Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “Fine. She hasn’t caught this crud yet, but she will. So will you. This bug’s so potent it’ll crawl through the phone lines and get you.”

  Involuntarily Larque pulled back from the mouthpiece.

  “Hey, sis,” Byron went on affectionately, “you got a few bucks to spare? Doctor bills caught me kind of short. Just till next month, when the Brother’s Helper money starts coming in.”

  “No,” she told him, “sorry.” She really was sorry, too, that was the appalling thing. There was something never-say-die about Byron that made her want to humor him just on the off chance that he really might win one of his mail-in sweepstakes someday. Whatever it was about him—it was nuts, but you could almost call it courage. Larque ruefully adored him.

  “Hoot’s quit his job,” she explained. “And I’m kind of unemployed too, right at the moment.”

  “Unemployed? You?” Byron sounded astonished, though of course he had not been surprised to hear about Hoot. “How does a free-lance painter of your talent and popularity become unemployed?” He was serious. Byron genuinely loved her work, which was almost the same as loving her. Larque’s house might be decorated with dog hair and Escher posters, but Byron and Carolyn had decorated their place with Larque originals.

  His tone was so warm that she felt herself smiling. “Long story,” she said. “Tell you next time I see you, okay? Gotta go.” She told him to get well, then hung up.

  In the junk drawer of the old dry sink in the kitchen she found a Soudersburg map. For the next half hour she scanned it and the phone book. She found Pine, Elm, Cherry, and Poplar Streets in town, as well as an Oak Lane on the outskirts and a Sycamore Circle in a development. She found O’Connells in the phone book who lived on Water Street, Beaver Street (now there was one hell of a name for a street, especially one in that part of town), in various small surrounding boroughs and/or R.D. 6, 7, and 10. But none of them had the correct first name or even the correct initial, R for Ryder.

  As an afterthought, she looked for Popular Street, so she could find it again sometime and go shopping. But even though she knew approximately where it had been, she could not locate it on the map.

  That night she had a dream. Even though she slept curled against Hoot’s sturdy back as always, it seemed to her that she lay flat, like a prone slab of stone, and her belly was a stage across which ballerinas danced. Her head was propped against something, and with her chin to her chest she had a good view of the show. With complicated kicks and twirls the ballerinas danced all in a row, linked together, holding hands, and their vast pink crinolined skirts were labeled

  BAD GIRL

  and

  BAD BAD GIRL

  and

  DADDY DADDY DADDY

  over and over again, like a Dumb Things I Gotta Do list that would never end. This continued until she coughed with impatience, and all the ballerinas, still linked, swooned into dying swans, and all the stage lights went out, and the dancers lay still in the dark.

  The next day, Sunday, Larque mostly sat in her studio. The paper on her easel remained white.

  By Monday morning she had her ducks in a row somewhat. Getting her artist’s touch back had turned into a dead end for the time. Getting the real Sky back, ditto. Finding her father, the same—she had called every O’Connell in the phone book, on the chance that some of them might be her father’s relatives, and learned nothing. She was getting nowhere—but she still had an artist’s creative approach to problem solving. When something won’t work one way, you come at it from another direction. And only the survival angle remained.

  Monday morning, therefore, she went out looking for a job.

  FIVE

  IT DID NOT GO VERY WELL. FOR STARTERS, SHE COULDN’T locate a dildo factory. There were no helpful listings in the yellow pages. The people at the employment agency got stuffy with her when she asked. She was going to have to find work of a less interesting sort.

  Even a week earlier she probably would have dusted off the damned old suit, sucked gut to get into it, clopped in her pumps (Why do they call them that, for God’s sake?) down to the Soudersburg Area Library System office, showed her degree, and gotten herself an interview. But now for some reason it seemed to her that any job to which she could not wear blue jeans would be unbearable. She abhorred the thought of drafty skirts, itchy pantyhose, crippling heels. Couldn’t see herself as a library clerk anymore. Twenty pounds lighter and she maybe could have been an exotic dancer, which probably brought better money than any of the above but almost certainly would have necessitated shaving her legs.

