by Karen Karbo
The plane was filled with caramel-colored men in dusty, ill-made suits. Tony found out, chatting with a Somalian sitting next to him, that many of them were attending Muslim World Day in Paris. The Somalian didn’t eat the plastic food distributed by the flight attendant but tucked it into his carry-on bag.
Mouse tried to read but found it as impossible as sleep. Instead, she took a datebook from her purse and counted time. In forty-eight hours she would be in Los Angeles. In a month, provided her mother had recuperated, she’d be back in Nairobi, spotting the sound track for Marriage Under Mobutu. With luck, and a few twenty-hour days, they’d be able to finish it and have the print in Kinshasa within two weeks. She closed the datebook and tucked it back in her shoulder bag. The counting used up five minutes.
She glanced over at Tony, who was reading a thick book with a garish cover, given him by his buddy Vince Parchman, before Vince left for the States the year before. Tony had been so busy writing his screenplay that he was just getting around to reading it now. He laughed out loud and kept saying, “I say, you must read this. It’s a stitch.”
The Somalian, thinking Tony was speaking to him, said, “I shall.”
For dessert, there was some viscous taupe-colored glop sandwiched between two slabs of sugar-coated cardboard. Apparently it was pear cobbler.
Tony cut it into fours with the side of his plastic fork and slurped it down without looking away from his book. “Try some, poppet, this isn’t quite as dreadful as it looks.”
Mouse suspected that Tony was utterly free of demons and fiends. She was irritated, then jealous.
There was a night spent somewhere. Either Paris or New York. Anyway, it was by the airport. Mouse could not get over so many English speakers in one place. So many pasty faces. It was disconcerting, like picking up a rock and discovering a colony of albino insects.
The room was overheated, Mouse couldn’t sleep. The sheets were slippery and untucked themselves every time she rolled over. Tony fell asleep while she was still in the bathroom inspecting a row of pimples along her jawline. She hadn’t had pimples in ten years. She wondered if Mimi had pimples.
Their room was across from the housekeeper’s supply closet. The housekeepers began work very early, much earlier than the rooms were ready to clean. They sat on a bench outside the closet and talked about their lives, which sounded bleak, but they laughed more than anyone Mouse had ever heard. They were Haitian or Jamaican and had loud, lilting voices. Mouse recorded their conversation, slipping the microphone of her portable tape recorder just under the door. She squatted next to the recorder, her head on her arms, tired, dehydrated, disoriented.
New York to Los Angeles. A Stretch Overwater 727. It bothered her that they were using this plane but not flying over any water. Everyone on board was white. Next to them, Tony looked ruddy and exotic, handsome with his curly, reddish-blond hair, his outrageous freckles, and big crooked nose. She had managed to snag a few hours of sleep and was glad, this morning, that he was with her. She felt this sudden surge of love because they booked too late to get seats together.
Tony had an aisle seat in row 5, next to a genial, balding set designer.
Mouse had a window seat in row 23, in the smoking section, among a gang of noisy teenage girls: the Manhattan Beach High School Women’s Volleyball Team.
Mouse tossed her duffel bag into the overhead compartment, crawled over the knees of an extraordinary-looking fifteen-year-old with nutmeg-colored hair. She said nothing but excuse me.
Back among Angelenos, Mouse was suddenly shy.
Bending to the advice of The Pink Fiend, Mouse had spent her last Kenyan shillings at the most expensive women’s store in Nairobi, buying a presentable travel outfit. This was before she received Mimi’s telegram. Can’t be at airport. Bok group. Unable to cancl.
Mouse wore the outfit anyway. White cotton blouse, tweed blazer, brown A-line skirt. Pantyhose. She had not worn a pair of pantyhose since she graduated from high school.
There were twenty or so girl volleyball players. They were returning from a tournament in Syracuse, where they had won second place.
Their shimmering hair and ferocious good health were merely the accoutrements of youth. They chain-smoked, knocked back gin and 7-Ups as fast as the flight attendant could deliver them, crushed into the rest room two at a time for a toot of cocaine. They called each other by their last names, discussed in the same loud voices volleyball, bladder infections, past bad dates.
