Without magnification, Chloe shouldn't be able to see the image, but it steps from the easel to stand at Evan Lee's windowsill. It is a little girl, pale, red-lipped and covered with beach sand. She stands in the window like a warrior, with a stick in her hand, a lance, a spear, a bright sword. Behind the girl is the massive, aquamarine curl of a wave, shot through with foam and strands of black kelp. In a shimmer of chalk dust, the warrior child waves her driftwood spear at Chloe and sticks out her little pink tongue. Then she's smiling, sharp nacreous teeth. Her hair flutters in the ocean breeze, crazy dandelion fluff. No longer a dread specter, a harbinger of cold aquatic death, she is a nixie, a sprite, a sandy-legged sylph.
Chloe bends toward the window, and scribbles a little to get the ink flowing from her pen. Words spill onto the dusty sheets, random, tumbling, breaching like porpoises over warm waves. As when she was crazy and young, her first disjointed attempts fall to the floor in a mad cascade of half-crumpled paper. Writing this topsy-turvy way, uninhibited, is like pulling the handle of a slot machine, again and again with blinking lights and caterwauling sirens: Loss, loss, loss, win! Loss, loss, win! Jackpot! A winner! Fly!
She isolates an image, adds another and another, and as the discarded pages pile up under the windowsill, an epic erupts and takes flight. Her pen hand dips and soars to keep pace with the words, climbing, banking, gliding on thermals, accompanied by a burbling that fills the room like a child's breath escaping water, but this time Chloe isn't driven to the disinfectant. She is uplifted up, up, up toward the receding storm clouds, “D—.—.—.—d—.—.—.—d—.—.—.—DONE!"
Triumphant, Chloe looks at the artist. With a gaze like volcanic glass, the artist releases the neck of the easel to lean naked against the windowsill, chin propped on her chalk-blackened elbows. She has no breasts, no nipples, no navel. Her skin is smooth caramel satin over muscle and bone. Like a priestess offering a blessing beneath a canopy of wild olive, she raises a hand, closes her eyes, and sings Chloe's newly penned verse:
Young Pallas, daughter of Triton, and granddaughter of Ocean
Was the beloved friend of Athene, Gray-Eyed goddess of war.
Both girls loved a good skirmish, spear and javelin most of all
And sadly, when they matured, all the crude nonsense started
With “Mine's bigger than yours” and “It's quality not quantity."
So, when Pallas raised her weapon, no doubt to prove a point
She was struck down by accident to fall dead at Athene's feet.
And grieved to the heart, Athene wrapped Pallas in the aegis
The snake-cloak of protection, and placed her body in a shrine
And bought her fixtures, and clothing and self-help books like
"How to Forget Your Javelin, in Twenty-Eight Days or Less."
And although in a tomb, Pallas wove macramé to pass the time,
Learned to cook and to sew and to praise Athene's offerings.
Growing strange and preoccupied, under the weight of her dread,
She stuffed her ears full of wool, and bent to the sharp spindle
Avoiding the call of the Deep.
Wolf Love
As a teenager in Venice Beach, Chloe wasn't afraid of the ocean and people and wide-open spaces. She spent long summer days in the sand scribbling poetry, waiting for boys to invite her into the surf. Befriending foreign boys was best because all languages were like oxygen, and she didn't stutter on foreign syllables. One summer she had many conquests. She gave four days of passion to a doe-eyed Argentinean, two days of frivolity to an apple-cheeked German, five days of tenderness to a studious Swede named Jan. The day Jan had to leave, Chloe ran home to her mother and wept tears of sand and salt.
Her mother had been shuffling notes with a screenwriter named Tinky all afternoon. She caught Chloe up in arms of warm cotton fluff and rolled her like a sausage in the scene-blocking cards until all of them including Tinky were pink and fizzy and giggling. Her mother told Chloe not to be sad. She said, Take heart, my little wild thing, for you were raised by wolves good and proper. Don't you know that wolves run in packs, and sing to the moon, until they find the One Wolf that makes them complete? Jan is certainly lovely—bless the moon and stars—but does he hear the heavenly music? Does he, Chloe-love?
