by Carole Maso
“How’s my makeup?” she asked.
I wiped layers of color from her face. I felt the giant clock’s sharp arm cutting into my back like a blade.
“I’ll call you on Sunday,” I said. There was so much snow—it pressed down on us. I turned to leave.
“I have loved you my whole life,” she said. “Even when I was a little girl even then.”
When I turned back to look at her, she had already taken the big silver bracelet from her purse. She picked up one suitcase. It was so heavy she tipped over to one side, her leg in the air. She waved good-bye.
All those times, sitting on her bed, buried under clothes, the suitcases overflowing, I found it easy to imagine that she would not come back again, but I did not think of it that day when we parted in Grand Central Station, she on her way home to Connecticut and I back to Poughkeepsie.
Those days of packing always ended with Father coming in to close the suitcases that neither she nor I could manage, they were so full. He would then lower them to the floor. To me at this point she seemed already to be gone, though she’d be chatting away, knowing little work could be accomplished on a traveling day. If I could have changed shape, left my human life for the life of clothing, been fabric against fabric in my mother’s suitcase, I would have—even to have been something frivolous, bought on a whim and never once worn.
My mother, now in a fitted dress, now in a billowy one, now in a hat, now in a veil, a scarf, a bit of plaid, my mother now in felt, now in lace, now in cashmere, smiles. My mother’s shoe, one year a pump, one year flat, one year alligator, one year suede, pivots. She takes my hand in hers, one year polished, one year not, one year gloved, and we go down the stairs, she first, me following. This is how I remember her best: an extravagant, exotic figure, descending stairs or getting into the car, but always saying good-bye.
I borrowed from this scene, not on purpose, for what was the recurrent dream of my childhood. For years, nearly once a week I saw this in sleep: The room is white. My mother walks to the closet and drags the suitcase out—I recognize its smell immediately; it is like the smell of the interior of a new car. I feel as if it might suffocate me. “Mother,” I say, but before completing the sentence she tells me to just relax. Breathe deeply. It’s OK. She is so comforting at this moment, so maternal, that I can’t believe this isn’t her daily role. She looks at me, her head resting on her hand. “Shh, shh. Breathe deeply. Everything will be all right.” I nod. All afternoon as she’s been packing she’s been uncertain, hesitant, sorrowful, but now, patting my head, comforting me, she is stronger than anyone I have ever seen. She moves with new confidence to one corner of the room. Her face has an exquisite pallor. Her chin is raised, her eyes are focused. From the corner of the room she takes a large heavy piece of white cloth and like an expert folds it into a triangle and, smiling, she gives it to me. It calms me down and I can breathe again. From the top of the stairs she passes the suitcase to my father. This is how I know the dream is nearly over. At the end of the staircase there is always fog. I hug the triangle to me. Through the fog I wait for the sound of the door closing. I can see the back of her head perfectly, even through thick fog. I listen for the engine. The lights go on. She turns to wave.
All night Fletcher had been awake or half awake in anticipation of his first trip to the airport. Earlier in the day he had cut airplanes from newspapers and magazines and tacked them first to his bulletin board, then somehow to his ceiling. When I left him at bedtime, he was circling his room, a truck in one hand, a giraffe in the other, learning to fly. In the morning Grandpa and I found him asleep in his chair. He had made a cape out of a light-blue blanket which was wound around his shoulders and knotted at his neck. He was curled up in it, that sweet flyer, his thumb in his mouth.
My grandfather knew what Fletcher was dreaming. He had dreamt the same things many times before his own first trip—a swirl of clouds, the sound of engines, a lifting in the chest.
My grandfather rarely missed a chance to pick up my mother at the airport. He seemed willing to drive any distance and was always sure to go well in advance so as to have time to take in all the sights. He had not at that time begun to mistake barn swallows or wasps for airplanes.
“My God, that pilot must be crazy flying so near the house,” he would shout in his last years.
“Dad,” my father would say gently, “that’s only a bird.”
