The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (7 page)

I want to be a good student. I know how to do that. I think being a good student will help me in the long run. I think of the long run, the way that Aunt Loretta says it. Me, running, down the sidewalk past the old German dairy store and Emanuel Hospital, across the Fremont Bridge, and through the hills that must lead to somewhere. Aunt Loretta wishes she had thought about the long run, had studied more, gotten a better job and a husband different than Uncle Nathan that wasn’t so funny and didn’t have a special kind of disease just for men who are funny like him. You can get real sad later if you don’t think about the long run as open arms that will hold you.

The race starts. I run. I run faster than Tamika. And maybe I’m going as fast as Eric S. would. I run and run harder. And I cross the finish line first.

The medal ceremony is in the middle of the football field so everyone can see. I go to the center of the field. It is Carmen LaGuardia, the student class president, who gives me the blue ribbon and medal I will wear home that afternoon. I imagine how she will put the blue ribbon with the golden saucer-sized medallion around my neck. Gently, gently. Then smooth the front of my shirt with a long, soft stroke. She will take my hand and raise it in victory, and everyone will see that the beautiful Carmen LaGuardia is just like me. She is no longer one of the fifteen. And I will no longer count myself as one.

These are the first words she says to me: “Mmmh, girl. You got them boys pantin with your titties all hanging out. Don’t try to steal my man with those.” Tamika is second place and bends at the waist laughing. She is still bent over when Carmen LaGuardia puts the smaller medallion around her neck and then gives her a high five. I don’t cry. I have the blue bottle. I make resolutions. I turn twelve next month. It’s Day 223. I’m the new girl. I must be the new girl. I will fill myself with the color blue.

Roger

When Roger first met Nella, the joint was getting so hot that the windows dripped with dew. Isaac Hayes blared from fourfoot Pioneer speakers, and the dance floor was full.

“First time in this joint, huh? My first time too. Just visiting my buddy Maurice—over there—I’m up from Ramstein,” Roger said when he approached Nella.

Roger liked white girls, but not American white girls. They didn’t do much for him, because they acted like you were supposed to be happy just because you got to rub your brown on their cream. But not these European girls—they loved the black boys they met in the bars near the American base. Roger loved them back.

He didn’t wait for Nella to answer. A smile was enough invitation. And she did smile, even though it was hidden behind her hand.

“My name’s Roger Morse.”

“Nella Fløe.”

“Nella Flow. You ready to cut loose? Do you flow when you dance?”

He could tell she didn’t understand all of what he said:
joint, loose.

“You’re from here?” he asked.

“I’m Danish,” she said.

“Danish, huh? Danish girl, what’s it like there? In Danishland?”

Nella laughed.

“Danish is from Denmark,” she said. She was from a small town on the peninsula, Herning.

“Her-kneeing,” Roger said, imitating her accent as he put a hand on her leg.

Nella laughed, but she didn’t move away.

“Denmark. That’s where those stories are from. The ones we read as a kid.”

“Hans Christian Andersen?”

“Yeah, yeah. I used to dig that stuff as a kid.”

Nella looked at him quizzically.

“Like,” Roger said. “Dig is like.”

“Oh.”

“So what’s a pretty Danish girl doing here?” he asked.

“Practicing my English. Then I am going back home to go to school,” Nella said.

Roger smiled wide. “I can teach you some language,” he said and scooted closer to Nella, putting his arm around her. She touched her hand to his leg.

They danced that night. They kissed. Roger recited for Nella some Shakespeare he learned from a Vincent Price album. That seduced a girl easy. Never underestimate the appeal of a black boy speaking in tongues. That was Roger’s personal style.

They kissed some more. And that night Roger couldn’t help but make love to that shy white girl who came from a little town in a little country he knew nothing about—except that in her country’s stories, wishes came true.

Rachel

Aunt Loretta has taken me for the first time to see the Multnomah Falls, beautiful waterfalls about one hour away from Grandma’s. Only they’re not moving. Waterfall after waterfall is frozen in midstream—giant icicles—stuck in a going down way.

