LIGHTNESS

March 1985

SHE THOUGHT OF IT AS the lightness; that was the name she gave it. The first time it happened, Mary was a little girl, alone. This took place in her bedroom in the apartment on Naomi Street in North Minneapolis, in a time before her sister, Cheryl, was born. Mary remembered nothing else about this place, for they lived there less than a year; the building was owned by a relative, and her father managed it, collecting rents and maintaining the apartments and grounds, while going to college at night. This was a difficult period for her parents, a time of small children and no money, and, as Mary later learned, her parents had nearly divorced. Her father would tell her about this on a trip they would take together to San Francisco, the year before Mary herself was married. Though the tale was meant to be cautionary-marriage is a long haul, he told her, like carrying a sofa up a flight of stairs and trying to wedge it through a narrow doorway-Mary also understood that the story was a happy one: her parents had, after all, stayed together, and by the end of that year her mother was pregnant again. She told him then about the hummingbird, her only memory of that year. They were standing together on the fantail of a ferryboat, crossing the choppy bay. A hummingbird, her father said, laughing and shaking his head in the wind. All that arguing, and what you remember is a hummingbird. My God, we thought we’d scarred you for life.

This was how she remembered it: yellow sunlight and the high, purple smell of the lilacs; her own tiny body, and the feel of a hummingbird’s wings beating inside her. Their apartment was on the ground floor; beneath Mary’s bedroom window was a lilac bush. On a summer afternoon, Mary was kneeling on her bed to look out the window when the bird appeared, darting between the blossoms on a blur of wings. Never had she seen such a bird. It seemed not to fly but to float-its long beak and inexplicable aeronautics made her think it might be a kind of insect-and yet whenever it moved, it seemed to disappear, reemerging at some adjacent spot of air as if it had not traveled through space but around it. Pure pleasure filled her, watching this wonderful new thing at her window, when suddenly she wasn’t watching: they were one and the same, Mary and the hummingbird and the lilac bush, and all the dense bright heat of the summer afternoon. She felt herself suspended; she seemed, like the hummingbird, to be both in one place and also everywhere, her consciousness joined to another, far larger than her own. The sensation was new to her-she had no words for it-and yet it did not frighten her; she wanted to close her eyes to make it last. She did, and thought: Who’s there? Who’s there? But when she opened her eyes she found no one; even the bird was gone.

The second time she was at a friend’s birthday party; Mary was nine, or ten. Hats, balloons, games that seemed childish but were still fun: The girl whose party it was, Simone, had invited no boys, or else they simply had not come. It was February, a Saturday afternoon in Minnesota, and the house, a rambler in the same subdivision where Mary lived, was a modest variation of her own. The party was held in the basement, a low-ceilinged room with brown paneling and shag carpet the color of moss. Mary’s mother kept a bag of presents in the coat closet for birthday parties, and Mary had selected Spirograph, which now embarrassed her: all the other presents were better, more grown-up. Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker, a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft, a poster of David Cassidy, a neon-purple Hula Hoop-the last a child’s toy but also something older girls did, girls who had hips and waists and could keep the thing spinning for hours. What could she have been thinking with the Spirograph? Still Simone had thanked her, pausing dutifully to open the package and insert the pen into the gears, drawing a single fleur-de-lis before putting it to the side. Spirograph, Simone said, smiling. Cool. I haven’t used this for years.

They sang “Happy Birthday” and ate the pink-frosted cake, and when Simone’s mother had left them in the basement, one of the girls, Simone’s older cousin Rose, showed them how to practice kissing with a pillow. They taped the poster of David Cassidy on the wall, and took turns kissing this as well, tilting their faces as they knew they were supposed to; you had to be careful, Rose instructed, not to go straight in, or you would bump noses. When this was done Rose took one of the empty pop-bottles and placed it, on its side, on the coffee table. The girls all sat around the table while Rose explained the rules and gave the bottle a lazy spin.

Mary watched as the bottle turned on the wood-it seemed to go around forever-and then it came to rest, pointing at Mary like a finger. All the girls laughed, though Mary knew this wasn’t personal: they were simply relieved that the bottle had pointed at someone else.

Mary curled her hair behind her ears. “Sure,” she heard herself say, “I’ll kiss you.”

“Remember what I said about the noses,” Rose warned.

It happened so quickly it was nothing. Mary had never been kissed on the lips before-her parents did not do this-and she leaned across the table, letting her eyes fall closed and trying to think of David Cassidy, and kissed Rose. So this is kissing, she thought. A pause fell over the room-Mary felt this silence, as she was also aware of the taste of pink cake-frosting and watermelon Lip Smackers-and when their faces parted Mary realized that with this kiss the game had ended. The bottle was a dare, meant to be accepted only once; because Mary had done this, the others were absolved.

“When you kiss a boy,” Rose said confidently, “you’ll want to use your tongue.”

Mary said nothing; this did not seem true. Use it how? Around them the girls laughed again; they had no idea either.

“You’ll see,” Rose said.

It was later, on the car ride home, that she felt it. Darkness was falling; the snow, in great piles beside the roadway and the houses, had turned a pale and lifeless gray. At her waist Mary was holding the small party favor that each of the girls had gotten, a jewelry-making kit wrapped in cellophane, and her father was smoking, tapping the ashes from his cigarette through a slender crack in his window. How was the party? he wanted to know. Did she have fun with her friends? What was that there, honey, that little thing on her lap? Was it a prize that she had won? The moment was common, and yet everything about it had begun to feel strange to Mary. More than strange: The smell of her father’s cigarette and the close heat of the car, the slipperiness of cold vinyl beneath her jeans, the remembered taste of Rose’s kiss-all of it was both less than real and somehow more, as if she were dissolving into sensation itself, like a lozenge on the tongue. A warm weightlessness flooded her, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and she wondered if she had responded to her father’s questions, though it seemed so; her father was beside her, nodding and puffing away. Mary closed her eyes. In school they had been warned about drugs, and all the girls had read Go Ask Alice, both thrilled and frightened by this story of a girl so like them who had sailed away as easily as a balloon cut from its string. Daddy, she wanted to say, Daddy, something is happening, but these words did not come. A new awareness filled her, a sense that someone was very near, inside her even, a presence without form or substance yet somehow known to her; she felt her lips move to speak its name but as she did, it vanished altogether, and when she opened her eyes she found only the lights of her own house looking back at her, glowing to greet her in the winter twilight. Her house. Simone’s party. The car in the drive. Just like that she was back from wherever she had gone.