Skylight Confessions

  Arlyn wore her red hair twisted, put up with tortoiseshell combs. It was an old-fashioned style; she believed that her mother, who died when Arlie was a toddler, wore her hair this way. At twenty-four, Arlyn herself felt old. After she sent Sam off for the morning, walking him down the lane to the bus stop so he could go off to nursery school, she usually came back to the house and slipped into bed with her clothes on. Sometimes she didn’t bother to take off her shoes, the old leather slippers her father had bought her, which were by now falling apart. She’d had them resoled twice, but the leather itself was shredding. Whenever she wore them she remembered that the entire time her father had been a ferryboat captain, nearly twenty years, he never stayed a single night in Connecticut. It’s a far-off country, he would say of the place where she now lived. Those people with wings keep them folded up, under their suits and dresses, but at the right moment, just when they need to fly, the wings unfurl and off they go. They never go down with the ship — they lift off at the very last moment. When everyone else is sinking into the sea, there they go, up to the clouds.

  Wherever she went, Arlyn found herself searching for such people, in the treetops, at the market, on telephone poles. She felt light in some strange way; disconnected from roads and grass, from everything on earth. She herself would have chosen a raven’s wings, deep blue-black feathers, shimmering and strong. Once she went up to the roof of the garage and stood there, feeling the wind, wishing that her father’s stories were true. She closed her eyes until the urge to jump passed. She had to remind herself that her child would be getting off the school bus at two, that he’d expect her to be waiting, and that no matter how she felt inside she must be there, holding a bunch of lilacs she had picked as she walked down the lane.

  Sam continued to surprise her with how special he was. Today, for instance, when she picked him up at the bus stop he said, “I hate school.”

  “No, you don’t.” Had she made him feel too special, as John often accused her of doing?

  “Everyone has to stand in a straight line or we can’t go to recess and I’m not everyone.”

  “Well, everyone is someone special,” she told Sam.

  “But the rules don’t bother everyone.”

  “We all do things we don’t want to do.” Was this what she wanted her son to believe?

  They walked home hand in hand.

  “Daddy doesn’t like me.” They had reached the turn where the largest hedge of lilacs was. They could see the roof of the Glass Slipper. You had to know it was there to see it, otherwise you would look right through it into the clouds.

  We could hide here, Arlie wanted to say as they passed by the hedges. We could never come out again. Not till our wings grew. Not till we could fly away.

  “Every daddy loves his little boy,” Arlyn said.

  Sam looked at her. He was only five and he trusted her, but now he didn’t seem so sure. “Really?” he said.

  Arlyn nodded. She certainly hoped so. When they walked up the driveway, Arlyn was thinking about how tired she was. All the while her father was sick she didn’t sleep through the night and then when Sam was a baby she had sat up to watch over him. The exhaustion hadn’t left her.

  Every time she’d heard her father cough or moan she was on her feet, ready before he called for her. She knew her father loved her; he showed it in the way he looked at her when she brought him water, or his lunch tray, or a magazine to read aloud. She had always been certain of her father’s love; the same wasn’t true for Sam and his father.

  Maybe tonight Arlyn would dream about her father and he would tell her what to do. Stay or fly away. Tell John what she truly wanted or go on as they had been, living separate lives under the same glass roof, pretending to be something they weren’t, pretending that all little boys’ daddies were too busy to care.

  She and Sam continued down the drive until the Glass Slipper was right in front of them. All at once Arlie realized how much she hated it. It was a box, a cage, a trap that couldn’t be pried open. It’s not an easy place to live, her mother-in-law had told Arlyn when she first moved in. It seems to attract birds. True enough, there on the steel-edged roof a cadre of blackbirds called wildly. Oh, they would surely make a mess. John would be able to see their shit and feathers from the living room whenever he looked up and he’d be furious. One more thing that was imperfect, just like Arlyn herself. Arlyn guessed she would have to drag out the ladder so she could climb up and clean the glass, but then she saw something odd. A man with wings. One of the Connecticut people her father had spoken of. Such creatures were real after all. Arlie felt something quicken inside. The man on the roof was standing on one leg, like a stork. One of the Snow brothers, not the usual one, but the younger brother, flapping his coat thrown over his shoulders, scaring all the blackbirds away. He was tall and blond and young.

