The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “What are we speaking about now—buying the island or decorating the house?” she asked imperturbably, lifting her teacup off the little side table and taking a sip.

  “Take … your … pick!” I said.

  “I dunno,” said Jocelyn, looking into the fire as if it were all the same to her, which I’m sure it was. She looked sad again. She always looked sad or absent or annoyed. But there was never, ever any spark. I wondered if there had been any before the accident. It was hard to like someone who was like a pile of wet logs that never caught fire. Had anyone ever liked her? Had her parents? Perhaps they looked on her as she grew up and wished they could like her. I imagined them locking their bedroom door at night and whispering to each other, “Do you like her yet?” “No, do you?” “No. Do you think we ever will?” “All our friends seem to like their children.” “At least nominally.” “You’re supposed to like your children.” “Are we beasts?” “I blame Jocelyn.” “She did turn out to be such a wet dishrag, didn’t she?” “Let’s not let on to anyone that we don’t like her.” “God no, then no one will take her off our hands.” “We’ll be stuck with her forever.” “Let’s pretend she’s got some likable qualities.” “And send her to college in Australia.”

  I found such thoughts comforting as I sat in the chair sniggering to myself.

  “Maybe he’s just goofy about the holidays,” suggested Jocelyn, taking another sip of tea languidly, ignoring my sniggers.

  “Well, Canadian Thanksgiving came, and you didn’t see any turkeys around or Pilgrim decorations.”

  “People don’t really decorate for Thanksgiving the way they do for Christmas.”

  “They hang Indian corn.”

  “Oh well. Indian corn.”

  “That’s not an argument. You can say, ‘Oh well, Indian corn,’ about anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It just sounds like it does.”

  “I mean people don’t get excited about Thanksgiving the way they do about Christmas. You don’t see year-round Thanksgiving stores like you do Christmas stores. People don’t start getting ready for Thanksgiving in July the way they do making things and shopping in July for Christmas. My mother’s guild made decorations all year. They had craft fairs in September. Christmas is a bigger holiday because it’s baby Jesus’ birthday.”

  When she said that, “baby Jesus’ birthday,” I was afraid that the gulf between us was too huge to bridge and I stared into the fire. Christmas was so full of family tradition, I didn’t understand people who wanted to make it all about the baby Jesus. Wasn’t your family just as important to you as the baby Jesus? I’m sure he wouldn’t have thanked you for it. The last time I looked, the baby Jesus had his own family and traditions, and I don’t think one of them was Christmas. My parents never went to church, so I don’t know if they believed in Jesus or not. It wasn’t a hot topic in our house, and I could tell this was going to be an eyebrow raiser for Jocelyn.

  The week before Christmas my mother would make little almond sprinkle cookies which we didn’t have the rest of the year and which my mother would, in the spirit of the season, refrain from eating all herself because these were Christmas cookies, and my father would insist on getting a live tree that we could plant in the forest again afterward and visit in the summer, although every summer when we returned to the forest to check on our tree it was always dead, and my father always walked away scratching his head, with my mother begging him to save the earth another way and instead have an artificial silver tree. But we always had a live one again in the end. The argument about this became a cherished tradition in itself. We hung felt stockings we had decorated together when I was in kindergarten, and my mother insisted on telling me stories from all the traditions, Jewish and African and Tibetan and Buddhist and Hindu, and I sat patiently waiting for the part about Santa Claus. Christmas was my holiday, and what was sacred about it was my family, and when Jocelyn said “baby Jesus’ birthday” like that should be the important part for good people, I wanted to throttle her. It was smug. As if she were part of some big club where all the members were privy to information the rest of us, crying in the wilderness, were not. As if anything were certain. Like her certainty in itself were virtuous. If there was one thing I thought she would have learned by now, it was that you cannot be certain. Baby Jesus had grown up and gotten himself killed. My parents had followed suit. So had Jocelyn’s. Christmas was gone. But I didn’t say anything. Instead I got up and went to bed. Over the stair railing as I went to my room I saw Humdinger watching Jocelyn from the kitchen doorway and, as I reached my door, pad silently over to her and offer her a mint.

