White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online

church once stood, and some of them are rich, and beautiful, and poised, and witty, and well-dressed, and always have been. When they walk down the hall together, it is like a wall of power, all ecstatic laughter and glamour.
    They are like gods among the rest of us, walking faster, looking better.
    And those kids knew who Phil was, but I was invisible, and fat. Why would he ask me? When he asked, I shrugged, half thinking that this was a joke, a prank his buddies had put him up to. “Sure,” I said, as if I were doing him a favor
—no skin off my nose
—and he looked a bit deflated: one of those fireworks on the Fourth of July that fizzles out halfway into the sky.
     
    That night, the night of the winter formal, I was 140 pounds of myself in a long pink dress, but Phil didn’t seem to care. He walked from his house next door to get me in a rented tuxedo with big sixties lapels—brand-new but out of fashion—and he looked good in it, like a mock-up of the perfect first date. Teenage heartthrob. Lean but muscled.
    My mother had taken me to buy the dress, and everything I tried on displeased her. “Your coloring is good,” she often told me, by which she meant the pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes that mirrored hers, “but you’re forty pounds overweight.” I would step out of a dressing room with something long and ruffled on, and she’d shake her head and sigh.
    Finally, the pink one was the last straw.
    “Oh, well,” she said, “it’ll have to suffice.”
     
    And I was painfully aware of the fat as I danced: its folds, its white cream, its fluid pressure like a rain-swollen creek beneath the dress, which made noises like a thousand little girls whispering viciously against my flesh.
    Garden Heights, Ohio, is not a place to be plump, to be homely, or malodorous, or scarred, or shy. There were girls from my high school at that dance in strapless black sheaths and four-inch heels. Girls as flawless as mannequins, their feet preformed to fit into their mother’s expensive shoes. They didn’t seem to have been born with the nuisances of blood or skin or shame.
    Next to them, at this winter formal, I looked like a feminine whale, paddling the air with my thick fins, stuck between a couple of icebergs, going nowhere fast—a sympathetic character, perhaps, but not lovely at all. If, to anyone, I appeared sexual, it would have been the way in which the inside of a cat’s ears are sexual. As nude as scrubbed fruit. A glimpse of something vaguely obscene—obscene because you hadn’t wanted to see it, because you don’t want to think of something as vulnerable, as
personal
, as a fat girl’s sexuality exposed.
    And Phil, in his long-limbed blue tux, seemed to be perpetually dancing the funky chicken—arms jerking around his shoulders as if someone were yanking at him with strings from the sky. He thought he could dance—believed in his abilities on the dance floor with the same kind of stubborn confidence with which he believed he was handsome—and, after I got over my initial embarrassment for him, all that energy let loose like a flightless bird beneath the snuffed gym lights, I started to believe that he could dance, too. Watching him flail in front of me as I shuffled in front of him, I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you
could
. Like those dreams of flying—dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body—if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you’d crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.
    Phil didn’t stop to think. He just danced.
    We both danced, all night. Couldn’t stop. Out of breath within half an hour, but we danced nonstop for three more hours.
     
    A few years ago, about a hundred miles into the country from our suburb, there was a farm plagued by stray voltage. An electric current under the pasture was surging up from Toledo Edison, shocking the cows, turning their hooves to