She imagined the fly’s little insect grin, all gummy, self-satisfied, mocking, its orbital red eyes gleaming. Is the little bugger taunting me? Is there no one in this house who respects me?
The fly knew what was happening yet was helpless to delay the inevitable. For him, love equaled sacrifice; what a great journey this was, to give himself so selflessly to his one great amour! He watched as Clarissa wrapped her hand around the newspaper and wanted nothing more than to taste her delectable skin, especially the soft inner curve of her elbow. He heard Section A crinkle as she tightened her grip. He considered India’s sacred cows and how they viewed humans as little more than pests. The news of divine bovines had first been relayed in 1898 by an Indian fly that had made the journey to America in a valise made of crocodile hide. As global travel became more commonplace, tales of the nonstop banquet the cows afforded India’s flies spread wing to wing, coast to coast, and generation to generation with all the continuity of a narrative-born genetic marker. So, too, did the news of how the cows viewed the worshipful humans. If sacred cows had thumbs, the fly mused, they’d take swatters to every idiot who dared approach them with a lantern smoldering with incense. The whole sacred thing had rendered their lives meaningless, had forced them into an unnatural state of grace. He twitched his wings, unable to get past the irony that one person’s deity was another’s pest. Here he was, adoring this goddess of a woman, and all she held for him were murderous thoughts. If he were a writer, the fly decided, he would pen an opus titled Of Pests and Gods.
Clarissa was grateful that her husband had—for whatever reason—fashioned a club. She steadied her heart and grip, kept her eyes on the insect prize even as she pulled on her cerulean boots with her free hand and stood upright—her superhero breasts perky, hard, Buick-proud.
The fly stayed very still for her, sad beyond all measure but thankful that he had had this day, thankful in the way of the hopelessly lovesick that he was allowed to sacrifice himself on the altar of her dysfunction. He did not close his eyes, not even when Clarissa shouted like a good warrior, “Fwuk u u liho!” because that would have dishonored this moment and her need. In the face of death, he was full of ardor.
With one mighty, well-placed blow, Clarissa smashed the god fly, her accidental suitor, into a blood-and-guts, peanut-buttery mash.
“Hmpf!” Clarissa said. She tossed the paper to the floor, a casual but triumphant act. She smoothed her T-shirt, which her subconscious fancied was a gold lamé second skin, threw back her bouncy hair, and took a deep, deep superhero breath.
And all the while, Clarissa domestica, who’d taken cover in the buried cave of Super Clarissa’s dermal layer, felt slightly embarrassed about the thrill she’d experienced in killing her tormentor. As she struggled to the epidermal surface of her life, she fretted over where her inner Buddha (she was certain she had one) had fled. Was he that fickle? Was she that unworthy? Had he simply decided to leave the killing to her so that he could then enjoy life untainted by guilt or insect? Was the Buddha a student of The Art of War? She did not know.
Leaving the dead fly where it lay, all the Clarissas in her body walked into the kitchen and headed for the fridge. She was hungry and was certain Iggy was, too. The man had a mammoth appetite. Three burgers or a whole chicken at one sitting was a normal meal for him. A possible new title: Iggy: The Great Blue Ox. She threw open the fridge door and pondered what to fix for lunch. Her eyes wandered over a package of thawing chicken breasts, a bouquet of parsley still on the stem and stuffed into a tumbler of greening water, an unopened package of hoop cheese, a giant can of Hansa pilsner sent by a school chum from Johannesburg, a half-full bottle of Pinot Grigio, and a loaf of nine-grain wheat bread. She thought about Jane and how she’d declined the cookies because of her braces. Clarissa knew full well what an annoyance a mouth-ful of metal could be. But that was nothing compared with going through life with a severe case of catty-whomped teeth. Clarissa reached for the Pinot, uncorked it, and took a slug, and as the wine cooled her throat, she found herself mercilessly stumbling backward into the dark heart of her childhood.
