A Girl Named Zippy

by Haven Kimmel

  Polly cried and cried. She loved her brother the way I loved my sister, even loved the stranger who had come home in his place. She cried not because he might go to jail for the rest of his life, but because she didn’t want people to think ill of him, and even more, she wanted it to never have happened. She wanted to undo it all.

  It wasn’t until she finished her story that I realized how hard my heart was pounding, and how much I just wanted to get up and leave the room. Even without extensive tact conditioning, I realized I was stuck in the situation I had created, a situation in which a girl was sobbing out a story I had no business demanding.

  I went to Mrs. O’Dell’s desk and brought Polly a box of Kleenex. Old women always know the value of tissues. She was just wiping her face and blowing her nose when Mrs. Denver came in to find us.

  “Hey, girls! Come on out to the playground and join us. No use sitting in here moping.” Mrs. Denver could be crazily cheerful.

  I looked at my teacher and realized that she thought I had taken Polly under my wing. She thought I was trying to help her, which was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I suddenly felt very, very busy. I had so many things going on. All my life I had heard that you can’t help everyone, and Polly, quite obviously, was everyone.

  Mrs. Denver took Polly by the hand and led her outside. I walked a few steps behind them. Mrs. Denver’s entrance had prevented me from having to respond to Polly’s story in any way, which was a miracle of luck. I watched the two of them head toward the open field where kids were gathered in clusters, playing games, Mrs. Denver scuttling in her nervous, good-willed way, Polly already taller than the adult walking next to her, and cumbersome.

  I sat down on the steps of the fourth-grade shack. I had never heard, never imagined a story that featured a mountain of dead women and children. I had never heard of a man’s hair going white from violence and shock.

  I crossed my arms over my knees and rested my head on them. Ants scurried back and forth across the sidewalk in what appeared to be a prescribed route. I had yet to hear a satisfactory explanation about why ants carried their dead right back into the ant village and down the ant hole, but that’s what some of them were doing as I watched. My mom had suggested to me that if I didn’t know the scientific answer for something, I should choose the most obvious explanation. And the obvious explanation for why the ants hauled their dead back home was, clearly, compassion.

  Halfway across the field Polly had stopped and turned back toward me. She was standing perfectly still, and when I looked up at her she waved, tentatively. I waved back, sighed, and began to make my way toward her.

  * * *

  ARISEN

  My mom and I were in my parents’ bedroom, discussing what I would wear to the Easter sunrise service at church.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Yes. You are. We have this problem every year, and every year you have to go, and yes, you are going to wear a dress,” my mom said patiently.

  “I’m not going and I’m not wearing a dress.”

  Mom didn’t answer. She just maddeningly continued flipping through old dress patterns, trying to find one that might cause the least amount of rioting.

  “Mother, do you know why it’s called ‘sunrise service’?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Because it’s held at sunrise. Now, I just can’t be expected to get up at that time, unless I’m going fishing.”

  She put down the pattern she was studying and looked at me over the top of her glasses. “This is a thing that troubles me,” she began. “You are perfectly willing to get up in the dead of night to go fishing with your father, but I have to fight you to get you to do it once a year, one time a year, with me.”

  I threw myself face down on her bed and began kicking my feet so hard her bedspread flew up in the air and covered me. Mom was all the time using unfair arguments, and sometimes I could figure out where she had cheated and sometimes a reply just escaped me. This time, though, I got her.

  “Aha!” I said, sitting up quickly. “I have to go to church with you three times a week! That’s something like six thousand times a year. How many times do I get to go fishing with Dad?”

  “That’s beside the point.” She was terse, and turned back to the patterns and the sewing machine.

  “Also,” I said, unable to control the momentum of how right I was, “it’s freezing cold outside on Easter Sunday and every year I just stand there with my teeth clacking, and singing outside in a dress in the freezing cold is the most stupidest thing I can think of.”

  “You can’t say ‘most stupidest.’ Stupidest is not a word, and even if it were, it implies most.”

