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Debra Marquart The Horizontal Life |
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She would never have lost her
virginity, this girl that I was, if the grain elevator had not burned down. Not
that she was saving her virginity for anything special. In fact, she saw it
as a filmy substance, a dying skin that needed to be cast off. She was not your
stitch-in-time-saves-nine kind, not your
roll-the-extra-string-into-a-ball-and-save-it type of young woman that
fiction writers who write stories about midwestern
girls like to create. If you had to classify her, you would say that she was
a spender, that she was all thin limbs and long hair, that she was fourteen
years old and she had that walk down cold—the walk of someone who doesn’t
believe in life after twenty. The grain elevator burning down
was an ironic event in her life. Not that the girl would have perceived it as
such, since she had never heard of irony and would not hear about irony for a
good many years—long after she had ceased to be herself and was on her way to
becoming someone who would, by some strange twist of fate, become me. At this point in her life she’s
working on more basic concepts, small things like trying to get people to
call her Deb, instead of the more childish Debbie, and trying to find someone
to lose her virginity to. By the time we see her here,
watching the elevator burn down, she has experienced a number of things. She’s
tried French kissing and seen plenty of window fog. She’s had her breasts
nibbled, studied and stroked, and explored an endless variety of back seats,
quietly undoing snaps and zippers and tricky belt buckles, slipping her hand
deep into the moist pants of a writhing stranger. The horizontal life has not
completely eluded her. But she has impossible standards.
She does not want the tentative touch of a novice, nor does she want a clumsy
farm boy. No one who wears tidewater plaid pants, smells of cow manure, and
lusts more for her father’s full six quarters of land than for her own
strong, slim and tanned body. She’s no longer interested in
shy exploration, or wonderment, or handing her carefully pruned virginity
over to a husband on a wedding night. She has an itch somewhere deep inside
her, in a place she cannot even begin to direct someone to. But she doesn’t
want it scratched, she wants it vanquished. It will take an expert, someone
who is as efficient as he is kind. She’s looking for a wolf with a nice
demeanor. But whoever this guy is, if he ever lived in this town, has
certainly moved away. So, discontented, this girl that
I was gathers with the rest of the people of her town and watches the grain
elevator burn from the top to the bottom. As the blaze gains strength, the
volunteer firemen train their hoses on the hottest parts and circle the
elevator. They will not be made to do anything heroic, even though it’s their
own carefully cultivated grain surrendering itself to the flames. Sending their wild sprays flying
in the air, they hope for containment and nervously eye the two other
elevators twenty yards away. The grain is popping and exploding in the bin. The
grain is offering itself up to the fire. As the girl watches the spiral of
black smoke rise and hears the roaring breath of fire, something lifts up
inside her. Perhaps it was a spark, some
friction in the dust or a carelessly discarded cigarette that started it, but
now it’s the very substance of the grain sustaining the original spark, which
is still to be found somewhere in the larger context of the blaze, growing
from yellow to orange to red roaring up and crackling in a way that the tiny
spark could never have imagined. How intensely it burns and how
little it leaves, the girl thinks. It reminds her of the cigarettes her busy
sister lights and leaves unsmoked in the ash tray,
the thin column of ashes burning clean down to the filter. Already she has an
eye for metaphor that only causes problems for her in this town. The habit of
drawing equations between unlikely objects—an ability that will serve her so
well later—only meets with raised eyebrows and shakes of the head in this small
town. She doesn’t realize the many
ways she’s being separated out, like chaff from the hard grain of the people
in this town. But she doesn’t yearn to be understood. She’s never even heard
of alienation. She still thinks people are the same everywhere you go. And
although she’s experienced angst, she doesn’t know yet that there’s a word
for it. There she is a year earlier,
mowing the lawn on the fourth of July. She’s thirteen—her profile flatter,
her hair straighter, but still it’s the same girl. See how immaculate the
lines she is making, running the mower up and down the endless length of her
parents’ dried up lawn—lines, perfect, like a landing strip she is preparing
for someone who may be passing overhead. Already she is scanning the
horizon for methods of escape—light aircraft, men in goggles with long
scarves streaming behind them. Already she is scheming quick passage out of
this dust hole, this graveyard that her father inherited from his father. Inherited,
in turn, from all the fathers who came before. Looking at the sky and thinking
so intensely of flight, she feels the first jagged stab of pain crack like
lightning at her navel and bury itself deep in her
pelvis. No one has prepared her for this moment,
still she understands the ever-widening stain that now spreads throughout her
layers. She doesn’t bother to go inside
