How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

by Connie May Fowler

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

New York Times -Bestselling Author: A “compelling and memorable” novel of a frustrated woman’s ordinary life suddenly taking flight ( Lincoln Journal Star). Set amid the lush pine forests and rich savannahs of Florida’s Northern Panhandle, this novel tells the story of one woman whose life until now has been fairly normal. She’s thirtysomething and married and goes about her daily routine. But we soon discover that Clarissa’s life has been burdened by ghosts and an indifferent husband—and like a butterfly in a chrysalis, she is poised on the precipice of great change. Today, for the first time in her predictable existence, she has awakened to the realization that she has had enough. Suddenly, wanting nothing more than to spread her wings and set her heart free, Clarissa will have to find a way to do the unthinkable . . . “Florida novelist Clarissa Burden is suffering from writer’s block. She lacks no creativity when daydreaming up death scenarios for her philandering buffoon of a husband, but when it comes time to put fingers to keyboard, her mind is blank. However, on June 21, 2006 (the longest, hottest day of the year), Clarissa will encounter no less than a multitude of ghosts, a one-armed angel, a one-eyed man, a sexy young love interest, a dwarf circus, and a host of critters. Each one in some way will grant her the courage it will take to escape the dull monotony of her day-to-day existence and write a new story.” — Booklist “Magical, funny, at times heartbreaking . . . Compact and enchanting, yet achingly dark, it reminds me of the novels of Alice McDermott and Alice Hoffman that I love to read.” —Mary Morris, author of Gateway to the Moon “Funny and heartening.” — The Miami Herald

Release date: April 1, 2010

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 286

Sample

“Folksy and sophisticated, humorous yet at times grave… seductive and thoroughly satisfying.”

Library Journal

“A wacky, witty, self-reflective romp.”

—Tampa Tribune

“[This book] is a mush of genres… But it is a lush, ripe, heated, fragrant, and very often pleasurable mush… Kudos to Fowler
for her imagination and her imagery.”


—HuffingtonPost.com

“Fowler lends magic and voice to the singular Florida landscape and gives an interesting twist on the novel; she blurs the
line between the written and the writer.”


—Booklist

“Fowler’s commanding skill at creating a sultry, vivid sense of place makes this book memorable.”

—Miami Herald

“A fine novel… The quirky characters are as rich in detail as they are in humanness.”

—Winston-Salem Journal

“Fowler has created a quilt of characters and plot that come together into one very satisfying read.”

—Florida Times-Union

“An imaginative, magical tale… This novel is rich with imagery, vividly capturing everything her title character sees.”

—Charleston Post and Courier (SC)


“A little magic goes a long way.”

—St. Petersburg Times

“Fowler is a storyteller extraordinaire… You can feel the summer heat in the lazy Southern town, catch the scent of roses, and empathize with Clarissa’s self-imposed
entrapment… So powerful is Fowler’s narrative that you’re left to wonder just what passes unseen around us.”


—BarcelonaReview.com

“A whimsical, emotional tale… a perfect read for those upcoming days of summer heat.”

—Wichita Falls Times Record News (TX)


“In this magical, funny, at times heartbreaking book, Connie May Fowler has shown us that even a housefly can have a point
of view. Compact and enchanting, yet achingly dark, it reminds me of the novels of Alice McDermott and Alice Hoffman that
I love to read. Now Fowler gives us a midsummer’s night dream of her own!”


—Mary Morris, author of Revenge

“A soaring achievement… Fowler challenges readers with a most original voice and manner. Her prose glitters, and her mix of
psychological and spiritual truth, of realism and fantasy, takes readers up and away.”


