Her latest was a fling with a fellow college student named Robert. He had told her, on their first date, that she, and she alone, could call him Bobby. She smiled politely at the gesture but couldn’t bring herself to do it, awkwardly reverting to the standby pronoun usage, “Oh . . . you !” On their second date, he’d walked her to her door and leaned in to kiss her after standing on the doorstep for three gauche seconds, which started out fine, until his tongue began jabbing into her mouth like a child’s thumb squishing ants. Then, as if that weren’t enough, he pressed himself up against her, his penis bulging stiff in his pants. She stopped kissing him and fumbled in her purse for her keys, but he still hadn’t gotten the hint. Instead, he proceeded to grind away at her, as if he were an overzealous German shepherd and hers was the closest leg he could get to after the urge had struck. She pushed him away, coldly thanked him for the movie, and never talked to him again. And it had occurred to her, at some point throughout the week, that that pathetic bungling on her doorstep happened to be the most interesting thing that had ever happened to her.
She’d never been an introspective person, had never lain awake wondering at the ceiling above, until the party last Saturday night, where everything changed. Since then, she’d spent most of her time thinking, digging into her formative years, trying to find things that stood out, things that would make her life a little more than a simple going-through-the-motions. She hadn’t come across much, but she had revisited one distinctive afternoon quite a few times, mulling it over, sure that there was something in it worth considering.
It had been a blue-sky day, early summer, and she was eleven years old, in the backyard and playing with her Barbie, a craze-toy that had been released the year before, in 1959. She remembers that she was sitting alone at a table near her mother’s flower garden, a table she appreciated for the fact that it was perfectly aligned with a birdbath in the yard, which rose out of a pool of chrysanthemums like a whale spout. She remembers considering the birdbath as being mythical or sanctified in some way. And looking back at it now she’s sure that, if she hadn’t been playing in the way a girl should, with her doll, sitting at a table being discreet and innocuous and complacent, she probably would have had her hands in its water, knee-high in the bee-drunken flower heads, maybe playing with the floating curls of down that birds sometimes left behind on the water, blowing on them like miniature sailboats; she could have been an epic wind to an epic ship on an epic voyage. But she was playing like she should have been instead.
She remembers why she held the birdbath in such a fabled light but isn’t sure if what happened with the grackle took place that same afternoon, the same blue-sky day that her brother leapt from the garage roof. She doesn’t think so.
The event with the grackle probably happened earlier, and it was a simple one, but striking, extraordinary. She’d been crouching down near it, at the edge of the flowerbed (maybe stealing a petal, maybe spitting onto the dirt, inspecting the gummy flesh of a worm that had surfaced, maybe even touching it while no one was looking—who could say?) when a dark form flapped into view and splashed into the water only three arm-lengths away from her. The bird, a common grackle, began to wash itself immediately, oblivious to her presence, shaking long drops into, then out of, its iridescent plumage, raising its head after every dip to survey the yard with its piercing yellow eyes, which never managed to pierce her, to see her as a threat, as a potential predator cloaked in a pink dress. She watched it, mesmerized, as still as a statue on the edge of a fountain. In the sunlight, glistening, the bird was almost candescent, a metallic sheen, like oil streaks filming over a dark puddle, every colour in a nighttime rainbow. When it flew off, abrupt and without warning, a drop from its feathers had landed on her arm, and she’d held it up close to her face, as if to look for colour, for some kind of tint in its clarity. But it was only water.
Yet it wasn’t. It wasn’t only water. Now it was something more. It was a drop of water that had fallen from a flying grackle. Just because something was commonplace, she thought, didn’t mean it had come from a place that was common. Wasn’t it possible that the soot from a volcano was more than just soot, that the coating of frost that smudged a plum was more than just frost? Or that a piece of corrugated cardboard, from her brother’s makeshift flying machine that he’d jumped off the roof with, was more than just cardboard?
