Falling Angels

by Barbara Gowdy

  When they hear the front door open, he throws the bag of grass and the pipe behind some books and shuts the window. Blows out the candles, switches on the blinding overhead light. It’s like the end of a movie.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  Up in the kitchen are two small terrified-looking people, still in hats. “Mum, Dad—Lou Field,” Tom mutters, walking right by them.

  They smile anxiously at Lou, the father glancing at her tight jeans. “Don’t shit yourself,” Lou wants to say,“nothing happened.” In the front hall she puts on her jacket in silence. Tom opens the door for her.

  “Bye,” she says indifferently, expecting the same from him.

  But he says,“See you at school tomorrow,” in a conspiratorial voice, and she feels his fingers brush the ends of her hair.

  Sleep is out of the question. She turns on her flashlight and starts reading the Wallace Stevens book she borrowed from the library a couple of days ago. She commits three poems to memory. The next day at lunch Tom sits at her table, and they eat together. Her competitors all look suicidal. Ten years later the recollection of their devastation will still lift her spirits. She directs the conversation to Wallace Stevens, specifically to the three memorized poems: “Domination of Black,” “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage” and “Girl in a Nightgown,” pretending to summon them back after a long time. She chose them for their sexy titles and reasonably short lengths, but he broods about what her attachment to their themes means.

  “Peacocks, Aphrodite and sensual awakening,” he says. “What unites all three? What would Freud say?”

  By the end of the day the rumour is they’re going steady. She doesn’t deny it. Maybe he hears it and is influenced, because he starts eating with her every lunch hour. Some days he waits for her at her locker, and they walk home together. They smoke grass in anyone’s unlocked car and once a week in his basement bedroom when his parents go to an English pub downtown.

  All they do is talk about what they’ve read. To keep up with him, she has to read library books until two or three o’clock in the morning. She is tired all the time. Not just from late nights but from acting the way she thinks he wants her to, which is deadly serious and angry about world events. She tells Sherry that they’re sleeping together, but after a month he hasn’t even kissed her on the lips. Saying goodnight he sometimes pecks her on the cheek, and once, sharing her umbrella, he put his arm around her. Obviously he likes her (she’s the only person he hangs around with) but she can’t tell if he’s in love with her. Maybe he’s just taking it slow. Maybe there are English courtship rules she doesn’t know about.

  Maybe it’s her. That idea begins to incense her, because she knows she turns men on. When she wears Sandy’s miniskirts, workmen whistle at her. “Jesus fucking Christ, what does he want?” she shouts at her mirror, all terror concerning sexual inexperience long ago jettisoned.

  In daydreams she makes the first move. There are so many opportunities to kiss him. What stops her more than fear of being rejected (she has imagined all the humiliating variations, as well as her subsequent vengeance) is fear of having nobody to love.

  “I’m in heaven,” Norma thinks when she is with Stella. Sometimes she thinks that Stella is an angel. The evidence is strong, and although Norma doesn’t pray anymore, she still believes in God and the possibility of miracles.

  Stella is so lovely, so perfect. Her angel’s hair shimmers down her back, her skin is milky and flawless, her teeth white and straight. She smells of baby powder. And an angel would be tall, Norma reasons. An embodiment of glory would, more than likely, be tall.

  Stella says (having never been given reason to think otherwise),“People are good underneath.” Her parents call her Bunny. Every time she enters a room that they’re in, they exclaim; they get up and give her a hug and a kiss. They are medium-sized brown-haired people who can’t seem to get over the daughter they’ve made.

  When Stella was five years old, her favourite uncle died. Her parents hid their grief and told her that the uncle had gone on a world tour. They even arranged to have postcards sent to the house from foreign lands. This went on for five years, until one day Stella happened to say that she barely remembered Uncle So-and-so, and only then did her parents break the news.

  They tell her that fish don’t feel the hook. They rave over her C-average report card, claiming that girls who get high marks are unfeminine.

  “Right, Norma?” they ask.

