by Dale Peck
She was afraid of nothing, not even of flying.
I have this dream before a flight where we buckle in and the plane moves down the runway. It takes off at thirty-five miles an hour, and then we’re airborne, skimming the tree tops. Still, we arrive in New York on time.
It is so pleasant.
One night I flew to Moscow this way.
She flew with me once. That time she flew with me she ate macadamia nuts while the wings bounced. She knows the wing tips can bend thirty feet up and thirty feet down without coming off. She believes it. She trusts the laws of aerodynamics. My mind stampedes. I can almost accept that a battleship floats when everybody knows steel sinks.
I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.
After a quake, the six o’clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher’s instructions.
“Bad earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.
But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb, or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other’s hard-to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers the way they learned in Seventeen. They pose.
A formation of low-riders pulls over to watch with a six-pack. They get vocal when the girls check their tan lines. When the beer is gone, so are they—flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
Above this aggressive health are the twin wrought-iron terraces, painted flamingo pink, of the Palm Royale. Someone dies there every time the sheets are changed. There’s an ambulance in the driveway, so the remaining residents line the balconies, rocking and not talking, one-upped.
The ocean they stare at is dangerous, and not just the undertow. You can almost see the slapping tails of sand sharks keeping cruising bodies alive.
If she looked, she could see this, some of it, from her window. She would be the first to say how little it takes to make a thing all wrong.
There was a second bed in the room when I got back to it!
For two beats I didn’t get it. Then it hit me like an open coffin.
She wants every minute, I thought. She wants my life.
“You missed Gussie,” she said.
Gussie is her parents’ three-hundred-pound narcoleptic maid. Her attacks often come at the ironing board. The pillowcases in that family are all bordered with scorch.
“It’s a hard trip for her,” I said. “How is she?”
“Well, she didn’t fall asleep, if that’s what you mean. Gussie’s great—you know what she said? She said, ‘Darlin’, stop this worriation. Just keep prayin’, down on your knees’—me, who can’t even get out of bed.”
She shrugged. “What am I missing?”
“It’s earthquake weather,” I told her.
“The best thing to do about earthquakes,” she said, “is not to live in California.”
“That’s useful,” I said. “You sound like Reverend Ike—‘The best thing to do for the poor is not to be one of them.’”
We’re crazy about Reverend Ike.
I noticed her face was bloated.
“You know,” she said, “I feel like hell. I’m about to stop having fun.”
“The ancients have a saying,” I said. “‘There are times when the wolves are silent; there are times when the moon howls.’”
“What’s that, Navaho?”
“Palm Royale lobby graffiti,” I said. “I bought a paper there. I’ll read you something.”
“Even though I care about nothing?”
I turned to the page with the trivia column. I said, “Did you know the more shrimp flamingo birds eat, the pinker their feathers get?” I said, “Did you know that Eskimos need refrigerators? Do you know why Eskimos need refrigerators? Did you know that Eskimos need refrigerators because how else would they keep their food from freezing?”
I turned to page three, to a UPI filler datelined Mexico City. I read her man robs bank with chicken, about a man who bought a barbecued chicken at a stand down the block from a bank. Passing the bank, he got the idea. He walked in and approached a teller. He pointed the brown paper bag at her and she handed over the day’s receipts. It was the smell of barbecue sauce that eventually led to his capture.
The story had made her hungry, she said—so I took the elevator down six floors to the cafeteria, and brought back all the ice cream she wanted. We lay side by side, adjustable beds cranked up for optimal TV-viewing, littering the sheets with Good Humor wrappers, picking toasted almonds out of the gauze. We were Lucy and Ethel, Mary and Rhoda in extremis. The blinds were closed to keep light off the screen.
We watched a movie starring men we used to think we wanted to sleep with. Hers was a tough cop out to stop mine, a vicious rapist who went after cocktail waitresses.
“This is a good movie,” she said when snipers felled them both.
I missed her already.
A Filipino nurse tiptoed in and gave her an injection. The nurse removed the pile of popsicle sticks from the nightstand—enough to splint a small animal.
The injection made us both sleepy. We slept.
I dreamed she was a decorator, come to furnish my house. She worked in secret, singing to herself. When she finished, she guided me proudly to the door. “How do you like it?” she asked, easing me inside.
Every beam and sill and shelf and knob was draped in gay bunting, with streamers of pastel crepe looped around bright mirrors.
“I have to go home,” I said when she woke up.
She thought I meant home to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.
I felt weak and small and failed.
Also exhilarated.
I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They’d serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.
