Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Mankind never stops thinking of ways to ruin his own life, foul his own nest, and yet we have built great buildings, painted, dreamed, made music, written books, tamed rivers,” my father continued. “What do you think of our species, Moise? What’s your take on the progress of Homo sapiens sapiens?”

  Moise said he hadn’t made up his mind yet about the species. “But your opinion,” my father pressed. “Surely you think about it.”

  “I do not think about them as a whole,” Moise answered. “I think of them in groups. Americans, English, Germans, the Spaniards, bicyclists, automobile manufacturers.” He was still being very serious.

  “That’s good.” My father sits back and gets this thinking, caring, intimidating look on his face that is probably the reason his students voted him the most challenging professor any of them had ever had. Also, it’s the reason I will probably die too if he dies, which will definitely happen if he doesn’t stop smoking. He has a deep sense of mortality and a fear of it but he won’t even mention stopping smoking and his blood pressure is so high anyone else would already be dead. I guess someday I will understand how someone with his vices can lecture the world on not having them, not to mention keep me scared to death to do a thing I want to do. Well, except for last summer when I screwed Moise and got pregnant. See, I did what they told me not to do and what they told me would happen, happened. That’s very powerful conditioning. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover. I may never be able to screw anyone again even after I get married and that will be okay because I already know I don’t want any children. I will not grow up to be my mother no matter how much nature calls the shots. I will not have children. That is that. It’s bad enough to have to baby-sit for a living.

  But if I never get laid what will happen to all that libido? Well, so far I don’t have any pimples and although you might say I am slightly chubby no one can say I am fat.

  I wasn’t even chubby while Moise was here. I followed him around and ate what he was eating. He eats these very small portions of food and he eats very slowly and he doesn’t like to talk while he’s doing it.

  “I like to eat,” Ingersol said. He was polishing off his second double cheeseburger. We were taking Moise out to McDonald’s the week before he left to go back to France.

  “But you are very tall,” Moise said. “That’s why you can eat such large meals and not be fat like all the people here.” It was a bad day to be at McDonald’s. It looked like every fat person in Fayetteville had decided to eat lunch together.

  “Are they fat like this in other cities?” Moise continued. It was his favorite subject, especially since Ingersol had just beaten him at chess twice in a row.

  “I haven’t paid much attention.” Ingersol was getting annoyed at Moise knocking the United States and harping on fat people.

  I was getting tired of being in the middle of it. The summer was getting too long. So were the days.

  “Let’s go find out,” I offered. “Let’s go on a road trip. Moise needs to see more of the United States than just Washington County, Arkansas.”

  “Fantastic idea,” Ingersol said. “We can take my car. I just had the oil changed. Where should we go?”

  “I’ll get the map.” I ran out to the car and brought back a map of the south central United States. It only took a few minutes to choose a destination. New Orleans, of course. Where else would you take a Frenchman?

  So the next thing you know Moise and Ingersol and I are going to New Orleans to visit my mother’s aunt. She’s this very wealthy lady who never had any children of her own. All she ever had was a husband who was a drunkard and one of the heirs to the Coca-Cola fortune. My mother visited there when she was a child and she had taken me several times when I was small. I could remember it but not very vividly. Mostly I remembered the beignets, which are these little fried doughnuts you get in the French Quarter.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be a good guide,” I said. “I wasn’t old enough to drive when I was there and Aunt Betty is eighty-six years old. She won’t be any help.”

  “I’ll know what to do,” Ingersol said. “My mother went to Tulane. I’ve been down there with her. I know how to get around.” He got this very Ingersol look about him, like he had given away more than he had meant to at that moment. To tell the truth, I know almost nothing about Ingersol’s dead mother. This Tulane remark was one of the few autobiographical details he had ever given me. I looked at him with renewed respect for his ability to keep quiet about things that bother him.

