Alison McGhee

Why is it that when she searches for images here in cyberspace,  images related to concrete things here on earth, the images that come back to her are from space, outer space?

Like this one.  That image right there is the Cartwheel Galaxy, 150,000 light years away.

Cartwheels have been on her mind for a while, cartwheels like the ones she used to do when she was little, and also when she was not so little, when she was twenty and living on the ocean for that one summer, and she used to get up early and go down to the beach in the fog, and cartwheel down the beach on the hard-packed sand, plush beneath her feet.

She had just flown back to the U.S. from Taiwan, where she had been living, and the adjustment was disorienting. She was no longer an oddity, so tall, tromping around streets where she was the only one who wasn’t Chinese.

She and her best friend lived  in rooms in a tiny town  on the ocean, rooms that they rented by the week, in a house where no men were allowed past ten o’clock at night.

They were waitresses that summer, at different restaurants. They worked the dinner shift, and they got back late at  night, and they went out after they got back, to the only bar in that tiny town on the ocean.

Her best friend would order a gin and tonic, and she would order something called a Seabreeze, which was a simple drink,  a pretty combination of fruit juices that, when combined, turned a coral color in the glass.

The  bathroom at the bar was full of girls their ages, hovering before the mirror, eyes narrow and focused, re-applying mascara or lip gloss. The air in the bathroom was heavy with hairspray. She did not wear hairspray or mascara or lip gloss, but she too looked in the mirror, if briefly, covertly.

She was full of longing that summer, intense and unspecific, the kind of longing that kept her from deep sleep at night and woke her at dawn. In memory she makes her way down the narrow path through the dunes to the beach, wearing the pink skirt she bought from a stall in Taipei. Always the pink skirt.

The beach, in memory, is always fogged in at dawn. The high tide line, in memory, is always visible, and the sand down by the water is packed hard.

She raises her arms above her head and does the running skip she always does before the first cartwheel, lifts her right knee high, and then over she goes. She’s in the fog, it doesn’t matter if the skirt flies up above her neck.

Down the beach she goes, cartwheeling over and over, skirt flying up and settling down, flying up and settling down. Now her heart is pounding and she’s out of breath. Her palms are red and imprinted with grains of sand.

From out on the water come the sounds of the fishing boats, the bells, the harbor buoys. There is a boy out there on one of them who brings her fish while she’s at work, when he comes in from fishing. She finds a note on the refrigerator of the house with a stick picture of a fish, an arrow pointing to the freezer, her name, and a smiley face. She would like to see more of this boy, but he works while she sleeps,  and he sleeps while she works.

She has a bunch of friends who are men – boys, still – strictly friends is what they all are, and they come visit her that summer, in twos and threes and fours, and what are they to do, with that no men past ten o’clock rule? The only thing they can do, of course: Stay out all night, sleeping in the dunes in sleeping bags and under blankets.

Sleep, always elusive for her, is beautifully eluded that summer, down there on the sand, with her beloved friends asleep around her and the stars massing overhead, hundreds of thousands of light years away.

Late at night, every night, she leaves the noisy hot bar and walks down the street to the house, the ocean air salt and cool on her face. Again, in memory, she’s wearing the pink skirt.

One night she is walking back to the house, making her way through the grass by the side of the road, when a car swishes past her in the darkness. Someone calls her name from an open window, and calls it again.

Who?

She has always wondered.

From far away across the years, she is  thinking of that night now.  The dark night sky full of stars, the waves curling and uncurling on the beach, the grass brushing against her bare legs as she walks barefoot home, holding her sandals in her hand.

She wishes she had the pink skirt, wishes she’d kept it.

On summer mornings when she was a child she stood on the cinder blocks outside the small bedroom window of the addition built onto the trailer which sat next to the old frame house, out there in the foothills.

She shaded her eyes – the sun rose to the right, over the pines across the field – and peered in to see the grandmother  sleeping quietly in the bed, in the room with the knotty pine walls.

The grandmother was sleeping still. The child went away and came back again later. Climbed the cinder blocks. Shaded her eyes. Peered in.

Groan. Groan.

The grandmother was waking up. She had a headache when she woke up, a bad one, one that went away only after her coffee was drunk, her cigarette was smoked, an hour had passed by.

