by Haven Kimmel
“Melinda says she takes the puppies when they’re at their cutest, when they’ve got all that extra skin, and just tosses them in a pot of boiling water with some carrots, and that’s her dinner.”
We watched Edythe in silence for a few moments as she walked imperially down her sidewalk on Broad Street, her hands clasped together behind her back, her massive shelf of a chest thrust forward, her stride that of a field marshal about to bestow a visit on the degraded troops.
“Let me tell you something else, Julie,” I whispered. “I’ve been counting the number of days in a row she wears that same dress, and she’s up to twenty-three.”
“Whoo,” Julie said.
WHEN I TOLD MY MOM about the puppy stew she just said pshaw. I asked her wasn’t it a fact that Edythe was all the time trying to kill my best cat, PeeDink, and she said Edythe just didn’t like cats in her yard, and that PeeDink always got away safely. I asked her wasn’t it true that at our last church picnic Edythe had brought cookies that appeared to be covered in snot?
“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” Mom said, trying to shoo me outside.
“What were they made of, then?”
“Well. I’m sure I can’t say. But only because I didn’t taste them.”
“Ah ha! You didn’t taste them because they came out of Ede’s nose, that’s why!”
My mom snorted. “You’re shameless. We should feel nothing but pity for that old woman.”
“Pity?!” Now this got my goat, as Mary Ball down the street was fond of saying. “Is it or is it not true that that ‘poor old woman’ tried to kill me in my baby bed?”
For just a moment Mom looked like she would acquiesce, then pushed me out the front door instead. “That was a long time ago. You’ve got to learn to let go of things, honey, or at least stop bringing them up. She’s a very troubled person.”
I WAS CONVINCED Edythe ate puppy stew in order to give her the strength to put spells on people. I thought this because my sister had also mentioned, in passing, that if Edythe got me in a hard-core eye-lock she could draw me right into her house, which was unimaginable. When I pressed for the details of what Edythe would do to me once she had me, Melinda became uncharacteristically silent.
“Tell me! I have to know! I have to know how to protect myself!”
“Well, sweetheart,” she began, while gently trying to press down a clump of my gravity-defying hair, “you know she hates all of us, but especially you. There isn’t really anything you can do.”
I felt the urge to shimmy up my sister’s body like a panicked little monkey. “Why?!” I wailed. “Why does she hate me so much? I’ve never done anything to her!”
“She hates you because she and Mom used to be best friends, and then you came and broke up their friendship by demanding so much attention. Also she just hates little kids. But especially babies. Especially you.”
I sat down in the yard, defeated. Half of my butt was falling into a big earthworm hole I’d dug in the middle of the night. I was excellent at catching earthworms. I had my own grub box and everything, and sometimes when I went fishing with my dad we’d have so many worms left over I’d just toss them out to the fish, like dessert.
“But didn’t she know I was going to get born when Mom was pregnant for me? Couldn’t they have just worked something out then?”
Melinda looked off into the distance, still patting the top of my head.
“What? Lindy. What.”
“I don’t think I should be the one to tell you.”
“Aaaaahhhh! Tell me what?!” I knew from Marcus Welby, M.D., that this could and did sometimes happen, that bad news was followed by more and more bad news, until finally the doctor was telling you that you had to give up coffee, which I knew for a fact would have killed my dad.
“Mom doesn’t want you to know yet, but I think you’re old enough.” She paused for dramatic effect, as my heart leaped around in my chest like a bluegill on a line. “You’re adopted. Mom was never pregnant for you.”
I had to lie straight down in the dirt. Oh, my god. This explained so many things. I couldn’t think of any right off- hand, but I knew my life was about to become tragically clearer to me.
When the sky stopped twirling I jumped up and ran straight in the house to my mother, who was sitting in her corner of the couch, which by this time was a total nest. She was reading Isaac Asimov, the love of her life, and eating popcorn from the night before.
I skidded to a stop in front of her and gave her a look of hardest accusation. Without looking up at me she said, “You should brush that worm stuff off before you come in the house.”
“As if that matters! How could you not tell me I was adopted?! Don’t you think I have a right to know? And who were my real parents anyway?” I was trying to be mature, but periodically spit flew.
“Gypsies, honey.” She had still not looked up from Isaac Asimov Explains the Whole of Reality and Then Some.
“Gypsies? Really?” This was somewhat compelling. I sat down.
“Yes, I thought we managed a very wise trade.”
“Gypsies? In Mooreland?”
“They were just passing through. We heard them long before they arrived, because their horses and their wagons are all covered with bells. It’s quite lovely. And they were led into town by a pack of wolves, who, during the full moon, stand up and preach.” She looked up for a moment, remembering. “They were such a sight.”
There were at least forty-two questions I needed to ask, but only one that really mattered. “What did you trade for me?”
Mom looked at me lovingly. “A green velvet bag.”
“A velvet bag?! Who wants a stupid bag?”
“Well, it was a very special bag. It had no bottom.”
“Ha! Joke’s on them!” I had to tip over a little for laughing at the retarded gypsies, then straightened back up as I realized I was laughing at my own family.