  “Boo,” he shouted. Scallops of sunlight fell across his face. “Get into the sky where you belong!”

  Arlyn stood on the grass and applauded.

  When the window washer turned to her he was so surprised to see a red-haired woman grinning at him, he nearly slipped on the glass. Then Arlyn would have seen if he really could fly, or if like any mortal man he would simply crash and splinter.

  JOHN MOODY LEFT THE HOUSE AT SIX IN THE MORNING AND didn’t come home again until seven thirty or eight in the evening, often missing dinner, just as often missing his son, whose bedtime was at eight. Not that Sam was necessarily asleep; after being tucked in, he often lay in bed, eyes wide open, listening to the sound of tires on the gravel when his father came home. John was usually in a foul temper at the end of the workweek, so Arlyn had a standing arrangement with Cynthia Gallagher, their new neighbor and Arlyn’s new best friend, to come over on Fridays for drinks and dinner. Cynthia was having her own problems with her husband, Jack, whom she referred to as Jack Daniels, for all the drinking he did. Arlyn had never had a best friend and she was giddy with the intimacy. Here was someone she could be real with.

  “Oh, fuck it all,” Cynthia was fond of saying when they went out shopping and something was particularly expensive and she wanted to encourage Arlyn to loosen up. Cynthia had delicate bone structure; she was attractive and dressed well, and she certainly knew how to curse and drink. “If we don’t have a good time, who will?”

  Cynthia had a way of cheering things up. She wore her brown hair straight to her shoulders and she looked young, even though she was several years older than Arlyn. Maybe it was the fact that Cynthia was free. She had no children, and had confided she didn’t think Jack Daniels had it in him to produce any progeny, though he’d sworn he’d been to the doctor to be tested; he vowed that he was, as Cynthia put it, positively filthy with sperm.

  Cynthia was daring and fun. She could snap John Moody out of a bad humor in an instant. “Get yourself a glass of wine and get out here,” she’d call to him when he came home from work on Fridays, and he would. He’d actually join them on the patio and tell stories that had them laughing about his idiot clients whose main concern was often closet space rather than design. Watching John in the half-light of spring, with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, Arlyn remembered how she had felt the first time she saw him, back when he was lost and she was so dead set on finding him.

  John went to the kitchen to fetch some cheese and crackers and freshen their drinks. “And olives, please!” Cynthia called after him. “God, I love your husband,” Cynthia told Arlie.

  Arlyn blinked when she heard that remark. There was a scrim of pollen in the air. She stared at Cynthia: her pouty mouth, her long eyelashes.

  “Not like that!” Cynthia assured her when she saw the expression on Arlyn’s face. “Stop thinking those evil thoughts. I’m your friend, honey.”

  Friends as different as chalk and cheese. They disagreed on politics and people, on fashion and homemaking. More than anything, they disagreed on Sam.

  “You should have him tested,” Cynthia always said, just because he liked to be alone
and preferred playing with blocks to making friends, because he didn’t speak in the presence of strangers, because of the look of concentration Cynthia mistook for an odd, troubling detachment. “Something is off. And if I wasn’t your friend I wouldn’t bother to tell you.”

  Well, Arlie had finally had him evaluated and it turned out Sam had a near-genius IQ. There was some concern over one of the tests; Sam had refused to answer the series with the pictures, he’d just put his head on the psychologist’s desk and hummed, pretending he was a bee. What on earth was wrong with that? Sam was imaginative and creative, too much so for silly personality tests. And a little boy had a right to be tired, didn’t he?

  “You’re going to have problems with him,” Cynthia warned. “He’s pigheaded. He lives in his own world. Wait till he’s a teenager. He’s going to drive you crazy. Trust me, I know big trouble when I see it.”