If the grandmother was groaning, then she would be up soon. The child went inside and lit the tall, skinny oil furnace with a long fireplace match. She put water on to boil. She got down two teacups, two saucers, two spoons and a single plate.

The grandmother was getting dressed now, washing, brushing her hair.

When the water boiled, the child stirred Nescafe into one of the teacups and added Cremora. She tore open a hot chocolate packet and emptied it into the other teacup and stirred hot water into it. She added Cremora to the hot chocolate.

The grandmother came into the tiny rounded-end kitchen of the trailer and sat in her chair at the formica table. The child set the coffee before her.

“Thank you, dear child,” said the grandmother.

The grandmother tapped her pack of Lark cigarettes against her palm and shook one out and lit it. She leaned forward, supporting her aching head with one hand and smoking with the other.

The child put two slices of Roman Meal bread into the toaster and got the plastic tub of whipped margarine out of the tiny trailer refrigerator. She waited for the toast and she watched the Lark cigarette.

When half an inch of ash hung off the end of the cigarette the child said, “Flick,” and the grandmother tapped her cigarette on the ashtray.

The toast popped up and the child put it on the plate and turned her back to the grandmother, hiding the plate from her so that she could spread an inordinate amount of whipped margarine on it. This was her secret vice. When she ate the toast she would hold the slice, heavy with its over-buttered-ness, under the table so that the grandmother wouldn’t know how much butter she had spread on it.

Now she wonders if the grandmother knew anyway, and thought, let her eat as much butter as she wants to.

They sat together in mostly silence, the grandmother and the child. The grandmother often closed her eyes and groaned, waiting for the headache to dissipate. She let her coffee grow cold before she drank it. This was a peculiarity of the grandmother – she wanted her coffee boiling hot, but she never  drank it while it was hot.

When the grandmother had smoked her first two cigarettes, she would tell the child stories of her own childhood in the big city, the biggest city in the world, six hours downstate from the hundreds of acres of woods and fields that the child was growing up in.

The butcher down the block, who wrapped three slices of bologna in white butcher paper for a penny, can you imagine? The grandmother’s father, who stowed away on the ship from France, bound for the harbor where the Statue of Liberty raised her giant torch, and he dove into the water in the middle of the night, and he swam to shore, and he spoke to a man on the street in French, and the man answered in French. The child’s mother, whose hair had curled in long silky ringlets until that time she had the long fever, and it never curled again.

The child spoke, but not much. She listened to the stories she had heard so many times. She knew the inflection of each sentence, and she waited for the dip of the head and the brief smile that meant the story was finished.

The grandmother had been a model in her youth. She had married late after several engagements. She had borne her only child when she was nearly forty years old, almost unheard of back then. She had worn high heels and suits every day to her job as legal secretary. She was a sophisticated woman who could not have imagined she would ever leave the bustling streets of the biggest city in the world, a woman who carried the knowledge of that city and its life with her always, as she sat at that formica table in that tiny trailer kitchen, looking out at the woods and fields that were not the city, nothing like the city.

One day the grandmother looked straight at the child and leaned toward her.

“You don’t talk much,” she said. “But I want you to know that you can tell me anything. There is nothing I have not seen. There is nothing about you that would shock me, and I am here to listen to you.”

“I know,” the child said in a voice that she made bright and childlike.

I won’t, though, the child thought, in a thought that was not childlike. I won’t tell you anything, anything that’s real.

She thinks about that now,  how the grandmother leaned toward her, the intent look in her eyes. There was so much that the child didn’t know then, and there was so much she had to protect and keep safe and contained and hidden.

And now? She thinks about the grandmother every day, usually at dawn. Sometimes she thinks about how unspeakably hard the grandmother’s life was, at times, but more often than not she simply sits and lets the grandmother come to her.

Which she always does, leaning toward her with outstretched hands and a genuine smile.

Wherever she is now, she is happy. That is the sense that the now-grown child, a woman now, has of her – happiness and light.

The woman talks to her now the way she never did as a child, about things that are real.  See the two of them, leaning forward in their chairs, hands moving, smiling and laughing, the toast and the cooling coffee and the silent cinder blocks forgotten.