Knuckles and bones, marrow and tendon, skin and vein—the entire all-suffering, Christ-like body of being Mrs. Burden’s daughter rushed at her. She saw little Clarissa, one of the many Clarissas whom she found embarrassing, whom she could not love, standing on her tiptoes, gazing into the cracked medicine cabinet mirror in the small, dimly lit bathroom that, in all honesty, appeared to be a divine indulgence given the size and modesty of that single-wide trailer.
Her mother towered over her, swirling her bourbon and Tab in a plastic tumbler and flicking her cigarette that was poised all jaunty and absurd in its stop-smoking plastic filter. To Clarissa, her mother resembled Ava Gardner in her boozy role in Night of the Iguana, which was for some odd reason her very favorite movie on the entire planet, and she was happy that Channel 13 sometimes ran it on Saturday afternoons. But she was also bitter that there was no Richard Burton or Deborah Kerr or dying poet to save her and her crazy mother.
Little Clarissa brought her hand to her mouth and pressed against her teeth—those teeth that stuck out at demonic angles, those teeth that were an object of derision and shame.
“Push harder,” Mrs. Burden ordered, her red lips releasing each word in a tiny, invisible, bourbon-scented barrel.
Clarissa pressed her fist against her buckteeth with all the force she could muster, so much so that her face shook. Her hand shook. Her lips—flushed with blood—grew warm and the tips of her knuckles blazed white. Her eyes widened in tandem with the bubbling pain.
Her mother grabbed Clarissa’s chin, tilted the girl’s head to the hard light of the naked bulb, and inspected her daughter’s profile. “They haven’t budged a hair.” She let go with a shove. “Have you been doing this three times a day like I told you?”
Clarissa did not answer. Her job was to keep pressing those teeth, forcing them into pretty-girl alignment, because being bucktoothed all her life was out of the question. But so was paying for braces. How many times would her mother have to tell her that? “No goddamn braces! We have no goddamn money!” As Clarissa applied more pressure, she became snagged in her mother’s reflection, which dodged like a punch-drunk prizefighter in the cracked mirror.
Mrs. Burden grabbed her daughter by the hair and yanked. “I said push!” Then she gripped the doorjamb and propelled herself out of the bathroom, away from the fractured image, and down the hall. “Don’t stop until I say you can stop,” she shouted, slurring, from the front room—although shouting to be heard in the confines of this aluminum can with wheels was unnecessary. And despite the fact that she mumbled her next words, Clarissa took note of each syllable: “Stupid child.”
Clarissa’s hand was tired; that’s why she brought both fists to her mouth and pressed with double strength. She pressed so hard that her body, not just her face and hands, shook. She heard herself grunt. She willed her spirit into a dark, still room and swore she would not let it out until her mother’s cure worked.
“You have to become a girl with perfect teeth or else you will die.” That’s what she told the little girl in the mirror.
Clarissa shoved the wine bottle back into the fridge, and as she recorked it, she knocked over the parsley-filled tumbler. It fell in slow motion, or so Clarissa thought, toward the floor, pulling Clarissa back to the present moment. It twirled end over end, brushing the air with a green, feathery swath. In its descent, the tumbler seemed Newtonian, determined to obey gravity no matter how much Clarissa tried to intercede. As if there were two of her—one who was real and one who simply went through the motions of life—Clarissa saw herself mouth the words Oh no and heard in exquisite, symphonic detail the high-pitched stutter of glass shattering against tile. Shards, both infinitesimal and large, sliced the air, settling in a pattern that appeared loose and chaotic but actually followed the laws of physics.
Iggy’s voice swirled from on high, plump with irritation. “What’s going on, eh?
”
Clarissa tested the point of a large shard with the ball of her right foot. “Nothing.”
“What broke?”
She eyed the distance between herself and the broom that she’d tucked into the narrow space between the fridge and wall. Could she lean that far? She picked up the large shard and slid it against her thumb. She watched a strand of blood curl slowly down her hand.
“Kak! What do you mean, ‘nothing’? I heard…” Her husband’s voice ushered in—close, surprising.
She looked up.
He stood at the base of the stairs, staring into the kitchen. He must have been using the hole punch; a paper dot was caught in his beard. “Shit, Clarissa, why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to bother you. Don’t come in here without shoes.” A drop of blood spiraled downward, landing on her big toe. She couldn’t differentiate between her blood and the nail lacquer. Perhaps harlot red was the wrong name. Slasher red—now, that was more appropriate. She had to fight back a wild giggle.
