The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Sabine waited three more days before calling Dot Fetters.

  "Just checking to see how the wedding plans are coming," Sabine said, but she could not make her voice sound like her voice. It shuddered and broke.

  "Sabine?" Dot said.

  Sabine put her forehead against the heel of her hand and nodded.

  "Are you all right?"

  "I'm good."

  "You're coming out, aren't you? That's what you're calling to tell me."

  "I was thinking...," Sabine said, but didn't finish.

  "Bertie," Dot Fetters called, "it's Sabine, pick it up in the bedroom."

  In the distance, Sabine could hear a scramble. Dot Fetters was no fool; two would be more persuasive than one. In the moments it took Bertie to reach the phone, Sabine saw the rooms of the house on the other end of the line. She saw the living room where Dot Fetters sat in a reclining chair unreclined, pale tan walls and practical carpet with a braided rug over that. The kind of rug that Parsifal referred to as a big doormat. The light was dim and gold and the house was as small as Sabine's was huge. The halls were hung with family photographs from generations back. The double bed that Bertie was now sitting on was covered in a white chenille spread. She didn't stop to turn on the light on the bedside table before picking up the receiver.

  There was a click and then a breathless excitement on the line. "Sabine! Are you coming?" she said in the dark.

  "She's thinking about it," Dot Fetters told her daughter.

  "You have to come now," Bertie said. "We could use help with the wedding. You've got such good taste and I don't know what I'm doing. I need help fixing up Haas's house, too. There's so much around here that needs to be done."

  "Don't make her think we want her to come just to put her to work," Mrs. Fetters said.

  "She doesn't think that, do you, Sabine?" Before Sabine could answer, Bertie went on. Sabine thought of her pink hand clutching the phone, the engagement ring making a brave light. "I'm just making excuses. I'm just trying to make you think that we need you so you'll come. We just miss you, is all. You don't have to do anything once you get here."

  "You fly to Denver," Dot Fetters said. "Then you take the shuttle to Scottsbluff. We'll pick you up there. Unless you're afraid of those little planes. If you're afraid, I've got no problem driving to Denver to get you."

  "They plow all the roads to Denver," Bertie said.

  "No problem getting to Denver," Dot Fetters said.

  "Do you have warm clothes?" Bertie asked.

  "She's got warm clothes. There were pictures of her and Guy in the snow."

  "I wasn't sure. It was so warm in Los Angeles. Well, don't worry about it. There are plenty of clothes here. Everything's going to be too big on you but between me and Mama and Kitty there's a ton of stuff. Don't go and buy anything."

  "Do you mind the cold?" Dot Fetters asked.

  At first Sabine thought she was asking Bertie, but when there was silence on the line she knew it was her turn to answer. "No," Sabine said.

  "It's cold here," Mrs. Fetters said. "I don't want to mislead you about that."

  "I understand."

  "So when are you coming?"

  Sabine leaned forward in bed and looked down the hall. It went on forever. It went on so long that it simply got dark and faded into nothing. "Tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow?" Dot Fetters said. "Honey, do you have a ticket?"

  From the extension in the bedroom, Bertie made a squealing sound of perfect joy.

  "Those tickets are an absolute fortune if you don't buy them in advance," Dot Fetters said, her voice bewildered.

  "Mama, be quiet," Bertie said. "Don't scare her off. Don't make her think we don't want her to come."

  Nebraska

  "IT'S USUALLY NOT as bad as this," the woman said to Sabine once the plane had righted itself again. "I make this flight sometimes once a month, and most of the time it's fine."

  Sabine's seat was shaking. She could hear the strain in the hardware that bolted it to the floor. She tried to keep her body relaxed, not to take every jolt in her spine. The plane dropped a hundred feet, as if it had been suddenly seized with the realization that it was deadweight, then just as abruptly it was caught by some invisible upsurge in the air. Sabine's head hit against the window next to her. She touched her temple lightly with her fingertips. She took a deep breath and tried to focus her eyes on the bright white light on the tip of the wing.

