“Mom.” Conner tugged at her sleeve. “It’s no big deal. I’ll let Terry pilot my turn on Saturday.”
“You bet you will.”
“Terrence, it’s not OK to be rude,” Moor said. “And Conner, that’s not the issue. We get two flights, one for each of you to pilot.”
“But I’ll be rebuilding the plane. Come on, Mom. I promise the plane won’t catch fire again.”
“Moor, if you feel that strongly, then by all means feel free to speak to Linda. You can catch her now, if you want,” Kay said. “But maybe there’s a work-around we can find. Will, any solutions come to your mind?”
A traitorous look of thoughtfulness crept into Will’s expression as he threw his head back to examine the fixture again. “I could wrap some chicken wire around the base and protect the bulb that way.”
“Great solution,” Kay said. “I think we’ve solved it, Moor.”
Moor glared at Will as he winked at her and padded away in his tangerine Crocs to fetch his tools. Kay watched them archly, smug that Moor’s lover was an elementary school janitor.
Why had she told Kay about the affair? Moor berated herself as she drove Conner home through an unexpected fog, thick as cotton batting, that forced her to creep the car along the side of the road. Had it been some impulse to brag, as Kay bragged about her engineering PhD or her most recent salary bump? Was sleeping with Will Moor’s biggest accomplishment? She’d never know what spasm of misguided ego had made her tell.
Anyway, they’d been drunk. A month ago, the Science Olympiad work had overwhelmed them both. Getting busy parent-coaches to schedule practices had been a pain. Then a coach melted down during a Science Jeopardy practice when the buzzers malfunctioned. That’s what happens when parents volunteer to coach an event just to get their kid on the team, Kay had complained. Moor had wondered why on earth anyone would volunteer otherwise.
“They have to be committed to the event,” Kay had responded. “Not just to their kid.”
So they’d met at a bar to toss out names for replacements. Not a real bar, but the one attached to the family restaurant where she and Ivan always took Conner; where, while waiting in the lobby to be seated, Moor would stare through the glass doors at the crowds of the unattached as they drank and flirted and cheered at whatever sports contest was on the big screen. She and Kay had talked through the Olympiad business. Kay assigned Lola Hughes to coach Science Jeopardy.
“She won’t lose her cool. She’s used to managing twenty-five computer techs. Anyway, now that she’s a stay-at-home, she’s completely underutilized,” Kay noted.
As they drank, Kay, as usual, segued into bragging points about her job, about the upcoming multimillion-dollar contract and the need to fire so-and-so next week for nonperformance, and Moor had asked, “How do you do it? The work-family thing? I mean, I struggle with a part-time schedule, and my job isn’t nearly as stressful as yours.” Moor worked as a liaison for Russian émigrés at a social-service organization. What had started as a volunteer position years ago quickly became a part-time job because of Moor’s native Russian and natural sympathy for the sad circumstances that brought the émigrés to America. These days the stories more often concerned financial ruin than state persecution. Ivan was far less sympathetic to her work-related conversations than he used to be, when the traumas had to do with honor, not greed. Moor herself found it harder to tolerate the sad stories, but not because her sympathy had slipped. She knew most of the émigrés weren’t equipped to compete, having never been bred to it the way Americans were. Despite their high hopes for their futures here, Moor knew they would never regain even what little they’d left behind at home.
“Tom and I are fifty-fifty,” Kay said.
Tom was Kay’s husband, a low-key guy who drank brandy and scrubbed dishes every time Moor visited Kay’s home for a meeting. “You are? I mean … what does that mean?”
“Fifty-fifty split at home. Chores. Terrence’s care. Dealing with the school, with our folks.”
“Well.” Moor, loose by then, had spoken without thinking. “How do you keep track, through charts?”
She was joking, but Kay had brightened as if Moor had pegged the system exactly. “Chore lists. Broken down by task and due date. We keep our spreadsheets in a family binder. Great organizational tool.”
“Shit.”
“Terrence is by far our most complicated chart. Especially right now with his four Olympiad events.”
“Ivan and I are most definitely not fifty-fifty,” Moor said. “I don’t think Conner would trust him with his care chart.”
