Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “Well, I’m opening for a change.” Shadow headed toward the Magic Makeover. “Lark, practice,” he ordered as he went out.

  She made an obscene gesture at his slim wedge-shaped black-shirted back, but did as he said, spending the morning dealing with the doppelganger K-Y tubes and Tupperware lettuce crisper and electric shaver and wooden spatulas still floating around the apartment, putting them back into the originals. Most of the time this worked for her now. Of course, she had no feelings about these things. It might have been harder with things she had feelings about, such as herself.

  Sky was outside, showing off her new clothes up and down the street. It was no use trying to tell her to stay in; the kid was as wild as a little mustang. And anyway it was beautiful out there today, with the rainbow-colored wind catchers fluttering from the just-as-bright awnings and the Popular Street people dressed to kill and thronging in the street. Checking on Sky, Lark looked out the window often and with longing. It was like being grounded from a party. Popular Street looked the way it used to, exciting and gay.

  “You want to be out there, don’t you? Go ahead,” Hoot grumbled from behind Lark’s back. “What’s the problem?”

  “Come with me?” Lark invited. He was wearing borrowed sneakers and tee shirt and jeans now. He could go outside without inciting either a riot or an orgy.

  “No, thanks.”

  “That’s the problem.” She did not want to keep going farther and farther away from him, but he was afraid. To him, Popular Street crawled with invisible cooties—but being a truthteller, Lark could not blame him too harshly for his homophobia. She was the same way, or part of her was—the part that picketed.

  “Where the hell is she?” Lark exclaimed. It was almost noon, and the V.W. and the Virtuettes had not yet arrived to resume their antideviance campaign.

  Sky came bounding in, demanding peanut butter and jelly. Shadow came in with her, acknowledging Lark’s work with a nod but more intent on another agenda. “Where is your tight-assed alter ego?” he wanted to know.

  “Ditto.” Argent came up the stairs. “It makes me nervous, not knowing what the hell is going on.”

  “Maybe she stayed home,” Lark said rather sharply. “People do that sometimes, you know. They stay home.” Even though she herself disliked the V.W., she did not care for the way they talked about her.

  “Is she home alone?” Shadow asked slowly.

  “Probably. It’s Saturday. Jason works. Jeremy and Rodd have Little League. Hoot usually takes them.”

  In tones that would not have been out of place on a battlefield he said, “Then this might be the perfect time. Lark? Are you ready?”

  She shrugged, at the same time feeling her heart start to pound. Is anybody ever really ready for anything?

  Confront the Virtuous Woman? She was terrified.

  Because she was a guy and guys are brave, because she could not say she was scared almost literally shitless, she disconnected. Her body, and what it was doing and saying, became temporarily unrelated to her mind, which went off to fly in frantic circles somewhere. A few minutes later, when she came back, she found that somehow in her absence a consensus of opinion had been reached, a reconnaisance sortie had been organized, she had her hat on—it felt too late now to doppelganger it into a brave, brash, black one—and they were all walking toward the Harootunian place. Or rather, Lark, Shadow, Hoot, and Argent were walking, and Sky was cavorting ahead.

  “We’ll stay back,” Shadow was briefing Lark. “You go to the door and knock. When she answers it, put her back where she belongs before she has a chance to resist. Or if the other Hoot answers, maybe you can put our Hoot back together with him.”

  Lark was not sure she wanted to. Her head told her she had to go through with this, if only for the sake of her children. But her amoral heart—only time and the results would show what her heart wanted to do. And if it was all up to her, what were the rest of them along for? To watch the show? “Where are you going to be, hiding in the bushes?” she asked sharply.

  They were coming around a corner, almost within sight now of the house.

  “Actually, yes. That sounds like a good place to be when you’re in action.”

  Then he gasped, and she never got to make the snappy comeback his comment deserved, because he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her behind somebody’s van. A short way up the street a little red Suzuki Samurai had pulled over, and getting out of it was Florrie, all dressed up in a sequined tee shirt and her best white polyester pants, her blue hair sprayed stiff as a crinoline, her soft old face smiling like mad.

