The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “There is something wrong with the girls. Such quiet!”

  “Well, that’s hardly any of our business, Mrs. Mendelbaum.”

  “Not our business? Whose business should it be, I’d like to know? The thin one, what’s her name?” Mrs. Mendelbaum was always forgetting people’s names. She seemed to know who people were, so I wondered if the North American names simply didn’t register on her. Perhaps she would remember them if she could rename us familiar names from her youth. Did we all have a data bank of familiar, easily accessible information garnered in our youth and not added to after, say, our teens? I made a note on a piece of scrap paper about returning to this idea with a possible end to writing a paper on it. This seemed to infuriate Mrs. Mendelbaum, who barked, “Hert zich ein!”

  “Jocelyn, I think,” I said, absentmindedly, still scribbling away, not a clue in the world what she’d just barked.

  “Is she sick, I wonder? She hardly eats, that one. A bird she’s the size of.”

  “Well, girls like to be thin, don’t they? They watch their figures. Do it on purpose, I believe. When they’re not cramming chocolates down their gullets like Strasbourg geese, they starve themselves. It’s not a nice way to live, I admit, but it’s apparently what you have to look forward to if you’ve been born without a Y chromosome. I didn’t create the system. You must have been a girl once, Mrs. Mendelbaum, surely you can remember. Besides, I don’t know what else to do for them. I gave them chocolate,” I said, putting my pen down.

  “They don’t like each other, those two,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, ignoring me.

  “Well, we all have to make adjustments, my dear woman,” I said, very nearly adding, After all I don’t like you. But I caught myself in time.

  “Go. Go and have a little talk with them.”

  “Me?” I yelped, horrified.

  “Who else?”

  “Well, you’re the one who noticed it,” I argued. “If it’s even true. I prefer to think that things are just in a calm. Yes, a calm ebb. Everything ebbs and flows. Soon it will flow and there will be noise again. Right now we are experiencing a calm ebb.” I hoped that this sudden new theory could be true. It would keep humans manageable for me. But Mrs. Mendelbaum would not let me have it.

  “Are you CRAZY?” she screeched. “ZEY ARE AT VAR!” When Mrs. Mendelbaum became particularly agitated, her German accent grew thicker and stronger. It seemed to be tied to her emotions, and the stronger her emotions, the stronger it became.

  “Well, then zey, I mean they, will have to work it out. If you don’t agree, then you go talk to them,” I said, quite reasonably.

  “I’m just the cook,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum with finality.

  “Now, now, you mustn’t think of yourself in those terms. I’m sure you’re a person in your own right,” I said, wondering when I had gotten the job of counseling distraught servants with inferiority complexes. The next thing you knew, I’d have a shingle on my door and a long line of disgruntled workers with low self-esteem. It did not pay to be too good at this sort of thing. “Go on, now. Go have a little word with them. I’m sure you’re better at it than I am. You’re a woman, after all.”

  “Again with the woman business! He has the nasty habit of giving women credit for being better at anything he does not want to do himself,” muttered Mrs. Mendelbaum, turning her head to look at the wall behind her. Who was she talking to when she did this? “It should all fall on me, maybe? The cleaning, the cooking, now the child raising?” she asked me.

  “Well, you can’t expect me to do it. You brought it up.” Honestly, I thought, it was as if we were married and these were our children we were arguing over. No wonder I’d remained a bachelor. Imagine having to deal with someone constantly like this because you’d committed yourself to a lifetime of conversation about such things. Imagine getting into bed at night, knowing you were in for not putting your head on a cool pillow and drifting off, wrapped in the luxury of your own stream of consciousness, but a barrage of someone else’s daily leftovers, all their hopes and dreams and desires and fears and angers and thoughts. All coming at you. And you were supposed to pay attention to that. And that was what people got married for, threw their fortunes in with each other, that and sex, I supposed, but it really really was not worth it. I didn’t understand it at all. How did people live like that? “I didn’t mind the quiet. God knows I wasn’t complaining. Now, I have an awful lot to do here. I know it doesn’t look it when you come in and find me just staring into space, biting on pens and such—”

  “It looks meshugeh,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Mendelbaum, I know what that word means,” I said curtly.