He would flush then, put on his glasses, joke about being so old, then look again. “Well now, so it is,” he’d say with a bewildered look. He was shaken by his mistake, for he knew, of course, that it was much more than a simple failure of the eyes. “Well, how do you like that?” he’d chuckle, looking into our faces for any sign of alarm.
“It’s OK,” Fletcher would whisper to him, “really, it’s OK.”
Walking in the fields with me that final spring he would often say when a wasp flew by his ear, “just listen to that engine, Vanessa. It’s the modern age, all right! There’s no turning back now.”
I never corrected my grandfather. It seemed to me his hearing grew more and more acute as he grew older—sharper, more complex. In a wasp’s hum he could hear the promise of the twentieth century.
“Are we there yet?” Fletcher said, opening his eyes suddenly, looking up to where the paper DC 10’s and 727’s flew.
“Not yet,” my grandfather whispered, “but get up and get dressed. It’s almost time to go.”
Grandpa, an early riser, had already had his breakfast of melon and cereal and was dressed and all ready by 8:00 A.M. He wore a starched white shirt and extra cologne on the days he went to meet my mother at the airport, like some secret lover.
That day, Fletcher’s first day, they left hours before my mother’s plane was due, so as to have plenty of time at JFK. In the car, cinched in by a seat belt, Fletcher dozed, shifting in his seat, his arms now and then straightening at his sides like wings. “Zhummm,” he murmured.
“Come in, copilot Turin,” my grandfather would say, and my brother would relax his wings, open his eyes, and let the blue sky fill them. Afraid that he might have missed something, he looked from the sky to my grandfather worriedly.
“Relax,” my grandfather said reassuringly. “When we get near, the sky will be thick with planes.”
For another one of his unexplained reasons, my father did not like airports. If he believed in photographs, which he did not, we might have seen a picture of someone during wartime, waving and trying to smile from the cockpit of a bomber. A close relative who had plummeted to a fiery death? A good friend perhaps? We might have nodded at last, understanding why our father did not like planes and why, though he could not wait to see my mother, he avoided picking her up at the airport whenever possible. But there was no such simple clue. He refused to go; he never explained why.
So it had been decided: Grandpa who had made the trip from Pennsylvania the night before would go to the airport with Fletcher to pick up Mom, and Dad and I would make the welcome-home dinner. My father loved to cook. I could not, at age five, cook at all, but knew I was some special help to my father, who never liked to be alone on a day my mother was flying.
“Well, Vanessa, what shall we make?” he’d ask, early in the morning.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I’d say and automatically get the chair to stand on to reach the countless cookbooks he had arranged in some mysterious order on the shelf, while he dragged in piles of Gourmet magazines that we studied until we could decide on a menu.
I loved to watch my father cook. He was so animated on those days, so busy in the kitchen: measuring, testing, timing, my father the scientist flourishing among the food; methodical, exacting, I thought—though, occasionally, in the middle of whisking the beurre blanc or the béarnaise sauce, he would stop quite suddenly, against all rules of whisking, to squeeze my hand tightly and give me a kiss, as if he sensed air turbulence, landing gear that would not lower, a flock of birds flying towards the engine. We made intricate dinners the days
of my mother’s homecomings with five and six courses and desserts we set on fire. It kept Father’s mind occupied. It kept his thoughts off flying. But I never worried about Mother when she was flying. I was not afraid of the air; I thought, like my father’s arms, it could hold anything.
“Where are we?” Fletcher gasped, opening his eyes, sitting straight up in his seat.
“We’re approaching JFK, my friend. We made good time, clear visibility, we’ll be able to watch lots of planes before your mother’s lands. You can hear them already,” my grandfather said quietly.
“Are the planes bigger than houses?” Fletcher asked.
“Much,” my grandfather said.
“Do they have lots of windows?”
My grandfather nodded.
“I bet you can see inside the clouds,” Fletcher murmured.
My grandfather patted Fletcher’s dovv nv head.