Without a word, she yanked off her mask and threw it on the floor. She kicked at the blankets and moved to the door. She must have hated having to pause for breath and balance before slamming out of Isolation, and out of the second room, the one where you scrub and tie on the white masks.
A voice shouted her name in alarm, and people ran down the corridor. The Good Doctor was paged over the intercom. I opened the door and the nurses at the station stared hard, as if this flight had been my idea.
“Where is she?” I asked, and they nodded to the supply closet.
I looked in. Two nurses were kneeling beside her on the floor, talking to her in low voices. One held a mask over her nose and mouth, the other rubbed her back in slow circles. The nurses glanced up to see if I was the doctor—and when I wasn’t, they went back to what they were doing.
“There, there, honey,” they cooed.
On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried, I enrolled in a “Fear of Flying” class. “What is your worst fear?” the instructor asked, and I answered, “That I will finish this course and still be afraid.”
I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
What do I remember?
I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan’s mother invented Wite-Out, that twenty-three people must be in a room before there is a fifty-fifty chance two will have the same birthday. Who cares whether or not it�
��s true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.
I review those things that will figure in the retelling: a kiss through surgical gauze, the pale hand correcting the position of the wig. I noted these gestures as they happened, not in any retrospect—though I don’t know why looking back should show us more than looking at.
It is just possible I will say I stayed the night.
And who is there that can say that I did not?
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.
Spring
by Brad Gooch
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Brad and Bobby are sitting on the concrete-block edge of a foundation for a new house on Winola Avenue. So far only the basement has been dug out of what used to be an empty lot. The lot next door is still empty: grown-over grass and a big old chestnut tree with thick trunk, knotted branches, and floppy leaves, almost tropical except for their Northern dark green pigment, near black in this twilight. The sky is blue and its moon, a heavy hanging half, past full, is manila. The two lots together had been used for a whiffle ball field. Now the boys in the neighborhood have to play longways which makes them feel cramped.
Brad’s family’s house is right across the street. It is a double-block, and he looks over every so often, wondering if anyone is watching him. Brad is a little pudgy with a bland face, dark skin, and a crew cut but without the front wave that sticks up on most crew cuts. He told the barber to trim it down. The front wave is an aggressive swish that he feels is reserved for others. He is twelve or thirteen. Dressed in a striped T-shirt (striped crossways), dark corduroys with patches sewn on the knees, low white tennis shoes, and colored socks. Ankle-high PF-Flyers or Keds are another fashion which he feels excluded from. He is dangling his legs, tapping the wall erratically with the backs of his heels, humming.
Bobby’s family is a little farther up the street. Their house is a double-block also, but divided into a top and bottom half rather than a left and a right half like Brad’s. Bobby’s family lives in the bottom half. His father works in a brewery; his mother makes Italian spaghetti as a housewife and a caterer. She is pretty fat, wears lots of makeup, is friendly, and once gave Brad the frames from her old imitation-pearl eyeglasses which Brad had admired and tried on when he came over for dinner.
Bobby is sitting sideways, facing Brad. He has his knees hunched up in front of him. Has long straight brown hair, a thin animal face, and a bony body. Has on a sleeveless T-shirt and, over that, a cotton shirt with repeating Revolutionary War drum designs, black pants that show the scuffs from the concrete, brown tie shoes and socks. He keeps stretching his neck and twitching around his jaw.
Spring is just beginning in the neighborhood. The air smells sweet. A breeze rustles Bobby’s shirt. Brad stares into patches of thick fruit trees in the yard next door. Some birds are flying around, making their last noises before it gets too dark. Both boys are dirty, especially their hands and faces.
Bobby: What do you want to do?
Brad: I don’t know. What do you want to do?
Bobby makes a face. They have this exchange a few times a day, sometimes for five or ten minutes at a stretch.
Bobby: I said last time. It’s up to you.
Brad: What time is it?
The street is still active. Cars go by every few minutes, some with headlights, some without. They either pass quickly or (fathers coming home from work) slow down to turn into one driveway or another. Brad checks to see if one of the cars belongs to his father who works as an accountant. His mother stays pretty much at home. He just finished supper with her a half-hour ago. It was iced tea, potato salad, a brown cooked meat, creamed corn, swirled ice cream for dessert.
Brad: I want to tell dreams.
Bobby: No. Not now.
Brad: Well, tell me what you said in confession on Saturday.
Bobby: I can’t.
Brad: Why not?
Bobby: It’s against my religion.
Brad: Who else was there? Was Terry there?
Bobby: Maybe.