That day, while she was playing with her Barbie on the table (as a girl should), her brother had been busily constructing it in the back alley with three of his friends. Using a two-by-four, the box from a newly purchased freezer procured from somewhere in the alleyway, and two rolls of black electrical tape, he’d fashioned an impressive wing, complete with two slots cut out for his hands to grip on to the two-by-four frame inside, for steering purposes. It took all four of them to manhandle it, first onto the high fence, then onto the roof of the garage itself. Before lifting the contraption onto his shoulders, her brother looked up to the sky professionally, searching for wind and pivoting in a full circle, akin to a weathervane. The air was still. A seagull—six hundred miles from the nearest sea but only a mile from the local dump—glided through the blue and screeched as if in response to so many eyes following it through the sky. Her brother, giving the conditions a serious sniffle, lifted the wing onto his back.
Denise remembers that in the days leading up to this, her brother had become fixated with the idea of air resistance, jumping off trash bins with a small piece of plywood in hand, off a ladder with a garbage bag, lugging their aluminum toboggan to a playground to hurl it from the top of the jungle gym. He had an easily engaged, though some would say obsessive, personality. A toy in a catalogue would suddenly catch his eye, jump out at him from one of the glossy pages, and inspire him to rip it out, Scotch-taping it to his bedroom door, and saving allowances, mowing lawns, shovelling walks, and collecting bottles from corner-store garbage cans until he’d saved enough money to buy it. Likewise, he seemed confident in his methods and preparation here, teetering on the apex of the roof with the long cardboard wing on his back, focusing on the edge that fell away. When he was ready, he sounded a barbaric yawp over the rooftop and broke into a sprint down the slope to the overhanging eaves. There was no hesitation.
Denise was standing on the lawn below, with the others, and had innocently envisioned him gliding around the neighbourhood for a while before landing, and, as such, had looked at his trajectory, the line he would be swooping in directly after takeoff. But right across from the garage was her father’s greenhouse, a recent addition to the shed, which had grown into something much larger than the shed itself, a framework of opaque plastic that was misted with transpiration, the odd droplet of water trickling down its sides like a shower stall. Her brother would crash into it.
She stepped forward as if to yell a warning, as if to implore him to abort mission before it was too late. But nothing came out. And realistically, nothing would have stopped him anyway. He’d made up his mind. About what, Denise couldn’t be sure. She suspected, thinking about it now as an adult, that it wasn’t even about flying. It was about something else entirely. Maybe a test of conviction—where even the failure to take flight would carry with it, somehow, the taste of success; the flavour of something won, something magic, a precious metal, the acridity of brass in the blood that was about to run from his mouth.
He leapt. The cardboard folded up like an inverted umbrella, and he plummeted to the grass, legs collapsing on impact, his body crumpling forward and, with his hands still clinging to the two-by-four in the wing, onto his face. Pushing the flying machine off him, and already crying, he peered up at his shocked audience, his teeth coated red. The three boys who’d helped him, swapped a stunned look, turned, and fled the scene. Denise wasn’t much better in terms of assistance, only managing to stare down into his face, unable to move, playing with her hands, biting her lip.
Eventually their father came running, and her brother was soon whisked off to the hospital, gagged with a tea towel
to stop the bleeding. He’d broken his fibula, chipped a tooth, bit his tongue open, and would spend two months in a heavy cast, hobbling around on crutches, recounting the story to any and everyone that asked, without the faintest tenor of regret.
While he was away at the hospital, Denise had knelt on the grass, avoiding the dark stains, and had torn a piece of cardboard from the corner of the failed flying machine. She doesn’t remember ever seeing the piece again, which means she’d probably thrown it away, or hid it somewhere so particular that she’d forgotten where it was. What she does remember clearly is that, the following morning, she got in trouble for leaving her Barbie outside on the table all night. “The poor thing was left out in the dark,” her mother had scolded, “not put away, unattended to, uncared for. How would you’ve liked that?” Denise went outside to collect her doll, who’d been lying on her back in her fur-frilled gown, white gloves up to her elbows, her earrings lobed, lipstick crimson, staring up at the night sky with her flawlessly eye-shadowed and mascaraed eyes, wide open. While the stars blinked back.
