But even so she wasn’t immediately available for the project. She had to rethink it constantly. She spent lots of time turning it over in her mind. We would be sitting by the fire and she would be staring intently at the flames and suddenly say, “Well, where are we going to build it without it being seen?”
“The barn back behind the house is empty.”
“How are we going to get the parts through the doorway?”
“Well, gosh, Jocelyn, it’s a barn door.”
“I don’t think it can be done.”
And I’d have to go over it all again slowly with certainty and confidence because she was always half a step away from backing out.
“It can be done. We find the plane parts, we take them into the barn, and we put them together.”
“Again, why would your father teach you to build a plane?”
“To be ready for anything. Suppose I flew a plane alone and crashed somewhere? I should be ready to fix it. I should know how to survive.”
“My father didn’t teach me that when he taught me to fly,” said Jocelyn. I shrugged. Her forehead was screwed up. “My father didn’t seem to think he needed to prepare me for such things.” I shrugged again. Then her tone stopped being ruminative and became shrill. “And he was right! Because nothing like that happened to me. And what happened to you and what happened to me couldn’t be prepared for, so it’s a waste of time trying to prepare anyone for anything. Anyhow, we build the plane and then what?”
My mind went to the moment of liftoff. That second when miraculously you leave the earth behind. When you’re up above it all. Removed. Out of reach.
“And also,” she said, her shoulders slumping, folding in on herself again, “do you have any idea how much plane parts weigh? Even very small planes?”
“We’ll need some kind of dolly. We’ll need all kinds of things, Jocelyn. Soldering irons probably. Or, who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find a plane that’s not in such bad shape and just needs some repairs. I mean, until we start looking, we don’t know what we’ll find.”
“Even if we make a plane, we might not be able to fly it.”
My mother had taught me that if you could think it, you could do it. That’s why my mother had such hopes for the guesthouse in Zimbabwe. It never occurred to her that she couldn’t make it happen. She wanted it so badly that that in itself became a kind of faith. My mother’s faith had been so strong that her beliefs created my universe, too. I realized that what we may think is incontrovertible knowledge of what is, is only made up out of our beliefs. When she died with all those things she was so sure she would do undone, all these beliefs collapsed for me. The universe was not what my mother believed it to be. I could not hang my hat there anymore. I didn’t know what to believe in now. Somehow, as much as I had been sure about my mother, my mother who was so loving, who surely must be in touch with what was, so clear-sighted, so good was she, despite all that, she had gotten it all wrong. She hadn’t known any more than anyone else. Because I found it hard to believe that this was possible, I harbored a half hope that it had been a mistake, they hadn’t died, it must be that my mother and father had somehow survived without anyone knowing, that they weren’t buried in foreign soil but were perhaps making their way through the Zimbabwe countryside to me and anytime now I would see them again.
“Jocelyn, suppose our parents aren’t dead?” I asked suddenly and, as soon as I said it, was sorry.
“They’re dead,” said Jocelyn flatly and got up and left the fire.
* * *
Mrs. Mendelbaum began interviewing butlers shortly after that. Although when Sam delivered us, he put me and Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum on the ground, a sop to our femininity perhaps, he treated the butlers as milk and dropped them wherever he felt like it from a hanging insubstantial-looking ladder. Jocelyn and I would be scouring the fields for airplane parts and hear the whirring blades of a chopper, and down a butler would come, bowler hat and all. At first the hats startled me and Jocelyn, and then we read Mrs. Mendelbaum’s ad: Butler wanted for large household of Mr. Marten Knockers. Must have experience. And proper clothes. Including the butler hat.
I was amazed at the number of men who showed up to be interviewed. I don’t believe I would go to an interview for a job in which they asked you to bring “the butler hat.” I told Mrs. Mendelbaum that she had a better chance of getting a higher-class butler if she called it a bowler. “You know, Mrs. Mendelbaum, so many of these bowler hats look brand-new. I think they buy them just for the interview. I think what you’ve got here is not a lot of experienced butlers but a lot of out-of-work waiters with new hats.”
