by Joan Barfoot
“Again, your flight attendants are available to provide assistance. We regret the delay in bringing today’s in-flight movie to you, but the attendants will shortly be asking you to lower your window blinds and it will begin. If there are further matters about which you need to be advised, we will briefly interrupt the movie.
“Finally, as many of you no doubt know, both this airline and this aircraft have excellent safety records. It is virtually unknown for a plane of this type to experience any sort of crisis that warrants serious alarm.” That sounded like a flat-out lie; possibly because there already is serious alarm.
“Thank you for your patience.” His voice vanishes with a click and once again the cockpit is its own world, where perhaps Frank McLean and Luke Thomas are handing each other high-fives, made mirthful by their hoax, and by hopelessness.
Somewhere towards the end of the speech, maybe when he mentioned the movie, Lila got furious again. Surely they deserve to be told what it means that a wing is on fire. Surely people are owed the right to prepare their hearts for final moments, if that is a possibility at all. It’s one thing for that silk-voiced man and his friend—at least she hopes they’re not enemies—to have their hands on the controls of the sound system, and on the controls of the plane. But in no way do their hands belong on people’s final moments.
And everyone is supposed to obediently lower blinds and watch a Western, however cleverly nouveau? Pulling down blinds hardly puts out the fire, does it? It doesn’t go away just because people can’t see it.
There are lots of things Lila doesn’t look at directly, but they go on anyway. She can scarcely bear to imagine Tom at home and tries very hard not to, but that doesn’t mean that isn’t exactly where he is: enjoying his fireplace on winter nights, building and fixing this and that (although he claims to be clumsy and unskilled around the house), reading bits of interesting books and articles out loud, sitting in his room of memories admiring his life, lying in his bed, reaching out on occasion, no doubt, touching skin.
Lila can close her eyes like blinds, but sometimes bitter images blaze through her lids anyway.
This is not the time. There is no time.
“I could just spit,” she tells The Web.
“I can tell. You’re busting my hand.” But he’s smiling. Still, a bit unfair, when she didn’t complain at him hanging so hard onto her. “How come you’re mad?”
She sighs. “I don’t know, really. The business about the movie, I think.”
“Yeah. I wish it wasn’t an oater. I sure don’t want to go down watching the back end of a horse.” It’s a joke, or a brave stab at one, but he’s made himself go pale. “Aren’t you scared?”
“Sure. Of course. Only, sometimes being scared makes me angry. Because anger feels better, I guess. It doesn’t seem as helpless as fear, although”—she sighs again—“I suppose it probably is.”
“Yeah?” He looks interested, and as a result less afraid. “My girlfriend’s sort of like that. She goes off the deep end real easy; she says it’s better to be mad than sad. That what you mean? Is it some kind of female thing?”
Lila laughs. “It does ring a bell, I admit. What does she get mad about?”
“Me. Our folks. Her job. And she’s totally pissed about all this.” When he gestures, Lila sees that the hand she was holding so tightly is tattooed with what looks like a pink peony surrounded by a cluster of green leaves. That can’t be right; who’d have a peony tattooed on his hand?
A rosebud on the butt, maybe. Years ago, Lila considered getting one herself, just for the hell of it, because she was tickled by the idea of something privately pretty, but she never got around to it.
This could almost make her weep.
She had no idea she was such a fool.
“Where were—are—you going?” This is a question she failed to ask Adele, whom she imagines headed for some evangelical rally, an international gathering of buttonholing, arm-clutching, redemptive, tragic wackos. Wouldn’t that be something to see! Hundreds of muted print housedresses, and dark suits, plain ties, white shirts, all the blissful faces, every one stoned on salvation. Do people like that have theological schisms? Lila bets that if they do, they must be quite fierce and tiny.
“We were going to bum around for a month. Get ourselves together, you know?” Lila does. “Her folks don’t like me and mine can’t stand her and it’s not like we have to care but it gets on our nerves.” He snorts. “Man, who knew about nerves! This is really bad. How about you?”