  You see, I have this theory about how we all live in two different worlds. The world of everyday consciousness, ruled by the cerebral cortex, which is the newest part of the brain, and the world of dreams and fears and secrets, which is the old part of the brain and the one that is really in control. It has to be. It’s the part that smells and sees and reacts like a frightened, hairless animal, which is what we are. At night when we dream we sort out our fears and try to conquer them with images from the conscious world. The older and smarter and more in control we become, the more we can bring huge fields of data into play to control our dreams and fears. But the same old images keep cropping up. Water, water, everywhere. Because we were probably aquatic at some point in our evolution. Not to mention floating in the watery depths of the womb. We are like inlaid wood. The top all shiny and polished and perfected. Underneath, layers of wariness and trembling. Terror. And why wouldn’t we be terrified, since we are definitely going to die?

  My father says that is why we have children. To assuage our fears of death, but I have other plans for myself. I plan to feed my mind so much information and all the newest data from every science that I will overcome my fears of being mortal and just think, that’s how it is and this is where I am and so what. Then I won’t be afraid to face the darkness without bringing some more people in to face it.

  I’m not sure why my parents agreed to let us drive to New Orleans but they did. I guess Mother was sick of having us around. All Dad did was give us some money and sit us down for the lecture. He had all of us in the room but it was Ingersol who was being addressed.

  “You have to drive the speed limit. You have to promise not to drink. You have to protect her with your life.” Ingersol looked him in the eye and promised. My father adores Ingersol. Ingersol was the first teenager ever allowed to drive me somewhere in a car.

  So the deal was cut and the last week Moise was in the United States was spent driving six hundred miles from the central United States to the swamps of New Orleans. And being there. And coming back.

  We left at dawn on a Monday. Ingersol arrived at our house at five-thirty and Moise and I threw our bags into the back of the old Nissan Pathfinder and Ingersol started driving. He had a thermos of coffee and some paper cups and a lunch his father had packed. He had a portable CD player and a box of CDs. He had a portable chess set. He was wearing the khaki shorts I helped him pick out at the Gap and one of the stupid baseball caps he still collects even though he is seventeen years old.

  We drove up Highway 71, which is the most dangerous road in America. We drove across the new bypass that takes you down to Alma and points you east. We drove across the state of Arkansas and crossed the Mississippi River and drove through the cotton fields to Jackson, Mississippi, and down to Hattiesburg. We drove seventy-five most of the way and only stopped three times. Twice to go to the bathroom and once to get some coffee at a McDonald’s in the Delta. We were on a road trip and a mission. I kept getting out the map and showing Moise where he was and he kept commenting on the size of everything and how much land there was.

  We drove into New Orleans over the Bonnet Carré spillway and went straight to the French Quarter and walked around and had café au lait and beignets before we went to my aunt’s. We had to kill some time so they wouldn’t know how fast we had driven getting there.

  It was eight o’clock at night when we drove down Saint Charles Avenue and turned onto Audubon Boulevard and came to a stop before my aunt’s huge stone pa
lace that looks more like a library than a house and is about as comfortable as one. She was standing on the porch with her cane and her nurse and a tall black man in a dark suit. “Where are we?” Ingersol laughed. “Is this a movie set?”

  We went up the stairs and were greeted and questioned and told to call our mothers. Then we went inside and about three servants came out of different doors and took us up a flight of stairs to our rooms.

  Then we had dinner with Aunt Betty. It was cold potato soup so good you could never forget it. Then some roast beef that was overdone and little fried potatoes and asparagus and carrots and flan and coffee for dessert. Aunt Betty was asleep most of the time so we talked to the servants and each other. Then she kissed us good night and was taken off to bed.

  “Back to the French Quarter?” Ingersol asked.

  “Why not?” I answered. “Let’s go see what’s happening.”

  Not much was happening down there. Mostly it looked like a lot of old people getting drunk and trying to act like they knew how to dance. Moise was really grossed out and Ingersol kept worrying about something happening to his car. In the end we just went back to the Café du Monde and had some more beignets and then walked up these concrete stairs to the top of the levee and watched barges going down the river. Then we went back to Aunt Betty’s and went to bed and slept until ten the next morning.

