Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  Hoot almost choked on his last bite of crab cake, and wished he had bought himself a Mountain Dew.

  “Picasso,” the other woman suggested.

  “One of those famous people. Anyway, it makes sense to me. I dated this gorgeous guy once and he turned out to be gay and I was so mad but now I wouldn’t be, you know why? It wasn’t his fault. It’s just like they keep saying, it really isn’t their fault. All it is is, they were women in a past life. And they did something wrong, so they had to come back as men.”

  The way she said “men” made Doris and her friend laugh like ha-ha birds. Hoot gulped the remains of his pie and skedaddled; he had heard enough. What was it about women and queers anyway? Most women seemed to adore faggots. They panted over swishy models and movie stars. His boss always got the hots over the most faggoty-looking strippers. Larque had made him stop telling fag jokes around the house. She said he might be hurting the kids, there was a one in ten chance Rodd or Jason or Jeremy could be gay. Which had shocked the hell out of him, that she would say that or even think it, but that was Larque. She had a mind that was always going; it showed in her face like a spotlight playing on her—she always looked more alive than anybody else he knew, and she would say things that he wouldn’t even let into his mind, much less talk about.

  Down on the main floor of the market again, he tried to concentrate on the nonfood booths now, looking for a gift for her. Even staying away from the flowers and the perfumy candles and potpourri and fancy soaps and stuff, he still had plenty of choices. There were all sorts of little craft stands. Stuffed animals, cloth dolls, ceramics, wooden toys, door wreaths—

  Hoot settled on a heart-shaped grapevine wreath that was plain, kind of nice-looking, and not too god-awful expensive. But then before paying he stood there with his wallet in one hand and the grapevine heart in the other, hesitating. Would it cheer her up, or would she think he was saying she needed to pay more attention to the house? Or would she rather he didn’t spend the money? Face it, she made most of the income, and with a month’s work destroyed and her not feeling like painting right now, things were going to be tight, and she had to be concerned about that.

  Would she like it if he brought this thing home to her? He really couldn’t tell. He didn’t even know how she was going to react when he told her what Doris had said, about her being a reincarnated Rembrandt or somebody. Would she laugh and take it as a compliment? Or would she snap, “Sure, right, in order to be anybody I have to be a dead white European male,” was that what she’d say? Maybe he shouldn’t even tell her at all.

  Would she like the door wreath? Women, they kept saying they were equal, but they sure as hell were different. Might as well be from Mars. Twenty years married, yet how often could he really tell what she would think about anything?

  To hell with it. Larque would be okay. Save the money. Hoot put the grapevine wreath back where he had found it, bought himself a Coke and a Kit Kat bar, and ingested them as he walked back to work.

  THREE

  UP TILL NOW IT HAD BEEN NO PROBLEM FOR LARQUE when doppelgangers disappeared—the sooner they did it the better. But usually they just faded away; none had ever run out the door as dramatically as Sky had done. It had not been a proper exit, somehow, and everything about Sky felt different, dangerous, life-changing even aside from the problems of income and career.

  Emergency bells were ringing in Larque’s bones. She had to find Sky.

  The only sensible suggestion so far, she decided, had come from the heavyset housedressed woman with the rolled-down nylons, the one who had wanted to see a photo of the missing person. Larque didn’t have any, or if she did, it was boxed in the attic somewhere and would take her days to find. But she knew who might have one handy.

  Early the next morning, therefore, she went to see her mother.

  This was not a lightweight undertaking. Years before—when she was in her forties—Florence O’Connell had abruptly divorced Larque’s father, sold her fully carpeted three-bedroom home with baseboard electric heat, and moved into a series of eccentric dwellings, each more distanced—Larque felt it as distancing—than the last. Becoming a Scientologist, Florrie had lived in a remodeled Piper Cub hangar set in the middle of a cow pasture, sans cows. Then, transmogrified into a Wiccan, she had moved into the woods, occupying an A-frame complete with Jotul stove. After answering an altar call at a Baptist tent revival, she had bought herself a condo at the foot of a ski slope. That and religion had pretty well blown her stock portfolio. Right now she lived in a beaverboard bungalow set far back a flooded-out dirt road alongside the Cold Bottom River, but Larque didn’t know what her mother’s current metaphysical mind-set might be. Larque had stopped asking her about that sort of thing.