“The same. My friend and I were going to wander around like you for a couple of weeks. We have family problems as well.” And there’ll be more when this is over. What the hell is Tom doing? Craning, she can just glimpse him sucking on a pen. Funny, to be the one avoiding crucial conversations, when usually she’s the one who starts them.
Don’t get sad, get mad. She’d like to meet The Web’s girlfriend.
“Do I have to call you The Web?” she asks. “It makes me feel as if I’m sitting with Spiderman.”
He shrugs. “No. My girlfriend calls me Jimmy. It’s my buddies call me The Web.” He grins. “Except when we’re at her folks’ house, then she calls me The Web, too, because it gets them crazy. And the tattoos and the motorcycle, and they think I’m too old for school. I dropped out of high school and now I’m going back to learn computers. I figure that’s the way of the future, right? The thing to get into?”
“It certainly sounds like it.” Literature, either the learning or the teaching of it, is not, in the view of many experts or for that matter of many students, the way of the future. Which may in any case be straight down.
“Yeah. So it’s a one-year course, and we figure this is our last chance to get away together. Figure out where we’re going, maybe decide to get married, I don’t know. We had to go on the cheap, but that didn’t hardly matter. Shit.”
Lila pats his hand. Under the peony, or whatever the hell it is, it’s a strong, tense, young hand. Rather an appealing hand. She pats it again.
“I drive delivery for a drugstore, and Mel’s in a pizza joint, cooking mostly, but it’s not so cool any more. We aren’t either of us stupid or anything, it’s just, in school we could take off on my Harley and ride all over the place, and that’s what we really wanted to do, so we quit school so we could keep the bike in shape and have money to keep going. You ride?”
Lila shakes her head. “I’d like to, though.” Suddenly she would, she would. To her surprise, she finds she longs to dress in leather and roll along highways, skin burning from air and speed, low to the ground and exposed. She hasn’t thought of this before, but now it’s another enormous lost desire to be mourned.
“Too bad. You’ve really missed something. At least, we’re crazy about it. But you can’t go forever on minimum wage, taking orders and crap. Anyhow, we might want to have kids, and”—he grins—“they’ll need their own bikes. So that’s why I’m going back to school. I figure if I can fix bikes, computers shouldn’t be that much harder, right? Which is okay for me, but Mel has to keep making pizzas till we work out something better. Anyhow, when we get back we’re moving in together, see how that goes.”
He stops, then mutters, again, “Shit.”
“I know.” Lila tries to sound comforting, at least.
He is telling all this as if he’s storing it in one of the computers he’s been hoping to study. Like Sarah, like Lila for that matter, he seems to feel putting his story into the mind of a stranger will keep him alive in some form. Or like others, he is drowning out the sounds of terror in his own ears.
Jimmy’s life, however he has adorned and decorated it, isn’t especially unusual, but equally it is, of course, unique. There are dozens and scores of stories here. Like Adele, Lila could go from row to row, seat to seat, grasping arms. Instead of offering salvation, she would demand to hear tales of all these lives.
�
�You ever hated somebody your kids go out with?”
So much for cheekbones and eyes—naturally he only sees someone maternal in Lila’s bones and flesh. But what was she thinking? Surely not something else, not that kind of story.
“I don’t have kids.” Tom does, though, and has spoken of a couple of completely unsuitable young men, in his view, linked to one or the other of his daughters now and then. “You have to ride it out,” he’s said. “If you crack down, it gets worse. What I did was kill the pricks with kindness; that took the shine off.”
“But,” Lila goes on, “I understand it’s smart to pretend to like your kids’ choices, whether you do or not. Or at least be polite. Otherwise people get their backs up and hang on whether they actually want to or not.” Was that tactless?
“Yeah, I hope I’m that smart when we have kids. Her folks think I’m a loser and mine think she’s, I dunno, a slut or something, so I guess that makes us tighter. Not,” he adds quickly, “that we wouldn’t be tight anyway. But we know we gotta look after each other, too.”
“That’s nice. Looking after each other.”
