The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  Micki looked back at them. Tanya whispered to Lonnie. They laughed behind their hands, looked at Micki, and scampered over to another clutch of girls. By day’s end everyone in the fifth grade knew Micki was adopted. Sebastian took her pencil; she grabbed it back and he said, “Your mother didn’t want you so she gave you away. Like to Goodwill.” He thought this was hilarious, and high-pitched laughter twisted out of him and corkscrewed around the classroom, making everyone laugh with him. Ms. Winston rapped her shoe on her desk like she always did when the class got crazy, but the sight of her bare foot only made it worse.

  The next day Micki’s adoption was all Ms. Winston’s class talked about. Not only had she been given away, she had been given away because there was something wrong with her and everyone had a theory about what that was. By the time Ms. Winston knew about it, the game of the season was Make Micki Cry.

  That time, even Micki’s father could not make the pain go away because it was easier to believe the kids than fight them. She was weird, she was messed up, she was stupid; no wonder her real mother couldn’t wait to dump her. She was a reject—unwanted and unlovable. Her parents sent her to a kiddie shrink with basset hound eyes who gave her a book about adoption. They read it together and talked. She knew—logically—there was nothing wrong with her, and she had not been abandoned. Her birth parents had talked to a lawyer and out of hundreds of couples, chose Lana and Jack to be her parents. After a week or so, the kids in Ms. Winston’s class turned on someone else and Micki’s wound scabbed over and only hurt when she scratched and made it bleed. Occasionally someone got bored and brought it up again. Micki knew they did it because she got upset, but she did not know how to hide her feelings so it kept happening over and over.

  For most of the fifth grade she had felt as she did now, mousing through the corridors of Arcadia School to avoid attention. Like Tanya, The Fives had recognized something out of whack about her.

  At the end of the main hall, Micki hurried down the ramp and ducked into the corridor that went past the gym. Anyone who saw her there would think Micki had come to school early to use the exercise equipment; girls did that sometimes. Fives never did, but hey, she wasn’t a Five. By minute increments she was getting used to the idea.

  Outside a teachers’ cloakroom, she met Ms. Hoffman.

  “You’re early, Micki. Is there anything wrong?”

  Ms. Hoffman’s eyes could see into you like a hawk’s.

  “I had to do some things,” Micki said, and made herself look right in the teacher’s eyes because if she did not, Ms. Hoffman would get suspicious. “I’m cool.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Ms. Hoffman had been teaching English at Arcadia School for twenty-three years, almost since the school opened. Six feet tall and shapeless, she nevertheless carried herself with the hauteur—a vocabulary word—of a runway model. Wings of gray framed her dark hair, which she wore parted in the middle and wound in a braid at the top of her head. Her features seemed to belong to three different faces: small, sparkly yellow-green eyes, a beaky nose, and a large, rectangular mouth enclosing big, very white teeth. By any set of standards Micki possessed, Ms. Hoffman was a homely woman; and yet there was something so special about her appearance that there were times when she appeared almost beautiful to Micki. In a cockeyed way.

  Ms. Hoffman perspired prodigiously and addressed the class in stentorian—Micki loved vocabulary drill—tones that begged to be mocked. When she talked about “the great women of lit’rature,” she raised her eyebrows and flexed her nostrils so that if you sat in the front row as Micki did they looked like black holes with hairs.

  Her classroom was at the end of the building. She said seniority had to have some reward apart from exhaustion and despair. This was a joke but the first time Micki heard it she just stared at her teacher and wondered what kind of despair Ms. Hoffman meant. Micki imagined if she could see into her heart, there would be an image of Ms. Hoffman’s only lover, probably a writer killed in Korea or Vietnam before he could finish his novel. She probably kept the pages in her house and took them out once a year and read them and maybe cried although it was next to impossible to imagine Ms. Hoffman actually crying tears.

  Her classroom was extra large and had two walls of windows. On the gloomiest day it was airy and full of light. Unlike other classrooms, where the desks were lined up like chocolates in a box, Ms. Hoffman arranged the desks in a long oval, open at one end to make space for her to stand near the white board.