  There was a tree, luckily not a huge tree, down across the rutted road. Larque had to get out of her rattletrap Chevette and drag the trunk to the side in order to get past. No big deal. Just another obstacle.

  The bungalow crouched in shade so moist and deep that moss and dandelions grew on the roof. The door felt sticky with wood sweat. Larque did not bother to knock, but shoved it open and walked in. “Hello,” she called.

  The place was mostly one room inside. Sitting yoga-style in the middle of the floor, her mother looked up at her twinkle-eyed, like a gnome.

  “Hail to thee, blithe spirit!” the gnome recited. “Bird thou never wert.”

  “Blithe I never wert, either.” Larque had long since gotten used to being greeted this way. It was one of the shits of life, meant to be accepted, that her mother had in Catholic school gotten hung up on the Romantic poets, who were in Larque’s opinion a bunch of self-kissing hyperventilating assholes. This opinion she had never voiced to her mother, who tended, like Wordsworth and Shelley, to become overwrought.

  At this moment Florrie reminded her of a gift-shop porcelain Buddha, right down to the apple-cheeked smirk. Sweet enough to make a person’s stomach hurt.

  Larque walked around the Buddha, heading for a kitchen chair—and there, crouched sulkily between a blocky plaid love seat and the wall, was Sky.

  “You’re here!” Larque exclaimed.

  “Of course, dear.” Her mother rolled to her knees and got up, so short-legged she could hoist herself off the floor by using her hands, with her round bottom in the air, like a toddler. “I never get out of here before noon.” The little woman, not much more than four feet tall, shuffled ducklike in wide polyester pants toward the microwave. “Had your coffee, kiddo? You’re the early bird today.”

  Hugely relieved to have found her missing doppelganger, Larque didn’t even mind yet another bird wisecrack. “No,” she babbled, “no, but—I mean her. Sky. How long has she been hiding out here with you?”

  “Dear? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see her? One of my damn doppelgangers is skulking behind your sofa.”

  Sky frowned fiercely and scrooched against the wall.

  “Really?” Florrie blinked serenely at the indicated spot. “No, dear, can’t say I do.” She continued toward the microwave.

  Sky looked rumpled and runny-nosed and quite grubby, being gray all over with Florrie’s crud-of-ages house dirt. Apparently, however, Sky did not perceive herself as wretched. She glared daggers of defiance at Larque. “I am not coming home with you,” she declared.

  Such statements from children were best ignored. Anyway, something bizarre was happening. Larque appealed to her mother, “Don’t you hear her either?” What was the matter? Florrie had never shown any trouble seeing, say, the ghosts of babies past that occasionally followed Jason and Jeremy and Rodd around.

  Over a cup of tap water her mother looked at her blankly and blinked again. “I should be hearing something?”

  “Never mind.” When Florrie blinked like that it meant the world was too much with her, late and soon. As long as Larque had known her, Florrie had possessed a disconcerting ability to blink things away, to make unpleasantness cease to exist in her world by simply, briefly
, shutting her eyes. And it was a good idea to allow her this sleight. Cornered by unwelcome reality, Florrie tended to go to pieces in a colossal way.

  Her maiden name, which she had taken back after the divorce, was Lawrence. It had sometimes in sympathetic moments seemed to Larque that being named Florence Lawrence was sufficient excuse for all her mother’s eccentricities, including her affection for sentimental poetry and its painful rhymes.

  The microwave turntable whirred. Getting out the Folger’s Crystals, Florrie hummed along with it, Larque, in effect talking to herself, said grimly to Sky, “I’m sorry. You are not a damn doppelganger, just a doppelganger. And I shouldn’t have hit you. I’ve been looking all over the place for you.”

  “You still don’t like me.”

  Larque evaded that. “Why did you come here?”

  “Dear,” Florrie sang across the room, “have one of these.” It was a summons best obeyed. Larque went over to the table and found, sitting on her saucer alongside her hot water, a suit-button–sized pill that appeared to have been pressed together out of wood chips.

