by Haven Kimmel
Mom was perhaps nervous. “Ah, is this an animal, vegetable, or mineral question?”
“What is the nature of your business, madam?” The honey cooled, hardened.
“I received a letter from him,” Mom said, clearing her throat, “and he wants me to come in and see him.”
“Your name?”
“My name?”
“What is your name, ma’am?”
“Oh. Yes. Delonda Jarvis.”
“Hold please.” The Office of the President left Mother hanging without benefit of music, then returned. “I handle all of his correspondence and I have no record of such a letter.”
Then tell me who will say yes.“It’s personal.”
O. of P. took her time sighing. “You may see him Tuesday at two.”
Mother remembered her own elegant voice. “That will be satisfactory. Thank you.” She made the slight, distracted sound of a woman squeezing an obligation into a frightfully busy day, then hung up the pay phone, which reeked of axle grease and gasoline.
Back in the house she contemplated her wardrobe, which did not exist. Her three pairs of black polyester pants no longer fit, and her stunning cherry red pantsuit, which she claimed could cause retinal damage in direct sunlight, was big enough for two or three unbruised mothers. She sat down at her Singer sewing machine, the machine on which she had made all of our clothes (except for Dad’s, which were store-bought and fashionable), and the dolls Melinda and I had loved to pieces: Samantha Pollyanna, Rebecca Mathilda, and Suzy Sleepyhead, not to mention Gladly, my Cross-Eyed Bear. She took up the sides of the cherry red pants, did her best with the sprung elastic waistband. She would leave the top as it was and belt it. The problem was that the crotch of the pants now hit her in the knees, so she put them on and practiced taking very small steps. I came downstairs just in time for this runway move and Mom asked me how she looked. I studied her a moment and said, “You look like a radioactive potato.”
“Hmmm,” Mom said, nodding her head. “That’s not so bad.” She picked out a wig to wear on the special day, too, a style and color she considered “subtle” and which I thought said “Pekingese.”
The second thing that happened in those last ten days involved her professor of Interpersonal Communication, Dr. Reiss. After class on Tuesday — the very Tuesday she was to meet President Pruis — Dr. Reiss asked Mother to step into her office for a moment.
“Could we — is this very —” Mom asked, glancing at the clock in the hallway.
“Just a moment, please.”
Dr. Reiss was a tiny woman, but she had a long, manly stride, and she reached her office nearly a full minute before Mother did. “Are you all right, Mrs. Jarvis?” she asked, studying Mom’s new gait.
“Fine, fine,” Mom said, carefree. “I’m simply trying to slow down and enjoy life more.”
Professor Reiss offered Mom a chair and sat down facing her. She crossed her arms over her stomach. Mom tried not to look around for a clock. She tried not to glance down at her watch, or have a nervous breakdown.
“You’re a very bright woman,” Dr. Reiss said, breaking the interminable silence.
“Thank you.”
“And I understand you have a perfect four-point GPA.”
Mom brushed away something imaginary from her pants leg. Nothing would actually stick to the red fabric; all was repelled.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“A shame, then, that I shall be giving you a C in this class.”
So this was it, Mom thought. She had managed to fool an entire university through the force of will alone, and she had come within inches of making a clean escape. But Dr. Reiss could see through her, could see the whole bleak story: the scholarship to Miami University she’d sacrificed at sixteen to marry my father, who she thought was twenty-six years old and a pilot. (He was eighteen and a gambler.) The twenty-four years of poverty and terror and ennui; the sexy, unpredictable man who managed it all, dominated everyone around him, animals even. Her children, who had never before had any reason to be proud of her, and who now saw her in a new way, children she had adored and ignored simultaneously, because she simplycould not get up off the couch, she could not clean a condemned house with no running water, she could not cook meals with food that didn’t exist or wash clothes without a washing machine. Without clothes. She couldn’t drive a car she didn’t have, without a license she couldn’t acquire. She had taken her vows and then they had taken her, and the forces amassed against her were greater than love, greater than obligation. They were elemental, heavy as a dead planet. One chance — that’s what she had seen she had — one flying leap that was really composed of eight thousand separate possibilities for falling, and she had taken that chance and come this far and been found out. And in a stupid class full of selfish, self-indulgent, narcissistic, spoiled children who were encouraged by Dr. Reiss to talk talk talk about their feelings, when what they ought to have been doing was shutting up and studying the conversations of their elders and superiors. It washere ? Here she would be done in?
