Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “Not for a few days.” He raised his bandaged hands in apology.

  She could tell he was the kind to help if he could. It was not in reproach that she muttered, “I don’t think I can last that long.” Rather, she was afraid, and her fear felt reasonable. The Virtuous Woman was strong.

  In a low, careful voice Shadow said, “You might be able to do it yourself.”

  She goggled at him. This was information hard to process. Before she could ask any of the appropriate questions, Argent said rather stridently, “Shad, really. Just because her mother is a reshaper doesn’t mean she—”

  Shadow cut him off. “She had herself with her in spirit form the first day I met her. A spirit child.”

  “Sky,” Larque put in, “that was Sky, which is another problem, I don’t know where she is, I—”

  “I never saw her!” Argent seemed oddly vehement. Shadow peered at him.

  “Nobody said you did. Why would you?”

  “I—never mind.”

  “—have to find her, she just disappeared into thin air,” Larque was saying.

  “One crisis at a time. Please.” Shadow turned back to her. “Do you want to try to find the boy Lark again? He’s in you, we know that. I don’t actually create anything. I can only pull out what is already in a person.”

  Inside every aging person was a young person kicking and screaming all the way. Inside every woman was a young person yelling to be free? A boy? Maybe. “I see.” Larque nodded hard. Then she shook her head. “No, I don’t see. What do you want me to do?”

  “How did you make Sky?”

  “I—I’m not really sure.”

  “Well, don’t think about her right now, anyway. Think about the person you want to be. Think only of the other Lark. Make him happen. What you do and what I do are not so different, except I do it with my hands, you with your eyes and mind. And you manifest a double, but I do not. My doubles are within the same body, so they remain solid, do you see? Otherwise, it is the same process.”

  Upset and finding it hard to think, Larque was lagging far behind most of this. “Um, like making one of my doppelgangers on purpose?” she said.

  “Is that what you call your spirits, doppelgangers? Yes. Like that. Except—” To make sure she was hearing him, Shadow sat up straight and admonished her with his tarnished silver gaze. “Except for this: while he is coming into being, inhabit him, do you see? So he will be solid. That is the most important part. You must choose to be in him rather than having him be separate from you.”

  Like making a doppelganger, Larque thought hazily, but stepping into it.

  “Try it,” Shadow told her. “I think you can do it.”

  “Wait,” Argent said. “I’m not sure this is wise.”

  Larque barely looked at him. “I can’t stand being like this. I have to try it.” Already her gaze was focused on creating an image of herself younger and stronger and harder and thirty pounds lighter, a good-looking self with cheekbones and kick-fighter skills and eyes that saw truly, a self that really really knew how to dance. A self who had left her breasts in the top dresser drawer at home, a self with a fascinating toy dangling between her legs. Lark.

  The image wavered in the air between her and the water bed, gauzy, just barely casting its reflections in the many mirrors, just barely standing on the deep-pile, pale gold carpet. What good was it doing her there? Then with a surge of desperation Larque remembered Shadow’s instructions to inhabit the Lark she made. But maybe it was not yet too late. She lunged—not in body, the Virtuous Woman would never do anything so precipitous. Her shaved, pantyhosed legs stood still. But the rebel soul and outlaw spirit inside her leaped for life. A naked, chilly moment in midair—

  “Whoa!” Shadow exclaimed. “Don’t!”

  And then she was there. Argent said softly, “Too late. She’s already done it. She’s split.”

  Two visitors stood solidly on the pale gold carpet now, one pudgy middle-aged woman and one lean, very attractive teenage boy. Lark looked at herself in a mirror, bounded off the floor and yelled, “Holy shit, I did it!” As soon as she touched down she turned to Shadow. “Hey, dude, thank you!”

  Slowly Shadow said, “Don’t thank me. This is not exactly what I had in mind.”

  “It’s fine! I’m fine. What’s the matter?”

  Larque the Virtuous Woman stood with her pillowy bosom heaving as she wildly looked around at mirrored ceiling and water bed and Shadow, bruised and half-naked in it. And at Argent, standing by Shadow now to touch his bandaged hand. “What is this?” she burst out. “Where am I?”

