A Girl Named Zippy (13 page)

“Good game,” I told Dana, as we approached the school.

“Shut up,” she said, barely nudging me with her stiff shoulder.

DANA AND I BEGAN
talking with a speech impediment that caused my mother to wish us both harm. It involved making all of our s-sounds at the very back of our mouths, with copious amounts of spit.

“Mom,” I would say, “I’m heading over to Dana’zsh houzshe.”

“Stop talking that way,” Mom would answer, through clenched teeth. She almost never got mad, although once when I was five I had come barreling down the steps, stomped straight into the den where she was talking on the telephone, and demanded that she hang up and make me a peanut butter sandwich. She ignored me. When I demanded louder, and with a furiously stomped foot, she reached up without looking at me and slapped me in the face.

“Okay, I’ll zshtop,” I’d zshay, heading out the door.

“I’m going to return you to the gypsies,” she’d yell, returning to her book.

“Zshorry, Mom, but it’zsh too late for me and the gypzshiezsh.”

“My mom hatezsh it when we talk like zshish,” I told Dana, while rolling around on her huge bed. Everything in her room was gray, and it was all very spartan, like she didn’t really live there.

“My mom chazshed me with a yardzshtick,” Dana answered.

“Did zshe catzshch you?” I asked, interested.

“No. Zshe only barely made it out the front door before zshe zshtarted wheezshing,” Dana laughed. Ha ha on the smokers.

I HEARD MOM
tell my dad that Dana’s parents’ life in Mooreland had all the marks of a second chance gone ugly. And while Lou and Jo associated with no one in Mooreland, preferring the company of the people they worked with in the factory in New Castle, Dana didn’t hesitate to tell her friends at school some of the most intimate details of their life, like: they were atheists. This was crazy and unheard of, and I advised Dana to keep it under wraps. Also, her parents had been married and divorced three times, all to each other. Dana’s oldest brother had once smoked marijuana. While high he fell asleep and into a dream about the Wizard of Oz. Just as he dozed off he heard the beginning of “Hotel California,” and then he was on the Yellow Brick Road, and the dream went on and on and on, and as he started to awaken he guessed he had been asleep and dreaming for about five hours, but in fact, “Hotel California” was just ending. This was another fact I felt it best no one in Mooreland know.

Dana’s mother, Jo, was short and whippet thin with dark hair bleached platinum and the skin of a career smoker. She was very tanned. Dana had inherited her deep, gravelly voice from Jo, and her short temper. I never heard Jo speak to Dana kindly, or maternally, or really in any way at all, except to give housekeeping orders, which Dana performed with a fabulous competence. One afternoon we went to her house after school—there was never anyone there—and Dana noticed that there were dishes to do. Two things stood out for me immediately: one was Dawn dishwashing liquid, which I didn’t know existed. We had only ever used Ivory in my house, which made Dawn seem hopelessly blue and exotic. The other was that Dana knew, somehow, when the dishes were done, to wipe down the counter around the sink. She even moved the canisters and wiped behind them. I watched her, puzzled. How did she know how to do that? Who had taught her? Even her hands, the way she held the sponge, and the turn of her arm as she reached the corner of the counter, were superior to anything I’d seen in a person my own age.

Dana’s father was the kind of man who bragged excessively about breaking the speed limit. He was big in a general way, with a long stride and rather stooped shoulders. Like his wife, he drank heavily and chain-smoked; he carried a whole roadmap of broken capillaries on his face. His eyes were what scared me most: he wore the look men get in their forties when they’ve given up hope and plan to get even. Everywhere he walked a vague sense of violence prevailed, although I was never certain whom he had hurt or if he was just a living threat. After working all day at the Chrysler, he and Jo spent the evening drinking and bowling. I rarely saw them.