Chloe pondered her mother's breathless question for the rest of the summer. She sat on the sharp rocks at Gideon's Point and ignored the bonfires and the hoots of her classmates. She was sick with emotions; love and fear battled inside her, war on an Olympian scale. But the fire that burns hot burns quickly, and in the last week before she went off to college, she smoldered like a banked ember in the depths of the recliner. She slept in the bright throne of creation that had not yet forgotten its purpose.
Today, 11 a.m.
Stricken, Chloe reads her poetry on the lips of a stranger. Her heart falters, and she presses against the arm of the recliner to keep from falling out the window. The artist smiles with a tired compassion, a battle-scarred veteran fresh from a deadly dance, still ankle-deep in the blood of a fallen companion. There is a moment of stillness, a moment of reflection, and then she motions. Sit on the windowsill. Pose for me. I will draw you.
Chloe stands motionless in the window, a gazelle paralyzed by the heat of a tiger's breath. She waits for slashing ivory teeth to end the meticulous diorama. Get it over with, cut my throat.
The artist reaches for her tools.
Wild Child
One afternoon, Chloe stood knock-kneed in her second-hand swimsuit and watched a gang of children build a sandcastle. There were three kids in the gang, two pale blond boys and a girl. They worked like golden fiends on the structure, but for all their frenzied scooping and dumping, the best they could do was a lopsided cone of sand. Unable to stop herself, Chloe sidled up and whispered to the boys about battlements, and moats and curtain walls. The stunning blonde sister tossed her silken hair over one shoulder and said, Look at that dumb girl. She's got a ratty hole in her bathing suit and her sandals don't match.
The stink of Chloe's fear excited the golden children. Twitching their little red beaks, they stalked her like scavengers. They made fun of her pale skin and her apricot-colored hair and her s—.—.—.—s—.—.—.—stutter most of all. Cawing, they snatched her packsack and tore it open, used her pencils like lawn darts and screamed her poems at one another, before twisting them into little ropes and flipping them into the surf. Then they fled the carnage, toward the blanket and umbrella fortress where their mother was reading a fashion magazine.
Chloe nudged her beach bag with her foot, and ran home. Unable to laugh it off, unable to cry, she was numb, mute, dead. Chloe's mother took her into the Story Chair and told her a good one about the day Chloe was born. Did you know you were born with a hole in your heart?
Mama, please.
Oh, I know what you're thinking. But there was a little hole—a real pinhole—right through the muscle of your heart. Even though it closed up when you were six, it still hurts. All your life you will pour things into this pinhole to ease the pain, the way you wiggle your tongue inside the empty tooth spot. As long as you keep your heart filled, you'll be blessed, Chloe-Bear. Promise me you'll fill it with magic and secrets and sunlight and ocean waves, and all the other things that hurt but also make you feel alive. Promise you'll do this. Forever and ever. Promise me.
Oh, I promise, Mama. I promise.
Today, Noon
The sun is streaming through the open window, drawing beads of sweat from deep within her body. Maybe the sweat comes from fear, or from tears trapped in the folds of the garments she uses to anchor herself. Her anxiety is receding. It's not as bad as it was when the artist first began to paint. But at eight minutes to noon, the heat is changing from prickly insect feet under her arms to a massive cowl of wet wool around her neck and shoulders.
A voice inside tells her that if she doesn't unwrap her sweating body soon, she might faint, strike her head. Die. Strangely, the idea
of death is no longer comforting.
Nakedness has been a horror ever since she abandoned her tools on the reclining chair, and only in the shower, contained in that small, wet-pounding space, can she bear it. Whenever she's naked out in the open air, she feels rumpled and slack, although her muscles are still firm and her skin sleek. It's not the nakedness itself that disturbs her, but the buoyancy.
The artist waits with a long sable brush held lightly in her fingers. Her canvas has been prepared, the oils squeezed into mounds that glisten wetly against a sheet of rounded fiberboard. There's a glimmer in her dark gaze. Her expression is challenging, but loving, that of a teacher watching a favorite pupil. She could draw Chloe swaddled in bathrobes like circus tents, indeed she could, but instead she waits for the human being to emerge.
