Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I would like to come to the United States and see where you live,” Moise said. “Are the streets paved with dollar bills?” He laughed to let me know it was a joke but what I really knew was that we were in love. Capital L, o, v, e, like in books and songs. Like in fate and destiny and this is the real thing.

  I didn’t even bother to wonder if I would sleep with him. I’m not a virgin anyway. I mean I wasn’t one. I had slept with two people. One at Governor’s School. I slept with him twice. He was a brilliant guy from Little Rock. We didn’t really fall in love but we keep writing to each other. The other person I slept with I just won’t talk about. It was too stupid and my parents found out about it and haven’t trusted me since. It didn’t have anything to do with him anyway. It had to do with drinking beer and trying to be normal and popular.

  So I wasn’t thinking about if I would sleep with Moise. I was thinking how and when.

  A vast pine forest surrounds Le Touquet Paris-Plage, which is the coastal town where Moise works. It was only planted about a hundred and fifty years ago. Inside the forest are beautiful villas. The air is so sweet, so clean and alive that you feel like you have been transported to some clearer, finer world.

  It was in this forest that Moise took me for his bride. We said the marriage vows. I swear we did. Sitting in his Renault with the pines all around us we swore to be faithful and love each other until the end of time. I made up the words and wrote them down and we both said them. I don’t think Moise had done it with many other girls either. He didn’t know that much more about it than I did. Not what you hear about the French, is it? Or was he just pretending innocence to please me? That could be true. On the other hand it was me seducing him as much as him seducing me. The way I was thinking was it’s either this gorgeous man or else it’s going to be some basketball player in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Face it, I’m a healthy young woman with normal hormones racing through my blood. It was going to happen. I am not nun material, no matter how hard Alice Armene watches me. Alice Armene is my mother. I have been calling her Alice Armene since I was four years old. She doesn’t think it’s funny. My psychotherapist says it was my first successful rebellion. Anyway, she watches me like a hawk but it didn’t do her any good in France. She was too busy mourning and making images of Joe out of Carrera marble to be on her usual guard, and besides she’d met Moise and she thought he was “lovely.” Who knows? Maybe she wanted me to get laid.

  “You didn’t do a thing to prevent conception?” she kept asking me later. And all I could think of to say was, “Well, no.” Just because I have a high IQ doesn’t mean I have any common sense.

  We said the vows and then we kissed once, very gently. Then we drove in complete silence to the guest house of a villa that belongs to Moise’s uncle and we walked into the pristine stillness of a room and lay down upon a bed and made love. Well, I won’t regret it as long as I live but neither will I baby-sit a baby for the next twenty years to pay for it. Men are so lucky. They just walk away. We get pregnant. I know. I know. I should have had some birth control pills but how was I to get them? Think about it. It was not an option open to me.

  We lay on the bed and looked up at the ceiling and out the windows at the pine trees and then Moise got up and opened all the French windows in the bedroom and we let the outside come in and join us. I will never smell a pine tree again in my life without thinking of that moment. So nature takes advantage of our needs and uses us to her purposes, but not me.

  Doctor Masterson will be back Friday and I will go in and get this pregnancy ended, this possibility aborted. I have a life to live, a lot of things to do. I don’t see me pushing a baby carriage like Etaline Silvers, whose daddy made her have her baby last year. She got pregnant on a one-night stand with a boy from Fort Smith and they made her have the baby and then he married her and beat her up and now he’s out on probation and everyone’s life is all screwed up. She lives a block from our house and the whole neighborhood was in on it. The women wanted her to get an abortion and the men thought she should have the baby. So her daddy won and everyone’s screwed and the whole town knows the story so where does that leave the kid?

  I am not weakening. I see no reason not to remember the day in the blue bedroom of the guest house in the forest and the smells and sights and love we had together. It was so very, very good and it’s a good thing I have a scientific mind and am not, repeat, not slave material.