  “And also I don’t even like Easter. It’s the stupidest of all the holidays. What kind of a retard would believe in a giant bunny who happens to not even come to my house. Can you explain that, please?”

  “Which part?” she said, looking back at me.

  “Why the Easter Bunny doesn’t come to my house.”

  “Because Easter is a religious holiday. I don’t believe in the candy part of it.”

  “Well, that’s a fine thing! You should see the baskets the Easter Bunny leaves at Rose’s house! Which he does because William and Joyce believe in the candy part! Rose and Maggie get enough candy for the rest of the year, plus sometimes one of those little soap lambs they like to eat.”

  Mom had apparently found the pattern she was looking for, because she was studying it in a pleased way which flat-out caused my stomach to sink.

  “Look at this one, sweetie,” she said, holding it out for me. “I could make it out of blue-and-white gingham, and it’s got this little collar that I could embroider flowers on. It will be perfect for spring.”

  I turned my head, put my hands over my ears and began humming “Twinkle, Twinkle.” I was trying to be very clear about seeing and hearing no evil.

  I felt her gently removing my hands from my head. “Listen to me,” she said, turning my head to face her. “Easter is about Jesus rising up into Heaven after he was crucified. It’s about how he still lives with and for us.”

  “Mom,” I said, for what must have been the eighty-fourth time. “How can you believe such a thing?!”

  She put her hands in her lap and sighed. “Because I have to, angel. I don’t have any choice.”

  I stood up and looked at her for a second. My mom was nothing but a mystery sometimes. As I reached for the door I said, “Well, I don’t have to believe it.” And she let me go with the last word.

  IN ADDITION TO ALL the humiliations I was heir to, when Mom made me a dress that I would have rather eaten hominy than wear, I was forced to try it on while it still had pins in it. Whoever thought of such a thing? In a normal world, if I had said to my mom that I was just going to slip on these jeans and this T-shirt, which P.S. were full of straight pins, she would have felt my head for a fever. I had to stand on a three-legged milking stool for the punishment, too, which was none too steady but the perfect height for measuring a hem. Sometimes my sister was there to assist, and she was not against me getting stuck by a pin. In fact, she was always delighted by the prospect of me in a dress.

  “Are you going to make her brush her teeth, too?” Melinda asked, gleefully.

  “No,” I answered, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “Yes,” Mom said, around the pins she had between her teeth.

  “Maybe we could pull her hair back in two little barrettes, like this. Oh, no, wait, that just makes her wings more noticeable. Hmmm. Maybe we could pull all of her hair up on top of her head and slick it into a little curl with some Vaseline, like you used to do when she was a baby.” She had her hands all in my hair, making me kind of sleepy and mad.

  “Lindy, don’t pick,” Mom said, but she was distracted.

  “I know! A hat! She can wear a little Easter bonnet, like I used to. Have you ever had an Easter bonnet?” she asked, tilting her head in a quizzical way, as if she didn’t k
now that I’d poke out my own eye before I’d wear anything except a proper knit cap on my head.

  “And if you’re worried about your legs getting cold, let me suggest some nice, fuzzy tights, the kind that don’t go all the way to your crotch, but stop just in the middle of your thigh.”

  I swung out at her, but she ducked.

  “Girls!” my mom said, dropping two or three pins out of her exasperated mouth, which I would find later with my bare feet.

  I narrowed up my eyes at my sister in a furious way. “Is there a reason you torture me so much?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, yes, there is. But I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.” And she straightened up the hem of the dress just a little and managed to poke me fourteen times.

  “Mom, I’m counting to five and then I’m getting down off this stool.”

  She didn’t even look at me. “You’ll get down when I’m done, sweetheart, and not before. Now straighten up.”

  I straightened up. At the very end of the ordeal they fastened the little collar around my neck, which was just a fraction too tight. It was, in fact, made of blue-and-white gingham, and my mother had, as she threatened, embroidered a variety of pastel flowers on the collar. In order not to choke on it I counted in my head: only one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine more years until I could leave home. Eighteen was the age that Julie and I planned to both buy our own farm and hit the open road, in no particular order.

