“You’ve run out!” I barked, pulling myself up. I had been slumped on my pillows, balancing a teacup on my stomach.
“You are better now and what do I have left, nothing. Shmek tabik. I know, I know how it is for you, as it is for me. Es vet gornit helfen. Nothing will help. The others do not understand. You and I know, it is over, our little time, our little pyesseh. And I have no energy to start new. And I think you, too, have no such energy. But ich hob es in drerd, enough, give me the medicine.”
“I can’t,” I said in alarm. What did she mean, she had run out? I thought she had bottles of it.
“You won’t, you mean, but it is enough for you. It is my cough syrup. I have lent it to you for just the short time. To get over the hump.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, falling back on the pillows wearily. Now what would we do? “I ran out, too. Last night. I took my last dose.”
“Show me,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum in steely tones, and I took the empty bottle from where I kept it under my bed and handed it to Mrs. Mendelbaum. There was nothing but the smeared remnants on the inside of the bottle. Mrs. Mendelbaum took my water pitcher and slowly dribbled some water into the bottle, shook it up until a filmy gray liquid evolved from the water and the few drops of tarry medicine clinging to the sides of the bottle, and quickly drank it.
“Now it is finished,” Mrs. Mendelbaum said and left the room.
I felt strange all afternoon. I was doing nothing these days in the afternoon but waiting until it was time for the cough medicine. I hadn’t even realized that this was what I was doing, that it lent a whole rosy glow to the afternoons, the anticipation. The mornings were getting over the haze I awoke with from the medicine, the afternoons were the happy anticipation of the medicine. The evenings were bliss and then sleep. Sleep like no other. I had found a way to live. It was impossible that this was taken from me. I was furious and irritated and in a panic. And it was worse now that I felt better. When I was feverish I hardly needed the medicine because I could fall into deep sick sleeps and lie in semicomatose states when awake by myself. But now I was conscious and had energy and I didn’t want it. I wanted the haziness. I wanted the sleep. I wanted the blissful oblivion.
I guessed Mrs. Mendelbaum was feeling the same way because I heard shouting from her room. Humdinger had brought Mrs. Mendelbaum her supper tray and Mrs. Mendelbaum was screaming, “Take it away! Can you nothing well do? This by you is food? Go, go and leave a poor old lady to sleep. Maybe I will drop dead in my sleep! Or better, maybe you will!” I knew how she felt. Others were unbearable. Their noise. I had gone out in the hall to listen and Humdinger came out of Mrs. Mendelbaum’s room before I had a chance to scuttle back into mine. For a second he eyed me there and then he looked at Mrs. Mendelbaum’s door and a thoughtful look came over his face. I slipped back into my room and closed the door, breathing hard. I mustn’t panic. And I mustn’t yell like Mrs. Mendelbaum. If I yelled like Mrs. Mendelbaum everyone would know. I mustn’t let on that being without the medicine made any difference to me at all. On the other hand, what did I care what they thought, any of them? What did I care about anything?
MELINE
WHEN I WENT OUT THAT NIGHT I was furious with Jocelyn. Malingering. I had heard my father use this term about airplane pilots who got drunk and called in sick and then sometimes stayed sick for a few days. I took my heavy flashlight and headed off into unknown parts of the island. There were still bits and pieces of the island not covered. Unless you walked up and down in straight lines over every inch, there were lots of copses and hills and tiny clearings you would miss.
When I had gone out the day before, angry with Jocelyn for not seeming to care anymore about the only important thing we had to do on the island, build the flying machine, I had stormed off across the fields and realized that there was a long peninsula yet unexplored. I headed there tonight. Everything looked different at night and somehow we had circled around the same parts of the island over and over, leaving this peninsula unexplored. I marched toward it, full of angry energy, hoping to find an airplane part that we particularly needed, that would fill her with envy for the moment of discovery. Then with her appetite yet again whetted for our project, I would torture her with indecision: Should I or should I not allow her back in? Had she displayed the proper attitude in all circumstances? I trudged with great stomping feet across the meadow with this on my mind, and I probably would have headed in the direction of the peninsula if it hadn’t been for sudden thoughts of the bull. I stepped in something nasty, and for a moment when it occurred to me that it was some kind of animal droppings, I gasped and thought of Humdinger’s bull.
