The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “Heavy lifting?” Meline asked, laughing and spraying crumbs everywhere. Jocelyn looked politely away.

  “Yes, in the kitchen. Heaving pots of pasta water or heavy roasts and turkeys about,” I said imperturbably, returning to my meal. Girls were really very silly. Anyone could see the woman could cook and that’s what I hired her for, so what was all this talk of résumés and references? I wasn’t hiring for NASA, after all. And how the heck was I supposed to know if someone was too old to work unless they told me so? I could rarely remember how old I myself was. The only important thing about people was their ideas, and the tragedy was that they seldom had any. “I don’t even know how old you are,” I said, continuing aloud my train of thought.

  “I’m sixteen,” said Jocelyn.

  “I’m fifteen. Well, almost sixteen. Nearer to sixteen than fifteen,” Meline added. She took one foot out from under her and sat on the other one.

  “Really,” said Jocelyn, “it is extraordinary how you always sit with one leg under you. Like some kind of stork. Are you hatching your feet?” Jocelyn placed her knife and fork together on a diagonal in the center of her plate and sat back, looking as if she were done with dinner and us as well. Meline and I looked at her in amazement. It was not like her to be so rude. Then Meline peered down at her foot as if expecting a baby bird to indeed come crawling out of it. She put both feet on the floor and seemed disturbed.

  I spied Meline’s plate with all its leftovers and nearly untouched brisket and said, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “I had a lot of chocolate,” she said.

  “Ah,” I replied happily. I was quite pleased that my solution had worked. When I had noticed the hot dog dinners were not being greeted with enthusiasm I tried to think what I could use to tempt the girls’ apparently capricious appetites and remembered that a woman I had met at a conference had told me that women were crazy for chocolate. That they would do anything for the stuff. I remember standing back and looking at her searchingly, speculating on just how crazy she was. Then I promptly forgot the whole business, but with two hungry but appetiteless nieces this conversation had come back to me. What was the name of that chocolate this woman had spoken so lovingly of, oh yes, Godiva. I got on the Internet and ordered the girls each twelve boxes to be sent overnight. That should hold them. That should keep them from starving to death. I had Sam, the helicopter pilot, deliver them. He accepts all my mail and deliveries at his address in Vancouver and then drops them on the island when the mood seizes him. Sam likes being a delivery service, although he really isn’t very good at it, mostly because he can only manage to drop my mail and deliveries in roughly the direction of the house. I never complain and, in fact, don’t find my packages half the time, but then, I often don’t remember ordering things, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.

  Anyhow, when the chocolates arrived, I could tell from the rattling sand sound in the boxes that, because of Sam, they were broken to bits. But girls weren’t fussy about the shape their chocolates were in, were they? That woman at the conference made it sound as if, given a choice, they would just inject them directly into their veins anyway. I’d found one of the boxes in a rabbit hole. It was rather like an Easter egg hunt, I thought happily. I found some other things Sam had “delivered” randomly about the island as I went around hunting for the Godiva boxes, and they came as a pleasant surprise, as if they had sprung out of the earth spontaneously. The reverse of spontaneous combustion, I thought with amusement. Sometimes my own temperament and lifestyle suited me so exactly that I felt a wave of contentment wash over me. If only people would stop fussing. If they would enjoy the things that happened to them in the serendipitous way they occurred instead of worrying that they weren’t happening the way they were supposed to happen, they’d surely be a lot more content with life. All those people I met at conferences who were always off to the gym in the hotel or doing something equally improving. Improve yourself to what end, I always wanted to know. What was it that people wanted to be?

  “Well,” I said, pleased that Meline had enjoyed her chocolates, “interesting dinner.” Forgetting that the interesting part had all been happening in my head and they hadn’t been privy to it. It occurred to me again that once you started making contact with people they wanted you to listen to them and the whole thing became exhausting. Positively exhausting.

  “Who wants cake?” Mrs. Mendelbaum, her mouth full of kugel, called from the kitchen, where she was eating standing up at the kitchen table while making a grocery list.

