“My dears,” Uncle Marten announced at dinner, raising his glass of port ceremonially and not noticing that it was only me at table, but then “my dears” was less a term of endearment than a verbal accessory that went with his new Victorian-gentleman-of-largesse persona that he had adopted for the holidays.
“My dears, it is time for the tree. I propose we all equip ourselves appropriately with axes and saws and similar equipment necessary to the task, and foray out to the steep rise of the bluff, the wooded one with all those lovely little baby Douglas firs, and cut ourselves a tree. The tree-gathering expedition is a time-honored one in North American families.” I was pretty sure this was a direct quote from something he’d read about Christmas somewhere.
“Well,” I informed him, slowly cutting my meat into teeny tiny pieces and taking my time with my pronouncement in the off chance it would sink in, “Mrs. Mendelbaum is bedridden and Jocelyn still has a fever and I’m not so pert myself, but I suppose I could drag myself up a bluff to cut and haul a tree if it was a very small one.”
“Oh, we can’t have small. We can’t have small at all,” said Uncle Marten, who had changed from Scrooge into Dr. Seuss. “After all, there’s that large dolly you wanted. We must have room underneath for that, mustn’t we?”
I’d given Uncle Marten my Christmas list as requested, and if he thought it odd that it consisted entirely of tools, hardware, and a large dolly he hadn’t given any indication. Now he seemed to be making jovial allusions to it, but unless he came out and asked me just what I needed all this stuff for, I planned to ignore him.
“Besides, we’ll get Humdinger. Humdinger, I’ll be bound, can drag anything.”
So the next day, muffled and bundled, the three of us set out across the meadow and up the steep hill to the Christmas Tree Bluff. Humdinger and I kept trying to point out smaller, more manageable trees at the foot of the bluff, but Uncle Marten seemed set on the really huge fourteen-foot ones toward the top of the hill, and we couldn’t talk him out of it.
“I’ve got simply boxes of ornaments, you see, they’ve been arriving all month. Of course, a lot of them, well, most of them, got crushed when they were dropped from the helicopter. You’d think that they’d pack them better, wouldn’t you?” When we didn’t answer—me because I was breathless already, and Humdinger because he never said anything unless he said something polite and encouraging and agreeable, which must limit even him on occasion—Uncle Marten just nattered on. “In this day and age.” Again there was no word of encouragement from us. The ground was muddy and steep, and if most of the ornaments were broken, it really seemed pointless to spend the morning dragging an enormous, hard-to-hold, prickly, sappy monster of a tree all the way back to the house. “I mean with modern technology. Bubble wrap and all.” We were silent still, which seemed to disappoint Uncle Marten, who never paid much attention to others himself but obviously found it upsetting when people didn’t respond to him. “I mean, I know they aren’t thinking the boxes will be dropped from helicopters. They don’t pack them with that in mind. But can that really be much worse than the wear and tear of being shunted in and out of trucks and trains and planes?” Silence. “I think not.” Silence. “I think not indeed. Careful you don’t trip over the fuselage.”
I, who was in a trance slogging ever upward through the mud, woke up a few seconds later, it having finally registered what Uncle Marten had said in the midst of his diatribe, and I stared back down the hill. Sure enough, I saw the corner of a fuselage peeking out from under some fallen trees on the side of the path. Then I caught Humdinger stopped in his tracks as well, staring at me staring at the fuselage, and I gave him an irritated look, running up the hill to catch up with Uncle Marten, who had finally found a tree to his exact specifications and was standing in front of it, his arms held wide as if to hug it.
“Great, let’s chop it down and get out of here,” I said, going for an ax, but Humdinger took it gently but firmly out of my hands and began to chop himself. He was really being awfully pushy if you asked me.
