I ask the mother to please take the dummy off the table and she does, putting it on the floor beside her chair. I clear my cup off the table, watch as the mother finishes eating and gets up, re-forms a curl of hair near her ear and picks up a pink sample case from behind the door. “The dummy,” I say, and the mother comes back to her chair, picks the doll up, slings it under her arm. By this time Melissa is back in the kitchen waiting for her ride to work, her hand shaking as she fumbles with her collar. The two of them leave and I finish getting ready, straightening, finally getting into my own car and driving through town. I watch the old women sitting on front porches. Fuschia plants with globular pink flowers, the florist’s tags still on them, hang obscenely above their heads; sharply angled front porch steps have crumbled overnight into dust. If I’m not careful I will think about Melissa during the day, remember the way she looked when she came back into the kitchen, the chalklike powder to cover the redness around her eyes, the way she was bent over and dressed in an old woman’s flowered dress and old cardigan sweater, a graying handkerchief showing in the pocket. I know I will not be able to understand why Melissa affects me so deeply, why I can’t simply let her live her miserable life in the back of my house and go on feeling comfortable about my own life, the possibilities for the life I am creating for myself. I remind myself that I can move freely in the world, that I have the beginning of a good career and a small circle of friends, and that the only failure, the only possible failure or limitation is the failure of imagination. But there is something in me that needs to release Melissa, to shake her, make her spin. And I’m not sure why I myself am here, how I ended up here, why I stay. I grew up in a city and my inner resources depend on external things; I’ll be the first to admit that. I begin to feel a heaviness, fear the morning will come when I’ll wake up certain there is nothing beyond this town and so nothing in it, and the dust will begin to replace the air as I breathe, less deeply every day.
Melissa changes into her bathrobe as soon as she gets home from work, lies down on her bed with the blinds drawn. I fix myself a glass of wine and a tomato sandwich, sit and read the paper. The mother arranges samples of soap in a black cardboard box. Every few minutes I hear the springs squeak on Melissa’s bed and the water run in the sink in Melissa’s bathroom and then again the sound of the springs. After an hour, I put down the paper and knock on Melissa’s door. I hear the sound of the faucet again and quick movement and Melissa is at the door, bathrobe buttoned unevenly, squinting in the light, the impression of the bedspread on the left side of her face. I ask if I can come in and she laughs nervously, backs into a shadow, says, “Of course, please.”
The room smells of old lady lavender and plastic roses. I go to the window and open the blind, raise the window to let in some air and immediately I feel better, look around to see if Melissa feels it too, this release, but she is huddled against the headboard of the bed, a pillow clasped to her stomach. “How would you like to go to a movie tonight?” I say. Melissa bows her head, smiles, says she has other plans but thank you very much. I pick up a white china cupid from the dressing table and press my finger on the point of the wing, decide to face things directly and say, “Melissa, won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
Melissa looks concerned, reaches out toward me as though I’m the one who needs comforting, says in a soft voice, “I hope I’m no trouble to you.” She gets up from the bed and goes to the closet, takes out an old wool skirt and lace blouse, picks up her thick glasses from the nightstand and puts them on, smiles showing the pink gums and hastily put-in teeth, the brown hair absolutely without highlights around her shoulders, the child’s body. “I must get dressed now,” she says. “I hope you’ll excuse me.” And she pulls the bathrobe tighter around her waist. She smiles like a nun, holds her hand to her throat as I leave and shut the door.
The mother’s room is wide open and filled with light. She stands looking into a mirror, applying red lipstick, a flowered pantsuit tight across her rump. She turns to the side and pulls in her stomach, hits her hip with the flat of her hand, says, “Too fat, all Pentecostal preachers’ kids are fat, can’t be helped,” and she backs into a chrome mobile of biplanes.
“Why does she turn on the faucet all the time?” I ask, and the mother shakes her head, says, “Beats me, she’s a strange kid.” I pinch myself, think: you could do more to help her, you old witch. The muscles tense around the dimples in the mother’s fat arms and she turns to me, says, “She’s fine, honey, she’s living her own life,” and I say, “That’s no kind of life,” and I leave the room.
Later the mother leaves with her sample case. The door to Melissa’s room stays shut. I go out into the back yard to water down the dust in my garden, see a vague outline of Melissa sitting by her bedroom window in a straight chair, dressed for the evening.
I drive to work the next day and notice the trailers and small boxy houses folded in among the fields. It seems impossible for anyone to live in those things. I wonder what those people do with their time, what they enjoy. I hate it, the meanness of it. The artificially too-pink cupcakes in grocery stores, women with pasty faces going through the cheap clothes in a K-Mart, the heartbreaking way a woman will suddenly squeal over some hideous plastic flower arrangement, plastic grapes, a conch shell spray-painted phosphorescent green and wired up as a night-light, saying isn’t this beautiful or isn’t this cute until I want to scream or to cry. I close my eyes and imagine a cloud in a champagne glass, a rose in a bell. I am doing well in my job; in another year or two I will be able to sell my house and find a better job in a city where I can wear fine silk blouses in the daytime, dance at night, never get the deep lines in my face, live the mean existence.
