When the ocean flies, p.10
When the Ocean Flies, page 10
They stared at each other. The room seemed to heat. No one else lifted their gaze from MTV.
Chuck’s brother opened his wallet, pulled out his ID and tossed it in Chuck’s face. “Go. Get. More.”
“Come on, Chuck.” Kelly jumped up.
Chuck and Dwayne had downed at least four beers. Chuck’s driving wasn’t the best in the first place.
“We could walk,” Alison said.
They all turned.
Her neck and face flushed. “We walk to lots of places in Scotland.”
She stood.
“You’re cool to stay here.” Chuck’s brother, still in the doorway.
“Seriously, Alison, it’s cool.” Chuck said. “Me and Kelly will go. They turned for the door. Alison sat. As the screen door thwacked shut behind them, Chuck’s brother turned to Dwayne. “You should go with them. Make sure he doesn’t fuck it up.”
Dwayne didn’t hesitate. Alison bent to put on her shoes, but by the time she had one on, the engine rumbled, followed by the scrape of metal as Chuck pulled out of the driveway too fast.
“Might as well take that shoe off,” the linebacker said. “They’ll be a while.”
Martha Quinn on MTV, and then a beer pulled out from under the sofa.
“Want to see my trophies?” he asked.
Dad’s voice in her head: say yes.
His trophies were in the basement, converted to one huge room for Chuck’s brother, the linebacker at Clingman. Full ride, he said.
Alison sat on the bed, facing the trophies. He sat next to her, the mattress sinking under his weight. Hand on shoulders, pressing. Lips on her neck.
She pressed back against him, turned her head to the side. “No.”
And then she was on her back, with his huge body above her.
“It’ll feel good. Give it a minute.” Hand on zipper, hand against her skin. “Feels good now, doesn’t it?” She pushed against him again. He did not seem to notice.
“No. No. No” Quieter and quieter, and then absolute stillness. Eyes closed. Ceiling fan shifting the air above. The heat of his thighs on hers. In in in in. Huge, broad chest pushing against hers.
Weight, lifting. The sound of bare feet in shag-carpet. Billy Idol, “With A Rebel Yell,” drifting down. The pop of a can.
He hadn’t even undone her pink, Oxford cloth button-down shirt. Her bra was still hooked. Shorts and underpants tangled just below her knees. She pulled them up. She stood, Bambi-legged. The room swirled. She tried to orient herself: trophy case to the north, door to the hall at the east, stairs (and him at the top) beyond that, bed to the south, window due west. She slid it open.
Pine straw on the flower bed underfoot, then grass, in need of being cut, tickling the ankles. Pavement still holding some of the day’s heat but having released enough to be safe for skin. Left right left right. No Papa. No walking stick. No compass. Left right left right. No Vic. No fags. No flask. A left turn. A right. A sign at the edge of the neighborhood. Pine woods across the street. Curved road. Half an hour. The swirl of air as each car passed. Clunk of beer can on the road ahead, a whoop, arms out the window of a brown Pinto. No one slowed or stopped. Grateful for that. An hour, bare feet beginning to bleed. She paused, looked skyward, there on the corner with woods on all sides. Above, a bird circled, wings outstretched, then a flap, movement forward. She followed until she saw a gas station ahead, the one they passed on the way to school.
Feet on the grass in front of her house, she paused. The only light on was in Mum’s bathroom. Alison imagined her in the bath with her usual cigarette in one hand, drink in the other. Safe to come in.
She’d have showered had she not been afraid that Mum would enter, pull back the curtain, somehow know what had happened. Why hadn’t Alison done something different, gone with the others, not gone out with them at all? So many small things she could have done differently to make things add up to a different series of events.
Alison climbed into bed as she was, unbuttoning the blouse, unhooking the bra, lowering her shorts and the purple underpants with the butterfly, feeling her own skin. Too much. She pulled on her pajamas, curled into herself.
In the morning, just as the sun was rising, when she felt sure Mum would still be asleep for several hours, she slid out from under the covers and climbed out the window. She could have walked out the front door, into the clear, early light of day. Sneaking this way felt right.
