Skipped Parts

by Tim Sandlin

  I’d never heard my mother laugh before.

  Lydia mostly liked to comment on things. She didn’t really care to do anything and laughing requires some kind of doing. I didn’t know if I liked this turn of events or not.

  When the slide finally petered out, she was lying on her back with both arms out in a crucifixion look. Hank slowly stood up and brushed off his face, but Lydia didn’t move a muscle. I flashed on paralysis and death. The three of us all made it to her at the same time. I knelt next to her head and touched her limp shoulder. “Can you move?”

  Lydia smiled. “Isn’t the air pretty.”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  She sat up with her hands around her knees. “I was just admiring the sky. Do you mind?”

  “You never admired the sky before. I thought you were crippled.”

  “Why can’t a person admire the sky without their kid calling for an ambulance?”

  I looked at Maurey who seemed to know what Lydia was talking about. They made eye contact. What I thought was the word: pregnant.

  Lydia struggled to her feet. “That had a high entertainment value. Let’s do it again.”

  ***

  I wish I could claim that I caught the historical significance of watching The Ed Sullivan Show in the Pierces’ family room that night. Kennedy day I knew we were involved in something bigger than us, but Beatles night I was considerably more wrapped up in me and the baby thing than any history-unfolding deal.

  My brain was stuck on the first joke I ever memorized. Lord only knows how old I was, but I must have been young because I thought you could tell a joke five thousand times and it would still be funny. It’s a wonder Lydia and Casper didn’t slap me upside the head.

  I would stand real straight and recite, “Mary had a little lamb,” then I’d hesitate a millisecond before screaming, “and the doctor fainted.” I got the biggest kick out of that.

  Buddy was home, sitting in his Stratolounger, taking apart the trigger doogie on a thirty-ought-six. He spread all the little pieces on a cloth on a TV tray. Petey played Candy Land and he cheated. I saw him. Maurey lay on her stomach on the floor with a pillow under her chest and her chin propped on both hands.

  She raised one foot, then lowered it and raised the other one. I watched her instead of Topo Gigio, the Italian mechanical mouse. I pretended I was the baby in her. It would be dark and hot and wet. Really wet. I imagined the baby as a wet mouse. It would be a girl. We could name her Vanessa or Chadron; or maybe Nancy since we’d both read over thirty Nancy Drew books.

  Maurey would marry me if we had a daughter. Buddy would make her.

  Buddy dropped a tiny screwdriver and said “Shit,” just as Annabel came in the room with a tray of cocoa mugs. Maurey’s mother must have been a cocoa junkie and I think it affected Maurey’s outlook.

  “Don’t talk like a cowboy in front of the children,” she said.

  “I am a cowboy.”

  Petey jumped to his feet, singing, “Shit-shit-shit, shit-shit-shit,” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” He danced around the room in his pajamas, driving everyone right up the wall. If Maurey’s and my kid acted like that I would put him in Culver Military Academy.

  Buddy raised his arm in a mock backhand and Petey ran screaming to hide behind Annabel’s legs. “Don’t let Daddy beat me. Don’t let Daddy beat me.”

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Annabel said.

  I was always intrigued by the flow of the Pierce family. I think the only way you can act cruddy to a family member is when you deep down inside care for them. Lydia and Caspar were formal and polite because they didn’t like each other. Anything approaching honesty at the manor house would have caused bloodshed.

  “Shut up,” Maurey ordered.

  Ed Sullivan is like the American role model. The guy couldn’t do anything—couldn’t act, sing, draw, throw a ball—absolutely talentless in every way, not to mention he had the posture of a train-station beggar. Yet he was a king-hell big deal. People sucked up to Ed like he was president of the world or something. No wonder kids grow up weird.

  I was watching Maurey breathe, trying to see if there was a baby in there, so I missed the first part, but when she said, “Shut up,” I looked at Ed hunched over by a curtain.

  He said, “And now…the Beatles.”