  “Oh, Christ,” Hoot moaned. He and Argent had taken cover behind the van also.

  The street was parked solid with cars. Clusters of people were heading toward the Harootunian residence, across the front of which Lark could now see a white freezer-paper banner proclaiming in gold glitter script, “Trailing Clouds of Glory Do We Come. Happy 20th Born-Again Virginity, Mom!!!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Hoot elaborated. “It’s the celibate mother-in-law bash. How could I forget. Must have repressed it.”

  With some sympathy Argent asked, “You weren’t looking forward to wishing her twenty years more of the same?”

  “About face,” Shadow ordered at the same time. “Back to Popular Street.”

  “Can’t,” Lark said. Her mouth had gone dry.

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  She looked past him, staring at the house and at her mother duck-walking happily toward it in new white sneakers. She said, “Sky’s in there somewhere.”

  The kid had last been seen veering toward the Harootunian front door.

  Lark had once almost bought herself a tee shirt printed with a cartoon penis wearing a condom helmet and declaring, “Cover me. I’m going in.” It was a line she had always wanted to use, full of gallantry, hand grenades, the risk of dismemberment and painful death. And facing Florrie felt no less dangerous than facing gunfire. Now, however, when Lark had a suitable occasion to say, “Cover me,” she didn’t think of it. She just said, “You guys stay here.”

  They didn’t obey, of course. They all trailed after her, with Shadow protesting in the fore and Argent complaining in the rear as Lark strode up the street, up the walk, and into the trap she had once called home.

  Florrie must have blinked the inside of the house for the occasion of the party. The place was bigger than it should be, and there was now a vestibule, which there had not been before, monitored by a pearl-draped Barbara Bush look-alike in a Leslie Fay dress who wanted Lark to sign the guest book. Better play along or she might call a bouncer. Lark stalked over to the thing.

  “Little Joe Cartrite,” the most recent entry declared in a childish scrawl. Verification had been achieved. Sky was in there, all right.

  Lark scrawled “Maverick” and went on in without removing her hat. The place was full of more people than should have been able to fit in, many of whom looked as out of place at a decorous gathering as she did. Florrie retained a strange assortment of friends from her many spiritual metamorphoses. It was hard for Lark to remember, but the size of the crowd reminded her: Florrie was perceived quite differently by people who did not have to be her daughter. Serene, sunny, friendly toward all (because anyone she encountered was, Q.E.D., Very Nice), pleasant to be with, the little old charmer was well liked, even beloved. So brave, the way she stayed cheerful no matter what. Wasn’t it darling, the way she fluttered her eyelashes.

  Looking around, Lark did not see Sky, but caught a glimpse of her mother’s sequined shortness in the enlarged living room. The place was decorated as if for a tacky wedding reception, with cerulean-and-white crepe paper twists hanging in cloud-bellied swags from the ceiling. Jason and Jeremy and Rodd, looking miserable in suits and bow ties, were offering trays of what Hoot used to call horse ovaries. Candy Ass and the V.W. were in there too, working the crowd, smiley-nice.

  Lark ducked the other direction, toward the dining room, where an orangely refulgent woman s
tood none too steadily on three-inch heels, dipping white sparkling grape juice from a punch bowl into plastic disposable stemware.

  Doris looked up. “Lark!” she stage-whispered. “What are you doing here?”

  “What the hell are you doing here! Have you seen Sky?”

  “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.” The important question hadn’t registered; this was not unusual for Doris. “Get a load of that cake.”

  Taking up the entire dining room table, it was the mother of all cakes, its colossal presence such that Lark stood momentarily stunned and nonfunctional, gawking at it. A colonnaded structure, it was built in Dantesque tiers connected by confection-decked stairways leading to a lofty summit inhabited by oversized sugar white angels with too many wings. The thing was wired for electricity, with tiny bulbs arranged like stars in the bottom of each tier to illuminate the one below. Moreover, it incorporated a pump to carry its own private supply of white grape juice in a transparent plastic tube up the middle of the whole creation to culminate in a lighted fountain at the apex. Skewered carousel-horse–style on the columns supporting all this grandeur were swans, doves, lambs, and lesser angels, the kind with a normal number of wings. Harps in hands, the latter were positioned upright, with the columns disappearing under their robes and reemerging at their heads, as if they had sticks up their asses. With mouths wide open, the angels looked pained, and Lark could not blame them. She felt similarly pained herself, ineffably screwed.