She crouched at the edge of the creek, sunk her hands into the soil. At first, her fingers dug in aimlessly, and then she began to scoop out the clay, piling it beside her, as though she were five again, there on the shore beside the rocks, Papa beside her with his dark shoes, shirt loose at the neck.
The form came, a head. A twig fallen from a hickory became the tool to shape eyes, nose, lips, to carve hair. Alison lifted the bust and set her in a shaft of sun. Orange earth masked her hands and forearms. She crouched again, digging in, wiping the clay compulsively further up her arms, then on her face, covering every piece of exposed skin. The sun, rising, heating, began to dry the clay. Delicate cracks formed, as though she was watching herself age.
She wrapped her crinkly arms around her waist, the closest she could get to the arms of an old woman. She was crone come to hold herself.
She rocked, dry-eyed, eventually scooting down the bank until she was in the stream. She lay herself down, finding a twisted space between rocks. Submerged.
What would it be like to hold myself here? To return to the place before, or after, or to nothing? She imagined it dark and silent and beautiful.
Her eyes opened first: she could not do it. She could not die. Neither did she particularly want to live.
She struggled up into the sunlight and air, began to rub off the clay: scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing until she was clean, on the outside, at least.
She dripped her way towards the house, through the woods and across the back lawn, leaving a wet, slug-like trail on the window ledge when she slid back in. Though she felt as though she never wanted to be naked again, she stripped off, pulled on her heavy blue sweatpants and pep-rally shirt, gathered her soaked pajamas and last night’s clothes and stuffed them in the washing machine.
Later, Mum cornered her in the laundry room. “What are you hiding?” Sunlight through the window illuminated the crow’s feet around Mum’s eyes.
“Nothing,” Alison said. She pulled the bundle of clothes from the dryer, turned for her room.
That night she said Hail Marys until she slept, asking Mary to petition God to not make her pregnant. She wondered if her mother, her Beautiful Girl, had done the same. She wondered if she’d been beautiful at all and if there had been love, or if she, Alison, had come from a few minutes in a basement in front of a wall of trophies.
In the morning, Alison started a letter to Vic. She scrawled the date in the upper right of the page, day first, then month, a small rebellion against America. ‘Dear Vic,’ she stared at it. What words would she write? What she wanted was to sit on the rock wall with Vic, or across from her on the train, or any-fucking-where. Vic would see, know, feel the whole thing in an instant. They could burrow down together, hold each other.
Instead, Alison gave up on the letter, tiptoed through to the den, lifted three long cigarette ends—they looked as though Mum had taken one puff and given up—and made her way to the woods. When she returned, hours later, Mum told her that Kelly had called. Alison didn’t call her back that day, or the next or the next. The day after that, she didn’t see the Camaro in time to leave. Mum answered the door. Kelly’s voice chirped.
In the back seat, four of them scrunched. Alison sat on Dwayne’s lap. Journey belted out from the speakers; Dwayne’s face pressed against her ear.
“Why’d you sleep with Chuck’s brother?”
Apparently, the linebacker-at-Clingman told Chuck, who told Dwayne. No one else seemed to know.
Her face heated. Her throat constricted. She feared she may vomit there in the back seat of the car while everyone sang along to “Don’t Stop Believing.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“That’s not what he said.”
“I told him no.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” A tiny parting like the sliver of morning light that came through the blackout curtains in Papa’s bedroom. Dwayne wasn’t Vic, but maybe he would do if he understood.
“That’s not what he said.”
She swallowed the bile in her mouth. The car swayed around the curves. The music seemed to get louder. Her stomach rolled and clenched. She turned to Kelly.
“I don’t feel good.” She felt clammy. A cold sweat erupted on her face and neck.
“You don’t look so good,” Kelly said. She made Chuck stop the car, and Alison clambered over everyone to the still air beyond.
“I can walk home.” She felt it miraculous that she managed to let the words out and hold everything else in.