  Micki liked Ms. Hoffman because she made her feel it was important to be female. She dismissed most male writers with a set speech at the beginning of tenth grade. “We’ve been reading the lit’rature of men for so long, they have very little left to communicate to modern women.” They still had to read men but only the best of them.

  Micki sat in her class that morning, slumped deep in her desk so the base of her spine was on the edge of the seat. Tiffany sat beside her, doodling pictures of girls with long hair and Bambi eyes. Teachers at Arcadia were required to use seating charts set up at the first of the year and positions rarely changed. This meant Micki and Tiff sat next to each other in almost every class. But they didn’t talk anymore.

  To introduce the works of Emily Dickinson, Ms. Hoffman talked about the time way back when there were hardly any women writing books.

  “If you had eight children and never learned to read or write, you would not contribute to lit’rature either. But if you and I could eavesdrop on those times, we would no doubt hear stories spoken mother to child, friend to friend, poems invented on the spot—perhaps in the form of prayers. Who knows?” Ms. Hoffman looked down at Micki. “Micki Porter, can you tell us in what other ways your female ancestors may have expressed themselves creatively?”

  The eyes of the whole class drilled her. She sat up, chewing her lower lip, trying to think of something to say.

  “Once, I went with my family . . .”

  “Speak up, Micki. Let the back row hear you.”

  “. . . on a trip and we went to a museum in this, like, real small town and there were these sort of pillow things woven out of hair. Human hair.”

  Someone behind her said, “Gross.”

  Why had she told about those stupid pillows? They had nothing to do with poetry. She slumped again, letting the magenta hair fall forward. She tugged it and stared at the floor.

  “Not lit’rature, certainly. But a highly creative use of materials at hand, though by today’s standards, somewhat ghoulish. Why do you think they did that, Micki?”

  She wanted to look at Tiff and have Tiff make a face and both of them giggle. She wanted the moment to be funny and over with, not a drawn-out misery.

  Ms. Hoffman tilted her head to one side. “Micki?”

  “I think . . . it’s like, sometimes you want to make something and you don’t have any cool supplies?” She watched Ms. Hoffman’s face for a signal that she had said enough. “And maybe they didn’t think they could write good poetry. Or couldn’t write at all, never went to school. Or maybe they wanted to do something really personal, like for someone in the family?” She swallowed and sat on her hands. Ms. Hoffman smiled without showing her teeth, which Micki took to mean the answer was satisfactory if not excellent. “Plus they all had a lot of hair back then.”

  Someone laughed. Micki recognized it as coming from a fat, braying creature who never would have dared to make a sound if Micki had been a Five.

  After Ms. Hoffman’s class came lunchtime. The worst part of the day. The time when Micki wanted to evaporate. She stood in the hall outside the upstairs bathroom and through the window watched Tiff walk off campus in a group of Fives. All blondes, all talking—probably about her. She imagined they were going to Naturally Good or for coffee at Bella Luna; they would be talking about their diets and their ’dos. And what a dork Micki Porter was.

  Micki went to the library, as she had every day since she was dinged, and sat on the floor back in a dusty corner where th
e librarian stacked the books with torn covers. She dug a granola bar out of her purse and tore a corner open with her teeth. She had brought a book from home, snitched it from her mom’s old paperbacks. This one was called Fear of Flying, only it was not really about flying. It seemed more about sex and women who were afraid to be themselves. Micki knew authors really liked this subject, but she did not think any of them had a Tanya in their lives. Or got totally dropped by their best friend and a whole club.

  The year before, Micki had told Tiff about what happened in the fifth grade. She already knew Micki was adopted but she had never heard the gory details of her revelation to Tanya. They were smoking a joint Tiff had boosted from her mother’s stash. It was a summer Sunday afternoon and they had Tiff’s house to themselves and a half-gallon of Rocky Road ice cream on the coffee table between them. Even though Micki had long before sworn she would never tell the whole story, the tale had poured out of her in such a way that it might have made Ms. Hoffman smile and say that women are natural storytellers. Ms. Hoffman said that for thousands of years women had no other source of entertainment than themselves and if they were accused of gossiping, that was just another name for a certain kind of storytelling.