—Naples Florida Weekly (FL)


On June 21, 2006, at seven a.m. in a malarial crossroads named Hope, Florida, the thermometer old Mrs. Hickok had nailed to
the WELCOME TO HOPE sign fifteen years prior read ninety-two degrees. It would get a lot hotter that day, and there was plenty of time for it
to do so, this being the summer solstice. But ninety-two at seven a.m., sunrise occurring only three hours earlier, suggested
a harsh reckoning was in store for this swampy southern outpost. The weight of the humidity-laden situation pressed down on
nearly all of the village’s inhabitants, including its sundry wildlife—squirrels, raccoons, possums, rats, deer, and one lone
bobcat—each of whom, immersed in its particular brand of animal consciousness, paused (some even in slumber), noses twitching,
tails snapping, all steeling themselves against the inevitable onslaught of the day’s hellish heat.


Hope’s only living being to appear unfazed by the rising mercury was Clarissa Burden, a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d moved
to the north Florida hamlet six months prior with her husband of seven years. Trapped as she was in a haze of insecurities
and self-doubt, and being long divorced from her animal consciousness, she peered out her opened kitchen window into her rose
garden and felt an undoing coming on that was totally unrelated to the weather. It was as if her brain stem, corpuscles, gallbladder, nail cuticles, the mole on her left shoulder, the scar on her knobby shin, the tender corpus of her womb—the
whole shebang—were about to surrender. But to what, she did not know.


She watched her husband—a multimedia artist who dabbled in painting, filmmaking, sculpture, pottery, and photography as long
as his muse wore no clothes—alternately sketch and photograph a sweating young woman. With the exception of a silver ring
piercing her belly button, the woman stood in the bright light of morning amid Clarissa’s roses as naked as the moment she
was born.


Clarissa leaned windward to get a better look. Barefoot and still wearing the clothes she had slept in—a rumpled T-shirt and
dirt-stained shorts—she tapped her finger on the screen’s dusty mesh, wondering what it felt like to be her husband’s muse.
Was the young woman racked with insecurity, fearing the artist was casting judgment with each stroke of his charcoal pencil?
Or was she empowered, fully aware of the spell that flesh cast on weak men?


Her husband, Igor “Iggy” Dupuy, paused from his sketching and wiped perspiration from his bald pate and big face. “You have
beautiful skin, even when you sweat.” Clarissa took in every lyrical syllable her husband uttered. And while unhappy with
their intent—even if it was a harmless observation—Clarissa had never grown tired of her husband’s accent. South African by
birth, of Dutch ancestry, and American by choice, Iggy was actually born Igor Pretoriun but changed his last name, favoring
a French influence, to distance himself from his birth country’s racial past. She appreciated that in him. It was something
they had in common, both coming from a land of racial sins and both feeling it forever necessary to let people know that the
old politic was never their politic. He was a tall, strapping man with hands twice the size of Clarissa’s. It was one of the
things that caused her to fall in love with him eight years ago, this stature that far outpaced her own.


Unwilling to continue to spy—that’s what it felt like to her, but only because Iggy wanted her nowhere near him while he worked—she
floated her attention past her husband and the young woman, beyond the towering magnolia with its opulent white flowers that
Clarissa so loved, to the field south of the rose garden. There, hidden amid tall blades of grass, a black snake shed its
skin. The snake, nearly finished with the process, soaked up the sun’s early heat, enjoying the sensation of warmth on freshly
minted scales, while all but two inches of its old self draped behind in the grass like a dull transparent cape, an afterthought.


If she had known the snake was out there, Clarissa’s sense of imminent implosion might have lifted, because, while not stupid,
she was superstitious and believed that the presence of a snake meant she was going to come into money. Without good cause
except for a writer’s ingrained insistence on avoiding clichés, she had long overlooked the importance of shed skin and what
that might predict. She batted at a fly that had been pestering her ever since she’d put on the coffee. If it weren’t so hot
and if her husband weren’t out there with a naked woman, she would have gone for a walk. They owned ten highly treed acres,
and she was taken with it all: leaf and petal, blade and stamen. The north Florida landscape reminded her of abundance; it
was such a far cry from the south Florida, palm-tree-stuttered trailer park of her youth.


