Falling Angels Read online

  Barbara Gowdy

  Falling Angels

  To my parents

  for not being the parents in this book.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Resurrection 1969

  Christmas 1959

  Paradise 1960

  Disneyland 1961

  White Overnight 1963

  Mortified by Desire 1967

  Dance to the Music 1968

  Vital Disconnection 1969

  About the Author

  Praise for

  Falling Angels

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  Author Biography

  Select Awards

  About the book

  How Falling Angels Took Flight, by Liam Lacey

  Read on

  The Feral Side of Fiction: Reading (and Writing with) Barbara Gowdy, by Marni Jackson

  Web Detective

  An Excerpt from Mister Sandman, by Barbara Gowdy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Resurrection 1969

  All three girls are in the front seat. The fat girl with the glasses is driving. In the back seat their father is asleep sitting up.

  They pull into the parking lot, and two men who are leaning against a blue Volkswagen van turn to look at them. One of the men has a camera round his neck. “Fuck,” the thin girl says.

  Their father jerks awake. Before the car has come to a full stop, he has his door open. “Scram!” he yells at the men. He falls out the door, onto one knee. The three girls quickly get out of the car. Their father stands up and heads for the men, thrashing his arms. “Vamoose!” he yells. “Bugger off!” The men don’t move.

  “Dad,” the fat girl pleads. Their father staggers away from everyone and slaps his pockets for cigarettes.

  “Just leave him,” the thin girl mutters. She starts walking, giving their father a wide berth. Her sisters follow. The fat girl with the glasses can’t squeeze between the fenders of the two hearses, and she reddens, conscious of the men approaching. “Climb over,” the thin girl orders. Glancing at the photographer, she reaches into her purse and gets out the pack of cigarettes that their father is searching for. If she has to have her picture taken, she wants to be smoking.

  The photographer starts clicking. But not at the thin girl. He aims at the third girl, the pretty blond one, who is waiting while the fat sister climbs over the fenders. “Figures,” the thin girls thinks. The pretty girl gazes at the scorched white sky as if wondering whether their mother is up there yet.

  “Excuse me,” the second man says, sauntering up. The pretty girl smiles politely. The thin girl narrows her eyes. The eyes of the man are rabid with fake pity. He says it’s a real drag about their mother and he hates like hell to hassle them, but the pictures aren’t going to have captions unless he gets their names straight.

  Both the fat girl and the pretty one look at the thin girl. “Lou,” the thin girl says. The man flips open a pad and starts writing. Lou nods at the fat girl,“Norma,” nods at the pretty girl,“Sandy.” This is the first reporter that Lou’s let anywhere near her. It’s because he has long hair and a beard and is wearing blue jeans.

  “Still in high school?” the reporter asks conversationally.

  “For another few weeks, yeah.” Lou blows a smoke ring. The photographer goes on clicking at Sandy.

  “When did you get the cat?” the reporter asks.

  “What?”

  “The cat. Your mother went up on the roof to rescue a cat, didn’t she?”

  “We better get inside,” Norma murmurs.

  Sweat starts dripping down the reporter’s forehead. “I understand that one of you was there when it happened,” he says, earnest now.

  “We were all there,” Lou says. Her hand shakes bringing her cigarette up to her mouth. “Okay, we’ve got to go,” she says, moving around the reporter, feeling herself on a dangerous verge.

  Inside the funeral parlour, Sandy asks where the washroom is. She has decided to put her false eyelashes back on.

  It’s not vanity, like Lou thinks. This morning Lou said,“You’ve got too much makeup on. Nobody’ll believe you’re broken up.” So Sandy took her eyelashes off, but now she wishes she hadn’t, and not only because of the photographer. She can’t understand why someone as smart as Lou hasn’t figured out that the better you look, the better people treat you.

  She bats her lashes to see if they’re stuck on. “Beauty is only skin deep,” she tells herself defensively. She has always taken this expression to mean that only what is skin deep is beautiful.