  “Chill, woman,” Lark told her happily.

  She didn’t. “Perverts!” she cried, taking half a dozen scurrying steps back from Argent and Shadow. “Deviants! What am I doing here? Where is my husband? I want to go home!”

  Lark’s grin faded fast. “Don’t talk about Shadow and Argent that way.”

  “Do you hear me? I want to go home!”

  “So go already!” Lark retorted before she realized what she was saying, where this woman lived. Her home was the Harootunian residence. Her husband was Hoot.

  Except maybe for the skirt and the perm and the slathering of lipstick, the V.W. looked just about like Larque Harootunian, premakeover.

  The V.W. stamped her foot ineffectually on the thick carpet. “But I don’t know where it is! I mean, I don’t know where I am!”

  Lark stood with her mouth open, trying to come to one of those really son-of-a-bitch decisions.

  “You let me out of here immediately,” the Virtuous Woman ordered in teary tones, “or I will call the police.”

  “Christ, don’t shit a brick.” Lark knew she had to do it, got her good-looking butt in gear, and moved. “I’ll take you home.” She grabbed her former self by the arm and propelled her streetward before the V.W. could insult Shadow and Argent any further. “Sorry about the narrow mind,” she said hastily over her shoulder before she closed the apartment door behind her.

  Once away from Popular Street, the Virtuous Woman calmed down and put her energies into walking as quickly as she could, which without shoes was not very. Lark strode along beside her, blessedly strong and young and male again, booted again and quite silent. Thinking. Feeling an odd pain in the vicinity of her heart.

  “Where did I lose my shoes? Oh, I just want to get home again!” the V.W. exclaimed.

  Lark said in a soft, taut voice, “You take good care of Hoot and the boys, you hear?”

  “Of course.” The V.W. merely nodded at her, and Lark realized this airhead did not have the faintest idea who her guide was, or the curiosity to find out. The V.W. had been raised to accept passively almost anything that did not violate her taboos.

  Lark realized also that the pain inside her was partly hunger. Forget heart—it was gut. She was starving.

  “I know where I am now!” the V.W. exclaimed happily.

  “Rub some of that lipstick off your mouth,” Lark told her.

  Tamely she obeyed, and she seemed neither surprised nor perturbed that Lark continued walking beside her. When they came in sight of the house, though, she said hastily, “Thank you very much,” and ran pattering ahead.

  Dismissed, Lark stood behind the neighbor’s bushes, watching.

  Both cars were in the Harootunian driveway, including her Chevette with the dead battery. Hoot must have gone to get it, maybe with the aid of a buddy who owned jumper cables, and now he was busy with the battery charger and an orange extension cord, looking under the hood. Lark could see his ample bluejeaned rear end sticking out of the car’s jaws. In a moment he shuffled back and stood up, and then she could see his face. He looked terrible, and not just because he had gotten grease on his forehead like a black bruise. His eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed to have lost five pounds overnight.

  “Oh, poor baby,” Lark whispered. She had been thinking of him as angry at her, and her answering anger had been keeping her going. But looking at him now, she saw no anger—only pain.
The man was hurting.

  And then he caught sight of the Virtuous Woman hurrying toward him, and his face lit up like sunrise.

  “Larque!” he exclaimed. “Oh, thank God!” Despite the car dirt on his hands—and Hoot was fussy about things like that—they embraced. He held her for a long time. “I was getting worried,” he said.

  “Why?” the V.W. inquired.

  He thought it was a straight-faced joke, stood back and started to laugh with happiness. Then the boys came stampeding out of the house. “Mom dudette!” Rodd yelled. “You’re back!” Jeremy hugged the V.W. around the waist. Jason ambled up to her with teenaged dignity and said, even though he could not possibly mean it, “Good going on the hair, Mom. Awesome.”

  “You guys better get to school,” Hoot urged. He wanted his wife to himself.