“Oh, gross, Aileron!” I said because he had been running around the meadow and was now standing behind me sniffing my shoes. I flashed the light down. Most likely it was from deer, but what if it wasn’t? My heart at that second began to beat rapidly. Suppose Humdinger was right, after all. I grabbed Aileron under my arm like a football and started to run.
I didn’t know where to go because I couldn’t concentrate on holding the flashlight upright and Aileron under my arm and run and panic at the same time. Something had to go. It was enough to remember to hang on to the flashlight, and then it occurred to me that this was making things awfully easy for the bull, so I turned it off and ran in the dark for a while and then, when I didn’t hear the bull in pursuit, I tiptoed in the dark for a while, worried that I might actually be moving toward the bull, except that I heard nothing. Not a whisper of bull breath or the sound of hooves thundering across a meadow. Not a sound. So I tiptoed noiselessly on. Aileron cooperated by making no sounds either, which surprised me, you would expect him to protest being suddenly picked up and carried away by someone who up until then had shown him no attention or affection, but apparently he wasn’t a grudge-holding type of puppy. Either that or he was just drop-dead stupid. We walked a long way in the dark until I felt confident enough to turn on the flashlight, half expecting to see the bull walking noiselessly behind me. But instead what I saw made me drop the puppy in fright.
It was a gravestone. Not just one but an entire circle of them and Aileron and I had somehow managed to walk between them, like doing a maze in the dark, and we were now standing surrounded by them, in the middle of what looked to be a small private cemetery. Had I kept going in the dark without turning on the flashlight at that point I would never have known they were there. In the very middle of this circle of graves was a pile of broken planes, wings and bodies and cockpits and ailerons, fuselages, elevators, stabilizers, it was all there. The remnants of all the planes that had crashed, everything I would need to build a flying machine, with one plane almost intact in the center. If I moved debris, I could just attach the necessary parts to that one. I read the names on the stones, Second Lieutenant John C. Hooker, Second Lieutenant William Macdonald, Second Lieutenant Daniel Levesque. Someone had buried the Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane, carefully marking their graves, crudely scratching their names in stones, gathering their broken machines. I wouldn’t have to drag things to the barn any longer. I could put it together right here.
JOCELYN
I WAS WELL ENOUGH to take a bath for the first time in a while. The water running through my filthy hair felt like heaven, but halfway through rinsing it I began to shake uncontrollably. I’m not ready yet, I thought, and quickly rinsed off, wrapped myself in a towel, and sat on the toilet shivering for a moment before I had the strength to dry off and get back into my nightgown. I padded softly down the hall. It was easy to walk quietly now that I had lost so much weight, I could feel that there was hardly anything between my bones and the air. When I got to my room I stood silently for a moment staring at Mrs. Mendelbaum, who had her back to me and didn’t even know I was there until she happened to turn around.
“What are you doing in my room?” I whispered, so surprised to find her there that my voice couldn’t be called up from the depths of my throat. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror looking like a wr
aith with my long hair wet and tangled, shivering on the carpet by my bed.
“Where is it? I must have,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, making a fist and advancing threateningly toward me.
“Have what? What do you mean?” I asked, backing toward the door.
“You know. The medicine. The medicine I gift you from the goodness of my heart and which you stole and hid.”
“I showed you the empty bottle. I finished it two nights ago,” I said, alarmed.
“No, you could not have gone through it so fast. You are too thin. So much would have killed you.”
“I did, Mrs. Mendelbaum. It wasn’t so much. It was only a half bottle when you gave it to me.”
“Gif it back.”
“I don’t have it. Really. But listen, Mrs. Mendelbaum, we have to get more.”
“We don’t have to do anything. It is my medicine. It is mine. Sophie got it for me.”
“Where did Sophie find it?” I asked, thinking there was no sense dealing with Mrs. Mendelbaum anymore about this. She was clearly crazy. Any medicine that came to the island she would claim as her own. But I could get some if only Mrs. Mendelbaum would tell me where.
