Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [17]
Who did she think she had been up until now? Brice once said, punning on her name, —You’re a view from above. An airy spirit.
But from this new vantage, what kind of view had that been, and how free a spirit was she?
Never having had reason to believe otherwise, she’d presumed for all the world that she knew herself, insofar as anybody could know such a thing. Absurd hubris, but the idea had endured through two dozen years. All that was undone by this news. Busted, shattered, despite her assurances otherwise to her parents. Still, lighting yet another cigarette, Ariel remembered fondly the visceral sense of being a little girl sure about this or that. Of knowing she’d been born not far from this very spot. That every night at eight her father would read her to sleep. That her mother would walk her to school until she was old enough to get there by herself. Trusting the basics, the building blocks.
Most of what she’d always believed remained true, though, did it not? The problem was degrees of familiarity fading toward the unknowable. Brice’s mother, the religious one in the family, once told her that her name was also that of a desert city in the Book of Isaiah. How could she save the person Ariel from the fate of her namesake city, destroyed millennia ago? Architects know better than to build on uncertain bedrock, but Ariel lacked an architect’s skills, never having faced the need before. One clear memory could prove that much—the memory of a sharply determined city kid on an innocent afternoon in deep December, asked along with the other children in her grade-school class to make a faithful rendering of the buildings outside their bedroom windows. She could recall her excitement on that darkening day which threatened the first snowfall of the season, and the glorious dread her teacher stirred in her beating heart with that word faithful.
She pictured herself setting out pencils and smoothing flat the sheet of heavy paper on her homework table. Her cat, a Russian blue named Buddha, arched his back on the windowsill, then chattered at the wretched pigeons huddled together, shivering in their shabby feathers on a ledge across the street. She pictured her young face, tongue caught at the corner of her mouth, as she began her drawing of ornate granite pediments, eyes glancing up, focusing, down, re-focusing. She couldn’t resist adding one of those poor birds, beak tucked into its breast against the storm. Knowing her teacher would disapprove, she remembered adding another, a companion. Then others, pigeons with impromptu feathers and plump breasts, stroked with her quickening pencil. The building started to disappear beneath its growing menagerie of pigeons, but the birds were there, weren’t they, clinging to the narrow ledge, part of the personality of the facade? This was faith, wasn’t it? A faithful interpretation of the building out her window.
Ironic that just this year she’d had that drawing framed as a reminder of unassuming rebelliousness. Whenever she looked at it hung on her adult wall, she could clearly hear the teacher’s chiding voice—she’d been right to assume it wouldn’t meet with approval—dismissing the girl’s shy if precocious contention that birds gave the sketch relative scale.
What exquisite dissidence, she thought. A quality her parents had always cultivated rather than censured. Something precious she wanted never to lose. Something more useful now than ever.
She resurrected with equal ease Brice’s own rebellious nature. For one, his refusal to celebrate Christmas.
—Look at this, calling her over to that same childhood window. —Look at them down there dragging home their dead Christmas trees. It’s delusional.
—Delusional, Ariel mugged.
—You know why Santa’s suit is red? Because the Coca-Cola advertising department decided sixty, seventy years ago that red matched the color of their product logo during holiday ad campaigns.
Another myth smashed to smithereens. She nodded.
—Isn’t a pine tree better off