  Moise is coming over here next summer. I will be seventeen by then and he’ll be twenty. I have to write and tell him about this baby. If I don’t tell him I can’t write to him at all. I can’t live with some lie. I have to get it out on the table and see if he hates me. But not yet. Not until it’s over. Not until it’s done.

  September 18, 1996. I haven’t written any more about the abortion incident because I had to process the information. It’s the first cool day. It’s six in the morning and in an hour and a half I’ll get into my little Camaro Daddy bought me to make up for the trauma and I will drive down to Fayetteville High School and get to work fixing it so I can go to college. We are shooting for Vanderbilt or Princeton or maybe Tulane. My grandmother will pay for it but I think I’ll get a scholarship. Anyway, that’s where I am now. I could of course be sitting around waiting for a baby to be born. I could have given in to nature without a fight but that’s not my nature. Two of my grandparents are descended from Highland Scots. We don’t give up without a fight. Our family motto in Scotland was, loosely translated, nobody messes with us with impunity. This includes nature.

  As for the fetus, I aborted it. I went to the doctor’s office and was weighed and measured and lay down upon a table and we did it. I was pretty sore and sort of lightheaded for a few days. I couldn’t believe it was over, that I’d been saved.

  Dad bought me the Camaro the next day. Baby blue with off-white seat covers. It’s a better car than Mother has. Well, her marble is being shipped home at severe cost so she can’t complain. Alice Armene gets her share.

  I had a few bad dreams. I dreamed the baby was holding my hand and trying to drag me into some sort of pit. I dreamed he was looking at me with this really mean face, like he could kill me. I am trying to figure out where that dream came from. I think it came from all the guilt and fear I felt when I was waiting to get the abortion. I mean, I was scared to death I was going to have to have that baby. Just petrified. I would have done anything to end that pregnancy. Taken any drug, stuck anything inside myself. If you haven’t experienced this you can’t understand what it’s like.

  Moise has not answered my letter. Dear Moise, it said. I was pregnant when I got home so I went down and had an abortion. Of course neither of us needs a child at this time in our lives. Et cetera. Just that ice cold. Do you think this is a trend? That I will go on being this self-protective to the exclusion of all other culturally dictated thoughts?

  I’m working on this positive outlook. I live in the greatest country in the world in a time of great economic prosperity. I have a constant food supply and a heated and air-conditioned house. I can manipulate my parents if I need to and I’m on my way to get a great education at Vanderbilt or at least Tulane or Mississippi College for Women. I have medications for my skin if my skin breaks out. I have antibiotics for infections. I have a doctor who is brave enough to do abortions even though his office has been bombed and his life threatened.

  I will turn each morning to the north and east and south and west and thank the universe for my species and my fortune. I am grateful for my life, and if I pray, it’s to Athena, the goddess of reason.

  Have a *Wonderful* Nice Walk

  From the breached files of Aurora Harris, age seventeen, born under the sign of Capricorn, destined for greatness or despair.

  Entry, Fayetteville, Arkansas. A typical nuclear family. July 6, 1997.

  You won’t believe what my little sister, Jocelyn, is doing. It is ninety-eight degrees in the shade and she is out on the street in front of our house painting a picture so that pe
ople who walk by will be cheered up by it. She has done this before and received so much praise and even a present left in the mailbox by a stranger that she has become like an insect that follows its habits no matter what. Last spring she made the first painting on the street. I should explain that we live on a road that goes around the top of a very small mountain and it is hardly ever traveled except for the cars of people who live here and people who drive up and park and go for walks in the early morning and late afternoon. One of the people who goes by at six every morning is a retired senator. Another is a famous painter. It is the painter who contributed the most to encouraging Jocelyn. A few days after Jocelyn’s first painting appeared, a smaller painting of three flowers was on the sidewalk leading to our house. It was a perfect painting. Only the painter could have painted it. Beside the flowers it said, Merci.