  “Well, that’s what it looks. Meshugeh, if you ask me.”

  “I am thinking when I’m doing that. At least, I was until you came along.”

  Mrs. Mendelbaum rolled her eyes again. “So you’ll talk to the girls?”

  “Oh, all right. But I have no idea what you want me to say.”

  “Just have a little word. Is that so bad?”

  “Well, it really does seem so intrusive to me,” I began.

  “And another thing,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum “And you could listen for a minute, maybe? Not scribble away, leaving me here, holding this farkuckt teapot?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I said impatiently, dying to do just that.

  “I can’t keep running this house alone, doing everything myself. Am I six people? Eleven bedrooms the man has. Oy, the dust bunnies alone! And six bathrooms. All that grout! A living room you could drive a truck through! Three floors!”

  “I know the size of my own house,” I snapped. “Approximately.”

  “I need a butler.”

  “You need a butler?” I repeated in astonishment. “What for?”

  “You need a butler,” Mrs. Mendelbaum amended. “To answer the door. I should answer the door on top of everything else?”

  “But no one ever comes. We live on an island,” I pointed out. “If we hired someone to answer the door he’d have nothing to do. Really, Mrs. Mendelbaum, you must be completely dotty.”

  “He can pick up the dropped packages for one thing and solve for us the problem with milk. They can only drop the cartons out of helicopters at such a height? He can organize the girls and share in the worrying. I should be the only one to worry?”

  “What worry?”

  “I worry.”

  “So you want me to hire a butler. One more person when I was perfectly happy living alone. So that he can help you worry.”

  “I don’t want him to help me worry more. I want him to do the worrying. So I can worry less.”

  “Really, Mrs. Mendelbaum, you should be married. You seem so resolutely determined to do things as a pair that are perfectly well done alone.”

  There was a silence as I recalled that Mrs. Mendelbaum had been married and had had a family, but they’d all died. Maybe it was tactless to bring it up. But good Maud, people do die, I thought uncomfortably. They die every day. She should have gotten used to it by now. Mrs. Mendelbaum said nothing, and for a moment it was as if she wasn’t there anymore. All her energy seemed to have left her. I liked the deflated Mrs. Mendelbaum even less than the annoying one. “Anyhow, now I’m beginning to worry because all this is beginning to make sense. Please leave me before it does. But let me ask you something, Mrs. Mendelbaum, if you get this butler you’re so anxious for, do you think you could talk to him more and me less?” Mrs. Mendelbaum came back from whatever place she had gone to and nodded.

  “And is a butler above a cook, status-wise?

  “Who knows such things?”

  “I thought you’d been reading books about servant protocol, but never mind,” I said hastily, remembering that the last time we’d discussed servant protocol Mrs. Mendelbaum had gotten touchy and shouted at me. I did not want to start that again. “What I want to know is if I give the butler an order to keep you away from me, could he order you to do that?”
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  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum uncertainly.

  “And have you direct your comments and complaints to me through him so that I deal with him? Could he, for instance, bring me tea?”

  Mrs. Mendelbaum furrowed her brow in consternation as if she was trying to decide whether or not she liked the implication here, but before she could speak I said, “Good. Then start advertising. Now please go away and don’t bother me until dinner.”

  “You’ll have a little word with the girls?”

  “YES! YES! NOW GO!” I said, and Mrs. Mendelbaum left looking satisfied.

  “It’s all going to hell,” I said to myself. “It’s all going to hell in a hand wagon. Oh, but unified fields…” as new possibilities occurred to me and I became lost once more in thought, mercifully forgetting Mrs. Mendelbaum and butlers and nieces and everything else.