She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. A cacophony of scents enveloped her, the floral high notes mingling with the musky
scent of things dying. Clarissa was proud of her garden. It was becoming what she had envisioned the first time she’d stepped
onto the property: her own private Eden, genteel and spilling over with rosebuds, jasmine, pendulous wisteria. Every time
she tucked a plant’s roots into the rich soil, she felt the distance between her adult life and her fatherless childhood grow
ever greater. And that was a very good thing. She opened her eyes. The snake wandered into taller grass, leaving its former
skin behind. Clarissa saw the grass sway but didn’t think a thing of it. She was meandering through her garden’s history:
how she had, without her husband’s labor or input, dreamed, planned, tilled, planted, sweated over, bled over, and adored
her garden into existence. Wind rippled through the branches, bringing not a respite from the weather, but a mobile wall of
heat. Clarissa tightened her ponytail, shimmying it up a tad higher on her head, and decided that she hadn’t wanted his help.
Not really. Her husband ignoring dirt, and plants, and compost was, she knew, the least of her matrimonial worries.


Iggy’s big voice cut through the humid air. “Aye, Christ, this heat!”

“But when you sweat,” his model said, “sex is the best.”

“Fowking A, sweetie, fowking A!” That’s how he said “fuck,” as if the vowel were an o; stupid man. Determined to ignore them, Clarissa scanned the far boundary of her yard, where the regimental hand of her design
gave way to the exuberant chaos of an oak grove. She watched a pileated woodpecker on those long wings with their lightning
bolt patches of black and white dart through the cloud-free sky, and she considered the possibility that the malaise her marriage
had slipped into was (a) inevitable; (b) temporary; and (c) possibly fatal. The woodpecker zigzagged over the treetops, cawed
raucously, and then disappeared into the swamp’s verdant green veil.


Batting again at that annoying fly, Clarissa thought, Iggy’s art is his kingdom, but I am not his queen. He had many queens,
models all: She was very clear about that issue. And also this one: He had not touched her—not so much as a peck on the cheek,
an arm around her waist, a caress amid dreams on a warm night—in nearly two years. His amorous intentions had not stopped like a switch being flipped. They had slowly—over a period of… Clarissa wasn’t sure, maybe four or five years—evaporated.
Maybe, she thought as she scratched at a raw mosquito bite on her elbow, this is normal; maybe all men lose interest in their
wives; maybe the whole “seven-year itch” thing should be renamed “24/7, 365 days from the get-go” itch.


As she stood there, looking at her garden teeming with hidden but complex activity—grubs eating tender roots, parasites sucking
precious sap from nimble stems, mole rats digging underground labyrinths—she thought back to the first time they had met.
They were both living in Gainesville. She had taken a visiting writers gig at the University of Florida, and he was an artist
everyone in town wanted to know, because in those days he was funny and expansive; he didn’t constantly bitch, and the whole
foreigner thing was in.


A mutual friend who taught in the History Department, Jack Briggs, had invited a dozen or so people over to watch President
Clinton’s televised address regarding an alleged tryst he’d had with a White House intern. She and Iggy never saw the president
speak, because not long after Jack introduced them in the kitchen, they wandered onto the back porch, where they settled into
a couple of rocking chairs and talked for a good three hours.


Clarissa had been immediately struck by Iggy’s otherness—his height, his big-boned frame, his Afrikaner accent that, she would
discover, grew thick and impenetrable when he was angry or drunk. He was sixteen years her senior, and because she’d never
known her father, she’d decided an older man in her life might offer stability.


Standing in June’s webbed heat, thinking about that first meeting, Clarissa felt her heart swell with love and hate. She remembered
gazing up at him, thinking he had the most amazing imperial blue and to-drown-in eyes, when he said, “I fowking hate the Afrikaners and what they did to the country. All the whites should leave, including my family. It is not their land. It
is the black man’s. Every last drop of white blood should leave the continent.”


