Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

“If it works out would you sell part of it to me? I want a business of my own. I can borrow ten thousand dollars any time I want it. People want to do business with black men. It gets them in good with the government.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I have to believe in something.”

  “Let’s try it for a few months and see how it works out. I’ll pay you by the hour, whatever you were making. I’ll be fair to you. I’m always fair. Ask anyone who knows me.” She sat back on her arms. “Can you cook? Do you know anything about catering?”

  “I can cook if I need to. I’ll do whatever it takes to get a start.”

  “Then come to work in the morning. I’ll meet you there at eight. At the kitchen.”

  “Whenever you want me.” He was quiet then, looking out at the water, waiting for her to speak about the other thing. It was a long while coming.

  “Do you ever think about that afternoon?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t really understand it. Why it was so different. Don’t look away. Turn around and look at me. It made me think we are more different than I imagined. And you aren’t even black. You’re half white. So why was it so different? I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “You don’t care what you say, do you?”

  “I want to know the truth. That’s all right, isn’t it? To want to understand.”

  “Yes. I suppose it is.”

  “We have a house on the beach. In Pass Christian. We could go there sometime.”

  “Not at his house. We’ll go to my place if you like. Or to a hotel. There are the casinos. Those hotels are nice.”

  “When?”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Nothing. Then let’s go.” She stood up and he stood up beside her and took her hand. He decided she was right. It was different, the touch, the smell, the immediacy, the refusal of hesitation. He packed up the lunch things and deposited them in a trash can. Then he came back to her and took her hand again and they walked together toward the car. She was sorry no one was around. She wanted someone to see them. She wanted to be threatened and afraid. It was spring and she lived in a free country. Land of the free, home of the brave. Besides, her grandfather was dead and her father had gone back to his whores in Texas. There was no one to fear anymore. No one who could make her do a thing she didn’t want to do. No one to beat or shame her. No one to threaten to lock her up in a loony bin for loving or being brave.

  “Come on.” She turned and took Adam’s hand and they walked on to the car. The sun was pouring down upon them. It was noon on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and they were going to take the afternoon and make it one to remember.

  While We Waited for You to Be Born

  W. S. Merwin was in town. He read his poetry for two hours in the Tulane Chapel, the one with the pretty stained-glass windows. He read at night. You couldn’t see the sun coming in the leaded glass the way you can sometimes in the mornings. First he read for forty minutes, then talked and answered questions. Then he told us he would stay and read another hour for anyone who wanted to hear more poems. Twenty or thirty of us stayed. We moved nearer to the lectern. We made a circle around him. He read anything we asked to hear. He read “The Judgment of Paris” and “Come Back” and “Farewell” and “The Last One.” All the poems that we adored.

  In Southeast Asia children were being bombed and gassed. In Russia and China they were being jailed. In the French Quarter they were being sold to men from out of town. Young girls and young boys, too. I quit the ACLU because they defended a man in Little Rock, Arkansas, who sold his son. It was the first argument your father and I had where I stood up for something I believed. I believed it because you were in my womb and I knew you already. Within my womb as I listened to Merwin you were struggling and moving and getting ready to make your big move. Become an air breather, take that first long incredible gasp and the epiglottis would open to the oxygen that plants provide for us. Provide, provide, dear grass and shrubs and trees. And then they give us flowers.

  Flower of my heart, flower of my soul, beautiful daughter of my heart. I love to think of when we sat in that chapel in the dim electric light and listened to Merwin read his poems. You were already six days late. Monday’s child is fair of face. Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. It was Wednesday when Merwin read. But I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t believe in superstitions or Gothic fears. I knew you already. I knew your bright red hair and wildness and power. I knew your will.

  I was nineteen years old. I didn’t have enough sense to be afraid of anything. Your father was afraid. He was thirty-three. A poet himself, a graduate of the Iowa writing program, a tall, funny, excited man. He kept me close to his side. He loved my pleasure in Merwin being there. He had taught me Merwin’s poetry. He knew Merwin. They had marched together at Aldermaston in the late fifties when your father was still a boy. It was because of him that Merwin had come to Tulane.

  Your father wanted us to be married before you came. I wanted to wait and have a white dress and a wedding in Brookhaven but finally, after the reading, I agreed to come back the next morning and be married in the chapel with Merwin as the best man.

  But you were born at dawn, as you know, and so we had the wedding at the hospital instead, in a dingy little chapel there. It didn’t seem dingy. It was Merwin who named you Ariel. I’m sorry you hate your name. I’m sorry you are embarrassed by all of this. I’m sorry you hate me for it and I wish you would stop being so angry all the time. I cannot bring your father back to us. I don’t know where he is.

  “Oh come back we were watching all the time

  With the delight choking us and the piled

  Grief scrambling like guilt to leave us

  At the sight of you

  Looking well. . . .”