Her head swam as she stood there, still, on the sidewalk, while Kelly tried to tell Dwayne he should walk with Alison and Dwayne said Alison didn’t want him to and, though Alison won’t recall it, she nodded and Dwayne told Chuck to just go, and then, at last, Kelly’s, “I’ll call you,” wafted out the window as they pulled away.
Almost as soon as they left, Alison’s stomach began to settle. Her head steadied itself. Safe. Alone. One foot in front of the other. One breath after the other.
The next morning, she began a new routine. She left at the same time every day, pool bag in hand, and walked until she was out of the sightline of the house. She looped back to the woods, a sketchbook, a book, stolen cigarette ends and matches under her towel. She found a shaded place to lie beneath the sheltering branches of a water oak. She embraced the nicotine rush, imagined Vic at her side. She thought of their pact. How silly they’d been, thinking they could somehow reach each other across the miles.
Kelly called a few days later, saying she was sorry they’d left Alison. Alison stood in the dark den; Mum lounged outside on the deck, her belly nearly black already. It was as though she was absorbing all the sun she’d missed over the past forty years.
“I told Chuck to go back but he wouldn’t,” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“After we dropped Dwayne off, Chuck told me you were a slut.”
Alison’s stomach churned.
“I told him you weren’t. He says that about lots of girls.”
Alison wanted to hang up, to run away into the woods; she was rooted in, unable to speak or move.
“I told Mama, and she told me that if Chuck is the kind of boy who says that about girls, I shouldn’t be with him, no matter how much I like him.” Kelly hardly took a breath. “She said he probably says that about me, too. I don’t know if she’s right, but I broke up with him anyway.”
Though Alison was grateful that Kelly didn’t ask for details, she stuck to the woods during the day. In the evenings, she lied her way through the superficial questions her parents asked: how was the pool and Kelly and so on. “Fine, and fine, and fine.”
Gradually, Dwayne and the linebacker sunk to the riverbed of Alison’s core, resting beside Andrew and the gypsies, with her always, though not consciously present.
~
Fall rolled in: crisp air and stadium lights in the darkness. A sense of being part of something, there in the stands, even though she didn’t fully understand the game. Homecoming: a king and queen would be crowned, American royalty. Neither Kelly nor Alison had dates for the dance. They headed for Pizza Hut. The parking lot was even more crowded than usual. Apparently not that many people needed to go to the dance to see the royal couple crowned. Kelly and Alison squeezed into a booth with a boy Kelly liked, Anthony, and his friend Les. They settled into pepperoni pizza and cokes and Morris Day on the jukebox.
“Let’s ride around,” Les said, swallowing the last of the pizza.
“We could just stay here,” Alison said.
“Come on, Alison.” Kelly swatted her hand across the table. “It’s too crowded. Plus look at that line for tables. We’d be mean to stay.”
They would. “Okay,” Alison said.
Breeze through the windows. Four lanes, bright streetlights, Chaka Khan on the radio. Kelly sang along, loudly, off-key. Alison joined her as Les turned off Robert E. Lee Boulevard, and then off the side road, bumping onto grass, towards the woods.
“Where are we going?” Alison asked, hand squeezing her own leg.
“To see the stars,” Les said.
They spilled out and Alison stood with her head cocked back, looking up, while Les opened the hatch. When she turned around, he’d put down the back seat, and the four of them sat, side by side.
The Big Dipper, Orion. Alison let him point, did not say that she knew all of the constellations, did not mention that she’d even seen the Aurora Borealis, or that on black winter nights away from the city, the sky sometimes became so crowded that the constellations were hard to distinguish in the busy, starlit sky.
“Bet they’re not this good in Ireland.”
“Probably not,” she said. She thought of Vic.
He kissed her. Gently. Like Vic. The car rose a little as Kelly and Anthony slid out and away into the woods. Les’s hands began to move up her stomach and on, and when he tried to ease her onto her back, though she was rigid, she neither fought nor spoke.