  MOM SHOOK MY SHOULDER GENTLY. I burrowed more deeply into my sleeping bag, until all that was sticking out was my hair sprouts. As soon as I had my face inside my sleeping bag, I knew for certain how desperately I didn’t want to leave it. It was incredibly warm, and there is simply nothing more comforting than the smell of one’s own bed. I was wearing my favorite flannel pajamas, too, which kind of stuck to the inside of my sleeping bag like Jesus and the Apostles on the flannel-board at church. The pajamas were bright yellow, with brown cowboys and lassos. I refused to give them up, even though the pant legs stopped just below my knees. Besides having my hair problem and my face problem and teeth too big, and besides being always the tallest, skinniest girl in my class, I had what my sister called “the unfortunate situation” of being deformed. Most clothes that we bought in a store came in sets, and if the shirt fit me even reasonably well, the pants were too short. We had tried buying the sets with the pants the right length, which meant my mom had to take in the waist, and the shirt fell right off my shoulders. I was thinking maybe the solution would be to find the girl who was deformed exactly the opposite of me, and we could share.

  “You’ve got to get up now,” my mom was saying, as if she was in her right mind.

  “Mom!” I sat up angrily. “It must be four-thirty in the morning! What are you doing waking me up?!”

  “It’s exactly four-thirty in the morning,” she said, happily bustling around the den. I could see that she had laid out the dreaded Easter dress on the couch like a shroud.

  Dad was sitting in his chair with his arms crossed. When I met his eye he just shrugged one shoulder, as if to say he was entirely helpless in what was about to happen to me.

  I grumbled out of bed and stood shivering next to the coal stove. I was instantly cold in the way that causes the spine to shrink up. In desperation, I put my forehead against the black enamel stove and burned it, just a little. Then I tried to straighten up, but failed. I scrunched over again, put my forehead against the stove, and burned it. After I did it the third time I had no choice but to look at my father.

  “You want to just open the door and stick your head inside?” he said, with his arms still crossed.

  “Daddy. Are you going to get me out of this, yes or no.”

  “No.”

  I headed for the bathroom, which turned out to be much warmer than the den, because Dad had gone in and turned on the heater, well before Mom woke me up. I sat on the floor in front of it, scrunched up into a ball. I heard my mom call from the den.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Brushing my teeth!” I shouted, under the door.

  “Why isn’t the water running?”

  I jumped up and turned the water on, then quick opened the medicine cabinet and jostled the toothpaste around noisily. Unable to think of any more delays, I walked back into the den miserably.

  “Okay,” I said, holding my arms up in surrender. “Put the dress on me.”

  But because it was so cold outside I had to first put on a scratchy undershirt, and then a slip that I would have sworn hadn’t fit me two years ago, and then the fuzzy tights that stopped in the middle of my thighs, and then the dress. By the time I picked up my little pink New Testament and said good-bye to my dad, I also had on snow boots, a scarf, my gloves, and my winter coat with the hood up and tied.

  Mom and I trudged the one block down the street. It was still dark, but I could see a little light on the horizon. We would gather in the meadow behind the church, which happened to face the east, so we would see the sunrise in its glory. There were three churches in Mooreland, and they all had sunrise services, but we were the only ones with a meadow, which was, really, no kind of claim if you didn’t want to be there in the first place.

  Pastor Eddie and his wife, Shirley, were standing in the meeting place. There would be no more than fifteen or twenty of us, because common sense can prevail even with the most faithful. Shirley had brought two baskets of lilies, which looked especially beautiful on the still winter ground, and I could see that under their coats, everyone was dressed in their best clothes. The Hicks family were all there, making up more than half the assembled number, and so there was the sweetness and festivity that they took everywhere with them. There is a kind of wildness that grows up among people who have gathered in the dark, and we all felt a little giddy.

  After we had stood in silence for just a few cold minutes, Pastor Eddie raised his head and said, “I’m so glad to see you all here today.”

  And a few of the grown-ups who had no self-control, including my mother, said amen.