  Her throat tightens. She has had an awful thought. In an autopsy they remove all your organs, don’t they? She isn’t sure. But just the idea of strange men rummaging around inside their mother … She thinks of their mother’s organs sloshing in whisky. She thinks of their mother’s womb, and she starts crying and fishes in her purse for Kleenex. Even before their mother died, the depressing image of her womb crossed Sandy’s mind a couple of times. She pictured an empty drawstring purse.

  Norma and Lou go into the room where their mother is. Nobody else has arrived yet. They’re an hour early because yesterday their aunt phoned and told them to be. The casket is against the far wall, between big green plants that you can tell from the door are plastic.

  Norma walks over. “Is she all here?” she whispers. Only the upper part of the casket is open, and the lower part doesn’t seem long enough.

  “Who gives a shit,” Lou says in a steady voice. “She’s dead.” Last night Lou cried her heart out. Their sweet little mother who tap-danced … have they cut off her legs? No way is Lou going to look in the casket.

  She walks to the window and parts the heavy velvet drapes. Their father is yelling at the newspapermen again. They are about ten yards away from him, standing their ground. Lou can’t hear their father, but the newspapermen are nodding as if whatever he’s yelling makes a lot of sense.

  Norma touches the tip of their mother’s small nose. “It’s me,” she whispers. Their mother’s nose is like a pebble, cool. Her face is white and smooth as a sink, and Norma realizes it’s because the blood has been drained from her. “What do they do with the blood?” she asks Lou.

  “Christ,” Lou says, lighting another Export “A.” “Do you mind?” She wonders if Sandy went to the washroom to cry. In a couple of weeks Sandy plans to marry a guy who has the stupidest face Lou has ever seen on a person not mongoloid retarded. Lou suddenly has a panicky feeling that she has to put a stop to the wedding. As soon as possible. Today.

  She closes her eyes. What the hell is going on? she asks herself. What does she care who Sandy marries? Maybe their mother is seeping out, and Lou has swallowed Maternal Instinct. People in Wales believe that you can swallow a dead person’s sin. But their mother had no sin, and nobody can tell Lou that she sure had one, the biggest one, because Lou has always viewed that as a sacrifice. Their mother had no instincts left either, now that Lou thinks about it. Drowning pain Lou doesn’t count.

  When Lou opens her eyes, Sandy is entering the room on the arm of an undertaker. He gestures toward the casket, disengages himself and backs away, and pressing her hands to her mouth, Sandy walks over and stands beside Norma.

  “She’s got lipstick on,” Sandy says.

  “They always do that,” Norma says.

  “But she never wore pink lipstick,” Sandy says, her voice breaking. She slowly brings her hand down and touches her fingers to their mother’s lips. “Are her insides in her?” she asks.

  “I think so.”

  “They’re pickled in formaldehyde,” Lou says. Lou is still looking out the window. Their father h
as just accepted a flask from the reporter, and now he’s shaking the reporter’s hand. “What a prick,” Lou says.

  Norma sighs. She walks over to a chair and drops into it and removes her glasses, which have felt too tight ever since they fell into the eavestrough. She knows that the prick Lou is referring to isn’t one of the newspapermen, it’s their father. Lou says she hates their father. Norma’s never been able to hate him and especially couldn’t now, when he’s so pathetic. Even Lou has to admit that he loved their mother. What drove their mother to drink and probably to the roof, and what drove him, part way at least, to every bad, crazy thing he did, never really drove the two of them apart. Yesterday, in their mother’s bedside table, Norma found the kidney stone that he gave their mother—for luck and instead of an engagement ring—on the night they met. Lou wouldn’t look at it. Lou blames him.

  Lou turns from the window. Norma is staring at her without glasses. Sandy is crying quietly, leaning into the casket. She seems to be stroking their mother’s face.

  “What are you doing?” Lou asks her.

  “Changing her lipstick,” Sandy sobs.

  Lou feels nauseated. “I need some air,” she says and leaves the room.

