How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

by Connie May Fowler

And with that thought, her bemusement vanished. These were just folks, making a living, talented, brave, hungry, mischievous, petty, kind, gentle, good, mean, evil, silly, serious, tired, hopeful, scared, longing, confused, arrogant, jealous, wise: the human condition in all its frail and glorious fuckery. And what was a dwarf going to do in this world besides stick around with a bunch of other dwarfs, where no one but the interloping tall people took a second gander? And weren’t the tall people the outnumbered outsiders and therefore members of a powerless minority? Was a freak show a freak show when everyone looked alike save the customers? She decided that no matter what, come morning she would visit the All-American Dynamite Dwarf Carnival, and she would try not to feel guilty or superior or inferior. She would try to just be. Clarissa. Clarissa.

  She drove the three blocks to her house and turned in. The place was lit up stem to stern, as if electricity were free. Did everyone on the planet tonight, she wondered, need illumination? She hadn’t counted on him being awake. Would he take one look at her and know that another man had held her? Would he smell the scent of want and abandon and fear and willfulness? Would he care? Or would he rage? What should be her stance? she wondered, turning off the wipers and then the headlights. She gazed at the old house—its clapboard siding, its wraparound porches, its beautiful old wavy glass windows—and understood that a terrible crime had been committed there. She’d woken up that morning naive. And now she was not. Now the world was a different place. And Iggy was going to have to catch up.

  “Steady as she goes,” she whispered as she got out of Yellow Bird and made her way past the salvia and bee balm to the porch, where an armadillo stood hunched in the shadows, considering upending the yarrow so that he could enjoy their tasty roots.

  Her ovarian shadow women began to whimper, but Clarissa wasn’t all that afraid. Rather, she was curious. She stepped into the chandelier room and tried to divine Iggy’s whereabouts. Was he watching TV, in his office staring into the glow of the computer, or wrapped in a fetal knot in the far corner of their bed? She checked her cell phone—3:05 a.m.—and decided to try the bedroom first. Winding her way through the back hallway, her bangles chiming, announcing her arrival, she decided that thanks to some dogleg detour in love’s reasoning, the chaste nature of her evening with Adams made the entire episode even more explosive.

  The bedroom door was closed. She gripped the knob but hesitated. Should she feel guilty?

  “Absolutely not,” her old friend Deepak chimed. “You were only seeking your bliss. Bad situations prompt that, you know.”

  Deepdeep was right. She turned the knob and charged into the room as if she had every right to come home at three a.m., excuse-free. But even in the dark, she could tell that Iggy wasn’t there. She walked over to the bed and felt the spread; it had not been slept in. For reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on, this pissed her off. Perhaps she was primed for a reckoning and needed him to show up for it. Otherwise, what was the point? She went into her closet, kicked off her pretty blue pumps, shimmied out of her jeans, pulled the chemise over her head, snapped off her bra, and left everything in a pile on the floor except for her jewelry. She kept that on, including all twenty bangles; she might need armament. She slipped on her robe and resumed her search.

  As she wandered, finding nothing but one empty room after another, her mission to confront him became more urgent. When she approached the living room, she tuned her ears, trying to detect the gaspy sound of late night TV porn. She knew what he did in the wee hours. Many a morning, she checked the on-screen purchase history to find his late night proclivities spelled out in a list untainted by judgment (just the facts: film titles, purchase price, time ordered). Clarissa would read through the titles, searching for clues about why he preferred adult movies to her. She was just down the hall, after all; warm, alive, wanting. Perhaps she simply couldn’t compete—even though she was in the flesh—with the girls in Oral Ecstasy Three.

  She pressed her ear to the door. All was quiet. She walked in and searched for clues. The TV was off but still warm. An empty bottle of Heineken, its sweat leaving water trails on the coffee table, was still cold. He’d cleared the room in only the past few minutes, she decided; perhaps he’d heard her drive up and took his leave. A stack of contact sheets lay abandoned on the couch. She shuffled through them. They were images shot that day, mostly in the barn: the two models together, acting like farm animals, mounting each other. How was this art? How did this uplift or inform the human condition? How was she supposed to live like this? He was sick, she decided, a fucking nutcase.

