How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly by Connie May Fowler
Clarissa walked into the chandelier room, took a deep breath, opened the back door, and without sticking her head out said, “Iggy, I need to speak to you.”
“Iggy!” The blonde’s squeaky voice unfurled across Clarissa’s raw nerve endings. “Your housekeeper wants you!”
Why, you little impudent cretin, thought Clarissa. In an instinctive move to protect her heart and deflect anger, she withdrew into her imagination, where a wholly new death scenario played out, one in which she was the star. In her mind’s eye, she ran into the kitchen, grabbed a wineglass from the dish drainer, broke it on her counter as if she were a galloping babe in a Wild West flick, and sprang forth not as a victimized wife, but as a superhero hot babe named Super Dame. Dressed in a red jumpsuit and cerulean knee-high boots, she fearlessly pursued her mission to defend all women who’d been wronged by all hussies throughout all known history, or at least ever since women had been keeping count of the sins and digressions of their husbands. She flew out of the house (Jane was in awe, a female counterpoint to the traditional cub reporter), into the yard—the glinting edge of the broken glass transformed itself into a laser beam—and back onto the porch, where she buzzed her husband and the squeaky-voiced model with all the efficiency of a bombshell fighter pilot.
“Fuck you, you little whore!” she screamed, but Super Dame’s voice was so loud, so otherworldly, that the words came out distended, flaccid, loosey-goosey. It sounded as if she’d hollered, “Fwuk u u liho!”
Words and their meanings didn’t matter, though, because she was Super Dame—a woman who was more action than talk. Her laser beam pulsing, she took aim at her husband’s foolish, arrogant, dysfunctional, anemic, mean-spirited, necrotic, cheating little heart. First she’d off him and then both models. She paused, midair. A text bubble formed over her head: “Perhaps less drastic measures are in order.”
“What do you want, Clarissa? I’m busy.” Iggy’s giant frame filled the doorway, his words and presence slamming shut her fantasy. He wiped sweat from his brow with a white towel and was, she thought, working hard to avoid making eye contact. The heat and humidity were causing his beard to frizz.
“I’m sorry. But there is a reporter here interviewing me and I don’t want her to see them.”
“Them who?” He stared at the ceiling. He was sunburned. She’d told him a thousand times to wear a hat.
“Those two girls. I don’t want the reporter seeing them. Naked and all. She wouldn’t understand.”
“Jesus fowking Christ, Clarissa, I don’t care what the stupid little twat sees.” He looked toward the models. Clarissa couldn’t see them, but she heard them whispering, giggling.
“Don’t use that language with me. And get them out of sight. Go down by the barn or something. I don’t care where, just get them out of here.” Clarissa surprised herself. She didn’t have that sliding-down-the-slippery-slope feeling she got every time she was about to cave.
Iggy walked away, swiping his hand through the air in dismissal. Clarissa watched him go, and a horrible possibility took hold. Maybe the nitwit thought Clarissa was the housekeeper because that’s what Iggy told her. No, not that, please not that, she thought, watching them parade into the yard.
Clarissa went back into the kitchen—Jane was writing furiously—and peeked out of the blinds. They were prancing out of sight, down by the dogwood grove. Now was her chance to close the window. She opened the blinds, said, “We’ll go see the library just as soon as I close this,” gripped the base of the windowpane, and pushed, but it didn’t yield. She tried again; it slid halfway down, shimmying to the left. Jane stood at the island, paying no mind to Clarissa, reading over her notes. Clarissa hit the side of the pane to try to get it to even up in the casing, which it did, but she still couldn’t get it to slide a hair farther, so she turned around, thinking that if she pushed with the base of her hands, she’d exert more strength. Her arms shook from the effort. A fine dappling of sweat broke out along her hairline. Just as she was about to give up, the window hurtled shut like a guillotine blade, catching her shirttail and trapping her at a preposterous angle because more of the left side of the shirt was jammed than the right. She couldn’t stand up straight. She looked like Quasimodo.
“Do you need help?” Jane asked, flipping pages.
Clarissa felt as if she had been sucked into an old I Love Lucy show. Except because it was happening to her, it wasn’t funny, at least not at the moment. “No, I’m okay.” She pulled, but the shirt didn’t budge.