  JOCELYN

  THE DAYS AND NIGHTS grew darker and wetter, but it didn’t deter Meline.

  “You’re crazy,” I said when Meline appeared, as she did—regular as clockwork—at my bedside at 2 a.m.

  “Come on, come on, you always say that. Get dressed,” said Meline impatiently. She was not at her best at 2 a.m. either, I noted, although I don’t think she ever would have admitted it.

  I sighed. There was no sense arguing. It was like arguing with a tornado. “My coat is still damp,” I said when we reached the mudroom. “And my boots are still wet on the inside. They never get a chance to dry out.”

  “What do you do, step in creeks?”

  “Your boots are wet, too,” I pointed out, but Meline shoved her feet in them, ignoring me. She got herself worked up into a state for the search at this hour and I half expected her to start bouncing unseeing, unfeeling, off trees.

  It was always a shock to leave the house at that time. The cold damp hit us as soon as we opened the door, and it was hard for me not to just turn around and go back to my warm bed.

  The woods were full of fog patches. Occasionally we would see the red gleam of animal eyes, deer, raccoons, squirrels. Every time the flashlight picked up red eyes, I shrieked. At this hour all I could imagine was bears and cougars and maybe even, secretly, werewolves. We stayed out until the darkness began to lighten imperceptibly, and then we gave up and went back in.

  “I’m telling you,” I said one night at 3 a.m. It wasn’t pouring for a change, but the mist clung to my hair in little beaded droplets, as uncomfortably wet as rain. “There’s no hope. I can’t keep this up. I’m mildewing.”

  “Nonsense, best thing for your skin. You’ll never age.”

  I thought about not aging and was filled with horror. I did not want to be this age forever. I couldn’t wait for time to carry me out of it. Away from it. Anything was better than this. But away to what? I couldn’t imagine. That’s when I felt like a deer in the headlights. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere.

  We entered the woods and I prepared myself for another long, fruitless trudge, but this time the flashlight picked up something red and shiny. At first, thinking it was an animal’s eyes, I turned to run out of the woods, but Meline stopped me, grabbing my arm. She pulled back the bush. Underneath it was a badly rusted aileron. “I think it’s still usable.” She squatted down, trying to pull twigs off it, while I held the flashlight steady. “It’s got a lot of nicks and holes, but we should be able to patch those. Let’s see if we can drag it back to the barn.”

  We grabbed an end together and between the two of us worked it out of the bushes. In the process, I cut my fingers and Meline banged it against her legs, ripping her pants in two places, but after that we were able to begin to pull it out of the woods and across the meadow.

  “This means that Uncle’s story was true,” spluttered Meline excitedly. There was a little line of drool down her chin. Was she foaming at the mouth, finally? I had half expected her to come to that eventually. “There must be lots more parts. We’re going to build a plane, Jocelyn.”

  “We won’t be able to drag a fuselage or a cockpit,” I said, huffing and puffing and trying to shift the metal to keep it from digging into the wounds on my hands. My mother had always told me that a lady was known by her hands. My mother’s hands were rough with work, but she poured gallons of Jerg
ens lotion on them every night and used an orange stick on her cuticles. “Or a whole wing. We can’t drag that.”

  “That’s why we need some kind of dolly. Remember I told you that at the beginning. When I first had the idea.” Meline was shaking with excitement, but I felt no different. I looked at the plane part and tried to imagine what she was feeling. It was a plane part, that’s all. We were building a plane. It didn’t change anything. “I said that if we ever found the parts, we’d need a way to wheel the big pieces in. I’m glad we found this first, aren’t you? Wouldn’t it be frustrating to have to leave it in the bushes?”

  “It’s only one part,” I said looking down at it, again trying to feel what it was that was getting Meline so animated, but I couldn’t.

  “Come on, the barn isn’t that far from the house,” said Meline in encouraging tones.

  “I hope no one sees us. Humdinger’s light is often on at night. He prowls.”

  “Well, no one’s light is on now. I can see the house from here and it’s dark.”

  Meline sat down for a second to rest. She was panting.