Mouse felt as though she was a prisoner in an airborne locker room. She tugged self-consciously at her short dark hair, cut by Camisha at the kitchen table. She felt stuffy, stodgy, utterly out of it. She felt like Margaret Thatcher, minus the prestige, money, and power.
The seat belt sign pinged off. She could relax a bit, now that she’d gotten them safely off the ground. She took off her blazer and jammed it between her and the girl with the nutmeg-colored hair. She tried to read her book, a history of the British Documentary. The type was tiny and hard to read through the smoky soup engulfing the rear of the plane.
She pressed her nose against the window. What, she wondered, remembering Mimi’s telegram, was a bok group? Can’t be at airport. Bok group. Unable to cancl. It sounded like something to do with Eastern religion. Whatever it was, it was bound to be the height of fashion. From the time they were small Mimi had doggedly followed trends like a fogbound ship fixated on the beam of some far-off lighthouse.
She’s your sister. She loves you so much, The Pink Fiend purred. You are so judgmental.
The two girls behind Mouse began arguing over the best ways to make yourself throw up. One favored mustard and hot water, the other her index finger. Mouse felt like turning around and telling them that all they needed was a pink fiend hounding them day and night.
“Blowin’ chow is blowin’ chow,” said one of them.
“Yeah, but why make yourself sick? Mustard is disgusting.”
“All I gotta do is think about you sucking off Zack O’Keefe and I want to throw up,” the girl sitting next to Mouse bellowed back over her headrest.
“Fuck you, Matson.”
Mouse cut a glance at the sullen, smoking Matson. She was over six feet tall, with that silky nutmeg-colored hair, tied in a loose lopsided knot on top of her head. No one in Mouse’s high school had ever looked like this. Matson’s bone structure was the kind that inspired black and white photographers, but her clothes had Mouse baffled. From the waist down she was dressed for scuba diving, from the waist up for yard work. She wore tight black rubber pants that accentuated every curve and cleft on her fully developed body, and a short Manhattan Beach High T-shirt which afforded a view of her rippling brown midriff. Mouse had no idea the female body could ripple there. A number of small, dirty, once brightly colored woven bracelets were tied around her bony forearm. Her nails were bitten down to the quick.
“Fuck you,” Matson laughed without turning around.
“Pardon?” It was the flight attendant, bending toward them, a dinner tray swaddled in plastic in each hand.
“I meant fuck her,” Matson said to the attendant, gesturing blandly in the direction of the girl sitting behind her.
Cruelly, the dessert was the same pear glop encased in sugar-coated cardboard. Mouse had a brief image of crates of this cardboard cobbler being lowered from a freighter by crane, then rushed to the airlines of the world. Tears leaped to her eyes. As a thing that existed in the universe she found this profoundly depressing. The plane hit an air pocket and dropped a few dozen feet, leaving Mouse’s stomach on the ceiling, wedged in between the concealed oxygen masks. She was so tired. She resolved that when she got to Los Angeles, if she got to Los Angeles, she would go straight to the hospital to see her mother, skipping Mimi and the bok group.
Matson unwrapped her meal and stuffed the plastic in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her. She pinched up a bit of salad in her fingers, shoved it on her fork, then steered it into her mouth, wiping her fingers on the
first thing they came into contact with: Mouse’s blazer, jammed between them. Orange salad dressing dribbled down her chin. Mouse watched, transfixed. This was certainly worth a trip to the dry cleaners.
“Hey, Katalski, got a smoke?” Matson yelled behind her.
Out of the corner of her eye Mouse saw a white slip of something wavering between her seat and the window. She glanced over to see a bunch of brown fingers lacquered with magenta nail polish waving a long cigarette by her ear. “Hey, lady, pass this over, would ya?”
Mouse passed the cigarette to Matson. She was dying to see how this girl tackled her peas.
“Whatcha reading?” asked Matson, by way of saying thank you. She picked up a sirloin tip dripping in partially congealed gravy. Shoved it onto her fork. Steered the fork into her mouth. Wiped her gravy-stained fingers on the blazer.
“The History of British Documentary.”
