by Jan Carson
Simeon Klein, silent throughout the singing, threw back his head and launched into a note-perfect rendition of ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window’, the very last song he could recall from his hearing years. Clary O’Hare quit fumbling about with teaspoons and, for the first time in fifty years, felt brave enough to engage in honest, wordy interaction with other human beings. The Mrs Hunter Huxley and George Kellerman, overcome by a fresh realization of their own salvation, felt the youthful exuberance of the immortal itching through arthritic fingers and knees, and began to fandango like loose-limbed teenagers round and round the Treatment Room. Irene remembered everything in an instant, and, seeing the jealous years peel from his wife’s face, Bill recalled the woman he’d married and fell furiously in love all over again. Nate Grubbs, still lamenting his own stupidity, felt the shotgun guilt lift from his shoulders like a pair of sandbags, unleashed, while Soren James Blue was struck by a sudden and all-consuming awareness of her own peculiar beauty. Roger Heinz, with a sly grin, sensed an unprovoked stirring in his underpants, and, cheered by the possibility of loving the Meals on Wheels lady all by himself without pills or pumps, could barely contain his own excitement.
Emboldened by the miracles unfolding in every corner of the Treatment Room, the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs whooped and hollered, raising their wrinkled chins and hands in anticipation of further healing. The noise was deafening. Only Malcolm and his mother hesitated on the edge of hysteria, unsure whether the truth should be counted a blessing, or a particularly heavy curse. Both had already begun to note slight physical changes, multiplying with each minute spent bowed beneath the speakers. While Malcolm would soon come to mark this, his moment of salvation, his mother would fluctuate for years between the thankful heart of a recovered addict and the suspicion that the Treatment Room had robbed her of something essential and irretrievable. Martha Orange would leave the Treatment Room four pounds lighter than she’d entered. Each fledgling wing accounted for a single pound of loss. The final two pounds marked the precise weight of thirty years worth of ambition, suddenly excised.
Arms beginning to ache from the weight of Cunningham Holt, Martha Orange had started to experience a fluttering sensation in her shoulder blades. The truth was singing to her soft and low and, much as it pained her, Martha could not keep her body from responding. Her baby wings, barely one hour old, began to retract, fizzling back into her flesh with stunning speed. She felt the loss like a toothache at the back of each lung and, for a moment, could not place the pain. Removing a supportive hand from Cunningham Holt’s armpit, she stretched her arm over her shoulder and cupped the remains of her right wing. It pulsed in her hand like a newborn chick, frail and feathery. Martha could not bring herself to let go. As she held on to the possibility of future flight, her wing shriveled from a potato-sized handfuls, to a lemon, a marble, and finally a damply warm spot in her shirt. Malcolm’s mother was disappointed but not surprised.
Standing unwinged and ordinary in the middle of the Treatment Room, Martha Orange remembered the very last story of her sessions with Junior Button. At the time it had seemed an odd sort of epitaph to a week’s worth of biographical mumblings. Now it came back to bite her like a misplaced punch line.
‘Girl,’ the old man had said, propping himself up on one massive elbow, ‘let me tell you a story about a young lady I once knowed back in my Jefferson days.’
Martha Orange, noting that his hand now trembled over his water cup and his thrice daily shots of insulin only kept him conscious for an hour at most, hopped up on the edge of Junior Button’s bed and prepared to take what she knew might well be the old man’s final confession.
‘Tell me all about it, Junior,’ she’d said. ‘I love your stories.’
‘This ain’t no story, child. This is God’s honest truth and you’d be best fit to take heed of it. Give me a nip of the good stuff and I’ll tell you the whole sorry tale.’
Passing Junior Button the bottle of Gatorade laced with liquor she’d been smuggling in and out of the Center for the last few days, Martha Orange had taken a quick swig for herself and curled into a question mark at the foot of the bed. Bent double and caught up in the stories of her childhood, she’d come to feel the years peel away like ancient scabs.
‘It’s like this,’ he’d begun, coughing loosely as the liquor began to warm the insides of his rib cage, ‘I used to be friendly with this gal called Mary-Betty Omquist. Stunning girl she was; all arms and legs and braids like boat rope. Don’t mind telling you Martha, I’d a notion of wedding Mary-Betty when I got old enough. Course a girl like that is always going to be out of my sort’s league. Old man Omquist would have scalped my ass if I’d so much as laid a finger on Mary-Betty, but it sure as hell didn’t stop me looking and grinning at her like a great, gallumping halfwit every time I passed her on Main Street. Mary-Betty was a sweet gal and God bless her, but didn’t she always beam back at me – face like a Fourth of July picnic – until I got to imagining the girl had a notion of me.
