The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  It was because my mother was a member of this society that she and my father and Meline’s father and mother and I were traveling through Zimbabwe. We could not have afforded to go otherwise. It wasn’t that I blamed the society, but I couldn’t help thinking of them as one of the reasons it happened.

  It had been my mother’s dream to return someday to England, although she knew it would be difficult to get my father to leave the prairies and the unbroken line of land to sky and the miles of airspace to traverse and the acres of crops to dust. There are so few things to really love in this world, he said to me, the only time he ever brought up my mother’s desire to return to England and her tiny campaign in that direction, that the things that you find to love you should hang on to forever because time is short and you have to spend it, as much as you can, with your heart engaged. But back then I didn’t know what this meant. Time seemed endless to me, to stretch to the horizon and beyond, an unbroken line like the prairies, and I didn’t feel the need to hang on to things. And my mother had already instructed me on the care of my heart, and although I didn’t understand my mother’s advice any more than my father’s, I took it in as I did all things pertaining to my mother, as the right way. What did my father mean now by saying you engaged your heart? My mother told me that things happened to you and they acted upon your heart. You had no choice in the matter. And you saw things differently accordingly. Wasn’t that what life was? So you protected your heart, that fragile, beating, bloody mass of meat, as soon as you learned how easily things from the outside could damage it. That’s what life was: a gauntlet of events battering you, and you tried to slip through as unbroken as possible. You crouched around your heart the way a mother crouches around her child under sniper fire, protecting him from bullets. Doing what she can. All your energy, according to my mother, had best go into protection and preservation. The idea of engaging your heart, going out to the front line, so to speak, was alien to her.

  I didn’t even give it any thought, what I loved and what I didn’t. I assumed the only life I would have was the one that had been handed to me. The idea of making a life, starting from scratch, being responsible for what was to be, was foreign. My days were the endless days of the farm, the sounds, the farm sounds, the lowing cows, the birds when I awoke, the wind rushing through long grasses, the sound of combines, reapers, tractors, the whirr of machinery, and the silence of evenings. The sights: the lovely swaying motion of things, grasses, laundry, my mother’s quiet solid movements, never resting, never stopping, the rhythm of the world, my mother’s rhythm, unquestioningly, always. Not until Zimbabwe did I even guess that there were other rhythms, other days, other ways to be. But then I had never lost anyone and didn’t know that when you lost someone, you disappear with that person, the part of you that fit with them, leaving you wondering who you are. That though you can remember that person and yourself, the self you were with that person is gone.

  My mother and father had not seen eye to eye on Canada and Canadians and so they didn’t discuss it. And because my mother couldn’t discuss it with my father, but it preyed upon her mind, she discussed it frequently with me. My mother was homesick and she thought Canada was a barbarous country where people did things the wrong way. I was afraid to leave our farm without her; I thought I needed always to be with someone who at least knew the right way to do things, to insulate me from all those people doing things wrong. She said we didn’t belong in Canada. Now that I was here on the island, it was a comfort to remember the things my mother had told me. To know that the strangeness and unease I felt with these people was in part because I did not belong with them. My mother had been right. People were not following the rules of civilized society. They were being strange, North American, unruly, wrong. And they poked at their food like animals.

  MELINE

  “AND YOU, MY DEAR,” said Uncle Marten, looking down the length of the table at me, “should try this very brown meat. It’s really rather good. I know it looks like a big mess. Really, as if someone had thrown up on your plate, but it’s tasty and probably nutritious. Yes, I think Mrs. Mendelbaum will work out fine.”

  I took a bite. It wasn’t just that I had never eaten meat before coming to the island, although I didn’t tell anyone there that. I had liked the hot dogs okay, just not every night, and besides hot dogs were familiar because I had eaten tofu dogs, which were in the same ballpark taste-wise. But the brisket flavor was dark and deep and complicated, and because my mother never used salt in her cooking, the sheer saltiness was overwhelming. I put down the rest of my forkful. “I think it’s crap,” I said. I think I said this partly because I knew it would make Jocelyn wince, and it did. It annoyed me that she could continue so primly, so distantly in the face of something so disastrous it should have broken down any barriers between us, but we went our separate ways during the day, meeting up only at meals, and apparently nothing ruffled her calm.

  “Oh no, surely not?” asked Uncle Marten. He looked terrified at the thought that Mrs. Mendelbaum might not work out after all and this, of course, had not been my intention. I almost relented enough to eat the rest of the brisket just to put him at ease, but I couldn’t. I knew it would make me sick. Besides, I didn’t want that kind of power. I didn’t want to feel that menus would be arranged around what I liked or didn’t like. I didn’t want to have to worry all the time about whether I could eat something and what hung in the balance if I didn’t.

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  I REGARDED MELINE with furrowed brow. If she did not like Mrs. Mendelbaum’s cooking, or Mrs. Mendelbaum was going to go off on strange cooking tangents involving overly brown meat, then the whole damn thing would have to start again. The advertising, the interviewing … but no, I realized with sudden relief, this time, if Mrs. Mendelbaum had to leave because the girls could not eat what she cooked, I could quite fairly put them in charge of hiring the next cook. They could advertise. They could interview. I would be out of it altogether. And that way it didn’t matter if Mrs. Mendelbaum worked out or not. It wouldn’t impinge on me. I finished my dinner serenely after that, even making small happy eating noises.