  Going around a corner in the hall, she bumps into their father.

  “Oh, hi!” he says, astonished.

  His whisky breath makes her stomach heave. “The last room on the left,” she says, shoving by him.

  She opens an Exit door and is in the parking lot. The heat slams into her. The photographer is gone, but the reporter is still there, resting against a car that’s in the shade. He gets up and wanders over.

  “What are you hanging around for?” she asks.

  “Waiting for you.” He lights her cigarette. The back of his hands and forearms have a rug of black hair on them. “So,” he says,“was it an accident or what?”

  “Didn’t the whisky loosen my father’s tongue?” she asks sarcastically.

  “I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say.”

  She wonders why she doesn’t tell him. It’s none of his business, but that’s not the reason.

  “Off the record,” he says. “Strictly between you and I.”

  “Between you and me,” she corrects him.

  He dips his head to look in her face. He has whisky breath, too.

  “I’ve got to go back in,” she says, tossing away most of her cigarette.

  “Hey, come on.” He grabs her arm.

  “Let go.”

  “One minute, okay?”

  “FUCK OFF, OKAY?”

  They stare at each other. He drops his hand.

  In the washroom she looks for feet under the cubicle doors. Sees none. She shuts herself in a cubicle and starts crying. She can’t believe it, it makes her mad, because last night she imagined she experienced the final evolution of her heart.

  What is she crying about? Not about their mother or about the baby that she cried at the thought of having and still wouldn’t keep. She isn’t crying for these deaths on either side of her.

  She’s crying because … She doesn’t know why. But when she’s cried herself out, the relief leaves her light-headed. No, it’s more than relief—it’s the same feeling she had up on the roof with their mother and Norma (although she never felt more separate from everyone), when she was above the whole subdivision, and the clouds rolling from horizon to horizon made her think of a great migration. The wind whipped her hair. It was warm and windy. Not dark or light. Their father couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t climb the ladder! Their mother wouldn’t climb down. There was a standoff, a stopping of time. Something was going to happen—Lou felt that much, although she didn’t know it was going to be something so terrible—but in that suspended minute or two, Lou was in heaven, on the verge of flying even. Doing out of no fear what their mother, a few seconds later, did terrified.

  Christmas 1959

  Between opening gifts and having breakfast, their father always got out his Bible and read from St. Luke, Chapter 2. For some reason their mother left the room at this point, and although on Christmas Day 1959 the girls found out why she did, they were still pretty young then (Sandy eight, Lou nine, Norma ten). There were years to go before they saw the link between their own baby brother and their mother’s aversion to the mention of babies, including the baby Jesus.

  Without fearing God (how many times had she dared him to strike her dead, show his face, burn a bush?), Lou was the one who remembered and pondered the Bible stories, and at night in bed she sometimes retold them to her sisters, who consequently thought, as she did, that Jesus died in Calgary, where the cowboys were now. They associated this with his birth in a small barn and thought that in spite of having to die nailed to a cross, he was incredibly lucky, not just to be born among the animals but to have adults kneeling before him and giving him precious gifts. You only got this kind of treatment, Lou informed her sisters, if your father didn’t plant a seed in your mother—if your father didn’t have anything to do with you getting made.

  No seed also meant that your mother was pure, like a pure blue sky or pure gold. The girls equated the Virgin Mary’s purity with soft, flawless, hollow, crystal-clear beauty. They loved her because of her purity and because she was like their mother—meek and mild, named Mary, and different from all other mothers.

  Instead of doing housework all day and going outside now and then to shop or sweep the porch, their mother went outside once a year. The rest of the time, from six in the morning until eleven at night, she watched t?. Only in the fall, after Aunt Betty had dropped off cousin Mary Jane’s old clothes, did she do anything else. The girls would come home from school and hear the sewing machine humming in the basement. “What are you making?” they’d cry, running down to her. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies” was their mother’s answer. She worked fast, broke thread with her teeth. Her hands were steady. In no time there’d be a new dress for each of them.