Chloe's hands are moist. They pat and pluck, and search her taut surfaces for access. She unfastens the necktie, her fingers trembling. The first thing to come off is the housecoat, size 32, and it hits the floor with a wet fump. The second item is a brocade bathrobe, size 18 (because it comes from a line that caters to women who like to consider themselves Rubenesque). The frog closures are satin, and they slip in her sweaty fingers. She shoves the bathrobe under the recliner with her foot. A third garment, cumbersome pink satin, drops to the floor with a rustle. With the release of each garment, her legs shake less, her hips ache less, and her heels seem to apply less pressure to the floor. Away drop three gabardine button-ups, sizes 18, 16 and 12. Next, two pairs of leggings and three pairs of tights, which she peels off and drapes over the arm of the chair like empty snakeskins. Off come two sweatshirts (sized 10) and two T-shirts (sized SM). Off comes a rumpled cashmere cardigan and a camisole edged in marabou, both dropping into the dust from light fingers. Dressed in a wisp of silk, Chloe teeters at the window. The sable brush caresses the underside of one lace-covered breast, the oil paint rolls across the curve of her hip, delineates the line of her thigh. All is terror. All is joy.
What would Dean think? Should she tell him how she stood bare to a stranger? Would his hands make that warding-off gesture? Would he call her a whore? Would he leave her? Should she go downstairs into the garden and behead the glads, the hyacinths, the fussy tea roses, before he comes home? Should she break all the dishes, smear all the windows with her sexual liquids, warn him somehow of her return to the Deep? Should she show him the wild child, that creature with the perforated heart, the beast she tamed and destroyed?
If she flies, will he fly with her?
Can he still hear the heavenly music?
Chloe looks across at the artist, and she hears the call of the sea. She looks at the brush, at the canvas, at the glistening oil paint, at the artist's moist, parted mouth, and Chloe's arms rise of their own accord to smooth the marks from her white skin. The crashing of the surf increases to a thunderous roar, and she tastes sea foam on her lips as she strips away the wisp of silk to stand naked at the window. The wood floor is as smooth as shell beneath her feet. She raises her hand to the artist, and she opens herself to Ocean.
Somewhere a clock strikes noon.
The Birth of Pallas
Chloe-Bear does not wear a bathing suit while she splashes in the waves. When her mother is not looking, she strips it from her body and flings it into the sand before plunging into the surf like a quicksilver fish. When she dives wearing the old patched suit, the sand tumbles down the neck and collects in a clump between her legs. This makes her itch, so little Chloe swims in her skin whenever she can get away with it.
Today she's playing dolphin, with much diving and breaching, and so the suit has to stay on the beach, where Mama is flipping through her notes like a crazy person. While Chloe-Bear dips and bobs in the warm waves, she wonders how much the little mermaid hated the prince because of the knives in her feet. She pretends to have a fish tail, and then a whale tail, and then flippers like a sea turtle, which is so funny she pees, but just a little. But it's the ocean, not the pool at the Y, so it's fine. Fish pee in the ocean all the time.
Her hair looks like carrots when it's wet, and that's fine. When she's done swimming, she's alone on the beach because it's Monday and it's not tourist season. She forgets all about her suit, and finds a long stick, because the rat's nest of her mother's gray hair rolling in the breeze makes her think of a poem. Naked, Chloe drags the stick along the edge of the surf where the sand is as wet and gray-brown as the belly of a seal. With her tongue hanging out, she writes a long poem in loopy letters, and dots all the i's with stars, even though that makes teachers mad. That kind of mad isn't the real kind of angry, especially when people like the words you write, with annoying little stars and everything.
When she finishes the poem Chloe signs her name in time to see the bubbly-white sea foam drag the first lines into the sea. After another surge of surf, the poem is gone, but it was kind of a dumb poem anyway, she thinks, so she takes a breath and lets the buoyancy take her. A wisp, a bit of beach fluff, Chloe drifts on a gust of salt wind, and her dragging toes leave long creases in the wet sand. Gathering the ocean spray around her like a cloak of invincibility she floats toward the far horizon, and then blasts off like a rocket into the high noon sun.