  So, jeans-clad, she continued her rounds of employment agencies and temp services. She could tell she was not making a good impression.

  “We require professional dress,” a large woman at Kelly told her.

  “I don’t own a professional dress.” The few skirted items in Larque’s closet were more amateur than pro.

  The woman said frostily, “Well, come back after you get yourself a few.”

  At this point Sky walked in through the closed door. The large woman’s bosom leaped up, wrapped itself around her neck, and apparently choked her, because she made peculiar noises. Larque left hastily.

  “I told you to stay in the car!” she scolded. The way Sky looked at her, with big cocker spaniel eyes, did not make her less angry. She didn’t want a big-eyed doppelganger following her around. She just wanted to find a job so she could tell herself that at least one thing in her life was going right.

  Her interview at Manpower went better at first. Blue jeans weren’t such a problem there. Contingent on a physical exam, Larque was offered a position as flagger on a construction site, a nice-paying chance to strut her stuff and boss men in large vehicles. But then in came Sky.

  This time the person behind the desk, a burly male, seemed not to register that the girl entered the room without opening the door. Nor did he seem to notice that the kid was see-through. His entire attention was taken by Sky’s mere presence in his office. “Who’s that?” he sputtered. “Your daughter? Why isn’t she in school? Is she retarded? You going to be calling in sick because of her?”

  Larque wanted to scream at him. Instead, once she was back in the car she screamed, in effect, at herself, “God damn it, Sky! What the hell are you trying to prove? If you can’t do what I tell you, just get out of my life!”

  The doppelganger started to cry.

  “Oh, for the love of—something.” Larque looked away in guilty disgust and tried to start the car. It didn’t even grunt. The poor old thing acted like the battery was dead, or something in the electrical system had shorted out. “Great,” Larque despaired, and then she discovered she had reached that point beyond which not much seems to matter. She became calm, and got out of the Chevette without even slamming her door. “C’mon, Sky,” she invited the weeping child. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  She had no goal in mind other than to take a break. Maybe by the time she got back the car would heal itself. They did that sometimes. Men didn’t understand, but really, it happened.

  Side streets led off the seedy business strip where she had parked, including one where there were tiny front lawns with huge birdbaths still swaddled in plastic from the past winter; the things lined the street like giant mushrooms. This attracted Larque, who chose that street to turn onto. Sky walked beside her, snuffling.

  The kid’s nose was running. Automatically Larque tried to locate a something to wipe it with. She didn’t have her purse with her—as suddenly as she had started wearing boots and jeans she no longer felt like carrying a purse all the time. It was such a weigh-me-down load of feminine drag-along. Open, shut, open, shut all the time, like a giant baggy crotch. She had left the little-lady thing home and just brought her car keys, some money, and her driver’s license in her jacket pockets, and she knew there were no tissues in there. She had just cleaned them out, and anyway she had always been a rotten mother in that regard. Never had a Kleenex, even when her kids were tiny.

&n
bsp; She groped at the jacket pockets anyway, then at the pockets of her jeans, then with a small feeling of victory she pulled out a wadded paper napkin. Opened it—what in the world was inside? Oh. Her mother’s sawdust pill. Larque flung it away, shook out the napkin—something else fell to the sidewalk, this time with a small metallic ping. Something of value? Larque stooped and picked it up.

  Yes, okay, she remembered. It was a tiny metal star.

  She glanced up, and there was the corner of Popular Street.

  “What the—what’s that doing here?” It was not even remotely near where she had found it last time. But who cared. The bright-colored balloons bobbed from the awnings, the shop windows caught the sun like rainbows. Larque started to smile. There was the Penis Place, practically right at her elbow, a potential employer nearly as attractive as a dildo factory—but job hunting could wait. “Hey, Sky,” she offered, “want to go shopping? I’ll buy you something.”

  To her surprise the little girl’s sniffling erupted into a wail. “I can’t!” Sky sobbed. “I can’t go in there!”