‘Us flying folk has a way of knowing our own and I could see the flight hovering over Mary-Betty from five miles out. That girl had a peculiar way of carrying her feet like she could hardly bear to be touching on the sidewalk. She dandered about Jefferson with her nose turned up, eyes fixed on the heavens, ’til the other girls – evil bitches, every one of them – pronounced her uppity and pushed her out of the Sewing Circle and the Lutheran Ladies’ Prayer and Bible Study. Mary-Betty was mortified. She was a humble kind of a gal, inclined to turn primrose pink at the very thought of offending another critter. It wasn’t pride that kept her nose pointed to the clouds. I could tell it was the flight cause my nose was forever itching upwards too. It used to kill me to see the poor gal sitting at the soda counter in the drugstore all alone with no kids her own age to keep her company. Them there days, I was always lonesome myself. There weren’t much company to be had for a black fella like myself in Grant County. Well, I don’t mind telling you Martha, I got to thinking that me and old Mary-Betty had more in common than her papa might have thought. Back then I didn’t know shit about wings or flying children but I knew, sure as God and all his angels were floating in the sky, that I should be up there too.
‘By the first day of summer vacation I’d got my guts up to speak to Mary-Betty. I wasn’t thinking of asking her out nor nothing. I just wanted to say hi, maybe tell her how pretty she was; nothing crazy. I knew better than to make moves on a white girl. But when I sat down beside her on the bench outside the store I could see she’d been crying and I couldn’t help myself.
‘“Why you crying?” I asked, and that was enough to really get the girl going. She went off like a broken faucet; the water wouldn’t quit coming out of her.
‘“Is you crying about them mean bitches from the Lutheran Ladies’ Bible Study?” I asked, and she just kept right on howling so I couldn’t tell if this was her particular bother or not.
‘“Oh Mary-Betty,” I said, cause the up-close sight of her boat rope braids was doing something funny to the inside of my belly and other parts. “Don’t be getting yourself in a state. Them girls ain’t worth two cents. You’re better than all of them put together. You’re like me, ain’t you? All your head can think about is flying far away from Jefferson.”
‘And Mary-Betty quit her crying in an instant and grabbed at my arm, all big eyes and G-D braids. “Do you feel it too?” she asks me. “Do you think about flying all the time, even when you’re asleep?”
‘What could I do, Martha? I couldn’t lie to the girl. I nodded my head and when Mary-Betty reached for my hand I sure as hell didn’t try to stop her. I just kept right on nodding and holding that white girl’s hand and before I had the sense to stop myself I heard my mouth saying, “Mary-Betty, maybe I could fix it for you to do flying, just once, you know, so you could feel what it was like.”
‘That was it, Martha. I was screwed. I knew in my head that if I could get Mary-Betty up in the air, out of Jefferson, it would
be a sort of miracle. And if one miracle could be done then there was every chance of another one and maybe, just maybe Mary-Betty Omquist would be my girl. Sense and reason went hot-footing it out the window. Next few weeks I spent every spare minute working on my flying plans. I done drawings on the back of my pa’s newspaper. I built stuff in the backyard. I tried and failed and tried again ’til I finally got something I thought might just maybe do the business. It wasn’t rocket science or magic, Martha. It was a dining room chair with a bit of rope for a seatbelt and ten dozen flapping birds bound to the back rest with parcel string. Catching them birds was a hell of a job. Binding them to the chair was another thing altogether. It took almost a week to get it right but when I finally got the last bird tied down and I saw fit to toss a handful of breadcrumbs up in the sky, well, them G-D birds all start flapping in the same direction and the chair went five clean feet off the ground.
‘The very next day I grabbed Mary-Betty outside the drugstore. She was sitting on the stoop, sipping a Coke and pushing the dirt round with the toe of her sneaker.
‘“Hey, Junior,” she said.
‘“Hey, Mary-Betty,” I replied. “You still want to do the flying?”
‘“Sure,” she replied.
‘“You gotta follow me.”
