Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I’m sorry.” He stood beside me in all his lanky wonderful tallness and kept his hands folded like he was at a funeral and watched me with those kind eyes. “Does it hurt?”

  “No, it doesn’t hurt. It is here to remind me that I am part of nature whether I like it or not. And I do not. Come on, that’s a famous restaurant, I think. Maybe we’ll just order something while we’re there.”

  We collected Moise at a tomb and walked across the street and Ingersol found the maître d’ and told him what had happened and a blond woman overheard it and took over and took the boys to a table and then led me to the ladies’ room.

  Which is how we got to have lunch at Commander’s Palace, which is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had fried oysters and cream of asparagus soup and flounder amandine and Baked Alaska for dessert. We had coffee so strong I may never sleep again if I even think of it, and a French chef came out of the kitchen and greeted Moise and it turned out he was from Calais, which is practically Moise’s backyard, and they talked about the tunnel under the English Channel and if they would ever want to ride on the train under the water.

  The ladies’ room at Commander’s Palace is so beautiful and there were dispensers with free Tampax and everything I needed to get back to normal. I threw Ingersol’s handkerchief away although I was tempted to keep it for a souvenir.

  After lunch Moise begged to go back to the cemetery for a few minutes, so we went with him. He was writing down the names of people buried in the wall for something he wanted to write for his local paper when he got home. Ingersol and I wandered on back to the back again. We were both just stuffed with food and in a weird sort of mood. I lay down on top of a tomb and folded my hands like a mummy and then Ingersol lay down beside me and said we were the pharaoh and his wife waiting for a streak of light to whiz us up to heaven. Then I rolled over and hugged him. That is all this journal will have to say about that since my mother reads it anytime she wants to for which she will rot in hell or at least have to feel guilty every minute of her life. I will say this. It was very funny to feel the cold marble of our fate underneath my body and on top the soft moving breathing body of my best friend and maybe boyfriend if it comes to that. We didn’t do a thing but hug each other and watch the leaves of the funny little flowered trees along the fence and the wall.

  That’s about it except for two more trips to the French Quarter, a tour of the Tulane campus and a trip with Al to see the New Orleans Museum of Art.

  Then driving home with Moise asleep most of the way and Ingersol and me playing all our CDs until we were so sick of them we were ready to throw them away.

  We got home on Sunday. On Tuesday Moise left to go back to France. I have never been so glad to see someone leave. As soon as I got him on the plane I went over to Ingersol’s house to see if he wanted to play some chess.

  “Let’s lie down on my bed and pretend we’re on a tomb in New Orleans,” he said. “Just kidding.”

  “No, you’re not,” I answered. I got up on his bed and propped myself up on one arm and patted the pillow. “Get in. Let’s neck or smooch or whatever stupid teenagers call the sexual drive and its manifestations.” I was really glad I had on my new ribbed turtleneck and my paratrooper pants even if I was burning up in them. I was glad to be alive, to tell the truth.

  “I like you more than any girl I’ve ever known.” He was looking right at me. Not looming or hovering although he could at that height. He never gives you the feeling he is dangerous or too tall. He is just a presence and he lets himself be one. “If you want to you can keep my stupid high school fraternity pin at your house.” He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to me and I took it and stuck it in the pocket of my pants.

  His hands were so warm on my back. Even through my shirt I could feel the warmth. Do you know that if a child isn’t held by its mother right after it is born it will pay forever for the deprivation. In case my mother should be reading this journal which is marked PRIVATE, she might be feeling bad about how sick she was after I was born and I had to be in an incubator for three days being fed by machines and tubes. No wonder I like stereos and television sets. It’s a wonder I could have gotten in all that trouble in France, much less be normal enough to have a boyfriend who happens to be the smartest kid in the entire Fayetteville school system.

  If you think I’m going to be writing down anything private about Ingersol and me, you’ve got another think coming. Two people as shy as we are are lucky we can even think about putting our bodies within ten feet of a person of the opposite sex.

  It is true that I am a very cold-blooded person about what’s good for me. I know that going steady with Ingersol will solve a lot of problems for both of us. People at Fayetteville High School think there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have a steady boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s their culture and what they believe. If I didn’t have to go there I wouldn’t have to pretend I don’t think they are pitiful not to be able to conceive a larger world but I do go there. I have to go there for another year.

  Everything I am thinking is divided like a coin with two sides. Half all sappy and feeling good and adoring passing for normal and the other half cold-blooded and knowing Ingersol is cold-blooded too and tired of people thinking he is weird because he is a genius. Being smart is good when you’re very small or when you’re grown but it’s a minefield when you are in junior high or high school.

  August 29, 1997. Update, Jocelyn. You should see what she painted on the street this morning. While I was sleeping, getting ready for the school year stretching out before me with Ingersol’s high school fraternity pin on the inside of my bra and about to be worn on the OUTSIDE any day now. Me, Aurora Harris, about to rejoin the middle class, not that Ingersol represents the middle class but he goes along with things, he likes to be happy, he likes to be liked, he is actually going to run for class president. I mean going steady with Ingersol is agreeing to be in on the deal and I guess I have to admit I got out of the deal because the deal wasn’t being nice to me. I wasn’t going to be part of any system that was putting me in second place. So here I am, in love with Ingersol. I’m getting more comfortable with it every day. Is this crazy or good? To be happy all the time and actually excited about school starting for a change?

