And suddenly Vera feels as if yet another bolster’s been pulled out from under her: the myth of her friendship with Carmen. They’re nothing but a lonely hearts’ club—if Lowell and Frankie didn’t exist, they’d have nothing to talk about. Vera knows this isn’t strictly true. She and Carmen talk religion, matters of the spirit. Meaning what? Soul investigations and angelic cafeterias. When Vera leaves This Week, they won’t see each other again, not unless they happen to meet in line for cotton candy at the circus.
Vera goes into her office. Abandoning all pretense of having come in to straighten up—she doesn’t even have boxes to pack things in—she calls Louise and, miraculously, Louise answers. “Awful,” Vera says when Louise asks how she is. “Just awful.”
“Well, hop on the first plane out here.” It’s what Louise always says, what Vera counts on her saying. “We’ll talk. Eat. Get fat. Two happy fat ladies. That’ll cheer you up.”
“I wish I could,” says Vera. “I wish I had the money…”
“God will provide,” says Louise. “Especially if you give Him time to pay it off on the MasterCard.”
Vera thinks of the severance pay she’s supposed to be getting from Shaefer. “Well, maybe…” she says. “I don’t know…”
“No maybe about it. Find some story you can research while you’re out here. Then you can write the whole thing off on your taxes. It’ll be like Uncle Sam’s paying you to fly out.”
It’s why Vera so loves Louise: she can talk God providing in one breath and tax write-offs in the next. “Story for where?” she says. “I’ve been fired.”
“Not for that rag,” says Louise. “I mean a real story.” And this, even more than the need for Louise’s company, is what finally convinces Vera. Louise knows her from before This Week, remembers a time when she wrote real stories, led a real life.
“I’ll call you back,” Vera says. “Let me think.” What she’s thinking is that something about this tax write-off business has sounded a familiar note. And then she remembers: That’s what Ray Bramlett suggested in his note inviting her to the cryptobiologists’ convention. Vera looks for the letter and it’s there, right in the desk drawer where she left it.
Is it possible? Why not? She could write about them, just as she would have when the everyday and the profound drew her so much more strongly than the simply bizarre. Everyone—everyone but the Greens, she reminds herself—loves her cryptobiologist stories, perks up when she tells of retired academics exploring the Congo for dinosaur tracks. What could be more ordinary than a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Carl Poteet or more fantastic than their search for the Mokele-Mbembe? And who could be better qualified to write about it? Five years trekking after the yeti, trawling Loch Ness in Nessie’s wake, seeking Bigfoot in every dream and nearly all her waking hours—it’s time Vera put her own peculiar version of job experience to some practical use.
For a moment she falters, thinking it’s more of the same: more Sasquatch, more giant squid and Mayan treasure, more false hope. More This Week. But really, she knows it’s not. These people aren’t looking for magic in the magazine racks by the supermarket checkout line. They’re going out to seek it. Their myths are still vital to them, intact and so important they’ll go almost anywhere to find out if they’re true.
Vera looks down at the conference schedule, headed with the cryptobiologists’ logo: a rather crudely drawn kangaroo that looks for all the world like a potbellied, biped Basenji. It’s a dog, Vera thinks. It’s a sign.
VERA LOVES MAKING TRAVEL plans. Paradoxically, they anchor her in the present, ground her in the physical world. She thinks of those sixties gurus who used to talk about being here now. Maybe the reason they always seemed so calm was that they were always traveling. Even with a retinue, you don’t get far without applying some degree of concentration to some amount of detail. Just having to look at maps and buy tickets and pack keeps you from thinking too abstractly about the future, which is precisely what Vera doesn’t want to do.
Travel plans also keep her from facing her terror of travel, a fear she attempts to control by ritualizing every step. She never deals with agencies, only with the airlines and only certain airlines, always takes the earliest morning flight, will only make connections in warm, hospitable-sounding cities—Atlanta, St. Louis—never in cold, forbidding Chicago or Cincinnati. Meanwhile she’s vigilant in watching for omens—how long it takes her to get through the airline’s busy signals and Muzak, whether a flight’s scheduled when she wants to leave. Once, bound for San Francisco, the zipper on her favorite suitcase broke and she nearly canceled her trip. She’d never have met Lowell.