  Sometimes these sewing fits inspired her to other activity. “Lou,” she’d say,“go out and buy me a bag of cooking apples.” Then she’d bake a pie. She knew how to tap-dance, and if they begged her, and their father wasn’t home yet, she might get her tap shoes from the trunk and click out “Tea for Two.”

  Christmas Day was the one time she went out of the house. After breakfast she put on her girdle, her black slip, her black dress with the tiny red and blue flowers, new nylon stockings that their father would bring home the day before, shiny black high heels, and the tomato-red lipstick she used to wear on stage during her hoofer days. Sandy—who was her image, who was so golden and fragile that women in the street threatened in longing voices to steal her—fell into rapture watching their mother dress. Each year she saved the piece of toilet paper their mother smacked between her lips; she sniffed the lipstick scent and kissed the lonely, floating mouth, then put it in her own white-covered Bible, between two pages of all red words, which was Jesus speaking. So far she had three of their mother’s mouths in there.

  They were, all of them, in their best clothes for going to Uncle Eugene and Aunt Betty’s. Taking the show on the road, their mother called it. Their father’s nerves were always shot driving there. He chain-smoked, yelled at them in the back seat to shut up. This year he almost drove into a stopped truck and killed them all without even noticing. Over the screech of his brakes he was asking their mother for the tenth time if she thought Mary Jane would like Cindy the Mardi Gras Doll.

  “She’ll dance with joy,” their mother said.

  He shook his head. “What the hell,” he said. “The whole goddamned business has gotten out of hand.”

  Lou muttered,“Who does he think fat Mary Jane is, anyway? The Queen?” But she knew (their mother told them last year) that it wasn’t the gift he bought for Mary Jane that got him worked up every Christmas, it was Uncle Eugene being a rich bank president and driving an Oldsmobile, though he was the younger brother and only named after the man who wrote “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” while th
eir father, the older brother and named James Agar Field after a president of the United States, sold used cars and drove their old Packard. “Brotherly rivalry,” their mother explained. “Such as Cain and Abel had.”

  It turned out that Mary Jane already had a Cindy the Mardi Gras Doll. She dropped the one they gave her back in the box, where it landed upside down with its taffeta underpants showing. Their father pulled out his wallet and tried to give Uncle Eugene money. “Buy her whatever she wants,” he said. “The biggest doll in the store.”

  “I’ve got the biggest doll,” Mary Jane said stonily.

  From Aunt Betty and Uncle Eugene the three sisters each received what seemed to them an amazing new invention—white roller skates that laced up like ice skates.

  “Top of the line,” Uncle Eugene said to their father. “Straight from Germany.” He told Sandy to come over and give her old Uncle Eugene a big kiss, but she kissed Aunt Betty’s soft, powder-smelling cheek instead, and Aunt Betty hugged her too hard and screamed,“Oh, my little beauty!”

  “Mary Jane!” Uncle Eugene yelled. “Go show your cousins what you got.”

  “Come on,” Mary Jane said, leaving the room. Their mother stood up to get lost in the crowd as far as the kitchen, but Aunt Betty screamed at her to sit down, she’d get her a drink.

  “Ginger ale,” their mother said, handing over her glass.

  “That’ll be the frosty Friday,” Aunt Betty cried.

  Mary Jane led the way down the long hall, swivelling her body to show off the bouncy fullness of her skirt and to remind them that she was the oldest and that in her house she could walk however she wanted to. “Wait ‘til you see,” she said.

  “What is it?” Sandy asked.

  “Just wait.”

  It was a Mary Jane doll. Standing in the middle of the room, its arms bent up in an “I surrender” pose. It was the big doll that Mary Jane spoke of earlier. Incredibly, its face was Mary Jane’s ugly face, and it was as fat as she was. A fat, ugly doll wearing Mary Jane’s pink chiffon dress and pink bow in its tightly curled brown hair, and even wearing Mary Jane’s pointy pink glasses.