  The audience went nuts—you had to be there—as four guys in wimp clothes with their hair combed forward broke into “All My Loving.” I didn’t know it was “All My Loving” at the time. Maurey told me the next day at school after Kim Schmidt told her.

  “Sissies,” Buddy said through his bush of a beard.

  “I think they’re cute,” Annabel said.

  Petey threw a Candy Land marker at the screen.

  The weird part was the screaming girls. No way could they hear the music; they were making too much noise. The camera blew off the Beatles to focus on these regular high school-looking girls with tears streaming away and their hands up in helpless supplication. I can’t stand seeing strong emotions. Makes me nervous.

  Maurey’s right foot was up in the air going side to side with the song. She held the cocoa with both hands and blew steam toward the television. When the two Beatles on the left leaned into the same microphone, the scream intensity doubled.

  “If they’re so hot why don’t they buy a separate microphone for each guy,” I said.

  Buddy had an answer. “Cause they like to stand close to each other. England is all boys who like other boys. I was there in the war.”

  Annabel did a tsk action with her tongue.

  My mind said “Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant,” over and over. I hate that when you get a word in there and it won’t go away no matter what you’re doing on the outside.

  They sang five songs. “She Loves You” was pretty good and the last one, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was okay. The others were somewhat drippy for me, though it was hard to tell with all the screaming. For sure they were better than the Singing Nun.

  The next act was some dogs who wore fu-fu clothes and rode bicycles. They reminded me of Otis, whose leg I shot off. I’d been in town six months and shot one dog and gotten one girl pregnant.

  Maurey got a comb and stood behind me, combing my hair forward like a Beatle. Embarrassed me to no end.

  “You’ll look cool at school,” she said.

  “Being from the East causes me enough trash. If I look like an English wimp Coach Stebbins will hate me sure.”

  “Coach Stebbins hates you?” Annabel asked.

  “He thinks I’m an outsider.”

  “You are,” Buddy said. “But you’ll get over it.” He held up the rifle barrel and sighted through the tube right at me. Gave me a funny feeling in the spine.

  Maurey stood back to admire my hair. “This’ll drive Chuckette Morris crazy. She’ll be all over you in homeroom.”

  “I don’t want Chuckette Morris all over me in homeroom.”

  “Have to fight ’em off, huh?” Buddy said.

  Maurey smiled at me. “With a stick.”

  ***

  Sometime after midnight, I came wide awake. I lay there with my eyes open, trying to piece together the room, where I was, why, when. What had caused me to come to. A coal glowed bright over by my desk, then dimmed. Lydia’s head was silhouetted by the window. The coal moved down and she flicked a part of it into my trash can.

  “I was so sick the day I found out I was pregnant with you. I’ve never been so sick. It was worse than I’d dreamed.” She inhaled on the cigarette. “The doctor told Caspar first and Caspar came into my room and hit me in the face. The only time he ever hit me. So far.”

  The coal went bright again. “I fell into my dollhouse and broke the roof.”

  She was quiet a long time. I was afraid to move—she seemed so delicate, fragile—as if raising my head could chan
ge her. Lydia finally went on. “I was so sick I didn’t care that he hit me. I just wanted you out of me so I wouldn’t feel sick anymore.” Her foot touched the trash can, making a metal sound.

  “I would have gone for an abortion if Caspar hadn’t tried to make me have one. Why doesn’t that man ever figure me out?”

  This time the silence stretched the length of a cigarette. She threw the live butt in my trash can and stood up. “I got pregnant to spite my father and I refused an abortion to spite him. I wonder how that makes you feel.”

  I listened while Lydia made her way across the house and into her bedroom. Then I got up and poured water into the trash can.

  14

  “If you are pregnant, we could get married and live in an apartment. I’ll find a job.”

  “Oh, Sam, don’t be a squirrel.”