“You have to insist, Moor.” Kay had leaned across the tall table. “You have to make it clear to Ivan that if you are going to work outside the home that the income partnership you create in the professional sphere demands absolute equality in your domestic partnership. Anything less and you’re just selling yourself short.”
Or selling Conner short, was Moor’s reflexive thought. On the rare occasions she asked Ivan to fix Conner a bowl of cereal in the morning, they both pouted through their morning routine; and, Moor hated to admit, their reaction pleased her. She didn’t like Ivan caring for Conner in those personal ways. He performed them as mere tasks. Not that Ivan wasn’t a good father. He loved Conner. He simply expressed that love through a specialized band of interactions—minilectures on the physical properties of things, or the discipline of self he practiced so carefully. It was Russia in him. Severe, touched with sadness. Moor felt a sudden tipsy impulse to defend him.
“Fifty-fifty’s not for Conner,” she answered, swerving from Ivan’s presence in the conversation.
“You’ve got to train Conner to accept it.”
“Or I could have an affair.” She’d blurted it out. It made no sense to say it. Another glass of Shiraz appeared. Moor hid behind the curve of the oversized glass.
“Are you?” Kay’s eyes narrowed. Moor shrugged. “You are!”
“I’m fucking the janitor.”
Everything about the vulgar way she’d said it was false. She was in love with Will. And although there was not a thing in the world wrong with being a custodian if that’s all he ever could be, he’d chosen it. He’d been an electrician with a successful business. Successful until one big client had welshed on one big job. He could have started over, if the recession hadn’t tanked the construction trades. But he’d seen the custodial job posting, and he’d leaped at the opportunity for security.
“The blond guy who works afternoons?”
Moor nodded.
And Kay had pursed her lips together, lifted her beer. Her obvious surprise seeped to smugness as she took a deep pull from her longneck and surveyed Moor as if she’d tumbled a few more notches down the ladder of success; as if her competition-allergic kid, her part-time job, her ninety-ten with Ivan, her rash choice of lover, cast her forever in the rubbish heap of underachievement.
Dammit, what was I thinking? Moor navigated through the sheet of fog tensely. Tonight that same clandestine smugness had radiated from Kay’s bearing as soon as she spied Will. Why hand her all that power?
She felt Conner’s fears, of the weather, of the rusted sedan’s wobbly creep, sink into her bones. “Don’t worry, sweetie. Almost home.”
“Can we rebuild the plane in time?” They’d constructed the plane from a National Olympiad mail-order kit. The kit Moor had allowed Terrence to assemble with token assistance from her son. The thing had been so expensive she hadn’t wanted to order a backup.
Kay would have gone ahead and bought the second one, damn the budget, and built it at once as a back-up. While angling Tom for that fifty-fifty split on the construction checklist.
“Of course. We’ll get Papa to help.”
She wished the mention of Ivan would reassure him, but Conner slouched and stared out the window at the opaque white shroud pressing the glass.
Her affair with Will was energy and inertia in equal balance. She felt this most strongly whenever she was confronted with
a moment when she might confess to Ivan once and for all. For months she had thought her affair was playing out the physical law Ivan was always explaining to Conner, that all objects resist changes in their state of motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Passion, she’d hoped, was her unbalanced force. Yet it turned out she’d created a way to stay put permanently, unless she did something.
And she was rooted to her spot.
Particularly on a night of crisis like this, the evening after the fire in the dome, when she was hunkered down at the dining room table with Conner seated at her elbow. Ivan was isolated in the den, absorbed in a pile of work, and she knew she’d have to pull this off without him despite the fact that in training and temperament he was far more suited to rebuilding the Wright Stuff plane. A dispirited heap of wood, thin plastic sheathing, glue, and toothpicks for detail work confronted her. She’d picked up a couple of cheap hobby shop kits, some cast-off material from the local scrap store. She’d thought at the time she’d done a good job selecting what they’d need, but the debris before her was more upsetting than the ashen remains of their first little craft.
