage personified; he shot free throws as if in prayer, and we attended every game. There was something between him and my father that flared up black as the fairy tale you don’t repeat or record, but in the gymnasium Dad never took his eyes off his son and he cheered him with an openness we never saw anyplace else. There is even a photograph that appeared in Dan’s senior yearbook: Dad is leaning forward, clapping, the look on his face one of joyous pride, and I am leaning over on Dad’s leg, yawning. The caption was “Excitement for Dad Is Boring for Sister.” My hair looks like it had been purchased at a rummage sale after all the real hair was gone.

Here are the things I remember, and they are mine: one Halloween as Melinda and I were walking home from trick-or-treating with Lindy’s friend Cheryl, Danny came running down a dark alley toward us in a Dracula cape and we couldn’t see his face until he was right up on us under a streetlight dimmed for the occasion, and all three of us, the grown girls and me, nearly died from heart attacks. It was, perhaps, the most frightened I have ever been, and yet as soon as I knew it was my brother he swept me up off the ground and carried me home on his shoulders. That night I lay in bed, stuffed with Reese’s cups and surrounded by candy wrappers and I couldn’t forget it; it had become a moment not of terror but of beauty so sharply honed it hurt me instead of scaring me. I wanted to see it again and again — his great silent stride, the cape flying out behind him, the split second when the three of us, stunned, recognized him and clutched our hearts and were grateful.

Girls called our house for him and Mother took messages because Danny wouldn’t talk to them, he wouldn’t date, he would not trifle. A beautiful blond girl pursued him for months, a girl who could have had anyone, and he stood his ground miles away from her because he was waiting for someone else and he hadn’t met her yet.

He loved fossils; he loved fishing and hunting. He could shoot a bow and arrow and hit a running rabbit. His vision was flawless, he never let his hair touch his collar, he belonged to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and he sang in a Christian group called the New Beginning. His voice was so fine he even made a record, a Christmas song about a giant tree that didn’t want to be cut down but ended up in front of the White House.

His room was next to mine and it was gray and fossily and above his bed there hung an old framed picture of a wolf standing on a winter hill, howling. There is a valley below, and lights on in the small houses, smoke coming from the chimneys, but the wolf is alone. He slept in his bed, in a sleeping bag and under many blankets, all through the winter, no matter that there was no heat upstairs; the rest of us camped in the den around the coal stove but Dan stayed in his room.

At night I used to lie with my ear pressed against the wall so I could hear him sing. One night he put on a record and sang along with it; he played it many times until he understood how to sing it better than the recording. I slipped out of bed and lay down on the floor in front his door, my ear in the gap, holding my breath so he wouldn’t know I was listening. On my little blue tape recorder I had captured hours of useless conversation and even hours of television, but if there were only thing I could go back and preserve it would be that night and his voice and that song.

He ran cross-country; he played practical jokes with his friends. One time my father hit him so hard Danny was knocked halfway across our street, and when he got up he didn’t say anything or do anything, although by that time he was such a specimen of a man he could have killed Bob Jarvis. That moment was the measure of him, and he did not fail, depending on your point of view.

He referred to the crazy old woman across the street as “Ede,” which drove her off her remaining three inches of cliff. He sometimes asked her on dates. Edythe
shook,
he made her so angry; clearly he did not understand the rules, which were that he was to be afraid of her as I was afraid of her, and he was to keep a distance which she dictated and she owned. Danny didn’t see things Edythe’s way, and so he was forced one night to write on the street outside her house, in soap,
Ede! Will You Marry Me??
And then we got to sit on the front porch and watch her pour boiling water on his proposal and scrub at it with the broom she had probably just climbed off of after a trip to the bank.

Like my father, he was a natural driver of anything, any vehicle, and like Dad he was not averse to driving angry. He flexed his jaw muscles almost all the time and could not be made to converse if he chose not to, but with his friends he loved to tell a story and he laughed and laughed. There was never a time he didn’t love Jesus; there was never a period in his life when he was faithless, and as he grew up he became more and more devout, and more hurried in his desire to leave home, which he did.

He joined the National Guard and there was boot camp at Fort Polk, Louisiana. He wrote letters home and included a picture of himself on his bunk in a white T-shirt, a sweet smile on his face we rarely saw, and then he came home. He had become a man meant to wear a uniform. Uniforms were only concepts until the first time Dan Jarvis wore one and then the universe stepped back and said
Ah, so that’s who they were for.