Mom nodded, sighed. “Have I not gotten an A on every paper? Attended every class?”
“You have,” Dr. Reiss agreed. “But this course is called Interpersonal Communication, Mrs. Jarvis, and I have yet to see — or hear — you communicate with our class at all. You have revealed nothing of yourself this quarter.”
Mom sat back, stunned. “You must be joking. The students discuss ‘warm fuzzies’ and ‘cold pricklies.’A diagram of their ‘feelings’ could be used onSesame Street. ”
“Nonetheless, you seem not to take the goal of communication very seriously.”
“Interpersonal communication, you mean.”
“It’s an important field of study.” Dr. Reiss turned her bracelets around and around her small wrist, leaned toward Mother with intensity. “It is through a more feminine approach to dialogue that we will eventually break through the hegemony of the patriarchy, Delonda. No less than that.”
“I see.” Mom looked at her watch, took a deep breath. “I have noted that you reveal absolutely nothing of yourself in class, Dr. Reiss. You are as closed as a prison guard.”
Professor Reiss sat back, blinked five or six times behind her thick glasses. “Write me a final term paper justifying yourself and I will rethink your grade. You are dismissed.”
There was no possibility she could get to the Administration Building on time. She ran up the hill, away from the English Building, ran in teeny tiny steps. A girl on a bicycle stopped to watch her.
“Are you all right?” The girl was young, athletic, tall. “Weren’t we in a class together?”
Mother was so winded she could barely control her lips. “I have…a…oh, God.” She held her side, tried to catch her breath. “I have an appointment at the Ad Building in five minutes and I don’t think I can make it.”
The Tall Girl said, “Bummer. Can you ride a bicycle?”
“Of course I can ride a bicycle,” Mom said, thinking of mine, which was trusty and dear and even had a bell.
“This is my boyfriend’s bike — you can take it if you’ll be careful and lock it up. Just leave it in front of the Ad Building and I’ll get it later.” Tall Girl took out a combination lock on a chain in a plastic tube. A plastic tube. Mom had absolutely no idea what she was seeing. “Are you ready?”
Mom nodded and tried to get on the bike. It turned out Tall Girl had a Tall Boyfriend, and Mom couldn’t get her foot over the center bar, particularly with the crotch of her bright red pants nearly down around her ankles. She hiked up the pants, exposing white tube socks she’d borrowed from Rick. A crowd began to gather. Someone yelled, “Jump on it from the back, like a horse!” She tried that and found it to be regrettable.
Finally, a boy with a Gary, Indiana, accent, someone from the Region, said, “Hey, lady, you wanna get on that bike? Give me your foot.” She trusted him with her foot because she had grown up in Whiting and so they were practically family. The boy had two friends brace
Mom on her right side; he pulled one foot up and over, the other boys pushed, and before she knew it she was on the seat, the tiny little seat of the Very Tall Boyfriend’s bicycle.
The Region boys said, “Ready?”
Mom whispered, “Yes.”
They pushed her forward, down the hill toward what was called the scramble light, an intersection where students crossed four lanes of traffic in six directions at the same time, in faith believing that (a) they were immortal, and (b) cars would stop for them because they were young and pretty. But Mom’s bike kept gaining speed, no matter how furiously she pedaled backward. She had never heard of hand brakes, I had never heard of hand brakes; all civilized bicycles in all the decent nations of the world had back-pedaling brakes and that was all we knew.
