by Joan Barfoot
At such times the two of them have presented most unattractive faces to each other. They have been saved, she expects, by a mutual disbelief that these are each other’s true faces, except at small and particular moments.
They do not quarrel well. They would be poor examples for books on how to argue.
What a thing, that there actually are books on how to quarrel, not to mention manuals for almost every other kind of human action. And people write and read these things.
They’re missing a market, though, for more important challenges. She can’t think of a single guide to how to starve, or flee a war, or go down gracefully in a burning plane. The sort of book that could come in truly handy.
Actually, she had a pretty good time the week he was gone, out playing at movies and bars with Patsy and Nell. She was slightly worried he might also be experiencing unexpected pleasures in this absence from each other. She wouldn’t mistake temporary lightness for a permanent desire, but was afraid he might.
He phoned when he got back to town. “Jesus, Lila, I missed you.” And there they were again, until the next time he couldn’t quite look her in the eye. Like now.
“Sorry,” he repeats. “What were you saying?”
“I was asking what you thought.”
“About what?”
Good lord. “About what’s happening. What’s likely to happen. About what the co-pilot was talking about, and whether we’ll make it or not. All this,” and she waves her arm vaguely, intending to encompass her concerns about the likely nature of a mass of varied humans in a small and dangerous space.
“Oh god.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know.” Now what the hell is this about—he’s finally looking at her, but appears to have flown into a fury. With her? “But I wish to god I wasn’t here.”
“Yes. Well. I expect you have plenty of company there.”
Her voice was too dry, she supposes. Less than soothing.
“What the hell do you keep finding so funny?” His voice is cutting and she flinches. Then she is furious, too—how dare he cause her to flinch? What does he want from her? If she can’t make little jokes, what’s she supposed to do with all her bubbling disbelief and terror? If these things are going to bubble, they might as well roll out as laughter. Considering the alternatives.
Still. This isn’t like the two of them getting so huffy he can march out her door for a comfortable return to his own, other life, while she slams doors in her house. This isn’t a case of having a chance to reunite later. “We ought to be able to comfort each other better,” she has suggested more than once. If they had taken her advice to heart, they’d have had more practice by now.
“Actually,” she says quietly, “I don’t find it funny at all.” She touches fingers to his knee, hoping the gesture can’t be mistaken for the sort of placating move she associates with women fearing injury. “I’m only trying to work out what’s going on and how to be prepared and how not to be crazy. At least we’re together. Whatever happens, we can maybe try to help each other. That’s something, isn’t it?”
She is proud of herself for this, feels extremely mature. Camouflaging huge emotions, feigning others, seems often enough the very definition of maturity.
“Christ.” He shakes his head. “What’s going to happen?”
He can’t imagine she would know; but she keeps her fingers on his knee, and her voice light. “That’s what I was trying to work out, from what he said. Some kind of formula to decode, a sort of arithmetic, I thought. Subtract the need to keep people calm from what’s actually wrong, add a bit of hope and multiply the skill involved—if we could figure out the formula, we might be able to tell what the odds are.” She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Disaster.” He is muttering more to himself than to her. “It’s a fucking disaster.”
Oh. Now she sees what he’s talking about. Not death so much as the debris.
Yes, they’ve mainly been careful, and lucky as well. But now here they are, indisputably together. Is there an explanation some kind friend or ally might come up with to account for this? Tom has the flimsy excuse of a conference, but Lila has no possible purpose for being here. And if she had, what are the odds they’d be beside each other on the same plane? And have booked the same return flight as well?
Still, people believe what they want to. What they need to.
She can certainly see that, for Tom, this may be a fucking disaster, all right, in a number of ways.
If they go down spectacularly together today, they might just as well have stripped off in a campus courtyard between classes, and embraced, and caressed, and licked each other’s nipples, and laid each other gently on the sunny bricks.
Right at the moment, she can’t quite make out his features, but surely that’s only tears, not an absence of love. Which is funny, since she is not a weeper, at any rate in public. “I can’t save us,” she says, without quite knowing what she means. “But we could help.” Each other, but she already said that.
“No.” He sounds exhausted. “You’re right. We should never have started.”
Did she say anything remotely to that effect? She can’t recall it, but perhaps she did; or something similar, and sufficiently vague that he could misinterpret.
And what does he mean, should never have started? Started what, the conversation? The trip? Their entire time together, the whole five-decimal-five years they’ve had their scraped-together, by-and-large precious, miraculous, middle-aged, greying, pot-bellied, skin-crumpled, joyous moments?
How easily, lightly, selfishly he tosses regret and grief in her direction.
That’s certainly something new to know about him. Ordinarily, she assumes any knowledge will find a useful place for itself sometime, somewhere, but what exactly is she supposed to do with understanding that he doesn’t want to die with her? That right to the last, hurtling through sunlight and over streaks of clouds, sitting beside a flaming wing in this potential wreckage, it’s the secret that’s important.