Jane held her pen aloft and looked at the ceiling, her eyes dreamy. “Do you write at night or during the day?”
Clarissa tugged as hard as she could, grunting involuntarily. “Day.” She felt the left shoulder seam begin to give.
Jane nodded as if that were fascinating information. “Longhand or on a computer?”
“Computer.” Clarissa gritted her teeth and heaved herself forward. She got only as far as the fabric not jammed in the window would allow.
“Do you have a favorite place you like to write?”
Oh, my heavens. Jane was, unknowingly, ticking off the list of the most asked, most useless questions thrown at writers. “My studio.” She put her hands on either side of the shirt and yanked. The shoulder seam ripped wide open, but nothing else gave. She had no choice; she was going to have to slip out of the shirt. But that wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since thanks to the angle at which she was trapped, she was in essence straitjacketed. Sweat dripped down her cheeks to her chin, forming a clear, tremulous goatee.
“Your husband is African, right?”
“South African. Afrikaner.” Clarissa twisted to the left and tried to free her right arm, but her torso was bent at such a crazy tilt, she couldn’t wiggle her arm out of the sleeve.
“Afrikaner?”
“Yes. The bad guys. I mean, he’s not bad, but, you know, the apartheid crowd.”
“Oh.” Jane’s lips settled in on themselves, grim, tight. “Sooooo, he hates black people?”
“No, no. It’s not like that at all. He didn’t agree with apartheid, so he left.”
“Whew! I was getting worried for a minute.” Her face brightened.
Clarissa decided that she’d pull one last time, and if that didn’t work, she was going to have to ask Jane—who appeared oblivious to the seriousness of Clarissa’s predicament—for help. She grabbed the shirt on either side again and gave one desperate heave-ho.
“How did y’all meet?”
The ovarian shadow women piped up. “Harder!”
The scratchy sound of denim tearing filled the air as the shirt ripped along the fault line of the jam. Clarissa tumbled forward, fell, and hit her head on the floor. It really, really hurt. This is the worst interview of my life, she thought. She looked at Jane. “We met at a party.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean?” Clarissa rolled over and sat up. She swiped at the sweat on her chin with her shirtsleeve and felt her forehead, fearing the possibility of a goose egg. That would keep her butt at home tonight for sure.
“Hmmm. I mean, what caused you to fall in love?”
An innocent question, delivered straight from the bowels of hell. “Well…” Clarissa grabbed the corner of the island and pulled herself to her feet. She rested her forearms on the marble. “He was a lot better to me than the previous boyfriend, who beat me, and a lot better to me than my mother, who also beat me. In fact”—Clarissa pushed away from the island, suddenly grateful for the question because it stirred in her long-forgotten recollections of things past—“come with me.”
Clarissa headed for the library, looking out the back door as she passed, happy that not a soul was in sight. She stepped into the room, Jane at her heels with pen and paper in hand.
“Cool beans!” Jane said, her eyes drifting over the bookshelves. She walked over to Clarissa’s collection of Floridiana: chalkware busts of male and female Seminole Indians, a timetable for the Florida East Coast Railroad, a heavy b
“See this?” Clarissa picked up a framed photograph. “This is Iggy and me at my first book signing down in Gainesville. Listening for Light was under contract when I met him, but it wasn’t published until after our wedding. He was real helpful back then.”
Jane studied the photograph, and that dreamy glaze returned to her eyes. “Aww. Your life is perfect!”
Clarissa placed the photo on the shelf, her finger lingering on the image of a smiling Iggy—an Iggy who hadn’t yet shut her out—turned to Jane, and said, “You know, my husband doesn’t make much money—what artist does?—but in the early days, he was supportive and that meant the world to me.” Clarissa settled into the planter’s chair that faced her red fainting couch. “That’s off the record, of course.” And she should have stopped there but couldn’t. She felt a need to protect this girl from that world of mistakes waiting right outside the library door. “It’s important to be with someone who celebrates you rather than resents you, Jane. Remember that.” She picked at a rough spot in the chair’s cane weave. “And sometimes, resentment? It comes on slowly.”
Jane nodded; her eyes looked even bigger in the library’s soft light. Or perhaps Clarissa had simply said too much, revealed more than she should have. “It’s good to be loved,” Jane said.