‘Mary-Betty didn’t look none too sure of that but the girl was so frickin’ lonely I guessed she’d have upped and followed the Pied Piper himself if the old devil had asked. We went round my pa’s place. My pa was out. It was market morning. I’d made sure he would be out cause I knew he’d tan my ass for bringing a white girl round our place. Folks like us had got themselves lynched for less in Grant County. I could tell Mary-Betty was nervy. She didn’t do as much grinning as usual. She didn’t try to do holding my hand. When she saw the chair with them flappering birds she went paper white and quit smiling altogether.
‘“No way,” she said. “No way am I getting on that chair.”
‘“But you wanted to do flying Mary-Betty,” I said. “You told me you wanted to do the flying.”
‘“It’s not safe. I could fall off.”
‘“Safe as houses. Already been up in it myself,” I said. This was a lie but my granddaddy once told me the Lord Himself was always tellin’ lies for the good of mankind. “You want to be sad forever, Mary-Betty, or you want to feel real good about yourself right now? There’s nothing like doing flying. Best thing I ever done.”
‘Mary-Betty looked mighty sad and scared so I put a hand on her shoulder and shoved her a little bit into the chair. She let me push her. She didn’t even fight me. I wasn’t thinking about Mary-Betty, Martha. I was thinking about myself and the way folks would look at me different and better if Mary-Betty was my girl. I might have shouted at her a bit.
‘“Mary-Betty, you sit there in this G-D chair and quit your sniveling. You’re going to do flying today and when you get back down after you’re going to thank old Junior Button for making you happier than you ever been in your whole life.”
‘I belted the rope across her middle and stepped back. Them birds were flapping and swirling round her head like a prairie cyclone. One of the pigeons had gone and got itself caught in her boat rope braids. Mary-Betty looked like she was just about to shit herself in panic. Her hands were holding so hard to the chair I could see the white lumps of her bones. Her eyes were closed tight shut.
‘“One, two, three,” I shouted, and chucked a couple of handfuls of breadcrumbs into the air above her head. I wasn’t expecting the birds to go so quick. In a second they were whooshing up towards the clouds, dragging Mary-Betty and my ma’s old dining chair with them. For one short, wonderful second I could see right up the girl’s frock, then I could only see the bottom of her sneakers waving wildly like a pair of white headache pills.
‘“Mary-Betty!” I yelled. “You OK?”
‘But Mary-Betty was out of earshot. I couldn’t hear a damn thing the girl was saying. Ninety seconds later when her fingers got un-feared enough to undo the belt she came tumbling out of my ma’s dining room chair. She made no noise at all coming down. You’d have thought her to scream, wouldn’t you, Martha? I’d scream if I was falling that far through the sky. No noise at all, but when she hit the ground she made a noise like eggs breaking. Hell, Martha, a noise like that stays with you. It haunts you, so it does. She was all snapped legs and arms and two dead birds caught up in her boat rope braids. I couldn’t look at Mary-Betty except through my fingers. Honest to God, I thought the gal was dead.’
‘And was she dead?’ Martha Orange had asked, interrupting Junior Button before he could finish his story.
‘No ma’am,’ Junior Button had replied. ‘Old Mary-Betty wasn’t dead. More’s the pity. The poor girl never did walk proper again though, and her pa got word of who was responsible for her busted legs and ran my ass out of Jefferson with a sawed-off shotgun.
‘Don’t mind telling you, Martha, I never did make no more tries at flying. Mary-Betty scared the living shit right out of me. I didn’t want to end up like her, all broke up and crippled. No ma’am, I couldn’t bring myself to think about flying no more. See, I got to figuring you can be content with your working lot and enjoy the two walking legs the good Lord gave you or you can be like Mary-Betty Omquist, take your shot at the big blue sky and end up losing everything that was ever important to you. Me, I went and taught myself to be contented with both feet firmly fixed to the ground. Never done me any harm far as I can see.’
‘What about me?’ Martha Orange had asked, her throat thick with anticipation. ‘I can’t seem to settle anywhere. Do you think it’s OK to fly if you really can’t get away from it?’
‘You got to decide for yourself, child. Depends what matters most. It’s a hard lot whatever you choose. Once you fix upon flying, you can’t come back and expect things to be sitting the way you left them.’