“But you zee! Zey come. Zey all want the work,” she said, pointing out the window at a newly arriving candidate who was hanging from the helicopter ladder, calling imprecations up to Sam. His fist was raised and his face was red, and really you couldn’t blame him, it wasn’t one of Sam’s better hoverings. The ladder skimmed the ground around and around in a ten-foot radius.
“I hope he doesn’t fall,” I said to Mrs. Mendelbaum. We were sipping tea and she was getting out her list of interview questions from the kitchen table drawer.
“Never mind them, they are all alike,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum.
“Haven’t you found one you like?” I asked.
“Zey are little pansy boys dressed in their daddy’s clothes. I need a man who can VORRY.”
I didn’t know what “vorry” was, and the butler was quickly approaching the door, so I left. It never did much good to talk to Mrs. Mendelbaum: half the time it was as if she wasn’t listening and the other half she didn’t seem to know what I meant. But she always offered us cake and tea.
I winced when I saw Mrs. Mendelbaum’s list of questions. Jocelyn and I overheard several of Mrs. Mendelbaum’s interviews when we were sitting by the fire. Interviewing made Mrs. Mendelbaum very nervous and caused her not only to lapse into her German accent but to speak a strange mix of German and English. “Site vem haf you butlering began?” and “Vee feel housen haf you been butler at?” If you spoke a bit of German, you might be able to figure out what she was asking, but so far none of them had. Some courageous souls, after trying to get her to paraphrase her questions, gave up altogether and simply made a stab at any kind of answer at all.
“Zey are all idiots,” Mrs. Mendelbaum would moan after they left.
It didn’t help that many of them were still shaking from the helicopter ride and circus-ladder-type descent. One fellow, obviously thinking his arrival might be witnessed, as indeed it was, made a daring leap off the ladder, but he misjudged the distance and landed on his face in a large mud puddle from which there was no reclaiming his savoir faire. Mrs. Mendelbaum said nothing and gave him a dry pair of Uncle’s pants and, after an extremely perfunctory interview in which none of us had a clue what she was asking, sent him back to the hill to wait for Sam. We saw him shivering there in the rain for an hour, holding up his too short, too wide pants. “She might at least have given him tea,” sniffed Jocelyn.
“It’s like she’s looking for something specific in them and when she doesn’t find it, she gets angry,” I said, but I did not want to think about who people really were. All I wanted to do was keep busy and not think at all.
The butler interviews continued for two weeks. Some candidates handled them better than others. One threw up. Many of them lost their bowler hats in the descent from the helicopter and, when they weren’t hired, wrote to Uncle Marten demanding he replace them or reimburse them.
Uncle Marten, who wasn’t paying attention, as usual, came into dinner one night and said, “What are all these letters demanding hats? Money for hats? From perfect strangers. Is this some new kind of charity or someone’s idea of a get-rich-quick scheme? Bilk the poor unsuspecting rich fellow for hat money? Is it a prank? Well, I won’t have it. It’s very annoying.” And he threw them all in the fire. It would take a lot to get hats out of ole Marten Knockers, he told us, and right there made a vow he would never send anyone m
oney for hats, no matter how plausible-sounding their claims. He rewarded himself with an extra piece of cake at dinner. “Girls,” he said, “I am having extra cake because some days one is especially pleased with oneself. Some days one simply congratulates the universe for having one in it.” Then he dug greedily into the cake, chocolate this time, and was so excited that he missed his mouth with his fork and actually stabbed himself in the chin. He had tine marks for a week.
One of the last interviews that Jocelyn and I overheard began with Mrs. Mendelbaum challenging the poor fellow, “ZO! You ZINK you vant to VORK on an ISLAND???”
The butler, who was somewhat less intimidated than the dozen who had gone before, perhaps because he was British and had maybe even been a butler at some point, turned to us, who were sitting not far away by the fire, and said, “Good Lord, do you have any idea what she is trying to say?”
“Don’t talk to ZEM. Zey are just silly gells,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum.
“Seagulls?” said the poor man. “See here now, they are not seagulls. Dropped from a helicopter, told very ordinary young ladies are seagulls. I demand to speak to Mr. Knockers. It was Mr. Knockers’s name on the advertisement.”