  I will write Merwin and see if he has heard from him. I know your father loves you. I know he wants to see you, to be with you. I think he will come back someday, if he is alive, if he can. He may be too far gone into sadness now. The sadness of being unsuccessful. The sadness of poems no one wants to read. It is the saddest thing I know for a man not to know how to make a living. He knew once. He was a good teacher at Tulane. They fired him when he married me and you were born. It wasn’t your fault and we did not regret it. He said he didn’t like teaching rich kids anyway. But he had liked the paycheck. After that we had to depend on my father. We went to Brookhaven and he worked for Daddy in the hardware store until Wal-Mart put us out of business. Then he left. He went to sea for a while. He wrote to us from ports around the world.

  I don’t know. I haven’t heard in three years. You know all this. I cannot change the past, my love. I cannot lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all my tears wash out a word of it.

  I thought you wanted to know. You told me to tell you and so I am telling you everything I know. Here it is. It is all I have to give. You are the age I was that night when Merwin read in the chapel. Exactly the age. It was nineteen years ago this week. You want all the rest? Here it is.

  We lived in a small ground-floor apartment on Octavia Street. A doctor owned the house. He lived next door in a modern glass house with a swimming pool. He owned all the houses on the block and rented them to people that he liked. We were within walking distance of a grocery store and a Laundromat and a bar. Your father got up every morning and rode his bicycle to Tulane and taught until they fired him in the fall when they found out about me. The English Department knew about me. It was the administration that didn’t know right away. The thought police. So for the first six months of your life he got up in the mornings and rode his bicycle to the school and taught English literature to the angry or sweet or spoiled or scared students who were mostly stoned or else in league with the thought police and listening to every word he said so they could tell their parents.

  After he left I would feed you and change your diapers and put you in the bed with me and we would sleep away the soft, sultry summer m
ornings. Outside the bedroom window was a mock orange tree and a row of Cape jasmine bushes. If I opened the windows the scent of heaven came into the room and lulled us both into a paradise. You, soft against my skin with your fine golden skin. You in my arms as you slept and slept and slept. I adored you. He did too. But he did not get to hold you in his arms those long hot mornings as I did.

  I was too lazy to even make coffee. After you woke I’d take you in the stroller around the corner and eat snowballs for breakfast and stroll you up and down Magazine Street in your borrowed, elegant, navy blue and white, canopied, shuttered stroller.

  My family had cut me off those six months. My father was so angry he wouldn’t let my mother write to me but my sister still called me up and came to visit and lent me things she had left over from the babies she had had five years before. She never stopped lecturing me but at least she lent me lots of things that came in handy as you grew.

  Why did he leave? you ask and ask and ask. Because after we got back to Brookhaven I forgot the things I had learned at Tulane. I began to believe the things my parents believed again. I went to the Presbyterian church. I hated the black people and thought they were going to rape me. I hated the ACLU and not just because they represented that man in Little Rock. I went back into being afraid all the time. I thought everything would go wrong and it did.

  Your father wanted me to go with him when he left for San Francisco but I would not go. I was pregnant again but I did not tell him. As soon as he was out of town Mother took me to New Orleans and I had an abortion. They got me a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office. It was three more years before they let me go back to Tulane. I took you with me part of the time. Part of the time I had to leave you in Brookhaven with your cousins. I had to get an education, Ariel. You must believe me when I say that. I did not abandon you. I was never gone more than a week at a time. I got my degree in social work. I got my duplex in Metairie. We have lived here ever since. Haven’t we been happy? Why do you hate me so much? Why are you so angry?

  Ariel says, “The results of the failed bond are guilt and shame. You refuse to believe that.”

  “How could there be a failed bond? I held you in my arms morning, night, and noon. You slept in my arms. We lay in the bed in the mornings and smelled the jasmine and mock orange and I loved you as much as anyone could love a child.”

  “I remember maids.”

  “Only after we moved back to Brookhaven. Until then I took care of you all by myself. You never left my arms.”

  “I only remember Sally Lee. Every memory I have is of her big old body slowly bending over or giving me something to eat. No wonder I’m fat. All she did was feed me morning, night, and noon. I lived in a high chair. You weren’t even there.”

  “You are not fat. You have to stop thinking you are fat.”

  “I need to lose fifteen pounds. I’m too fat. No one ever asks me out.”

  “If you were nice to people you’d be asked out. If you didn’t always say such rude things to people. That’s the part that’s like your father. When you see him he will know who you are. He will be crazy about you when he finds out you turned out to be just like him. I’m going to cry, Ariel. Stop talking about this now. I need to rest. I can’t talk about this forever. I’m sick. Can’t you see it just upsets me and makes me worse.”

  “You aren’t sick. You have psychosomatic migraine headaches from being horny. You need to get laid, Mother. Go get yourself a boyfriend.”

  Ariel left her mother’s bedroom and walked out into the living room of the house they shared. It was very very neat. Not a magazine out of place. She went into the kitchen and got out some bread and cheese and made a cold sandwich and ate it as she went out and got into her car and drove over to Tulane to her English class. Write Merwin, she decided. Yes, he’ll know where Daddy is and I will go and live with him. I’ll get out of here. I’ll find my father and a life a person with a brain can stand to live.

  What was all that bullshit about her not wanting to marry him before I was born? Of course she wanted to marry him any way she could and any time. It’s the oldest scam in the world. Fuck your professor or your boss and get pregnant and make them marry you. I bet he hated her guts. No one would want to be married to that boring, whiny bitch.