“Except, you know, it’s tough today, for sure. That’s why we took turns hitting the can, to get away for a few minutes, calm down. You know how people get on your nerves sometimes, just little things?” Lila nods; she does. “Mel’s real hyper anyway, and her legs were bouncing like she was running and it was making me nuts. So she got mad and said at least she should be able to be scared her own way.”
Good for her.
“How long have you been together?”
“Ten years, almost. Since she was twelve and I was fourteen, except for breaking up sometimes when we’d have a fight or want to go out with somebody else. Even so, we always get back. Like, it’s not like I don’t know she’ll be back and she knows I’ll be sitting here.” He looks abruptly sad. “At least if we go down, we’re going together. You feel like that? With the guy you’re with?”
One of the things Lila likes very much about many young men these days is that they know how to ask questions. It seems to her their worlds are bigger than those of older men, including Tom sometimes, who grew up talking about themselves and never stopped.
“The thought crossed my mind,” she tells Jimmy cautiously. “That if this were going to happen, I was glad he and I were together.” She takes note, silently, of her own past tense.
Jimmy and his friend appear to take better account of each other than Tom and Lila do; but then, they’ve been together much longer than Tom and Lila, who could be their parents. She sighs. “I should get back to him.”
“Yeah, I guess. He’s probably wondering.” Not noticeably.
Jimmy looks a bit bereft. Lila pats his slim, flamboyant hand once more. “Your girlfriend will be back any minute.”
“I just hope the Bible babe doesn’t get here first, that’s all. Thanks for the company. It was nice of you. It was nice meeting you.”
“You too. You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”
She has no faith in that at all, and it sounded as if she were speaking to a child. Nevertheless. Leaning over, she kisses him lightly on the high arch of his cheekbone. “Thanks, Jimmy.” For, she supposes, giving her heart. A little hope for love, a good example.
“Hey!” comes an outraged voice from over Lila’s shoulder. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Chill, Mel,” Jimmy orders.
“Chill, shit. I go away for a few minutes and you got some old broad snuggled up kissing you? Chill yourself, asshole.”
If this is Jimmy’s girlfriend, Lila feels some sympathy with his parents. Or hers. Or all parents everywhere. She rises with, she hopes, some dignity. Old broad!
Although apparently a threatening one, even to this exotic young woman. Narrow, amazingly vivid, she’s a jungle orchid, something wild. Her large dark eyes are outlined in black, cheeks splashed with colour, wide lips painted a deep red. Black hair falls below her waist, and she’s wearing a bright blue, bright green outfit that looks like what cyclists wear on the road. Look at her bones!
If these two, Jimmy and Mel, ever had children together, they’d be stunning.
People do not, as a rule, much resemble what they do for a living, but it’s hard to imagine this woman stooped over pizza ovens.
“I’m Lila,” reaching out her hand—who invented hand-shaking? It’s a very disarming sort of gesture, anyway, which is likely its point—“and I have no designs on Jimmy.”
Mel looks embarrassed, drops her eyes. “Sorry. I’m Mel. Melissa. I’m kind of uptight.”
“Me too. It’s like a twelve-step program, isn’t it? My name is Lila and I’m kind of uptight. Uptights Anonymous?”
When Mel laughs, Lila sees what must appeal to Jimmy: an earthy young woman who can’t contain herself. She is spilling out of herself; maybe she always does, not only today.
Imagine being that sort of person.
If Lila were creating herself again, she would pay utter attention. She would perform even the smallest act intently. She would be electric. She would make her own hair stand on end.
“Lila,” Jimmy offers, “was keeping me company and saving me from this Bible-thumper we met in the line to the john. She got Lila, and she was coming after me. Hey, babe, you’ve been a while.”
Mel shrugs. Her shoulders go very high and very low inside the skin of her outfit. “I met some people, too. Then when the announcement came on, nobody moved, everybody wanted to hear. Except nobody still knows. Do they?” she asks Lila, flinging herself into the seat Lila just vacated.