* * * *
There has never been a boundary I didn't want to smudge. As a child, I wanted the ice cream with the gumballs stuck in it, and books with soft or crackly swatches of things to stroke. Later, I sculpted, played with geometric proofs, rode horses, acted in musicals, and read novels about kids who crossed into Faerie. In college, forced to choose a curriculum, I stumbled on classical studies and plunged my thumbs into a dozen pies. I gobbled ancient philosophy salted with classical mythology. I savored Roman art and architecture steeped in the pickling spice of three dead languages. When I wrote “Pallas at Noon,” I meant to crack open Athene's myth and transform the stuff of epic poetry into personal prose. I stargazed with the telescope pointed the wrong way around, married poetry with physics, and wrote muses into the mop water. I wrote half of the story backward, and I had a blast.
Despite my best intentions, Chloe Larroway is not a boundary crosser. She is a boundary sitter—a boundary watcher. It's in Chloe's silent watching, I hope, that the borderlands in her smallish life are invaded, and her vast inner spaces illuminated.
Joy Marchand
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Willow Pattern
Jon Singer
The plate in the display-case is worked in a lovely indigo underglaze. It is quite the darkest I have ever seen, and has the most saturated color; but the pattern is not as I recall it—the little faces of the lovers are fearful as they run across the bridge, their hands barely touching. Behind them the whip is held at a lower angle than the one I keep in memory, and there is no rope flying from its end. The rest of the scene is tautly still. Even the birds above the bridge seem locked into place, drawing the viewer's attention down to the figures below them.
The glaze on the rare Ming version in the next case is a soft buttery yellow, and makes it hard to see the pattern. There is, however, a button you can push for a special light to increase the contrast. When you do, you can see that the foliage is antique in appearance and that the reptilian heads of the creatures, as they turn toward you, are remarkably distinct; the more so, considering the usual slight looseness of the brushwork and the odd effect of the lighting. From time to time the case seems to fill with a thin fog.
I look at the greenish-black glaze of the plate on its stand. The stream is choked with weeds, and the house dilapidated. One of the birds falls from the sky, feathers everywhere, as the old man fires a warning shot. His face is grim. The lovers on this plate are in a panic, not even touching each other, flying headlong down the endless bridge toward the path they will never reach.
Here the glaze is palest sky-blue on a dark ground. Our experts have concluded that the figures are indeed aliens. Possibly they come from the far West, or they may be hairy people from the most Northern of the islands off the coast. They are, no
netheless, engaged in the statutory activities—scourging one another with whips, and casting their victim from the bridge onto the rocks below. The wind is rushing everywhere, and you can see their little hats in the sky, along with a few sickled leaves from the tree-ferns or cycads that almost obscure the low dwellings to either side of the bridge. The dusty texture of the glaze is singularly appropriate.
The glaze on the plate is red-brown. The figures are tumbling from the bridge into the stream, as if from the lightning-struck tower. It is hard to tell whether they are yet alive, or have been felled by the blasts from the shotgun—their faces are not visible, and their limbs, tossing randomly, give no clue. The face of the Father is almost obscured by the cloud of smoke billowing from the gun; but one eye, huge and bloodshot, protrudes through a gap—.—.—.—it is clear, from the positions and angles of the elements of the scene, that he has shot his daughter first.
This [disk] is the largest of its kind that we have yet recovered, and emits the most intense radiation from its glaze. The base material appears to be [granite?], some ten [untranslatable unit] thick, and has withstood repeated firings, possibly including one or more to test or anneal it before the glaze was applied. Some earlier units of this type, presumably made before the technique was fully developed, have cracked; this one, in contrast, is in splendid condition, with almost no flaking or spalling. It retains nearly all of its details, from glaze pattern to makers’ insignia to the highly distinctive tooling marks in the surfaces of the rock, which are visible where there is no glaze cover. The inscription on the central boss of the underside translates: “It is estimated that [untranslatable, name] spent 17 [time unit indicating long cycles, possibly “years"] at the desk [?] and bench, toiling to conceive and produce this flawless record of the events of [untranslatable (Place-name?)]. [Name, honorific form] went on to produce only one further object of note before succumbing to [?] in the [untranslatable phrase] times of wanting."
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