That evening, after we had cut and dragged the ridiculously large tree back to the house and then been unable to get it in through the doors until Humdinger took them off their hinges and removed them, letting a blast of cold air through the house in the process, and after dinner, through which I had to bear Uncle Marten going on endlessly about Bohemian glass ornaments from the thirties, which it seemed he had decided to start collecting, spending thousands of dollars to have them dropped from the helicopter and broken, when I was safely ensconced in my cranberry chair by the fire with a book and a glass of cranberry juice—all the beverages in the fridge were now red and green; currently we had lime Kool-Aid and cranberry juice going—while Uncle Marten ran around with boxes of things muttering to himself and unpacking ornaments and preparing everything for the tree-trimming party he was putting together with hot chocolate and eggnog and cookies and fruitcake, which nobody wanted after such a large dinner, Humdinger made his way over to my chair and I thought, finally, because when Jocelyn had been alone while I was ill, he was always sneaking up behind her offering her mints. Finally, he is offering me a mint, and I couldn’t wait to tell her, but instead he said, “I’ve taken the liberty of washing and drying all the wet clothes behind the freezer.”
Was I being baited? Was he trying to tell me he knew what we were up to with the airplane parts? I couldn’t think of anything to say to this except thank you, but by that time he was already padding out.
And where’s my mint, I thought.
I don’t think the tree trimming was quite the festive occasion Uncle Marten had anticipated. Humdinger was washing dishes and taking trays up to the ill. Uncle Marten kept falling off the ladder into the branches, knocking the whole thing over. He got scratched up and covered in sap and he kept trying to keep himself from swearing mid-swear, so that he said things like “Da!” in deference to me, I suppose, although I had hung out with my father and his pilot and mechanic friends enough to be inured to such things and in the end it just annoyed me, the idea that I could be so easily shocked with everything else that could go wrong in the world, and finally it irritated me so much, it seemed so oblivious to any of our real situations, that I went up to Jocelyn’s room, leaving Humdinger, who had finally joined us, and Uncle Marten with only seventy or eighty ornaments still to hang and roughly fifty or so to break still. There I sat on the edge of Jocelyn’s bed and said to her sleeping form, “There’s a fuselage, or at least part of a fuselage, on the Christmas Tree Bluff.”
* * *
Of course, what Humdinger knew or how much was the question. “I don’t see how he can know what we have planned. It’s not like you’d expect two girls to build an airplane and fly away in it just like that. That would be quite a leap of logic.” I had taken a bowl of nuts into Jocelyn’s room and was sitting on the edge of her bed cracking and eating them. Jocelyn was in the kind of comalike sleep this flu produced, so she wasn’t actually hearing any of this, but I didn’t care. In fact, I preferred it. I didn’t keep a diary and I found coming in and airing my thoughts to a comatose Jocelyn to be extremely relieving. I found myself wishing that Jocelyn, if she must recover, would continue to fall into regular comalike states. It was talking to someone without the bother of having to listen in turn. “Anyhow, you’d better perk up soon. Christmas is coming and Uncle Marten seems to have high expectations about the whole thing. I think he may have plans to tie you to a chair in an upright position if you can’t maintain it by yourself.”
JOCELYN
I WAS AWARE that Christmas was coming and I was hoping that they would all let me skip it. I was feeling worse and worse and I didn’t like to leave my bed even to use the bathroom. I knew my hair was filthy. It hung in long, loose oily strands, but I didn’t have the strength to wash it. I couldn’t stand the thought of that moment of cold when you get into a bath or a shower before your body adjusts to the change in temperature. It was bad enough when I did have to get out of bed
to use the bathroom, my feet touching the cold, bare floors, the energy it took to put on a bathrobe and pad down the hall. And when I coughed now it felt as if my lungs were going to expire afterward, fold up and be good no more. And really, I thought, that might be the best thing.
One night at three in the morning when I was coughing terribly and trying desperately to keep at bay thoughts of how my mother used to sit with me when I was sick, I thought that now there was no one ever to come care for me, no one who would really care in that way if something happened to me. I wondered, if no one cared, could you really care yourself if something happened to you? Would you have the strength to care, would it make sense to care, it was almost as if you needed a second opinion about this. Perhaps, I realized, we take our strength without knowing it as much from the people who love us as we do from any resources of our own, and I knew no one in that house loved me. They might like me all right, although I hadn’t really detected any of this either, but there was no love there. I sank my hot head in the cool pillows and decided to expire quietly, when there was a tap at my door.