“Oh.”
Matson picked up the peas one by one, stacking them three to a tine, very meticulous. Into her mouth. Fingers to the jacket. Mouse wondered what she’d do when she discovered it wasn’t her own jacket she’d been using as a napkin. Mouse wondered if maybe there wasn’t a documentary somewhere here. Here was this ravishing middle-class American beauty with the table manners of a girl raised by wolves. For the first time since the phone call, Mouse felt hopeful.
Matson glanced over at Mouse. She started chewing with her mouth closed. She finished her meal, wiped her mouth with her braceleted wrist, then wiped her wrist on the jacket. She lit up her cigarette, tipped her head back and blew circles.
“That’s my blazer,” said Mouse.
“You want it?” She picked it up and held it toward Mouse. Her blue eyes were empty of embarrassment. Enlisting whatever was at hand, including the clothing of strangers, in the service of personal hygiene, was simply a habit with her. Suddenly Mouse felt quite elated. She was traveling to a foreign country after all, something she was very good at.
Mouse hated using the bathroom on airplanes. For one thing, it took her away from her window. For another, she expected to flush and see clouds. She made Tony stand outside, in case she was sucked out. She mentally forgave him for his short-comings because he willingly stood guard without making fun of her. He talked to her through the door, telling her about the genial set designer. He really was a good man.
Before they returned to their seats they stood by the emergency exit. They took turns peering through the window.
According to the pilot they were forty-five minutes away from landing, but outside, below, there was Los Angeles, winking in the twilight. A strip of orange sky sat on the western horizon, where the sun had recently set. The channel islands were purple humps in the gray Pacific.
“I’d like to go right to the hospital,” she said.
“I should think your sister would be expecting us.”
“I have no idea how she is, my mother. I would really like to see her. Then we can go to Mimi’s.”
They crossed a knot of freeways, coiled around and under each other like a mass of snakes. Mouse recognized, or thought she recognized, this particular interchange, downtown, next to USC, where she took her first, and only, filmmaking class. She recognized a brick tower which used to play a record of tolling bells on the hour and a monolithic parking structure. The plane banked. She grabbed Tony’s arm, worried, suddenly, that she would slip through the emergency exit and land back in that class of sixteen years ago, like some time-traveling movie character.
5.
MOUSE AND TONY SPED NORTH ON THE 405 FREEWAY, through the Sepulveda Pass to Encino. After the sopping heat of Nairobi, the Los Angeles night seemed cold and dry. They had tried to rent a car, but it turned out to be impossible, due to a lack of official documents – driver’s license, car insurance – and account numbers which would reveal them to be, honest, upstanding adults.
Mouse stared out the window, silently munching her bottom lip. Tony felt sorry for her. He had never seen her so crinkled with worry. Brain surgery was such odious business. Even if her mother survived, the very fact she’d undergone something so excruciating was bound to change things. To think otherwise was like cracking an egg, redepositing the contents back in the shell, taping it back together and imagining it was still the same egg. The thought sent a chill zipping up his spine. Still, he couldn’t help feeling a bit grateful – hell, extremely grateful – that Mrs. FitzHenry’s misfortune had afforded him the chance to get out of Africa. He reached over and covered Mouse’s hand with his own.
Even though it was nearly nine o’clock, traffic was heavy. The cabbie, a large scowling Latino, drove seventy miles an hour, six inches from the bumper of the car ahead of him. In any other circumstance this might have been alarming, but everyone else drove this way, too, so it seemed quite safe.
The freeway was elevated, affording Tony a view for a half-dozen blocks in either direction. He was astonished how clean the streets were, how empty. They were so wide and black, lit with strange acidic orange streetlamps. Low clouds bounced the orange light back onto the roofs of modest apartment buildings, small stucco bungalows, L-shaped malls that bracketed every corner of every block on every main street.
The back windows of the apartments and bungalows faced the freeway. What Tony glimpsed through them was not glitzy, glittery, or wild, as he had expected. Vince Parchman had lived in L.A. before joining the Peace Corps and had bags of stories about sex-starved women with tits that rivaled Kilimanjaro, bowls of drugs set out with the canapes at round-the-clock parties, guru-worshiping Hollywood producers with cocaine encrusted nostrils, all of whom were functionally illiterate. Tony was mildly alarmed, looking through these windows, to see people doing dishes, watching television, reading the newspaper.