  As she listened to Micki’s storytelling, Tiff’s eyes filled with tears and she swore to hold sacred what she had heard. They had kissed on the lips to seal the truth between them. A strange thing to do, but it had made the vow more profound. As she leaned against the stack of musty-smelling books scheduled for recycling, she supposed Tiff had told the story to The Fives by now. She wouldn’t dare mention the kiss, though.

  Sometimes she missed Tiff even more than she missed her father. Tiff could listen for as long as it took to get something said, and she knew the right questions to ask and when to laugh. But now, as she watched the motes dance in the thin winter sunlight slanting down through the library’s old-fashioned sash windows, burnishing the maroon-and-buckskin-colored bindings of the old books, it seemed humiliating that an ordinary person who was neither Micki’s mother nor father could be so important to her.

  The first class after lunch was music. All that month they had been studying Russian composers and today they were going to listen to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and write a two-page impression of what they heard. This was a no-brainer. The Firebird had been one of her father’s favorite pieces of music and thanks to him, Micki knew all about the myth of the phoenix rising from the ashes. During class Ms. Levine walked around, tapping girls on the shoulder with a ruler when they looked like they might doze off.

  When Micki got to class, Tiff was at the front of the room gesturing a lot as she talked to Ms. Levine, who listened intently, puckering and unpuckering her lips like some kind of fish. The classroom filled up and they were still talking. Micki could tell by the way Tiff moved her shoulders from side to side that whatever she was saying was important to her. Once or twice Ms. Levine looked over at Micki and gradually Micki began to feel a weight as if a heavy coat were slowly dropping down on her shoulders. Finally, Ms. Levine nodded and Tiff walked to the back of the classroom. After a moment a girl who had entered Arcadia with the New Year and to whom Micki had never spoken—she didn’t even know her name—came to the front and slid into Tiff’s seat.

  Micki started to say something but the girl interrupted. “Hey, don’t blame me. I like the back of the room.”

  The strains of the Firebird Suite washed over and into Micki, rose in her and flooded her with shame, filled her lungs and pressed against her heart. She heard someone moan and recognized her own voice.

  The new girl nudged her. “What’s wrong with you?”

  A sharp pain darted through her stomach. She grabbed her book bag and escaped.

  She had no particular plans when she left the school, nowhere she was heading for sure, but eventually her wandering took her along Fifth Avenue, past the bookstores and boutiques, through Hillcrest and into the green expanse of Balboa Park. The parking lots were full and the tourists out in force. She recognized them by their pale skin and the maps and guides they clutched. At the Mingei Museum she stopped long enough to run her hands along the curves of the huge Nicki St. Phalle sculptures. Her father had let her climb them when she was small, holding her lightly with his rough, gardener’s hands. In the organ pavilion someone was practicing, filling the air with the same repeated bars. She knew where she was going now.

  Balboa High School was on the far side of the park, across the wide boulevard that ran straight into the middle of downtown. It was one of the city’s oldest schools, having been established at what was once the edge of town. Tiff called it the fortress because of the forbidding, windowless exterior cement walls. Micki crossed the parking circle and pushed open the front office door. The long front counter was crowded with kids and adults and she had to wait ten minutes for a student aide to ask what she wanted.

  “I heard about a special program . . .”

  The girl was Hispanic. She wore blue eye shadow and her black bangs had been combed straight up and sprayed stiff. No one at Arcadia wore her hair in that style. Micki wondered how she looked to this girl in her plaid uniform skirt and navy blue blazer.

  “We got lots of programs. You mean sports or—”

  “Academic,” Micki said.

  The girl sighed. “You gotta be more specific.”

  “An honors program?”