I startled, sat up rigidly, and stopped breathing. Who could be there? It wouldn’t be Meline. Meline never knocked. It was as if my mother had heard my thoughts. Could she come to me like this? I had secretly hoped all these months that she would find a way. That her love was so strong that even death couldn’t keep her from me if I needed her. But did ghosts make physical noises? Well, of course, they could. There were poltergeists, after all.
“Oh, come in, come in,” I pleaded, croaking hoarsely, all the hope I had left in the world pinched painfully into that invitation, but it wasn’t my mother who came through the door and I felt once again I had been cruelly led on by the universe to create this terrible moment of expectation and disappointment. It was Mrs. Mendelbaum.
Mrs. Mendelbaum was hunched over, wearing a black bathrobe. Who buys a black bathrobe? It was funereal, and funereal and bath attire weren’t congruent. It seemed wrong and bizarre, especially for someone like Mrs. Mendelbaum, whom you’d expect to find in something pink and fuzzy. It was bad enough to have comfort and hope wrenched from me, but now I had to deal with the wrong and the bizarre. Even the newly familiar was unsure. Not what you really thought. Changing before you had a toehold. I fell weakly back on the pillows and stared unseeingly at the ceiling.
“I hert you!” said Mrs. Mendelbaum. “You were coughing batly.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” I said, thinking, Oh, leave me alone, leave me alone!
But Mrs. Mendelbaum approached slowly across the floor, her tiny arthritic steps and the black bathrobe making it seem like some strange religious rite. “I brought you some of my meticine.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks, but the doctor said it was just the flu. I’m not taking anything except some Tylenol. For the fever. And aches.”
“Yes, I know, maideleh,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Oy, these doctors, oy, these men. You’ve no one to take care of you proper, no? Es iz a shandeh far di kinder. If your mother was here she would give you this meticine. A mother knows. It’s for the cough. So you sleep. You can’t get better if sleeping you don’t do.”
“I don’t know…” I said, stalling. I didn’t want to be rude and I felt too deflated to argue, but I couldn’t just swallow anything this old woman pushed on me. Who knew what was in it? What it was she believed in. It looked like thick black ink. Meline was right, I had no trust, no faith. But why would I?
“I am taking it myself. Didn’t I get better? So the proof you say is in the putting.”
“Pudding,” I said, distractedly. “You can leave it on the table, if you want. It’s very kind.”
“No, I give it to you now. A dose now. A dose later in the night if you neet it. But only if you neet it and only at night. I have not much left and it’s to make you sleep. I was given six bottles, but I haf neet for it as well. My friend Sophie, she makes it in the shtetl. A Polish meticine.”
“Well…” I couldn’t think. What difference did it make anyway? At worst, it would kill me, and I’d been thinking about that anyway. Maybe, too, my mother had someone send this strange woman to me. Maybe I was meant to be killed here in the middle of the night by Mrs. Mendelbaum so I could join my mother. So I took a spoonful of the black goo that Mrs. Mendelbaum held out to me, and Mrs. Mendelbaum then wiped the spoon on the back of her bathrobe. In my daze I wondered if that’s how the bathrobe had gotten so black. How many times had Mrs. Mendelbaum taken the medicine and wiped the spoon just so? She would have had to drink an awful lot of it.
“Goot, goot. You rest now. You sleep, my little angel. I hat angels of my own once.” And the way Mrs. Mendelbaum said it, I began to cry because I knew Mrs. Mendelbaum was not giving the medicine to me, now. She was giving it to her own children. She was giving it to them fruitlessly, as if this loving act could bring her back into time with them. It was her own children she was trying to make well and bring back. Over and over and over.