As strange as it was, Denise had actually gone to the party that had changed everything in the way she saw her life by accident. Cedric had asked whether or not she was going to “the shindig on the weekend,” using the crucial misleading word: weekend. Then, during her bookkeeping class forty minutes later, an acquaintance invited her to a get-together on Saturday night, owing to someone’s parents being away. And how many different parties could there possibly be in one junior college? So she’d accepted the invitation, done her hair and makeup for an hour, and arrived to hear people talking about the wild bash that had happened the night before, on Friday, and caught Cedric’s name wafting in and out of the tales of inebriation. Great, she’d thought to herself, just great.
She looked around the room for somebody to talk to, somebody she liked, but hardly recognized anyone. It was a different crowd than she was used to, the kind of people who were going to school to become park wardens and Fish and Wildlife officers, where the hot topic, besides the bigger party that she’d missed the night before, was fishing. But out of common courtesy, she resolved to mingle for an hour or so, then slip out the back. She said a few hellos and accepted a snub-necked bottle of Lethbridge Pilsner from a guy she’d once been introduced to, though had since forgotten his name. He asked her if she had come with Patricia, one of her classmates, who was apparently with her sister downstairs (at the word “downstairs,” he had widened his eyes with drama, but Denise didn’t feel like taking the bait and asking what he’d meant by it). “Not really,” she’d answered, already looking for the stairwell, thankful that there was at least someone in the house she knew. She lit a cigarette, left the conversation, and, beer in hand, started down the unlit steps.
The stairwell descended to several small landings, the second of which was the porch for the back door. Just outside, Denise saw three men through the doorglass, standing in a circle, passing around a hand-rolled cigarette, each of them squinting as they took their turn to suck in an enormous lungful of abnormally blue smoke. They were dressed like they hadn’t showered in days, weeks maybe, their hair unkempt and greasy, clothes more colourful than they should have been. And as she turned on the landing to continue down the steps, she caught a sniff of their skunky smoke, and it all came together. They were hippies! And that was marijuana they were smoking, here, behind the very house she was in!
Like everyone else, she knew all about the existence of the counterculture, had seen the Vietnam protest marches on television, the banner-waving tie-dyed processions, the braless women with their beaded headbands, and the men with their patchy beards and circlet sunglasses. But those types certainly weren’t seen around Lethbridge. The police had made it clear that such antisocial behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated in the city, making all sorts of inquiries and arrests at the mere rumour of drugs and printing an anti-narcotic series of articles in the newspaper. In fact, only a month before, four raggedy-looking people were seen standing in front of the local theatre, and a paddy wagon promptly appeared to take them into custody, for questioning under suspicion of drug possession. It turned out that they were actors taking a cigarette break at a dress rehearsal days before the premiere of Oliver ; Fagin’s grubby apprentices from a Victorian society gone wrong, a perfect match to the modern version, who were slipping down the same criminal slope.
Not knowing what else to do, Denise pretended she hadn’t seen a thing and continued downstairs. But as soon as she stepped into full view of the basement, she wanted nothing more than to turn around and run. The suite was split into two large rooms, the first with a pool table as the focal point, five or six respectable-looking college students scattered around it, none of them women, and most of them using their cues as a crutch while they paused to leisurely look her over, and the second was candlelit and blaring with music, every piece of furniture draped with real true-to-life bona fide hippies.
There were only two people she recognized, a young man named Arthur, who was holding a beer and watching her, leaning with his hand on the green felt of the table (to the understandable irritation of the players), and her classmate Patricia, who was in the other room with the hippies, having what seemed to be a heated argument with one of the women.
Denise gave them all a sheepish grin. “Hi.”