  That’s all it takes to make Jocelyn believe the world is a wonderful place full of good people. The present that was left in the mailbox was a doll. I personally would not play with a doll a stranger left me but of course Jocelyn just added it to the dolls on her bed and hugged it every time she walked by.

  Personally I am not too crazy about having a stupid sign painted on the street in front of my house but it’s so hot this week I can’t even bother to care. Have a *wonderful* nice walk it says in large letters with stars where the commas should be. Below that is a huge painting of a bug. I am not sure what it’s supposed to be. It looks like a tick or a chigger but even Jocelyn isn’t dumb enough to like them. It is more likely it is a ladybug since we had an epidemic of them in the spring. What happened was they were afraid the killer bees would come up here from Texas, so, without asking anyone’s permission, the biology department at the university turned loose a lot of ladybug larvae. Ladybugs are supposed to eat killer bees, a wild assumption to begin with. Anyway, the ladybugs ate all the honey bees in the area, ruining a thriving Ozark business. Also, they proliferated past all expectations and our houses were filled with them all spring. In the mornings we would have to shovel them up around the doors and windows. I collected them on pieces of paper and carefully took them outside for the first week. The second and third weeks I just swept them up with a broom and threw them out the door. They aren’t the beautiful, bright red ones you think of when you think of ladybugs. No, these are a darker, muddier-looking variety. We don’t know if they are here to stay. We do not know if we are going to have our drapes and carpets covered with ladybugs every spring or if something will come along and start eating them. Next spring will tell that tale.

  Meanwhile Jocelyn has painted one the size of a truck on the street in front of our house. At least it’s only painted with colored chalk so it won’t be there forever. However, it hasn’t rained in two weeks and there isn’t a cloud in the sky so if we have one of our famous midsummer droughts it will be there when Moise arrives from France. What will he think of that? Not to mention the general tackiness and waste of the United States? I don’t care. He’s coming to my home and he can take it or leave it.

  I don’t know if you remember, but Moise is the boy I met last summer in France and was impregnated by and then I had the abortion and he didn’t write me back for six months after I wrote and told him I had killed his baby. When he did write to me he didn’t mention it. I still haven’t figured that out. Either he thinks it wasn’t worth mentioning or else he just can’t talk about it until we see each other. That abortion bothers me personally about as much as shoveling up those lady-bugs. Sorry. I have a scientific mind.

  July 28, 1997. Here’s what got Moise about the United States. The fat people. The minute he got off the plane and walked through the airport he started noticing them. No, it might have been later when we took him to see the supermarket. Then he started complaining about the food. We ended up going to the farmer’s market three times a week while he was here and letting him make soups. “I am starving to death in the midst of all these fat people,” he kept saying. “Why are they so fat?”

  “It’s a class thing,” my father explained. My father is trying to like Moise. He is working at it night and day. He is determined not to blame Moise for getting me pregnant since it is nature that is to blame, along with him taking us to France without putting me on the birth control patch before we left. He is determined not to blame other people for what happens in a finite and complicated world. That’s one of the things he said to me when he got me in his office to talk before Moise arrived on the plane.

  “The past is gone,” he said to me. “We had a good time in France and you learned things I hope you won’t forget. If you sleep with him while he’s here I’ll be deeply disappointed. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “It won’t happen,” I replied. “I’m not going to sleep with anyone, Dad. It wasn’t the abortion that scared me. It was the AIDS test. That scared me to death, waiting for the results of that.”

  “I’m counting on you to display willpower.” He sat up straight and looked me hard in the eye. “You have the strongest will of anyone I’ve ever known, except my mother. You are descended from a line of strong women. Your great-grandmother was married to the governor of Wisconsin. There were six Auroras before you. You are descended from women who lived into their nineties before antibiotics were found. No, don’t turn away from me. I want you to know the genes you carry, the fortunate DNA. Don’t throw it away on adolescent dreams. I want those grades to come up this year. I want you at Harvard or Tulane or the University of Chicago. Don’t look away. This is the only talk we’ll have all summer. Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m going to pull them up. It’s my main thing. Well, I’d better go help Mother. She’s getting the room downstairs ready for him. He knows we aren’t going to do anything. I wrote and told him twice. That’s it. He’s coming to see the United States. I’m not in love with him, Dad. Believe me on that.”