  The boys headed down the street, coltish, shoving at one another. “Watch where you’re going!” the V.W. called after them. “Don’t get run over.” Okay, it appeared as if she would do a good job. Now she was giving Hoot an adoring glance, one of those Nancy Reagan melting looks. And Hoot was giving her one of his presexual hugs, the kind in which the hands stray downward. End of show: the two of them went inside.

  In the shrubbery, Lark waited a few minutes, an odd menagerie of small sharp-nosed animals gnawing inside her belly. Jealousy, heartache, hunger. When she considered that it was safe to do so, she moved to feed at least one of them, trotting out of hiding and around her house to the back door—unlocked, as she expected. From the silence downstairs and the soft noises overhead, she surmised that Hoot and the V.W. were in the bedroom, also as she expected. Moving quietly, Lark raided the kitchen for food. This was one home where she felt fully entitled to do so. She grabbed a loaf of bread and a cardboard bucket half full of Kentucky Fried Chicken from the fridge. Biting into a drumstick (Extra Crispy, her favorite) as she went out, she softly closed the door behind her.

  Oh. Hoot, you doofus. So easy to fool.

  Lark felt hurt, yet relieved. Hoot was rescued from unhappiness now. The V.W. would keep him pacified while she was away.

  Beyond that, who could tell what was going to happen? She loved him. Love—what an inadequate word to describe the bond made of months and years and decades of day-to-day living. He was her husband.

  But love and the marriage bond were not everything. There was also her need to be—to be. To be Lark.

  Once she followed her need, would she ever find her way back to Geoffrey Harootunian? And would he want her if she did?

  Lark felt her heart beating fast in her strong young chest. There was a kind of freedom in not knowing the future.

  Freedom. That part of being Lark felt good, very good. Freedom and the spicy fast food she was swallowing. Freedom and her hard young body to take her wherever she wanted to go.

  She had no money, no husband, no driver’s license, no car. No passport, no birth certificate, no social security number, no phone. No home. No breakables except her own bones. No bed to sleep in. Nearly no gender. The Virtuous Woman had all those things that had once belonged to her.

  No birthdate or age that made any sense. No picture of a boy named Lark in the high school yearbook, no classmates who would remember Lark that way. No family anymore. No job, and no chance of getting one without all the pieces of paper she lacked.

  Realizing all this, Lark felt at the same time panicked and joyously weightless, as if she could grow wings and fly. She wandered lonely as a cloud.

  “No income,” she said aloud, “no income tax.” She finished her second piece of chicken and licked her fingers. As soon as her stomach was full she found that she badly wanted to sleep. And why not. The sun was warm. Daffodils were blooming. In a little traffic-island park by a statue of some portly Civil War general she found a wooden bench only mildly sullied by bird droppings. Also, on it like a gift awaiting her, like a chocolate on her pillow, lay a really nice blue jay feather. Her mother had always told her not to handle wild bird feathers because they would give her lice. Her mother had told her a lot of things, few of them true. She picked up the slate blue shining thing and held it between her fingers as she went to sleep.

  A few hours later she woke, stiff and sunburned, and blinked at the man sitting on the grass beside her head. It was Argent.

  In the sun he verily shone: “silver belly” Stetson, hair like white gold, ivory skin, and those strange turquoise eyes. Grass stains on the elbows of his linen suit from leaning back while he waited for her. Maybe he didn’t care about his clothes—but she knew he did care. She knew he was a silver-stud pearl-button dandy. What was he doing there?

  He said without greeting, “It’s not a good idea to sleep out in the open. Predators can’t resist a person asleep. And a homeless person is a victim nobody will report.”

  She was always cranky when she first woke up from a nap. And something about his tone, pedantic, preacherly, seemed to hint at an assumption of ownership that clashed badly with her newfound sense of freedom. For both reasons, Lark was irritated, and flared at him, “What’s it to you? What do you care?”

  He said, “You’re my daughter.”

  Hoot stood out on his front sidewalk looking at his own front door, so bemused he was nearly going cross-eyed. He felt so Lord-God happy and relieved to have Larque back, happy right down to his you-know, he should have let it go at that. But he couldn’t. Despite feeling really, really fine, he kept staring and thinking.