  "Oh," said the woman across the aisle.

  Sabine looked at her and smiled sympathetically, but she did not speak. Even opening her mouth felt dangerous. The woman smiled back. She was, in fact, not much older than Sabine, but she had lived a different kind of life. With her gray hair and wide lap she appeared to be well past fifty. In this particular circumstance of fear, they were very much united. Sabine had never been afraid of flying, but this felt more like a preparation for crashing. From time to time the stewardess made a low moaning sound from the back of the plane.

  Sabine was thinking about her parents, the rabbit tucked between them on the sofa in the living room, getting the news. Hadn't they told her not to go? Didn't they cry, both of them, not much, but still a few tears, when she left off the food and the pillow Rabbit used for a bed? Her father had held him in his arms; running his thumb back and forth in the soft dent between his ears. "Sabine is going to a place where they eat nice bunnies like you," he whispered.

  They had asked her very pointedly to forget about Nebraska. They had tried their best to be understanding and kind when she decided to go just the same. That would be the story they would always tell. How they begged her not to go, their only child, and how she left.

  "Ladies," said a buttery voice over the intercom, dropping the "gentlemen" because it was only Sabine, the one other woman passenger, and the stewardess on board the little plane, "this is your captain speaking. It's a little rocky out there tonight, so we're going to ask the flight attendant to postpone the beverage service. We're hoping you can just bear with us and we'll see if we can't find a better altitude. In the meantime I'm going to leave the seat belt sign illuminated and ask that you please remain in your seats."

  "I was really thinking about stretching my legs," the other woman said.

  Sabine smiled again in polite acknowledgment. The woman sighed and shook her head. The stewardess was in the center of the very back of the plane, strapped into a jump seat with a crossing shoulder harness. She was flipping through the pages of a magazine, but when the plane pitched sharply to the left for no apparent reason, the magazine flew from her hands. Sabine turned around again and closed her eyes.

  Everything would go to her parents. Salvio was staying at the house and she hoped he would have the good sense to take the gay porn videos out of the drawer under the VCR. If she ever got back to Los Angeles, she would make a point of giving them to him. The truth was her parents would deal with the burden of all those possessions much better than she had. They would wait a decent amount of time and then they would go into the house and methodically break it down, save a dozen pictures out of the fox-fur box, and then throw the rest away. They would sell things of value. They would give wisely and generously to charity. They would choose a handful of memorabilia: Sabine's scrapbook of the magic act, one of the model houses she had built from her own designs that proved what a fine architect she could have been, the real pearl necklace they could not afford when they had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday. They would take a few things they simply liked, the extravagant Savonnerie rug from her dining room, which would fit perfectly in their living room; the pair of brass stags whose antlers held candles at different heights; the small foul Klee painting that Phan had bought for Parsifal on their one-year anniversary. The rest of it would go. The house would go, even though they liked it, even though they had greatly admired the yard and had always wanted their own lemon trees; they would not move. What Sabine realized as the commuter plane from Denver to Scottsbluff tossed and dived, the wings shearing
through dirty clouds, was that her parents would get on with their lives in a way she had been unable to. In spite of whatever immeasurable grief this would cause them, they were the sort of people who picked up and went on. In a wave of nausea, Sabine felt inestimable love. What greater comfort was there than to know that they wouldn't fold under this potential loss?

  When her parents had told her not to leave Los Angeles, she had known they were right. Sabine's best interest was always what they had in mind. It was for Sabine's sake that her parents had left Israel. They looked at the baby in the crib and thought of all that uncertainty. A place that was only for Jews was too new, the world would never permit it. All around them countries were full of anger; and much of it, or so it seemed with this child, was directed towards them. Sabine's father had cousins in Montreal and Sabine's mother spoke French, and so they thought they had found their place. In August, when they arrived and moved into the little apartment over the cousin's garage, they felt sure they had done the right thing, but by December they were not so sure. The winter paralyzed them. There were too many unhappy memories in cold weather. As soon as there was enough saved to make a second trip, just barely enough, with nothing left over, they moved to Los Angeles, a place like Israel, so warm that the citrus fruit stayed on the trees year-round. They went to the Fairfax neighborhood, where the public schools closed down for High Holy Days and the menus came standard in Yiddish. They stayed there even after the neighborhood declined, even after there was money enough for a better house in the Valley, because, as Sabine's mother said, they were through with change. Four countries were more than anyone should suffer in a lifetime. How could one street be so different from the next? If they didn't feel the need to wander, why should she?