And that whether they wind up shattered or brilliantly, gratefully whole, they are surely exposed, and he is ruined, and he cares that he’s ruined.
Already in the other world miles away and down, their situation is drawing attention. It’s known about at, apparently, several airports and by various experts in the field of flights and airplanes. Almost certainly, information is being picked up on emergency bands and monitors. Perhaps at this moment phone calls are going out to their nearest and dearest, or at least to their closest relatives and flight insurance beneficiaries.
Word will be simply in the air, spreading in its normal quick and mysterious ways; not unlike flames.
Does he really imagine she would spend what may be her own last moments fretting over his exposure in the hearts of other people? What must he think of her? Who does he suppose she is?
Perhaps he believes she is good. Good, in the sense of being a whole-hearted altruist. In terms of having no being whatever, none of her own interests or concerns. All this time, has he mistaken her for a mutant Mother Teresa?
“Jesus. I cannot imagine what you keep finding to laugh about.”
Well, for one thing, that they’re going to go down, if they do, with the same ridiculous, irreconcilable dilemma they’ve always had: the struggle between his interests and hers.
Lila would hate it if Tom crashed in a plane with his wife. She would drive herself crazy with pictures of their last, desperately intimate moments.
It would certainly be ironic if Dorothy drives herself crazy with pictures of Tom and Lila’s last desperately intimate moments. Because right now Lila is as angry with him as she has ever been. Jammed together, she thinks they could scarcely be more remote from each other. She could hurt him, very badly. She could just weep.
six
On this mild, bright June day, Lila could have been poking around in her garden, mo
wing her small lawn, leaning her face up into sunshine. Enjoying an ease, if not exactly a joy, she might barely have noticed.
Now she can no longer quite believe in a life beyond this narrow, catastrophic space. A few hours ago, when the plane lifted off, houses grew tiny, roads shrank, landscape diminished, finally disappearing under the first wispy cloud layers. In just that way, other possibilities have now also receded, grown tiny.
And she is in this enormous rage.
If they survive, if that co-pilot is right and the odds aren’t entirely bad, what does she do then?
She could break Tom’s bones for insufficient love. She could break her own for enjoying ease, if not exactly joy, and barely noticing.
They have been glaring at each other, hard. Now, finally, his eyes drop. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what came over me.” He looks older than he did a few hours ago, a different man from the one standing eagerly, nervously, at her front door this morning.
This morning!
The edges of his eyes, the sides of his mouth, have started to fall. At this rate he’ll look like a basset before this is done. Does she look like an aging stranger to him?
“Lila? I’m sorry. Really.”
Apology or regret? There’s quite a difference.
“It’s fine,” she says, although it’s not. He looks happier. Good for him.
He’s been her lover, not her enemy. But at this moment their history doesn’t apply, and something is certainly hostile.
This space? Her body has been folded for ages into its narrow seat, beyond which is Tom, and then the narrow aisle, and then more rows of people in, or scrambling around and out of, their own narrow seats. There’s no room to move, and no place to escape to. Tom has his briefcase tucked under the seat, as Lila has her shoulder bag tucked beneath the one ahead of her. Other people have cluttered their small spaces with sweaters, toys, books, bags and computers, all the detritus of a disrupted journey; and overhead in storage, who knows? There could be anything up there.
Crazy people used to be wrapped into straitjackets—does that still happen? They were as bound and swaddled as babies, as trussed as turkeys, so radically immobilized they must have wanted to burst out of their skins.
“Lila?” Tom is saying. “You okay? Truly, I’m sorry.”
“Sure,” she says vaguely. “I know.”
When she was alive, Lila’s mother was an irritatingly dab hand with the banal. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” she liked to say, bustling around her kitchen, her yard, her town, intent on tidy good works of one sort or another. And on the same theme, “If you keep busy, there’s no time to brood.” Lila’s mother apparently found her broody, which made Lila feel rather hen-like, in a lethargic, sedentary sort of way.
Or as if she contained some hard, fragile, out-of-proportion thing, which at some point would require painful release.
Once again Lila thinks, I want, but still cannot find an object for the verb.
What would her mother have had to say about this situation, in which there’s little choice about having idle hands, except in the cockpit, where Lila hopes hands are being quite busy and useful?
Her mother scrubbed floors on her knees and vacuumed ferociously. Or she set off briskly, in her click-clicking heels, clip-on earrings swinging time, to spend a morning or afternoon visiting one or another sad or sick person. Even then, Lila recognized the anger, although unable to identify its source.
“Poor soul,” her mother would remark, shaking her head. “We’re very lucky, compared with that poor soul.” Who might be temporarily or terminally ill, or recently bereaved or abandoned, or just permanently embittered and cranky.
All this fuelled Lila’s mother in what Lila considered a slightly creepy way: as if, while doing good, her mother was taking nourishment, as well, like a vampire or a vulture, from the disasters of others. Also, when Lila was very little and had to go along, she disliked the smells of some of those houses. Not dirty, necessarily, or connected with, say, decaying leftovers; rather, smells she came to associate with defeated humans.