  “Let’s go,” I said, suddenly tired of the whole business. I didn’t care if we found any more parts. It was all so meaningless. “The sooner we get it into the barn, the sooner we can get to bed.”

  Meline heaved herself up and looked dizzy.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I just had a head rush, never mind,” she said.

  Then I realized it wasn’t drool on her chin. Her nose was running right down her face. She must be getting a cold.

  After we had deposited the aileron in the barn and stumbled back to the house, Meline threw her muddy clothes on the mudroom floor and, leaving them there, went up to bed without another word. I sighed and picked up my own and Meline’s clothes and hid them behind the freezer as we always did before going upstairs. I could hear Meline coughing the rest of the night.

  “I told her we’d get pneumonia,” I said to myself as I fell asleep. “Mummy would never have approved of any of this.” I dreamed of my mother again and it was always the same dream: my mother was coming out of the wreck of the train. Burnt up and bloodied bodies were everywhere and people crying and screaming, but my mother was always fine, unscathed and wearing her favorite sandy-colored light chiffon party dress, the one she had admired and wouldn’t buy because it was expensive and impractical. I told my father about it and we gave it to her for Christmas. My mother loved the color. My father said it was the exact color of my hair and when my mother spun around it looked like my hair blowing in a breeze. My mother laughed and said, Don’t be so fanciful, but it was always her favorite dress after that.

  Now in the dream my mother looked beautiful and calm and comforting, and she drifted toward me, smiling gently. Just before she got to me, I always woke up. But I didn’t wake up into consciousness, I woke up into another dream, only in this one my mother wasn’t all right, she was dead and buried, and then, oh horror, when I went to tell my father I saw he was buried, too, and I had no one to tell, I was alone with this horrible information and I saw his grave and always said the same thing, “At least in my dream I got to see my mother once more before it happens. Why can’t I see my father, too? Why?” And no matter what else happened in that second dream, this sat like a stone upon my heart, immovable, unchangeable. It was cruel, my subconscious. Why did it come to hurt me in the worst way night after night after night? Why did I dream such things? It pounded my heart into a flinty shield. I would feel no more. Not until night came again and the dream. And as soon as I saw my mother, my heart opened without a thought, and I was filled with joy and love for her, and then it happened again, just as it had in real life, and it would be as fresh and terrible as the first time, and I quivered with the shock.

  I didn’t want to go to sleep after that. But I was so tired during the day. Meline wore me out so with her energy and busyness. She pushed me to keep moving. She kept saying what else did I have to do? What else was I doing? How could I be tired, I never did anything. She didn’t see how hard I had to work just to find a livable place inside myself. Always wanting to sleep during the day and always wanting to stay awake at night and avoid the dream. There was nowhere for me to live comfortably anymore. And I didn’t know how to cope with any of this except by being polite. My mother said no matter what happened, a lady was always polite.

  In the morning Meline coughed all through her breakfast. We were in the habit of going into the kitchen ourselves and making our own breakfasts now that we went to bed and arose so late. Uncle Marten had instructed Mrs. Mendelbaum to put breakfast out, a good hot English buffet breakfast, probably like the kind he had read about in novels, but after weeks of putting these dishes out on the buffet at seven and at ten taking uneaten serving dishes of eggs and toast and bacon and kidneys and fruit off the buffet and throwing them away, Mrs. Mendelbaum had had enough. “Vaste! All I see is vaste! ME KEN BRECHEN!” she said. “Enough.” And she stopped putting breakfast out. We didn’t care. We didn’t want the big buffet breakfasts. I liked making my own toast and I think Meline did, too. That’s what I did at home, and anything homelike was comforting, no matter how small. The grandness of Uncle Marten’s house, the strangeness of the formal meals at the big table, had been just more newness that wore on the heart. I liked to have my toast alone in my room. Meline liked to sit in one of the cranberry-and-green wing chairs in front of the fire. Sometimes the cat came down and rubbed herself on my ankles while I was making my toast. Her warm purring quiet soft body was comforting.

