by Haven Kimmel
“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 sinceHomo 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 couldnever 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’ttell 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 sooppressive 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 themusic 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 seemedpossible 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.”
I had been to one of those houses on the other side of the avenue, with Grandmother Mildred. We’d visited one of her old ladies, a church friend or a distant relative and it had beentiresome. The houses on this side were much more modest and small and boring-looking, but the street was still pretty. Cherry trees were dropping blossoms on the well-tended lawns. I slipped on my shoes and followed Dad inside.
The house was nothing like it seemed from the outside. The living room was a sea of dark red, thick carpeting, a color out of time. The room was furnished in antiques, unusual ones. I’d lived with my dad long enough to know that all the pieces were fine and valuable. There was a red velvet horsehair sofa with arms that lowered to make it a bed. Beside the sofa a very old teddy bear sat on a tricycle, surrounded by wooden blocks. A tall china cabinet held an entire collection of ruby ware behind its curved glass doors.
Dad asked Mrs. Friend where Mr. Friend was and she said he’d been called into work.
Against the wall sat apump organ. I couldn’t imagine how old it was. The keyboard was short, only forty keys, and the tones were controlled by knobs you pulled out or pushed in like a throttle. There was a carved wooden stool with a red velvet seat for the person who could figure out how to play it; just looking at the place a foot would go to depress the bellows made me shake my head.
I was introduced to Mrs. Friend and we shook hands; her nails were the longest I’d ever seen, and painted a glittery white. Mrs. Friend had a daughter a year older than me? It was hard to believe. Who knew mothers could be so…not motherly-looking? So young? She was petite (I was many inches taller already), with long black hair. Black eyes. A tan. She wore a finely woven white turtleneck with short sleeves, black pants, black shoes.
“Why don’t you come in and have some coffee anyway?” she said, and Dad said okay.
She went into the kitchen and Dad stood in the kitchen doorway, talking to her. I looked around, not touching anything, just wandered from one lovely thing to another. In the dining room area I saw anice chest, the original refrigerator. The outside appeared to be ash wood — I wondered if Dad hadnoticed this — and there were separate doors that opened with metal handles you pulled toward you. I opened the top one and saw that the wood was a frame built around a dense, gray, unusual substance — not quite marble or metal but like a combination of the two. It felt like a very old ice cube tray, the kind designed by Satan’s little ice cube tray trolls. One Christmas Eve at Rose’s party I’d been trying to crack such an evil thing and couldn’t get the metal handle to give at all. I put it down on the counter and held one end while pulling with all my might. It didn’t move and it didn’t move, and then it slammed backward and pinched a piece of my hand completely off and I still had a scar but who cared, I liked scars.
The top door of the ice chest closed with a smooth click. It was a flawless, amazing thing.
Mrs. Friend came out of the kitchen and gave me a tall glass of Coke filled with ice cubes. I liked both scars and ice cubes very much. I thanked her, and said, “This is beautiful,” resting my hand on the glassy smooth ash of the refrigerator.
“Thank you, I think so, too,” she said, and told me where they’d found it, what luck it had been. She called her daughter, who was behind a closed door listening to music I could hear through the walls. When the door opened I saw that Ghost Girl had with her two small dogs, one with a lot of hanging-down gray fur that made me nervous, and a dachshund, the only breed of dog that ever bit me. The daughter came out and she was even smaller than her mother, and looked emaciated; she seemed to weigh the equivalent of one of my legs. Even so she was striking. Her hair, too, was long and black, but thicker than Mrs. Friend’s, and when she turned her head a certain way it was so black it had ablue cast, blacker than Lindy’s, even. Her eyes were a nearly solid black, and I wondered if any light could get through them. We went into her room and it would have been clear to even the most incompetent detective that Ghost Girl was insane for Kiss. There was so much Kiss stuff in that room it looked like a checkerboard. And that was the music playing, too. Ghost put my new Queen devotion to shame, and I could see I was going to have to up the amperage, or whatever that phrase was my dad used. And perhaps — this hurt, but might be necessary — I couldn’t also give my heart to Steve Martin. I had one record of his,Let’s Get Small, and my daily music order wasA Night at the Opera, both sides;Let’s Get Small. A Day at the Races; Let’s Get Small. And the just releasedNews of the World, which that unpredictable Julie Newman had gotten me for my birthday even though I hadn’t s
aid a word to her about my Queen conversion and never took those records to her house and so she had just reached up into the air and pulled down the best present I’d gotten for a long time.News of the World, which wasstunningly good;Let’s Get Small. I had the whole record memorized and could quote from it at any spot, a fact which amazed Mother and caused Melinda to threaten me with violence not even invented yet.
“Do you think it’s possible to be true to two different things, a band and a comedian,” I asked the Ghost Girl, sitting on her bed, “or do I have to pick one?”
She held the nervous little dogs. The gray-haired one shook and I couldn’t figure out where its face was and I hoped they stayed over there with her because my instincts had somehow gotten the idea that all shrunken dogs were wormy and I couldn’t stop thinking it even though the house I was sitting in was immaculate. Mrs. Friend was not in any way the wormy-dog type. And yet.
“I don’t know,” GG said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her. She had the accent, too, the Indiana hillbilly twang my mom had told me a writer named Kurt Vonnegut had compared to the sound of a monkey wrench being thrown into a moving engine. He didn’t like it, was what I read there. My own inflections tended to be less Indiana and more Kentucky, something I’d picked up from Mom Mary and Dad and I don’t know where-all, but I had to pay close attention or I sounded like someone married to her first cousin, both of us the children of first cousins.
“I’ve only got the one,” GG said, and when I realized she was talking she continued, “band.”
“Well, you’re probably right.” Which was true but maybe if I considered the problem whilelistening to Steve Martin that would help me decide.
She didn’t talk much and she was very ghosty but I could see that the New Friends’ Daughter was as sweet and genuine as a person can be, if that person also happens to be so sad she wants to die and doesn’t have one single word to explain why it is so. I’d never met a sadder person in my life, not at a funeral, not even at the nursing home where I sometimes played the piano for my brother while he preached and led hymns. Those nursing home people had been the undisputed champions of sad until I met the Ghost Girl, who, like the old ones, stirred a whole lot of confusion into her sadness. She didn’t know how to take even the very next step, it seemed, and I liked her instantly and wished I was smarter and knew something to say. But I didn’t know anything. Neither one of us did, but at least I felt fine about it and assumed I’d know more later.