  It was the beginning of the end of Arlie’s friendship with Cynthia. She didn’t let on that she was disenchanted for quite a while, not even to herself. But the damage was done. Arlyn could not value someone who didn’t value Sam. And now that the blindfold was off, Arlie couldn’t help noticing how flirtatious Cynthia was. All at once she saw the way John looked at their neighbor during their Friday evening drink time. People thought because Arlie was young and freckled and quiet that she was stupid. She was not. She saw what was going on. She saw plenty.

  They were playing a game around the table when she first understood what was happening. I spy with my little eye. John had gone first and Cynthia had guessed correctly. John had “spied” the tipped-over pot of red geraniums. Then it was Cynthia’s turn. She was looking at John’s tie, a pale gray silk, the color of his eyes. She spied something silver. Something that was very attractive, she said. Cynthia had sounded a little drunk, and much too friendly. She had a grin on her face that shouldn’t have been there, as though she knew John Moody wanted her.

  Arlyn glanced away. Even if nothing much had happened yet, it would. Arlie stared upward and noticed Sam at his window. He waved to her, as though they were the only two people in the world, his arm flapping. She blew him a kiss, up into the air, through the glass.

  Maybe that was the day when Arlyn left her marriage, or maybe it happened on the afternoon when she ran into George Snow at the market. He was buying apples and a sack of sugar. Her cart was full of groceries.

  “Is that what you eat?” Arlyn said to him. George was ahead of her in the checkout line. “Don’t you have anyone who takes care of you?”

  George Snow laughed and said if she came to 708 Pennyroyal Lane in two hours she would see he didn’t need taking care of.

  “I’m married,” Arlyn said.

  “I wasn’t asking to marry you,” George said. “I was just going to give you a piece of pie.”

  She went. She sat outside 708 for twenty minutes, long enough for her to know she shouldn’t go in. At last George came out to the car, his collie dog, Ricky, beside him. He came around to talk to her through the half-open window. Arlyn could feel the mistake she was about to make deep in her chest.

  “Are you afraid of pie?” George Snow said.

  Arlyn laughed.

  “I didn’t use anything artificial, if that’s what you’re worried about,” George said.

  “I’d have to know you a lot better to tell you what I’m afraid of,” Arlyn told him.

  “Okay.” George just stood there. The dog jumped up and barked, but George didn’t seem to notice.

  Arlyn got out of the car. She felt ridiculously young and foolish. She hadn’t even brought the groceries home before she went to Pennyroyal Lane; she’d just driven around as though she were looking for something and couldn’t quite recall what, until she found herself on his street. By the time she did get home, half of what she’d bought at the grocery was ruined; the milk and the cottage cheese and the sherbet had leaked through their containers. But George had been right. He made a great apple pie. He listened to her when she talked. He fixed her a cup of tea. He did all those things, but it was Arlyn who kissed him. She was the one who started it all, and once she had, she couldn’t stop.

  Sometimes Arlie would go to his house on Pennyroyal Lane, but she was afraid of getting caught. More often she drove out to meet George at a public landing at the beach while Sam was at school. She never let it interfere with Sam; never let her affair with George affect Sam in any way. It was her secret life, but it felt realer than her life with John ever had.

  George’s collie loved nothing more than to run at the beach. They’d chase the seagulls away, running and shouting, then George would throw stones into the sea.

  “I’m afraid of stones,” Arlyn admitted. She didn’t want things to break and fall apart any sooner than they had to. She thought of the stones on her father’s night table from the time he’d almost drowned. She thought of the house she lived in now, made of a thousand windows.

  “Afraid of a stone?” George had laughed. “If you ask me, it makes more sense to be afraid of an apple pie.”

  George had the blondest hair Arlyn had ever seen and brown eyes. His family had lived in town for two hundred years; everybody knew him. For a while, he had left window washing to start a pet store, but he was too kindhearted. He gave away birdseed and hamster food at half price, he was bad at figures, and the business had failed. Reopening the pet store was his dream, but George had a practical nature. He did what needed to be done. He was a man who fulfilled his responsibilities, and his brother had asked him to come back to the family business. That was why he was up on her roof the day Arlie met him, working at a job he hated, although Arlyn secretly believed it was fate that had put him there. Her true fate, the one that had gotten misplaced on the night John Moody got lost, the future she was meant to have, and did have now, at least for a few hours a week.