He found a girl so pure she could have been made from Ivory Soap. When I first met her she seemed only barely older than I, she was so petite and shy, and she had the delicate facial features of a cat: blue, almond-slanted eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose, long black hair. My sister said she was a size “aught,” and maybe her dresses were even in the negatives. Elaine. I met her and thought she must have been floating around in a purity bubble all seventeen of her years, nothing mean or crude touching her, but it turned out she was stubborn in her goodness and that’s how she had kept it. She was so tender to me and her hands were so small; when Dan gave her his letter jacket she looked like a child adrift in giant’s clothes. Where Elaine was concerned, quiet as she was amid our family of scalawags and jesters, there was nothing not to love, and Dan married her as fast as he could. The high school girls, the lovely blondes with money and lake houses, disappeared like dandelion fluff.

He and Elaine gave us our first new baby, Jenny, and she too was breathtaking, and all of us had to acknowledge that there had been a certain amount of beauty, a pool available to our family, and Danny got nearly all of it, then gave it to his daughters, including Jessica, who came two years later. And none of us resented it, because you can’t resent the sublime when you are lucky enough to see it, and it’s pointless to resent a man you cannot reach or touch. He took his wife and little girls and moved away.

Here are memories I stole. He had a terrible temper and Mom asked Dr. Heilman the best way to deal with it. Dr. Heilman said, “If he throws a tantrum tell him you’re going to take away his favorite thing until he calms down. Then give it back to him.” Dan’s favorite thing was his Davy Crockett coonskin cap, and one afternoon when he lost his temper Mom said, “Danny, I’m taking your cap away until you can behave yourself. When you’re done acting this way, you can have it back.” He looked her dead in the eye. He was three years old. He said, “I don’t
ever
want it back.” And she knew right then that she had snapped a little something in him entirely by accident, a part of him that must have been born fearing the way love unzips us and leaves us vulnerable to assault. He zipped that part up. Mom never took anything away from him again, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she did.

She could not prevent him from sneaking outside and peeing on the street. When she asked him why he insisted on doing so, he said he didn’t want to miss anything; he wanted to watch the cars go by.

He had a little red wagon in which he pulled around a tombstone. The tombstone remains a mystery, but he loved it. Then in winter he would silently leave the house in the morning, pull the wagon down to the elevator, and pick up scraps of coal to help us heat the house. Our father didn’t help him, didn’t stop him, didn’t acknowledge it, and Dan performed this task without a word.

Later he did many things to save my father from shame, and even though those things might have made Dan feel ashamed himself, they too were done in silence. He was just a boy. My sister used to hide under her pillow and weep about the wagon and the disgrace; she couldn’t bear it. Those are her memories but she has lent them to me.

They were one family and I was another, so late, an Afterthought. They had one set of parents and I had another; they had a decade already shot past and I missed it. But I loved him, loved him, a little girl is helpless against her love for a brother. I climbed on him, harassed him, begged him to carry me, take me with him wherever he was going. From a distance he seemed both cold and receding, a man whose most familiar feature was his back as he walked away as fast as he could. But there are pictures of him, many of them, holding me as a baby, standing with me as a little girl, and the eye of the camera sees what nearly everyone but Elaine missed: a tenderness so wounded it had grown ferocious and fixed as the evening star. Really, I barely knew him. When our family’s darkest days arrived he could not be reached, he demanded to be left alone, he wanted no part of it, and for years I believed he hated us. I thought he had simply wandered into the wrong family in the first place, like a toddler at a strange picnic who grew into the handsomest of princes but remained bound by name and history to the peasants who had lured him with potato salad and a tricycle.

In truth, if there could be said to be one truth about my brother, it is that he carried both a tombstone and scraps of coal in a little red wagon, and what that did to him and what it meant to him is written in a closed book in a library guarded by dragons. He sang like an angel, he was faithful to God and he waited honorably for the wife he believed God chose for him. He made two daughters who shone like mirrors in the direct sun; he blazed his path with a scythe and his broad shoulders, and he was who he
chose
to be, which is the hardest and bravest thing a man can do. He looked at us, his parents, his sisters, his whole crooked family, and he flexed his jaw muscles, packed up his truck, and drove away.