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The Hang-Glider's Daughter
For Catherine Logan My forty-year-old father learned to fly. Bat-winged, with a magic marble fear keeping his toast down, he walks off a sheer shaved cliff into the morning. On Sunday mornings he comes for us. Liane and I feed the baby and Mario, wash up, clear the kitchen mess. Maman is never there; that is the morning she and Joseph try to tell the other pickers how the Word can save them. Liane gets me good and mad changing her outfit sixteen times, while I have to change the baby. All the way up the hill road she practices on him, flirt- ing like she does at school. My back teeth hurt from chewing Pepper Gum on the bad side. She's three years younger. I'm three years behind. Did he mean that? Shift the gum. Did I remind Mario, if the baby cries, he needs burping? I can stretch out on the back seat. The olive terraces stacked in the sunshine are shallow stairs a giant child could climb. My hiking shoes look giant on my feet. Maman says "a missed boy." What do I miss? I wonder what the word in English is for that. Funny, that we should have been born somewhere we wouldn't even understand the language now. I was already three when we left. If someone hypnotized me would I talk English like a three-year-old? The bright road twists up; bumpily we shift gears, breathe deep. In the front pouch of my sweat- shirt, I've still got my two best marbles. Rolled in thumb and finger, they click, points gained, told beads. Not for Joseph's church. If I forgot French, too, who would I be inside my head? My hands remember better: how to hold my penknife to strip branches, where to crack eggs on a bow! rim, how to pile a block tower-when I was little-high as my nose. Could I, still? The box of blocks is Mario's now. My knee's cramped. I wish that I could walk to Dad's house, or that I was up front, talk- ing to him. How does he feel, suddenly slung from brilliant nylon, levering onto air currents like a thinking hawk? I'd be scared. I'd be so scared I can't think it. Maybe a long slope on my skateboard's like that. Climbing isn't scary: no time. The air's fizzy, you're care- ful what rock you hang your weight from, and where your toes wedge. My calves ache, after, ribs sting, but I'm good for something. What I like high is mountains. I'll go up the hill behind Dad's house this afternoon. I'll pick Liane flowers. Nahh, we'll be leafing magazines for school clothes on the sun porch after lunch. I like those purple bell-spikes. My cleats crunch the crumble, I stretch to the ledge and pull out the whole rooted stalk. Sometimes there's twelve bells, purple as-purple as nothing else except a flower, ugly and beautiful at once. Across my face come the two smells: grandmother's linen-chest spice-sweet petals and wet dirt clinging, half meat, half metal, all raw. Between them I smell myself, sweaty from climbing, but it's a woman's sweat. I had one of the moon dreams again. I stood on the flyover facing purple sea, head up, while a house-huge full moon hurtled toward me; then it was me flying, feet still