  “Yeah, right,” Norma says. No more than them does she want the truth to tarnish this precious girl.

  Before Norma knew to be careful, she mentioned that their father used to hit her. She didn’t think it was any big deal. But Stella was horrified, then inconsolable. She actually burst into tears, and to stop her crying, Norma had to swear that she was just kidding, that their father wouldn’t hurt a flea. She’d have sworn to anything. They were sitting on Stella’s bed, and as Norma fabricated a golden childhood, she held Stella tightly in her arms.

  Twenty times a day Norma relives this moment. It has crossed her mind to let slip another old hardship so that Stella will fall shuddering against her. But Norma shudders at such a mean thought.

  All the things Stella likes to do—read fashion magazines, practice putting on makeup, curl her hair in juice cans, talk about what’s going on at school—are harmless, girlish things. They are things a saint wouldn’t see fit to do, Norma grants that, but an angel, containing no evil or earthly know-how, might fall into them. Anyway, watching Stella do them is Norma’s definition of heaven on earth. It’s like watching a beloved baby at play. In Stella’s company the only time Norma is unhappy is when she gets a weird feeling that Stella is Sandy, and then she thinks how Sandy has turned into the kind of girl who wears short skirts and tight sweaters and necks with boys. Whenever Norma thinks this, she becomes her old self, assuming all blame for everything—Sandy’s decline, everything. The feeling doesn’t last long. A few minutes or so. She gets over it. Tom calculates that if they drop a half a tab in fifteen minutes, they’ll be tripping by New Year’s.

  It’s quarter to eleven. Tom is lying on his bed, Lou is standing at his dresser. All the candles are lit, and Jefferson Airplane is on the record player. Tom’s parents are out at the English pub.

  “A half?” Lou says, pressing her finger to one of the tabs of L S D and picking it up. It’s like a square sequin but even thinner than that. She can’t believe a half will be enough, because these days it takes a lot of grass to get her stoned. “You’re talking to the daughter of a woman whose tolerance to intoxicants is immeasurable,” she says.

  “A whole tab will blow your mind straight through the roof,” Tom says. She flicks the tab off her thumb, back onto the piece of foil with the other one. She says she’s game.

  She’s not trying to impress him. She has resolved that tonight is her last night as a virgin, and she is relying on this acid trip to compel her to take her clothes off. If he isn’t turned on by her naked, at least she’ll be able to deny she had intentions. In Time magazine she read that people on L S D are overcome with a desire to undress and jump out of windows. When she told this to Tom, he said,“We’ll be in the basement.” She’d like to think he’s staging tonight to get her nude, but she doubts it. He’d have kissed her before now, tested the waters.

  “I’m serious,” she says. “Let’s drop a whole tab each.”

  In the mirror Tom gives her a condescending smile. “Check with me at midnight,” he says. “If you want more then, I won’t stand in your way.”

  When fifteen minutes are up, they swallow the L S D with beer, then lie on the bed and wait. Propped up on one elbow, Tom reads from his current passion, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: “There is no need to fear. The lords of death are the natural form of emptiness, your own confused projection, and you are emptiness …”

  After about twenty minutes he closes the book and takes off his glasses. She doesn’t wear glasses anymore. A couple of weeks ago she broke t
he pair she bought, and since she was starting to get afraid anyway that he would discover the lenses were just ordinary glass, she didn’t bother to buy another pair. She’s never seen him without his glasses. His eyes are green, long-lashed and inscrutable.

  “What happens first?” she asks.

  “It depends.” He stretches out beside her and folds his arms behind his head. It’s all she can do not to roll over and lie against him. It’s all she can do.

  “Why?” he asks after a minute. “Is something happening?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll know so.” He’s told her that this is his third acid trip.

  The record ends, and he puts on Jimi Hendrix. Over the music she can hear her heartbeat. It’s the most desolate sound she can imagine. Her eyes fill with tears. And then she begins slowly to levitate, and simultaneously lights burst in her head, and she is ecstatic. The whole of The Tibetan Book of the Dead spills through her brain, even though she hasn’t read it. But she knows it, she knows everything.