  In the first place, Larque had not wanted to do some of the down-and-dirty sex stuff she usually loved.

  In the second place, instead of putzing around in her studio the way she usually did, she was cleaning the john, which she hardly ever did.

  In the third place, those clothes, that hair—they just weren’t her.

  But mostly what bothered him was the wreath, the stupid heart-shaped grapevine thing he was staring at. He had given it to her, and she had kissed him and hugged him and said she loved it and hung it on the door. And that was all.

  “Wreath wars!” was what she should have said. “Damn the torpedoes, full peed a head!” or something like that. She used to make fun of the neighborhood wreathupsmanship. Also the ribbon wars. Like, neighbors were always displaying red ribbons for being against drunk driving, purple for supporting battered women, yellow for the hostages, green for the environment, blue for being nice to cops, white for antipornography—Larque swore she was going to put up a wreath of black ribbons and be prosmut. Or a wreath of all colors, every conceivable color, so she could be for and against every conceivable cause, and the neighbors could go crazy trying to figure it out. That was the way Larque was. That mind of hers and that wicked sense of humor never quit.

  But the wreath—she had just hung it there.

  The door swung open, startling him. Larque breezed out of the house, wearing high-heeled pumps with that dowdy-looking skirt she had glommed onto somewhere. “I’m going grocery shopping,” she sang, blowing him a kiss. “Perdue roasters are on sale for eighty-nine cents a pound at the Giant. We can have roast chicken and stuffing and mashed potatoes for supper.”

  Hoot nodded, waved, watched her pull out, then turned back to stare at the door some more. He no longer felt really, really fine. Something was still wrong with Larque.

  Lark stared at Argent. She could not possibly recognize this so-called father or feel anything for him. He looked nothing at all like the daddy she remembered.

  Later, she was to go through all the various degrees and forms of anger, doubt, tenderness, grief for the lost years. And if there had been time to think about it and plan it and imagine it, likely she would have wasted that first white-hat sunlit moment with kisses, tears, or shrieks of rage. But as it was, waking from sleep with the blue token of a truthteller in her hand, she blurted out her first thought.

  “Christ,” she said, “Mom blinked you too.”

  His mouth gaped and his breath seemed to stop for a moment but then came back as a yell of laughter. He laughed long and loud a
nd hard while she lay on her bench and watched him—not, she decided, laughing at her, or not entirely. The lines of his shoulders had been tired and tense, and the thoroughgoing laughter eased them. He was laughing at the wackiness of it all. Life was hilarious and bizarre.

  “Sorry,” he managed to say when he was mostly done laughing. “Sorry, I—you’re right, she tried to blink me all the time. But not into this. Not hardly, not your mother.”

  “She didn’t want you to be gay?”

  “Florrie?” It was a stupid question, and he would have had a right to laugh at it, but instead he smiled the warm, slow smile of a cowboy at Lark. “What do you think?”

  Lark shrugged and sat up, starting to function, starting to remember she had reason to be angry at him. She said in a hard voice, “I think somebody should have told me. Nobody told me why you went away. I thought it was my fault.”

  He stopped smiling. “I—I’m sorry. I felt—”

  “How do you think I felt? You abandoned me. Never came back, never even sent me a postcard.”

  “I was ashamed. Back then—the way things were—I wanted to die, didn’t think I was fit to live. They convinced me the best thing I could do for you was stay away from you so you wouldn’t have to know.”

  “They?”

  “People in general. The way they talked about queers.”

  “And Mother in particular,” she said. Florrie the Mortified, head firmly tucked into sand. It was all starting to make sense, yet Lark’s voice was still edgy and tight.

  Argent said, “I don’t want to criticize your mother. I don’t hate her. She just scares the shit out of me.”

  That surprised laughter out of her the way she had surprised it out of him. The reward of truthtellers is often laughter. Lark lay back on the park bench and kicked her booted feet and laughed until she felt afraid she might wet herself. Then she made herself stop, sat up again, and crossed her legs tight. But her voice was soft and quiet and relaxed.

  “So Mom kicked you out on your sinful wazoo,” she said.