I sat for a second in bed looking at the wall. Mrs. Mendelbaum had placed the medicine bottle on my night table and left. Then what did I begin to smell? Wet earth. Overheated dense air, full of life, the thick mists of the jungle. I was vaguely aware that this was not just the fever. It was some drugged response to the cough medicine, and I felt both heavily sleepy and sharply awake somewhere else. I heard the brushing of the large, heavy fronds against the window and the clickety clackety clack of the train wheels, like large hooves, trotting over the old tracks. Clickety clack through the jungle, clickety clickety clack. Oh no, I murmured feverishly, because suddenly I knew what was coming next. Then I felt it, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, patting it and saying, It won’t be long now, Jocelyn dear, and we’ll be there. I sighed and leaned into my mother’s soft body and smelled the faint whiff of her carnation talc and the faint powdery tang of her deodorant. I settled there and turned my head slightly to gaze out the window at the jungle. Every so often there would be a clearing and I would see a village or a fire, women washing clothes in a river, their feet splayed against the tiny pebbles of the riverbed, their knees apart slightly wider than their feet, their perfect balance, perched over the rocks, and the slap wring slap wring of the clothes, accepting and unhurried in this task. It was the rhythm of their lives while my life and what was to be moved hurriedly on down the tracks.
MELINE
THE NEXT MORNING I came into Jocelyn’s bedroom very pleased with myself. “Wake up,” I said as Jocelyn stared at me. She had hair matted on her head and some stuck to the corner of her mouth with dried drool and something black and brackish. She really looked as if she’d been fished out of a swamp.
“Whah? I’m sick. Go ’way,” said Jocelyn.
“You won’t want me to leave when you’ve heard what I’ve found,” I said.
“Will too, guarantee it, go ’way,” said Jocelyn, squeezing her eyes even more tightly closed as if there were a chance this would get rid of me.
“Oh, stop it and WAKE UP!” I barked. “You’re not that sick. You’re not even as sick as I was. The doctor said so.”
“Fever,” said Jocelyn. “Flu.”
“Jocelyn, PAY ATTENTION. I … found … a … COCK … PIT!” I figured if she cared about our plan at all, this would excite her.
“Don’t care,” said Jocelyn. “Don’t care. Don’t care at all.” And this time she put the pillow over her head and held it there and refused to make any kind of response to my fervent pokes, even to defend herself.
“Oh, all right. You’re of no use when you’re sick, Jocelyn. I’ll tell you that much. You’re really of no use at all.” I crashed downstairs and paced around. Now that I was feeling better I didn’t know what to do with myself. If Jocelyn had been well we could have begun piecing plane parts together, but it wasn’t something I could do by myself. Or we could drag the cockpit into the barn or at least try to. We might still need the dolly for that. I couldn’t believe we had come so far and Jocelyn was just lying feverishly around pre
tending not to care. The cockpit was such an important discovery. I supposed I could get into it and check out the instrument panel, surely Uncle must have been wrong about the planes being stripped of all the instruments. After all, he didn’t know planes and the story was hearsay anyway. I was dying to get a good look but afraid that it would roll over and things would be further smashed. I wanted to secure it before I got in. Right now it was wedged at a bad angle between some logs.
I decided finally to make a list of things I could do, which would at least give me the illusion that I was doing something. I was sitting on a chair by the fire when Humdinger passed right behind me. I felt him more than saw him. I certainly didn’t hear him. I waited expectantly, but no mint. I suspected it might be because I wasn’t waifishly pretty like Jocelyn. It was my observation that the waifishly pretty girls of the world got everything, including sympathy, it seemed, and mints, and that if you were ugly you always had to prove that you didn’t have an ugly personality to match and so one must develop charm and an easy pleasant interest in others, but I had decided a long time ago that this was too much trouble to go through with every idiot that came along.
* * *
I awoke to another gray day and got out my list of things to do. I forgot it was Christmas morning until I heard the bells. Because we had no churches on the island I put on my robe and searched the house. They seemed to be coming from Uncle Marten’s room. His door was open a couple of inches, so I gave it a push. It was some program he had put on his computer, ringing in Christmas morning.
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane Page 14