“You vill zee NO ONE. NO ONE. I am in charge!” roared Mrs. Mendelbaum, getting up and putting her hands on her hips and for emphasis throwing on the floor the wet dishrag she’d been wiping down the kitchen with when he arrived. This seemed to stymie the man, who was swiftly losing his composure. He was at the mercy of a mad German woman on an island with no apparent way off. I could see his point completely. If she would only relax and offer them tea and cake instead of getting so nervous and shouting at them.
“Now listen, I’ll just go, then,” he said, getting up.
“Mit out your tea?” asked Mrs. Mendelbaum sweetly, sitting down again. She knew there weren’t many applicants left, and whereas usually she would have been happy to see the back of this one—she never liked ones who quaked in the face of her fierceness, or gave up—she knew she had to choose someone soon or be out of luck, and who knew who would follow this one, so she was willing to make allowances.
“You’re raving mad,” said the butler and turned to me and Jocelyn again, asking us where the helicopter pickup was. We pointed to the hill, although we warned him that Sam wouldn’t be back for another three hours. He looked at Mrs. Mendelbaum and looked at the rainy hill and chose the hill. I thought this showed good judgment, and she should have hired him on the spot. Jocelyn, when we were discussing this later, said that it showed a complete lack of character and anyone who couldn’t deal with Mrs. Mendelbaum would be completely undone by Uncle Marten.
“But Uncle Marten is kind,” I argued. “I don’t think Mrs. Mendelbaum is exactly.”
“I don’t think it’s that she isn’t kind,” said Jocelyn.
“She throws the butlers out into the rain,” I said evenly.
“She doesn’t.”
“Well, they always end up choosing the rain over her before she has the chance, but you know very well that given the chance she would throw them out into the rain.”
“I don’t think it’s that she isn’t kind,” said Jocelyn, staring absently into the fire. “I think it’s that she is afraid.”
But when the quaking butler got back to the mainland he turned out to be one quaking butler who was not ready to let bygones be bygones. He e-mailed Uncle Marten and told him he planned to sue. He had been traumatized. He had been almost kidnapped as far as he was concerned and made to wait on a rainy hill, fearful for his life. Even Uncle Marten knew this was overstating things, but it still caused him to go downstairs to the kitchen and speak to Mrs. Mendelbaum. “You mustn’t scare them, Mrs. Mendelbaum,” he admonished. “It isn’t nice.”
“I? Scare them?” asked Mrs. Mendelbaum, snorting with derision. “A frail little Jewish lady? Pansy froufrou boys. They should know from scary.”
“Nevertheless,” said Uncle Marten, coughing gently. But that was all he could think of to say, and he returned to his room defeated. Later at dinner Mrs. Mendelbaum, who felt unjustly accused, tried to bring it up again as she carried in the soup. “I shouldn’t ask interview questions? I should maybe let them interview me?”
Uncle Marten gazed into his soup bowl with exaggerated interest. “There, there, what kind of soup did you say this was?”
But Mrs. Mendelbaum was not ready to let it go and insisted on carrying all the courses into the dining room while keeping going a running monologue about her own frailness and the unfairness of such accusations, the better to torment Uncle Marten, until he finally gave up, saying “I can’t listen to any more of this. Do what you must. I’ve got particles on my mind. Articles about particles.” And left the table.
“There you see!” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, turning triumphantly to us. “He is no GOOT to us anymore. He is RHYMING!” And she took away the dishes with a queer little smug smile on her face. Uncle Marten spent a lot more time in his room after that, and it was our impression he was avoiding seeing her ever again.
* * *
During all of this, we had been scouring the island and I couldn’t believe that we hadn’t found so much as a fuselage. “He must have made it up,” I said for the umpteenth time to Jocelyn.
“He couldn’t. He hasn’t the imagination,” she said.
“If he didn’t make it up it’s not because he hasn’t the imagination. He has plenty of imagination. I think if he didn’t make it up it’s because he has too much respect for the truth.”