  But no matter how lost in thought I might be, I knew I would have to behave honorably and keep my promise at dinner, so after several false starts when I put down the book I was reading, looked at the girls, and picked up the book again, I finally leaped in with “Jocelyn, please pass the peas.” There, half accomplished, I said to myself happily. This was going very well. This was going very well indeed. It would soon be all over. Then, “Meline, enjoying the chicken? Excellent.” Ah, done, thank goodness. Imagine, starting a conversation in the middle of a perfectly good silence. It was madness. What was my world coming to? Then I stumbled off to bed. The next day at tea Mrs. Mendelbaum came tearing in.

  “I thought I’d gotten rid of you,” I said.

  “WHAT? Gotten rid of me? You should only get rid of me and see what you would be eating then, Mr. Smarty Pants.”

  “What do you want now? Have you advertised for a butler?”

  “A little talk with the girls, he promises.”

  “I did talk to the girls. I said, ‘Please pass the peas’ and something else. If they didn’t want to jump on the conversational bandwagon, well, you can hardly blame me for that, can you, my dear Mrs. Mendelbaum?” I did not think her dear at all but was hoping to soothe her with my professorial charms and so get rid of her. That was the ticket. Did I have any professorial charms, I wondered. Well, we would find out.

  “By you two sentences is a conversation?”

  “I will not become the Mussolini of the dinner table even to please you, Mrs. Mendelbaum. If the girls do not wish to talk, so be it. Silence is golden. A thought you might even wish to ponder, Mrs. Mendelbaum.”

  “A talk is a talk. ‘Pass the peas’ is not a talk. ‘Do you like chicken’ is not a talk. A tomb it is here. A tomb. I did not leave a tomb to come to another tomb. So fix it or make your own miserable messes, mister.”

  This stopped me in my tracks. First because “miserable messes, mister” was more alliteration than I would have ever given Mrs. Mendelbaum credit for coming up with. And second because Mrs. Mendelbaum had never called me “mister” before and I could not for the life of me figure out what this presaged. She was constantly surprising me in small ways.

  “Ahem.” I cleared my throat because I could think of no response, but felt I had to retain the verbal upper hand. “I see. Well, I will try once again, but I don’t know how I can guarantee you a certain noise level. It seems a most unreasonable request.”

  But Mrs. Mendelbaum seemed satisfied with my promise, so at dinner I fussed with my potatoes and pushed about my salad and cut my meat into tiny pieces and thought, What in the world am I going to say to these two little statuelike creatures? Finally I looked up and said, “Ahem. Have I told you about the island?”

  Jocelyn and Meline put down their forks and looked at me expectantly.

  “When I left Wall Street I knew I wanted to buy an island here off the coast of British Columbia. I investigated what was available, whole islands being in rather short supply, as you can imagine. Most of the ones for sale were too small and dull or so remote that to have any deliveries made and to get on and off them was too complicated. Finally my realtor found this one, which he didn’t think I would be interested in. It had a bad reputation, covered with debris, tragic history, etc. But I found it much more topographically interesting than the others, as you can see, meadows and beaches and woods and hills. It had been a training camp for pilots a long time ago. What are now the meadows had been dirt runways. They were trying to teach pilots to land in difficult circumstances, and the island was ideal for that as they could also teach them to land on water. Then one day a new commander was put in charge and took the idea of teaching the pilots to land under adverse circumstances a bit too far. He decided the pilots should learn to fly and land without radar or any instruments at all but by the seat of their pants. He insisted it could be done. That pilots could be trained without all the fancy equipment they had come to rely on, all their crutches, as he put it. All the things you sissy boys seem to think you need, he said to them. He didn’t tell the air force this, mind you. He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. He just calmly stripped all the small planes in his command of their instruments and began his own small corps of what he claimed would be the most powerful fighting force anyone in the air had ever seen because his pilots could fly anywhere under any circumstances. He called it the Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane.