Ivan should be at the table. He never let up on his relentless attention to work. It was Russia in him, this overkill of conscientiousness. He’d begun his career in aeronautics, trained in Novgorod. Twenty years ago aeronautics had been the leading edge of Soviet technology. But when he’d emigrated, it had taken him five years to catch up with the young American engineers who developed more expertise as undergraduates than he’d done working as an engineer in a top Soviet facility. He was perched precariously in America where he’d been secure in Russia, and the hard work, and the long path, and the sense of inferiority he’d carried through it all made his intense focus his only defense. He’d reached as high as he would ever go in his profession. He wanted only to remain where he was, never sink, never advance.
But he didn’t need to work so hard anymore, Moor often pointed out, usually when there was something on the table that Ivan should rightfully handle.
She’d volunteered herself, not Ivan, for the Science Olympiad, she told herself firmly as her resentment bubbled. If she was in over her head, it wasn’t Ivan’s fault.
Conner sat patiently, chatting up possible methods of attaching this stick to that scrap. It would never be won, this battle against inertia. She couldn’t even move Ivan from the den to the dining room table. She sighed and watched Conner’s plump hands rummage through the mess. “How about these, Mom?” He held up two sticks that almost looked like wings.
“Here’s the glue. Give it a whirl.”
He attached the wings to a fat body constructed from two flat pieces of wood affixed end to end. Fashioned a propeller from three smaller pieces and a rubber band. Moor helped him attach plastic sheathing to the wings, and they went outside to the deck for a test flight. Conner nudged it airborne with a gentle flick of his wrist. Immediately the plane banked a hard right into the bushes. The plane collapsed on impact. Wreckage pocked the yew’s flat top.
“We’ll never get it to work on time!”
“Don’t overreact, sweetie. It’s our first try.”
“Terrence is gonna kill me!” Conner’s voice shook. Tears streamed down his round cheeks. He cupped a hand to his brow to hide them from her, a man’s gesture.
“Conner, Terrence is not going to kill you.” She laid a hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t know him!”
“Yes, I do. The little asshole doesn’t know how to behave. It’s just an expression he uses. He doesn’t mean it.”
“Don’t swear, Mom.” He stared at the wounded plane. Not once had he reminded her that she’d promised him help from his papa.
“Come on.” She grabbed his hand and walked him through the house, down those two steps into the den as if descending into a pit. Ivan was hunched over a manual, his sagging shoulders forbidding humps in the dim light. When he raised his head, his full beard hid the annoyed curl of his lips from Conner, although Moor saw his expression plainly.
“We need your help with this plane,” she told him in her firmest nonnegotiable tone.
“I have a deadline.”
“So do we. The Olympiad is this Saturday.”
Ivan rested a broad hand on Conner’s shoulder. Moor burned when Conner flinched. “Son, I would love to help you tomorrow. Tonight, it is impossible.”
“Sure, Papa.”
“I’ve got to do a test flight tomorrow night.”
“Moor, it is difficult for me.”
“You can get up early tomorrow to work. Besides, this won’t take you long. You loved model planes as a kid. Shit, you designed planes for a living, once.”
“Mom.” Conner winced. “Don’t swear.”
“Once upon a time,” Ivan said gravely. But he hoisted the manual and his notes—Cyrillic script, she saw, he still organized his thoughts in their first language—onto a side table. You’d think it was a funeral, Moor thought bitterly as he shuffled after them to the dining room.
But she had to hand it to him. At the sight of the detritus, his mourning transformed. He took in the materials with a thoughtful eye and sat elbow to elbow with Conner while sifting efficiently through the junk. Moor poured herself a glass of Shiraz and leaned against the doorjamb to watch the rare sight of Ivan ignited and Conner absorbing his spark. Before long they had the frame constructed.
“Will it fly, Papa?” Conner asked.
“The laws of physics can be counted on if we meet their requirements. There are forces at work that, if we respond to them correctly in our design, will make flight certain.”
“What’s physics?”
“It is the study of force. Matter, and energy, and motion.”
“Like flying?”
“Like flying.”
“What are the forces of flying?”
And Ivan smiled, a crimson pucker beneath his whiskers. “We have four. We have lift, and gravity; and thrust, and drag.” By then Ivan had covered the wooden ribs with plastic sheathing. He held the plane level, ran his long fingers from the nose to the tail. “And we must balance all of these forces to achieve flight. This is called equilibrium. The wings will give us lift, to counter gravity.”
