Larque on the Wing (7 page)

In autumn of her senior year, at a powder-puff football game, she met Jeff Harootunian, a new student who was cheerleading for the freshman-sophomore team. All through college she had been conducting a discreet search for owlish men of Scottish descent, qualities she had learned to loathe. This blond giant was distinctly neither. She fell at once wildly in love with him for the length of his sturdy legs, the flair with which he wore his pleated skirt, and the utter conviction with which he defended his falsies, balloons begging to be popped. She was playing tight end, which earned her some kidding, but not from him. He noticed her, she could tell, but he had a kind of sublimity about him that elevated him above yelling such things as, “Great ball handling!”

She played flag football for all she was worth, but his team won because they cheated. Afterward, at the party, to which she took care to wear her shortest minidress, she went up to him and told him so.

“My classmates, right or wrong,” he informed her.

He had changed into jeans but was still wearing beneath his sweater one unpopped balloon, a badge of honor. At the time Larque had formidable fingernails. She reached out and dispatched it. “Why'd you do that?” he asked, aggrieved.

“So we can dance.”

On the dance floor he moved like he had a stick up his ass. Had there ever been such a thing as a heterosexual man who really knew how to dance? Larque decided it would be better to try to talk with him, and they took a walk to get away from the party noise, and they lost track of time, and she nearly missed curfew. Every night that week she nearly missed curfew. They were seeing each other all the time, and she was simultaneously ecstatic at having found him and heartbroken with dread of losing him—which had to happen, because he was the wrong one. He was Pennsylvania Dutch, not Scottish. He had nothing to do with fireworks or dandelions, and he was anything but owlish. Any moment they were together it might happen, she would slip up, she wouldn't be able to keep from thinking about his body, and oops, doppelganger time. Then it would be all over. He was not the one the Wiccans had foreseen for her; he would not be able to cope. He would run like water.

She spent every minute she could with him, collecting memories like flowers to press.

On the Saturday evening of their one-week anniversary, on a special date, they were walking across campus when a dorm mate jeered out a window at Jeff, “Hey, Hoot! Still trying to score? You're in big trouble, man.”

To hell with the insulting content of this remark. Hoot?

“Hoot?” she gasped. “Is that what they call you? Hoot?”

“Yep.”

She laughed, she pealed out wedding bells of laughter, not because the name was comical but because all had been lost and now was found. Scottish, schmottish! The turbaned woman had seen his silly little kilt of a cheerleading skirt. The thing on the computer screen had been a powder puff.

She calmed down just enough to speak. “Hoot,” she asked him, “what is your opinion of doppelgangers?”

“I firmly support all First Amendment rights. What's a doppelganger?”

“You'll find out. Can we get married?”

He quit college to do it. Said he had no idea what he was supposed to accomplish in college anyway. Larque invited the members of the Ladies' Witchcraft Circle to be her matrons of honor: the poodle-haired housewife, the black woman in her turban, the redheaded computer programmer, the sleek society woman. Her mother, who was now a Baptist, wanted a church wedding, but Larque insisted on a barefoot back-to-nature hippie affair in a county park. After which she and Hoot moved into a far-from-nature fifth-floor no-elevator apartment, and he found his first of many jobs, handing out free wiener samples in supermarkets.

While she and Hoot applied for the wedding license, Larque noticed his Social Security number. It was 186–40–3201.

Almost twenty years later, Hoot remained fun-loving, impassioned, optimistic, quirky, easily bored, in constant flux yet the most constant bedrock in her life. Larque did not usually mind when Hoot quit jobs.

This time, however, felt like an exception. She minded. It had happened once too often, maybe. Or maybe mid-life was getting to her. She had problems of her own. Maybe after almost twenty years Larque felt ready for her turn to be quixotic.

FOUR

R
ATHER THAN FACING
H
OOT OR THE STUDIO THE NEXT
morning, Larque dressed and got out of the house. Sky, or the prissy little spirit-girl who called herself Sky, was sitting stoically by the easel in the north-lit room, presumably waiting for her, and Larque hoped to get away with leaving her behind. Quickly and stealthily she went out the front door, locking it, and hurried to the car. Halfway down the block, however, the girl materialized in the passenger seat beside her.