  “What?” I asked. “Did you say something, Mrs. Mendelbaum?”

  There was a pause while she swallowed. “I said who wants cake? A nice little piece of honey cake, maybe?”

  “Are you still eating in there?” I called back.

  “I shouldn’t eat?”

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant. I keep telling you, dear lady, you don’t have to eat in there like some kind of fugitive. Why will you not join us here at table? I’m sure the girls wouldn’t mind.”

  “Mind? What’s to mind?” yelled Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Poor little things lose their parents, the only living things they have in the world, and they should care if I eat with them?”

  “It would be good for them is what I meant to say. I’m no great shakes at keeping them company. A woman at the table would be … an asset for us all.” My voice trailed off at this last. Good manners demanded such a response that would further imprison me in intolerable company, but I choked it out in a desperate victory of principle over desire.

  “A woman, why a woman? I should menstruate on them?” She was muttering to herself, unaware that we could hear her quite clearly, that poor little Jocelyn was turning red. “Now listen, Mr. Smarty Pants,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, raising her voice so we would hear her and slapping out the “t”s in “smarty pants” in her most acid German accent, putting all her derision into that consonant, “so I read. So I know. The cook does not eat with the family. Don’t think I didn’t see that book you planted in the kitchen—What Does a Butler Do? What does a cook do, one whole chapter. What does a footman do? Who heard of such things, Mr. Fancy Pants? A cook, the book says, does not eat at table. A cook eats in the kitchen.”

  “Could I be more welcoming?” I whispered anxiously. “It isn’t I, is it, that is instigating this ridiculous argument? I could not be more democratic. Not that there is a need for it. Of course everyone should eat together. But she is going to be temperamental, after all. I hoped not—but I feared. I read about that in that very book of which she speaks. So many cooks are temperamental. It is, after all, called the culinary arts.”

  “You see, you should have interviewed, and not just picked the first one that came along. You might have discovered this ahead of time,” whispered Jocelyn.

  In a louder voice I called, “I swear to you, Mrs. Mendelbaum, I didn’t plant a book about servants in the kitchen so that you would find out that cooks don’t eat with the family. I didn’t plant any books anywhere. Well, that is, I did put books about in logical places, but not with any idea that anyone but me would read them. I didn’t plan to have anyone else living here. You all just … showed up.”

  “Showed up, just showed up, did I?” muttered Mrs. Mendelbaum and ate a second piece of kugel, ignoring us in the dining room and finishing her list. “Crazy man.” She ate a few more bites and then shouted to the dining room, “My Mendel was a student! Educated!”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. We waited. It sounded like the beginning of an accusation, but nothing else was forthcoming. We sat and looked at each other around the table for a few minutes silently and then all said at the same time, “Mendel Mendelbaum?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mendelbaum. You must believe me when I say I had no idea that book was going to give you such ideas. Please throw it on the fire immediately or get rid of it in any way that satisfies you. I don’t remember half of what is in this house. All you have to do is clean it to find that out.” I thought this was a very s
atisfactory and ameliorating thing to say, but it only seemed to ruffle Mrs. Mendelbaum all the more.

  “So now you are suggesting I don’t clean properly? I’ll clean it all right!” shouted Mrs. Mendelbaum threateningly.

  “She told me earlier she wasn’t feeling well and her feet hurt,” whispered Jocelyn to us from mid-table.

  “Please come eat with us. I beg you to eat with us. I’m dying for you to eat with us,” I said, now stuck in a landslide of cascading and escalating entreaties, each one more insincere than the last.

  This is what comes from having people living with you. It all comes down to doing strange things, crazy things, such as entreating someone to do something which clearly neither one of you wants in an attempt to convince that person of the affection you do not feel for them and which, in any case, they don’t want, in a further attempt to do no harm or ameliorate the harm you unknowingly did. We should all live alone on islands.

  There was a long pause from the kitchen as if Mrs. Mendelbaum was thinking it over. Finally she said, “I don’t like sitting down to such big heavy meals. Es brent mir ahfen hartz. I bloat.”

