Angel Girl

THERE IS NO WAY to skin off the fur of what you’ve done and who you have been. There is no excuse, either, for saying she was young, she was an orphan, she needed love so badly, she was led astray. Her body has been ruined. She will never bear another child after the one the ancient doctor with whisky on his breath scraped away. But even more lasting is the verdigris of spoiledness that she carries, will never shed, along with the knowledge that it was inevitable, that no matter how far she goes back into her childhood can she see a point where the story could have changed.

No child is born rotten, the sage authorities will tell her. She knows better.

CLARE WOKE UP AND STARED up into the rafters of the bedroom at the bat thoughts hanging there.

The point is not that she has agreed to go to a festival, a wedding festa, with a man who may be a womanizing scoundrel (after all, she has only heard this from his bitter brother-in-law); the point is that for hours after she came home, she actually imagined herself stepping through the slurred-up canvas into a new land. All the signs were there. Even the ridiculous business of the returning hat. Even the business of “sacrificing” it in front of the basilica of the saint, and then sloughing off the silver belt as well, that eye-catching reminder of who she really was. She tried to tell herself that this had nothing to do with the man whose twisted forgiveness had brought her to this country. With one gesture she would be different in every manner. Free. Maybe she pictured herself as the reincarnation of one of those Etruscan dancing girls in the glass case in the museum, whirling, whirling, with a seven-tiered candelabra on her head and little lions at her pretty toes, rescued to dance again for new eyes. The truth is, the past never lets any one of us go free.

There was perhaps one moment, long ago, that hinged her future.

IT HAPPENED AT THE end of October, the year that Clare started middle school. A tall girl of thirteen, with fine-spun curls. Chiara. My girl with angel hair.

But it was leading nowhere, wasn’t it?

It had been lovely when she was very small. He would take her hand and together they would climb the stairs to the tower. He would steal an hour, poring over her dead grandfather’s ethnographic work. He had imagined coming to the States would be a brief adventure, “but then I met your aunt and fell in love.” So sad, his tone. Clare had become his accomplice, listening to things no child would give a hoot about, straining towards understanding. Such power she felt, to see the darkness in his eyes give way when he felt he had a small vessel eager to be filled with his own lost dreams.

It had been thrilling when she was ten, eleven, twelve. To be special. To have a secret land where they went together in imagination, travelling by foot or mule along the pathway of old-fashioned words, to cities and museums and brilliant tombs. Flying on the wing of myth carefully made safe for tender ears.

But she’d long ago discovered the real stuff in his bookshelf in the tower. She went there when he was elsewhere, waited till he was elsewhere, so she could touch his things, close her eyes and breathe the air he breathed, and after she had put his pipe into her mouth — moved the bitten stem in and out between her lips, wiggled the tip of her tongue into the small bitter-tasting slit at the end — she would then pick up the Ovid and read versions of those same stories that made her hot all over. The things that happened to these girls when they strayed into the countryside to gather flowers. Leda. Europa. Versions of their peculiar adventures were already familiar from his telling, but even then Clare had sniffed the darker incense that coiled behind his beautifully spoken words.

He never spoke of the likes of Myrrha. But surely it was not so dreadful to imagine a version where the bold girl crept into the bed of a lover — no relation, really — just inconveniently the husband of an undeserving aunt. Far less damning, anyway, than the imaginings of Myrrha with her excuse that farm animals did it all the time, bulls mounting their own calves, stallions mounting their fillies. Easy for the bold girl to imagine her hands growing his long fingers, letting them explore, always with results that left her weak with the loss of something she would never have.

Now that she was becoming ripe, sometimes she’d catch a moment of indrawn breath when she came around the corner and their eyes met. Then came the aunt’s pronouncement that her uncle had his own work to do upstairs. Clare should not be going up there all the time to get help with her homework. “If you need help with your math, come to me. After all, I’m the one who balances the books.”

Clare had been a top student till then, the surest way to lay claim to his attention: to study hard, to come up to his room with her questions, to stay and settle in a deep chair with her homework, breathing the air made dense with his tobacco and his thoughts, his thoughts of her. She was sure they were of her. Of what they would do one day soon, how he would finally have had enough of being husband to a witch who denigrated the success of his writing. How together they would make a break for freedom. This had started as fantasy, an alter-life she led: how they would travel not as uncle and niece, but as lovers. Nothing wrong, as long as she could go inside of it the way she entered a book, feel it pulsing the way the life of a book pulses inside its covers. But as she became twelve, thirteen, the book more and more frequently crept open on its own, till she could no longer close it up. So Myrrha’s mind, weakened by wound on wound, wavered uncertainly this way and that … no respite for her love except in death. Amazing, to find exactly her own story there, so close to his hand. She was sure he read it. She knew the whole of it by heart. It ended badly, yes, but that was long ago.

THAT GIRL OF THIRTEEN. Books jammed up against her chest as she walked along the highway after she missed the bus.

Eric Klassen, picking her up. Star of the basketball team. Old enough to be in grade eleven though he got held back a grade. He sidetracked down to the canal, and she let him kiss her, and before she knew it he was hard and hot and when she stopped him he made her hold it. And when she started crying, first he was sorry. He’d been watching her for so long, he said. Thinking about her for so long.

When he drove her home he said, “What’re you acting like such a virgin for? Everybody in Skagit County knows your uncle does you all the time.”