  He told us that there was no greater day of celebration anywhere on the calendar, not even Christmas, because this was the day that Jesus truly revealed himself as Lord, by throwing off the shackles of death that no other human being had ever escaped. Then he asked us to go backward in the story a little bit, and think about those days that Jesus spent on the cross, and how his mother must have felt watching him die so slowly. How she spent every waking hour at the foot of the cross, offering him comfort, as we must do now, in our hearts. And how, at the very moment of his death, the whole world, indeed, the entire universe, was simply silent. And we all stood silent.

  I felt, suddenly, wide awake. The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and I looked at the faces of the Friends gathered around me. Some had closed their eyes; some, like my mother, were looking at the sky. At the fence bordering our meadow and a neighboring farmer’s field, a small group of horses had gathered, and were standing perfectly still and watching us. Their breath steamed out in the cold. Down the street the bells of the North Christian Church began to ring, and it was morning.

  Eddie finished the story of Jesus’s death, and how he was carried to the tomb, and the rolled stone, and his appearance to the five thousand, and then we stood in a circle and sang “Christ Arose,” “He Lives,” and “I Serve a Risen Savior.”

  I looked up at my mother as her voice rang out above all the others. She had made an Easter dress for me, but not one for herself. She was wearing an old gray dress Mom Mary had given her, out of season, and a red plaid coat that looked like a horse blanket, with buttons. She looked down and saw me staring at her, and took her gloveless hand out of her coat and rested it on my head. I leaned up against her and put my hand in her warm pocket, where she always kept some Kleenex and those Vick’s cough drops that taste brown.

  Every year I forgot how short the sunrise service really was; how quickly we were inside the church for coffee and sweet rolls. We would e
ven get to go home for a few hours, then come back for the regular Easter service, the one the normal people attended, including my rotten sister, who with her husband slept right through the sunrise on Jesus’s high holiday.

  On the way home, Mom stopped me just as we reached Reed and Mary Ball’s house.

  “Look! Do you see those flowers? Those are called crocus. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. I’d seen the crocus every year of my life, and they always just looked like fierce little weeds to me. “They sure are purple,” I managed, which caused Mom to nod her head as if that were the whole point of them.

  In the afternoon of that day, after she had helped me out of my dress and my tights, Mom walked me down to William and Joyce’s, where the Easter Bunny had come, and Rose and Maggie met me at the door with their brimming baskets of eggs and chocolates and soap, and just like every year before, they told me to take as much as I wanted—they had more than they could ever finish.

  * * *

  THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

  I briefly took up with a little Holiness convert girl named Sissy Bellings. One of Sissy’s front teeth always pointed north, and every day she wore one of her dead Granny’s dresses, which drooped where her Granny used to keep her bosoms, and hung unevenly to the floor. Sissy’s dun-colored braid reached the small of her back, and little wisps of hair slipped free and framed her face. I found Sissy very exotic, not just for the tooth and the dresses, but because of the way she always sat alone with a Holiness look on her face.

  Sissy was the half sister (or maybe the whole sister, no one knew for sure) of Sammy Bellings, a mean little girl with a flat face I was quite fond of. We were all in the same grade. Sissy and Sammy and their fifteen siblings lived together in a two-room house next to the diner, and not one of them was anything like the other. There were babies of them, and one girl old enough to have babies of her own. One high school boy called Trick was so pretty he looked like an angel on a postcard, only with a good tan and big muscles. There was a retarded boy who spent all his life riding a tiny bicycle, and another boy, also with scant resources in the brain region, who loved rock’n’roll and refused to bathe. We called him Smarty. He was in the fourth grade for the fourth time. Smarty drove our poor teacher, Mrs. Denver, to bitter distraction. One spring afternoon when it came time for recess, Smarty asked Mrs. Denver if he could stay inside with her for the fifth day in a row. Exasperated, Mrs. Denver stood up and shouted, “Oh, good Lord! Why don’t you just go outside and blow some stink off!” We all laughed so hard that the little epileptic boy peed in his pants and Mrs. Denver started to cry.