  She made this big curved sign that says, HAPPY FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL. All around it were little symbols, lunch boxes, apples, rulers, a compass, a bar of music, and under that “School Days.” I don’t understand Jocelyn and I never will. She is completely happy just to be alive and have Mother and Daddy adore her every minute of her life. She will probably never leave home. She will live with my parents until they all die. Maybe she’ll be a schoolteacher. She has the personality. I’m thinking of starting to like her. Even if the front of our house looks like some sort of garage sale for happiness. Ingersol adores her. He’s crazy about her, to tell the truth, and wants to make a movie about her life. A documentary where we just follow her around and film all the crazy things she does like paint her room three colors of blue after a photograph she saw of this house in Sweden, or, if we could get up early enough one of the days when she goes out on the street and paints it with colored chalk.

  The deal about abortion may not be as simple as I thought it was. Mother and Daddy wanted to have me, they say, but they were “surprised” by Jocelyn. There’s a philosophical argument that’s been raging for hundreds of years about whether mind is a function of matter or the other way around. What if mind calls up matter as the Buddhist monks believe? Then if a life wanted to be manifest, it would override anyone’s attempt to abort it, wouldn’t it? Or is it all so unfinished that mind and matter slosh around in each other’s workings and the balance is always shifting? Before the Big Bang there was perfection. Then it all split apart and it’s still expanding. If I’d had that baby, where would Moise and I be? And I sure wouldn’t have Ingersol. Just because he’s a genius doesn’t mean he would want to have a girlfriend with a baby. It would definitely hur
t his chances to be class president at Fayetteville High School.

  Well, that’s the past and the past is a swamp where we wander at our peril.

  Have a *wonderful* nice walk. Happy first week of school. Deeper in and farther out, as the mouse said when he jumped ship in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my and Ingersol’s absolute favorite childhood book.

  Witness to the Crucifixion

  I was brushing my teeth when she started in again. “I want you to be in Paradise with me,” she said, leaning her long blond hair so close to the sink it was hard not to get toothpaste on it. “I was praying for it when I woke up.”

  “Jocelyn,” I screamed, foaming Crest going everywhere. “You are a little eleven-year-old Methodist in a small town in the Ozarks. You are not a television evangelist. Now get the hell out of this bathroom before I kill you.” I turned and glowered at her. She is almost as tall as I am now. She is growing extremely fast for eleven. She has reached back into the gene pool and brought up some of Dad’s old Scandinavian genes from when his ancestors lived in Wisconsin and fought the snow. Now we are in Fayetteville, Arkansas, fighting madness, low IQs, and Christians. Dad and I are fighting them. Mom and Jocelyn have joined up. They go to church about five times a week. Jocelyn is a Christian Scout and wears a blue vest with a flowered cross embroidered on the pocket and another on the back that she added just to be different.

  “Don’t you respect me?” she says. “If you curse me that means you don’t respect me.” This is one of the things they teach the scouts to say.

  “No, I don’t respect you. I don’t even like you and if you don’t get out of this bathroom I’m going to have to kill you. I’m giving you three. One, two…”

  She moved back three paces and stood in the doorway looking sad and sadder. They teach her things to say but they don’t teach her what to say next if the person she is working on doesn’t respond with guilt or fear.

  I pushed her out the door and shut it. I finished my teeth and started putting on my makeup. I had a meeting at eight o’clock with the other editors of the literary magazine. We were trying to find a way to pay for a field trip to SEFOR, a breeder reactor in Strickler, Arkansas, which is only twenty miles from the town where we live. A breeder reactor so hot a Geiger counter goes off as soon as you get within two hundred yards of the silo. It was built in the 1960s by a consortium of German and American utility companies to see how much uranium 235 and plutonium 239 they could squeeze into a building and not have it go critical, melt down, or, in other words, turn northwest Arkansas into Chernobyl. We were lucky. One melted down in Detroit, Michigan, first and after that the consortium cooled SEFOR down with liquid sodium, one of the most inflammable things in the world, talked the government into taking most of the uranium and plutonium up to Hanford, Washington, and then gave the reactor, the visitors’ center for the reactor, and the six hundred acres of land around it to the University of Arkansas. The university took it. Can you believe that? And my dad teaches at the place.

  “You didn’t have to curse me,” Jocelyn says when I sit down at the kitchen table to eat my scrambled eggs. For whose benefit, do you suppose?

  “Aurora,” my mother begins, getting her pitiful oh-how-can-this-happen-to-me-so-early-in-the-morning, why-is-my-life-this-way, where-did-I-go-wrong, why-am-I-here-in-this-terrible-family-when-I-meant-to-be-a-sculptor look on her face.

  “I didn’t curse her. I told her to get her goddamn hair out of the sink while I was brushing my teeth. It’s okay with me if she wants to go to school with Crest on her ponytail but I bet old Jerry Hadler will want his friendship bracelet back if he sees it.”