“Yes, yes, it is.”
They spent the next twenty minutes talking about writing and books. Jane had never heard of Zora Neale Hurston, so Clarissa gave the girl her own copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God. “No Florida writer should be without that one,” Clarissa said. She signed a copy of Listening for Light to Jane’s mother, April, and Blue River to Jane. At eighteen years old, the girl seemed a little starstruck, which Clarissa found endearing. And when, upon leaving, Jane asked if she could take her picture—for the weekly Aucilla Chronicle, no less—Clarissa did not have the heart to say no despite her dirty tee, the ripped denim shirt, and the serpentine chaos of her hair.
Jane retrieved her camera from her gray Mazda 323, and Clarissa stood on the front porch, holding copies of her books, and that was what Jane shot: Clarissa standing on the worn planks of the 183-year-old house, hardcover books in hand, surrounded by hanging baskets of bougainvillea, sumptuous thickets of roses, wild sprays of azaleas, and the bright comet of one remarkable ghost.
Jane’s visit had perked up Clarissa, made her feel nearly like a writer again, as though, while optimistic, six months to write her book might be within the realm of possibility. She’d never know if she didn’t try. What had she just told Jane? You have to keep your butt in the chair because novels don’t write themselves. So she waved good-bye to Jane and then hurried into the library, shelved the books, and checked the time. It was approaching ten a.m. If she started writing now, she’d have plenty of time to get some work done, fix supper, and make it to Adams’s reading.
She went into the kitchen (Iggy’s shirttail hung from the window like a flaccid blue tongue), fixed a cup of tea, and headed for her studio, which was connected to the eastern wing of the house via a deck. If she ran into Iggy and the girls, she’d simply ignore them. After all, housekeepers were under no requirement to be nice.
The fly, which if he’d been human could have been arrested for stalking, waited on the ceiling in the chandelier room, and when Clarissa exited the kitchen, he flew in circles, keeping pace with her forward motion—a laborious process given that he could fly much faster than she walked. Still, when she stopped abruptly at the back door, he bumped into the wall, nearly knocking himself out.
Clarissa peeked through the blinds she’d hung from the door just the week prior. The coast was clear. She pushed open the door, dashed to her studio, spilling some of her tea in the process, and ducked in.
The fly, exhausted, set a straight course for a poster nailed to the facing wall. It featured Clarissa holding the paperback edition of Listening for Light; blurbs of praise from other authors filled the foreground. The fly lit on the gray-tone ridge of Clarissa’s cheek.
The studio was steamy. Its old walls had no insulation and it was so poorly sealed that among the animals that came and went as if it were a Ritz for wildlife were frogs, lizards, snakes (Clarissa once opened the door and down from the top jamb fell a four-foot-long rat snake—thud—who, upon landing, slithered into the wall), mice, rats, and even the occasional pine skink.
“Good God, it’s an oven in here,” Clarissa said, turning down the thermostat to sixty before flopping into her office chair. She set the tea beside her monitor and closed her eyes. Her former optimism evaporated now that she was in the presence of her computer; no siree, she did not want to face that blank screen. From the sidelines of her brain, Cookie Manx, sounding strangely like Bobby Knight, yelled, “Six months!”
Christ. How was she going to pull this off? It was as if she’d removed her brain and stuffed it in the freezer.
“Six freaking months!” Cookie Manx screamed.
Okay, okay. Failure was not in her lexicon. Or was it? She opened her eyes, straightened her spine, and hit the on button. Her old computer sputtered and quarked and finally came to life. The din that resembled the low growl of a wounded wildcat—the one that usually didn’t start up until about three hours in—filled the studio’s wretchedly hot air.
Clarissa decided it was best to jump right in, without a plan, a plot, a character, a pot to pee in. Maybe a miracle would happen. She typed: “The girl.”
Fuck. What girl?
Whose girl?
How old of a girl? She pressed the delete key until the page was blank.
Then she typed: “The moon wept.” Delete. What was she, a freaking poet? Like that’s really going to help.
“The girl with the long blond hair broke her husband’s easel into one thousand and eighty-six jagged pieces.” Delete.
“It was a dark and stormy night and the girl was pissed.” Delete.
