She has landed on her head, torn ligaments in her toes, broken nails, fallen on her face but now the move is perfect; like someone blowing a smoke ring into the sky, like a ball shooting through a hoop and not touching the rim, like receiving a longed-for kiss, she feels weightlessŠif only for a second, the second of the thrust, the lift, the spin‹perfectly timed by feeling. She didn¹t understand the science of a round-off back somersault, only the thrill.
One day she would be too old or too afraid to soar over the gray scrub grass. One day the world wouldn¹t spin. One day she would be just like everybody else. She could feel the moments rushing toward her, engulfing her and smothering her in time.
She analyzes her faults. Eyes not round enough, she always looks sleepy. Hips too narrow, smile too wide. Kids used to call her Cyclops because of the beauty mark between her eyebrows. She grudgingly admits the light green, catlike color of her eyes is unique.
She stands on the edge of the grass, which meshes into the neighbor's. She concentrates on the morning sky. Everything else fades away like a wave rolling back. She grows straight, slaps small hands on hard thighs, rises to her toes and with a hop explodes across the grass in swift strides.
Hands down legs up high now gone. The rotation makes her feel
like everything is suspended with her and for that second all the world
stops. She looks around, but the side street with its dead end sign, the
'end' spray-painted out, and single birch tree with green-gold leaves,
small
shingled houses with boarded windows, cracked cement stoops and piles
of cardboard boxes, shopping carts, rusty cans, plastic containers and
stench of sour milk are all as they were a moment before.
Gwen, her mother yells, you'll kill yourself. Stop that crap once and for all. You¹re sixteen and too tall for that to boot. Don¹t ya see how little they are in the Olympics?
I don¹t want to be in the Olympics.
Her mother walks away and waits on the corner for a ride to the factory.
Gwen turns her head so fast it seems as if she¹s been slapped. She concentrates on the sky again but somehow her enthusiasm, her drive, is lost. She sits on the cool, pebbly stoop and waves good-bye.
Eat something before you go to work, her mother calls as she climbs into the back of the crowded old Rambler station wagon, miles of cord dangling from the empty hood rack. Her layered, badly dyed brown hair separates as a breeze fills the car. The bright pink scalp fades in the distance.
Morning. Gwen feels the stoop slowly being washed with sunlight.
She exhales and sees her breath. Her palms have tiny stones stuck
to them. She wipes them on her legs and stares at the cracks in the
cement, the ants wandering through to their secret world. When she
was small she thought ants were stupid. She would melt the wax of
a candle over the line of them to
form a tomb, then watch them die. But now they seemed so brave,
so diligent. She sees them carrying their dead all along the cracks
and disappear in their labyrinth under the sand. She
worries that she probably kills hundreds a day, just by walking.
She rides her bicycle to the mall and knows the only thing that keeps her from throwing all the special occasion cards and stationery through the store is the possibility of seeing his beautiful face.
Straighten aisle one, her boss yells, interrupting her daydream. A lively song begins to play at the organ shop upstairs. She is sick to death of the deep organ notes, the same three old songs played night and day: "Wave", "When Sunny Gets Blue", "Bad Bad Leroy Brown."
Gwen goes through the anniversary cards, pulling large envelopes from
small cards and regrouping them where they belong. She dusts off
filing chests and folders, restacks notebooks and typing paper. Makes
sure all the pencils are erasers-up. In the back of the store, on the left
side, out of view of the open stockroom door, she kneels on the gold carpet.
He is just upstairs.
Straightening gifts‹vases, incense and burners, candles, plastic flowers,
ceramic people with cartoon faces. She has watched his fine hands
picking up a music box to find out the price. Her hands are small
and not particularly attractive. Just functional hands, hands meant
to work at a
stationery store, move on to the factory to shove mascara wands into
tubes the rest of her life. But his hands are like a dove¹s
wings‹opening a fist gently to expose callous-free palms.
How much did you say?
He turns the music box over again, seconds after having just looked.
