Off the Rack

how round her kneecaps looked at just that point in her stride when her foot left the ground. I often remarked how unusually good her posture was. She had a grace uncommon in a woman her size, and I think these outings, the chance to study herself that way, fostered her symmetry a great deal. But, as things would have it, a hotel went in and then a department store, until the plaza was little more than a sidewalk, and the mirrored building, sandwiched between stone and brick that way, no longer caught her reflection.

  Of course, the kids at school were hard on her. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t personal. That’s just the way people are. But at fifteen that kind of saying isn’t useful and perhaps isn’t even true. It often happened that when I tried to talk to her I found I had no idea what I was saying. Everything turned into nonsense. I guess I was just trying to console her, as if telling a person, It’s not your fault, could keep the world from hurting. When she accidentally shattered the concrete floor of the locker room one day, sending a gaping crack through the new gymnasium and splintering all that smooth, freshly varnished wood—well, I couldn’t make her go to school anymore. No truant officer came; the school never even called. Some kids rode by in a car and yelled a lot of stuff at her—cheerleaders and ball players.

  About this time there was a young pilot working for me in my shop. I liked him well enough, and it crossed my mind a few times that he was alone here. I put it to him that he might take my daughter out if he was of a mind to. It seemed to go well enough at first.

  He called for her early in the evening—a Saturday it was. I’d said a few things to prepare him and whatnot, and he kept himself well under control when she came into the room. She was so beautiful. It was deafening, the blood rushed in our heads so. After a while they got underway, and I settled down with the paper and tried not to worry. About 11 o’clock the phone rang and her voice boomed down the wire. “I’ve lost him,” she cried. She was frantic. He had been leaning over her shoulder and had fallen into her shirt-front. She had been searching for him twenty minutes at least. At one moment she thought she had felt him wiggle under her waistband but she couldn’t locate him. She thought she heard him groaning. Her finger might have dislodged him into her pants leg. I told her to stand still, and I went straight to the place. We searched for more than two hours. Finally, we had to give up. Maybe he had shaken out the bottom of her pants leg, I said. He’d probably turn up. But of course it was a disaster. Her first date.

  They had been talking, she said. He had to cover his ears when she spoke in order not to be deafened. She’d had to lean her ear down to hear him better, and he, probably taken with the lovely bend of her neck, almost lost his balance. So he moved to the back of her shoulder where the wind from her voice wouldn’t blow so hard against him. Then, leaning forward, yelling loudly, he had joked that she “blew him away.” Laughing. Imagine them laughing there together in the starlight. And then he fell into her bosom.

  I never saw him again. No one inquired after him, and I told her he may have moved on, not wanting to face me. But she was so downhearted. If she could fit in the mirror she thought she could have found him. But there was no one to help her. The very bubbles in the tub frightened her into thinking they were his dying breath. More and more my mind was occupied trying to think of ways to lift her spirits. It was in these times I missed her mother so.

  One day I stopped in the library hoping to find something that would bring her out. I talked to the librarian about my daughter, and, although she gave me a sharp look or two, she went into the shelves and brought out three books: Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and Gargantua. I mentioned again that my daughter was sixteen; weren’t these children’s books? She assured me they were not. So I made out the card and tucked the books under my arm. On the way home I began to wonder whether a large eye could see more or less. Hawks, it seems, can see small creatures from high altitudes—can, in fact, see more than a man looking down at the ground from a plane. But what of elephants? Aren’t their eyes larger than a man’s? And what can they see? Trees, grass, lions. I wondered if she would be able to see what was in the books. I began to worry that she might soon need glasses.