“Sophie makes. All the women in her shtetl make it so.”
“Well, we have to get more, that’s all.”
“From Sophie?”
“Yes, of course. I’m sure that Uncle can arrange to have it delivered like everything else.”
“He will drop it like everything else, that meshugener pilot, he will break it. Er zol vaksen vi a tsibeleh, mit dem kop in drerd.”
“Yes, that’s true,” I agreed. Sam would be sure to break the bottles. Nothing glass survived Sam’s deliveries. “Let me think. Let me think. I know. Sophie must bring it herself. Would she? Would she come on a helicopter and let herself be dropped from a ladder?”
“No, not Sophie never. She does not like planes. But she would come by boat. We must a boat find for her.”
“But there aren’t any boats, Mrs. Mendelbaum, the ferries don’t stop here,” I said, climbing into bed now that the danger of an attack from Mrs. Mendelbaum seemed over. I was so tired it felt as if my bones must pulverize right there in the sheets, leaving nothing but a skin bag full of powdered bone.
“Sophie must find one. She must find one and deliver us the medicine. Many bottles.”
“Oh yes,” I echoed weakly. Many bottles. “Mrs. Mendelbaum, if she knows how to make it, she can make it on the island. She can teach us to make it.” This was the obvious way. If we learned to make the medicine ourselves we didn’t need Sophie anymore. We didn’t need anyone.
“I will speak to your uncle and you must speak to him, too. To make him find for Sophie a boat.”
“How am I going to ask for a boat for your friend? Why would I ask him this instead of you? It will sound suspicious.” I did not want Uncle to suspect a link between me and Mrs. Mendelbaum. I did not want him to find out about the cough medicine.
“That is true. That is true. Yes, you are a bright girl. Well, you must speak on my behalf. That it is your observation that I an old sick woman am, in need of a friend to care for me and keep me company.”
“Yes, but would he agree to more people? He doesn’t seem to like people.”
“Ech, he will agree to anything, that one, if you promise to leave him alone.”
“Yes, I suppose he might. So I say you need Sophie. But will she come?”
“She will come,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, falling weakly into a chair as if her legs had suddenly collapsed beneath her. “I can always make Sophie do what I ask. She has no strength. Now go. Find your uncle and beg him to find a boat to bring Sophie.”
“I will, after I sleep. I’m so tired,” I said. But after Mrs. Mendelbaum left I was not able to sleep. I hadn’t been able to sleep properly since I ran out of medicine, and it was beginning to frighten me. Instead I lay exhausted with my eyes closed, hopelessly counting sheep and saying the alphabet and doing everything I knew to lull myself into oblivion, but it wouldn’t come. When midnight came I began to worry that I had permanently lost my ability to sleep without cough medicine. Later, I heard Meline come in and come upstairs. I opened my door a crack. I could not stand lying alone in the dark like this anymore.
MELINE
“GOOD, YOU’RE AWAKE,” I said when I saw Jocelyn poke her head out the door. “I told you you were getting better. You won’t believe what I found.”
“An airplane part,” said Jocelyn, shivering.
“Are you really that cold?” I asked. I was, after all, soaking wet but I wasn’t shivering. Of course, Jocelyn’s bones were sticking out now. She had been thin when she came to the island. Now she was skeletal. She looked as if every morsel of food would be visible heading down the digestive tract. “I’m not cold. Why are you always so cold? You’d better start to eat more.”
“I can’t eat more. The thought of it makes me sick. And I can’t sleep,” said Jocelyn.
“Well, of course not. You’ve done nothing but sleep for days on end. You’re slept out. Bound to happen sooner or later. Good. Listen, I’m making tremendous progress now with the plane.” I was about to tell her how I had taken the tools out of the barn and moved the operation to the cemetery, which I was pretty sure Humdinger hadn’t discovered yet. There was everything I needed there for a serviceable flying machine and I was going to be finished with it much earlier than expected. This was pretty exciting, but for some reason all Jocelyn wanted to talk about was Mrs. Mendelbaum and her friend Sophie. I had heard this about invalids: that they become very self-absorbed and blow up the minutiae of life way out of proportion, so I tried to listen patiently even though, clearly, she was bonkers.
