by Joan Barfoot
She hopes the members of the crew are not so foolish. Of course they’re not; naturally their faith will be in machinery, not words.
Lila’s touch has finally reached Tom, so that his gaze shifts, it seems reluctantly, to her. “Lila?” She can’t hear him, but sees his mouth forming her name. “Lila?”
“I don’t know.” She can’t tell if he can hear her. “I don’t know,” which is no answer, but then, it wasn’t truly a question.
There isn’t time to say everything twice like that. There isn’t time, for that matter, to say everything once.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe everyone’s wrong. She only glanced for a second. On planes, sometimes things look wrong, or reflect in the air strangely, when nothing’s really the matter at all. On night flights, sparks in the darkness have startled her on occasion. Maybe these are only sparks in the light.
She turns to look again. Those are not sparks. Those are flickers of flame at the edge of the wing.
Where is fuel stored on an airplane? How could there possibly be fire out there, where the air, as she tried to tell Susie, is so intensely cold? Why isn’t someone doing something? There must be things to be done. She hopes the crew hasn’t been stricken immobile by a disbelief similar to her own.
She turns back urgently to Tom. “This isn’t happening, is it?” Surely he could alter reality. He has altered aspects of her reality for as long as she has known him, why not now?
“Oh Christ,” he says. “We’re going to die.”
What?
She could shake and shake him. She’s had such hopes, and he’s not even trying. If he cultivated a disbelief like hers, could they not, with their combined wills, make this not be happening? Instead, such despair is in his face, along with terror.
She reaches out again to touch his skin. At the moment, she loves and pities him to death, and it does not feel like an odd combination.
Wait. Just wait. She is a rational person, and it’s important to know things. With facts, a person can figure out how to feel, but they are flying at the moment without critical information. Not fair.
The running children have disappeared from the aisles. Susie is wrapped in her mother’s arms, weeping. Does she understand, or is she just upset by an explosion of adult hysteria? Nobody understands; how could Susie? Why doesn’t somebody tell them what’s wrong? There might be hope, and no great problem, and nobody’s telling them that, either. She starts to stand, to look around, to demand something from someone. She feels Tom’s hand on her arm and looks down. “Lila,” he says. “Lila, please.”
Those words. She is so very weary of hearing them on important occasions. There was a time, early on, when she wanted her and Tom to be together, but “Lila, please,” he said.
She said, “Other people do it all the time.”
“Lila, please, we can’t talk about this. I know they’re almost grown, but the girls would be devastated. They’re close to their mother, and I don’t want to lose them. Maybe it’ll be different once they’re out on their own.”
Which they now are, but even then, Lila doubted it. She foresaw family events rolling into the future—graduations, weddings, births of grandchildren—in a festive parallel universe, followed by various crises, disintegrations, disasters and deaths. All the this and that, forbidding a move. And she was right.
Now this. She has an impulse to say, “I hope you’re happy now.”
She still can’t hear small sounds, like his voice, very well, although shouting and screaming from elsewhere feel as if they’re drilling holes in her head.
Prayers used to be promises, bargains: “If I get a doll for Christmas, I promise I’ll always be good.” Or “If I get a good mark on this test,” or “If I get asked to that party”—and always, in return, the promise she’d be good. She guesses she never kept it very well; but she would now. “I’ll give up anything, I’ll do anything. I’ll be so good in my life, if I can only, please, have my life.”
Tom is her only really outstanding sin—old-fashioned, unfamiliar word that even at this terrible, bargaining moment doesn’t feel like the right one. Without him, she would be lonely and sad, but alive. And she is not young any more, and at least she would remember love, and there must be other pleasures: wisdom, meekness, generosity, all those virtues she seems to have put off acquiring. She isn’t stupid; she could probably get the hang of goodness.
“Lila!” His voice now is sharp, and she can hear him quite sharply. “Settle down, Lila. Come on, now, sit down.” She realizes she is still standing and that Tom, looking up at her, seems worried. Or disappointed. Or irritable. She can’t always tell the difference. Sometimes there isn’t much difference. Disappointments and worries irritate him, as a rule; cause and effect blurring together.
“Yes,” she says, “okay,” and obediently sits.
He keeps a grip, not tight, on her arm. “Keep calm. We need to be calm.” He should speak only for himself. He has not earned the full-hearted place in her life that would allow him to speak for her.
Her skin marks easily. There are already flushes of blood around the white marks where his fingers grasped her arm. And her bones are thin. As it turns out, there’s not much to her. Tiny freckles on the backs of her hands would sizzle in flames; her bones would collapse at the slightest downward spiral, shatter at a touch of land.
Or, she remembers, ocean.
This is the sort of circumstance in which the deft, sausage-fingered, life-saving Geoff might have come in handy.
Or, more likely, he’d do well in the aftermath, stitching together the uncountable bits and pieces that may fall from the sky.
Poor Geoff, perhaps she was unfair. Perhaps she is also unfair to Tom, and to other people along the line, and to herself, as well.
Don’t think and don’t look. Keep the mind in the air.