  She knows that the last destination of every impulse, no matter what twisted or frustrated route it might take, is to cut through the crap to the purity of emptiness experienced during your first minutes in the world. She laughs at how ridiculously obvious this is.

  “I’m here,” Tom says.

  She is almost up at the ceiling now. She tries to touch it. Her arm is as long as a highway, red-checkered. Fire ripples out of her fingers.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Go with the flow,” Tom says, his voice a thousand pianos.

  During the night his mother and father apparently return home and go to bed. Tom points out their galoshes in the hallway closet when Lou is leaving.

  “Shit,” Lou whispers, only now remembering that he has parents.

  “Ah, they were probably blotto,” he says. Then he tells her to wait, and he runs back downstairs, returning with the suitcase she’d brought so that their father would think she was going to a pyjama party.

  “Oh, yeah,” she says, taking the case. He kisses her softly on the lips, and she floats out the door.

  It’s very cold. The sun has just risen, and the sky is the flat grey of a switched-off t? screen. The bungalows along the street squat and gleam and steam like kettles.

  She remembers that she and Tom kissed a lot. Suddenly they both had their clothes off and were kissing but always stopping because of getting distracted. There was no self-consciousness. His penis was hard sometimes, and sometimes it wasn’t. She remembers it descending on her from a great height, and her pointing to her crotch, and both of them gaping at the writhing snakes that her pubic hair looked like.

  It wasn’t frightening. None of it was. All night he talked in John Lennon’s voice. At one point she asked him to sing “A Day in the Life,” and he did. At one point they dropped the other half tab.

  They kissed, and he ran his hands over her body, and they were both naked. But—it only now dawns on her—she can’t remember if they went all the way. She stops walking and concentrates on how she feels down there. But her whole body seems anaesthetized. Maybe she’s sore, maybe she isn’t. She can’t tell.

  Their mother is the only one up. She’s watching a test pattern on t?, and dropping on the floor at her feet, Lou gets caught up in watching it with her.

  Their mother seizes Lou’s hand, something she does every time Lou goes near her these days. Their mother’s tiny, smooth hand is a child’s. Her white hair is an old lady’s. Her tight hold on Lou’s hand is like a child’s or an old lady’s.

  Bringing their mother’s hand down before her eyes, Lou studies it, enraptured, in love with every pore and fine line. You’d never know by their mother’s hand that she grew up on a farm. It was probably her two older brothers who did all the chores. Their mother has said that she thought the sun rose and set on her brothers. One of them was named Jim. Lou thinks that he’s who their mother named the baby after, and it was a coincidence that her husband had the same name. Although maybe because of being surrounded by Jims (it was also her father’s name) their mother just felt that a male baby had to be called Jim. You can’t talk to their mother about babies. Or about her brothers dying in the war. She pretends not to hear. Another thing you can’t talk to her about is her hair going white overnight.

  Lou looks up at her hair. Her hair is her, Lou thinks. Pure and white. A surprise of whiteness that Lou suddenly feels mirrored inside herself as the one unsullied thing she has harboured no matter what. Inside Lou the surprise of whiteness is that she has been mad at everyone but never at their mother. How could she be? Lou thinks that this whiteness, this absence of anger, will get her into heaven.

  “Are you happy?” she asks their mother, reaching up and touching the white hair to touch the purity inside herself. She wants their mother to be blissful.

  “Oh, yes,” their mother answers, and the two of them watch the test pattern again.

  But after a minute their mother says,“Every once in a while, though, I yearn for the most terrible thing to happen.”

  The test pattern turns into razor lines, prison bars made of razor blades. Lou lets go of their mother’s hand.

  “Some days,” their mother says,“I want to be on the brink of a terrible thing.”

  Lou comes to her feet. Why is their mother telling her this? Lou has forgotten asking their mother if she is happy. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Lou mutters, leaving the room.