Today things are going well. The airline answers on the first ring and not only has just the flight for her but volunteers the information that, for twenty dollars over the New York-Seattle round trip, she can buy a Super-See-America fare entitling her to fly anywhere in the continental U.S. At first she’s annoyed, like when she orders Rosie fries at McDonald’s and the cashier asks if she’ll be wanting apple pie with that. If she’d wanted to eat apple pie or see America, she’d have said so. Then it occurs to her: It is what she wants. New York–Seattle–Phoenix–Flagstaff–Phoenix–New York.
Connections are smoother than Vera can believe, especially when she decides not to ask the size of the plane to Flagstaff. The intervals between flights are just right. The only rough moment comes when the clerk asks, smoking or non-smoking? and Vera gulps and says smoking—an interchange she makes the best of by telling herself that the back of the plane is statistically safer.
So. Vera’s leaving tomorrow, spending two nights at Louise’s, then on to Flagstaff Friday unless by then the plane’s crashed and helicopters are already combing the Mohave for her bones. In that case she wants someone to know she’s there, to identify the elbow she chipped falling off a swing, the molar she broke on an olive pit. She dials her parents’ number.
“Where?” Norma says.
“Seattle,” says Vera. “Then the Grand Canyon.”
“And what’ll you do with Rosie?” asks Norma. “Send her down the canyon on a donkey?”
“Rosie’s with Lowell,” Vera says. “In L.A.” The pause that follows this is so long that Vera says, “Hey, are you okay?”
“Sweetheart,” says Norma. “Don’t go overboard.”
Vera likes the conclusion Norma’s jumped to, that Vera’s sent Rosie off to her father’s so she could cover the cryptobiologists. “Going overboard” implies conscious choice, as if Vera’s kicked Lowell and Rosalie off the raft and is thinking of jumping in, too. “Mom,” Vera says, “It’s not like that.”
“What is it like?” Norma snaps, then catches herself. “Look, maybe you could take a few minutes, come out here, tell me and your father where things stand, you never know…”
Vera knows what “you never know” means. It means that either of them might be dead by the time she comes back. If she comes back. Heart attacks, plane crashes in the Mohave—lightning may strike any minute. If she doesn’t explain now, when will she? Vera used to hate this fatalism, this fear, so different from whatever spirit must have sent Dave off to Spain. It’s only since she’s had Rosie that she’s understood how it’s possible to see the world as the sum of all the disasters that can come between you and your child.
“All right,” Vera says. “I’ll come out.”
But as soon as Vera gets there, she realizes her mistake. She should have waited till dinner. Evening softens the outlines of things. After five, Dave and Norma could be any older couple, relaxing. At two on a weekday afternoon, it’s clear they haven’t been anywhere, have nowhere to go.
Vera decides to ignore the fact that Dave is watching General Hospital. In the kitchen Norma’s emptying an apothecary jar of cinnamon Red Hots into the garbage. Vera remembers those Red Hots. She used to get them as rewards for doing household chores. The candy’s faded, crusty, and white at the edges. Still, Vera’s surprised to see them streaming into the trash. What of those Indian childre
n? What would Karl Marx and God have to say?
“How are you?” Norma says. Vera wishes she wouldn’t stress the “are” like that. Though mostly what Vera’s irritated at is herself for having come here. She knows what she’s doing: passing her worry along so they can comfort her. She thinks of that girl in the Chinese restaurant telling her date about the guy who believed he could get rid of herpes by giving it to someone else.
Meanwhile, on General Hospital, stills of Hong Kong harbor set the stage for Laura, bound and gagged, to squirm and whimper in some TV-studio opium den. Dave’s so engrossed he doesn’t know Vera’s come in.
Vera’s relieved when Norma comes up behind them and says, “Look who’s here,” then worried when Dave doesn’t turn, then shocked when Norma strides over and switches off the TV. Dave’s gripping the armrests, and Vera can’t blame him. Still, she can see Norma’s side: imagine if she and Lowell were approaching their golden years, and Lowell seemed likely to spend them watching TV. Imagine that? Imagine anything else. What did Vera think she was moving toward? Two little gray heads in front of the nineteen-inch screen—what more has Lowell ever promised her?