They went to the fair in the late afternoon. That way, they could fly into the sky – or as close as they could come – when the Midway was lit up against the darkness. Two of them had been dreaming of the Kamikaze – which he termed “a truly horrifying ride” – since last year’s fair.

She had no such inclination. Why subject herself to the torture of dangling upside down, body held skyward by only a slender metal bar?

But the Kamikaze would come later, when the Midway was extravagant with colored lights beating back the darkness.

First, the food: for two of them, the traditional first-Fair-food foot-long hot dog, raw onions for the young one, fried for him, a stripe of mustard and a few pumps of ketchup for both. She looked at them eating their footlongs and thought, Will I go my entire life never having eaten a footlong?,  and stepped up to the window and ordered one.

And then it was on to the Fine Art, where the three of them scoffed at the prize winners and where they each gazed in awe at a magical, hand-stitched work of art on hand-woven cloth stretched over canvas, tucked away in a corner.

Ribbonless. Proving once and for all, in case there was any doubt left, that they lived in an unfair world.

Time for a beverage? Certainly. And what might she have, a rumless pina colada or an Orange Tastee? Why, a rumless pina colada, thanks. Feel free to have some, if you want.

On to the Amateur Talent Contest, where it soon became evident that the only kind of amateur talent remaining in the entire state was musical. Shall I sing this year?, wondered the amateurs statewide. I shall sing.

And they sang, all of them.  A skinny little 13 year old girl in cowboy boots, a country star in the making. A 39 year old security guard in tight blue jeans and a Stetson, a country star in the making. A retired man of 69 who took up the mandolin two years ago, a star of some kind in the making.

But wait. On stage came a sister and her twin brother in identical black suits and hats, tapdancing. I want to be that girl, she thought, I want to dance and smile like that. She wanted to be that girl because that girl’s joy was so evident, and so infectious, that the three of them sat on their hard wooden bench and laughed. The happiness of that girl made them all happy.

Laughing made them hungry again, so they journeyed on, on to the International Bazaar, and a giant cup of noodles for him, and another giant cup of noodles for the young one, and gyros sampler with tabouli for her.

He nudged her and pointed out the old couple next to them, the old couple with their coupon book, dozens of pages carefully sticky-noted in some sort of code known only to the two of them. She told him that watching the old couple confer over their coupon book made her want to cry, and he nodded.

Then it was getting dark.

They made their way to the Midway, where they carefully tore out the $6 off coupon from their own coupon book and purchased 80 tickets. She sat on the bench and watched as he and the young one were strapped in. She made a face as they gave her the thumbs-up.

She watched as they rose into the air, higher and higher, faster and faster, until gravity overtook the old steel cars and they whipped around and around and around, first forward, then backward, for many minutes on end. She watched as they grew silent and red-faced, split at the waist by that iron bar as they dangled upside down. Grim determination in the air.

She turned to the man sitting next to her on the bench and made big eyes of Never In This World to him, and he silently nodded in agreement. No Kamikaze for her, and no Kamikaze for the man next to her on the bench.

But what about Big Ben? What about the tall, tall clock tower with the dangling-leg seats and the anti-gravity swoop straight up into the air? What about that ride?

Why not?

Up they swooped,  and then down they plunged. She could not stop screaming. He laughed at her. The young one laughed at her.

The Crazy Mouse hurled them around its square corners, and had they not been strapped in, would have hurled them straight out into the night and the lights, human cannonballs. The young one’s phone flew out of her pocket and straight into the air, and he caught it as it came soaring back down.

And finally, on their way out, they stood before the Freak Show as they did each year, waiting for the tiny man to eat fire. 79 years old. Poobah, the last performing pygmy on the carnival circuit. He sat as he sat every year, on his small chair, his legs dangling down, two black spokes of iron held in one hand.

The fire eater has been performing for more than sixty years. The fire eater dipped the black spokes in fuel, set them ablaze, turned to the crowd and, one by one, patiently swallowed the flames. Black teeth. Smoke-darkened face. Eyes that every day watched a thousand eyes looking back at him, expectant.

Late at night they trudged down the dark roads to their car. The young one shared her cotton candy with them. Fireworks exploded above their heads, and their eyes turned high to the lit night sky.