He placed his immense hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch thrilled her, as did his passion. Still young and inexperienced
in the art of seduction, she tried to appear slightly bored, because boredom—she thought at the time—was an interesting, artsy
conceit. “So, your family is still there?”


As men are wont to do with their facial hair, especially when it’s the only hair they have, he stroked his beard, which, she
decided, made him appear thoughtful, smart, and I’m-too-sexy-for-my-politics in a Marxian sort of way. “They will never leave,”
he said, leveling his eyes to hers. “They love their money and their land too much.” He swirled his Scotch, studying it, and
then leaned in very close to her. She could smell the oak-and-oat aroma on his breath. “But it’s not their land. They stole
it and delude themselves into thinking God gave it to them.” He tapped his temple. “My parents don’t deserve me to be their
son. My sisters and brothers don’t deserve to breathe the same air as I.” He shot her a smile that was a nearly irresistible
mix of self-deprecation and ego. “Racist bastards!”


As he spoke, his Dutch face, which seemed to Clarissa to be impossibly long and redolent with the hint of shadows, reminded
her of someone Rembrandt would have painted. And at that moment, she had wanted him to kiss her. She found the very idea of
him disowning his family on moral and political grounds to be courageous. Blinded by the hormones of early love, she did not
see that it might also indicate a man who easily divorced himself from loyalties and truth. She did not ask, “If a man walks
away from his mother because he seriously disagrees with her politics, how deep is his allegiance to a wife?”


Clarissa picked at the mosquito bite until it bled. The fly settled on the window’s top sash, and from there, the scent of her skin and faint suggestion of blood enveloping him, he watched
her. Though a mere insect, the fly had a complex existence, full of near death experiences and matters of the heart. With
a life span of only fifteen to thirty days—and that was without humans swatting at you—he lived in a perpetual state of pregnant urgency, as if each moment might be his last. He was well
aware that he was in love with this human who, he thought, with her fair skin that often carried the scent of ripe apples,
was the most beautiful creature in his world. At that moment, while she searched her yard for reasons he didn’t grasp, the
fly wanted nothing more than to light in her blond curls and never leave.


Oblivious to his intentions (how could one ever know the hidden desires of insects?), Clarissa ignored him. Her gaze drifted
from the fringe of lesser oaks and skinny towers of bald cypress to the sprawling backdrop of a giant sentinel oak whose trunk
was of such circumference, she believed it would take ten people, arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip, to encircle it.
This is where the swamp began. Jake’s Hell was a gator-and-mosquito-infested expanse of fetid water that led, as far as she
could tell, to absolutely nowhere. But the oak was beautiful; its widespread crown was home to a heron couple that rose daily
into the dawn sky, squawking as they ascended, and returned at dusk—one behind the other—still squawking. In her six months
here, Clarissa had grown attached to the birds and their noisy pronouncements. They were a real team: hunting, gathering,
loving. And she found herself, even on this still young and fragile June solstice, hoping that the herons portended change:
a wild turn toward passion in her marriage. This morning she had missed the birds; dawn had come earlier than she had expected.
As she turned away from the window and the garden where her husband was asking his model to look toward the wisteria vine,
and yes, yes, lower her chin just a bit, Clarissa concluded that the detour in her routine—not seeing the birds take wing at first
light—was the reason for her unease.