As she approached the masses at the scramble light, realizing that she was homicidally brake-free and traveling at roughly fifty miles an hour, Mom did the only thing she could do: she began screaming, “I’m out of control, I’m out of control! Get out of the way! Run!!!”
Innocent children dove to the ground and Mom made it through the light and onto the sidewalk, where some idiot professor was getting out of his car without even bothering to see if there were formerly fat women barreling down the sidewalk screaming. Mom flew toward him, screaming, and he dove into the bushes around the Science Building.
She was slowing just slightly as she approached the front of the Administration Building, enough that she thought she might be able to get off the bike if she just threw herself sideways, which she did. She landed on her elbows and knees, abrading and de-skinning herself in ways with which I was long familiar. Miraculously, the cherry-red knees of her pants did not tear, but they did turn black from grass and blood. Mom’s head landed on her bookbag, breaking the little bottle of Avon Timeless cologne she had carried specially that day in order to dab a bit behind her ears before meeting the president. The bag began to leak.
Mom rose slowly, not even pretending she had reserves of dignity. She was bruised and bleeding, her wig was askew, but she took the time to lock up the bicycle, as she had promised. She marched into the Ad Building and up the stairs to the president’s office, limping and trying not to whimper.
Secretary to the Office of the President looked Mother up and down and said, rather faintly, “Are you the two o’clock?”
Mother nodded, gasped.
As the secretary led her into his office, President Pruis rose from behind his vast desk and studied Mom with a cautious expression. His suit was so subtle she almost couldn’t see it. “Won’t you have a seat?” he asked, directing her to a leather armchair the size of Mom’s car, but with more power. She sat, still gasping periodically.
President Pruis began to speak, as a politician will do, to fill the silence, the inexplicable appointment. He told her what a wonderful year it had been for the university, how well the basketball team had done, how much money the alumni committee had raised for a new building. His speech had the comforting rhythm one offers to children, old people, and residents of the Epileptic Village. Finally he asked, “Can you talk?”
“Yes,” Mother whispered.
“Can you tell me why you wanted to see me?”
“I got your letter.”
“What letter would that be?”
Mom took it out of the bookbag; it was dripping with Timeless cologne. Dr. Pruis held it at arm’s length, glanced at it, quickly handed it back. She saw it on his face: it was a form letter. He wasn’t proud of her. He didn’t know and didn’t care that she was being graduated summa cum laude from the Honors College after twenty-three months.
She laughed. She let her body go limp and felt her wig slip just slightly more and knew there was absolutely nothing to do but laugh. “It’s a form letter,” she said, “but that’s okay. It’s okay. I guess what I really came to say is that there were ten lepers who were healed, but only one came back to thank Jesus for healing him.”
Dr. Pruis blanched a bit, as one does when the word “leprosy” pops up in a peculiar conversation.
“I’m saying I want to thank you for all the things Ball State has done for me. I never dreamed I would finally get a college education, and now I have, thanks to you.”
He nodded, asked her what her major was, what classes she had taken. He asked about her scholarships and loans, about the people who had been most helpful to her. At last he asked, gesturing to her, well, everything, “What happened to you?”
She told him the story of the giant bicycle, her perilous journey, the professor who dove into the bushes and would probably sue. President Pruis laughed and laughed, he shook his head and pulled a starched handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “Ah,” he said. “I’m so glad I invited you to visit. May I walk you back to the English Building?”
Mom told Rose’s mother Joyce about Interpersonal Communications and how she had nine days until graduation and had decided just to quit. Joyce was not a woman who abided such nonsense in either word or deed, and she said to Mom, just sharply enough, “You could hang from your damn thumbs for nine days, Delonda, to get that degree.” Then she made Mom talk through the paper she would write for Dr. Reiss, and as soon as she began to explain it to Joyce, it all became clear, and she dashed home as quickly as her torn knees would carry her and wrote it.