Come with us, if you want. You can carry the bag of groceries, camping food – a loaf of bread, peanut butter and jelly, potato chips, eggs and butter, graham crackers and marshmallows and bars of Hershey’s chocolate. We’d be happy to have some help with the groceries, because we already have our sleeping bags and our pillows and our notebooks and pens and matches and toothbrushes.

Cross the road where no cars go, and follow us on the tractor path straight through the cornfield. Are you surprised that the corn is above your head? That’s how it is with un-sweet cow corn: it’s tall, much taller than you would think.

Into the woods we go, on the old logging road that’s now more of a trail than anything else. You’ve heard that there are coyotes living in here? You’re right. But they won’t hurt you, and later tonight – later every night – you can sit by the campfire and listen to them howl.

There’s nothing like that sound, of coyotes howling at the moon, or whatever it is that they howl at, unless it’s the call of a loon across a lake.

You can stay if you want, but you will be the silent camper, the one we don’t see, the one we don’t need, because we are sufficient unto ourselves. We are two girls, one very tall and scrawny, with long dark hair, one very short, with crayon-blue eyes and silky blonde hair.

That’s her up there in that photo, the short blue-eyed one. I think about her so often these days, that girl you see there, running beside her horse. She used to do that – hold the reins and run across the grass, the horse trotting beside her. Sometimes she’d put the saddle on and ride through the fields and woods.

She was my best friend, back then. When did I meet her? I don’t even know. Until I did meet her, I would’ve said, had you asked, that I had many friends but that I wasn’t a best friend type.

And then she came along.

She lived in a trailer on Round Barn Road, an unwalkable and unbikable distance away, back when we were little girls. But she was always at my house, or I was always at hers, the trailer with the framed-up-with-2×4’s never-finished addition where her bedroom was.

We were inseparable in the way that you can only be when you’re that age. We had all our classes together. We walked down the halls together. We met at her locker or my locker before school.  We talked on the phone at night. She rode the bus to my house and I rode the bus to her house.

We played a game that we called the Word Game, a game that someone else told me, when I was a grownup, is actually called Jotto. All we needed for the game was paper and pencil. We were exactly evenly matched, and we played that game for years, everywhere we were.

There was the summer she had a stomach ache every night after dinner, which, because we were children, we accepted without thinking.  We used to sit quietly until the stomach ache got better, and then we swung on the swings, or played the Word Game, or lay in the treehouse talking.

But the stomach ache turned into those long days and weeks – was it months? – of chemo and radiation. I would go with her to the hospital, more than an hour away. Long gray halls. Fluorescent overhead lighting. Gray doors. Polished speckled floors. A tall dark door with a chickenwire window and one of those nuclear-radiation-triangle-warning things: don’t go in there. Stay away. Fear. Disfigurement. A power beyond your control.

But she was in there, lying still.

And then back at her trailer, where she lay still on the couch and I sat next to her, talking, telling her about the days. I once had a new pair of hiphuggers, white with fake graffitti all over them – Kilroy was here, Darwin failed – and I waited for her to admire them, but she closed her eyes and tried to hold back the nausea until she had to sit up and use the bucket.

And then it was over, the radiation and chemo were done, and her growing was done, and her ability to bear children was done, but I, being a child, didn’t think about that. Did she? Back we went, to school, to the hallways, to the classes where we were the ones always to raise our hands, to our notebooks and our pencils and our endless, endless Word Game.

Then she  moved to Florida.

I can only write it like that: Then she moved to Florida.

I can’t feel what it felt like,  I can’t remember. I can’t remember what it was like for me to go to seventh grade without her, to walk those long hallways without her, to climb into my treehouse without her. Did I  go camping down through the woods again? I don’t remember.

I don’t remember how it felt when Mr. D the science teacher looked at me that fall and said, “What are you going to do now, without your leaning post?”

I remember those words, though: my leaning post.

There were the years of the endless letters. Letters of many pages, flying back and forth from my mailbox with its red flag to hers on that dusty dirt road, letters written over days, a line here, three pages there, illustrated, written on yellow legal paper or torn-out notebook paper or tiny scraps of paper numbered up to the hundreds, or toilet paper, unspooling and unspooling, so easily torn, each envelope also containing the Word Game, sent back and forth between us, one move per letter.

