Arizona leaned down and held out a hand, as if a flyweight like her could pull someone as solid as me up. “Are you okay?”
I was. But I wasn’t, too. I felt weird and different. But… the problem was, I didn’t feel different enough. I didn’t feel like jumping up and running around Hippie Hill in my bare feet. I didn’t take her offer of help. I just lay there, staring up at her and her faded red jacket, outlined in blue sky.
“I don’t feel any different,” I said. “If we just changed my past, why don’t I feel different? Shouldn’t I have different memories? Shouldn’t I remember running away? Shouldn’t I be-” I stopped myself before I could say it. “A better person.” A better person. It was a revelation to realize that deep down, I’d always seen myself as a coward and a cop-out because I hadn’t had the courage to make my dreams come true.
I sat up and picked at the knees of my wool-blend trousers, wiped a piece of grass off the toe of my shiny dress shoes. What if I’d changed my whole life, and it didn’t make any difference? What if I was destined to be stolid and plodding and solid, no matter what? “Shouldn’t I be a different person with a different job and, maybe, different clothes?”
“You are,” Arizona said gently. “In that other universe.”
“Other universe?”
“Didn’t you see it, as we were returning? Didn’t you see it branch off?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Arizona pulled her red jacket tight and sat down beside me on the grass. “I don’t really know how it works. I just know that each time I go back, each time I change something, I see the result splinter off into another future. I’ve done a lot of research on it, and I think it’s got to do with parallel universes. Did you know there’s a theory that there are infinite universes, all running parallel to ours?”
“I don’t give a crap about parallel universes! I care about this one. I thought I’d be different.”
“Aren’t you?” Arizona asked. “Aren’t you different, just a little bit? Doesn’t it make a difference that somewhere, sometime, the boy that you were took that step off the edge? Don’t you feel… thinner?”
I stared at her. A cloud skittered across the sky, across one cheek, up and over her nose, out the side of her forehead. Thinner. Not transparent. She was thinner, so thin I could see through her!
“Oh, my god.” I looked down at myself, felt my arms, my chest. I felt solid. I couldn’t see the grass through my thighs. I couldn’t see anything through anything. It was the first time in my life I’ve ever been glad to apply the word “solid” to myself.
“Every time it happens,” she said softly, “a little bit of me splinters off, too. A part of me lives on in those other universes, goes on, in another life. I’ve been doing it so long, there’s not much of me left in this one.” She slipped the faded jacket off one arm. “I knew when you saw me that it was a sign. Then when you told me about what you wanted to be when you were a kid, and about Janis Joplin, I knew you were meant to take the jacket.”
I could see individual blades of grass, swaying in the breeze, through her thin shoulder. I could smell the salt scent of the bay, blowing through her. I dug my fingers into the grass, into the ground. The earth was solid beneath me. The sky above had never seemed so hard and blue. It was my mind, my thoughts, that seemed wispy and skittering, like clouds. How crazy was she, to think a faded, old jacket could take her back in time? To think that she could pass her craziness on to me? To think that because I liked Janis Joplin’s music, it was a sign.
She was shifting, trying to slide the jacket off the other shoulder.
I stood up before she could get any farther. “I-look-I’ve got to get back to work.” I looked at my watch, as if just the act of reminding myself of the time of day could tame the skittering thoughts. As if doing something as normal and monotonous as checking the time could settle the panic that was battering around in my stomach.
She stopped tugging at the jacket and looked up at me with eyes that seemed to swim and waft and shift, clear, then solid blue, then clear again, like a fish’s eyes. “I thought you wanted to be different.”
For a moment, I smelled her again, a quick waft of funereal gardenias. I smelled ripe, ready-to-pick pears. Felt the lure of night stars and Janis Joplin’s singular voice. “I’m sorry. I-” I looked at my watch again, but I couldn’t see the hands. “I have to go. It was nice to meet you.”
Before I could smell that scent again, that scent of Texas night, I rushed away. I hurried across the park, taking shortcuts over the grass. I didn’t stop until I’d joined a clump of people who were waiting at the edge of the park for the light to change. After several seconds, I forced myself to look back.
Arizona had followed me and was standing several yards away on the grass. She was looking at me, but her expression was remote and sad and disappointed, as if she could no longer see me. She had put the faded red jacket back on. As I watched, she reached inside it and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. They were huge and round, pure Sixties sunglasses, nothing like the tiny, expensive aviator-shaped glasses that were so costly and popular today. She put them on. They dwarfed her small, luminous face.
Recognition hit me like a blow. I knew the red jacket. That’s why it was so familiar. It was Janis’. There was a picture of her wearing it, on one of her albums. Janis sitting on a motorcycle, wearing a red jacket trimmed with gold embroidery and enormous sunglasses, her frizzy hair lit by the sun. Her expression was luminous and faraway, as if she could see something the rest of us couldn’t.
The light changed. All around me, people started across the street. A couple of people shoved past me. Another one growled at me to get out of the way if I wasn’t going to cross.
I stared at Arizona. Smelled pears mixed with salt air. I stepped off the curb and plodded after the surge of people heading back to work, Janis Joplin singing in my head.
THE TRAVAILS OF PRINCESS STEPHEN by Jane Lindskold
The dress had been in the family for longer than anyone remembered, for so long that no one quite recalled for whom the dress originally had been made.
It was commonly referred to as “great-grandmother’s wedding dress.” But as the generations passed, and the dress was handed on with more or less formality, the question of just how many “greats” should be inserted before “grandmother” was a point subject to occasional lazy discussion.
The problem was that no matter how many faded wedding photos were dug out of dusty boxes, no matter how many dingy paintings showing the dress being worn for this wedding or that a hundred years ago, or even two or three hundred years ago, the dress itself argued against the possibility of its age.
Taken from its storage chest, shaken out, arrayed on a stand, the dress was as good as new. Better, even, for new fabrics don’t preserve in their folds the faint scents of roses and lilies, fragrant echoes of dozens of bridal bouquets. New dresses are not adorned with crisp, but not in the least scratchy tulle, embroidered with intricate hand-made lace set with minute beads that give back the light with the fire of genuine diamonds. New dresses may evoke the classic, but this dress-full-skirted with a daring but not vulgar bodice- was the wedding dress dreamed of by every bride since days when brides began wearing white and transforming themselves into princesses, if only for a single, special day.
For those sentimental brides who decided to wear mother’s or grandmother’s gown, the choice was often accompanied by bitter disappointment. When the treasured heirloom wedding dress was removed from storage, many a bride-to-be discovered that pure white had faded to ivory, or worse, turned sour yellow. Stitches had worked their way loose. Hems were too short or too long. Beading had unraveled. Waistlines must be loosened or tightened up. Buttons needed replacement. Bows needed pressing. Trains showed evidence of trampling. Veils and the tiaras that held them in place had gone missing.