On Geoff, connected as he is anyway with life converted from death. Six years she spent with him, slightly longer than she has so far been with Tom.
The night of her thirty-fifth birthday, Nell and Patsy took her to a restaurant to celebrate. He was at the next table with friends, or more likely colleagues. There was much laughter and drinking of champagne, and the two tables ended up together. Geoff sent her a half dozen white roses the next morning—“A day late, but it should never be too late” the card said, somewhat cryptically, somewhat enticingly.
“I’ve had some awkward moments,” he confided a few nights later over dinner, “since my divorce. Sometimes I’ve learned that a woman has gone out with me because of my work. I mean, because I’m fairly well known, I guess.”
“Yes,” Lila agreed, “I expect that can be a hazard.”
Down the road there were further words, in other tones. “For god’s sake, Lila, you knew from the start how busy I am.” Quite true. He went to some pains to tell her his marriage, for one thing, had failed precisely because he was a busy man, and not only that, busy in such a virtuous and necessary way that there was no point in merely personal complaints.
Who would, could, reasonably expect his presence when on the other side of the scale a life was in the balance? Geoff’s skilful, pudgy fingers were needed, absolutely needed, to dig beyond flesh into organs and arteries, pulling them out, turning them over, replacing them, sewing bodies together maybe moments from death.
A woman could hardly say to such a man, “Yes, I know the guy has only one kidney and it’s disintegrating as we speak, but I’ve had a really bad week and I’d like to rest on your shoulder, if you wouldn’t mind.” On the other hand, who unfailingly agreed that, always, it would be more urgent to give pleading speeches to Rotarians than to comfort someone who’d had a bad week?
“I have to,” he said. “It’s important.”
“So are some other things. You should know that. I hope you do.”
He said he didn’t like her tone; that it sounded threate
ning. “Up to you”—she shrugged—“what you hear.”
She read accounts of his speeches in the newspaper (how well publicized, for one reason and another, some of her lovers have been). “It’s difficult,” he told audiences wherever he could grab them, “for a physician to ask a grieving family to make such a wrenching decision. But to offer a chance of life—as physicians we must give families that opportunity. It’s a greater memorial to the values and spirits of loved ones than the grandest gravestone, or the most eloquent epitaph.” Didn’t he sound fine! Didn’t he give the most eloquent speeches, himself!
There will be no salvageable organs if this plane goes down, nothing useful for surgeons to “harvest,” as Geoff used to put it. Lila found the expression chilling; but it was nothing compared with this bone-clattering cold.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Geoff said when Lila’s mother died, folding large, pink, freckled arms around her. “I wish I could be with you.” A keynote speech he was giving, at a national conference. He had to fly west, she had to drive east. “I’ll call you when we both get where we’re going.”
Lila’s mother died, climbing into bed for the night, from a ferocious attack from her heart. She was only sixty-four, so it came as a shock. Like Aunt June, she lay dying and dead for more than a day before she was found by a neighbour. The despair, picturing those last hours—Lila surprised herself with sounds she’d never heard herself make before.
But Geoff, with his higher purposes, flew off; and Lila, not unreasonably, began developing a horror of dying alone and going undiscovered.
It appears she may have frightened herself with the wrong pictures entirely. She may die in quite the opposite fashion: in a great crowd, very publicly.
Several times driving back to the town where she grew up, where her stomach knotted and her head developed unaccountable aches when she visited, to which she’d driven eight years earlier for her father’s funeral—several times Lila had to pull to the side of the road to weep. Tears broke down roughly half for her mother, half for herself.
Later she thought, tuning out the minister’s rambling, beaming eulogy at the funeral, by which time she’d become much calmer, more removed, that probably her mother had finally burst from compressing too strenuously her true thoughts and emotions. “Dead of repression” crossed Lila’s mind as an epitaph. She heard herself laugh, quickly covered the sound with a cough. Even a sob; she wasn’t proud at that point.
Sheila the flight attendant rushes past, fighting her way to the front past harsh frightened voices and flailing limbs, not stopping for anyone. Her blouse is untucked at one side, her dark hair is no longer quite smooth. Seeing her eyes might tell them something: whether she is scared and doomed, or only determined to get someplace.
She is past before Lila can get a glimpse of her eyes. Anyway, people both show and conceal feelings in different ways, and unless Sheila is actually panicking, it would be hard to define her emotions on such flimsy acquaintance.
If there is a good time for either repressing or concealing rampant emotion, this must be it.
Still, Lila can’t believe that things like this happen. People like her don’t die; not this way. They die the way her mother did: plainly and privately.
Lila and Don and his recent second wife, Anne, saw the family lawyer, chose and sorted possessions, arranged to put the house up for sale. Don took the television set and the dining-room furniture. Lila took the pink-and-gold-flower-rimmed china her grandmother had passed on to her mother. “That’s all you want?” Don asked.
“I think so.” Certainly not the embroidery hoops with which her mother stitched pillowcases for the poor or newly married, or the wicker baskets she packed with soups, breads and casseroles for the sick, bereaved or hungry.
