Melissa switched on the tape deck, turning it up a bit, rolled her window down farther, and went back to watching the fields as they moved past, fields strewn with hay bales now, like course-haired creatures, she fancied, hunched over and sleeping, oblivious to that exceptionally wide-open sky and the elephantine clouds that padded along the prairie with their shadows.
They'd driven past most of the exits to Lethbridge and were cutting between the coulees, crossing a broad river valley where Melissa watched an extensive railroad bridge as it ran parallel to the highway, towering pylons as black as the coal it was built to transport. It struck her as one of those industrial eyesores that had since become quite funky, in that chic-urban-steampunk kind of way. She was about to comment on it but didn't. They drove up the other side of the coulee where the highway opened onto a yawning skyline and a road-gridded carpet of prairie that unrolled all the way out to the Rockies. They found a cheap-enough campground just as the peaks started to rise and shoulder into the wide panorama that their eyes had become used to. It was near the site of a devastating landslide that had buried part of a town in 1903, the sprawling boulderfield so barren it could have happened yesterday. They clambered to the top of one of the larger rocks and ate submarine sandwiches for dinner, talking disjointedly about all the houses that had never been excavated in the wake of the disaster, the homes that were buried beneath them.
The college band had found a disco ball in someone's garage and had proudly hung it from the ceiling with a thick and unlikely rope (the kind one might see hanging from the rafters in a barn). The disco ball was the only light on the dance floor now, a projected net of blue dots circling the massive space of the gymnasium, gliding over the wood strips on the floor and the painted sidelines, between the churning bodies where it climbed the fabric of dresses and descended the broad shoulders of suit jackets.
Denise Colwell leaned back against the wall, her hands behind her, a palm flat on the white painted brick. She had been scanning the faces for several minutes now, looking for Cedric Johnson. Earlier that day she'd overheard his friends talking in the hall, and knew that he was supposed to be there; that and the fact that he wouldn't have his mousy girlfriend in tow. His friends, incidentally, had almost used those very words while they loitered in front of their lockers shell-shocked and vacant, having written the last of their final exams, their conversations shifting from “forgetting” to study, to completely blanking out when the test papers slapped down in front of them, to the end-of-semester dance that eveningâwho would be there and who wouldn't. It was then that one of them mentioned how Cedric's girlfriend, Julie, was away in Red Deer, and that “of course” he would still be coming to the dance. This was, after all, Cedric they were talking about.
She'd already decided exactly what she was going to do when she saw him tonight. She was going to walk right up to his back, tap him on the shoulder, and say something that, only a week ago, she would never have imagined herself saying. Because it was now or never, and because the swirling pattern of light was making the dark of this college sports hall something feral and primitive, something turbulent; but mostly because of the way Cedric had looked at her every time they passed in the hall, or leaned over a table in the fluorescent quiet of the library, talking in a low, suggestive voice about absolutely nothing.
During the past week, Denise had been thinking a lot about her life, and had come to the realization that the only thing that was really exceptional about it was how ceaselessly ordinary it had been, how the years had managed to stream by without so much as a single drama, or grief, adventure, yearning. Nothing. She just
was
. That was the only way she could think to put it. She was. Of course she had had her bruised knees and birthday cakes, favourite toys, been on sports teams, and had learned shorthand and how to type one hundred and twenty words a minute. And yes, yes she'd had her romances too, which even seemed to be relatively sweeping at the time, though they soon fizzled out into an oblivion so insipid it was almost difficult to remember their names.
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 . . .Â
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 lookingâwho 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 seagullâsix hundred miles from the nearest sea but only a mile from the local dumpâglided 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 convictionâwhere 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.