  Ariel stopped off at P.J.’s coffeehouse and got an iced coffee to go and paid for it with the twenty-dollar bill her mother had given her the night before. Then she left the car where it was sure to get a parking ticket and walked onto the Tulane campus and over to the old stone building where a woman from Oregon was teaching eighteenth-century literature. She would write to W. S. Merwin and her father would come rescue her and she would no longer be a fatherless girl who was fifteen pounds overweight in a hot, boring city where nobody thought about a thing except how much money somebody’s father had or if they were going to be the Queen of Mardi Gras.

  What I have to remember, Ariel’s mother consoled herself, is that I was happy once and she was part of it. I was happy when I loved Daniel and I was happy when I was pregnant with her. I was ecstatic all those months when we lived on Octavia Street. I loved to stroll her down the broken sidewalks underneath the live oak trees and breathe the soft, sweet air and eat coffee snowballs for breakfast and put her to my breast and let her suck. She could taste the sugar, maybe the coffee too. She tasted me seven times a day, or eight or nine or ten. I did not wean her until they made me do it. Until Mother went crazy when I got the lumps in my breast. They would have gone away. And she wouldn’t have been sick all the time from drinking cow’s milk. I made mistakes. How could I help it? I was a child with no real education. I had no money, no power, no knowledge of the world. Only my husband and my child and I lost him and now I’m losing her. I do not know how to keep her. I do not know what I am doing wrong.

  She put on her old shoes and walked out into the yard to weed the flower garden. I’m too young to garden, she decided. I hate getting dirt in my fingernails. Where is my gardener? Where are my bells and shining whistles? Where are my maids?

  At noon she went into the house and made some toast and ate it and then got into the tub and bathed herself and cleaned her hands and toes and fingernails. She got out of the tub and stood in the warm air thinking about the water evaporating. She went into her room and put on her best white skirt and a navy blue polo shirt. She put on sandals and makeup and a string of pearls and then she sprayed perfume on her hair. I’ll get laid, she decided. Since that’s what she wants me to do.

  She went down to the Oak Street Bar and Grill where the poets had hung out in the seventies. There was no one there but the bartender, who knew her from the old days. “Hey, Sally,” he said. “Come on in. You’re looking great. What’s going on?”

  “My nineteen-year-old hates me,” she said. “She told me to go get laid.”

  “Ariel? Ariel is nineteen years old? Don’t tell me that. I must be a hundred. It’s strange that you came in. I was talking to someone last night who saw Daniel. He’s teaching at Hattiesburg now. Did you know that?”

  “In Hattiesburg, Mississippi? My Daniel? Ariel’s dad?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “I haven’t heard from him in three years. Since I called the cops on him for not paying my child support. He disappeared. He sends me money but he sends it through other people. My lawyer gave up looking for him. I don’t care. I’ve been making plenty of money. I work for the city four days a week as a welfare checker. Did you know I was in the workforce?” She sat down at the end of the bar where the bartender was drying glasses with a cloth. “You think I ought to have a drink this early in the day?”

  “No. Do you want one?”

  “Not really. I was hoping someone would be here.”

  “Here I am.” He looked her in the eyes. He was a sixty-year-old man who had taken one too many hits from life. Cancer three years before. Then losing half his teeth. It cheered him up to have Sally come walking in the bar at noon right after he heard that Daniel
was in Hattiesburg.

  “So he’s teaching at the university there?”

  “That’s what Frank Hanley said. He’s going up there to read next fall. He was really excited about it.”

  “Where can I find Frank?”

  “Right here if you come back around four or five. He comes in as soon as he quits teaching.”

  “Don’t tell him I was here. I want to surprise him.”

  She drove over to Tulane to look for Ariel. She went to the administration office and looked at the class schedule and then she went to the building where Ariel had a class at two. She sat down on the stairs and let the young men admire her legs. The sun was warm on her arms and face. It was nice to be back on the campus with funny beautiful troubled young people all around her hustling each other as they walked by, young men ready to hustle her if she batted an eyelash at them. She almost forgot what she had come there for by the time Ariel showed up ten minutes late for the class. She looked up and Ariel was sprinting down the sidewalk for the building. “Stop,” she said. “I know where your father is. Meet me here as soon as your class is over.”

  “What?” Ariel said. “What are you talking about?” They stood face-to-face, almost exactly the same height, their blue eyes saying many wonderful things while Sally babbled out her story.

  “I won’t go to class.”

  “No, don’t do that. Meet me here at three. I’ll be waiting.”

  “The class lasts two hours. It’s a lab.”

  “Then meet me at four.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go on. Don’t miss a class. We might have to miss them all tomorrow. If you want to go and find him.”

  “Okay. I’ll go. I like this lab. It’s editing. I need it. I like the guy who teaches it.”

  “Go on. You’re late.”

  At four Ariel emerged from the building and Sally took her arm and they walked to the car and got into it and drove down Saint Charles to Carrollton and turned and headed toward the Oak Street Bar and Grill. “What about my car?” Ariel asked. “I’ll get tickets.”