An astonishing number of people turned up for the funeral. “She was always so kind,” people said, touching Don’s black elbow, embracing Lila’s black shoulders. “She was a very good woman, your mother.”
And so she was. Lila, who has not followed her example, will have many fewer people, with many fewer benevolent memories, at her own funeral. Which may be dreadfully, surprisingly soon. Oh please, she thinks again. I’ll do better. I’ll be better.
Back home, when Geoff asked about the funeral and its attendant events and characters, she found herself looking at his hands resting with apparent concern on hers. “It’s too late and too little, just to describe it,” she said. “Too many feelings in a short time. I think it’s like a bad joke—you had to be there.”
She thought, Those stumpy, porky fingers, I’ve had them on my body, how could I? And think where else they’ve been.
There are moments when the eye, or something, is caught, turns over, and everything changes.
“Geoff,” she began carefully, “I know you save lives, and have a lot of demands and a lot of people wanting your attention.” She wondered what the word was for his expression—preening, she thought finally. He found this flattering, and looked like a plumpish, proud—oh, she didn’t know quite what, but some creature that preened. Not a parrot, exactly; a parrot’s features were sharp.
“And that’s very nice for you, and well deserved, but it’s not, as it turns out, very compatible with love. Or with care, for that matter.”
She thought that was clear, but apparently not.
“What are you saying? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“I’m saying it isn’t a matter of fault, but I’m tired, my mother’s dead, I have no more room for generosity, or even understanding, and I’m done.”
“With us?” He still wasn’t getting it. “With me?”
“You sound astonished.”
“But no warning? That’s not fair. To come out of the blue, springing this on me.”
“Oh, Geoff, there’s been plenty of warning. You just haven’t heard it.” He had many virtues, not all of them public ones: energy, focus, desire, intensity. And love, he said. But he had also been deaf, it turned out.
“Lila, be reasonable! I thought you were better than that. This is what I went through with my wife, for god’s sake. I never expected to go through it with you.” His finest shot, a comparison with the odious, frivolous, uncomprehending wife.
At least Tom has never done that. Rather the reverse, in fact, and just as upsetting.
“I’ve done the best I could,” Geoff said, and no doubt from his perspective he had. He looked as if he wanted to shake her, or strike her. Had he ever hit his long-gone wife with those ham fists?
He is still giving speeches and doing good work. She still reads his name in the papers, his story continues. Just over a year later—a pleasant, unstrenuous period Lila spent mainly teaching, reading, researching, and playing with Patsy and Nell, going to movies and plays and bars, telling secrets and sorrows and jokes—she met Tom, another good man with much of his attention elsewhere.
These percentages and decimals and tiny increments of love are hard to calculate. Hard, as in both difficult and wrenching. Lila has certainly had much delight from the ways words wander off in different directions.
How do some people stick in one life when even a word can have so many existences? Lila expects that, absorbed in stories of various real and fictional sorts, she has fallen easily into the idea of alteration and flux: that a multiplicity of characters in a multiplicity of situations must have a multiplicity of responses.
That makes today especially unpredictable and volatile. Except for Tom, these are strangers, and at that, who knows about him? Or herself? There’s no real telling what the two of them contain, never mind anyone else.
How long has she managed to avoid pictures of what’s happening and how they are doing? It feels like forever. If it’s even been quite a while, that must be a good, hopeful sign. But it may be a matter of seconds. The mind flies in a crisis. Is time flying?
Is the plane? Well, she
does have to laugh.
And again that offends Tom, although she can’t see why, it’s not aimed at him. “Lila!” His voice slices through the buzzing and din. His fingers, shockingly, burn on her face. “Stop it! You mustn’t.”
She stares at him, surprised not by pain, but because she never dreamed Tom had it in him to strike her. One way or another, sometimes deliberately, generally not, he has now and then caused her grief, but she has never had a moment of fear he would turn on her that way. Stupid, surely, to start now. How could he imagine frightening her, or punishing her? What does he suppose he could do?
“I’m sorry, Lila, but we have to keep our heads.” What on earth for, when they may lose everything else? She keeps that tiny joke inside.
What’s wrong with her? Because he’s right, this is awful, not funny. “What’s the matter with you?” he asks, and it’s a very good question, as well as an amazingly stupid one.
“I’m just not very good at reality, I guess.” It’s hard to keep her eyes from dancing. Her grandmother used to say, telling Aunt June some event, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Lila is tempted to tell him, “Really, it’s one of my gifts, not facing facts very well, and aren’t you lucky.” Nobody good with facts, for heaven’s sake, would spend precious time with a person with firm attachments elsewhere. Only someone with barely an acquaintance with reality would tempt fate with a two-week trip to another country with such a person. What does he think?
One thing she does know something about is fate. She teaches whole lectures on it, as it unfolds in various stories and plays, here and there, over time. She can point to many examples, beautiful words for fate’s sad victims.
No doubt the concept runs contrary to the views of a historian. And for a politician, hope, not fate, must be the carrot dangling just ahead.