“Oh, it looked like it had a bottom. It looked just like a normal bag, except that you could just keep putting stuff in it. It was like the human heart, sweetie: there was no end to what it could hold.” My mom insisted on saying such things, even though almost no one understood what she meant. My dad sometimes called her Addlebrain because she read so many books.
“If you had such a great bag”—its uses escaping me for the moment—“then why did you trade it for me?”
“The gypsies were camped out down at the school playground, and one night your dad and I were drawn by the preaching wolves. And just before we left, we peeked inside one of the wagons, and there you were, lying on a sheepskin rug in a pool of lantern light. And we took one look at you and it was just like falling in love.”
“Ugh.” I made a little throwing-up face.
She picked up a few pieces of popcorn and looked back down at her book. “Plus, you were born with a tail.”
I looked at her, completely speechless, my mouth hanging open exactly like a creature with a tail.
“We had it removed so your pants would fit. Also we didn’t want you to suffer in school.”
I jumped up and headed for the door. “Okay, thanks, that’s good enough for me, I’m just going to go outside for a minute and . . .”
My sister was rocking back and forth very gently in the porch swing, studying her lines for Up the Down Staircase.
I stood on the front step for a moment, contemplating the news. Mom and Edythe had been best friends because they both read books and they were both basically insane. I had heard from the Hickses, who had stayed close to both Edythe and mother, that the two of them had had some very interesting conversations before I came along. Okay. And then Mom and Dad picked me up from the gypsies and Mom had to tend to me, plus there was all the trouble of having my tail removed, and Mom and Edythe couldn’t talk as much anymore, and Edythe got really mad and jealous and tried to smother me in my baby bed while Mom was sweeping the front porch, but Mom had a premonition and ran in and caught her and then chased her across the stre
et swinging the broom at her, screaming like a banshee, whatever that was. And Edythe had gone on hating me just as much as the day I arrived in the caravan, and nothing would ever stop it, unless she could lure me into her house with the evil eye and squeeze my thumbs. The story snapped itself clear in my mind, like a mousetrap. The most important thing of all was, of course, that I was a gypsy.
“Did she tell you?” Melinda asked, still looking at her play.
“Oh. Yeah, she told me.” And I stepped off the front porch and headed for the drugstore for a lemon phosphate. I took my gypsy blood and my tail and walked right past Edythe’s house instead of crossing the street like I always did, in order to show my sister a thing or two, but just as I reached the edge of her yard, Edythe stepped out her front door whistling and I had to take off running for my life, even though I was wheezing so hard I saw stars.
THE DRUGSTORE WAS OWNED and operated by a man named, no kidding, Doc Holiday. It had a tin ceiling that must have been twenty feet high, and old wooden ceiling fans. There was a marble counter and twisty black iron stools and a soda fountain. The candy cases were made of oak and curved glass, and the doors slid open on ball bearings, delicately ticking. In the back of the long, rather narrow store were booths and tables where kids carved their initials and left their old chewing gum, and the west wall was all shelves of medicines and toiletries. My mom said that some of the medicine was so old it had undoubtedly come over on the Ark. There was a magazine stand, and a twirling rack that held comic books.
Many people found Doc Holiday’s personality objectionable, but I appreciated how one always knew where one stood with him, which was too close and making too much noise. He never even looked at people as he shouted at them, which was also reassuring to me, as if he were actually yelling at someone on the other side of the front window, or into the rear bathrooms. Doc dressed like a pharmacist, but asking him for advice was a mistake. I was once in the drugstore when a woman asked if Bag Balm was good for diaper rash.
“I don’t know! What are you asking me for?!” he bellowed, looking north.
Doc was not in the Rx business, nor was he in the business of meddling in other people’s affairs. He didn’t step into fights or defend small children from bullies. The bottom line for me was that I wasn’t safe in his establishment, not from any fate that might befall me, and particularly not from Edythe. At the Marathon station all the Newmans and all of their mechanics were on full alert when I was there, and would tell me exactly where Edythe was if they saw her approaching, and Big Dave had even figured out a way for me to climb into a little filthy tool closet if it looked like she was actually coming into the station. At the post office I had once tried to climb right inside our tiny mailbox when Edythe came in behind me, and from that time on the postmaster, Ralph, had let me hide behind the Dutch door leading to the mail-sorting room when necessary.
But Doc Holiday, who wore bowties and suspenders and had a perfectly round, bald head, and who in all ways appeared to be a gentleman, was a man of no sympathy. Once when Edythe was chasing me I had blindly run behind the counter, and he instantly and unceremoniously picked me up by the back of my shirt and plopped me right back in harm’s way.
To be perfectly candid, Doc and I had a history.
My third-grade teacher had been, in my opinion, the meanest woman in the history of the Mooreland Elementary School, and a bad teacher besides. She once lost her temper with my friend Dana and shook her until Dana was wobbly. She routinely slapped children for not bathing. Her hair was dyed a pink color and set in a permanent wave and she never taught us anything. We never read any good books or did any good science or learned how to divide. I spent the whole year so bored I wanted to smash my head into the radiator. Then one day in the spring a tornado came, and our classroom was on the second floor, and when we could actually see the tornado in the distance we turned to our teacher to find out what to do and she was completely gone. Julie was standing defiantly in front of a closed window, staring mesmerized at the oncoming tornado, and our teacher was gone. I finally had to drag Julie under a desk, using my unexpected emergency strength, which I now knew came from the gypsies.