I unlock the door to my office, wait for the first client. The walls are covered with what I know are fatuous posters covered with butterflies and contradictory slogans like “Grow Where You Are Planted” and “To Fly You Have to Leave the Cocoon.” Whenever I run into one of my clients months after he’s stopped coming in to see me, the client will always say, “I’m doing well—it was that poster, the one directly behind your head,” or “the one in the corner,” or “the one behind the Swedish ivy.” Or sometimes one will say, after I’ve worked with him for months, helped him get food stamps, a job—“It was the Rex Humbard Gospel Hour; it changed my life.”
An old man comes in and takes out his hearing aid, puts it in a box. He begins telling me about his girlfriend who is twenty years younger than he is, how he thinks she’s seeing another man. He writes country western songs, takes a sheet of yellow paper out of his coat pocket and begins to sing. I point to my watch; his hour is up. He leaves. One after another, they come into my office. A young girl who thinks she is unhappy because she fell in love with the newspaper’s picture of a locally infamous wife-murderer. No matter that the only picture they had to print was his high school graduation picture, and the man is now fifty years old; she is sure her life has ended. I listen to them. I direct them to different agencies. Often, through the day, I am struck with how little I have in common with this person or that. Often, through the day, I think of Melissa.
It’s dusk and on the sidewalk in front of my house the mother is moving on roller skates. She almost falls and catches onto a tree. She is ecstatic. “I saw a picture in People magazine,” she says. “It’s all the rage.” I hate that phrase, and I hate it that there’s an enormous woman on roller skates in front of my house. I particularly hate the fact that this enormous woman looks so happy, but I smile at her, try to find some sympathy for her, and fail. Inside, the door to Melissa’s room is, as usual, closed. I pick up a dustcloth and begin dusting—not only the tops of furniture but chair rungs, table legs. The cloth soon becomes so saturated that the dust simply flies into the air, settles somewhere else. I think about typing up resumes, applying for jobs someplace where life is really being lived, decide that I don’t have the proper kind of paper, that I’m tired and will go to sleep early. I put the cloth away, put on a nig
htgown, get into bed, and feel the cool cotton of the sheets on my legs, the faint smell of bleach. I fall asleep thinking about a man I once knew; I fall asleep to the scratching of the mother’s skates on the sidewalk, the thump of the faucet being turned repeatedly on and repeatedly off.
An hour or so later I awake to the sound of singing coming from the Holiness church. I get up and look out the window, see the church windows lit yellow, men with blue suits and pale necks, women in dark dresses and serviceable shoes. Every now and then one of them gets up and walks to the front of the church. Some of them are crying. I sit on the floor next to my window, the warm air on my arms, my face near the rust smell of the screen. Two teenagers are sitting on the curb in front of the Coke machine at the gas station. The boy reaches over and touches the girl’s hair, slides his finger along the nape of her neck. I notice Melissa sitting in the back yard, a glass cupid in her hand, looking at the church, looking, as I am, at the teenagers. The mother comes around the side of the house, puts an arm around Melissa; Melissa shakes her head, and both of them come inside. I think about one of my clients, a young woman who had gotten married at about the same age as the girl sitting on the curb. Two years later she had two children and no husband. She began to go to the bars in the adjoining town, began to abuse the children. I had to put the children in foster homes. The woman changed then, found a job, put up with her friends’ teasing when she wouldn’t go into town, finally got her kids back, lives what seems to me such a boring life, such an incredibly simple life, is still fighting herself and not really happy, but braver than I’ll ever be. It’s difficult for me to understand. My friends tell me to leave, to fly, to find someplace else to live, that my life will change. And I think of that girl, how she fights to stay in a worse situation than I am in. I wonder how someone else would look at me, at my life. I try to believe that life is rich and understandable and full of possibilities, that what people do is chosen, that they can choose again, and it’s difficult to think that in light of Melissa, in light of the fact that she is real. It’s tempting to think there are people who can live like she does, that I’m special. The mother thinks that way. When a young couple down the street were arrested for drugs, the police knocking over pots of geraniums in their excitement and clumsiness, the mother talked about it for days, and I tell her I feel sorry for them, for the shame of it. She says, “Oh, I don’t think it bothers their kind, do you?”
The girl on the curb cups her hand under the boy’s chin, her hair reflecting the yellow light from the church; her laugh cuts through the singing. An airplane flies overhead; I can blot it out with my finger.
The locusts begin their noise; the pollen is choking. I had made a vow to leave by fall, but it’s late August and I’ve done nothing. Half the people in town get their trees topped for winter fuel, and the town is full of amputees, the sidewalks littered with carnage of twigs and sawdust. Both children and insects seem to multiply geometrically. Insects run into screens, walls, people’s heads, crazy with dying. Children topple their bicycles, run into the streets, into old women with packages until they are finally gathered into the vaults of yellow buses taking them to another town. I like to think that one of them will spend her time daydreaming, designing pretend-rockets, golf courses, fuel-less lawnmowers, rocking-chair generators. Think of it: centuries and centuries when no one thought of how to fly and now the sky is filled with men and women flying.