and find out what’s happened. Instead, she keeps on working, looking only as
far ahead as the wide expanse of her parents’ lawn, concentrating on
finishing another long row before the afternoon sun rises too high in the
sky. She doesn’t stop to note the
appropriateness of this word that she has heard whispered in the hallways and
the school bathrooms by the older girls—this simple word, period, that eventually comes to punctuate every woman’s life. And even though it’s
the fourth of July, she doesn’t stop the lawn mower and conk herself on the
side of the head in a gee-I-should’ve-had-a-V-8-way and say, “Independence
day, my ass.” Later inside the house she finds
the cache of pads in the cupboard above the bathtub. Over the years she has
watched this giant blue box empty and fill, empty and fill, never
understanding the true significance of all this mysterious activity. Later
after supper is eaten and the sun has disappeared, the girl gathers with the
rest of her family on the newly mown lawn to watch the fireworks. Her grandparents bring their
folding chairs; her father brings his cooler. Her mother spreads a blanket,
and her brother, as official torch bearer ignites bottle rocket after bottle
rocket, shooting star after shooting star for their amusement into the still
night air. Fountains of light hiss and spit in the sky and transform into
streams of gold, fanning into shapes of exotic flowers, as the girl that I
was lies down in the cool grass with her sisters and oohs and aahs in appreciation. The summer after the grain
elevator burned down, it begins to rise slowly out of the ashes with the help
of young workmen who appear in the small town as if by magic. They are tanned
and rough-skinned. Their hair is thick and dry as straw from the sun. Every
day the townspeople pass the elevator and stop to watch the construction
workers whistle and pound away at the newly emerging structure. One of the workmen is a lanky Nordic
type from another part of the state. He is well into the sky when she first
sees him. He’s dangling on the ledge, a leather safety belt strapped to his
waist, his thick yellow hair blowing in the wind. He cuts a striking figure
up there with the sun blazing behind him, she thinks, like a phoenix rising. The
moment could be highly allusive. But it would be a lie to say that the girl
that I was saw him as anything more than shirtless, big-armed, and
well-tanned. His name is George, although he’s
no dragon-slayer. He came to town in a two-toned blue ‘56 Chevy with no
reverse gear and only a little left of first. He’s terrified of heights but
he’s even more afraid of poverty, so he overcomes his bad nerves every day,
climbing the scaffolding, weak-kneed and hung over, rising higher and higher
in the sky as the summer progresses. Perhaps it’s that walk of hers,
that careless mad march that attracts his attention. She’s crossing the
railroad tracks on the way to her grandmother’s house (this is no joke, she
really is going to visit her grandmother) when she hears his whistle come
from high above. She looks into the glare and sees only the flash of his
white, white, very white teeth. Later at the Rec
Hall where everyone goes to play pool, smoke cigarettes and eat the biggest
orders of twenty-five cent french fries in town,
she gets close enough to notice that his breath smells of spearmint, for he
chews gum liberally, flipping it around in his mouth with his tongue as he
speaks, chattering away about something she does not understand because she
is concentrating so exclusively on the length and shape and firmness of his
thighs. He has showered and changed. His
hair is bleached and damp, and his skin is rosy from the sun. He wears a
yellow shirt stripped open to his navel, revealing a nest of burnished chest
hair. Perhaps this George, this elevator man, reminds the girl of a Viking
marauder as he laughs and strokes his mustache. His lamb chop sideburns are
dark and wispy trailing down the sides of his face. When given the
opportunity to browse, the girl thinks, she is certain to find every
conceivable color of hair on this man’s body. They talk, but they talk of
nothing, George and this girl that I was, because they have no common words
with which to work. All they have are grunts and laughs, gestures and sighs
and fragments of words that they’ve heard and vaguely understood, which they
offer now to each other, peppering the silence that hangs between them. When he begins his little dance,
those circuitous steps he feels obliged to do to get her into his car, it
comes out seamless, a blending of feigned shyness, sly innuendo and a fair
amount of chest pounding. She watches this George, this
second-story man, do his little dance knowing that it is not necessary, that
it was never necessary for her sake, but allowing it to continue,
recognizing, in her characteristic early wisdom, that it’s necessary for him
to do. As they cruise Riding along in this ‘56
two-tone Chevy with no reverse gear and very little left of first, this girl
that I was is not thinking of trailer courts, or dirty dishes, or babies
crying late into the night. She is lighting a cigarette, bending the tip deep
into the flame. And when the ash grows long on the tip, she doesn’t flick it.
She leans back, just leans back in complete repose. And even though he’s a stranger
in town, she doesn’t bother to give him directions. So confident is she that
he will find a way to get them wherever this girl that I was wants to go. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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