  This startled Larque enough to make her stop walking and look. Sky’s outburst had sent yet more snot down her small face. Larque squatted and reached out with the paper napkin, then realized she was being absurd; her dabbings had no effect on this insubstantial being. Though God knew the kid was capable of having an effect on her.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, trying to soothe but also to persuade—she really wanted another look at Popular Street, but she couldn’t do it while leaving a balky child blubbering on the corner. Or rather, she could do it, but she wouldn’t enjoy it any. “What’s wrong, Sky?”

  The doppelganger just cried.

  “Hey, c’mon, tell me. It’s something about Popular Street, right? What are you afraid of?”

  “Truth-tell-ers.” Sky swallowed the syllables as much as said them, timing them as she did on intaken breaths between sobs. Nevertheless, Larque understood.

  “Truthtellers?” Yet she couldn’t understand. “They’re okay, they won’t hurt you. It’s fun down there.” She stood up and beckoned. “C’mon,” she coaxed.

  “No!” The child’s protests rose to a scream. “I can’t go down there, it’s all truthtellers down there!”

  “What in the world is wrong with truthtellers?” Larque was one herself. She knew this because she held a star off the silver toe of a cowboy’s boot in one hand.

  “Mom—Mom—Mom—my told—me—be—NICE, don’t—say things, even if they’re true.”

  “Oh,” Larque said slowly. “I see.” Which was of course true, had to be. She did.

  A bowlegged, stocky sort of sidewalk wrangler in a humongous magenta Hoss Cartwright hat was striding up Popular Street toward them. In high-heeled pinto-spotted boots he walked past them, whistling a cowboy tune, and winked at the weeping girl. Her back mostly to him, and not paying much attention anyway, Larque caught just a glimpse of the peacock feather in his hat, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, his curly hair. She didn’t know him.

  It didn’t matter who he was. “Oh,” Larque whispered, her attention all on her doppelganger.

  Grubby-fisted, snot-nosed, bony, and scabby of knee, the authentic Sky stood there.

  “Oh!” Larque shouted. “You’re back!”

  Tears had disappeared. Scowling, wary-faced, Sky backed away from her. “What do you care?” the girl challenged.

  Larque found this unanswerable. She stood with her mouth hanging open.

  Sky said, “You just want me so you can get back to doing your stupid paintings.”

  Holding the star in her hand, Larque knew this was true, more true than she cared to face. She protested, “Well, if you weren’t such a snotty, mouthy, bratty—”

  She stopped herself. This was not a real good way to start over. Luckily, Sky was intent on clawing at her crinolines and did not listen or answer. Right there on the street corner the kid pulled the tormenting garment down from under her skirt and stepped out of it. Larque reached for it, snagged it and flung it up toward a streetlamp, where it caught and hung, an ornament made of yellow net and shiny yellow taffeta, bobbing in the breeze like the balloons on Popular Street.

  Sky gave Larque a hard stare. One little act of collusion is not going to convince me, that stare said. You are an adult and not to be trusted. You have lied and lied. You have said you were going to do exciting things and then settled for less. You have sold out to security. You have betrayed me too many times.

  The doppelganger said, “If you want me to stay, you have to do everything I say.”

  Larque shrugged. The kid could make her do anything anyway now that she had Larque feeling so guilty. Guilty is truth, truth is guilty, quoth the poet. “Sure,” Larque said. “Okay.”

  “Give that to me.”

  “What?”

  “What you’ve got in your hand. Give it to me.”

  She handed over the star, feeling oddly bereft. “But now I don’t have anything,” she whispered.

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re with me.” The skinny child showed her front teeth (two missing) in a gleeful grin and then led off, skipping.

  The Marvelous Mags in the Comix Shop were all about super boys, super girls, kat kids, kosmic kids, some wonder youngster named True Ten. Larque bought Sky one about a youthful vandal named the GraPhantom, whose weapon against injustice was a potent can of spray paint.

  In the New Age Bookstore the slogan painted in the window was, “The New Age is Ten Years Old.” Larque looked around for the Shirley MacLaine sorts of books she expected, and saw instead adventures by Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott and Zane Grey.