  “Oh, yeah.” The girl looked under the counter and brought out a bundle of brochures. “You’re talking about the International Baccalaureate.” Her gaze assessed Micki. “You gotta have really good grades to get in.”

  “How good?”

  The girl made a face. “The tests are like way hard. Teachers here don’t even correct them. They get sent off somewhere like . . . Sweden, I think.”

  “Wow,” Micki said.

  She took a handful of brochures and stuck them in her backpack, and she did not look at them until she was back in the park, where she stopped at a refreshment kiosk and bought a fruit drink and sat on a bench in the Organ pavilion. The sun was warm on her head and shoulders and she slipped off her blazer.

  The International Baccalaureate Program was only available at Balboa High School and the brochure made a big deal of how it was open to any student who could handle the work. At the end of twelfth grade there were massive tests, and some of them were sent off to Switzerland to be corrected along with tests from students in dozens of other countries. If a student passed those tests she could get advanced placement in college.

  Thinking about all those tests depressed Micki.

  Atop the worn, gray plaster facade of the Organ Pavilion, over the flowers and leaves and birds and curlicues, lines of pigeons perched liked robed judges, black silhouettes against the blue sky. A plane passed overhead, orange and brown. Southwestern.

  She wished she were on a plane going somewhere far away. She felt trapped, her options as limited and grim as poor old Ken Allen, the orangutan who used to escape from his cage in the zoo every chance he got and was always brought back and the walls of his enclosure built higher. The sun dipped below the pavilion and violet winter twilight filled the park with shadows. Micki dropped the brochures in a trashcan, put on her blazer, and walked out of the park fast. It was creepy there at night and everyone knew the homeless slept in the gullies among the palms and ferns and eucalyptus.

  She wished that Eddie, the man in the Jaguar, would come by and offer her a ride. Despite her mother’s admonitions, she would ride with him gladly to get out of the park. Maybe not. Anyway, it didn’t matter. She had not seen him in days and days and she felt stupid for caring.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the hour before dawn when the winter light in Lana’s bedroom was the color of oysters and the only sound a ripple of breeze through the garden wind chimes, Jack had slept beside her, warm and smelling of soap and bed and dreams. Lana’s consciousness drifted outward to the edges of the day, moved from her own dreams into the thin, gray light. Eyes closed, she pressed h
er body against his back, reached around his slim hips and flat stomach and cupped his penis in the palm of her hand until it hardened and he made a sound, a kind of pleased woofle, and turned to her. Eyes shut, hands and body with their own intelligence. Sex in the morning, sex without thinking, sex a drowsy segue from sleep to pleasure and back and then awake. Quick sex, no fancy stuff, and afterwards lying together in a sticky union, drowsy as warm wolf cubs entangled with each other, drifting back into sleep.

  She would never have sex like that again. She might go to bed with someone, sometime, but never as easy, never as much fun. It had taken Jack and Lana almost twenty years to perfect the movements of their private dance. She would never have the desire or patience to devote twenty years to anyone again. Mars said buy a vibrator, said she owned one and the inventor should get a Nobel. For a while Lana lay in bed thinking about sex, about whether Jack would be her last lover. At this point, it did not matter to her if he was, so maybe she should buy a . . . device. She giggled at the unlikely image of herself walking into a sex shop in broad daylight. She did not care to think of who frequented such places after dark. If sex was the best way to begin a day, giggling came a close second.

  After lunch, Lana left the job and drove north on 805 to talk about bareroot roses with a wholesale grower. She crossed that off her list and drove to a little Del Mar perennial nursery and had coffee with the owner, whom she had known for years. Another item crossed off. On a whim, she detoured off I-5 going home and drove out Carmel Valley Road beside the wetlands to the long stretch of beach that separates La Jolla and Del Mar. To the west against a computer-screen-blue sky, the black silhouette of a line of pelicans skimmed the water, intent as bargain hunters. Beyond the roll of breakers, surfers dotted the water in their black wet suits. She liked the way they straddled their boards and waited for the perfect wave. She liked their implied confidence that there was such a thing as a perfect anything anymore.