“That’s a very nasty thing to mention,” her mother told her. She meant the smells, not defeat.
Between a mother and a daughter (Lila cannot speak for sons) lies a whole literature of longing and judgment. Mothers and daughters scrutinize each other, hoping for the best, and sharpening knives and lives on the worst. Fathers, especially quiet, kind, inscrutable ones who watch a lot of television, and spend much time in the basement repairing household items, and then die in their fifties, don’t stand a chance.
“My mother says your mother’s a saint,” a child in public school told Lila. “I think she’s nice, too.” So she was. “You’re lucky.” So Lila was.
Lila first learned the language of ambivalence and ambiguity not, after all, from stories, but at her mother’s knee. A girl who has questions about her mother’s obvious virtues is unlikely to become an incurious, naive or patient woman.
Curiosity, scepticism and impatience are not inconsiderable gifts, and Lila is grateful.
Her mother, Lila heard when she was grown and gone, was proud enough of her, although continued to consider her broody and not very useful. And true enough, in a really difficult life, Lila would not have done well. She would have been hard pressed, for instance, to make a living serving in a restaurant, or at the check-out of a supermarket, and certainly she would have been a ridiculously inept refugee. She lacks her mother’s experience, it turns out, in performing hard and necessary acts, and has been, as her mother suspected, too indulged when it comes to the point; as it may now be doing.
And so here she sits, furious as a child.
She smiles, very carefully, at Tom, who looks heartbreakingly relieved.
Either her own childishness or her rage may have brought her mother to mind. But also perhaps all those busy good works, the houses and rooms they entered together, the smells of various sufferings—it’s here, too, the contained stench of human desires and terrors and sorrows.
The house Lila grew up in had another smell, slightly sulphurous.
“Keeping busy,” her mother used to say, “keeps your mind off things.” Whatever those things were that couldn’t bear the weight of her attention, so that it had to keep flitting, propelling her into those uncountable hours of visiting the variously pathetic and undertaking vast amounts of minimalist, intricate dusting.
She danced so carefully, to avoid landing on the terrible, soft, crushable places of her existence.
Something to do with love, Lila supposes: not enough, not the right kind. Only a failure of love, in Lila’s experience, has such frantic effects.
Her mother even rocked Lila hard, that’s one of her first memories: being held close, which was nice, but with her head whirling from the speed of the rocking chair whipping forward and back, her mother’s faltering soprano lickety-splitting through a lullaby.
“Seething” is the word that comes to Lila’s mind; a burning under the surface, not conducive to anyone’s comfort or rest.
This may not be true, it may only be Lila’s impression. But if it is true, what pain the woman, who after all was far more than only Lila’s mother, must have lived with, and how grateful she may have been for the heart attack that deadened all that sizzling.
Lila, considerably seething and sizzling herself, finally finds herself, at this very late date, in complete accord with her mother. She, too, feels the need to act, to move, perhaps vacuum the aisles, dust the seats, scrub the overhead lockers.
Lucky Sheila, standing up there waving her arms, pointing out once again the emergency exits, and where oxygen masks will fall from, and how to retrieve the lifesaving cushions, and those lines in the aisles that will still be bright guides in the event of darkness.
“Excuse me.” Lila releases her seatbelt, starts to stand.
“Wha
t? Where are you going?”
To dust, to vacuum, to scrub, to move faster than her thoughts can follow. “To the washroom.”
Tom leans into the aisle, craning to look back. “There’s a line-up, and a lot of shit going on. Some wired-up people. You might want to wait. Or shall I come with you?”
A kind enough offer; he has no idea, does he?
“No, the line-up’s probably permanent. I might as well join it.” She edges, coolly courteous, past his knees.
What she wants urgently to do is to pace, to stretch, to walk and walk, feet pounding on pavement, the firm feel of ground.
Oh, the firm feel of ground! Imagine that.
There’s no way to do any sort of brisk circuit. It’s more than a line of people waiting for the washroom, there are people crowded in small arm-waving, wild-eyed, frantic-voiced groups in the aisles, leaning over, reaching out—just, Lila supposes, trying as she is to let off steam in a space where there’s no outlet for steam.
One man has grabbed another by the neck of his shirt, and is shaking him, shouting. What for?
Well, rage. Much like Lila’s own.
What are those men to each other, that they care enough to come to blows? Not lovers, she thinks; perhaps rivals of one kind or another.
Whatever desires and burdens came on board with each of these people will be heightened and tightened to a thin, high screech.
The thing is, once it’s released, how is fury recaptured? Or panic, or any strong feeling; love, too, is hard to restrain. On the best of days it’s a challenge to steer sprawling desires into acceptable channels.
Although there is a point to the effort—look at those men wrestling each other, that’s just ridiculous, surely. Probably.
Lila is suddenly terribly sad for the ways she has squeezed capacities and desires into a shape far smaller than she once had in mind. She never meant to be reconciled. She never intended to dodge disappointment by not hoping too much.