  Clarissa tossed the contact sheets on the table, brought her robe more tightly about her. Perhaps he was in the darkroom. She’d sure as hell aim to find out. She threaded her way back through the hallways and empty rooms, calm yet fierce, out the back porch, and down the stairs. She marched through the wet grass, made a beeline for the building that was situated directly behind her studio, pounded on the door. No response. Fuck! Exasperated, she wandered past the rose garden, stood in the clearing, and stared at the heavens. Remnant storm clouds swept eastward, pushed by a fair, warm breeze that—even without the poisonous effect ghosts had on particularly annoying insects—kept the hypodermic needles known as mosquitoes grounded. The stars, while not as stunning as they were at the beach, still gleamed with an intensity unseen by city dwellers. The waning crescent moon—the wishing moon of witches—was just beginning to suggest its presence by a nearly imperceptible glow in the eastern sky. More storms approached from the west.

  Clarissa’s long hair hung thick and wild around her shoulders. She was barefoot but didn’t care. She liked the feel of wet earth beneath her feet. There wasn’t a worm in the world crazy enough to take her as its host—that’s what she always thought whenever her mother’s admonition of “You’ll get worms if you go outside without shoes on, you little tramp!” swept through her memory bank. Little tramp: What a laughable arrow to aim at her. All those names her mother called her, all those secret scars from the whippings… Mother was mean and vicious and rotten. That’s all there was to it.

  The same armadillo that had watched her make her way into the house paused from his conscientious uprooting of the yarrow and studied her. It was impossible to know if the armadillo was sizing her up because he feared she might interrupt his late night tending or because she looked quite mad. Whatever the case, his beady eyes gleamed as they took her in.

  Oblivious to his presence, Clarissa realized that she was backsliding. Hadn’t she cried those old wounds away while lying in Adams’s embrace? She sure as hell had tried. Watching the clouds race eastward, she veered into a Deepakesque scolding. Think nice thoughts, goddamn it. Think about the cosmos and the rivers flowing deep in your soul and the full-moon beauty of your ass and Eve’s ancient wisdom nourishing your ovaries and how magnificently your hormones spin inside the uterine wholeness of your feminine goddess and… oh, horseshit.

  All the straps and rubber bands and cords and ropes and tie-downs and chains and duct tape and Band-Aids and Post-it notes Clarissa had used pretty much her entire life to hold her anxiety and emotions in place popped free—snip, snap, whiz, watch out!—in one great moment. Fists clenched, robe asunder, hair wild, breasts bared, Clarissa threw back her head, bangles up to her elbows, and screamed more loudly than she had thought humanly possible. It was a scream that endured, beginning in her neglected loins, swirling and gaining momentum in her belly and lungs and bellows of her heart, deepening in the protean cords of her voice box, breaking across her lips like an ocean unleashed, traveling through time and space with the grace and speed afforded solely to the good but fed-up women of this earth.

  The armadillo jumped before scurrying behind the steps. The lover herons roosting in the sentinel oak raised their heads, tested the air, shared a glance that spoke volumes about what they thought of humans, and then went back to sleep. Larry Dibble, having taken shelter in the barn, woke from a fevered, nightmare-riddled slumber, said, “Shut the
hell up,” and, for reasons he couldn’t ascertain, began to weep. An owl on the prowl for rats and snakes blinked once before flying from his perch in a nearby cypress to a pine snag down the road. The rat family living in Clarissa’s attic froze for a mere three seconds, determined they weren’t in danger, and then continued on, chewing through a tart rectangle of luscious cotton-candy-pink insulation. An indigo snake, unseen in the night, slipped deeper into the brambles, its tongue alive with the vibrations Clarissa stirred. These vibrations tripped invisible and sure over the glossy tongues of magnolia leaves and the satin petulance of her rose garden. And as for the stars? A reasonable person could have easily imagined that the buckle in Orion’s Belt and the bowl of the Big Dipper’s ladle shook, their star shine blurred under the weight of that distant howl. In all of Clarissa’s known world, only her husband—a man who had snuck past her when she was snooping at the contact sheets and then slipped without a sound into their bedroom, where he fell into an immediate and deep sleep—was left untouched, unaware.

