Changeling

Nancy Jane Moore

Chapter 2

…an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

Maggie Hines lived in Wichita Falls, Texas, a city on the Great Plains that sweep from Central Canada all the way to the Texas/Mexico border. The Great Plains possess their own harsh beauty—a sea of grass that shimmers in spring breezes, blue sky that stretches for seemingly thousands of miles in all directions, a view of the stars at night that makes one pine for a starship and all the time in the universe—but in the last hundred and fifty years human beings have tried to tame the land. Now the plains are crisscrossed with roads and fences, and the people have built towns and cities that mimic the ones they ran away from in the East (which mimicked the ones their ancestors ran away from in Europe).

The plains are not a land that civilizes easily, and nature regularly punishes these upstart inhabitants with tornadoes, blizzards, drought, and baking sunshine. They are hardy people, though, and so they refuse to leave, refuse to acknowledge that perhaps this land was not designed for the lives they envision. After every tornado, they rebuild; after every drought, they replant.

There are few cities in this area, and no great ones. he influx of people led to a need for concentrated marketplaces, and so some small towns have grown until they fill the role of cities. But on the Great Plains, these places jut oddly into the  landscape, completely out of context.

Perhaps none of these cities is so out of context as Wichita Falls. A pathetic clump of buildings no higher than ten stories constitutes downtown. The rest of the city sprawls, clustering around golf courses and malls. The elite meet at the Oilmen’s Club at the top of a downtown hotel to drink bourbon and ignore the lack of view. Everyone else drinks beer in more forgettable bars at street level.

Maggie’s earliest memory was not of Wichita Falls, but of vast spires seeking the sky. In kindergarten, when the other children were drawing boxy houses occupied by stick-figure daddy, mommy, and kids, Maggie drew rows of skyscrapers. When asked about the picture, she said she’d been born in one of those buildings.

Her daddy became very angry when she said that. “You were born right here in Wichita General.”

“No. I was born in the city.”

“Don’t lie, young lady,” her father said. Yelled, really, and scowled so fiercely that Maggie hid behind her mother.

Maggie’s mother was a tall, slender woman with dark curly hair. Maggie looked more like her mother than she did her father, a beefy man with bright red hair and the kind of white skin that never tans. But Maggie’s hair was more auburn than black, as if the red had been determined to make its mark.

Her mother put a comforting hand on Maggie’s head and said, “Now, Jerry. You know children Maggie’s age like to make things up.”

And Maggie stamped her foot and said “I’m not making it up” at the same time her daddy said, “That’s no excuse for telling lies.”

Her mother said, “Jerry,” in a warning voice, and her father turned on his heel and went out to the garage.

Maggie said, “But I was born there, Mom. I remember it.”

“I was there, and I can guarantee you that it happened at Wichita General.” Amanda Hines smiled tightly at her daughter.

At five Maggie wasn’t yet ready to interpret facial expressions, but the image of her mother’s smile at that moment stayed with her. By the time she reached her teen years, she knew her mother was lying, though she still didn’t know why.

Maggie didn’t stop drawing the city, but she did stop insisting she had been born there. And she didn’t show the pictures to her parents. Although they couldn’t help seeing them when they went to school for parent-teacher night, because the teachers posted student art work. And Maggie always drew pictures of the city.

Her father always turned red in the face when he saw her painting of a golden pyramid. But he said nothing. Her mom patted her hand and said, “That’s very good, dear” and then asked about someone else’s picture. Maggie came to understand that her city was one of those things (like Grammy’s drinking) that no one ever talked about.

So long as Maggie never mentioned the city, family life was good. Her father seldom got angry about anything but the pictures. He personified patience itself when he taught her to ride a bicycle down the flat streets of Wichita Falls, running along behind her with one hand on the back fender, helping her stay balanced. In her elementary school years, he coached her soccer team (even though he had to teach himself the sport, being a football man himself), and while he didn’t buy her a horse when she went through the classic young girl’s equine fixation—“We have no place to put it”—he did spend two years getting up at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings to take her to riding lessons.

While Maggie found shopping boring, she loved the trips she and her mother took to Dallas. The exhibition of goods in Neiman Marcus might not have been quite as exquisitely arranged as those in the stores in Maggie’s dream city, but it came close. She loved the windows at Christmas that showed Santa’s workshop or perhaps a scene from the Nutcracker with great etail and elaborate mechanical movement: elves built toys, the Sugar Plum Fairy danced, reindeer flew. And tomboy though she was, Maggie enjoyed looking at the dress-up clothes, draped on the mannequin in a way that suggested the eventual wearer would be more sophisticated and beautiful than anyone else at the ball. All of Maggie’s high school prom dresses came from Neiman’s.

After shopping, she and her mother would go to lunch in a nice Dallas restaurant and eat fancy salads full of arugula and watercress followed by chocolate mousse or strawberry cheesecake—food her father would have pooh-poohed. Girl’s Day Out, they called it, and Maggie enjoyed it even after she got to be fourteen and would normally have rather died than go shopping with her mother.

Life was good, but Maggie never forgot about the city.

copyright 2004 by Nancy Jane Moore