Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “Jesus jumping-on-the-water Christ!” To hell with calming down.

  “It’s prettier now,” Sky said doubtfully.

  Larque ignored the doppelganger. She was recklessly pulling out her largest, most expensive watercolor block, penciling in only a few light guidelines before she started to paint: an exquisitely handsome black-haired man. An ineffably beautiful man in silver-studded white. A black outlaw hat. A creamy straw Stetson. Two Popular Street cowboys.

  It was a scene that had been burning hot in her heart since the moment she had met them, and she didn’t know why. Her need defied analysis. She knew only that she had to paint this picture to save her soul.

  She couldn’t.

  What should have been a brooding, dark-browed hero might as well have been Howdy Doody. She saw it happening, and felt somebody she had once known having fits inside her, and told her shut up, okay, stop being a baby, these things happen, the reach sometimes exceeds the grasp, everybody has days when things just won’t go right. She rinsed the brush, squeezed out a little more Payne’s gray, attempted the figure dressed in white, and watched again as the brush defied forty years of marriage between her mind and her hand, turning him into a grinning cartoon, a caricature of what she had wanted to depict.

  Before it could be entirely over, Larque dropped the brush to the floor. She backed up against the studio wall and stood there leaning for support. When she had caught her breath, she whispered to the spirit-girl sitting quietly nearby, “Babe, we are in deep trouble.”

  The child turned big eyes to her but said nothing.

  Once again Hoot came home to only the most sketchy of supper arrangements. He was, however, accustomed to this, and gave his first attention to the girl sitting at the kitchen table. “Who’s this?”

  “Sky,” Larque said in echoing tones to the interior of the refrigerator.

  “Get outta here!” This was not an eviction notice, but an expression of disbelief. Hoot ogled Sky. “You gotta be kidding. I wouldn’t have recognized her.” He stared some more and started to smile. “What did you do with her? She cleans up nice.”

  Sky seemed to feel no need to react to any of this, but Larque straightened up, closed the refrigerator door, and looked at her husband. Twenty years married, and didn’t he understand anything? She found him wanting, and this distressed her mildly; she preferred to approve of Hoot.

  “I liked her better messy,” she reproached him, “and I still can’t paint.”

  He seemed not to hear reproof, merely a statement of fact. “Well, you’d better get started up again.” Hoot crossed the room, plopped himself down at the kitchen table opposite Sky, and said, “I quit my job.”

  Larque no longer bothered panicking when this happened. She asked merely, “Why?”

  “That Alec.” This was his boss, Alexandra. “You know I installed that garbage disposal for her a few weeks back.”

  “Yes.” This had been a freebie that shot most of a Saturday afternoon. “So?”

  “So she goes and gives me a gift certificate for dinner for you and me at some restaurant.”

  Sounded good to her. “So?”

  He looked astonished, evidently expecting her to understand at once. “So don’t you see? What the hell does she think I am, some sort of money whore?” Impassioned, Hoot was turning pink, and whenever he got that way he reminded her of a big golden retriever with a pink nose. He expounded, “She should take us out to dinner if she wants to return the favor. Giving a gift certificate, that’s just the same as if she had paid me.”

  Probably the poor woman was baffled by him. “Hoot,” Larque told him, “not everybody plays by the same rules you do.”

  “Well, they ought to.”

  “Why should they? Anyway, the rules change every day.”

  “Not mine, they don’t. Anyway, I handed it back to her and told her why, and we got in a big pissing contest, and I quit before she could fire me.”

  “If you’d let her fire you,” Larque pointed out, “you could collect unemployment.”

  “That’s not the point! Plus, I haven’t been working for her long enough to collect unemployment. So I’d rather quit.”

  “Idiot,” Larque muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m thinking, kind of a quixotic reason to quit.”

  “Well, she’s the one who took offense when I tried to set her straight.”

  “You don’t try to set the boss straight!”

  “If you’re me, you do.”