“You’re bleeding all over the floor.”
“It’s no big deal.”
He rolled his eyes. Clarissa concentrated on his height—was he twice her length?—this helped her ignore his omnipresent disapproval.
“What’s wrong with you? You should have called me, eh. What were you going to do, stand here all day and bleed to death? Fowk!”
Maybe, she thought.
He barreled to the doorway. “Where’s the fowking broom?”
“Just bring me my flip-flops. I’ll take care of it.”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
She watched him walk away—clop, clop, clop. He wore a size nineteen shoe, something that wasn’t easy to find. She wondered what it felt like to take up so much space on earth. He stopped in the chandelier room and looked under the sideboard. Why would he think she’d leave her flip-flops there?
“They’re on the porch.” She turned on her toes and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hung beside the door leading into the dining room. No cracks. No Ava Gardner mom. No buck-teeth. Just the unremarkable face of a pretty woman. Magic.
“Here.”
She spun back around.
“I really wish you’d learn to be more careful,” Iggy snapped from his renewed position in the doorway, heaving the shoes with the sudden resentment of a four-year-old. “Sometimes, I swear to God, you’re such a fowked-up mess. You remind me of my mother. Jou dom stuk kak!”
“Do not call me a stupid piece of shit. Or any other kind of shit, Iggy. It was an accident. They happen.” His hard-angled nose grew longer. She saw it sharpen into a beak. He was a bird. A big, fat, pooping bird. She hoped everyone in South Africa hated him. Clarissa tried to separate herself from his words by concentrating on the trajectory and landing of the flip-flops. They skidded and swirled, reminding her of tiny bumper cars, stopping near enough that she managed, by twisting each ankle in opposing directions, to slip them on without risking the minefield of broken glass.
“Thank you.”
“Sure you don’t want any help?” He uttered each word as if they were random sounds.
Clarissa studied him. Joy, disgust, pity, love: Nothing betrayed his steady features. She thought it probably took a great deal of energy to shunt all of life’s emotions into an interior space no one could get to. She tucked her hair behind her ear. “No, I’ll take care of it.”
Again he shrugged and turned away. “I’ve got paperwork to finish, and then I’m running into town,” he said, retreating.
“I was about to fix us lunch.”
“I’m meeting Yvette and”—he sighed; it was a buying-time technique she’d often seen him use—“umm, her boyfriend for lunch.”
“Who’s Yvette?”
“The brunette from this morning. Her boyfriend wants to meet me.” He said this as if some schlub wanting to rub shoulders with him was a big deal. “I suspect Natalie will also join us.”
Liar. He didn’t know that she’d overheard his suggestion that they shoot some “edgy” video and that Yvette had begged him to film them at her new apartment. Omission, you son of a bitch, is the same as lying. “Lunch, is it?”
“Yes, Clarissa, lunch. Do you even know how to spell the word?”
Clarissa ignored the insult; it would be too easy to go hysterical on him right now. But her ovarian shadow women screamed, “Can you spell asshole, asshole?”
She studied a strand of hair for split ends—a nervous tic—and said, “Leo Adams is giving a reading in town tonight. I told him we’d go.”
Iggy shook his head as if he’d just been told to eat cow balls. “And you’re just telling me this now?”
“I’m sorry. He called this morning. You know how Leo is. Everything is spur of the moment with him.”
“Well, that’s too fowking bad because I’ve got about thirty rolls of film to develop. I don’t have time to go to a reading. Besides, Leo bores me.” He studied what she hoped was an infection on his hand. “He ought to bore you, too.”
Clarissa decided she hated the big, pooping bird standing before her. She saw herself standing atop the cloud-shrouded Sears Tower, without her cerulean boots to give her wings. She felt her calves tense at the thought of jumping. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’ll just go alone.”
He rubbed his hand over his bald head and scratched at his beard as if deep in thought. “Clarissa,” he said in the exact tone fathers use with unruly toddlers, “the truck doesn’t have brake lights. You can’t drive a truck at night that has no brake lights. You realize that, don’t you?”