In fact, Los Angeles seemed a little plain, merely a backdrop for the huge colorful billboards that shot up into the sky. About the worst you could say about the place, he concluded, after they had chugged over the pass – through stark blue hills, marred only by a few half-occupied housing developments – was that it was rather unimaginative. It reminded him of the backgrounds in cheap cartoons, where the cat chases the mouse past the same tree, the same house over and over again: minimall Mexican restaurant Xerox copies tanning salon liquor store. Minimall Mexican restaurant Xerox copies tanning salon liquor store. Minimall Mexican restaurant Xerox copies tanning salon…
And in each minimall, the same shops, all geared in some way to the upkeep of feminine beauty – hair salon, weight reduction, weight training – or the renting of videotapes. There seemed to be a preponderance of shops that recycled the same four words: Happy Nails, Friendly Nails, Friendly Rosy Nails, Rosy Happy Nails. The cabbie, who turned out to be Korean, snorted that these were fingernail salons all run by scheming Vietnamese. Tony looked over at Mouse and thought she could stand a session at all of these places, save the tanning salon.
“Vince said once a woman in front of him in a queue at the grocery store invited him to her place up the coast somewhere, Santa Cruz, I believe. Her ‘place,’ it seemed, was a nudist colony of some sort. John Denver was there, serenading the nudists. His guitar rather artfully placed over –”
“– oh Tony, really,” said Mouse. She was not in the mood to hear Vince Parchman’s clichéd observations and anecdotes about life in L.A. Up to the age of nineteen she had lived here her entire life. Without exception it had been dull dull dull.
She leaned her head against the back of the greasy plastic seat and closed her eyes. The insides of her lids felt like emery boards. She had no idea what she felt or what she thought. She did know that she craved a shower and a bed.
“I’m sorry I’m cranky,” she said. “It’s just, you used this as an excuse to get out of Nairobi, didn’t you? Be honest.”
“I did,” he said. “No one can leave Nairobi without an excuse. They ask you at customs. ‘What is your excuse for leaving Kenya, bwana? It had better be good, bwana.’” He snaked his long, freckled arm along the back of the se
at around her bony shoulder.
“Just do me a favor and don’t look like a kid in a candy store, all right?”
“Far be it from me.”
AT THE HOSPITAL Mouse spoke to a young nurse with white-blond hair and heavily mascaraed eyelashes. Mouse was gradually getting used to all these beige-faced blonds of the First World. The nurse was tall and strapping, and wore a diving watch.
“I’m looking for Shirley FitzHenry.” Mouse glanced down at her hand on the counter and saw a thread of African dirt embedded under each nail. She knew she looked like hell. Greasy hair, mossy teeth, BO that would warrant a head turn even in the most odoriferous corner of Kenya. Cleanliness, Mouse realized, was not next to godliness, but affluence. The surfer nurse smelled like flowers, the hospital like mouthwash. You could count the germs in this place on one hand. Surgery could safely be performed on the floor of the waiting room.
“You must be Mouse,” said the surfer nurse. “Your mom’s in 456. Congrats.”
“Thanks,” said Mouse, confused. For what? Getting here in one piece? Maybe it was some new California colloquialism.
The nurse shrugged. “Sure.”
Mouse found Shirl propped up in bed snoozing through a news show. The other bed was empty and freshly made up. Her first impression was of the godawful white bandage. She thought her mother resembled the peg-legged piccolo player in the famous painting depicting the American Revolution. How can you think that at a time like this! The Pink Fiend scolded. Mouse chewed on her sunburned lips.
On her mother’s lap were stacked two or three slick magazines, thick as telephone directories. Her head hung to one side, her thin lips loose, shiny with saliva. Her skin was sallow, and the dastardly duo of Age and Sun had left their usual calling cards: wrinkles, lines, and spots. It was not the woman Mouse remembered. It was not the Olive.