If I had been left to my own devices the way Dana was, I would have eventually succumbed to both pestilence and malnutrition. My only comfort would have been to die in front of the television, watching Cowboy Bob and his sidekick, Sourdough the Singing Biscuit. But Dana and her two older brothers did just fine. In fact, she ate better than I did, and was at school every day in clean clothes (which I never had), with her homework done, and every time I walked into her jaunty, modern house, it was spotless, so clean it echoed. The new furniture was treated against stains; the carpets were vacuumed relentlessly, even though there were no pets in the house and no shoes past the doorways; no books or roller skates or dirty laundry menaced from the stairs. Dana’s house could have been cut from a magazine, the kind of home that tells a story, even though no one lives in it.

FROM THAT FIRST DAY
I saw her, in the second grade, all the way through our third, fourth, and fifth grades, these were the things that Dana did better than I: math, science, spelling, reading, history, all things domestic and, once she got over her initial basketball hump, all things sports related. I was disliked by all of my teachers for reasons that were completely mysterious to me, but even in that dubious category, Dana excelled. She was disliked more passionately, sometimes even inciting our teachers to violence, which I had yet to do. For instance, our third-grade teacher, driven to a rage by Dana’s wisecracking, shook her until she saw stars. That evening Dana went home and searched through the thousands of magazines her brothers collected until she found an article about the dangerous effects of shaking children, which she cut out. The next morning, while Mrs. Holiday was taking attendance, Dana marched right up and handed it to her. The whole class watched with a nervous excitement, but Mrs. Holiday, who could not be coerced into increasing her own knowledge, simply threw it in the trashcan without reading it.

When we were all invited to a party at Julie’s house in the fall of our fourth-grade year, I assumed that my naturally superior relationship with animals and farm implements would be revealed, and in the ledger in which our talents were recorded, I would finally have one little tick in my column. I no longer hoped to beat Dana at anything. I just wanted to be able to say that once, in the wretched life that followed her arrival, I had proved good at something.

The party’s beginnings were not auspicious. The Newmans’ pole barn was filled with shelled corn, an overwhelming mountain of it, and someone, probably Julie’s brother David Lee, who wished us all dead, suggested that we climb up in the rafters of the barn and dive into it.

“What a ridiculous idea,” I laughed. “We could suffocate that way—diving into corn is not so different from diving into water, except that it’s harder to get out of cor—” Before I could finish the sentence, the rest of the party was out the door and flying toward their doom.

When I reached the barn Julie and Dana had already scampered up the ladder and were making their way across the rafters like cats. When they were directly above the peak of the corn mountain they held hands and dove in. Julie’s red hair flew up behind her like a cape; Dana’s face was completely transformed by the surprise and joy of her brief free fall. When they hit the corn, surely harder than they had anticipated, they both disappeared for just a moment, then came up spitting, the air around them opaque with dust.

The game continued until everyone had jumped from the rafters; that is, everyone but me, because I was convinced that my father had a special and very limited form of ESP that allowed him to zero in on any situation in which I might be endangering my life. Each time I started to go up the ladder, I had a vision of Dad’s truck flying mercilessly into the barn lot. He would be out of the truck and in the barn before I could even begin sputtering excuses, and it was hard to choose which was more humiliating: not jumping, or not jumping and being escorted home by the seat of my pants by a man wearing a firearm. In the end I simply didn’t jump, choosing one fate over the other. Julie seemed not to notice, but Dana turned to me with the ironic smile that bespoke her earlier life in A City. She noticed.

We went out to visit three of Julie’s horses, Rebel, Diablo, and Mingo. Mingo was Julie’s favorite of all the horses, even though he was criminally insane. No one but Julie, not even Big Dave, could ride him, and once while she was on him he had become frightened by a water moccasin, threw Julie off his back, and stepped on her, breaking three of her ribs. Julie forgave him even as his hooves were striking her chest, and would have forgiven him with her dying breath if he had not ceased his attack, because in Julie’s silent philosophy, being angry with a horse for throwing off a rider, and then killing her, was as arbitrary as resenting a bird its flight.

Julie suggested that we play a form of rodeo, which was, I swear, that we each take a running start and jump on Mingo’s back, from behind. I mean jump on him from his butt side, where he was most likely to deliver a fatal kick.

I collapsed to the ground, moaning. “Julie,” I said, reasonably, “we can’t jump on Mingo’s back. Look at Anita and Annette. Do you want them to die?”