So one afternoon in the summer after my third-grade year I was standing at the drugstore counter watching Doc Holiday make my lemon phosphate, when in came my wretched, former teacher. I will never, ever know what compelled me to say what I did. It was probably just a misplaced desire to connect to a man I’d known my whole life, who had yet to call me by name.
As she sat down in a booth many feet away from me, I leaned across the counter and said, conspiratorially, “Speaking of the Wicked Witch of the West, huh? There’s no place like home, is there?”
For the first and only time in my life, Doc looked me in the eye. “She’s my wife.” He was very quiet, and so, in fact, was the whole planet.
“She is?” I whispered. I could hear myself blinking.
“What’s her name?” he asked, still drilling holes into my miserable face.
“Mrs. Holiday,” I muttered, swallowing. I could no longer look at him. I wished, in fact, for blindness.
He handed me my drink. “That’s twenty-six cents.” I handed him a quarter and a penny, as I did every day, and slouched out of the store.
I knew that in an emergency I could never count on Doc, and so I tried to keep my guard up at all times, but sometimes I got sorely distracted, notably when the new Josie and the Pussycats comic came out, which it had on this particular afternoon.
I was standing in the corner behind the magazine rack, trying to surreptitiously read a comic I had no intention of purchasing. When my instincts kicked in and I finally looked up, Edythe was heading straight for me. The bottom of her black dress was so tattered it looked like lace, and her long, white braid was coming undone, sending down strings of dry, dirty hair. Her hands were, as always, clasped behind her back, right where a bustle would be, but I knew what they looked like because I had seen them in church. Her fingernails were quite long, and filled with dirt. Her skin was so pale that a spiderweb of blue veins was visible under the grime on the back of her hands.
She was staring right at me and grinning. I stood frozen, desperately trying to breathe through the little pinhole left in my esophagus. I heard ringing in my ears, and began to pray to the baby Jesus that it would just be over quickly, that she would completely hypnotize me and drag me down to her terrible house and finish me off in whatever way she had planned, and that I would not feel any of it, like a gazelle being eaten alive by a hyena on Wild Kingdom.
Edythe leaned closer to my face. I wheezed. She got closer and closer, and when she was only about three inches from my nose she quickly and sharply clacked her false teeth together like a castanet, which in turn waggled her dreadful and fascinating whiskers and caused her seven chins to undulate in gray waves.
As my vision dimmed and my knees began to melt, I heard Doc Holiday say quite loudly to the ice cream freezer, “That’s enough, Edythe.”
Still looking right at me, she straightened up and laughed out loud, clapping her hands in front of her like a child at a carnival. Her mouth was a dark cavern. She turned so precisely the heels of her black, lace-up boots nearly clicked together, and she marched out of the drugstore whistling “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
I slid limply into a booth at the back of the store and put my head down, trying to catch my breath. Before I knew it Doc Holiday was standing over me, offering me a lemon phosphate.
“Talk about the Wicked Witch, huh?” he said, grimly.
“That woman is going to be the death of me,” I said, still staring at my own shoes.
“Well, what are you telling me about it for?!” he bellowed at the candy case. “That’s twenty-six cents.”
I slipped the change out of my pocket and placed it gently in his dry, old hand.
WHEN I GOT HOME my dad was under the raised-up hood of his truck, working on something. He often tinkered with his own engines, which caused me
no end of worry, because the hoods of Chevrolet vehicles made in the late sixties and early seventies weighed approximately three thousand pounds, and if they happened to fall, they simply cut a body in half.
I walked up beside him and decided to give him the what-for, even if it was, potentially, his last day as a whole man.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the gypsies?” I demanded.
He turned and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Been talking to your mother, huh?”
“Yes, and she told me the whole story, so don’t even try to lie and make me feel better. And what’s this about a tail?”
“Well, we all used to have tails, as I understand it.”
I realized in a flash that he was talking about evolution, which was a flat-out sin. “Ooooh, Daddy! You don’t want to be thinking that way. Here, listen to this song I learned in Sunday school:
Man is not the son of a monkey;
He was raised by God’s own hand.
And he never lived up in a coconut tree—
He was born upon the land.
I don’t believe in evolution,
’Cause the Bible says it’s true . . .
That if you monkey around with sin
It’ll make a monkey out of you!
“That’s a very nice song. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
He was doing something under the hood that required that he study a certain place for a really long time, and then take a ratchet and turn it and turn it while making little huffing noises, and then study and study some more. When my dad concentrated really hard he chewed on the side of his tongue, which I knew and he didn’t and I wasn’t about to tell him.
“Daddy, do you think Edythe knows I ain’t really a Christian?”
“Don’t say ain’t. I don’t know. She sees you in church three times a week, doesn’t she?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, I’m guessing that she thinks of herself as a Christian because she’s there, so she probably thinks you are because you’re there. See what I mean?”