In a field by the grain elevators, the Nazarene church sets up a revival tent, brings in a fattish preacher with a charismatic voice in the rhythm of preachers. His voice over the cold blue metal of microphones joins with the locusts. Every night there is healing. Women with the odd small-town combination of shoulder-length stringy teenage hair, stomachs large from childbirth and cake, lined grayish faces, smile like young girls in love. I can see the tent from my window, hear the shouting, the release of something in the people inside. For several nights the mother goes to the tent, comes back late with a look of high adventure.
I spend a lot of time on my porch swing watching, listening, am not moved, only curious. The locusts, the sound of the revival, the children in the streets, a neighbor sanding a car, the strangling sound of Melissa’s faucet and then, a strange thing, the squealing of trucks, twenty or so, pulling into a cornfield across from the revival, knocking over corn pale green and scrawny from heavy spring rains. It’s dark and I can’t tell what’s going on except that the trucks circle and people get out of them, begin hammering and moving.
The mother comes out onto the porch with the dummy, completely outfitted now, on her hip, a box of airplanes in her arms. “What’s going on?” I ask her, knowing that she would know.
“Poor Jack’s Amusements,” she says. “They’re setting up here this year. We’re going to have a fair.”
I laugh. “This place looks like the bombing of Dresden; half the buildings in town only have one wall. Where are the people supposed to come from?”
“They’ll come,” she says, “and I’ll be there waiting.”
The mother heads toward the trucks. Melissa comes out onto the porch, sighs, sits down on a step to watch. Her face has no expression; the eyelids now and then slip slowly down over her eyes and I think she’s asleep for a second or two until they open again, just as slowly. On some days something will excite her for some reason, will almost make her happy, and her upper lip will shake. Often she holds her throat, and it breaks my heart.
“How long is the revival going to stay there?” I ask her, thinking that she probably won’t know. “For another week,” she says.
For some reason this strikes me as funny, the whole thing, and I laugh again, make the swing bounce, hug my knees. Melissa is wearing a brown sweater buttoned up to the chin, but she pulls it tighter. “Don’t you think it’s hilarious?” I say to her. “Things are going to get crazy around here.” She smiles and touches her neck, touches the peeling porch paint, smoothes the hair back from her forehead. She gets up and touches my shoulder, sighs, and goes inside.
The mother comes running up the sidewalk then, a curl of hair broken loose and bouncing dangerously close to her mouth. She’s sweating from the exertion, still holding the dummy and the airplanes. “They’re going to let me set up a booth,” she yells. She begins to talk rapidly, backtracking in her story, going off on tangents, the dummy hanging precariously by his feet on her arm. They’re going to let her set up her airplane collection; apparently she’s convinced them she is a ventriloquist who can tell fortunes, a ventriloquist with some kind of Wilbur Wright gimmick.
“Watch me,” she says, sitting down on the porch step, in the place where Melissa had just a second ago been sitting. She puts the dummy on her knee, straightens the aviator cap. Hello, the dummy says in a high-pitched woman’s voice. My name’s Wilbur. What’s yours?
“Did my mouth move?” the mother asks.
“Did the dummy say that or did you?” I say. “I can’t tell the difference.”
The mother stands up quickly, the dummy sliding from her lap. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, really.” She looks hurt, and I feel strangely good about that and at the same time bad about feeling that way. And while I’m feeling those things, I’m apologizing, lamenting my horrible sense of humor and too-quick tongue, telling her what a good opportunity this is and how I’ll come and see her, how I’ll be her first customer, how very excited I truly am about having a fair in town, especially with a revival going on at the same time, things are certainly picking up aren’t they, before we know it the state will give us an exit on the interstate.
She doesn’t trust my apology for a minute, but pretends that she does and goes inside looking for Melissa. I’m even angrier with her since I had to apologize without meaning it, and I want to yell at her, “How come you’re so fat and Melissa’s so skinny?” but I don’t. I sit on the swing as though it’s a stationary chair, trying to be fair, wondering if I really want the mother to seek her own lowest point of mise
ry in the daughter and stay there, deciding that I do.
The next evening Melissa stays in her room dusting cupids, and for the first time I notice the grace in her movements, the fragility. The mother runs from one room to the next, leaving a cloud of perfume wherever she stays for more than two seconds, forgetting her anger with me as she asks me to zip her shiny blouse, comb the back of her hair. She “la la” and “mi mi’s” around the house like a singer, running in and out of Melissa’s room, practicing her voice. “I’ve really got it down now,” and she says, Ello, I’m Ilbur Ight in a voice strained through her teeth and too-rigid lips. “Dynamite,” I say, “just terrific. You’ll really wow ’em.”
Around six o’clock things crank up—the revival preacher starts preaching with a larger amplifier. I look out the window and see a gospel rock band setting up in the tent; the preacher means business. The air smells like corn dogs, sweet grease, and a ferris wheel begins moving and so do some other indistinguishable rides, each with its own music to cover the disconcerting sound of metal on metal, at least ten different colors of neon. Both the revival and the fair are strung with thick black electric cords, no sign of where they’re plugged in.
The Invention of Flight Page 9