  “HAVE YOU SEEN SKY,” she asked Doris urgently.

  “Omigod.” Doris looked around, wide-eyed. “She’s not in here, is she?”

  Somebody screamed, and it wasn’t even Lark. In the next room people shrieked and yelled.

  “Evidently.” Lark ran toward the commotion, pushing her way through too many decorously clad dowagers. Once again a male body was just what she needed. Her broad shoulders wedged little old ladies aside like nothing.

  “Oh, Christ,” she muttered when she could see.

  Sky was not there, was not the cause of the uproar after all. It was a Hoot-versus-Hoot confrontation.

  Hoot had seized his startled double by, of all things, the foot. “I would never wear tassel loafers!” Hoot was roaring, trying to pull the offending shoe off. Candy Ass appeared to have some good and proper Germanic character in him after all; white-faced and speechless yet stubborn, he resisted, stayed upright, yanked his ankle out of Hoot’s grasp, and refused to show much reaction to the latter’s loud invasion of his personal space. All of this made Hoot even more enraged. He invoked the third person mode of address. “Hoot Harootunian would not be caught dead in pansies!” This referred, evidently, to Candy Ass’s flowered tie, which Lark found rather attractive along with his lavender shirt, though his pearl gray polyester suit was a turn-off. Hoot lunged, ripped at the tie unsuccessfully, and then tried to tear Candy Ass’s suit jacket off his shoulders.

  “You show him, Dad!” Jason yelled, ripping off his own bow tie. All three boys had dumped their trays with silvery clangs to the floor and were jumping and cheering like spectators at a sports event. The other onlookers were not nearly so favorably impressed.

  “Is somebody calling the police?” one of the matrons standing near Lark exclaimed in lieu of screaming.

  “It’s one of those in-the-family things,” another replied knowledgeably between shrieks. “The police won’t want to come.”

  “This is my place!” Hoot bellowed at his apparent twin. “Get the hell out!” Not a logical command, as he had taken a stranglehold on his double. But that was Hoot. When he got this angry he didn’t think. Next thing he would be pounding on—on himself, in effect.

  Lark inhaled a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and focused. She knew she had to do it.

  Concentrating, she stared, and the Hoot who was doing all the yelling slipped back into the other one like a drawer into a chest, as neatly as if he had never been away.

  For Lark, it was a moment of personal epiphany. God must have felt somewhat the same way when he tidily tucked Jesus into Mary or pulled Eve out of sleeping Adam. And she knew she had done it perfectly, because Hoot kept right on yelling.

  “Christ!” he screamed, looking down at his clothes as if they were poisoned. “My God, I wouldn’t be caught dead!” He rushed out of the room, blundering into people and spraying buttons like bullets as he pulled his suit coat off.

  “Dad! Yo, Dad-dude!” The boys took off after him. Smiling, Lark watched all four of them disappear upstairs.

  “Lark!” A familiar voice, Shadow’s, shouted a warning from across the room. At the same time, out of the corner of her eye, Lark saw it herself: the short white sequined figure, her mother’s, was turning to peer at her.

  It was the most frightening caught-off-guard moment in Lark’s life except maybe the childhood time she was playing with matches and set her own hair on fire. A jolt of adrenaline jarred her like a cattle prod. She took off so fast she lost her hard-won cowboy hat and never noticed. Next thing she knew she was in the dining room, and she didn’t even remember starting to run, or knocking over so many respectable people on her way. This was turning into what would be quite a memorable event for many of Mom’s friends. How nice. The chaos was keeping Florrie in the living room for the time being, but Lark knew her mother would be on her trail soon. Where could she hide?

  “Under here,” somebody offered in a loud whisper, lifting the long white skirt of the dining room table.

  It seemed as good an option as any. Lark dived into concealment directly beneath the megacake, and Sky moved aside to make room for her.