  Well, that certainly made me sorry I had brought it up. When I wasn’t feeling vaguely sorry for Mrs. Mendelbaum, another victim of bad luck and circumstances, her whole family having predeceased her, she drove me crazy. Then I felt guilty for being driven crazy. What kind of heartless man is driven crazy by someone like poor, unfortunate Mrs. Mendelbaum? And why should I have to think of her at all? All I really needed to do was pay her salary. It was all so inconvenient. I had gotten her so I wouldn’t have to think about food and could keep my mind on my research, but now I found myself thinking about Mrs. Mendelbaum. I would never get any work done this way. And all because my nieces had to eat. And what kind of thoughts were these? To be unable to sit down to dinner with my own nieces without resenting it? To resent having to think about feeding them? “I’m a monster. A monster!” I said aloud to myself, forgetting as usual what was in my head and what could be heard. Forgetting even anyone’s presence at the table with me. I had already forgotten the girls, the dining room was so dark, ill lit, with its massive table, Meline a good twenty feet from me and pale, washed-out, little bony Jocelyn hardly noticeable in any setting, so thin and watery-looking. I pushed my chair out from the table and stumbled off to bed.

  Mrs. Mendelbaum came in as I was leaving. “Cake, anyone?” she asked.

  MELINE

  SIX WEEKS AFTER LANDING on the island, when the fog of our suddenly changed circumstances had had a chance to clear out of our heads, I realized Jocelyn and I would have to find something to do. The helicopter kept dropping off books and school supplies from the distance education program that my social worker had enrolled us in when she was making our arrangements with Uncle Marten. It was what most of the island-raised children did, she reported. But, given Sam’s hit-or-miss delivery system, sometimes we found the supplies and sometimes we didn’t. Neither one of us felt competent to hit the books yet, so the books and workbooks tended to sit around the house, still wrapped in plastic, wherever we tossed them after finding them on the ground by the house. When Uncle Marten came across them, more often than not he heaved them on the fire that was always roaring in the huge fireplace in the living room. Keeping the fire stoked was supposed to be one of Mrs. Mendelbaum’s jobs, but she was too delicate to spend the day heaving giant logs in, so we all, even Uncle Marten, took turns. Uncle Marten didn’t recognize the books as our schoolbooks and only saw them as rather cheaply bound things and wondered why he had gotten them. “What’s this garbage?” he would say, picking up a math workbook and chucking it into the flames. So even when we did periodically pick up a book and halfheartedly start a course of study, we’d find bits missing, textbooks or workbooks or worksheets, so that it was impossible to piece together where you were in the lesson and what you were supposed to do next, and eventually we just gave up. Giving up seemed like the logical conclusion for every endeavor in those days. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Everything ended eventually anyway.

  * * *

  The last time Jocelyn and I had seen each other was when I was nine. Her family had taken a vacation and visited us on Cape Cod. I remembered little about her from that except that she was lean and blond and quiet and not much fun. Heading out to the island to live with her, I had expected we would like each other much better than originally because we now had our shared tragedy as a common bond and would be in sympathy with each other in a way no one else could quite understand. But we were not. Jocelyn didn’t seem to be in need of any sympathy and she certainly didn’t want mine. Most of the time her face was hard and tight and her lips appeared set in cement. If I smiled at her she looked mortally offended as if I were trying to lure her, seduce her to join me in my slovenly ways. So now, after six weeks of stilted, uneasy conversation when it took all my self-control to keep from chucking things at her, we kept a polite distance.

  I spent a lot of time pacing around the house, itching for something to do, anything to keep me occupied but nothing that required too much concentration. Meanwhile every day at two o’clock precisely, Jocelyn put on her winter coat, which like mine was wool and completely inappropriate, and went trudging out into the driving rain.