  I returned his look. I hate it when he starts all that genealogy stuff about our ancestors. But I can’t help being a little interested in it. I mean, I really do have a strong will and I like to know my great-grandmothers had an education. I know what it means to be from generations of educated people. I appreciate it. I know how fortunate I am. He doesn’t have to keep on telling me that. Also, I may be in denial about how much I want to go to a really great college like Harvard or Tulane. I know I have to pull up my grades, but you try taking social studies at Fayetteville High School and see if you can stay awake.

  As soon as Moise got off the plane, I knew I didn’t want to sleep with him again. He looked different in the United States. He looked a lot smaller. I’ve been hanging out with this guy who’s the other editor of the literary magazine. He’s six feet five inches tall and gangly and I’ve known him all my life. We went to first, second, third, and fourth grades together. Then he moved into the other district and I didn’t see much of him until high school. His name’s Ingersol Manning and he’s deep into Mario Puzo and Michael Crichton. I can get him to read Rilke but his mind wanders. You see, Ingersol is not sad about anything although he should be. His mother died, about the worst thing that can happen to a human being. It is made better in Ingersol’s case by the fact that his father is a saint and the closest thing to a mother that a father can learn to be. Well, that’s another story.

  His other family problem is a born-again grandmother who puts all this language on him about hell and damnation and Christ the Savior and really embarrassing stuff like that. She actually got some anti-abortion armbands and tried to make Ingersol wear one to school. He gave it to me for a joke because he knows about my abortion and agrees with me that reason rules and so what if you get rid of a six-week-old fetus.

  You see, if I had loved myself I would have known I loved Ingersol from day one. In the first, second, and third grades I played with him every recess. But it took me two and a half years of high school to rediscover him. You know why? Because he is so much like me. Two wrongs make a right, I guess I was thinking like that. Why would I think that having an IQ
of 140 is something wrong? Well, it’s the tallest-poppy theory. The rest of them are always after us. They want us to be like them so they don’t have to worry that we might be smarter than they are. All of this was explained to me by a psychiatrist I used to see. More about Ingersol and me as a couple later.

  Ingersol went to the airport with me to pick up Moise and they hit it off right away. Of course, Ingersol can get along with anybody as long as they have a brain. We started playing chess every night Moise was here. My dad was on the chess team at Vanderbilt. He wouldn’t play with us but he was coming in and watching. I guess that was the high point of his life as a father. Seeing his daughter with two young men who were sober and could play chess.

  Even if I did get pregnant last summer by the short one and had to get an abortion. Sorry. I don’t mean to harp on that.

  “Basically,” my father is continuing, “fat people are the lower, less-educated classes. They don’t read well enough to be getting the information available about nutrition or else they were taught terrible eating habits and can’t imagine breaking them. Whole families of people in the United States are fat. You will see them out to dinner together, propping each other up in their vices. Gluttony is a vice as it leads to ill health and mental problems, which leads to more gluttony, which leads to huge medical bills being picked up by the taxpayers. I resent having to pay for heart bypass operations for people who made themselves sick by eating. I resent taking care of alcoholics and won’t leave my organs to science since I might be keeping alive an alcoholic who beats his wife.”

  Dad paused, waiting for a reaction, but Moise just leaned toward him with this intent expression on his face. The French are below the irony line, Dad told me in another context. He believes only southerners really understand irony. I usually take his opinions on such things. After all, he is the head of the Department of English. That stands for something, even in this pitiful little agrarian state.