She Got Up Off the Couch

by Haven Kimmel

  Mom said she had a surprise for me. She was going to take me to Ball State, just the two of us, to see a play.

  “I already know a lot about plays,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I’ve been in…gosh,Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, I had that bit inMusic Man. ”

  “This isn’t a musical,” Mom said, looking for the tickets in the satchel that had replaced her Army surplus backpack. “Here we go. Friday night — a date?”

  “A date,” I said, looking away. It had been a long time since I’d spent any time with just my mom, and I was thrilled and also horrified and what if the actors were terrible? Would I be able to sit through it? I wished that Rose could go with me, so we could hold hands and criticize.

  We took off, Sabrina sputtering and threatening to stall every time Mom touched the brake.

  “It’s freezing in here,” I said, tucking my hands under my armpits.

  “It’ll warm up.”

  I waited a minute. Maybe half. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “The heat comes off the engine, so the engine has to get warm first. I keep a blanket in the backseat; spread it over your legs.”

  “Let’s listen to the radio,” I reached for the strange, foreign-looking knobs.

  “You know the radio doesn’t work.”

  “How about turning on the heat then?”

  “It’ll warm up.”

  “What does this button do?” I asked, pointing to a black, rubbery knob that appeared part chewed by rodents.

  “I think it’s the — I don’t know,” Mom said, struggling to get the little foreign gearshift into third.

  “I know a song about a gearshift called ‘Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler).’Would you like to hear it?”

  Mom nodded. “I know that song.”

  I took off singing it in the self-important voice of the man in the Cadillac who looks in his rearview mirror and is surprised to find the silly Rambler following him. Mom didn’t know the words so well, and got lost, especially when the song sped up to its desperately fast conclusion.

  “Whew!” she said, as if I’d worn her out.

  “No kidding. It took me years to be able to sing that whole thing. What is this play called again?”

  “The Skin of Our Teeth.It’s by Thornton Wilder.”

  “The Skin of Our Teeth?! Do teethhave skin?” It was a gruesome concept.

  “Not literally, no.”

  “Then is it astupid play?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you know this man, Thorn Wild?”

  “Thornton Wilder.” Mom leaned toward the windshield as if she could make the car go faster. “No, he’s a famous playwright, he’s not from around here. He wrote the playOur Town. ” Mother had seriously taken up with the drama department. She was all the time reading plays and talking about them and had evenwritten one.

  “Our Town,hmmm,” I said, scrubbing frost off the inside of the windshield. “You could write a play called that.”

  “Not nearly as well, I’m afraid.” She scrubbed at the frost on the windshield. “But maybe you could.”

  I thought about it. “Maybe so. I did write that one good poem.” We reached Highway 3 and headed toward Muncie. Mom drove this route every day, it occurred to me. She did things every day that had nothing to do with me. I swallowed, feeling homesick, but I wasn’t sure what for. Our house was so cold we’d had to put a rollaway bed right next to the coal stove and that’s where I slept at night. And it wasn’t as if Dad was there, anyway, sitting in his brown chair with his glass of water and his pint of whiskey. It wasn’t as if he was staring in his fixed way at the television, the rifle rack behind him, his brown radio set to the Emergency Channel, his collection of animal teeth in a jar on the table beside him. It wasn’t as if I knew where he was. The house was just back there, empty and freezing except for the animals, who slept curled up against each other in little knots, cat indistinguishable from dog. “This play doesn’t even have anymusic in it?” I asked, aggrieved.

  “Not like you mean, sweetheart.” Mom leaned forward, looking out the one square of window Sabrina’s defroster had managed to defrost. She kept her eye on the space available to her.

  Mom knew exactly how to get to the parking garage, which was possibly my first parking garage. She knew how to walk down Riverside Avenue to Emens Auditorium and up the circular drive into the bright space of the lobby, where hundreds of people were milling around talking, drinking what appeared to be apple cider out of plastic cups. The lobby was bright and loud as if some great excitement had taken over everyone, something bigger than a basketball tournament or the Fair Queen contest at the Mooreland Fair, where the trick was to look as if you didn’t care at all. Here people laughed loudly and shouted to discover yet another acquaintance, and there were women dressed in ways I’d never seen before, men in suits of strange colors, men withponytails. Oh dear oh dear, I thought, imagining if Dad could see this what he would say. It would not be Christian (though neither was he) or repeatable. There were some Vietnam veterans out in the far reaches of the county and some of them had ponytails, but I was not to speak to them even though my dad was dead patriotic.These ponytailed men were employed — they were ticket holders to the theater — not gun-toting hair triggers hooked on skunkweed. (I was unclear what that last part meant, but it got said often enough.)

  Mom had our tickets out and we passed through a series of doors, older men and women in bright red blazers handing us a little book about the play and directing us to our seats. We were led to the left bank of seats, close to the front and near the aisle, where I could see everything very clearly.