She stepped into the center of the room—no chance to watch her husband from there—and decided she needed something to keep
her unsettled mind occupied. Perhaps she should be a couch potato for the day. Watch TV, turn on CNN. The war in Iraq—the
casualties, the lies, the misery delivered on the wings of ineptitude, the casual quagmire of it all—infuriated her, and she
wondered why Americans, including herself, hadn’t taken to the streets, demanding an end to an immoral war. It was as if the
entire world, in the early years of a new century, had given up believing in higher callings. Peace, love, and understanding
felt like quaint ideas proffered by naive people. She absentmindedly rubbed the back of her left calf with her right foot’s
big toe and took in her farmhouse kitchen—its marble-topped oak island where she kept her mixer and rolling pin and food processor,
the Marilyn Monroe cookie jar that was stuffed with pink sugar substitute packets (the fly lit on the tip of Marilyn’s nose;
Clarissa shooed it away), the jadeite dishware stacked in pale green heaps behind glass-front cabinet doors—and she decided
that the new century didn’t feel new at all. It felt overwhelming, as if change were out of reach and stagnation all the rage.


Clarissa tapped her fingers on the marble—it was still cool to the touch—and noticed that quivers of dried rosemary littered
her Spanish tile floor. Yes indeed, the floor needed a good cleaning. Her ovarian shadow women (that’s what she called the
exuberant chorus of voices that swirled up from, she supposed, the depths of her unconscious and did their best to alternately
ease her rising anxieties and inflame them beyond all reason) clucked and twittered, but she could not understand a damn thing
they said.


She grabbed her broom and began sweeping, gathering the rosemary quivers into a diminutive, spiky pile, when finally, one voice—it sounded suspiciously like Bea Arthur—broke through
the chaos and asked, “Don’t you have a novel to write?”


Then they all chimed in, prattling among themselves that, yes, she surely did, whatever was she thinking, it was high time
she stopped procrastinating, sweeping up rosemary wasn’t going to pay the mortgage.


Clarissa shoved the broom into the space between her fridge and the wall. “Oh, be quiet,” she said, exasperation cooling her
tendency toward long vowels. Noticing that the coffeepot was still on, she flipped it off. She knew the ovarian shadow women
were correct, but she also felt helpless to remedy the situation. Clarissa Burden, author of two highly acclaimed and best-selling
novels, had not written one decent sentence in over thirteen months. The longer the dry spell dragged on, the greater her
fear of facing the virtual blank pages of her word processor. And the fear on that June morning was enough to inspire in her
a slew of mundane tasks—sweeping, dusting, vacuuming, dishwashing—all designed to prevent her from laying even a single finger
on her keyboard.


She pulled her T-shirt away from her body—she was finally beginning to succumb to the high morning heat—and thought about
closing the windows and cranking the air-conditioning, but if she did that, she wouldn’t be able to hear what was being said
in her garden. Besides, in these past few weeks she had learned just how challenging it was to cool a circa 1823 home.


She retrieved the dustpan from its hiding place behind the door and, using her hand, pushed the rosemary into it. As she walked
over to the trash can, she considered the advantages of hygiene. Maybe she should shower and dress and put on makeup. This
was not like her, to sloth around in dirt-stained shorts, a T-shirt reeking with the sleep-stink, her face not yet washed;
but she had awoken to the solstice, fully convinced that nothing interesting was going to happen on this clear, hot day, so therefore there was no need for pretense or the appearance of hopefulness.
She attempted to dump the herb pile into the can, but the wind gusted, scattering the rosemary.


“Shit,” she muttered. Even the wind was conspiring against her. On a normal day, Clarissa would have tried again, but being
addled, she simply gave in, returned the dustpan to its hiding place, walked over to her sink, washed her hands, and wiped
her hands on her belly as if she had no manners whatsoever.


As she leaned against the counter, considering her next move, music, faint at first and then more vigorous, wafted into the
kitchen, but she couldn’t tell from where. Tilting her head, she tried to zero in: a fiddle swirling a strange and lovely
melody. Two nights prior, she had drifted up from a deep sleep, feeling guided and tugged by a similar tune. She had dismissed
it as dream music—syncopated, foreign. But here she was, wide awake, and it was back.


She walked into the central room that, architecturally, was your typical shotgun affair (you could shoot a gun through the
front door and the bullet would, barring impact with a human being, a hound dog, or ill-placed furniture, zip straight through
the house and out the back door). But the large space with its gleaming French crystal chandelier and gracious curved staircase
left no doubt that this house had little in common with typical southern shotgun shacks; unlike Clarissa’s home, they appealed
solely by virtue of their simplicity.