  At first I paid no particular attention, but as the days dragged on I got curious. What did she do out there? Why always at two o’clock? Was she meeting someone? No, that was ridiculous. There was no one else on this island. It was just the four of us and a lot of rain. Still, it was odd, and I hadn’t pegged Jocelyn as the type to do odd things, so one day I decided to follow her. I waited until she was across the meadow, then put on my heavy wool coat and slipped out behind her. By the time I had made it to the cover of the woods I was drenched and muddy. I had to race a bit after that to see where she was going, but even though I made a lot of noise she didn’t seem to notice, so intent was she on her mysterious, intensely purposeful mission. She looked very melodramatic and Wuthering Heights. She could be a gothic heroine, I thought to myself, one who came to no good end. Then I decided she wasn’t sympathetic enough to be the heroine. She’d make a better head of orphanage or strange housekeeper entrusted with the master’s dark secret. She had the pinched expressions for it. When we got to the top of a hill, she sat down in the clearing, pulling her knees up to her chest. Then I could not have been more surprised by what came next: she put her head down on her knees and started to sob. Did she come here every day to this spot, getting soaked, just to sit in the mud and weep?

  I thought about speaking to her. Telling her that sobbing on a hillside at two o’clock every day was about as bad a habit as a person could fall into, but even that seemed to take more energy than I had lately. And it only underscored for me the painfully obvious fact that if she had time for this, we simply didn’t have enough to do. I turned to go, but that, in the annoyingly contradictory way she did everything, was when she finally noticed me.

  “You! Are you following me?” she asked, tapping me on the shoulder from behind and causing me to cry out. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I don’t want to be spied on.”

  “You know, Jocelyn, if we had more to do, you wouldn’t have the luxury of sobbing on a hillside every day at exactly two o’clock. I was thinking we should find something to do because crying doesn’t do any good.”

  “You ate all your chocolates in just a few days. I suppose you thought that was going to make it all go away?”

  “I was hungry.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Eating all the chocolates like that was an indulgence in grief. But it seemed pointless to bicker about these things. We didn’t talk to each other at all after that. Sometimes, when politeness doesn’t work, bluntness finds a way into the heart and a friendship is formed. But this time I could see nothing; not even a pile driver was going to break down the wall between us. We had no real relationships, any of us. We had no one on the island. We were each of us entirely alone.

  MA
RTEN KNOCKERS

  ALL THIS SILENCE suited me fine. My take on it was that the girls had finally settled down, and I ate my way quite happily through the silent dinners, the better to think about where Einstein had gone so irrevocably wrong. As no one seemed to want to talk, I felt justified in reading at the table again, a practice I had sorely missed. But Mrs. Mendelbaum apparently didn’t like silence and came to me at teatime in my study. She was always coming to me with problems during tea because she brought my tray to me and clearly thought it was the perfect opportunity to ambush me in my lair. It almost made me abandon my afternoon tea, and I would have if I wasn’t so badly in need of caffeine and sugar at that hour to keep my brain pumped until dinner.

  “Sir,” she began.

  “I told you not to call me that,” I said irritably. “My name is Marten. Or if you must, Mr. Knockers. But not, I beg you, ‘sir.’ It makes my skin crawl.

  “A little word—”

  “You always want a little word with me about something,” I groaned. “And it’s always when I’m in the middle of some perplexing problem like trying to find the missing ingredient in the unified field theory.”

  “Oh, who can think of such things!”

  “Well, I can, Mrs. Mendelbaum, I’d say that’s rather obvious. But you’d have me switch from thinking about something important like trying to discover the force that ties together all the energy in the universe and instead think about something like we’re out of sugar again and the milk hasn’t arrived.”

  “It arrives. It arrives squashed. Milk everywhere in the ground but not in the carton. By you this is a small problem?”

  “All right, whatever it is, get it over with. I don’t want to argue about the milk endlessly. I contracted for a helicopter to make my deliveries, and if there are bugs in the system, well, there are bugs in any system. The house is the system I hired you to fix. The universe is the system I’m trying to fix. If everyone would just stick to their own system, I’m sure everything would turn out just fine. But I can see you are going to invite me in to solve another problem that I hired you to solve. So go ahead. What is it this time?” I asked, putting down my pen with a great deal of dramatic resignation, which seemed to be lost on her.