“I’d like to be a pilot, Grandpa,” he said. He started up his motor as my grandfather pulled the large soundless Oldsmobile into the parking lot.
“Sure, Fletcher,” my grandfather said, taking his tiny hand, “you can be a pilot if you want.”
The airport whirled around them. Everything seemed to be moving: ticket lines, conveyor belts, escalators, clouds. Fletcher, dizzy with excitement even before seeing one plane, dashed around madly, taking off and landing, taking off and landing until he collapsed in a plastic airport chair in a section where people were waiting to board.
I imagine the travelers as Fletcher saw them: adventurers, embarking on unknown voyages in these fantastic machines; all faith, all wonder. Fletcher must have studied them closely, the lucky children who got to go with their parents, the old people en route to warmer climates, those from other countries, the lost, the disoriented, those who had begun their trip at one time and ended up twelve hours later at the same time, somewhere across the world.
My grandfather and brother stepped onto the motorstairs and were taken to a large observatory window. Over the intercom announcements were being made, “Eastern flight 107 to Miami departing from gate 19.” “National flight 53 arriving at gate 12.” “Aer Lingus,” my grandfather read off a flight bag which raced by. Al Italia, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Pan Am—the various stripes and colors of the airlines blurred together. The announcements continued. Propellers whirred.
My grandfather and brother were not part of the group that hurried. They floated around the airport in slow motion, it seemed, and watched stewardesses fly by, ticket agents, anxious travelers.
That day my mother’s plane, Air France flight 446 from Paris, was delayed eight hours. Luckily, my father, always the one to imagine the worst, was not there. My grandfather and his small student of flight did not mind the wait at all. All day, then evening, then through the starry night, they sat in front of the large airport window pointing at the sky, getting up now and then to have snacks in the snack bar, then returning to watch the sleek bodies of planes, noting the particular angles of arrival and departure.
“There’s Mom!” Fletcher said, suddenly pointing to a gigantic silver and blue plane, all lights, that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“Yes, that’s her, all right!” my grandfather shouted. Their faces glowed like the runway’s guiding lights. They possessed the exceptional beauty of those who wait purely, out of love, outside the body, ready to meet the other some where halfway.
My grandfather thought, as he watched my mother’s plane make its descent, that it was wonderful to love like this. His son in the kitchen, moving towards my mother also as he peeled the ends of the asparagus, had the same thought and for one moment in time father and son were united through love and it made each comprehensible to the other.
Inside, my mother collected the miniature jellies, tiny liquor bottles, air sickness bags, and numerous pamphlets for Fletcher. Fletcher took my grandfather’s hand. “She’s coming!” he gasped. The wheels came down. They took a deep breath and watched her land.
A most unlikely line will come into my head when the cockroaches gather force around the toaster or a new hairline crack appears in the plaster of my tiny, crumbling New York apartment. This is when I need Fletcher most: when an anonymous sigh, as loud as if it were my own, floats in on the breeze through an open window or a car screeches to a sudden stop, when I must face the dark water at the bottom of the kettle. Then the first sentence of a speech my brother gave at a rally here in New York returns to me. “It is no secret,” he says, his voice like a trumpet, “that, with every breath, we are taking toxins into our bodies; it is no secret,” he says, “that we and everything we love will die from it if we don’t do something now.”
My brother still believed in change then. The quality of his voice, the conviction of his meter, his simple faith prod me on when I am in trouble. Fletcher always believed that we might live in a different way and, judging from his voice as he spoke in the afternoon light to a crowd of thousands that had gathered in New York’s Central Park for Earth Day, I think the dream must have seemed attainable to him, still within his reach. His voice does not falter; it does not back away.
“Look,” he said, “even here in our largest city, the earth is more eloquent than I,” and he pointed to the various trees and named them, the hardy wild-flowers, the wonderful rock formations. I looked to my mother, who sat on one side of me, and then to my father, who was on the other side. I looked back at Fletcher. In his adultness I could see the little boy I had grown up with. I could see what propelled his words, gave them their shape and color and momentum this day. It was the blueness of the lake, it was the woods around our house that early on he had learned he could not do without.
