Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  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.

  Crinolines. God, and for a solid day she had been watching this so-called Sky wear them like the good, good little girl her mother had always wanted.

  “Stand up,” Larque ordered the doppelganger, misdirected anger roughening her voice.

  The little girl did it instantly, standing like a toy-store doll on display, and Larque went down on her knees in front of her, reaching under her voluminous skirt to tug the miserable net fashion-accessories-of-torment off. She couldn’t do it, of course. Her hands slipped right through whatever aspect of Sky she tried to grasp. Sky could impact on Larque’s world, boy could she impact, but Larque could not impact on Sky. Sky could mightily screw up Larque’s life, but Larque could not do anything to Sky, nooooooo. That would have been too easy. She was stuck with this child who was already done, completed, a fait accompli of her personal past.

  “Can you do it?” Larque begged her, still on her knees. “Take them off. Please.”

  “What?” the little girl asked politely.

  “Take off your damn crinolines.”

  “I can’t. Mommy wants me to wear them.”

  “Mommy’s not here. Aren’t you uncomfortable?”

  Sky was looking at her in a peculiar, intent way, listening like a person who has just heard a snatch of a song once danced to with a first love, later forgotten.

  Larque pleaded, “Don’t they bother you?”

  “Yes, I hate them. They itch.” Tears started down the little girl’s smooth face.

  “Okay! Way to go.” Larque felt a rush of relief and joy, so much so that she felt like cheering.

  “Yaaaay for our team,” Doris supplied softly from her place on the sidelines.

  Larque urged Sky, “Why are you wearing them, then? Take them off.”

  “But—but they make me pretty. And Daddy likes it when I’m pretty.” Sky lifted her head and turned her tears into a Cinderella smile for Daddy. What a princess.

  “What a crock of shit,” Larque moaned, more to whatever gods might be awake than to Sky, and she sank back on her butt so that she was sitting on the floor, defeated.

  “Stinks,” Doris agreed.

  Larque looked up at her. They exchanged despairing comments with their eyes. “Somebody got a twelve-step program for doppelgangers?” Larque asked after a while.

  “If the
y did, I’d have had you in it a long time ago.”

  “Not me. Her. She needs help. Pretty was never the most important thing to me when I was a kid.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. If your mother told you your father wanted …” Doris looked sharply at Larque. “Do you ever see your father?”

  “NO.” Larque heard the edge in her own taken-by-surprise voice and tried to soften it. “No. I haven’t seen him for years. He didn’t come to the wedding, so I—you know, we lost touch. I don’t even know where he is.”

  “He’s not dead?” This was Sky, and suddenly the crinolined princess disappeared under tears, real tears this time, the kind that turn a face red and rubbery. “But—he’s not with Mommy! So he’s dead!”

  “Oh, God, I forgot.” On her knees again, Larque tried to put her arms around the weeping girl. It didn’t work. “Oh, shit,” she appealed to Doris. “She doesn’t know. The divorce and everything happened when I was a little older.”

  “He didn’t leave Mommy!” Sky screamed. “He wouldn’t leave Mommy!”

  “You got mad at him,” Doris said to Larque.

  “I guess. I don’t remember.” With Doris talking in one ear and Sky bawling in the other, Larque couldn’t think.

  Doris said, “Bullshit, Larque. You’re holding a grudge, or you’d be curious about where he is and how he is and what he’s doing.”

  Sky wailed, “I want my daddy!”

  Larque stood up and screamed hard enough to make her eyes close, “WILL YOU GIVE ME A BREAK, BOTH OF YOU!”

  Everything got a lot quieter right away. Not only did Sky and Doris shut up, but Doris’s refrigerator clunked silent, and the light over her sink went out.

  “Huh,” Doris said. “Must have blown a circuit breaker.”

  Larque opened her eyes, but regrettably, all her problems were still there. She did not have her mother’s talent.

  “Look,” she said to Sky, “I’ll call Mom and find out where Dad is, and we’ll go visit him.” To Doris she said, “Sorry I yelled.”

  “No, you’re not.” Doris got up and headed toward the basement to flick her circuit breaker. She wore a nearly unbearable smirk. “Hey, anytime.”

  Larque told her gently, “Go get yourself a carrot and you know what you can do with it.” She tried to grab Sky by the hand and came up with a fistful of air. Sighed at herself. “C’mon,” she told the kid. “We gotta boogie.”

  “Let me know how it goes,” Doris yelled after her, grinning. From the dark basement stairway her teeth shone faintly orange, like a special effect in a horror movie. With friends like her, who needed horror movies.

  “Listen,” Larque complained at her, “my mother left my father, not the other way around, so why would I be mad at him?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Oh, shut up.” Larque got in the car, already knowing. Because her mother had trained her to be mad at him, that was why.

  “Doris is right,” she said to her doppelganger on the way home. “I should have looked him up a long time ago. Maybe I actually do have one normal relative.”

  Probably not. What could be normal about a man who would let almost thirty years go by without trying to contact his daughter?

  Shadow knew where Larque’s father was. Shadow knew a lot of things about a lot of people—other than himself, whom he barely knew at all. He did not know his own past. He did not understand the power moving through his own hands, where it came from, whether the ability to direct it was something he had been born with or whether Gypsy Davy had somehow given it to him.

  Did the knowledge come with the power? Somehow he knew of the othernesses underneath the appearances of things.

  He knew the otherstories—of foundlings, changelings, princes, angels, desperadoes, outcasts, orphans, strays. The stranger riding in. The stranger riding away again.