The biggest waterfall is as tall as a cathedral. We walk up the wooden trail steps as high as we can. The wind tickles up the back of my neck even though I am wearing a hat and am wrapped up with a scarf so that you can only see my eyes. It’s so cold even Aunt Loretta’s cheeks are red. “That Indian’s showing up in you,” Drew says and kisses her cheek with his frozen breath.

We stand before the waterfall like we are in church. Drew, Aunt Loretta, and me. We stand on the little wooden bridge
high above the water and hold our hands together as we watch nothing. The water’s not moving.

Maybe eight other people are standing nearby watching the nonmoving water not move.

There are no black people in Nature today. Only us.

The wind catches me at the ankles now. My socks have fallen on the climb up the stairs to this lookout point.

“No way we could get Miss Doris up to see this,” Drew says.

“There’s no way my mama wants to be out in the thick of cold climbing up stairs to see anything but the Lord himself,” Aunt Loretta says. “But if she did . . .”

Aunt Loretta doesn’t finish what she’s saying. She stares out at the falls and moves her hands in the air like she can measure what she is seeing. Like she’s framing it with her hands.

“You about done with this cold, Rachel?” Drew asks.

“Yes, sir.”

Aunt Loretta is leaning on the rail, looking at the waterfall now. She’s hypnotized. I think she is crying.

Drew sees that she is crying too.

Aunt Loretta cries without sound, but I can see a shudder go through her. Is it the cold wind? Drew is saying something to her. I hear in only half volume. The wind is in my good ear, and in the other a thrumming, a hum.

“I want to be that girl again,” is all I can hear of what Aunt Loretta says. Drew seems to know what she means. He leans into her, but I move away. I don’t want hands on me.

I take small steps backing off the bridge. I walk slowly and carefully. What I’m scared of I can’t explain. It’s the look in
Aunt Loretta’s eyes, the way her voice sounds small and hurt. Maybe she’s measured a long icy fall.

When I finally get off the bridge, I see that Drew is still holding Aunt Loretta. But then suddenly she pushes him away to stand up straight again.

By the time we are sitting in the lodge drinking hot cocoa, Aunt Loretta doesn’t look like herself, but she doesn’t look broken. We laugh about Drew losing his hat. A strong wind stole it. He grabbed for it, but it was already gone, flying down toward the frozen stream below. We laugh about the woman who said my eyes were pretty but then looked at Aunt Loretta and Drew real funny. “Maybe she thought I was stolen,” I say and laugh. But I think what a family is shouldn’t be so hard to see. It should be the one thing people know just by looking at you.

“Now, if I didn’t have this mustache, we’d basically be twins you and me,” Drew says. I laugh, but Aunt Loretta doesn’t join in. Aunt Loretta just smiles.

A
UNT
L
ORETTA SEES
new after the day at the falls. Old things, throwaway things, leftover things, she sees them new and different and worthy. She makes Grandma save the bags from her morning tea on a plate by the toaster oven. She wants my old crayons—the ones that are broken or stubby nubs. She collects leaves from the dying flowers in Grandma’s garden. She saves pebbles and wrappers and peels. And she makes things with them.

Aunt Loretta has always decorated herself. Now she decorates the house. She has replaced the brown-green swirls on the
couch with an African brown fabric that has pictures of leopards and zebras and elephants. Next to the porcelain figures of kings and queens, she’s placed a statue of an Igbo goddess. The goddess means life and fertility and nobility. Aunt Loretta is teaching me about African things. African can mean a lot of things and it’s important to be specific. Aunt Loretta has never been to Africa but wants to go one day.

On the walls she’s hung a photograph of an old Asian man with a straw hat, and one of a Masai man, a certain kind of African man, in a bright yellow tunic. Grandma doesn’t like any of these things. She doesn’t want her house “lookin so African.” She likes things respectable, she says. She fusses but she doesn’t take down the pictures or the statues. Almost every day there is something new: a new mask or trinket or something hanging on the wall.

Grandma tut-tuts when she sees Aunt Loretta has set up an easel in her bedroom. After the day at the falls, Aunt Loretta dug out an easel, paints, and a paint cloth from the basement trunks. “Don’t be makin a mess,” Grandma says. “You never careful with the mess that makes.”