  Emens Auditorium was so enormous I would have guessed it sat one hundred thousand people. My mom said actually two. Two thousand. And there was something going on everywhere, more people milling around and ushers studying ticket stubs and an orchestra somewhere unseen tuning up. This could not have been more different from the gym in the Mooreland Elementary School, where our musicals had been held. We didn’t have actual sets, for one thing; we just dressed in costumes (whatever we could find at home) and came out on stage and sang. The gym was so old everything had faded to a uniform shade of gray. There were enormous metal support poles in the buckled floor that ran up to the ceiling, and they’d been wrapped in thick padding — obviously to prevent traumatic brain injury — and the padding had gone gray and shreddy. The walls above and behind the bleachers were faded to the color of rock. A wooden board still bore Big Dave Newman’s scoring record from the late 1950s, when Mooreland had its own basketball team, the Bobcats, before all the county schools incorporated and the Bobcats became ghosts. And Emens Auditorium was very different from the Blue River High School cafetorium where plays were held, called as such because there was a stage at the end of the cafeteria. An economical design. Despite the discrepancy, a jangle was set up inside me, remembering a traumatic moment in my way past.

  Years earlier we’d gone, Mom and Dad and me, to the cafetorium to see my sister perform in a play calledUp the Down Staircase. I was a really stupid little girl, maybe only six years old, and the set looked like the outside of a school building, three stories high. Characters opened the windows and spoke. There was no way to know Lindy was behind one of those windows until the cardboard shutters opened and she spoke her lines, and I was very shocked to see her there and also she was quite convincing and the whole thing upset me. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just kept watching, and then came the worst part: one of Melinda’s oldest friends, Debby Shively, who was a real actress — she was such a real actress she was at Ball State right this minute studying acting as I sat in Emens — had the most important part and she got in a fight with her teacher. It was just the two of them in the classroom. The teacher was reading from a letter Debby had written, reading in a mean way, as Debby crossed her arms and looked miserable. The teacher said something like, “‘I love you’ is a cliché.” It wasn’t just the way he said it, or the
words themselves, but that Debby’s eyes very subtly filled with tears, the way they would if you were a bad girl, or maybe a good girl having a very bad day. My stomach flew up into my throat and I thought I was going to burst out crying, too, and I couldn’t put it together that this was aplay, Debby wasacting, all I saw was my sister’s old friend, someone I’d known my whole life, her arms crossed and an expression on her face like loss, or doom.

  And then the house lights dimmed. I glanced over at Mom for reassurance and she smiled at me from behind her old cat’s-eye glasses, and the Thorn Wild play began. On the black velvet curtain, which seemed to stretch a city block, a grainy newsreel ran with the words NEWS EVENTS OF THE WORLD.There was a picture of a sunrise and an announcer telling us, deep-voiced and authoritative, that the sun had risen that morning and so the world had once again not ended. There was a picture of a glacier, and the announcer said the unexpected summer freeze had pushed some piece of world I didn’t recognize the name of to some other piece of world far away. The tone was funny, menacing. I squirmed in my chair, decided to take up nail-biting, one of the only bad habits I’d never been interested in before.

  The curtain opened on a domestic scene, but one off-kilter. There were four walls but periodically one would tilt and a maid (or whatever she was) would have to push it back into place. She was worried the man of the house wouldn’t make it home, and get this: there was a dinosaur in the house, and a mastodon. Not real, unfortunately, as that would have made for quite a play.

  I leaned over to Mom. “When is this happening, this play?”

  Mom whispered, “Pretty much right now. In the 1940s, I think.”

  I sat back. It was mentioned that the husband, Mr. Antrobus, was busy inventing the wheel and also the alphabet and numbers.

  “What about those dinosaurs, I’m wondering?”

  “Shhhh.”

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the Antrobuses, who had been married five thousand years, as they battled the glacier in the first act, the flood in the second (wherein Mr. Antrobus also became President of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans). I didn’t understand the third act, after the unnamed war, and the people wandering around in the back with big clocks, quoting, at nine o’clock, someone called Spinoza, at ten o’clock, Plato, and at the end, Aristotle. But I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. Everyone seemed so giddy, so optimistic, even when in the second act the black circles began to appear, the first for a regular storm, the second for a hurricane, the third for a flood, the fourth for the end of the world. It was as if the world were about to endall the time, every time the Antrobuses turned around, and yet they loaded the animals two by two, and eventually there they were, back in their little house in their little town, 216 Cedar Street, Excelsior, New Jersey. George Antrobus did as he wished: he invented the wheel, the alphabet, the numbers — he even rejoiced in having the hundred after hundred after hundred, as if he’d gone out and made it so, the way my own dad might build a chicken coop. I was dizzy. I wanted it to never end. I loved the dinosaurs.