  In other words, he knew all the otherwords—freak, geek, drifter, loner, outsider, oddball, fag, queen, queer.

  He knew women adored him, and he knew why—other than that his body was beautiful.

  What he did not know was himself, who he was.

  “Who are you?” the man who called himself Argent had asked him, gasping and trembling atop the chenille bedspread of the COLOR TV * VIBRA-BEDS motel.

  The only appropriate answer Shadow could give was a shrug of his black-clad shoulder.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I’m not sure.” It had never happened before. He was going to have to learn control, and he was going to have to learn it fast.

  “Well—what now? I can’t go back.” Already it was morning. Argent should have been on his way to the state university where he professed mathematics, but he was going nowhere, for he was neck-deep in love, like standing naked in white wine. “I won’t go back. I’ll follow you if you try to leave. Will you stay with me?”

  Shadow did not love him, but felt he owed him something. “Yes. For a while.”

  “Thank you,” the man whispered. “I won’t ask more.”

  “There will be danger.” There would always be danger for Shadow, who sometimes went places where he knew people would want to hurt him. He did not know why he did it. Trying to go home, maybe—if a beating had taken his memory away, a beating could give it back—or maybe looking for trouble out of a sick kind of superiority, to show that he could survive, or maybe out of inferiority, an illogical conviction of guilt, getting himself hurt because he felt he deserved it? He was not consciously aware of the guilt. Yet he felt a sense of being responsible, of obligation to Argent because he had laid his hands on the man’s soul.

  “We won’t be able to go far,” he added, “unless—do you have money?”

  “Not much. You?”

  “No.” But money was unimportant to him. There were other ways to survive, better ways, the gypsy ways, and Shadow knew them all. Also, a vision was growing in him, hot and quiet, like power growing within black clouds, of what he might be able to do. Things he had no right even to dream of doing.

  He touched the shaking man’s forehead briefly with one hand, and Argent quieted. “It will be all right,” Shadow told him. “We will make our own place.”

  Dead silence.

  “Mom?” Larque insisted. Probably she should have gone to see her mother instead of phoning, for the sake of eye contact and all that. But for some reason phoning seemed safer.

  “I don’t know, dear. I haven’t heard from him in years.” Florrie rushed to change the subject. “Are you going to take a vacation this summer, sweetie?”

  Larque almost fell for it. “Hoot seems to be taking his vacation right now.” But then she caught herself. “About Dad,” she persevered. “Where was he the last you knew?”

  “I really don’t remember.”

  “Mom, you must have some idea.”

  “I’d like to go to the shore,” her mother said. “You know, I haven’t been there since that time you were about six and you got so burned.”

  Now Larque knew why she hadn’t ventured to Florrie’s bungalow: so she wouldn’t get blinked. God knew how many times she had been blinked at while she was growing up. It might explain a lot about her. Heck, Florrie was blinking away all the unpleasant parts of this conversation right now. Larque knew this because she could hear the clicks on the line. Clickety-blink, clickety-blink.

  Larque closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried one more time. “Mother,” she said, “he’s my father. I’d like to find him. Help me.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake.” Florrie’s voice went high, rapid and agitated. “Honey child, you don’t want to talk with him. He is not really a very nice man.”

  People who did not possess this particular ontological quality, this quiddity called “very niceness,” were not allowed in Florrie’s world.

  Larque urged, “But you do know where he is.”

  “Why should I have the least interest in knowing where he is?”

  Coming from Florrie, this was almost a straight answer, because what she did not w
ant to know she truly no longer knew. Blink, blink, all gone.

  “Dear?” Her voice had reverted to being girlish and serene. “How are the boys doing in school these days?”

  Larque next placed a long-distance call to her brother, Byron, in Virginia. He was home, of course, because she had timed it right. Six days a week Byron could be counted on to be at home, waiting, around the time the mail came, because he was afflicted by an interesting form of brain flatulence: he really believed that adventure, wealth, and salvation were possible via the U.S. Postal Service. He lived for the next delivery. Worked evenings, if at all. Had the largest box on his rural route. Hated Sundays.

  “Dad?” His tone made Larque’s question seem preposterous; why on earth should he, Byron, know the whereabouts of their mutual father? “No, I don’t know … last I heard, wasn’t he right there in town with you?”

  “Was he?” Larque was not unduly surprised. The way her life went, all ironies were possible. Probably, now that she was looking for him, her father had moved to Australia.

  “I think that’s where he was, right there in Soudersburg, maybe a couple of years ago. One of those streets with a tree name, wasn’t it? Elm? Pine?”

  “How would I know? Nobody tells me.”

  “You didn’t ask. Did you get my Brother’s Helper letter?”

  “Yes, and I threw it in the trash. By, don’t waste your postage money sending me that sort of thing.” It was another of his pray-and-get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.

  “I just wanted to give you the opportunity to get in early.” He sounded peevish and stuffed up; he had the flu. “This time next month I could be worth a hundred thousand smackeroos.”

  “Dream on.” Byron had always been like this, younger than she even though he was older, the kind to send away for stuff from the backs of magazines, enter cereal box sweepstakes, place his gold sticker on the box marked YES! I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE. Sort of like Mom, except she blew her money on religion once she got rid of Dad. While he was still around he kept her on an allowance. Byron had a nice wife named Carolyn, a Waldenbooks manager, to take care of him, but women’s work didn’t pay enough, which might be why they had no kids.

  “How’s Carolyn?”