“And, Meline, listen, this is very important. Very important; Mrs. Mendelbaum wants her friend, Sophie, to come here. She wants Sophie to care for her. She says she can get Sophie to do anything. I am supposed to ask Uncle to arrange a boat to bring her here because Sophie won’t take planes. But I’m so tired, Meline, so could you ask Uncle?”
“I don’t know. If Sophie comes, then there’s less for Humdinger to do. We want to keep Humdinger occupied.”
“I’ll keep him plenty occupied. I promise. I’m still real sick.”
“Oh, you are not.”
“I am. I tried to take a bath and I couldn’t. I haven’t the strength. Humdinger can take care of me instead of Mrs. Mendelbaum. I’ll ask him for tea trays constantly.”
“What is this weird friendship you have formed with Mrs. Mendelbaum that suddenly her friend coming is so important to you? The two of you are thick as thieves. I’ll be surprised if she isn’t adopting you.” I sat on Jocelyn’s bed and thought morosely about this. I could see it. Mrs. Mendelbaum adopting Jocelyn and taking her off the island. The two of them living happily ever after in some light bright modern apartment in Vancouver, engaged in real life, going to rock concerts, out to dinner, Jocelyn going to college on Mrs. Mendelbaum’s savings. Sitting down to eat brown meat and savory puddings together. The two of them going to the theater, shopping, restaurants, Sunday walks on the waterfront. Happy as clams. It was because she just lay around looking pathetic, not doing anything. I had done nothing but work. I had kept busy. So, of course, Mrs. Mendelbaum liked Jocelyn better. Of course, she felt sorry for Jocelyn. Jocelyn reeked pathos. Jocelyn said nothing and closed her eyes. It felt as if any tenuous connection we had built on a joint project was swiftly slipping away. I hadn’t wanted Jocelyn as an ally especially, but it was humiliating to lose her to Mrs. Mendelbaum.
“Sure,” I said defeatedly. “I’ll ask Uncle.” If nothing else, it would show her that if she picked Mrs. Mendelbaum over me she was losing someone who can be unselfish and magnanimous even against her own best interests. That should make her think twice because I honestly didn’t think Mrs. Mendelbaum had exhibited these qualities. And I needed Jocelyn back. I could work pretty well alone with the almost intact plane I had found, but I might still need her for lifting, holding, and steadying. I d
idn’t want to burn bridges completely with her yet.
The next day I went upstairs to see Uncle Marten. I knocked loudly several times and finally went in. He was hunched over his desk, his eyes going back and forth from the computer screen to something he was scratching away at on a piece of paper.
“Excuse me!” I said and then again more loudly, “EXCUSE ME!”
He turned around distractedly and it took him a moment to get me in focus. Whatever he’d been working on was clearly still running through his head and he was reluctant to leave it.
“Can I interrupt?” I asked.
“You already have,” he said irritably. “As you see, you already have.” Then he sat there looking at me with his lips pursed and his brows furrowed, not saying anything, waiting for me to go on.
“Well, the thing is that Mrs. Mendelbaum is sick, as you know, and Jocelyn is, too, but Mrs. Mendelbaum would like her friend Sophie to come and care for her.”
“Care for her what?”
“To take care of her.”
“Why? Isn’t that what that Humdinger is doing or supposed to be doing? Didn’t I hire him for that?”
“No. You hired him to be the butler. Now he’s doing his job and Mrs. Mendelbaum’s and caring for Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum, and I guess Mrs. Mendelbaum just wanted a friend here. You know, in case she got worse. She has no family left. Sophie is her only friend.”
“Well, just how sick is she?” asked Uncle Marten. “Is she in danger of expiring soon?”
“Well, not soon,” I said, stalling. I didn’t want to leave any false impressions that would worry him. “More like soonish. Soonish rather than laterish because she is, after all, older. I mean much older.”
“Is she really so very old?”
“Don’t you remember Jocelyn said so?”
“Do you think she dyes her hair?”
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane Page 17