  “Shane,” Sky told her. “Look for Shane. I need a nice copy. With pictures.” The sullen edge had gone out of her voice, and her thin face was eager.

  “What is this thing about the number ten?” Larque asked the boyish man behind the counter as she paid for the book.

  “Oh, don’t you know?” He looked a little surprised. “I thought from the looks of you you did.”

  “Know what?”

  “Age ten, you see, that’s the secret. It’s when you think the truest, strongest thoughts you’ll ever have. It’s when you know best what’s right, what’s wrong, who the bad guys are, who you are, and where you should be going. So—”

  Back in the corner looking at the pictures in The Virginian, Sky wasn’t listening, thank God. Larque didn’t want the kid to hear this—she was insufferable enough to deal with already. “Thanks,” she interrupted, picking up her purchase. “Sky, you ready?”

  They went out, giving each other cautious, smiling glances. Something, maybe just the fact that they were both enjoying Popular Street, was making them partners of a sort. Equals in mischief. Though Sky had not yet forgotten she was in charge.

  “In here,” she directed at the door to the Magic Makeover. “You’re going to get one of these.”

  “A makeover?” The idea pleased Larque. She did not much like most feminine hairstyles, but on those rare occasions when she got something done to her hair—anything but a perm—she liked the feeling of sitting in a chair and being fussed over. It was almost like being mothered for a change. So what if the results never looked right on her? She had never had a makeover, but it ought to feel much the same. She would come out looking like a cheap china doll somebody won at the firemen’s carnival, but who cared? Something bruised inside her welcomed the chance to be coddled for an hour. A makeover sounded like a special treat, and she said so.

  “It’s not,” said Sky darkly. “You need one. The works.”

  “Fine with me.”

  The inside of the shop felt something like a one-seat beauty shop, something like her studio. Lots of light, but a barber chair instead of her easel. Brushes and palettes of color everywhere, but mirrors instead of matted watercolors on the walls. Supply cupboards. Countertops. Black leather hat, crown down, resting like a migratory bird on one of them.

  Black hat?

&
nbsp; The man standing behind the chair—it took her half a moment to recognize his slim, young, black-clad body, his absurdly beautiful face. This time her crotch behaved, but she felt her chest tighten and her heart start pounding ridiculously. It was the black-hat cowboy, the Popular Street desperado, and he had eyes the color of tarnished silver.

  “Name?” he asked.

  The moment felt formal. She replied, “Skylark O’Connell Harootunian.”

  He wrote it in a ledger without asking about spelling. Said, “Have a seat.”

  Larque settled herself into the chair. The act had a finality about it, as if she and the chair were fated things coming together, like the slow-motion couples in movies, and for that reason she did not resist. His smoky gaze on her was like hypnosis. Expressionless, yet she trusted him. He looked young, no, he was young, yet in a dreamy way she knew: he had been doing this for twenty years, maybe more. He was a pro.

  He said, “What we do here at Magic Makeover, we start with the top of the head first. Then the eyes, mouth, mind, and so on. After the head we consider the heart, the hands, the feet, and the soul. The entire process takes a few hours, but we do not suggest you bypass any part of it. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Larque whispered.

  “Okay. For the hair …” He brought out bottles of tint. “The red shades are for passion, black for danger and mystery, brown for simplicity, blond for transcendence. Or we can blend two or more—”

  “Just cut it all off!” commanded Sky impatiently.

  “Sure.” Larque could get into this. “Make it really short. Boy-cut, like Sinead O’Connor’s. No dye job; I don’t want to have to mess with it.” Though she later understood that his tints did not grow out.

  The young man had acknowledged Sky’s translucent presence in his shop with a nod, but now he seemed to have stopped seeing her, treating the two voices as if they came from one person, the one in his chair. He did not glance toward the floor where Sky sprawled watching with her knees immodestly up in the air, sitting like a frog. Intent on Larque, he tucked a towel around her neck, got out his clippers, and started shearing her hair. His touch was impersonal yet gentle. The taut bow of his mouth relaxed as he worked. Larque watched it when she could. She asked him, “What is your name?”