  “The first week out, three pilots died. Everyone was crashing, but no one was coming to the island to shut down the operation. Because he wasn’t reporting the deaths. And his corps didn’t even suspect that he wasn’t reporting the deaths. They just thought this was what they had been sent to do. No one could escape. They were on an island. They were stuck. It was crash your plane on the island or crash it trying to escape. It wasn’t as if they could swim to shore. You know what the waters are like around here. You can’t swim without a wet suit. And even then it’s iffy. No, it was a hell of an unfortunate set of options for those boys. Eventually, of course, one of the pilots figured out that it wasn’t the military who had set this whole thing up, that the Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane was simply a bug up the nose of this one man, his own pet project, and that even the air force wouldn’t let this kind of training go on if they knew about it—eleven pilots had died, and seven planes had been wrecked beyond repair. So when a new shipment of recruits arrived via helicopter this pilot stowed away and headed back to tell his superiors what was going on.”

  I stopped talking and went back to cutting up my meat in little pieces and thinking about binary equations. Had I told them enough? Nobody ever told anyone everything. Why should they? Why did meat have to come in such inconvenient chunks?

  “But what happened to the mad commander?” asked Jocelyn.

  “Oh, they put him away. Somewhere he couldn’t do any harm. Away from his men. Away from his family. They pulled all the troops off the island and sent them elsewhere and this island just sat abandoned and forgotten, an embarrassment, a testimonial to what can go wrong. And then while I was island-shopping, the Department of National Defence put this island up for sale along with its other surplus, and I bought their island of wrecked planes and wrecked men.”

  “They sound more than wrecked, they sound smooshed,” Meline said, eating her meat. “They sound blood-and-gutsed. They sound like a bunch of moldering corpses. They did bury them, didn’t they, in their haste to clear out?”

  “Oh…” groaned Jocelyn, putting down her fork. “Can we change the subject?”

  “I would assume so, Meline,” I said, not listening anymore and picking up a math journal to continue reading an article. I’d never found math interesting before, but it was! It was terribly interesting. At any rate, I figured I’d more than fulfilled my promise to Mrs. Mendelbaum, and you could only expect a man to do so much. Enough was enough. Now for some sensible thoughts. Then, forgetting I was in the middle of dinner, so engrossed was I in the article I was perusing, I got up, still reading, and trotted back toward my room.

  “Got in himmel!” said Mrs. Mendelbaum. She was still muttering to herself from the doorway as I was leaving.
“Such talk! You ask for a talk and you get such talk! Such talk to give a soul nightmares maybe. By him this is a healing talk? A conversation starter maybe? Oy. I’ll bring them some cake. A taste. Who wouldn’t feel better with a bit of cake?” She went back to the kitchen, to cut cake, I suppose. Well, there are those who think the answer lies in undiscovered knowledge and those who think it lies in cake.

  MELINE

  “JOCELYN,” I said the next day at two o’clock. I had followed her across the meadow to join her as she sobbed on her hillside. “I’ve been thinking we need something to do, and it might interest you to know that I know how to build a plane.”

  She stopped weeping for a second and glared at me. “You do not.”

  “Yes, I do. And I know how to fly a plane and I know you do, too. Now, what kind of possibilities does that bring to mind?”

  “Oh, you do not know how to build a plane. Maybe you’ve seen the mechanics in your father’s company working on a plane—”

  “I can. I can build a vacuum cleaner, too. So could my mother. My father believed that if you used a tool you should understand it, and the best way to understand it was to know how to build it. We could build a plane. I could show you how. Now, according to Uncle, there are plane parts scattered all over the island. And we’ve got a lot of time and nothing to do.”

  “How are we going to move the parts even if we find them?” Jocelyn asked. “How are we going to get a bunch of scattered plane parts to one place?”

  “I don’t know. The first thing is to find them.” I watched the wheels turn in Jocelyn’s head, and for a second I saw a glimmer.