  Letting go so fully was exhausting. And although Clarissa did not grasp the magnitude of what was happening, hers was not so much a private, primal scream as it was a release of all the vicissitudes that all women through all time had ever experienced. And she also, thanks to how desensitized she’d become in her rabbit hole of a marriage, did not yet know that such belly-busting hollering was an important step in becoming (a) free, and (b) a full, card-carrying member in the army of women who—at great peril to their safety and ingrained comfort zone—acted upon the hard-won knowledge that subservience wasn’t their game.

  Having emptied herself, at least for the moment, of ancient burdens, she found room inside for further self-expression, which was the risk in finding your voice: You wanted never to be silent again. And so, as if possessed by the Holy Spirit, Clarissa began speaking in tongues. Except she wasn’t full of the Spirit, and she wasn’t uttering Aramaic or some other such nonsense. With her breasts aglow in the moonlight, her core immersed in the eternal, roiling river of female vexation, what flowed was a mighty torrent of soul-saving obscenities. “Goddamn motherfucker son-of-a-bitch asshole jerk-off bastard. You will not do this to me, motherfucker! Shithead son of a bitch!”

  Feeling as if she were slipping from the grip of martyrdom—a condition she had co-opted and cultivated—Clarissa stomped inside the house with all the righteousness of Sherman marching to the sea. Instincts afire, she knew where to find the no-good, cheating, stomp-on-her-heart, slink-through-the-night bastard. Her robe hanging half off one shoulder, sweat beading translucent and pure along her hairline, she busted again into their bedroom. Blinded by the pitch blackness, she could smell him. She shut her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them, she could make out things fairly well. Her husband—a sheet covering his torso—lay huddled in the far corner of the king-size bed. He was curled in on himself like an armored bug protecting his belly.

  She kicked the bed. “Wake up!”

  He moaned, curled tighter.

  “I said, ‘Wake the fuck up.’ ” Clarissa frightened herself, but she was also excited. Who knew where this new tack might land her?

  He leaned on his elbows, shoulders slumped, eyes hooded. He looked drunk, but Clarissa suspected he was simply confused. She stood over him, her robe open, her body exposed.

  “What the…” He shielded his eyes with his hand and fell against his pillow. “What’s wrong with you?” His voice was clotted, thick with sleep.

  “Look at me, you son of a bitch. Look at me! You don’t even look at me anymore.”

  He rolled over, away from where she stood. “Jesus H. Christ.” His words were muffled, tangled in the bedding. “Voertsek! Scram!”

  Clarissa wanted to beat on him, scream at him, make him hurt, make him react as if he had some feeling—even hatred—toward her, anything but this all-abiding insouciance. “Get your fucking camera right now, asshole. Take my picture. If you’re incapable of fucking me, at least photograph me.”

  He didn’t move. He lay there, face in his pillow, belly down.

  “You don’t touch me. You don’t look at me. You barely even talk to me.” Clarissa spoke in a near whisper, which was appropriate given that she had just lifted the veil on the holy trinity of her discontent. “Talk to me. What is wrong with you? You haven’t touched me since the freaking Clinton administration!”

  She sat on the bed and batted down a desire to press her fingers into the small of his back. The ovarian shadow women whispered, “Don’t say another word; you’ve gone too far already.”

  But she couldn’t stop herself. Her entire future, in that one convulsive moment, seemed to depend on her asking what she had barely been able to ponder privately. She did not allow herself even a second or two of self-reflection so that she might consider whether blind rage or a reasonable need for truth propelled her forward. Clarissa Burden had come unhinged. Getting to the truth at any cost was suddenly the only thing in her life that mattered. She heard her voice scrape across the canvas of her husband’s indifference: “Am I that revolting to you?”

  In the silence that followed, she took note of little things. His inhalations and exhalations each lasted three seconds. The night-light in the bathroom cast a faint, milky path that stopped just short of the doorway. A dog—perhaps a quarter mile down the road—barked four times, paused, then barked again. She imagined him, a hound, satisfied that he’d run off his imaginary intruder, circling one tight revolution before settling down to sleep. Something lithe and small scurried in the attic. Rats. Always rats.