  FIFTEEN

  UNDER THE TABLE’S MODESTLY ALL-CONCEALING SKIRTS, in the dimness of its woody womb, Lark stared wide-eyed at her own embodied childhood.

  “What the hell are you trying to prove?” she hissed at Sky.

  “I wanted cake,” Sky said.

  “For crying out loud, I could give you cake! Didn’t you know Mom was in here?”

  “I knew. I wanted her to feed me.”

  The sugar-decked heaven overhead might as well be made of Styrofoam, Lark realized, for all the good it would ever do Sky and her. Mom would never slice it and share it with them. In fact it probably was made of plastic, to be kept forever under wraps in Mom’s virginal white freezer.

  Lark told Sky, “Baby, it ain’t never going to happen. You just let me feed you. Mom wants that cake all to herself.”

  She felt bitterness edging her voice. She saw how Sky gazed back at her, hard-jawed, hollow-cheeked, eyes huge in the shadows.

  Right outside her hiding place she heard an unmistakable voice say, “Where is he? I hear him.”

  She froze. Sky’s eyes widened even more enormously, and her bony hands darted out to cover Lark’s mouth. Lark’s voice had risen too loud, and now Florrie stood so close to them that the square toes of her little white sneakers were poking under the table skirt, nearly touching Sky’s black hat lying on the floor.

  “He is a deviant,” Florrie declared. “I know he is a deviant. Where did he go?”

  “Um, through there. Out that way.”

  God bless Doris; did her carotene-stained brain really understand what was going on? Evidently so. After Mom padded off toward the back door, Doris giggled—inversely, like the nerd she was. Lark would know that giggle anywhere.

  “Thanks,” she called softly, removing Sky’s hands from her mouth.

  “Shhhh.” Doris’s amused warning floated down from on high. Easy for her to laugh; she was just an onlooker. Probably God watched the human condition with the same sort of merriment a lot of days. “She’ll be back. You know that manic gleam she gets in her sweet little baby blue eyes?”

  Lark and Sky both knew that gleam, and the thought of it panicked them. It meant doom: it meant that in a few moments one of them would be blinked, or both of them, or Sky would run away to starve on a lonesome prairie again … no. Lark couldn’t let it happen. Her frightened gaze met Sky’s, and her hand reached out, but a
t the same time the little girl’s hand wavered forward to meet hers.

  “Here she comes,” Doris sang.

  “Call out the National Guard,” Lark snapped in reply to Doris. “Don’t run away,” she said to Sky.

  And of all the questions, “Do you love me?” Sky whispered to her.

  In the palm of Sky’s hand nestled a little metal star. Lark’s fingertips touched it as she answered without hesitation, “Yes.”

  “Really?” Sky’s voice rose till it squeaked. “You sure?”

  “Shhh! Yes. I really do.” Why was the kid bringing this up at such a crazy time? Yet Lark had to answer. The duck-toed sneakers of doom were waddling closer, Lark could feel their deadly approach in the floorboards, she could hear their tread even above the thumping of her heart, but what Sky wanted to know was as important as survival. Maybe it was survival.

  “I know he’s around here somewhere.” Florrie’s flutelike voice sounded right overhead.

  Sky looked sick with fear, yet rapt. Lark spread her arms, offering a hug, but the little girl sat back, making herself tall, and faced Lark eye to eye.

  “Will you take care of me always?” Sky breathed. “Promise?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  It was a sacred vow. Somehow Lark knew that even before it all happened, even before Sky snuggled into her arms, pressing against her chest. That same moment a bent old finger clawed its way under the table skirt and started to lift, but Lark barely noticed, for something was happening that was more holy and intimate than sex, sweeter than Godiva chocolates; with a hushed translucent face and lidded eyes Sky was coming back to her. The child’s form etherealized, impregnating her male body, melting into her heart, and it was a feeling like daybreak, like birdsong, like winging to the sky, chest bursting with song. Everything Lark had ever lost, all the innocence, the gusto, the wise wondering eyes and hiccups and shouting mouth and size-five sneakered feet that could run forever, it all sunrose back into her and blazed into a wildfire of joy. Sky was giving it all back.