  This was true. And for most of their marriage Larque had cherished—let her count the ways—this man who was quixotic, unpredictable, boyish, full of cloud dreams and masculine quirks and surprises. Generally she did not try to tell him what to do, proud because she had a career and made money and could spoil him, could keep him like a beautiful, large, impractical pet, like a palomino stallion in the living room. Generally he did not try to tell her what to do, either. He had made her the tacit exception to his idealistic rules about human conduct; she could have given him a gift certificate and he would have found a dozen reasons why it was wonderful. To Larque, this irrationale was part of Hoot’s charm, and it included his attitude toward her doppelgangers, which was simply that whatever Larque did was fine with him as long as it didn’t keep him awake at night. One thing Larque had noticed early, when the children were yowling infants: Hoot’s chivalry ended when the lights went off. Luckily, doppelgangers were usually quiet as ghosts.

  Probably he was the only man in the world who would have put up with them at all. Larque had searched long and hard for him. As a teenage girl, living in the woodsy A-frame with her Wiccan mother, she had read paperback romances and dreamed wet dreams and realized that her own situation was desperate if not hopeless: what man in his right mind would get involved with a paranormal-textbook case like her? Embarrassing things happened when she was around. Eggs dropped out of birds like tiny bombs falling, and stray cats cloned kittens on the spot. Once, lucky enough to be out walking the town with a hunky soccer jock, she had looked at him with a lewd thought and accidentally produced beside him an instant naked replica in complete genital detail. This startled her, because it was the first time she had seen a human penis, let alone an erection. However, it startled him even more, and he had forthwith abandoned her, which left her with a very attractive naked date but without a ride home. Not that the naked date was of much use to her. Being without substance, he could neither talk with her nor enter into physical converse. He was good only for looking at, and even that was causing problems. She held her sweater in front of him as a modesty shield, but people were screaming anyway, and then the police arrived to take him into custody. They tried to put cuffs on him, but the things went right through his wrists. This upset them, and though they gave her a ride home, they talked angrily with her mother when they got there. The year was 1968; already there was enough rebellious flower child in Larque so that when she grew annoyed at the cops she thought, “Pigs,” and that was a mistake. Not that they made trouble. They left right away and did not come back, but she felt bad. Altogether it was a depressing day, and the hunky boy avoided her ever afterward, so she never did find out what had happened to the naked doppelganger.

  And this sort of disaster was what she had to look forward to by way of a love life.

  “Learn some self-control, dear,” her mother had advised her.

  “I can’t! Who’s going to teach me? Are you going to teach me how not to make doppelgangers?”

  “No, honey, of course not. I meant the other thing.” Florrie’s Chiclet-shaped face flushed pink, and she made small push-away gestures with her plump square hands. Sex seemed to be something else that Florrie had blinked out of her existence. There was no man in her life—Larque would have known if there was—nor did she show any signs of wanting one. Her world revolved around some other sun. This was as close as she ever came to discussing “it” with her daughter.

  Nevertheless, when Larque persisted in talking about her
dismal social life and future prospects, her mother had taken her to a Circle meeting. “Skylark wants a sweetheart,” she had announced to the women of her coven, her tone martyred.

  “Now, Florence,” said another woman gently, “they’re good for making babies. Don’t you want a granddaughter?”

  “Every sister is entitled to find her own way to truth,” said a sleek gray-haired woman exquisitely dressed in expensive woolens. “Skylark needs what Skylark needs.”

  This was the attitude taken by most of them. They devoted more than one evening’s Circle to Skylark’s problem. The Ouija board would not perform for her, and tea leaves were inconclusive, but a poodle-haired matron consulted numerology charts and came up with 186403201. A black woman in a turban went into a trance and told Larque to be on the lookout for a Scottish man. A redhead with a physics degree had Larque lay hands on her computer, which then randomly generated an image resembling fireworks, or a fountain, or possibly a dandelion. The sleek wealthy woman tried scrying for Larque in a crystal ball and said, “I see an owl.”

  More damn bird jokes. But Larque kept her dignity. “What kind of owl?”

  “I don’t know precisely. What sorts of owls are there?”

  “Um, barn, screech, great horny?”

  “Yes, of course. One of those. Perhaps screech. Or great horny.”

  Larque spent the next several months looking up everything she could find on the symbolism, mythology, and folklore of owls, as well as Scottish history and literary references to fireworks. Her enjoyment of the research made her decide to go into library science, and she chose her college accordingly. For three years her choice of career was the only demonstrable effect of her meetings with the Wiccan Circle.

  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

  RATHER THAN FACING HOOT 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?”