  For one full second the plane seemed to stop. It hung in the air, motionless, and for that second Sabine could see the snow falling straight down. Then the plane caught on something and sputtered forward. Sabine had a single memory of Canada, and that was of snow. Standing in the snow and seeing white in every direction she looked, up and down, behind her, to the side. She turned and turned and swung her head around until she knew that this was an envelope from which she would never escape. Sabine's mother tells the story of hearing a scream that was the sound only a dying person would make. She thought that a wolf or a bear, animals that had never before come into the city of Montreal, was at that moment in her yard, eating her daughter alive. But when Sabine ran to her, it was only the snow she was screaming at, and her mother said she understood. She had felt like screaming herself. All of Sabine's other memories were of Fairfax, a place where a person could live in America without going to all the trouble of figuring out the country.

  "When I was in high school I wanted to be a flight attendant because I thought it was the only way I was ever going to get out of town," the stewardess said blankly from the back of the plane. Sabine and the other woman turned around. The stewardess had bright blond hair and wore her eye makeup like Natalie Wood. "I thought, How else am I ever going to get to go to Europe? Meet a wealthy businessman, get married? Nobody told me that I'd be flying to the same little fucking towns I came from."

  "Are you okay back there?" the other woman said.

  "These are the planes that go down, girls." The stewardess narrowed her eyes. "It's hardly ever the superjets. Look at the numbers. It doesn't get the big press because it's just a handful of us who get killed. These things are death traps with wings."

  The plane could potentially hold eighteen passengers in its moist and tinny walls. Tiny pearls of water shot across the plastic windows, which were etched with delicate patterns of frost. The blue carpet was frayed at the edges and the brighter blue chairs were made shabby by the pieces of white paper Velcroed over every headrest to protect the fabric from the stains of oily hair. The plane pitched so completely to the left that Sabine had to grab onto the armrests while her purse shot across the aisle and lodged itself beneath another seat. The stewardess screamed.

  "Hello?" said the other woman to the curtain up ahead of them. "Could somebody up there do something about her?"

  There was a pause and then a man leaned back through the soft folds of fabric. "Bad weather," he said, either the pilot or the copilot. Sabine hoped it was the copilot. She did not recognize the voice. "We're perfectly safe."

  "Her," the other woman said, pointing to the back of the plane. The stewardess hung limply forward in her shoulder harness, big, inky tears smearing her face.

  The pilot or copilot watched for a minute. "Becky," he said, trying to make his voice loud enough to reach the back of the plane, but she didn't seem to hear him. The engines roared against the wind. He looked first to the other woman and then to Sabine, and when neither of them presented an idea he disappeared back behind the curtain. "Becky," his voice came over the intercom. The girl sniffed and raised her stained face to the ceiling. "Pull it together now, we've got passengers."

  Exhausted, she nodded at no one. She brushed her hands back and forth across her cheeks and blew her nose on a cocktail napkin. She was quiet.

  And in that quiet, Sabine felt very clearly that she would not mind dying on this night, with these people, in this plane. The memory of Los Angeles seemed to pull away from her, thousands of tiny houses on neat curves, their roofs glistening like dimes in the bright sun as she looked out the window after takeoff. It looked like a world she would build herself, the order and neatness of miniature. She thought that maybe she would be lucky if her life ended quickly, like Parsifal's, and once she felt that peace in her heart, she knew just as certainly that the plane would land and they would all be safe and it would be a good thing not to die.