The very next day Junior Button had passed away in his sleep, stretched out on the floor with a bottle of Gatorade clenched in one hand. Martha Orange had a whole world of questions waiting to ask him but the chance never arose. With no advice forthcoming, she’d packed her life into a pair of grocery sacks and jumped the first bus out of town.
Standing in the corner of the Treatment Room, suddenly bereft of both wings, Martha Orange could not help but wonder if hers was the luckiest of escapes. If the absence of a credit card and winter coat had not drawn her back to the Retirement Village into the midst of crisis, she would currently be contemplating the weekend from the far side of the Canadian border and whilst life would undoubtedly be chock-full of open roads and possibility, she would never again have the opportunity to persevere through her children’s childish years. As the room turned and the People’s Committee slipped their skins for younger souls, Martha Orange lingered on the last will and testament of her good friend, Junior Button:
‘Once you fix upon flying, you can’t come back and expect things to be sitting the way you left them.’
The wide blue sky seemed a small price to pay for a lifetime’s worth of tiger hugs and tumbling love. Martha Orange screwed her feet into the spinning floor and chose to persevere: today, tomorrow and for all the dullish days to come.
Despite her reservations, the miracles continued to burst forth around Martha Orange’s skeptical ankles. All over the Treatment Room wrinkles relaxed, joints loosened and the last decade’s losses returned to the People’s Committee in double portion. The Jesus God was surely giving in reckless abundance and his unchecked enthusiasm seemed to highlight the rather tight-lipped taking he was working upon Martha Orange. Malcolm watched on in befuddled amazement as his mother lost her wings, transforming from an angel into an ordinary woman in less than half an hour.
Later he could not resist asking Martha about the wings. Mrs Orange refused to answer any of his questions. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ she’d mutter and settle into her resignation face, the same face which had watched two dozen states and any number of elderly relatives disappear i
n the Volvo’s rearview mirror. She refused to be drawn on the specifics of flight. Malcolm Orange pestered her for weeks but his mother would not, or could not, explain the miraculous appearance and disappearance of her wings. In the end Malcolm simply gave up. In light of the last month’s events he was happy just to have a semi-functional parent. Though a flying mother appealed to the little part of him which had not yet grown out of the X-Men, Malcolm Orange concluded that a stay-at-home, never-leave mother would be infinitely more useful in the long term.
The flight never quite left Martha Orange. On the occasional evenings when she allowed herself an alcoholic drink before bed, she dreamt of air currents and skylines; waking the following morning, heartsick disappointed with the metallic taste of cloud lingering in her teeth. The temptation to leave was constant and insidious. It rose to meet her over the breakfast table, mocking her maternal stumblings with the oatmeal and waffles. It tailed her to the school gates and taunted her openly on the rare occasions when she lost her temper with Malcolm. Good mothers, Martha Orange knew, did not long for the chance to abandon their children. Good mothers could not imagine an existence without them.
Martha Orange had no illusions about her capacity as a mother and yet she stayed put. She persevered through their growing years, assisting in the completion of homework, photographing Ross and Malcolm’s important moments and priding herself on her faultless portrayal of a good mother. She forced herself to see each flighty urge as a false contraction. No one, not least Malcolm, ever noticed the way Martha spent an inordinate amount of her adult life ogling the open sky. Her addiction was a private thing, practiced quietly, in isolation. In place of wings Martha Orange accepted a pair of ordinary arms; elbowed, fingered and all of a sudden brave enough to balk tradition and hold her family close and safe for a very long time.
Whilst Martha Orange suffered her own small loss in the corner of the Treatment Room, miracles – medium-sized and extraordinary – were blossoming like weed flowers all across the room. In the centre of the circle, floating on the outstretched arms of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs, the truth had settled upon Cunningham Holt’s face like August rain. Opening his eyes he saw the world as he’d long imagined it. Colors and shapes and kindly, familiar faces swam through the tears so when he passed away – just one full minute after his second birth – his last sight was not the darkness, nor the ground clamoring beneath his feet but a bold, white ceiling and the promise of sky beyond. No one cried. It was the sort of loss which left everyone larger for the losing. Two days after his death the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs, standing in lieu of his absent family, were forced to make decisions about Cunningham Holt’s funeral arrangements. When the Board of Directors pushed for a burial they insisted upon a cremation and, without waiting for assent or permission, bound the ashes to a bouquet of helium balloons, cast adrift over the Burnside Bridge.