His voice had the clarity and depth of the lake itself. Had I been up closer, I would have been able to see that lake still sparkling in his blue eyes. There was no dispelling that first childhood notion of beauty; it persisted, against all odds, like the wildflowers around the band shell, it lived, like the city trees girdled in cement. It lived. That tiny lake, not more than a mile wide, had played a big part in shaping my brother’s life, the contours of his concerns. We both doted on it, we both loved it, but it spoke to Fletcher.
A large and various crowd of people had assembled under the dark, dramatic sky. In the distance we could see the shape of the city, all rising geometry, all energy, quilted, patterned; beautiful, too, not as hard to love as one might have thought, abstractly, from a greater distance. It was beauty that united us that day. Though vastly different, we were all lovers of beauty, lovers of a place called home. An old woman several rows in front of me, trembling with emotion, began to cry. “This is our home,” Fletcher said, “and despite everything we must find the way to love it, to care for it, to claim it for ourselves—to make it ours.”
A division of the Gray Panthers, an activist group of senior citizens, had been bussed in from Long Island. They wore straw hats and buttons that said, “Save our children.” Students, professors, lawyers, doctors, housewives, children—all these people were there. Way, way in the back, the Socialists from Union City stood on tiptoe with the curious dog walkers and the joggers who had just finished their runs. I imagine they could only see a blur where my brother stood, but they could easily hear his voice, hooked to an elaborate sound system, and they were compelled to stay.
There was a confidence in Fletcher’s voice that made it irresistible, I think, to those less sure, to those whose convictions were less grand or were harder to articulate. His voice transcended language, for even the French tourists who sat next to my mother and kept asking her beforehand about “les boutiques et les cafés Américains” fell silent when my brother began, caught in that voice. And to me, who knew him, and to others, who did not, it seemed that he alone might purify the air with his tone. There was such command there that we thought he single-mindedly might take the clouds and shake them free of their filth.
We were so happy that day. It was one of the last times we would all be together. Dutifully we had dressed in white as
we had been asked to “for the visual effect,” Fletcher said, “something the media might easily comprehend.”
The visual effect was stunning. Father dragged the television from the closet so that we could watch the coverage of the event. We wanted to see what it looked like to the world. It was eerie to have a flash of Fletcher flickering blue from the TV set, if only for a second. And in the black and white dots of the newspaper I saw for the first time the strange resemblance between my brother and my mother. I was shocked that I had not seen this resemblance before. Maybe everyone doomed to newsprint, trapped on the page, in some silent way looks alike.
“Look,” my mother said, pointing to the sky just before my brother reached the podium. “A dove—a beautiful white dove.” But when I followed her arm into the air I saw nothing, just the ominous gray clouds my brother was about to address, hanging like symbols in the sky.
Had a common city pigeon turned into a dove before my mother’s eyes that day in the park as Fletcher got up and walked to the stage? Yes, I imagine it did. She had gasped with delight as she pointed up into the air, and it had reassured her in some way about the world. Watching her sitting there happy, content, I thought despite everything I would be privileged, I would count myself lucky to see what she saw, to be like her. I needed that dove, too, but when I looked up I saw only gray and no beautiful white bird intersecting it.
Had I missed the dove my mother saw so clearly as Fletcher walked to the stage? Had it flown away in one instant as I turned my head to see it? Or had she at that moment invented that bird as her contribution to the day? Often, I knew, she altered or remade the world, revising it, making it a more habitable place, a more bearable one, or sometimes just more complete.
“A dove,” she said again, this time softer. For an artist like my mother, there is no rest from perception. It does not stop when the body is raised from the typewriter, when the hands are folded safely in the lap, the canvas left to dry, the dance steps passed to the dancer, the whole rest placed on the final staff. It does not stop. There is no rest.