“Uncle Marten must have seen the plane parts himself, then. Otherwise how would he know they were here? It’s a big island and we haven’t seen it all.”
“He might not have seen them. He was told a bunch of pilots crashed small planes. He might have just assumed there were plane parts still around,” I said, collapsing on a hillside and getting soaked again. We were always getting soaked. I felt like a fish. I thought we’d have a nice whiny time of it in the mud deploring the size of the island, but Jocelyn looked at me sitting in wet leaves, turned abruptly, and walked back to the house. I could never get used to how she didn’t announce her intentions ever; when she wanted to go somewhere she just left without a word as if emphasizing the lack of connection between you. Her lack of obligation to you in the form of explanation, greetings, or closings or the usual grease of human interaction. I groaned and stood up on sore cold limbs and hobbled back behind her.
That night I awoke around 2 a.m. with an idea. I dressed quickly and, taking the flashlight that was beside my bed, went to Jocelyn’s room and woke her. She screamed as soon as I touched her shoulder. I moved my hand swiftly over her mouth to muffle it, saying, “For heaven’s sake get a grip,” and she bit me.
JOCELYN
ALL WAS DARKNESS AND DREAMS when I suddenly awoke on a train to bright, uneven, moving light. Firelight where there should be no fire and strange faces and screaming. Where were my parents? What were they doing to those women? Where was my mother?
“You’ll have Mrs. Mendelbaum in here in a second if you don’t shut up,” hissed a voice as a hand clamped over my mouth.
I sat up in bed panting beneath it and then, having apparently bitten Meline’s hand, gently pulled it away. A cold sweat dripped down under my arms beneath my loose nightgown and my eyes slowly adjusted to the familiar furniture of the bedroom. Meline didn’t seem to notice the state I was in, but I was used to this. No one else here had seen the fires or the bodies or the cast-off limbs. There were others there when it happened who were whisked off as quickly as I was, but even when I returned to identify bodies, I spoke to no one else who had been there that night. And then I was carried away as quickly as possible to safety as if geography could put distance between me and what happened. As if I didn’t live there now, every day. Your mind could be a country, I found out, and those around you made foreigners by an unshared memory.
“I had an idea,” Meline was saying excitedly, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as usual. She was always
so energetic. As if she had no feelings to weigh her down. As if she didn’t care what had happened. “We may have missed the airplane parts because over the years they’ve been covered with leaves which have composted. They may be the hills we’ve walked on. They may be camouflaged under bushes and brush. If there’s bits of metal poking out though, light has a better chance of finding it than our naked eyes. We need dark and a flashlight to spot metal peeking out from beneath all that brush.”
“It’s the middle of the night. The whole idea was crazy to begin with anyway.”
“So far,” Meline pointed out, “all you’ve done since getting here is sit around and raise your eyebrows at people.”
This took me aback. I had been mentally raising my eyebrows at people, it was true, but I had no idea it had been detected. This horrified me. I thought I had appeared scrupulously polite and kind. Sort of like Grace Kelly. “We’ll probably get pneumonia, going out in the rain at night,” I said quickly, leaping up and putting on my clothes to change the subject.
“Probably,” said Meline cheerfully, handing me a flashlight.
MRS. MENDELBAUM
SUCH PEOPLE who come looking for work. The last says to me, “I’d rather dig ditches than work for the likes of you.” Is this something you should say to a person? A feier zol im trefen. So that was that. No more applicants. No butler. Then, a brocheh, out of nowhere comes one more. But such a man. Like a corpse. So tall and thin. Does he eat, I ask myself ? And such color. He has never seen the sun? Eyes so far back, looking out from the back of caves. Like he stands perhaps at the edge of the ocean and looks out over water at you. Oy, this one gives me the shivers. And no résumé! Who comes for a job with no résumé? All right, I had no résumé, but what did I know? And no hat, but this I overlook because at least he keeps his head like a man. The helicopter? Not a word. This one does not turn a hair. “Implacable,” says Meline as we watch from the window. He climbs down the ladder. “Maybe that should have been in the ad.” “Hush,” I say to the girls. He should think this is a comedy club?
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane Page 7