  ***

  Being a squirrel was the worst thing that could happen to a boy. Kids would do anything, no matter how bizarre or dangerous, to avoid squirrelhood; all except for the really squirrelly ones like Rodney Cannelioski who didn’t know Shinola. I kind of felt sorry for him. He put more salt on his food than anyone I ever saw. We would sit at the cafeteria table and watch him shake salt over his square slab of pizza for five minutes. You could see it caking up on the awful stuff that passed for cheese.

  No matter what a chump you think you are, you never have to look far to find someone else in worse shape—only they don’t seem to know it. Lydia says it’s not nice to make empty, worthless people see themselves in a true light. “They just get angry and nothing changes anyway.”

  The conversation with Maurey where I suggested marriage took place next to our Oldsmobile on Saturday right before she and Lydia drove over to Dubois to see the doctor. Maurey had been nervous all week and I knew she was scared—pregnancy is a big deal whether you keep the kid or not—but she would never admit it. She seemed somehow mad at me, as if I’d imposed on her.

  The closest we came to talking about the baby was Wednesday after geography when I asked her if she felt like coming by for practice that night.

  “We practiced enough, Sam. We’re through with practice.”

  “Does that mean we’re ready for the real thing?”

  “I’m ready to go back to sixth grade. You can go anywhere you want.”

  Chuckette walked up and did the dirty-look-at-me thing for talking to another girl and Maurey went off to the ladies’ room where I knew she got sick between second and third period every morning.

  ***

  Lydia put a box of Sterno and her toothbrush in the backseat for their drive to Dubois. She was always afraid the car would break down fifteen miles from any people and she’d freeze to death behind the wheel and be discovered dead with bad breath. She hid boxes of matches all over town in case the power failed in a blizzard. And I know for a fact she stashed a spare toothbrush in the silver toilet-paper tube in the women’s John at the White Deck.

  “Want anything from Dubois?” she asked before they took off.

  “Spider-Man comic books.”

  “Sammy, you are so infantile.”

  Maurey sat on the passenger side, staring out the window, not looking at me. It occurred to me we hadn’t made eye contact, much less love, in a week.

  After they left I felt kind of flat, like you do when you’ve been waiting for something interesting to happen, then it does, and afterward it’s the same old same old. Being a father is supposed to change things, but it was still winter and I still had to go to a junior high full of idiot students and wimpy teachers; Lydia had a boyfriend now, but she still killed a pint of Gilbey’s every night at 10:30. Other moms fixed their kids grilled cheese sandwiches. Not once in my whole life did Lydia ever fix me a grilled cheese sandwich.

  I had one girlfriend I pitied and another friend who was mad at me for squirting in her. Thirteen years old and my sex life was probably over. Baseball season was months away.

  I went inside and lay on the couch with my head over the edge and a cushion on my chest. From upside down, Les looked a little like Caspar. I got to wondering what Lydia did to get us sent to Wyoming, which led to wondering about my father, which led to nowhere, so I got up and drank a Dr Pepper and walked uptown.

  Ever since the Beatles last Sunday, hair had turned into a major social issue. The longer your hair, the more coaches and principals viewed you as a rebellious snot-nosed troublemaker. I mean, it had only been one week. How could a person grow enough hair to make a statement in one week?

  My hair was probably longer than anyone else’s in the seventh grade—the curl showed anyway. That had more to do with Lydia being too emotionally tired to trim it than any wild-in-the-streets quirk in me. But Stebbins took offense, and even our principal, Mr. Hondell, stopped me in the hall to ask if I had a buck and a quarter.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get your hair cut then. We’re not running a dog kennel here.”

  Stebbins did his bit of king-hell nastiness in front of the whole class. He was big on public humiliation.

  He stood at the blackboard, showing us how to diagram a sentence with a subjunctive clause in it. I find the diagramming of sentences morally reprehensible. Who cares? Was Jules Verne any better or worse a writer because he could diagram a sentence? Seventh grade is such a waste of time.

  Stebbins had all these lines going horizontal, vertical, and off at a 45-degree angle—even worked in an interjection, Wow!—when he all of a sudden turned around and said, “Sam, stand up.”