“It was a dark and stormy night and the girl with the long blond hair was so pissed she broke her cheating, no-count, double-crossing, flat-assed Afrikaner husband’s most expensive camera (Leica?) into one thousand and eighty-six jagged pieces. She tossed them into the air. Their sharp edges scratched the sky. The moon wept.” Delete.
“How come I’m a talentless hack who deserves to have her fingers chopped off?
“How many letters fit on one page?
“How many capital M’s? Lowercase i’s?
“Do Chinese characters take up less or more room than the English alphabet on a Korean-made computer? Can my computer type in Chinese and, if so, why can’t I speak Chinese?
“How many times could I strike randomly at the keyboard before stumbling onto a string of consonants and vowels that lined up in a logical sequence of more than three words?
“Where is Jack Nicholson in The Shining when you need him?
“Motherfucking Stephen King never gets fucking writer’s block. And if he did, he has so much money he could pay someone to (a) unblock him, and (b) write the book for him while he drank mojitos on a nude beach in Puerto Rico.
“Stephen King naked—yuck.
“If one sat in front of a computer long enough, slapping out words, and more words, and more words, how long would it take for a novel to eventually form all on its own?
“Isn’t that how Kerouac did it?
“How many vowels, on average, are in a typical novel? A typical short story? A typical laundry list? A typical…”
Her work-stalling questioning was broken by laughter wafting in from outside. Iggy and his bimbo models were back. Clarissa looked up from her screen, which, if one wanted to be positive, was no longer blank.
The girls were voguing, using a white silk kimono embroidered with golden cranes as if it were a cape. That kimono be
Bile jettisoned up Clarissa’s windpipe: jealousy, bitterness, and anger glowing acid yellow. The fly lit on her shoulder. The brunette dropped the kimono in the grass and lay on top of it, buns up.
Clarissa, her face pinched, her eyes narrowing, hit the X key and did not let up. She filled several pages with the letter X. “X marks the spot. The X-Files. The X Girl has X-ray vision. Pressing the X feels X-tra good. X-tremely good.” As her virtual blank pages accumulated one X after another—XXXXXXXXX—forming a chorus line of stacked V’s, Clarissa attempted to conjure her superhero self, now named X Girl; but the stubborn little thing refused to don those cerulean boots or kick ass in any way. Clarissa let up on the X key. She turned off the computer. When it prompted her about saving the file, she clicked No.
Iggy’s voice wafted into the studio. “Tonight I’ll make contact prints of the shots I got of you two in the barn. Lunch tomorrow, perhaps? You can pick out what you want prints of.”
Well, ain’t he just got himself one dandy life, Clarissa bitched silently. She imagined him out there in his darkroom, mixing unstable chemicals in order to produce platinum prints of naked women—many of whom didn’t even know Clarissa’s name; hell, evidently he’d told them she was his house-fucking-keeper—when the unspeakable occurred: Death in the Darkroom, episode two.
There he was—a very, very old-looking fifty-one (he had not aged well)—moving with the herky-jerky intensity of a giant rodent in the haunting red glow of the safe light, mixing elements, practicing a relatively recent form of alchemy (it wasn’t as though he were creating fire from two sticks), producing one-dimensional objectified paper images out of three-dimensional hot-blooded bodies.
Careless, as was his way, he reached out his rodent hand and grabbed the wrong brown bottle. He poured it into a steel canister that already had some sort of chemical elixir in it. With the sure movements of a bartender who enjoyed the process of turning gin into a rickey, he shook, shook, shook, inadvertently concocting a poisonous brew. And although it was a total accident, the result was the same as if Clarissa herself had gone out there under the cover of a new moon and relabeled all the bottles. Just as with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s death in Love in the Time of Cholera sans the suicide twist, the photo chemicals—fine on their own but nuclear when coupled—sent forth an invisible cloud of murderous fumes… the scent of bitter almonds. And then, just as if life were nothing more than a sigh stirring the air of a windowless room before evaporating without a trace into the heavens, her husband—while placing an image of a giant crotch in the stop bath with the aid of a pair of old wooden tongs—collapsed, not recognizing his own stupid mistake, onto his rubber-matted floor, dead as a poisoned house cat.