She closed her eyes. Lay perfectly still, frozen. This was wrong; she was bad to be letting it happen. Deep within, a stronger drive insisted that she must give this boy what he wanted. It was how she had survived this long, not with boys, but with Mum. Just do what she wants. This was the only way she knew to keep her fragile sense of belonging.
In the distance, an owl hooted. Whisper of wind in pine. Up and up and up she travelled, away from this boy breathing hard, from the prickly sweat on her arms, from this tight, tight throat. It was as though this was a continuation of her body being handed, person to person: baby, child, girl-woman, her life one long crowd surf.
Les, there, over her physical body. She let go, became separate to herself, aloft in the night sky. Andromeda. Orion, the hunter, arrow poised.
When he finished, lifted his weight from her, kissed her gently on the cheek. Alison opened her eyes: white cloud over the moon, cool beads of mist. Stars. Stardust. Vic’s oldest sister once said that her science teacher had told them that they were all made of stardust—glitter and sparkle since the beginning of time. Vic had scoffed at the notion. Alison had secretly loved it even if she couldn’t believe it. Now, though, she wished to be like an exploding star, to shatter into a billion pieces, become dust, fall to earth, sink in.
“That was great,” he said.
“Thanks.” She hung her head, buttoned her pants, and when Kelly and Anthony came back, Alison and Les sat precisely where they’d been left, with Les talking about being in a deer stand as though it was part of the mythology of the heavens.
In bed, she Hail Mary’d herself to sleep again, though she wasn’t sure she had faith in anything that might be called God. Each morning, she pulled on her clothes as though she was stepping into a costume for a character in someone else’s story.
March 28, 2017
I’ve had barely enough time for a shower and to put product in my hair when Mary knocks. Mary. Oh, Mary, Mary, Mary. There’s still the part of me that wants to rush into her arms. Still the part of me that doesn’t fully trust that she’s here, we’re here, together. That she’s lovely. That she loves me.
I feel rumpled, inside and out, as I pull open the door. Thank God you’re here, I want to say. “Was that half an hour?” comes out instead.
“Nearly.”
“Sorry. Nice to see you.”
“Are you okay?” Mary leans in, kisses me, wraps her arms around me. I fear I may cry. I fear she’ll think it’s her fault.
“I’m fine. Just a bit, I don’t know.”
“You look as though you just woke up.”
“Sorry, sorry.” She doesn’t have to mention that it’s noon for me to feel the shame. At home, I’d have been up, spent an hour in my studio, run, cooked breakfast, taken Tori to school, even though she’s a senior with a car. She hates to drive. Wade says it’s namby-pamby bullshit that I still drive her, that I have no right to complain about being more stressed at work when I can just make her drive. Five lanes of traffic. Arsehole drivers balancing lattes and mascara and righteous entitlement to their lane. What mother would force her child to endure that if she had a choice not to? “She’ll never survive at college,” he said. “She’ll walk,” I said. “Or go to school in a city that has actual public transport, like the whole of Europe.” “That again,” he said. “Do what you want. Don’t blame me if you get fired.”
I’m not in danger of being fired. It’s just stressful. And he refuses to help. Still, I’d have been pressed and dressed and writing grants or hanging a show.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Mary says. “It’s just not like you.”
“Yes. I know.” Heat flares on my neck.
“Sorry if I woke you. I was just worried. I couldn’t wait any longer.” She pecks my cheek again and steps in. “Need to go back to sleep?”
“I’m fine.”
“Shall I put on some tea while you get sorted, then?” Mary starts towards the kitchen. I resist the impulse to follow, like a disheveled duckling. I return to the product and the mirror.
“It was rotten, was it?” Mary calls.
“Well, it wasn’t brilliant.”
“I should have been there with you.”
The bastard and her mother come to church.
“You definitely should not have.” What would Maeve have done to her?
What happens next is not visible on the outside. Within, though, there is the familiar falling away, of whatever I myself feel. It happens smoothly, like pulling the end of a silk bow, which releases the cape of self. I imagine it falling to the floor, deep purple velvet in glorious folds on the worn shag carpet.