  The plane was clearly losing altitude, although this time it seemed to be doing so with a sense of purpose. Sometime later Sabine felt the landing gear move down and lock. The fields below were blowing white, a whiteness interrupted only by the occasional shadow thrown from a drift of snow.

  "Ladies," said the pilot, "we are making our final descent into Scottsbluff."

  The woman on the other side of the aisle held out her hand, and Sabine took it and squeezed hard. There was a roaring like a tornado when the plane touched down, a roaring and a shaking that threatened to pull their hands apart, but they held on. The warmth in those fingers felt as much like love as anything Sabine had ever known. They were in Nebraska now.

  Even when the plane was parked, Sabine still felt the ground moving. A man in blue zip-up coveralls held her hand as she walked down the movable metal staircase into the snow. Immediately snow blew down the neck of her sweater and dampened the bare skin of her wrists between the ends of her coat sleeves and the tops of her gloves. Snow filled her pockets and pressed into her mouth. She had to stop and lean against the jumpsuited man.

  "Not much farther," he yelled over the wind, and put his hand beneath her arm in a professional manner. As they walked across the tarmac, sheets of snow pooled and vanished beneath her feet. It was like walking on something boiling. In every direction the snow was banked into high hills. Plows worked on either side, nervously rearranging what could not be made right. The flat, smooth place they were walking across now had been carved out like a swimming pool. The man worked hard to open the heavy metal door, and the wind made a sucking and then howling sound when it, with Sabine, was let into the warm building.

  Dot and Bertie Fetters were waiting.

  They looked different in Nebraska. Even at the first sight of them in the hallway, Sabine could tell they looked better here. Instead of seeming merely bulky, the heavy coats with toggles made them look confident, prepared. Sabine wondered if she too could buy high boots with rubber covering the feet. When they saw her, they called her name with a kind of joyful wonder that she had never heard in the word Sabine before. They threw themselves together onto her neck. What was lost is now found.

  "I half thought you wouldn't be on the plane," Dot said. "I tried and tried to tell myself that you were really coming but I couldn't make myself believe it.
" She hugged her again, hugged her hard enough to empty out Sabine's lungs. "Have you gotten thinner? It couldn't be possible that you've gotten thinner?"

  "Sabine," Bertie said, stepping back to see her fully, "it's so wonderful that you're here. Was the flight okay?"

  "Good," Sabine said.

  Bertie leaned towards her, her mouth up close to Sabine's ear. "You've got to meet Haas." She held out her hand to a man standing away from everyone, his back pressed against the wall. When she motioned he came to her, the nylon of his blue down coat making a soft shushing noise as his arms moved against his sides.

  "Haas," she said quietly, "this is my sister-in-law, Sabine Parsifal." Bertie's face was so hopeful, so eager to please, that Sabine had to look away from her. She shook Haas's hand. "This is my fiancé," Bertie said, "Eugene Haas."

  "Nice to—," he said, but was unable to finish the sentence, assuming, perhaps, that what was nice was implied. Haas was older than Bertie. He looked a little overwhelmed, frightened even. Like Sabine, he seemed unsure as to why he was in this airport. He pushed his hand back into his pocket and stepped away.

  "Haas drove us over," Bertie said. Sabine looked at the delicate bones of his face, the way his stocking cap was pulled to the top of his glasses, and thought, He worries about you in this weather. He's afraid you'll get stuck in an embankment and freeze to death on the road. He's afraid of someone skidding on a patch of ice and coming into your lane.

  "Come on and let's get you home and settled in." Dot took Sabine's arm and steered her with authority to where the bags were being set out by the man in the blue coveralls.

  The airport had two gates and Sabine had arrived at the second. In the lobby, orange plastic bucket chairs stood empty and waiting, bolted into two straight lines. There was a vending machine full of brands of candy she had never heard of before. Chuckles. Haas went on ahead to drive the car to the front door from where it was parked, fifty feet away. The woman who had sat beside Sabine on the plane smiled at her shyly now and without speaking, picked up her suitcase and left.