“Well,” Dave says at last. “My unemployed daughter.”
“That’s me,” says Vera. “Buddy, can you spare a dime?”
“Don’t take it so hard,” he says.
“I’m not. That’s the least of it.” Vera’s shocked by the stridency in her voice; she must want her bad news to hurt Dave as much it hurts her. “Rosie’s gone to L.A. with Lowell.”
“California!” says Norma. “The state’s full of nuts. Freeway killers, Zodiac killers, Mansons, Symbionese Liberation. And knowing Lowell, they’re probably all his best friends.”
“Don’t be silly,” says Vera. “Lowell’s not out to get killed.” Though, even as she says this, it’s occurring to her that Rosie may right at this moment be with a bona fide Mafioso with God-knows-how-many ex-friends who don’t want to see that autobiography written. Better she should ride the subway alone with her Walkman all night. “It’s okay,” Vera says, as much to herself as to them. “Anyhow, I can use the time. I want to get started on a story.”
“Story?” says Dave. “What story?”
Describing the cryptobiologists, Vera’s practically giving their resumés, emphasizing the fact that they’re mainly retired teachers, engineers. In other words: respectable scientists, not your garden-variety crackpots. Dave and Norma aren’t fooled. Their looks of disbelief turn to puzzlement, then back to disbelief and concern. You’d think she was going to look for Bigfoot instead of writing about people who have.
“Way the hell out to Arizona for that?” Dave says. “You can get better stories for a subway token.”
Vera knows what kind of stories he means: South Bronx squatters banding together to do something about their block. Feisty old union maids organizing their nursing homes. Ex-Wobblies and Lincoln Brigaders still fighting the good fight. The problem is, they’re not her stories. If she took the subway to find them, she’d only wind up writing about the screamers she met on the way.
She’s glad she doesn’t say this, doesn’t get a chance to. Dave can’t wait to get back to his TV. Norma is worrying a cinnamon Red Hot between her fingers. Now more than ever, Vera wishes she could get a glass of water from the Greens and that it would really work. She’d bring it to her parents. Here, she’d say. The Spanish Civil War wasn’t lost, and Dave came home victorious. Here, she’d say. Live forever in a workers’ paradise complete with olive trees and geysers of Spanish red wine. Here, she’d say. Everything’s different. I’ll never leave you, and Rosie will never leave me. Here. Drink this. Be young.
The film on the New York–Seattle flight stars Clint Eastwood and a monkey. Vera doesn’t buy headphones. Watching, not having to listen, lulled by the hum of the engines, the unchanging white-blue sky, she’s feeling extremely pleased with herself. She likes how being on her way somewhere gives her a sense of accomplishment without her having to do anything but sit. She also likes feeling cut-off and unreachable, even if her life isn’t exactly jammed with people struggling to reach her. Just having gotten this far—having passed through the metal detectors without emptying her pockets, then finding her gate and shuffling forward in an orderly fashion when her flight was called—seems like an achievement.
Only once did she falter: just after take-off, when she noticed how she and the other passengers in her section stared at the No Smoking sign and lit up the second it went off. And why? Because take-off was completed and they were still alive. She’d thought of old cigarette ads on TV, that couple by the waterfall, all joy in life made manifest in smoke. Now everything’s changed. Cigarettes are the skull on St. Jerome’s desk, coffin nails, twenty memento mori per pack.
She’d checked out her fellow smokers to see how they dealt with this knowledge but couldn’t find an inch of common ground. They all looked so pale and prairie-American, long Nordic faces out of Sandburg and Willa Cather. She could be traveling with a planeload of the dead. She’d thought of Mark Rothko, Theodore Roethke, thought, Seattle’s where you go to live without seeing the sun for six months and kill yourself. Though she reminded herself she was going there to visit Louise and not to stay, she was starting to get gloomy when the stewardess rolled in the drink cart. Remembering that airplane Bloody Marys never work, she ordered two bourbons and in no time was happily watching Clint Eastwood.