Grandma is worried about neatness and order and doesn’t have time for messy things. She doesn’t think Aunt Loretta should either. A lizard is not going to be interested in a woman with paint underneath her nails, or a woman smelling of chemicals instead of peaches and white soap.

Aunt Loretta paints every day now. She paints from memory at first. Every day she makes a new painting of a waterfall, moving or not moving. She calls them
Untitled 1, Untitled 2,
and so on, until she gets to number 15. She names the next
ones
Figure by the Falls, Woman on Bridge by the Falls, The Dream by the Falls.
I make up better titles for them, but she doesn’t use them. But then she uses me.

She wants to do my profile, and I am supposed to look down. I don’t know how to sit still. I notice I am making the same face as the statue on the mantel.

“Funny, you have that same wrinkle your dad had.”

“Really?”

“Your dad was the most handsome man. I think some of my friends were my friends just so they could be near to him.”

“But my dad was also the smartest,” I say without a question mark, because this is how I remember him.

“He sure couldn’t spell, but that’s supposed to be a sign of genius. Double consonants. Those always got him. He’d make them double when they shouldn’t be and vice versa.”

Aunt Loretta doesn’t talk much while she paints, but I ask her anyway, “Did he like any of your friends? Like Helen.”

Aunt Loretta laughs. “I suppose so. There was Helen. A couple more.”

“How did they look?” I ask. And for some reason what I mean is: Did they look like Mor? Or did they look like me? “Were they all light-skinned-ed?” I ask.

“Light-skinned,” she says. “It’s light-skinned, and the answer is . . . maybe. I never thought about it.”

“Aunt Loretta, when do you think he’ll come back to get me?”

She doesn’t answer the question I ask. Instead she says, “He came to the hospital, Rachel.” Suddenly the hum of Grandma’s story playing in the next room isn’t the loudest thing in
the house. “Those days, those first days,” she continues, “he held your hand and stroked your hair smooth.”

“But then he went on the mission? I don’t remember.”

“You were very, very sick.”

“I almost died.”

“But you didn’t.”

“When he finishes the mission, he’ll come back,” I say.

“Rachel, you know we don’t know. We don’t know how long the things he’s got to do could take.”

“Could he tell us?”

“No, my sweet, I’m afraid—he probably doesn’t know either.”

Aunt Loretta says “hush” after that but in a gentle way when she can tell I want to ask more. I have to be still for her to paint me. And for some reason I think about feeling lonely, right here in front of her. And I think about the things that maybe made Pop feel alone, right in front of us, his family. No one knew how to cut his hair—he had tight black curls like other black people. And maybe he even had ash on his elbows and knees sometimes. He never told us he was black. He never told us that we were.

“The light’s not right,” Aunt Loretta says.

Or I am a bad model, I think. There is something hidden about me that she can’t quite paint, Aunt Loretta says, but the word she uses is one of the big words I’ve learned:
elusive.

A
UNT
L
ORETTA STOPS
painting people and makes paintings of animals. They look like the African animals on the couch. But they are not the same, Aunt Loretta tells me. I
have never heard of a quagga or a thylacine or a moa. And even when Aunt Loretta tells me what they are, they still look like zebras and tigers and ostriches. She says these animals are different. They are extinct.

She paints these animals against a blue or red backdrop that looks like the sky or a burning fire. In her paintings the animals are in motion, in the air, doing backflips and somersaults and high dives. I imagine them springing off that wooden bridge that stretches above the falls. I cannot imagine them land.

Aunt Loretta says they are part of a series she calls Secrets of Extinction. I think about what those secrets may be. And I think about who keeps the secret if really you’re the last one. I think maybe she should call them Moments of Extinction. Because she’s painting what makes them move toward the end. It’s a funny thing to think about: moving toward extinction. And I think of how maybe I’m already extinct in a strange way—there’s no way to make another me: at least I can’t do it. But that doesn’t matter anyway because I never want to have kids.

Brick

Brick visited the next day again.

He played the song two notes short of good, the man said with a smile. “You hear how you’re making a song out of what’s just a whistle. Like a bird,” the man said.

“Yes,” Brick said.

The two sat quietly for a long time before Brick asked, “Sir, what do you do?”