  In the bathroom Lou remembers the other purity, the one she despises. She pulls down her jeans and underpants and inserts two fingers into herself. There’s no obstacle.

  All New Year’s Day Lou has living-colour dreams of babies. If the dreams represent pregnancy fears they are the only time until she misses her period that the prospect of pregnancy crosses her mind.

  The next day, at her suggestion, she and Tom make out during their lunch period in the same beat-up red Volkswagen that he dragged her to when she stabbed the knife into the vice-principal’s door. Their breath quickly fogs the windows, concealing them, but she would have taken off her blouse anyway. His unexpected cautiousness (“Better not,” he says when she starts undoing her buttons) only makes her more reckless. Tearing the last button free, she throws her head back and laughs to be acting so wanton.

  Almost every day after school they go down to his basement. He tells his mother that they’re working on a chemistry project so not to worry if she smells smoke. They light up a joint, and invariably it’s up to Lou to get things started, but as soon as she does, he takes right over. He ejaculates on her stomach. One time she has an orgasm, and it’s then, just as he withdraws, seeing the evidence of his orgasm.

  “I love you,” she tells him.

  “I know,” he answers, and she thinks he means that it goes without saying he loves her back.

  She is so happy! She is nice to everybody—she wants to be— while being her true wild self with Tom. At last! What a relief not to have to try to impress him any longer! She stops reading every book he reads and admits to him it was only a ruse. Anything that enters her head, she says. He sometimes looks shocked, but he’s never put off. “Let’s go back to my place,” he says. Afterward they have tea in the kitchen, served by his mother, a drab, frowning, old-fashioned-looking woman in a housedress and apron, who seems to have been warned by someone in another room to act normal. When they sit down at the table, she always comes out with something that sounds as if she’s on to them: “You can’t give it your best without nourishment.” “You’ve earned this, I imagine.” But Tom says she’s as thick as two boards. Once she’s poured their tea, she leaves them alone.

  Lou would like to tell Tom’s mother the truth. The last thing she feels is bad. In fact, she feels the opposite: holy, because love is flowing out of her, in all directions. Even their father she loves. She recalls how he was when he had Lovergirls, how he seemed, then, to be in the same mood that she is in now, and it occurs to her that he must have been in love with all of t
hose women to act so happy and nice.

  Of course Lou doesn’t tell Tom’s mother the truth. She doesn’t tell a soul, except Sherry, who thinks she and Tom have been doing it for months anyway.

  “When do I get to meet him?” Sherry asks.

  Lou taps her teeth with a fingernail she no longer bites. Before the acid trip the fact that she had a school drop-out for a best friend was one of the secrets she kept from Tom. Now she likes to see him surprised. “We’ll come by your work,” she says.

  They go there the next day. In the lobby they stuff their pockets with the free cigarettes that are lying around in silver cases for golf-club members. The promise of this is how Lou got Tom to come anywhere near what he calls a capitalist temple. Tom also takes a handful of matches. Then they go down a green-shag-carpeted hallway with overhead lights like giant golf balls.

  “This better not take long,” Tom mutters.

  Since it’s off-season, the bar is almost empty. In the gloom Sherry stands out like a spotlit entertainer. She calls “It’s okay!” to a man with a brush cut, who has demanded their identification. “They’re my friends!” she calls. She hurries over to them.

  Seeing her through Tom’s eyes, Lou can’t believe that this bouffant blonde in the tight low-cut white dress and white high-heeled go-go boots is anyone she remotely knows. She turns traitor. As they follow Sherry to a table, she looks over her shoulder at Tom. “Think of it as a freak show,” she whispers.

  Sherry goes back to the bar and returns with three glasses of Coke on a tray.

  “Spiked?” Lou asks.

  Sherry sighs. “There’s some dumb regulation that I’m not allowed to pour. Can you believe it?”

  Lou looks over at the man with the brush cut. “I thought my father was the last holdout,” she says.

  “I hope it doesn’t mean your father’s a premature ejaculator,” Sherry says. “Because that’s what Gino is.”