Arthur perked up. “Hell, it’s Denaise! How y’all doin’, sweetie pah?” Arthur was one of those people who liked to do accents and impersonations, the Texas cowboy theme one of his trademarks. Two of the pool players rolled their eyes at his back.
“I’m good, fine,” she said, taking a long sip from her beer and looking around the room. She could see that the basement suite belonged to a hunter, who was trying his hand at amateur taxidermy, stuffed birds flying out of the walls, an antelope head mounted on a velvet plaque and craning its neck to look in her direction. Right beside her, frozen into a stance that had it snarling into her face, was a mink or weasel perched on a piece of driftwood, eyes shining black, nose threateningly wrinkled, its teeth bared and even linked with a silicone stream of saliva. It occurred to her that the animal itself was thinner and more fragile looking than her wrist.
Arthur strutted over from the table as if he’d been riding a horse for five too many decades. “Ah know whucher thinkun,” he drawled, “that that there weasel there ain’t so beg. But I’ll tell yuh somethin’, them creatures is right vicious thangs.” He swigged his beer, wiped his mouth, nodded. “Trust meh, it was him . . . er may.”
She smiled and pointed into the other room. “Sorry, I’m just gonna go’n say hello to Patricia for a sec.” She squeezed between Arthur and the weasel and excused herself through the other men as well. Then she stepped into the clatter of music and the thick haze of incense that threaded the air of the second room.
To Denise, if anything was immediately clear, it was that the hippies had full control of the music. There was certainly no Tammy Wynette standing by her man in this crowd, no sir, it was more the likes of Janis Joplin bellowing out to a microphone whose metal stand she was probably thrusting her pelvis at, and Jimi Hendrix, squelching through an electric guitar like he was wringing the life out of a six-year-old plugged into an amplifier. Denise had no idea how people could listen to such noise. The only thing she could be sure of was that this sound, this new “genre” of music, wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. It just happened to suit these counterculture types because it balked at the contemporary ideas of what music should be.
It occurred to her that the coarse and aggressive sounds that were blasting from the speakers couldn’t have been more incongruous with the way the hippies were acting. Their eyelids were half-closed, eyes bloodshot, glassy, and staring into the centre of the room. Except for the two women arguing, no one was saying a word, or nothing intelligible anyway; one of the men was nattering on about something in the music, pointing his finger at the stereo whenever it—whatever “it” happened to be—pounded out of the speakers. “There! Right there! Just
listen to that shit!” Though, aside from him, no one really seemed to be. They were ogling at nothing, focused on nothing, grinning at nothing. They were, thought Denise, people who had abandoned themselves. They were lost.
Seeing as Denise was standing directly behind Patricia, and the two women were so involved in their dialogue, neither of them noticed her. And though all Denise wanted was to say a quick hello and leave, she wasn’t about to cut into an argument to do so, and soon found herself squatting down to a shelf, running her finger across the spines of a record collection, tilting her head to the side as if reading the titles but really only eavesdropping on the squabble. She had been wondering what someone like Patricia, who seemed to have her feet on the ground, would be doing in the farthest corner of a basement, arguing with a hippie. But it soon became clear.
“No way, Patty. A chance like this won’t come along again. There’s enough room in their van, and Fawn knows this cat in the city that we can stay with for a while. I’d regret it forever, not going.”
“Regret? You’re throwing your life away here, Joan! Can’t you see that? I mean, just forget about Mom and Dad and everything else you hate about this town for a second, okay? Think of how you’re gonna get by. You don’t have any money, any skill. What are you gonna do, marry one of them?” Patricia waved a hand at one of the chesterfields where four of these “cats” were sinking into the creases of the cushions like jellyfish into quicksand. “Find yourself a nice drug-dealer husband who’ll do what for you—what? Pimp you out in some slum, spread you around to his friends so you both can have a roof over your heads? Is that the plan? I mean, wake up.”
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