  After the play Mom took me to Arby’s Restaurant, where I had never been. It was just a tiny place not far from Ball State, a counter, really, where you ordered food and sat at one of three tables. There were two exquisite things about Arby’s: one was that the floor was inlaid with mosaic tiles that formed the face of a longhorn steer, and the other was that they had potato cakes in place of french fries. Also something called a Jamocha Shake, which tasted unlike anything I’d ever had in my life. We sat at our little table with our roast beef sandwiches and potato cakes and I knew I was a brand-new person.

  “What did you think of the play?” Mom asked, as if I were a grown-up with an opinion.

  I shrugged. “It was all right.”

  “Did you understand it?”

  “Nope.”

  Mom took a drink of her shake, pushed her glasses up her nose. I had no memory of her ever talking to me in quite this way. “Do you know the word ‘catastrophe’?” she asked.

  I thought about it. I did, actually, because in school someone had only recently mispronounced it while reading aloud as “cat-astrofe.”“It means…it’s something like disaster.”

  “Yes, it’s like disaster, only bigger. A catastrophe is something that changes your life forever. Sometimes they happen in the world, like in nature.”

  “The way there was a glacier and a flood.”

  “Right. And sometimes it happens at home,” Mom said, looking at me intently.

  I swallowed my potato cake, stared at the floor. I said, “Like the way the maid is going to steal the husband and the family will be over.”

  Mom sat back, smiled at me. “You did too understand it.”

  “Did not. Also it was just silly, those dinosaurs and animals and people speaking different languages and Gladys popping up out of the floor, that was just about retarded.”

  We finished eating and headed out into the black, cold night.

  “I’m freezing to death,” I said, as Mom pulled out of the Arby’s parking lot.

  “It’ll warm up.”

  We had the highway to ourselves and I could think of nothing but the play, the way George Antrobus kept repeating that they had survived the Depression by the skin of their teeth; one more tight squeeze like that and where would they be? I saw Debby Shively’s eyes glazed with tears, her arms crossed protectively over her chest. It was a sad and sinking winter night, and yet I’d never seen the stars so hard in the sky, shining as if they could harm us, but would spare us one more night. Mom leaned forward, pressed the Volkswagen home.

  One Leper

  Mother always said she was a size 7 woman she kept wrapped in fat to prevent bruising. When she started at Ball State she weighed 268 pounds, so the Thin Mom inside was abundantly safe. But by the end of her second full school year, she had lost a hundred pounds, oran entire other Thin Mom. She still had long hair she hated and wore in a bun — Dad wouldn’t let her cut it — and she was still missing some of her teeth, but there was no denying she had changed.

  It wasn’t until I stopped and looked back that I saw what she had done: she had taken the CLEP test and leapfrogged over an acre of requirements. She had finagled rides with seventeen different people over her first year. She had found Sabrina and redeemed her with advertising. Her too solid flesh had melted; she had gone to the theater; she had written a play that had been performed as a staged reading; she had taken me to the big campus and made me feel comfortable there, the way birds make their babies fly farther and farther afield, all the while saying, “See? It’s just the world, you know the world.” What I hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t recognized, were the course overloads, the punishing summer schedule, the arguments with advisers who told her no. (She handed to me, in those years, one of her greatest gifts: the ability to say with a smile, “Tell me who will say yes, and then direct me to his office.”)

  She had done all these things and she was going to graduate summa cum laude, which meant Good But Loud, from the Honors College, and she had done it all in twenty-three months. It takes some people more time to hang a curtain.

  Two things happened ten days before graduation: one was that she received a letter from the university president, Dr. Pruis. She opened it on an evening Melinda and Rick were visiting with Josh, and Dad just happened to be home.

  “What is it?” Melinda asked. In Jarvis Land an official letter was almost always guaranteed to be a threat of garnished wages or Interrupted Service.

  Mom scanned the thick paper. “Dr. Pruis says he’s proud of me. He’s invited me to come in and see him before graduation.”

  I whistled. Melinda said, “The president?”

  Not moving his eyes from the television Dad said, “It’s a form letter.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Melinda said, in a tone of voice that would have caused Dad togo straight up and scatter, as Mom called it, in the days before Melinda was married, in the days before there was a husband-pe
rson sitting there making sure it didn’t happen. “He probably knows her story, knows she’s graduating with honors and is proud of her.”

  “It’s a form letter,” Dad said, lighting a cigarette.

  “How doyou —” Melinda began, her voice rising.

  “Lin,” Mom said, folding the letter and slipping it back in the envelope. “I’ll just make an appointment and find out. How about that?”

  “Yes, do that.” Melinda reached down and picked up Josh’s diaper bag.

  “Yes, do that,” Dad said, still not looking at any of us.

  The next morning Mom walked down to the pay phone at the Newmans’ Marathon station; our telephone had been disconnected, although Dad claimed to have paid the bill. She used the coins I hadn’t already stolen from her purse to buy Mountain Dews and dialed the number on the Ball State letterhead.

  “Office of the President,” a woman said, in a special Office of the President voice: ground glass in honey.

  “May I speak to Dr. Pruis, please?”

  “This is his secretary. What is the nature of your business?”