  And in this silence, which was really quite pregnant with sound, she waited a long time for her husband to respond, long enough that she quit counting the intervals between his breaths, long enough for the hound to complete a dream in which he flushed a bevy of quail out of tall golden grass, long enough for the rats to lose interest in the copper wiring through which the house’s electrical lifeblood flowed, long enough for her anger to subside, for it to be replaced by something hard and cold and on the move: an ice floe.

  When the silence truly was pure, when the last ounce of warmth had drained from her fingers, she placed her hand on his spine. His shoulders, filmed in sweat, shook. The motion vibrated all the way up to her elbow and remained there, barbed, stinging cartilage, marrow, bone.

  Uncertain as to whether he was laughing or crying, she gathered up her robe, covered herself, touched his neck, felt the moist warmth of his scalp, whispered, “I understand,” and left the room.

  She stood in the back hallway of their gigantic old house and once more felt the electric jolt of something imperfect, beautiful, terrifying. She knew it was Olga Villada, that her house was full of haunts, and that the family who’d suffered such a hideous end was still here, demanding what? Justice? Revenge? Peace? Clarissa leaned against the wall, wishing it would absorb her, steady her, certain that this sensation of being suspended in a lightning bolt was not because she had made an ass out of herself in front of her husband by essentially screaming that she needed to feel loved; or because she had, in her unhinged plea, reduced him to what she now presumed were tears; or because her marriage was hurtling toward the cliff’s edge and the carriage had no brakes—but because she did not know how to help herself, much less the long-dead Villada-Archer family.

  Slumped against the wall, Olga Villada’s cold hand squeezing her shoulder, Clarissa felt herself collapse amid the ruins of her marriage. She wanted her husband to love her, to make her feel what she had felt when Adams held her—worthy, adored, no longer alone—or else she wanted out. By action and deed, her husband had left her to fend for herself in this godforsaken wilderness of a marriage while he surrounded himself with intimate strangers.

  Maybe if she said, “Look, we started out loving each other and now we find ourselves separated by things and people we don’t really want. Let’s just get rid of them. Let’s find a way back,” he would understand that she was right, that the absence of loneliness was a worthy goal, t
hat intimate strangers were expendable.

  As Clarissa pushed away from the wall, Olga Villada spun toward the middle of the room, pulsing with both light and shadow. The old pain of not being released from this place had taken hold again. The solstice having passed but the night still intact, she wished for only one thing: to die completely. She began to whirl, faster and faster, tearing a hole in time’s scrim, thinking, Surely this agony will ease; no one can survive eternity bearing a pain this great.

  Clarissa closed the distance between herself and the bedroom. She had to tell him. Surely, after all she’d just said, he was lying in bed consumed with sadness, crying, possibly even repentant.

  She cracked the door, peered in, and was met with the slumberous cacophony of her husband’s contented snoring. He was no longer rolled up in a don’t-touch-me ball but was on his back, legs and arms spread wide, as if claiming the entire bed, as if he somehow were the victor. Standing in the doorway, the darkness consuming her, Clarissa wondered how he could—after all that she revealed—roll over and go to sleep. In that moment, Clarissa’s old world, the one where she had made certain assumptions about the goodness of her husband, exploded. He had been laughing at her. Did he have a humane or caring bone in his body? Were his actions calculated, or did dismissing her come naturally?

  As her husband snored with the unstable ire of an old man, Clarissa admitted a truth she had been running from: Her husband really did not care. It wasn’t an act or a conceit; his indifference was his heart. She could yell or beg or plead or dance a striptease from dawn to dusk, and it would not affect him. He lived in her house and ate her food and used her electricity and her water and spent her money to buy his clothes, and underwear, and paintbrushes, and canvases, and videocameras, and wine-soaked lunches for his intimate strangers. Living with her, putting up with her presence, she realized, was a small price to pay for a life without responsibility or duty. He lived a wholly separate existence. She was an insect to him: swat, swat.