And how many times had she asked him to get them fixed? And the gas gauge? And to haul away the trash in the bed that was threatening to turn the truck into a toxic dump on wheels? But she was afraid to point out these issues, so instead she said, the cold Chicago air buffeting her, “I’ll just take the Civic.”
He turned away. His big feet clomped against the old pine. She heard him loud and clear as he ascended the stairs, “And what am I supposed to do, Clarissa? What if I need a car while you’re gone? I don’t think so.”
Seething, she had to fight an urge to run after him. Beating on him, screaming at him, demanding better treatment: None of it would amount to a hill of beans. She imagined him in the doorway, suddenly keeling over from what—heart attack?—landing with the force of a giant log (the bigger they are, the harder they fall), slicing his throat on a thick blade of broken glass. There was nothing anyone could do about a slit jugular.
She stepped gingerly, careful to avoid shards that could puncture her rubber soles, and grabbed the broom. She had to sweep up the mess. Every sliver. Not one thin dagger could be left behind to puncture an unsuspecting foot. Some things you just had to put your mind to. Cleaning spills and adjusting one’s attitude: They were ordinary chores in an ordinary day.
Her cut throbbed. She was the only one in the house who was bleeding. She reached for her dish towel and wrapped her hand. A deep self-loathing coursed through her. How could she expect her husband to be attracted to her with her obvious belly and butt and breasts?
Clarissa swept like a good soldier—intent, vigilant—searching for pieces she feared she’d never find.
But still there were the roses. And the garden out back that she wanted to ramble through. And the insistent need that this day not be lost. Clarissa slid the vacuum into her cleaning supply closet in the hallway—the broom, she’d decided, wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand—and spied the cut crystal vase on the top shelf, behind a shoebox filled with needles, thread, a dead spider, and one sterling thimble. She pulled down the vase, ferried it to the kitchen, and in short order transferred the rose stems. Her thumb no longer bled, nor did she give it another thought. She stepped back and admired her handiwork. Lucky for her she’d stopped cutting when she had, because the vase was packed as tightly as she dared stuff it. The blossoms—such a lovely shade of peach—had started to open. They bore tiny white centers—star-shaped a
nd soft. She brought the roses to her face and inhaled. What an intoxicating bouquet, something out of a movie! Wasn’t it wonderful, this capacity to grow things! It was a talent that until moving to Hope she never knew she possessed. She didn’t have to think long about where to put them: on the sideboard in the chandelier room. That way, each time she passed through the house, she would see them.
Holding the vase in both hands lest she drop it, too, she carried the flowers out of the kitchen, placed them on the white lace runner in the middle of the sideboard, and fussed with two stems that had shimmied below the others. She heard Iggy stomping around upstairs but felt under no obligation to tell him what she was about to do.
Satisfied that each rose was perfectly situated, she flung open the back door as his slammed shut and hurried down the porch steps.
Dear God,” Clarissa said, fanning herself, breathing hard, threading her way through the winding path of her butterfly garden that hugged the rear of the house. She rubbed her eyes, which stung with sweat and grit. It must be close to one hundred degrees, she thought, and she was not far off.
Larry Dibble had made his way to the edge of town and, though unaffected by weather, was still impressed when he saw that the thermometer nailed like a cross to the WELCOME TO HOPE sign reflected a climate more suited to the underworld: a round, voluptuous, even-numbered 102 degrees.
The mail lady drove by in an SUV that had 156,000 miles on it and three worn shocks, the fourth soon to follow. She saw Larry Dibble standing by the sign and, though naturally suspicious of strangers, was immediately smitten with the one-armed, dreadlocked man who shot her a dazzling smile.
He sniffed the air. Oil. The fetid gal had a leak. As he watched her stop at Hope’s first house on the right and open its mailbox with a long, hooked stick, he pondered the advantages of helping her out with her car problem or tending to her libido with a bit of afternoon fallen angel love. He tapped his index finger on the sign; his long nail clacked against the wood with curious intent.
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 8