  I was staring at the back of Maurey’s head, bored to death with subjunctive clauses and thinking I was kind of happy I’d probably made her pregnant, so I didn’t hear Stebbins.

  “Sam Callahan, are you defying me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I will have no back talk here. The one thing I demand in this class is respect. Now, stand up.”

  I stood up but basically forgot everything I ever knew about the teacher-student relationship. I asked, “How can a person demand respect?”

  He was so amazed he didn’t speak. Across from me, Teddy spit in his coffee can and I could see Chuckette digging at her retainer. “Respect is an earned and given deal,” I went on. “It can’t be demanded. Respect is like love. Force it and lose it.”

  “You think all that hair makes you smart, don’t you?”

  “No.” For the record, my hair touched neither my ears nor my collar. Already, I resented the Beatles.

  “What makes you think you’re so smart then, Mr. Callahan?”

  There’s no answer to a question like that so I fell back on silence. Maurey turned in her desk to look at me, but I couldn’t see any expression on her face. She had more to worry about than Coach Stebbins suddenly going weird on me and me going weird back at him.

  “I will not allow any know-it-all smart guys in my class. You will get a haircut, do you understand, Mr. Callahan?”

  “Sure.”

  I asked Lydia that night to trim it back some but she said she didn’t have the energy just then.

  The next day in sixth-period PE—which I say should have been basketball practice—Stebbins pulled me, Dothan Talbot, and a kid named Elliot out of the dressing room and gave us licks for having long hair.

  “You’ll get a lick a day until I can see white skin above your ears,” Stebbins said.

  I think we should of had a warning day before the actual licks began. I feel strongly about licks from coaches. They’re demeaning, and they sting like all hell. I have no fat back there and I don’t adapt well to pain.

  Elliot went first, shaking like an aspen leaf. I’ll never figure out that kid. He had terrible acne and all he cared about was playing the piano. He was like one of those idiot guys who can’t tie their own shoe but can tell you what day of the week January 15, 1631, came on.

  Dothan was second and he just smiled as if, boy do
I love this stuff. I’d heard his dad was big on licks, so I guess the defiant shiteater grin was his defense mechanism. I didn’t have a defense mechanism.

  Stebbins’s paddle was a one-by-four with a carved handle and World’s Greatest Dad woodburned in the flat area. He always swung low, below the butt bones and high on your legs, so sometimes he’d leave a red welt that said Dad backward on your leg.

  PE licks are as much a tradition in American values as anything, but I hated every minute of it and if they ever make me president I’m going to make the whole ritual illegal.

  ***

  Walking uptown Saturday, I dawdled a good deal to work out the ethical implications of the haircut. Stebbins was forcing me to do something by means of fear; therefore I shouldn’t do it because his means sucked. But I had been intending to get a haircut anyway, and not doing something because a jerk tries to force you to is letting the jerk control your life just as much as doing it would be. I could end up like Lydia who dyed her hair platinum a few years ago after Caspar told her he’d kick her out of the house if she did. Lydia couldn’t stand platinum blonde hair and wouldn’t leave her bedroom until it grew out.

  At Kimball’s Food Market I helped Mrs. Barnett carry two bags of groceries to her Buick. She called me young man.

  “Thank you, young man,” she said, and she pulled this rubber change pouch out of her purse and gave me a nickel. The pouch was shaped like a run-over football with a slit down the center, and if you squeezed the ends the slit opened. Mrs. Barnett came from a generation that thought shiny money was worth more than dull money, so the first nickel laid in my palm wasn’t good enough.

  She said, “Just a moment, dear,” and took it back, and poked around in the rubber pouch until she found a good one. I tried to imagine what Mrs. Barnett had been like when she was a teenager, before her cheeks got floppy. Had she worried about the compromise between wholesomeness and popularity? In her whole life, had the thought of birth control ever crossed her mind?