  When Arlyn went to the dry cleaner or to the post office, when she went anywhere at all, she felt like standing up and shouting, I’m in love with George Snow. Everyone most likely would have cheered — George was well thought of. Good for you! they would have said. Excellent fellow. Much better than that son of a bitch you’re with. Now you can right what’s wrong in your life!

  She couldn’t stay away from George. When they made love in the back of his truck, or at his house on Pennyroyal Lane, Arlyn couldn’t help wondering if he was one of those Connecticut people in her father’s stories who had unexpected powers. But she knew that such people always waited until the last moment, until the ship was going down or the building was burning, before they revealed themselves and flew away. Whether or not they could bring anyone with them was impossible to know until that dire moment when there was no other choice but flight.

  Although Arlie had never imagined herself to be the sort of woman who had an affair, lying was easier than she’d thought it would be. She would say she was going to the market, the post office, a neighbor’s, the library. Simple, really. She brought along a clothes brush so none of George’s collie’s long hair would stick to her slacks or her skirts and give her away. Not that John was looking for evidence of her betrayals; most of the time, he wasn’t looking at her at all. Whenever Arlyn thought about George, while she fixed eggs for Sam’s breakfast or raked leaves, she did not smile, not unless she was certain she was alone. Then she laughed out loud. For the first time in a long time, she felt lucky.

  The only one who knew about them was Steven Snow, George’s older brother, and then only by accident. Steven had stumbled upon them in bed, as he shouted out, “Hey, Geo. You’re supposed to be working at the Moodys’, get your lazy ass out of bed.” Steven had stopped in the doorway as they pulled apart from each other. He saw her red hair, her white shoulders, his younger brother moving the sheet to hide her.

  They dressed and came into the kitchen, where Steven was having a cup of instant coffee. It had been three months since the day she’d first seen George on the roof. By now they were too much in love to be embarrassed.

  “Big mistake,” Stev
en said to his brother. And then, without meeting Arlyn’s eyes, he added, “For both of you.”

  They didn’t care. No one ever had to know, except for Steven, who didn’t talk much to anyone and was a quiet, trustworthy man. They went on with their secret life, the life Arlie had once imagined as she had stood out on her porch. They did crazy things as time wore on. Did they think they were invisible? That no one would figure it out? They went swimming naked in the pond behind the dairy farm. They made love in the Moodys’ house, in Arlyn and John’s very own bed, with all that glass around so that anyone might see, the birds traveling overhead, the telephone repairman, anyone at all. After a while, Arlyn forgot to hide how happy she was. She sang as she raked; she whistled as she went down the aisles in the market looking for asparagus and pears.

  And then one morning as she walked back from the school-bus stop, Arlyn happened to meet up with Cynthia, who was out for a run. Arlie had taken to avoiding her former friend. If she’d ever really been a friend. That was questionable now. All those glances between Cynthia and John. A woman with her own secrets had no business with an untrustworthy ally. Arlie hid in the bathroom if Cynthia dropped by. If Cynthia phoned, Arlie made excuses, often ridiculous — she had a splinter in her foot, she was dizzy from the heat, she had lost her voice and had to squawk out her apologies. As for those Friday get-togethers, there was no reason to sit through those farces anymore. In fact, Arlyn arranged for Sam to take recorder lessons on Fridays; hours in the waiting room at the music school listening to the cacophony of student musicians was preferable to seeing Cynthia.

  “What do you know — you’re still alive,” Cynthia said when they met up on the road.

  “I’ve been so busy.” Arlyn sounded false, even to herself. She looked down the lane. She wished she could start running, past the Glass Slipper, all the way to George’s, a place where she could be herself, if only for a little while. She was shivering, though it was a warm day. She didn’t like Cynthia’s expression.