  She stalled for time by sitting down and fixing her coffee. “One of what?”

  “It’s a Nutri-Salvation wafer, dear. Ascorbic acid, bee pollen, fiber, everything you need. I eat them for breakfast, and some people have them for lunch too. In fact, if you take enough of these every day, you don’t have to eat food at all.”

  Larque recognized the fervor in those round brown eyes. Her mother had now joined a vitamin cult, to purify the soul by purifying the body of its atavistic craving for bacon and eggs. That, and other primitive urges. Some people got so they didn’t even want to crap.

  “Mother, don’t do that,” she protested. “You stop going to the bathroom, you’re dead.”

  “Don’t worry, dear. The very nice man on the phone explained everything to me. It’s completely safe, recommended by the Holistic Church of Inner Unity, and very, very healthy. I receive weekly shipments.…”

  It occurred to Larque that she was now mothering her mother. She hated this, because when was anybody ever going to mother her? As an act of covert rebellion she stopped listening. Florrie was explaining the Nutri-Salvation plan at some length, and while she gazed heavenward, fervid about transcendent health, Larque took the sawdust tablet and slipped it into her paper napkin, which she then stuffed into her jeans pocket.

  Crawling out from behind the love seat at that moment, Sky saw her. “Coward,” the little girl crooned.

  “Shut up,” Larque told her.

  Holding forth, Florrie blinked several times rapidly and focused on Larque, but kept talking. Sky did not shut up either.

  “You’re a coward and you always were. You always snuck about things. Brown nose. Goody-two-shoes.”

  “Go wash your face, for God’s sake,” Larque told her. “You’ve got snot down to your chin.”

  “Do not.”

  “Dear?” Florrie had stopped talking and was staring at Larque while maintaining an expression of benign inquiry on her softly wrinkled face. “Did you hear what I was saying?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “There, you’re doing it again,” Sky accused. “Liar. You lie like a rug.”

  “I’m courteous, that’s all. I’m just being polite.”

  Her mother said in hurt tones, “Well, I thought you’d be interested.”

  “No! Mom, I was talking to Sky.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—of course I’m interested in what you were saying.”

  “Tell her the truth for once,” Sky challenged. “You’re the reason she can’t see me.”

  “Oh, she can so see you!” Larque burst out. “Why did you come here if she can’t see you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Mom, you see her, don’t you?” In the backwash of the small tiff this suddenly seemed absurdly important to Larque, though obviously her mother did not see her spirit self of the past at all. “I mean, you will if you really look,” she amplified. “Right there, by the gas heater.”

  Florrie blinked at the indicated area of the room. Sky stood still. For a moment Larque wondered why Sky was cooperating, as the child seemed so difficult in general, but then she saw the look of dry-eyed longing on the little girl’s face. This was important to her too.

  “Standing right in front of you,” Larque said impatiently to her mother, but then she deliberately softened her voice. “It’s me when I was about ten,” she said. “Skinny. In oxford shoes and bobby sox, and one of those full cotton skirts that came down to my shins, and a plain white blouse.”

  Florrie peered. Florrie smiled like sunshine. “Oh, of course, Skylark,” she said gently. “I see you now.”

  But the child who stood there now was not snot-nosed. Not sullen or needful. Not scabby of knee, or bony of overlarge ankle, not ragged of fingernail, not a nose-picking crotch-snatcher, not uncouth or ungainly in any way. The Sky who now stood there, daughter of Florence Lawrence, was a delicate little fairylike creature in a crisp crinolined skirt that stood out from her slender body like a butterfly’s wings. The white blouse shone with starch. This dainty beauty had quiet porcelain hands, silky blond hair, a petal-skinned, utterly symmetrical face on which no particular expression lived. No pout. No pain. No dreaming, no yearning, no defiance.

  “No!” Larque exclaimed.

  Mother and girl-child turned on her the same serene stare. “What’s wrong, dear?” Florrie asked.

  “That’s not me.”

  “What do you mean, honey child? Of course it is. I’m looking straight at you.”