  The morning after finding the aileron, Meline was sitting in the wing chair by the fire eating Cheerios. The cat was padding around her chair. Meline kept coughing and spewing Cheerios everywhere. She cleaned up after herself each time, but watching from the kitchen doorway, waiting for my bread to toast, I found it stomach-churning. Couldn’t she keep herself from spitting like that? “Disgusting,” I said as Meline coughed and sprayed milk onto the tiling in front of the fireplace and the cat licked it up.

  “She appears to have a cough,” said Humdinger, who had come noiselessly into the kitchen, startling me. “I’m making breakfast for Mrs. Mendelbaum and taking it to her. She has the flu,” he said in apologetic tones, I guess because he realized he’d startled me.

  “I think Meline must have it, too,” I said shyly. I had never spoken to Humdinger before. He had drifted about as a silent presence, not even staying long enough to be thanked when he gave me a mint.

  “She ought to go to bed,” said Humdinger, peering out the door with concern at Meline, who had started coughing again. “You don’t mess around with the flu.”

  “No, I suppose not,” I agreed. I remembered stories my mother told me of hundreds of people dying in flu epidemics.

  “I had an aunt who died of the flu,” said Humdinger, as if reading my mind. “Of course, she was very old and in a weakened state.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said automatically but thinking, Hadn’t we heard enough of death? Why did everyone have to keep mentioning death all the time?

  To be fair, maybe it only seemed like everyone was mentioning death all the time because it was always on my mind, but I was in no mood to be fair. I was still mad about my dream. It seemed the universe was watching me with a malevolent eye and making endless trouble. I was mad at the universe and its evil, wily ways. This was not how I was raised to live. If you lived a solid, uncomplaining, productive life the universe was supposed to leave you alone. You were supposed to have, at the very least, a long trouble-free life. I was only sixteen. What had I done to deserve this? Nothing, I was sure. It was against all rules.

  “Well,” said Humdinger, placing the plate of muffins and the soft-boiled eggs he had made for Mrs. Mendelbaum on a tray, “you ought to tell her to go to bed. Get herself a good book and a nice pot of tea, that’s my advice. And stay in bed until it passes.” And he glided from the room like the wind.

  “Right,” I thought skeptically
, because I knew what Meline’s plans for the day were always like and they did not involve tea.

  I took my toast and hot chocolate and was almost at my bedroom door when Meline called up to me, “Hurry and get dressed.”

  I stopped and looked down over the banister at Meline. “Mrs. Mendelbaum has the flu. Humdinger’s aunt died of the flu.”

  “Well, I certainly hope Mrs. Mendelbaum doesn’t die. I can’t cook, can you?”

  “No.”

  “Humdinger looks like he might.”

  “You can’t be as unfeeling as you pretend,” I said before remembering that unfeeling was exactly what I aspired to be.

  “There’s nothing unfeeling about it. I don’t even know Mrs. Mendelbaum. You’re the one who compared her to some dead aunt of Humdinger’s. I’m just facing facts. If she dies, someone else around here will have to cook, at least until we can hire a new cook. Anyhow, hurry up and eat.”

  I looked blankly at Meline. Was she callous or was she mean? Could she really talk about someone dying so casually? I didn’t think I would ever understand her. All she seemed to care about was building the plane. “I don’t think you should be going out today. It’s pouring rain. We didn’t get any sleep and you’re coughing.”

  “Who cares?”

  “If you’re going to ignore your health, then make sure you leave detailed instructions for me in case something happens to you, because I don’t know how to put planes together.” Let’s see who’s callous now, I thought, but she ignored this.

  “I’m telling you, easy-peasy once you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Really, most of the things that grownups do don’t take rocket scientists. If they did, most grownups wouldn’t be able to do them either. It’s just a matter of learning. But that’s the problem for people. That’s where they get stuck. They just assume they can’t do certain things. They say to themselves, I’m only sixteen, I will have to wait until the magic age of twenty-five before I will be able to build a plane. But, of course, that’s nonsense. Your brain doesn’t get any smarter in those nine years. You could build a plane at the age of nine if someone would just show you how. And if you just believed you could and tried it. But it’s just as well that people think like this, that sixteen-year-olds can’t build planes, because then no one will ever guess that that’s what we’re doing and they’ll leave us alone.”