“Oh, shit.” Saddled with a translucent companion, Larque gave up thoughts of the shopping mall or wherever she had been going—where had she been going? She really needed to talk to somebody, but all her friends worked. Outside the home, that was. In regular jobs. With people. Whereas she worked, oh yes she worked, but all by herself, churning out representations of farm animals and archaic buildings seven days a week, paint paint paint, pink udders, gray privies, how exciting life had become—but wait a minute. The boys had not gone to school. This was Saturday.

She went to see her best friend, Doris.

“Hey, woman! C'mon in!” Doris called from her kitchen. Hers was a smallish one-floor development house, and standing at the sink Doris could see who was at the front door. “Have some carrots.” She was peeling an entire one-pound bag of them.

Larque let herself in and reminded Doris, “Real people do not eat carrots for breakfast.”

“I'm not supposed to eat them for supper either. My numbers are at an all-time high.” Doris was the only person Larque knew who needed to have her blood-carotene level checked. “My doctor is talking about getting me into some sort of behavior modification program.” Doris bit off the tip of one of her carrots and chewed with rapture, eyes lidded, lashes fluttering. “Ahhhhh! Oooh. Ah. My therapist says it's fetishism,” she added between ecstatic bites. “My group says it's hostility since the divorce.” She grinned, tongued the blunt stub of her carrot rather explicitly, then crunched it. “The people at Overeaters Anonymous see it as a diet disorder, a sort of modified anorexia.”

Most of this Larque could believe if she made an effort, but—“Overeaters Anonymous?” Doris was shapely and slim. Larque could not think of anyone their mutual age who needed Overeaters Anonymous less.

“Sure, because I exhibit obsessive thinking and behavior about food.”

“Maybe you were a rabbit in a past life.” Larque had heard about Doris's latest fad/philosophy, and it did not impress her, though—of course, Doris
would
glom onto reincarnation. Doris regarded all of existence as a twelve-step program. It was kind of the same thing.

“Maybe,” Doris said, quite serious, “but I don't display any other rabbity traits. Do you think it's an oral fixation? I honestly cannot cognitively grasp how not everyone is crazy about carrots.”

Larque sometimes thought wistfully about how it might feel to be a normal person with a normal life and normal friends. This was one of those times. She sat down at the table and said, “I think you should just eat your damn carrots and enjoy them.”

“Oh, I do, I do.” Doris sat down with her, chewing greedily. “See my palms?” She held them out—they were orange. So, customarily, were the soles of her feet. Because Doris could, and often did, binge her way through a two-pound bag of California carrots as if they were candy, she was golden all over, rather like a Perdue chicken, except rumor had it that the chickens were fed marigold petals. Larque wondered briefly about the possibility of feeding Doris quantities of something of a complementary color, say blueberries, by way of balance. Probably would have turned her gray. No good. Orange was bright, eye-catching, definitely made a better picture, and Doris was as orange as they come. When Doris cut herself the blood was orange. The whites of her eyes were yellow-tinged.

As if to demonstrate Doris opened her eyes wide, looking past Larque into her living room. “Hey, who's that? She with you?”

It was Sky, of course, sitting on a hassock with her hands folded in her lap. Little Miss Muffet on a tuffet. “Yes.”

“You didn't tell me you brought a friend.”

“She's not a friend. She's a doppelganger.”

“Oh? Of who?”

“Me.”

Doris looked again and shook her glowingly blond head. “No way. You were never like that.”

“I didn't think so either.”

“Hey, kid,” Doris called, “c'mere. Want a carrot?”

Shyly and politely Sky came into the kitchen. Shyly and politely she said, “No, thank you.” Shyly and politely she seated herself.

“My mother did it to me,” Larque said. “I mean, to her. To both of us. Now we're in deep shit. At least I am.”

“Explain yourself, woman.”