  “It’s not! I’m not like that. Don’t you have photos or something? I can show you—oh, never mind.” Probably this witch could blink at photos and change them too. Much upset—or she would not have been talking to her mother this way—Larque bolted up, hurried over, and grabbed the butterfly-Sky by her little ladylike hand. This did not work, of course. The apparition had less substance than dandelion fluff.

  “Come on,” Larque told her.

  “Why?” But there was no invigorating brattiness in the word. Sky turned to her eyes tame as a dove’s. The child was requesting information, nothing more.

  “So we can get you back!” Larque cried with more vehemence than lucidity. “C’mon.” Fleeing, she headed out the door, and Sky—if it was still Sky—followed her meekly.

  The dog, a simple-minded beagle-poodle cross named Harold, snarled hysterically at Sky when Larque brought her into the house, though he had not even barked at her before. His claws clattered on the kitchen floor in his frenzy. He crouched and lost control of his bladder.

  “Senile,” Larque scolded him as she cleaned up. The dog was only three years old, but what could one expect of a curly-haired, pinto-spotted, rat-tailed boogie? “Don’t mind him, Sky,” she told the child. “He’s brainless. Lost what little gray matter he ever had banging his head against the front door, trying to terrorize the mailman.” She smiled, but her heart was clenched like a fist in her chest.

  She took the girl up to her studio. As she set up her spare easel, she saw that Sky was trembling. Afraid of punishment, maybe. Understandably so. Larque was the woman who had slapped her.

  “Don’t be scared,” she told her.

  “I’m sorry about what I did. I didn’t mean to.” Gracefully, tenderly, without contorting her face, the little girl started to cry.

  “Trashing this place, you mean? I’m not worried about that.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. Here, would you like to paint something? You can use up some of this oil paint you got out.”

  Wet-faced, fawn-eyed, the youngster obeyed. Using the flat side of the brush like a rubber stamp, she started doing careful, orderly flowers in lemon yellow. Then she mixed some other colors, using plenty of white to mute them into pastels. Crimson became pink. Violet turned into lilac, ultramarine into powder blue. Her tears had dried. She made more tidy flat flowers, and some lettuce green le
aves.

  “There, that’s pretty,” she said when she was done.

  “Uh-huh,” muttered Larque.

  The pseudo-Sky pointed at the stormy oil the real Sky had done two days before. “That one’s ugly,” she said.

  “No, it’s not. I kind of like—” Glancing at the painting in question, Larque failed to explain what she liked about this passionate sheet-cake impasto, because her jaw had dropped and she was staring. She stepped closer—it didn’t help. Purple cloud and brassy sunlight remained, but the black-hat cowboy and the white-hat cowboy were gone.

  Sky hadn’t done it. Sky didn’t know how it had happened. It was no trouble to get this new, improved Sky to talk and answer questions, though the answers were no more solid than she was. The Florrie-approved doppelganger was pretty, quiet, polite, earnest, cooperative, eager to please. Larque just about hated her.

  “I think somebody blinked,” Sky offered shyly.

  “Who? Why?” Larque’s voice had gone shrill. Something about this child made her so mad she wanted to cry.

  “Mommy, maybe. Because it was ugly.”

  “It wasn’t ugly!”

  “You said it was ugly. You didn’t like it.”

  “I changed my mind!”

  “You didn’t like me when I was ugly.”

  “Well, phooey on me!” Larque grabbed a little stubby brush, an old favorite, stabbed at the palette’s puddle of black, and started striking in what should have been the legs of a black horse awash in mustard-colored sunshine. She painted fiercely, vehemently, more so than she had in years, trying to give back to Sky’s canvas what had been ugly and true. But the brush turned in her hand. She felt it happen. Now what should have been the black rider had become a meaningless paisley shape, a black fish most inappropriately swimming up the painting’s arid mesa.

  “Jesus Christ!” Larque slammed down her brush, picked up the palette knife and tried to scrape off the black blob. It would not completely efface. She invoked the deity again, told herself to calm down, and tried another approach, starting to paint with white.

  Her brush, despite her intentions to depict the white-hat rider on the white horse, complemented the black fish shape with a white one. She had completed a yinyang which floated, apparently sizable and in midair, over Arizona or someplace.