  Later that night, up in my room, I wondered for a second if I should have encouraged Meline to try a second bite of brisket, whether she wanted to or not. Weren’t you supposed to encourage children to expand their horizons? That was the whole problem, I didn’t know how to be with anyone, but at least I’d never been put in charge of anyone before; it hadn’t mattered if I didn’t know what to do with them. But now here I was ostensibly in charge and I didn’t have a clue what to do with those girls. Surely young women this age were beyond the need of encouragement. That is, I didn’t have to encourage them to be any particular way, they had their own ideas at this point, did they not? They were nothing more than small adults really, weren’t they? Just needing some feeding and housing until they went off to college. That seemed reasonable, a job I could perform with some confidence. I wasn’t expected really to mold them in any way, was I? I, myself, at such an age, well, at any age really, would have been highly offended at the idea of anyone molding me. It would have been an insufferable liberty. I would never inflict that on others. Not to mention that I really didn’t care or know how.

  For a terrible second I had visions of my nieces as clay and myself back in grade-seven art class with a lump of the shapeless messy useless stuff in front of me and the teacher telling me I must do something original. So I made something shapeless and labeled it “molecular nuclei.” No, no, said the teacher, throwing it in the bin to be recycled. Something original but recognizable. So I made a dog with six legs. “No, no,” said the teacher. Everyone else in class had progressed to mosaics. Something original, recognizable, and plausible. Well, this had stumped me. Surely art, real art, was not pinioned by all these criteria. And surely they couldn’t expect everyone to be an artist. Why, probably nobody in the whole school, the whole town was a real artist. How many real artists were born in a single century, let alone
in one school? Oh, certainly there were lots of clever people and lots of clever people making money in their clever artistic ways. But real artists, like real geniuses, were few and far between, so this time, I picked up my lump of clay and threw it in the recycling and took an F for the course. I cannot mold. My brothers, when making me guardian, should have taken this into consideration. I was not an artist and I couldn’t mold. I could pay bills. It would have to do.

  MELINE

  I ATE THE POTATO KUGEL, which was not too far from the kind of vegetarian casseroles my mother put together in our apartment over the store in Hyannis Port. My mother was a marimba player and had lived in Zimbabwe when she was younger. Her dream was to settle there, where twenty thousand dollars would buy you acres of land and a house. She planned to run a guesthouse, not unlike the kind that Jocelyn’s mother ran on their farm, only open to everyone and especially, she hoped, visiting musicians like herself, without much money, visiting vegetarian musicians who had respect for the land and for all people and wanted only peace and music and harmony. She had friends in Zimbabwe who said they could help. It was odd, I thought, that in pursuing this she had died in some horrible way. Anyway, I imagined it was a horrible way. I spent a lot of time blocking the images of the ways you could die in a train wreck. All the mangled ways. They were none of them peaceful or harmonious.

  My father had a small chartered plane business. Most of the profits he made went back into the business, so my mother said that they could never afford the land they would like in the United States. Zimbabwe was the hope. She didn’t want an acre or two, she wanted land as far as her eye could see. She wanted something wild. I think she would have liked the island, although it might have been too cold and rainy for her. She liked the heat. She loved summers when the apartment, which remained un-airconditioned, grew sweltering. The hotter it was, the more energetic she felt, unlike my father and me, who would go down to the beach in the evenings and try to stay there until it had cooled enough to be bearable in our bedrooms.

  I was always aware that we were poor and that everyone else in Hyannis Port was rich. It wasn’t the truth probably, but the rich seemed to glow in their brightly colored clothes. The rich in Hyannis Port wore lime green and bright yellow and gleaming white ankle socks and sneakers of an unassailable whiteness as though their wearers walked on air. Slightly above the ground. As if their money allowed them the luxury of never having to touch the pavement. My mother in her long cotton India print dresses stood out. She dressed me in similar India print clothes until I was old enough to object. Then she got my clothes from the thrift store and I wore the faded cast-offs of the lime-green-alligator-on-the-pocket people. I wasn’t concerned about fitting in, but I didn’t want to look as if my clothes were making a statement either, as if I were overly proud of being poor or thumbing my nose at their wealth. My mother didn’t care one way or the other. She felt she fit in fine with them and their pert trim neat haircuts and the healthy whites of their eyes as if they’d been fed the premium brand of pet food.

  At school everyone liked to pretend they knew the Kennedys and, when the summer tourists arrived, pretend to be the Kennedys. I didn’t care for the Kennedys. It seemed to me too often people confused virtue with believing in them. People were superstitious about virtue. As if, if you believed in the right things loudly enough, you became part of a club of people whom nothing bad happened to. But my mother was apolitical. Once a canvassing Democrat had steeled her courage and knocked upstairs on our recessed front door. She must have needed every vote to bother—it never looked like anyone lived there. When my mother said she didn’t plan to vote the woman told her that if she was not part of the solution she was part of the problem, and my mother said that, on the contrary, some people weren’t part of the solution or the problem, they just wanted to play music.