Just then a convertible goes by. The guy driving is alone in the front seat. In the back, Duane, a tall blond early drug-user, is sitting with two teenage girls on either side, giggling and kissing him. The car horn blares steadily, a low almost mournful sound, from down at the Pierce Street corner.
Brad: He went to the pool last summer.
Bobby: Did you see him?
Brad: No, but he spit on me once.
Bobby: (dubious) Where?
Brad: I was going to Vacation Bible School. In the summer. He was up on a second-floor porch and he spit on me all the way across the street.
Bobby: Did it hit?
Brad: Right on my hand.
Bobby: What did you do?
Brad: Wiped it off with my handkerchief. Then I threw the handkerchief away and told my mother I lost it.
Bobby: I wouldn’t let anyone spit on me.
Brad: Well, it just got me a little. Just on this side of this finger.
Bobby takes out a tube of Brylcreem from his back pocket, all rolled up like a toothpaste tube. He squeezes a dab on his palm and rubs it into his long brown hair, slicking it back. Light from the moon shows up the wet parts.
Bobby: (tossing the tube to Brad) Here.
Brad knows just what to do. Puts a dab right on his head, rubs the grease around his scalp freely. Tosses the tube back.
Bobby: We could go for a walk.
Brad: Where?
Bobby: Schoolyard.
Brad: No.
Bobby: We could go in Patsy’s yard. They’re not home.
Brad: (standing up) You want to cut through here?
Bobby and Brad go over to a low green fence by the yard next door. They jump over. Chained dog barking from the porch. They run past and jump the other fence to Patsy’s yard.
Now they’re in a more secret part of the neighborhood. There are yards facing them from the houses behind and yards on either side. The big brown two-story house where Patsy lives with her parents and sister is dark.
Brad: It stinks here.
Bobby: Does not.
Patsy is a good friend of Bobby’s, less so of Brad’s, although the three of them hang out together, mostly swinging. Patsy has acne, a well-developed body for her age, and is already starting to go out with football players who have driver’s licenses. Brad’s mother makes derogatory comments about Patsy’s family, something about her father having been in jail. Bobby’s mother and Patsy’s mother are good friends; they go to Mass together on Sunday mornings. Brad’s family is Protestant and they never go to church, but he goes sometimes with his friends who go to a Methodist church.
Brad and Bobby head directly for the swings. Brad lays down on the sliding board backwards, his head down toward the bottom, every so often starting to let go, as if he is sliding down, then catching himself on the handles. Bobby swings on a swing, legs way out in front of him.
Brad: So did you ever see Patsy with her clothes off?
Bobby: Once.
Brad: You’re cousins or something anyway, aren’t you?
Bobby: No. She was just over playing.
Brad: Playing what?
Bobby: Chinese checkers.
Brad: And what happened?
Bobby: Well, we were looking at the stacks of my mother’s Playboys.
Brad: Your mot
her’s?
Bobby: Or my father’s.
Brad: Yeah?
Bobby: So she said she’d show me and she took off her clothes.
Brad: What did she look like?
Bobby: Great.
Brad: How would you know?
Bobby: What do you mean, how would I know, I saw her.
Brad: Maybe if she put a bag over her face.
Bobby: Yeah, her face is pretty gross. But her body is beautiful. She has really big pointy breasts. And she has some hair you-know-where.
Brad: She just took them off? And stood there?
Bobby: She just stood there. And turned around. Then my parents were coming. The car drove up. And she went in and got dressed fast.
Brad: Remember that time your mother caught us?
Bobby: I don’t think she saw anything.
Brad: Yes she did. I’m sure.
Bobby starts swinging so fast and so high now that he can’t continue the conversation. Brad climbs back down the ladder from the sliding board. Goes for a walk in the backyard. He smells some bushes. Squats over a line of yellow flowers.
Brad: (shouting) Do all flowers open in the day and shut at night?
No answer.
Brad goes over to a green hose and turns on the spigot. He sits on the back steps and sprays water in different directions. A woman walks out of the house next door and comes over to the fence. She is all dressed up in a red tissue-papery dress that tutus out, going down only to her knees. She is carrying a box-shaped purse made out of glass.
Mrs. Evans: Do you have permission to do that?
Brad: Sort of.
Her husband comes out dressed in a light blue suit with a white carnation in the lapel. He stands tall and silent next to her. Bobby slows down his swinging and watches the confrontation, sitting balanced on the edge of his swing.
Mrs. Evans: How sort of?
Brad: We’re all in a club. Of which Patsy is the treasurer. Bob over there is president. And I’m secretary. We share all property in common. If I was away, Pat could come sleep in my bed. That’s how it works. Plus I’m doing her, them, a favor by watering their lawn.