Clarissa peered out of the wavy, thick glass of the double doors that led onto the back porch and into the garden to see if
her husband had brought out the boom box. Her red geraniums, planted in terra-cotta pots, lined either side of the railing.
In the halcyon light of the morning sun, they appeared too perfect to be real. She did not see a boom box or any other sort
of music-playing apparatus but was aware that her husband had just touched the hard edge of the model’s jaw with his index finger and angled her face to the light. She was also aware that the model closed
her eyes—probably against the glare—and that when she did, the music faded altogether.


The ovarian shadow woman who sounded like Bea Arthur said, “You have got to get away from those idiots in the backyard.”

“Yes, yes, I do,” Clarissa said, standing beneath the chandelier, not noticing that the fly had lit on one of its lower crystal
prisms. She wanted to feel sunny, bountiful, in control, not jealous and ticked. Her hands itched to dig in dirt. Dirt, without
a doubt, made her happy. And then she thought, Of course! Flowers! Cut some flowers; the front yard is chock-full of them.
But before she could get to her pruning shears, which she kept in the laundry room situated down a hall off of the kitchen
and to the right, or to the front door and outside to the rosebushes she’d planted five months ago by the porch steps, she
heard Iggy instruct his model to spread her legs wider.


At that very moment, under the soft changing light of the chandelier, Clarissa Burden wanted her husband dead. She stomped
through her kitchen, down a hallway (the house, like her brain, was a maze of hallways leading to rooms that she frequented
so rarely, they sometimes surprised her), into the laundry room, a realization washing over her that would, in due course,
change her forever: Not only did she want Iggy dead, she spent at least 90 percent of her waking hours and a good portion
of her dreamtime fantasizing about said death. Oh, my God, she thought as she reached for the shears she kept on a hook to
the right of the dryer, it was true. And disgusting. Contemptible. Obscene. She gripped the shears, unlocked them, and said,
“Holy shit.” She’d gone from being a writer who spun whole worlds from her imagination, populating thousands of pages with
stories people wanted to read, to being a discontented wife consumed with spousal death scenarios.


There was no denying it. These send-him-to-the-grave vignettes welled up randomly inside the withering fields of her imagination,
devoid top to bottom of literary merit. She searched her laundry basket for that pair of gardening gloves she’d washed just
yesterday. Could it be, she wondered, sifting through underwear and tees (the fly now perched on the dryer door), that these
death dreams were consuming every last drop of her creative energy? Were these negatively charged fantasies the source, the
cause, perhaps the very nexus of her block? In an instant—blink, blink—what had the makings of a lengthy self-interrogation
came to a whiplashing halt as she, with no will or discipline, tumbled straight into the dark heart of a death scenario rerun—one
of her most popular, judging by how frequently she tuned in. She continued to search for her gloves, but in action only; in
her head, she was on the scene of a grisly tragedy, one that changed little from episode to episode.


Clarissa saw herself with twenty-twenty clarity: Wearing a yellow sundress and black strappy sandals, she stood at the edge
of the cane, cotton, and sorghum fields that lined the two-lane blacktop leading into town. Why she was by the road in the
middle of an agricultural area, she didn’t know. But she didn’t need to; this was a fantasy, not a novel. Enveloped in the
stench of manure and pesticides, she shaded her eyes with her hand and watched her husband, who had just left the house to
attend to whatever affairs a multimedia artist must attend to, zip by in his green Honda Civic with the Monica Lewinsky bobblehead
doll grooving on the dash. The sun was so intense, the asphalt appeared unstable, as if Florida’s legendary heat had transmuted
the road into a river of molten black lava.


She saw, with the aid of God’s omniscient eye, her husband squint into the shimmying distance,. . .