She based her argument on a book calledThe Prince, by someone named Machiavelli, who I believed was also a sculptor and a kind of aftershave. She described a certain kind of man, a Prince, a President, a Potentate, whose greatest gift was his ability to ingratiate himself to his enemies with false intimacy. Once the enemy’s weaknesses were exposed, the Prince destroyed him, and thus was power maintained by the amoral and psychologically canny, or so Mother wrote. She quoted W. H. Auden, a poet who had once gotten in a bar fight in Muncie; she quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, someone I would for years believe to be a character in a cartoon strip. Mom said there were true and false vulnerabilities, and that there was “no name under which the false vulnerability should be courted, no value in achieving it.”
On the last day of her college career, Dr. Reiss gave her back the paper; Mom had gotten an A on the assignment and an A in the class. Dr. Reiss suggested they jointly publish it, with her own name as the lead: she was the one with the credentials, after all. But Mom just opened her hands, she made a gesture of emptiness, smiling, and said to her professor, “Just take it. Just take it for yourself, I don’t need it.”
Silver
In the old building on campus where Mom had an office as a teaching assistant, everything was either green or going green. She was studying to be a Master of English, and she didn’t mind that even though she was about to be the equivalent of a black belt in literature, her office carpet was squishy and smelled like an aquarium. I felt comfortable there, as I was a Pisces. Mom took me with her nearly every day after my school year ended, and I would sit on the floor in the cramped-up space, between old chairs and stacks of books, and color my fairy tales and superheroes. Students came and went and Mom always introduced me as if I were a full-sized person. Professors popped in. Once I looked up and a man with white hair and a white beard but a very young face was leaning around the door frame; Mom said, “Dr. Koontz, this is my daughter,” and he nodded and said, “Cute kid,” then left without telling her what he had come for. Professors could be that way and no one thought much of it.
The department secretary was named Mickey Danner and she insisted I call her Mickey, not Mrs., and there was this astonishing fact about her: her real first name wasZilpha and she wasnot lying. Her husband was called Howard or Howie, and within about five minutes of meeting each other he and I determined that we had the exact same birthday, which made four people so blessed. Mickey was the first old person I ever knew who was beautiful and I didn’t know what to make of it. Howard was old, too, but he was craggled and shambling and his nose looked as if it had melted and been reattached at the School for the Blind. He was what old people were supposed to look like.
And Mickey was very very smart; Howard was very very normal. I could tell — anyone could tell — that none of those differences mattered, because Howie and Mickey had already been married so long they’d passed the point of being individuals and instead added up into a single, average human with a nose problem.
College had made me sophisticated, but it was still the case that Mickey Danner’s sweetness was so deep and true and constant she made me want to cry, and she made me want to be a better person, or at least lie about the wretched person I truly was. I had never before met someone without a bit of darkness in her, and maybe Mickey was the only one who ever lived. When we went out to lunch together — and she would do that, she would invite me out for lunch, just the two of us — she would say, “Now, go wash your hands before we eat, dear,” and I would dash into the bathroom andwash my hands. If she asked me to look at a catalog and help her pick out new curtains for her guest room I’d take the magazine as if it were sacred and study the curtains as hard as I could, and never once say or even think, “Pick out your own retarded curtains, I’ve got bigger fish to fry,” which is very likely what I would have said to my sister. With Mickey I cursed myself for not knowing more about fabrics. When I told her, “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at this,” she took my hand and said, in her caramelly voice, her old face so beautiful she should have been on a postage stamp, “Oh, I think you’re good at everything you try. You just choose what you think is prettiest and I will take your word for it.”
After we’d been friends for a number of months, Mickey announced a contest to guess the date of the first snowfall. Each person in the department got to write their prediction on a slip of paper shaped like a candy cane, our names carefully inscribed by her beforehand. There was no distance Mickey would not go. The prize was a Santa Claus statue with a snow globe in his belly. In the globe was a village with little houses and streetlights. It was mesmerizing and best not considered too closely, as it was undeniable that the village was in Santa’sstomach.