Larque tried. It took a while. Doris got her a Pepsi and listened intently. One good thing about Doris, she was a terrific listener. All that practice at Group.

“Bummer,” Doris sympathized when she heard that Hoot had yet once more quit his job.

“And just when I can't paint,” Larque said with equal parts anger and self-pity. “Which is the most awful feeling. Is there such a thing as painter's block?”

“I guess there must be if that's what you've got.” This sort of tautology was logical by Doris's standards. “Can't you paint anything?”

“I could do fuzzy kittens, I guess. Fluffy bunnies. Cuddly puppies with big brown wet eyes.”

“Well, can't you still make a living, then, doing that sort of thing?”

Larque felt a moment of muted fury, but it was no use trying to express it or explain it. Doris worked as a receptionist for a chiropractor; how could she be expected to understand? Hardly anybody understood artists.

Artist? Mentally Lark gawked at herself a moment, because how often had she told people—modestly—that she was just someone who produced a home-decoration product, not a real artist? Since when was she an artist?

Since now
.

She said, “I'd rather look for a scutwork job than paint K-mart art.”

“Larque, you're nuts. You've got it good. Set your own hours, nobody bossing you, home when your kids need you, nice pay, you're crazy.” Here it came. “Isn't there some sort of a twelve-step program for, you know, creative people having trouble getting it together?”

Larque shook her head. Though she would never say it to Doris, she loathed this idea of perceiving life as a series of symptoms. That was the way it had been for her during the early years of marriage and motherhood, but no more. More recently life had been … beauty, textures changing, colors burning their way up the sky—if only she could get that back.
Twelve step, my eye
.

“Well, if you did have to go to work,” Doris was saying, “where would it be?”

“A dildo factory.”

Doris shrieked out a high-pitched golden-trumpet laugh, then sobered abruptly and said, “You
are
kidding, right?”

“Not really. Either that or a hot dog stand.”

Doris rolled her big harvest-moon eyes. “Do you have any idea how little those kinds of places pay?”

“This isn't about money, Doris.”

“No,” her friend agreed, “it's about you fighting sneaky with Hoot.”

Doris had good insights sometimes. It was true, Larque admitted to herself, that she was more than usually angry with Hoot; it was true that mid-life was making him seem more and more tiresome.

But something else was more urgently true.

“It's about tiding me over …” Until she could get back—not just her ability to paint, there was more to it than that, but she found it hard to describe how and why. She said, “If I can get back Sky, I think it'll all come together eventually.”

“Huh? Get back Sky? She's right here.”

“Are you kidding? Look at her.”

They both gazed at the spirit-child who sat much too still, much too quietly, and gazed into space, not interested in the glassfish and delta-tail guppies playing in their aquarium against the wall, not listening to anything the two women had been saying.

“I see what you mean,” Doris said. “She's not all there.”

“I think my mother blinked her.”

Doris said, “That's a funny thing, how your mother makes things go away but you make double what was there already.”

This time it was Larque who did not hear. She was staring at the way Sky's skirt puffed up around her little hands lying in her lap. Holding down the crinolines. God, crinolines, those scratchy implements of slow torture—Larque remembered now how they dug into thin legs, leaving a network of fine red stinging lines. Sky, the real historical Sky, had never sat still for crinolines. She had wriggled, and squirmed, and hiked up her skirts to scratch her scrawny thighs, and made many excuses to go to the bathroom for the sake of the temporary relief afforded by the smooth, cool toilet seat. For two years she had waged an oblique, fruitless battle with her stubbornly cheerful mother over crinolines. She had ditched crinolines in public restrooms, sabotaged crinolines with scissors, “lost” crinolines at school, hidden the awful things deep in her closet. Her mother, never scolding to acknowledge her naughtiness or sympathizing to acknowledge her discomfort, had serenely supplied her with more. Years later, long after the fashion had passed, Larque had realized that her mother could have simply provided a slip to go between the crinolines and her bare, assaulted legs. She had never asked her mother why she had not done this, because she had probably never told her mother why she hated the crinolines. In her family, quarrels were not allowed and, therefore, were never resolved.