Twenty-seven dollars. Yep, he says.
Twenty-seven, she says, hmmm.
He smiles, cupping his hand to his mouth and says, Yeah and they break all the time.
She wants to spend every penny she has on him; buy him a soda for his break, an expensive nail clipper with a leather case. A pair of gloves.
You must work in the mall too, he says.
How did you know?
She thinks for a second that perhaps he has stood across the way and
watched her spraying Windex on the counter, shining up the showcases which
house Parker ball point pens. She feels so warm suddenly she hopes
she didn't unknowingly sit making weird faces or bite her cuticles.
Or look as if she did or didn¹t like her job too much. You could
never tell which would be
the right sentiment.
You¹re not wearing a coat, he says, and it's cold out so you must work here.
Then someone says, Excuse me, can you help me, young man? With a flick of his hair he is gone down another aisle and she doesn't even know his name.
Gwen, Gwen! Go and take all of the Bic pens out of the display and dust off the boxes. Don¹t just dawdle around acting like a footstool.
She gets off the gold carpet and in a semi-trance, heads to the Big pens. She imagines one day he will be famous. For what, she hasn't a clue.
On her break she slowly gets on the escalator and comes to the upper-mall
level. She acts as though all she wants to do is get a Coke.
Nothing else. She tells herself that¹s all she¹s doing,
but ends up standing beside a pole in front of J. C. Penny, gazing across
at Goody Goody Good Gifts. Any second he may look out and see her.
She sips the Coke with her lips in a
charming pout. She puts a pinky to the corner of her mouth and
brushes a drop of soda with it, then sucks the tip of her finger.
She juts out a hip and rests against the pole. A casually sexy, relaxed
slump. She hears music begin. The damn organ again, "Wave."
She searches for him but doesn't see the thick chestnut hair, his flannel
shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows. No hands opening to her
like eyes. Maybe he quit. Or got hit by a car. Maybe
he's just off. Or unloading boxes in the stockroom. The whole
place may as well blow up without him there. Her heart pounds as
she leans against the pole, growing weak.
If he were there he'd see her and she could will him to come and caress her face. She¹d feel his cool, smooth hands and be revived. He would hold her hands, cover them with his and twined together, hers would become beautiful.
She stays there long past her break. She stays there after her eyes grow blurry with staring and her thoughts exhaust themselves as she does her body the cool blades of grass between her fingers, her feet pounding down, then forcing her up in circular flight.
She thinks of motion. And as gates begin to come down and store
lights dim, she wanders outside. The buildings are silhouetted against
the deep gold and blue striped sky. She has left her bicycle at the
stationery store. She tells herself she'll be able to pick it up
tomorrow but somehow she knows she won't. And as she comes to admit
the fact, she also comes to feel
some sort of pattern is being laid which she will follow the rest of
her life.
There are few cars in the parking lot as the last of the sun lowers to asphalt. She walks on the lines of the parking stalls, expertly making sharp turns. She stares at the ground as the cars edge by.
She does a languid cartwheel and lands perfectly on the line.
And then she stares at the black silhouettes of buildings. Why shouldn't
she do the move? She still could. The thing about it that stayed
in her head was the feeling of being in control of your life for one minute.
If you didn¹t
concentrate, if you didn¹t believe‹you had the power to choose
halfway through, and maybe you¹d break your neck. Why should
death be left only to chance? To come when you had no notion, no
expectation of it? She loved the edge of it in her feet and hands.
It gave her the power to smack out of a round-off and thrust six feet up
before rotating.
She concentrates on a darkening sky, slaps small dry hands on the twitching
hard thigh muscles and then bounds forward. As she springs in the
air she glimpses a pale hand waving to her. In her heart it
is the perfect hand of a saint; so peaceful, a white bird lazily
flapping by.
She comes out of the move, lands just scraping her knuckles across the
ground. He applauds in the distance. And suddenly she looks
forward to tomorrow.