  That was what I liked best about my mother. She always spoke her mind. Not in an unpleasant way. Just in an unafraid way. It seemed to me she lived her whole life in an unafraid way, which was why it seemed so unfair that her life was cut short. Would she have lived longer if she’d been afraid? Would this have kept her from going to Zimbabwe or believing she could have a guesthouse there? Or would her short life have been just more unhappy? Clouded by fear. It bothered me more than anything else that I would never know if things would have turned out differently if we could, for instance, have gotten back my parents’ lives and done them over, fixed the fatal flaws that caused them to end up on that train, riding, riding to whatever bloody, unvegetarian place they had arrived.

  I wanted to be like my mother, light and open and full of graceful courage, but I think I was more like my dad, who was forthright and stand-up but also enjoyed giving someone a good poke now and then. Well, we were none of us perfect. Not even my mother, who had her own small vices. She couldn’t make chocolate chip cookies without eating the entire batch. My father would come home saying the apartment smells great, what have you been making, and my mother would look around furtively and say … cookies … finally because although she was a pig when it came to cookies, she was not a liar, and my father would say, oh, fantastic, where are they, and my mother would say, none left, in a businesslike manner that hoped to cut short any further speculation about the fate of the cookies, and start to play the marimba really loud. My mother always wanted to lose ten pounds, but she never seemed to figure out that a good start would be to stop making cookies. She said, I am going to make cookies, Meline, and I am only going to eat one. It would be me who would only get one, at most two, then she’d tell me no more, they weren’t good for me, and when I came in the kitchen later a terrible look would be in her eye, like a cornered fox, and I’d know the cookies had once again gotten the best of her.

  In the end she came to believe that the cookies were evil. It was the only time I ever heard her call anything evil. As a rule she didn’t believe in evil, but it was the only way she could account for the cookies’ sway.

  One day I came home from school and tried to help her overcome her struggle with the cookies with a saying my teacher had written on the board that morning: ALWAYS PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE, by which I thought she could extrapolate Don’t let the cookies control you. My mother sat down and thought about that, but she didn’t seem to get the implication. “The one I like is DON’T BE FURIOUS, BE CURIOUS,” she said, pouring us each a glass of lemonade. I thought we were going to segue into an examinatory chat about such things, but instead she just looked off into space and sipped her lemonade and said, “Do you think that cat next door was really spayed? It looks pregnant to me.”

  I tried to think of a favorite aphorism of my father’s, but all I could recall him giving me in the way of organized advice was “DON’T TAKE ANY CRAP FROM ANYBODY.” It’s not exactly something you’d want needle-pointed on a pillow.

  Still, I had thought, a judicious blend of this advice would probably see me through. I had thought this on Monday still. By Tuesday I had changed my mind. Wednesday I was clinging to them again. Today I wasn’t sure. Tomorrow it would probably be something else. Maybe not. I took another bite of kugel. My world was gone. My world was gone.

  “Kugel? Brisket?” I said to Jocelyn. “I never even heard those words before.”

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  JOCELYN SAID, “Mrs. Mendelbaum told me that it was what she used to cook for her family. She said she cooked good simple food, nothing fancy. She isn’t a professional cook, you know. Or a professional housekeeper. She took the job because she couldn’t stand listening to only her own sounds every day in her apartment. It creeped her out. I’m paraphrasing, of course. She wanted to be someplace where there were other people’s sounds. You knew when you hired her that she was awfully old, didn’t you, Uncle Marten?”

  “I did not!” I said. Who thought about such things? “She doesn’t look it.” There was a pause as I considered this. “You don’t think she looks old, do you?”

  “Didn’t it say her age on her résumé?” asked Jocelyn, ig
noring my question and continuing to calmly cut her meat into teeny, tiny bits.

  “Her what? Oh yes. Those things. Well, I didn’t ask for one.”

  “References?” asked Jocelyn.

  “No, of course not. Well, I mean she looks okay, doesn’t she? Not like an ax murderer or anything. And, after all, if someone wants to make up a résumé and references, that’s easy enough to do.”

  “Yes, but you can phone the references to check them out,” said Jocelyn. “That’s what they’re there for. You can find out if someone is really too old to be working.”

  I felt cornered and bored. It was all much ado about nothing if you asked me. “Yes, well, I suppose you can. But there’s nothing to stop people from having their friends pretend to be phony references. Face it, Jocelyn, my dear, if someone in your future employ wants to hoodwink you, well, they can. So you may as well just dispose of the whole nonsense.”

  “Or go with your gut,” Meline said, shoving rolls into her mouth. She had apparently given up on dinner and made rolls the main course.

  “Exactly,” I said, looking at Meline gratefully. “Go with your gut. My gut says she looks perfectly okay.” I pulled my glasses down to the tip of my nose and glanced over them in the direction of the kitchen where Mrs. Mendelbaum was putting the finishing touches on a honey cake. “She looks completely capable of doing whatever a younger cook could do. Heavy lifting and such.”