After that, she was very good. She did not go up to her uncle’s room. Sometimes her looks got tangled up with his, and she smiled, and if she glanced sideways at the mirror above the old oak buffet, it did not seem out of place to see the face of a bad angel staring back.

MEANWHILE, A PUBLIC CONCERN had blown up. Her uncle had learned of plans to bypass environmental hearings regarding a nuclear plant. He wrote a piece for the local paper that got picked up by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and even The New York Times.

Shortly after this, she looked out the window at school and saw him standing by his car. When she sneaked out, he took her for a drive. He said he had come to an important decision. “And you, Chiara, are the one I needed to share it with.”

The one I needed. It was like flying in a dream. She knew he was going to leave the aunt. He and Clare would travel to all the places he had always told her they would go.

He said, “We’ll find a beach to walk on, and I will tell you my plans.”

SO THEY WALK. THE tide creams in. Bleached driftwood, the waves, and the sand beneath the rising water carved into ripples thick as arms and thighs all interlocked. He takes her hand and helps her over.

She frees her hand, willing him to chase her, and skips from rock to rock and around the next point, where she balances along a thin log that has come to rest across two others. Laughing, he comes up and puts his hands around her waist and lifts her down. His face becomes solemn. He draws a finger down her cheek, down the length of her bare arm. She feels herself burn into being, like a falling star.

“I have decided to run for County Commissioner,” he says. “I filed my papers this afternoon.”

She frowns. She can see he doesn’t like her frown. She can see a wash of emotions cross his face as he struggles to remember: She is just a child. Be patient. Explain.

He says, “I have been told I have an excellent chance. I will run on a platform opposing the nuclear power plant. Think of it, Chiara. I will be in a position to make a difference.” When she still does not react, he says, “Your aunt opposes me. Things will be somewhat difficult at home. But I know I can count on you as my ally. That gives me courage.”

Her heart breaks for him, too, even as it floods with disappointment.

Can this be as far as his imagination reaches? To envision posters with his picture along the highway, and then an office with filing cabinets and forms in triplicate? Oh, no. Oh absolutely no, she will not allow this to be his fate.

“You can’t,” she says. She is so sure, at that moment. A girl-woman at the pinnacle of her power, the apple of her uncle’s eye, she’s always known that. The angel girl who can do anything. She sees the waves coming in, washing right up to the base of the point they have just rounded. Yes, anything, even turn back the sea if she must.

“You can’t be County Commissioner, because everybody is talking about you,” she says. “They’re talking about you and me. Everybody says we do things. We have to go away. To Europe. Like you always promised.”

Into his silence, she repeats, “Like you always promised.” He drops her arm, walks away.

Would he have left her there alone, if the wind had not suddenly risen, if the waves were not now lashing at the point? If they were not cut off by the high tide?

Everybody says we do things. As she watches him go, she catches a pungent whiff of why he’s walking away so fast, as if the wishes in him had long been hot coals ready to flare.

“But you love me,” she says as she runs after him. “You know that.” Her arms are around his neck and she makes him look at her. He does. He looks at her and she kisses him, just as always in her bed at night she has imagined, kisses him first chastely and then opens, a ripe fruit. He shudders, responds, and she is alive, lit with her power and his surprise.

The moment after, punished by what her power has let loose, she is weighted, pierced to her centre by a man whose face is already averted, blind with tears.

IT DIDN’T END THERE.

For a month she thought it had.

They had to scramble up the cliff because of the tide. He helped her. At the top she said she was sorry. “It didn’t happen,” he said. No further word the whole way home.

When the election signs went up, his were not among them.

The other thing that didn’t happen was her period. The medical book in the library suggested that at her age irregularity might be normal. But she knew. What did happen was that she started letting Eric Klassen take her home from school, and after a few days she let him take her down to the canal again, though she felt only the force of it, blotting out every other thing.

One Sunday, when her aunt drove off to a horseshow in Blaine, her uncle called her up to his study in the tower.

He said, “Chiara, I am a lost and ruined man.”

He said, “Come here.”

They didn’t speak. She hardly heard his beautiful voice again. They moved into another land where everything was touch, his fingers alive, warm and sculpting. But the genii of the place had turned her to metal. She denied the shocks that went through her body. She thought if she was careful, he would begin to talk to her again. That beautiful voice. So she was good, very good; she wanted to be very good so he would see that what he was doing was all right. But when she left the tower, she heard him pacing, shouting No!

She went back up and said, “Don’t worry. I do all that stuff with Eric Klassen too.”

THE AUNT FOUND THEM out. That is the short ending of the tale. The aunt pretended to be going off for the weekend, but parked the truck at the grandmother’s cottage and walked back the half mile and tiptoed up to the tower. The aunt had other evidence as well — for one thing, the boxes of Kotex that Clare had left untouched. Clare was almost happy, imagining that now the truth was out her uncle would come to save her, and save their baby. But even before the business with the doctor, he was gone.

It wasn’t hard to persuade Eric Klassen to run away with her. She told him about the abortion, but she wasn’t honest. It turned out he had a heavy sense of moral responsibility for such a randy kid. He tried his best. He really did. Though after the first week on the road, what he wanted most was to take her back to the farm, and marry her, and somehow at the same time go on playing basketball.