There was the single trip to Florida to visit her. The smell of orange blossoms brings me back there, to the orange groves that surrounded the trailer where she lived with her mother and her sisters and her brothers. There were seashells, a school where the hallways were outside and uncovered, where shorts were worn year round. There was a can of Florida sunshine, and sponges from a place called Tarpon  Springs.

Where are you now, first best friend, girl who showed me how it could feel to have a kindred spirit, a boon companion, someone to see you through your days, no matter what comes?

Look at you up there in that old photo, running beside your horse. You were the magnificent companion of my childhood.  Beautiful girl, where are you now?

Greetings, feet. Look at you, dangling off the end of the bed like that. Long toes. Sandal tan. Badly-painted toenails.

How many miles have you walked in your life? Many. Many-many.

You were just feet when she was a child, and she didn’t think about you. Pedaling her bike, pushing against the bark of the tree when she climbed into her treehouse, dangling above the floor until her  legs were long enough. Running in the dusk when she and the others played tag or hide and seek or sardines. Catching fireflies.

Then came the years of days and nights when she started out walking and just kept on. Up the steep hills of the city in which she once lived. Down that dirt road in the Green Mountains. Around the alleys and side streets of Taipei, where it was so easy to get lost.

She walked herself out of places, and messes, and states of being. She walked herself from one life into another life, and then another. She walked herself away from things she wanted rid of. She wished she could walk away from her head, sometimes – more than  sometimes – but walking was as close as she could come.

Miles and miles along rivers, and oceans, along continents that once were covered with seas. Once, a woman came up to her as she walked along the low tide line. “You are the most intent walker I have ever seen,” she said.

But the intention was unintentional. She was walking away from what she could, walking her way into the calm that, for her, only comes from walking.

For fifteen years now she has watched a man walk the city she lives in. Once, a decade ago, she passed him as he sat on a bench by the lake with his hands on his knees. Apart from that, he walks, and so far as she knows, he does not ever stop.

In the last three years he has grown gray and gaunt, and his legs have bowed. He was once a handsome man, and now she thinks of him as he is in winter, with the dusty parka and no mittens.

Where does he go at night? She doesn’t know. She hopes that there are some quiet hours for him.

There were years in there when she couldn’t sleep, and when those she loved were not with her, and she clipped the leash to the dog and walked the lakes at 4 a.m. Others were out then too. Could they not sleep either? Were they coming off the late shift? Rising early, or about to go to bed?

And here you are, feet. Look at you. Do you hurt? You hurt. No matter what kind of shoes she puts on you, they are never just the right shoes. No matter how she vows to keep your toes painted, she doesn’t.

Chipped and calloused and aching, still you walk on. She never has to tell you what to do or how to do it. You just know, and what you know is to keep on walking.

That a person could spontaneously combust. That the word “absurd” was spelled and pronounced “absurb.” That the circular file referred to an actual file that went around and around, similar to the revolving spice rack in her sister Oatie’s cupboard. That she could write the beautiful book she dreamed of writing. That she could one day repeat that once-in-a-lifetime night in her childhood, when she closed her eyes at bedtime and opened them again to morning. That Phoebe was pronounced Foe-Eeb. That she would take her children on long road trips and they would all sing rounds in the car. That she would one day encounter Cindy S., magnificent companion of her childhood, in an airport. That she would have a 50-year marriage. That she would one day iron the green and brown shirt that for many years she had been meaning to iron. That she would overcome her fear of headstands.  That she would host a potluck gathering on the second Sunday of every month. That she would live in the country. That she would live among mountains. That she would live on the ocean. That she would never yell at her children. That she would buy an around-the-globe plane ticket good for an entire year. That she would have a signature dish or three. That she would speak fluent Spanish. That she could get over it. That she could get through it. That she could get past it. That heavy cream with her coffee was bad for her. That her sisters would remember the time all that water spilled down from the maple tree onto David C. That the piece of broken-off lead in the palm of her hand would fade away and disappear. That she would someday be good enough. That she would learn to appreciate wine. That she could live across the street from her best friend. That the next time she traveled alone, she would take photos of her shadow wherever she went. That she would always be able to comfort her children. That she would always be able to cheer them up. That the squirrels living in her eaves would move away of their own volition. That she would have a car with heated seats. That she could make others happy. That if only she tried hard enough.