  “Please don’t turn this into an argument.”

  “Please tell her to stop pushing Jesus at me. She’s out of control, Mother. You really ought to think of getting her some help.”

  “You’re the one who killed your baby,” Jocelyn said, so I got up and slapped her in the face with my napkin and went into my room and got my backpack and went out the side door and got into my car and drove off down Lighton Trail to school. I used to have a Camaro but it was wrecked when a truck ran into the side of it at the corner of Maple Street and University Avenue. Then my grandmother died and willed me her Toyota so I put the insurance money for the Camaro in my college fund and have been very happy driving Grandmother’s baby blue car with leather seat covers. It’s like having her around to get into her car every day. She adored me. She knew who I was. Sometimes I think she loved me more than anyone else ever will. The day before she died she got me in her bedroom and told me I was the only one in the family who had the genes. She didn’t call it genes. She called it spunk. “I thought your daddy had it but then he married your mother and sank into stone,” she said. “I love him. Don’t get me wrong, but you’re the one who has the strength to make something of yourself, Aurora. Thank God for you. I’m leaving you my car.”

  I never thought she’d die but she did. At eight o’clock the next morning, while putting on her makeup. She was living out in Cassandra Village where the rich people around here stash their parents while they wait to die. So, anyway, I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the goddamn abortion and get it off my mind.

  I did not kill a baby. I aborted a six-week-old fetus that would have ruined my life. I’m not cut out to be a mother. Sixteen-year-old girls with high intelligence quotients have no business having babies they don’t want. I guess I’m not as rabid about this as I used to be. All the goddamn anti-abortionists have planted doubts in my mind. They keep the balls in the air. They keep it on the table.

  I stopped on my way to school to pick up my boyfriend (my new one, not the one who got me pregnant), Ingersol Manning the fourth, six feet five inches tall, completely sane in every way. What does he see in me? You aren’t the first one to ask that question. He was walking to school because his Pathfinder is in the shop getting repaired. He worked all summer to make the money to have it fixed. Now it’s taking two weeks and he’s walking.

  He climbed in the passenger side of the Toyota and wiggled around until there was room for his head. “What’s going on?” he asked and handed me a strawberry toaster pastry.

  “We have to do something about Jocelyn,” I began. “She’s gone crazy down at the Methodist church. They’ve captured her, Ingersol. She’s completely lost it over Jesus.”

  “It’s the music,” he answered. “Bach. She’s an artist. The music gets them every time. It happened to me when I was thirteen. It was several months before I stopped having talks with the air.”

  “You were wonderful when you were thirteen.”

  “I was fat. I was shaped like a pear.”

  “I don’t remember you fat.”

  “You wouldn’t even play with me that year. One Saturday I came over and you wouldn’t let me come in.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.” He reached over and put his hand on top of mine to let me know he forgave me. He was right. There had been a couple of years when he was in the sixth and seventh grades when his jokes were too childish and disgusting for me. He had this friend, Charles Barton, who was on prednisone and would curse in strings of really gross, disgusting, bodily function words. Ingersol would egg him on to say them. Then he would die of laughter. I couldn’t put up with that even if Charles Barton did have cancer. He lived, by the way. He is completely in remission and recovered so I don’t have to feel guilty about thinking it was disgusting.

  “We could get her to read Malthus or Darwin or Desmond Morris or Nietzsche. We could invite her over to my house and trick her into watching my new Creation of the Universe tape by Timothy Ferris.” Ingersol was sticking to the subject, a great gift of his.

  “Oh, yeah, as if she can read. This is all my mother’s fault. She thinks the reason I’m not homecoming queen is because they quit going to church. She joined the church to get Jocelyn a social life. Now Jocelyn’s bought the program and from the way she’s acting Mother’s bought it too. So what a
m I supposed to do? Move out or fight?”

  “First we think,” he said. “Then we act. If it’s social, I see why she’s drawn to it. She’s a social creature. She loves the world. All we can do is hope to plant some doubts in her mind.”

  We weren’t getting any help from chance or luck. That very night our old brown Labrador retriever began to gasp for breath and fall down every other step. Dad put him in the back of the Explorer and took him to the vet and left him there. Jocelyn disappeared into her room. When I found her she was on her knees by her cedar chest, crying and praying. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m asking Jesus to save Bill Bailey,” she said through her tears. “I’m asking that he let him live until it’s spring and he can run after the squirrels and bark at them. It’s the wrong time for him to die, when it’s cold outside and we couldn’t even find a pretty place to bury him.” She cried on and I didn’t try to say anything to make her feel better. She was having a ball, kneeling on the floor like the virgin of the spring or Joan of Arc or someone. As if it was up to her to save a dog.

  About twenty minutes later I went back in her room and let her have it. “If Bill Bailey lives it will be because an army of atheist scientists and biochemists have been going into their labs every day of their lives and believing in science instead of superstition and religion. It will be the techniques and drugs they developed that save his life, if it gets saved.”

  “And who made the scientists and biochemists?” she answered. “Who gave them the brains to find the drugs? God did. It’s God’s world and He made it all.”

  “So you like a God that would kill a poor old dog right at the beginning of winter? That’s your hero?”