“Get up, you big nut,” Julie said extra quietly, offering me her hand. I took it, and Julie went over and began stroking Mingo’s neck. Dana appeared beside me in a cloud of ill will.

“Coward,” she hissed gleefully between her teeth. She wanted me to know she knew the truth about me without Julie hearing.

“You go do it, then,” I said, waving toward the gray-dappled Mingo, who stood however many hands equals a really tall horse plus three or four more.

Julie started about thirty feet from Mingo, so that by the time she reached him, she was running full out. She put her hands on his haunches and vaulted up onto his back just the way Jesse James would have, in one fluid motion. Mingo never moved, but continued to stare straight ahead, no doubt contemplating the many varieties of horse revenge available to him.

Dana said she would go next. She spit, and then turned and gave me her most smug face.

“I don’t even want to watch this,” I said, my arms crossed.

“You ought to watch it and learn something,” she said, her voice pointedly ironic and manly in the clear autumn air.

“It’s your funeral, Dana.”

“Yeah, you’ll probably be too scared to attend your own funeral, right, Jarvis?” Which brought a little laugh from everyone.

Dana started where Julie had, so that she was running hard when her hands hit Mingo’s back. I wish, even now, that I could report that some dreadfully embarrassing but not life-threatening accident had befallen her, but in fact, she vaulted right up onto Mingo’s back with just slightly less grace than the inimitable Julie herself. Blessedly, no one else at the party was willing to try it, so I was not alone where I stood, sensibly wary, next to the fence.

Later that same day we were chased by a bull, and as we ran hysterically across the pig lot, my shoes and socks were sucked off by the layers and layers of viscous poop and mud, and we couldn’t go back and find them because of the bull. Next: David Lee decided to show us how to do karate, which he had learned from watching late-night television, and naturally requested that I be his assistant. He threw me in an arc by the arm, dislocating it. As I lay on the ground, watching little pinpoints of light explode and fade in my eyes, I heard my father’s truck come flying into the barn lot.

As we drove away I could see Debbie in the front yard with her fist raised at David Lee, who had scampered all the way to the top of the big pine tree. He clung to it like a monkey as it swayed. Lying in the emergency room I realized that I never even got to eat any of the homemade french fries or fried mushrooms that Debbie had made. She had cooked so much that she was forced to break out the Fry Granddaddy. Plus I knew for a fact that there were about twenty-five freezing-cold Cokes in the refrigerator, the refrigerator that Julie and I had surprised Debbie by painting with exterior house paint, the same refrigerator on top of which there was a clock that always said 8:30. A party was going on in that kitchen, without me.

DANA INVITED ME DOWN
to see their new Ping-Pong table, which her father had set up in the pristine barn.

“Wow,” I said, running my hand over its greenness. “Where’d you get it?”

“We were in Muncie last night,” Dana said casually, even though it was fairly unusual to find oneself in Muncie, which was big and far away, “and Dad asked if there was a Zayre’s around somewhere, and I said, ‘A Zayre’s. Yeah. Isn’t there one on West Jackson Street?’ And we drove over there and sure enough, it was right where I thought it was.”

I stood with my mouth open, imagining the weird and superhuman power which would allow a fifth-grader to know the name of a street in a city thirty miles from her home. Mooreland had three north/south streets, and I only knew the name of one of them, Broad Street, and I only knew that because I could see the street sign from my own front porch. As for all the little east/west streets, I couldn’t imagine they even had names. Saying, “We live in the house next to Minnie Hodson’s old house,” was surely more efficient than assigning a number to our front door. And since Mooreland had only one of most things (the exception being churches, of which there were three, one for every hundred people), it was also quite simple to say, “We live at the four-way stop sign,” or “I’ll meet you in front of the hardware store.”

I snapped my mouth shut and nodded, as if I knew exactly the Zayre’s she was talking about. We played Ping-Pong for a little while, but it didn’t go well. I was completely unskilled and Dana played so hard her shots often went right off the table, and so I spent a fair amount of time searching the corners of the barn. (I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn’t have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.)