She’s wearing low green leather boots. When she sits, her belly stays flat, doesn’t ripple out like Lila’s. She is very beautiful. Since Lila never was, even at Mel’s age, this is not envy, but appreciation of a striking piece of art.
Mel has a tattoo, a match to Jimmy’s, on her own left hand. “This?” she says, seeing Lila notice and waving it closer. “We got matching flowers, like, we think engagement rings are junky, so we got matching tattoos.”
“What kind of flowers are they?” Because to Lila they still look like peonies, florid and unlikely, not to mention in real life susceptible to ants.
Mel shrugs. “No kind, I guess. We never asked. We just wanted something that showed. Man it hurt, getting it on the hand. Means”—she grins—“we can’t leave each other, though. Not after you go through that. It’s just about the most amount of pain I ever had.”
Her face changes radically. She looks like a little girl, although an untamed, contrary one. “If we crash, do you think it’ll hurt much?”
“I don’t think so. If it happens, I think it’ll be too fast for that. Maybe for a second or so, but that’s it, I’m sure.” Lila doesn’t believe that at all.
Mel nods. “I hope so. We’d die, though, right?” Jimmy has taken her other hand, the one nearest him, and is stroking it with his fingers, green-petalled at their base.
“I expect so.” How is Lila supposed to know? It must be that to these two, she could be a mother. She can see it’s a role one could grow into, a presumption of wisdom, causing the head to swell. Gratifying and tempting, although also, since she has no view of herself as a mother, slightly dismaying. She could use a mother, or someone, herself.
“Good,” Mel says, satisfied. “I couldn’t stand living if I was going to be all bashed up and busted. I’d really hate that.”
Funny, that possibility hadn’t occurred to Lila. But what if they do get all the way but then crash low, trying to land—she might just be badly broken. Then what? Pain, paralysis perhaps, twisted limbs and organs, and who would care for her?
She should have had children. They might not have liked to, but they would have had to oblige.
No they wouldn’t, what was she thinking? Children turn their backs on parents all the time, and so they should. Look at Jimmy and Mel, look at Tom’s daughters, l
ook at herself, for that matter. She did not kick over her job or her life to go and help care for her father during his last illness. She visited as often as she could, driving the few hundred kilometres there and back as his heart surged and collapsed through three attacks before the final one; but she did not stay long. She sat beside his bed in the hospital and held his hand, and they smiled at each other, but their habit of benevolent silence felt, by then, unbreakable and necessary.
She could not stay there with him and her mother. She felt choked, and drove away gasping for air.
When he died, her mother phoned to tell her. When her mother died, the neighbour who found her body called.
In her turn, Lila would also be alone. You can’t expect even friends like Patsy or Nell to take on onerous care; that’s not the sort of thing that’s assumed, presumed, of friendship. She has imagined getting old on her own, trying to look after herself, and finally failing. She just didn’t imagine it happening soon.
Dorothy would look after Tom. It’s what spouses surely do, locked together no matter what. It’s what Lila’s mother did, as best she could.
If Lila were maimed and Tom were not, he would not look after her. That’s a terrible difference: he would look after Dorothy in such a circumstance, but would have to abandon Lila.
Son of a bitch. Not his fault, but son of a bitch anyway.
If Tom were maimed and Lila were not, she would never get near him. Because how would they explain her attention, her devotion? How very odd, Dorothy would naturally think.
These are the kinds of things Lila and Tom know, but only remotely. Well, today’s the day, isn’t it?
“You okay?” Jimmy asks.
“Sorry,” says Mel, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay.” They’re nice, noticing kids, tattoos, rings, spandex and all. “I just had one of those shocks. Reality kicking in.”
Mel nods. “Yeah, it’s hard to keep knowing all the time.”
“It certainly is.” She smiles. “Now I’d better get back to my companion, I’ve been gone long enough.” Enough? For that matter, companion? Are she and Tom companions? She would have thought so, and they’ve even said so often enough, but true companions look after each other, and she has clearly seen that they would not.