The best thing about drinking on a plane is how slowed-down everything feels as you cruise thirty thousand feet up, flying six hundred miles per hour in the face of every law of nature and of God. Normally, she’d never get through a magazine article on how to tell if your boyfriend’s getting tired of you. Up here, she reads every word and even takes the test at the end. Adding the points up seems to take hours, but at the end she’s relieved to discover that her and Lowell’s score is nowhere near the Red Alert category or even the Danger Zone. They’re well in the Smooth Sailing range, and yet they’ve split up ten times.
Vera would meditate on this all the way to Seattle, but dinner’s arriving, and she puts down the magazine to give it her full attention. Given the care she lavishes on finishing every bite—the dense cube of beef, even the soggy bread square beneath it—the voice of the stewardess asking if she’s done could be the cries of starving children or the clarion call of the angel who guards your garbage to make sure nothing’s thrown out. “I’m done,” Vera says. To do any better, she’d have to eat the styrofoam tray. The fact that she’s polished off every crumb of the rock-hard amaretto cookies is making her think critically and with a certain drunken self-righteousness of Solomon. She’d thought that chicken-salad incident would shame her all her life, but now it no longer bothers her. People can eat anything. If he couldn’t swallow a few strings of celery, the hell with him.
By now the aisle’s full—a line for the bathrooms. As Vera gets up and joins in, the light of the bourbon shines even on this. She feels she’s taking part in a communal activity, like the members of some African tribe going at dawn to perform their bodily functions at the edge of the sea.
Approaching Seattle, the pilot and the stewardess repeat the local time till it even gets through to Vera. It’s three hours earlier than her watch says. She’s trying to recall the reason you can’t keep traveling from east to west forever and never get any older, but the effort’s confusing her. As the plane lands, she’s beginning to wish she’d gotten less drunk or that the landing were rougher. There’s not even a bump to run the adrenaline that might have helped sober her up. She waits for the rush of joy in having survived, the happiness that used to come when she and Louise would crawl weak-kneed out of the cramped front car of the Cyclone. Instead, depression settles over her, thick and cottony as the gray Seattle sky, as she remembers that the only thing that equals her love of making travel plans and being on her way is the inevitable letdown of getting there.
APPROACHING THE RECEPTION AREA, Vera’s afraid to look. She feels as if she’s at a
horror film, watching the screen through her fingers. All she can think of is the last time Louise met her at an airport, tricked out like some giant white cauliflower in a turban and nursey dress. She’s also afraid that Louise won’t have come and Vera will start signaling the mute, universal language of the stood-up to perfect strangers, who’ll cease their own anxious search for familiar faces and focus on her. Then she sees Louise, so radiant Vera thinks she could find her, like the sun, with her eyes shut.
Vera’s first impression is that living among the forests of Douglas fir has rubbed off on her. Tall and straight and dressed in pale browns and greens, Louise looks like a tree. Vera remembers that girl in the Chinese restaurant saying how her first best friend had better not be more successful or perfect. Vera and Louise used to feel that way, first when Louise was publishing poems and Vera was just a college student, then when Vera was publishing articles and Louise was just a towelhead. Now all that’s passed. They’ve realized that the world is wide and generous enough for them both to be successful and perfect and that they will probably never be either.
Lowell’s accusing her of not seeing him has made Vera self-conscious. Drunk and excited as she is, she’s careful to hold Louise at arm’s length and check for crow’s feet. She won’t make that mistake twice. Louise has them, all right, but she’s one of those women whose eyes look brighter with wrinkles around them, whose dark hair looks thicker set off by few strands of gray.
“You look beautiful!” cries Louise. Vera says, “So do you,” and then, “How could I look beautiful? I’m drunk.” Louise tucks Vera’s arm through hers and steers her off in what Vera hopes is the direction of the baggage claim. On the way, they pass a father holding his son by the shoulders and shaking him. The son, about Rosie’s age, is crying; the father’s fighting tears. Vera wonders if she should call Lowell from Louise’s; she doesn’t want Rosie to call home and worry. Let them worry, she thinks. Let them imagine the worst.
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