  But the books made her so happy. During those days I never saw her without a book in her hand, and at dinner she would tell me the stories and explain all about them. Gulliver, Alice, and Gargantua saw everything so differently. Of course, the world called them mad, but somehow their plight gave her comfort. The people in the books became her friends. She championed their causes and sympathized with them. She read Frankenstein, the old Greek stories of Homer, and I noticed that the more she read, the faster she grew. I became alarmed. I moved her to a vacant hangar and built in conveniences as best I could, but it was apparent she would soon be coming through the roof. At last, I was on the brink of telling her she would have to stop reading when I noticed she had stopped of her own accord. She could no longer hold the books, she said. They got lost in the lines of her hand. Turning the pages was hopeless. I suppose I could have found the time to read to her. But I admit I was desperate to contain her.

  In the days that followed though, I was tempted to reverse myself, she grew so despondent. At night I dreamed of a towering cathedral on a mountain in the clouds. I would fly my plane up to the top of it, and there she would be! My beautiful daughter, wearing the cathedral like a gown, the sun making a crown on her head. I would circle my plane around and around while she read to me from a book as big as the sky.

  At last an idea came to me. I worked on it for several weeks, modifying parachute harness, outfitting the plane. It was an old B-52 a friend of mine had bought when a commercial venture went belly-up. I figured the angle of the sun so it wouldn’t be in her eyes. The night before, I told her my plan. Tomorrow you’ll see yourself! She looked at me in disbelief. The morning was fine. We were up and away by six-thirty. By seven we were circling over Lake Okanalala. When I showed her the harness, she was very excited. She put it on as I explained about the chute. Only for emergency. I’m going to lower you with the winch—you won’t be free-falling—I’ll have you, I said. The chute is just in case. She understood. She did.

  I lowered her away, circling over the lake. The sun was just right. We were about a half-mile up when we passed over the water for the first time. There she was, filling up the sky, the lake. The look on her face, I could see it in her reflection. Well. It was worth a lot.

  We just didn’t guess, although I sometimes feel I should have. I’ve thought about it, of course. Whenever her limits were removed, she grew so fast—she filled any space within minutes. I don’t know if, being so, there’s any seeing your place in the world. The plane’s engine droned heavily and coughed. Her back arched against the clouds, blocking the air under the wings, and we began to plummet. I tried to reel her in. But even if the winch had been able to pull her up, she wouldn’t have fit in the plane anymore. She might have cut the line to save me, or to free herself. But suddenly the plane leveled off and she dropped away, her arms spread wide, soaring and falling toward the lake. Her body made a deep trough, splashing droplets on the plane’s windshield, and towering concentric waves began to roll towards the shore. Within a few seconds the waters closed over, and she was gone.

  I still go out there now and then. Circle around the lake and watch my plane’s tiny reflection in the sky blue water below. People say it was a miracle nobody was killed that day. And I think of her telling me about Odysseus, how he tricked the Cyclops and escaped by calling himself Nobody, and I’m ashamed we live in such an ignorant way.

  Wexford Strawberries

  Brigette Kinney

  Tendrils of fog writhed across the water, spread themselves thinly over the windshield, and then danced off behind the little car, driven by a frigid breeze. Brian had driven past the white line and emphatic STOP spanning the road, past the forbidding caution-yellow grid pattern painted on the last stre
tch of blacktop. The headlights illuminated a scant ten feet of the slipway ahead, a smooth ramp sloping down into the lapping black edge of the Shannon.

  According to the map, it should have been a journey of two and a half hours: a jog southeast through Limerick to get past the River Shannon, then a straightish run southwest to Tralee, and finally an easy stretch on the Dingle Road to Nora. Simple. Brian unlocked his stiff fingers from the steering wheel, gingerly working the chilled joints. He had turned the engine off an hour earlier as the gas level dipped below a quarter tank. Maisie was asleep in her car seat, head lolling above a shapeless bundle of thick sweaters, mouth open, arms and legs splayed. White puffs rose and dissipated with each breath.

  A single headlight bobbed in the rear-view mirror, growing with the sound of an engine until a motorcycle circled, reversed and came to rest beside Brian’s window. The rider raised his visor. Brian rolled down his window.

  “Last ferry sailed over an hour ago.”

  “I know.”

  “The drive around takes about an hour, but it’s faster than waiting till morning.”

  “Right.