“Here’re some wings.” Conner plucked two flat pieces of balsa wood from the jumble. Moor watched him hold the wings steady while Ivan glued them in place, and suddenly she remembered how Will had ruffled Conner’s hair affectionately, the gesture so natural it seemed Will performed it unconsciously. Will had called him buddy and Conner had drawn close to him, also unconsciously.
Ivan’s sole endearment was son.
By the time she’d finished her wine, they’d moved to the deck for a preliminary run. Ivan showed Conner how to launch the plane at the best angle to catch the wind under the wings. The plane glided gracefully, vanished in the dark.
“You see.” Ivan sounded pleased. “All forces working together.”
Conner nodded. “But what about the controls?”
“Just simple wiring for the remote. And now, run out to the big pine and get your plane. With this breeze it will have gone at least that far.”
Conner bounded from the deck. Ivan settled his arm around Moor’s shoulders. “You’re happy with the job we have done?” he asked quietly.
“It makes a difference to him when you get involved.”
“It’s you I want to reach.”
“You should have signed up to coach an Olympiad event.” She said it lightly, but Ivan dropped his arm to his side. “You’ll come on Saturday afternoon to watch him?”
“I will be in the office all morning. I will try.”
Conner appeared in the splash of light spilling from the back door. “I found it! It went all the way to the end of the yard, near the fence. You know, Mama. It landed right where we found Boxer. Remember?”
Moor swallowed. “I remember, sweetie.”
“I wish we could get another dog.”
“You’re all the puppy I can
handle right now.” Her stock answer, which provoked his stock exasperated grin up at her.
“Come on, Papa. Time for the controls.”
“In a moment.” They watched Conner dart into the kitchen, clutching his plane. Ivan slipped his hand into hers. Moor suppressed an instinctual pulling away. “You think this competition is right for him? Being an eager learner is enough, I think.”
Moor gave in to her impulse and took back her hand. “He needs to learn how to be eager to win.”
“He’d be that already if it were in his nature.”
“That’s not true. Our natures were fucked over by the time we were his age.”
“There’s no cause to swear,” Ivan chided.
Moor shook her head. He should know all about the fragility of temperament. Ivan’s nature had been changed by what he’d seen; Moor’s, by what she hadn’t.
As a boy in Leningrad, Ivan had been out for a walk with his grandfather when a man in a glossy mink hat dragged Dedyushka into an alley and stabbed him with an ice axe. Just like Trotsky, Ivan had tried to joke when she was still just a volunteer at the agency and it was his sad story she was absorbing. Although it was against protocol to touch, she had taken his hand lightly in hers. He showed her the petal-shaped scar on his collarbone where the axe had slipped and pierced his wool coat before he’d managed to sprint down the alleyway and hide behind a dumpster. The man in the glossy mink hat had kicked Dedyushka’s corpse and then disappeared. Blood poured from Dedyushka’s eye like an accidental leak. He’d reached out for Ivan, but Ivan couldn’t move from his hiding place. He’d listened to Dedyushka call his name, and then stop calling for him. He’d watched as the body was discovered and removed. For three days he ate discarded bits of sausage and potato before a garbage collector discovered him. Even then, he’d come out swinging a broken mop handle, cracked the trash man’s knees.
Because they were holding hands, she’d told him her story. She was six years old, living in Moscow. She’d heard something break, so she’d gone to the living room. She would always remember the crystal ring of shattering glass and wonder why she’d never found the shards of whatever had broken. The front door was closing. No one had cried out. Except for that first crash the scene was soundless. Yet she knew Mama was on the wrong side of the closing door. She’d approached, and the man must have heard her stocking feet gliding on the oak, because he burst back through and was upon her, fist raised high, angry amber-streaked eyes glittering, and she’d understood that the fist would crush her no matter where she tried to move. So she stood perfectly still. It’s what bunnies do, Mama had told her once. Even when trapped in plain sight, they freeze. In stillness lies safety.
States of Motion Page 8
