“She Got Up Off the Couch and Other Heroic Acts from Moreland, Indiana” Haven Kimmel

Every year at the end of the spring semester I send an e-mail around asking faculty, staff and administrators for reading recommendations. I then share the recommendations with everyone. There are some people who really get into this and send me some good stuff that I had never read before. Some have sent me the same names of books every year---they must really like those books, and I have read their recommendations or at least put those books on my list. There are others that think these e-mails are a nuisance. Oh, well.

Several years ago in response to my annual e-mail, Steve Rose recommended “A Girl Named Zippy” by Haven Kimmel. It’s a memoir of childhood in a blue collar neighborhood in Mooreland, Indiana. I loved it, and my sister really connected with Zippy. I recall the reviewers weren’t so kind, but there is something about the events of Zippy’s life that resonates with a particular age and class to which Steve, I and my sister belong. “She Got up off the Couch” is a continuation of that life that follows some of the changes that occurred in Zippy’s household when she became the only child at home. I was pleased with the change in tone from the first book to the second. Zippy is younger in the first book, and I felt it was written by a younger person, not just an adult writing as a child. That is not to say that the prose was like that of a child, but the viewpoint was that of a more naïve individual than that in “She Got up off the Couch.” Zippy is still naïve in the latter book, but she is losing her naïveté and, sadly, more aware of the adult world around her.

Kimmel has a way of writing that is not always comprehensible and because of that all the more endearing. It is as if she is trying to express what she is feeling, but it is so different than my own experience that the words don’t even make sense to me. (I just rummaged through the book for one of those incomprehensible sentences and couldn’t find one, so maybe it is me and not her after all.) Regardless, I love the way she says some things. “I visited my friends; they didn’t visit me. I noticed this, but it was rather like belching---I just didn’t have the equipment.” I can understand this, because no one ever came over to visit me; I always went to their houses, but not nearly as often as Zippy did. About a Volkswagen beetle that Zippy’s mother bought in order to drive back and forth to Ball State University, she said “there was that very particular VW smell, which I guess was the decay of German rubber and efficiency.” After a little work was done on it, on a trip back from Indianapolis “the ride home [felt] slightly more luxurious and less like a careening disaster at a two-bit carnival operated by convicts.” Although my childhood experiences were with a 42 Dodge coupe and not a VW, I can appreciate careening disasters, and was not a stranger to actual carnivals operated by convicts.

Zippy’s mother, Delonda, who in the previous book never got up from the couch and never seemed to accomplish anything especially housework and caring for the children, decides to get up, go to school and get an education. Zippy is both intrigued by the new things her mother is learning and sad for the changes this brings to her life. Delonda pursues an English degree and her eyes are opened to some aspects of life that neither she nor Zippy knew much about before and that Zippy was more fascinated with than educated by. Each night Zippy’s mother would talk on the phone with friends or fellow classmates about what had been discussed in class. Once overhearing a conversation her mother was having about the first sexual experience of many farm boys, Kimmel writes, “I knew some very rudimentary things about what my formerly pious mother was so blithely referring to as “sexual experience,” and they were not pretty. They were bizarre and wrong and no one actually did them. But adding the word ‘animal’ opened a whole new can of worms.”

Although my mother never had an educational epiphany like Zippy’s mother, she had one thing in common with her, and that was attracting people who helped make changes in her life. Of one woman whom Delonda carpooled with in the VW that had no motorized windshield wipers, “She was more than willing to pull the windshield screen on rainy days, and, like many people who arrive unbidden, she was yet another form of salvation for my mother.” My mother was used to having people tell her there were things she couldn’t do and accepting that as a fact of life, but when Zippy’s mother was told no, she asked “Tell me who will say yes, and then direct me to his office.” When Zippy’s mother got a letter from the president of the university saying that he was proud of her accomplishments, her husband said, “It’s a form letter.” This is the sort of response I or my mother would get from my father, and it makes the things that Zippy’s mother did all that more impressive knowing that she did them despite others telling her she didn’t have what it takes. Delonda did not know how to drive, and she must finagle her way into even getting a key for the car in order to get practice driving. This is how things start, and she succeeds despite her struggles as a first-generation adult learner navigating CLEP exams and creative financing schemes.

Just glancing at some comments about this book on the web, almost everyone said it was clear that Delonda was depressed. While that may be true, I never put that word together with her situation---my thoughts were about how much effort it takes to overcome a lifetime of being told that there isn’t anything you are good for. If that causes depression, then fine, but the depression is the resulting symptom, not the cause. I get angry with my students who tell each other how stupid they are, but I can’t be there to build them all up all the time.

Kimmel describes the short stories that her mother wrote as part of her master’s thesis, and I wonder if those are published. I think I’d like to read them.