  We ate breakfast and talked to Aunt Betty and the black man, Al, who turned out to be a professor at some special school for gifted young musicians. He had been born in the house and had gone away when his mother died of sickle cell anemia. He doesn’t have it, though. So when he came back to New Orleans to teach he went to pay a call on Aunt Betty and she asked him to live in the house and protect her. So they have this thing going that is sort of hard to understand. His mother was the maid but she was also this very close friend of Aunt Betty’s because they both had a child die of pneumonia the same year. This was all a long time ago when people died suddenly of all sorts of things, especially down there with all those mosquitoes. It explains the cemeteries. The whole town of New Orleans is filled with these morbid cemeteries with the tombs on top instead of in the earth because when it floods the caskets would just get up and start floating and that grossed everybody out, not to mention being a health problem.

  So Al invited us to go over to the musicians’ high school with him and listen to the kids practice but we told him we had enough school in the winter and would just go on out and explore the town.

  It is so hot in New Orleans in the summer that it takes a day or two to get adjusted to the heat and start moving. Like that morning. It was one o’clock before we even left the house and walked on down to Saint Charles Avenue to catch the streetcar and do some sightseeing.

  We got on the streetcar in front of Tulane and rode on down to the Garden District. The live oak trees make a green canopy above the streetcar track and we were going by mansion after mansion and stopping on every corner to pick up passengers and let them off. Al had made us a map of how to get to the Lafayette Cemetery and the Garden District Book Shop.

  The people getting on and off the streetcar were really good-looking people. Some were students from Tulane and some were housewives and some were black and some were white and one or two were oriental but they were all good-looking.

  “Not as fat as in Fayetteville,” Moise commented, and Ingersol gave me this look that said, Imagine, out of all this he still can’t do anything but judge other people’s bodies. It was at that moment, with the wind blowing his hair back from his face and his hand hanging out the window and his big blue eyes so sweet, that I realized Ingersol was the boy I loved. Even if I had known him since the first grade and there wasn’t a single bit of mystery to stir the pot except not knowing how he felt about his mother being dead, it was Ingersol and no other. How could I have been so blind? We were the editors of the literary magazine, for Christ’s sake. What does that tell you about who there is to talk to?

  I got up from where I was sitting by Moise and went back to Ingersol and sat by him and put my hand on his knee. “I love you, Ingersol,” I said. “You are the best friend I ever had in my life.”

  I looked out the window of the streetcar and had this Zen moment, this total realization of where I was and what I was doing. How often does that happen? I actually knew how fortunate I was. I was on a streetcar in New Orleans, Louisiana, with two really good-looking boys. One a Frenchman and one who will probably be the governor of Arkansas or a senator or the next Bill Gates. Me, Aurora Harris, who was passed over in a cheerleader election so corrupt it puts nature to shame. Not natural selection, not the survival of the strongest or the fittest, but the election of the skinniest, the girls who suck up the most to the teachers and the ones who have been impoverishing their families the longest by taking dance and gymnastics classes. It was a system for which my parents were not prepared since they are intellectuals and had me studying Latin with old Mr. Sykes on the afternoons when I should have been in gymnastics classes if only I had known that was the secret to happiness at Donovan Junior High School. I used to hate my parents for not preparing me for cheerleader tryouts. Then I came to understand they didn’t know what was coming. My little sister gets the classes. You can book that. She doesn’t even want the kind of popularity being cheerleader assures but she is being hauled down to Kim Lee’s dance studio three afternoons a week just in case she changes her mind.

  I changed my mind that afternoon on the streetcar. Whatever chain of events, deep sadnesses, mistakes, or chance wonders had led me to be heading for the Lafayette Cemetery with my hand on Ingersol’s knee and Moise in the seat in front was okay by me. I think I’m going to keep on being lucky now that it’s started rolling. I think I’m in.

  Ingersol started doing his head around like an Egyptian dancer, a sign he was getting nervous about my hand on his knee, so I slid it off and we started doing a riff on my dad’s making us promise not to have a drink. We were going to keep our promise. We just thought it was funny that he drinks three martinis before supper every night, then has the gall to lecture us about alcohol.

  “After we see the cemetery let’s go back down to the French Quarter and get one last plate of those beignets,” Ingersol said. “I woke up thinking about those things.”

  “Fine with me,” I agreed. “I think I could live on them, to tell the truth.” I didn’t actually put my hand back on his knee but I moved it down his arm on its way to my jacket pocket.

  Another thing about Ingersol you should know is that he is one of the few boys I have ever known who likes sugar as much as I do. He likes coffee Häagen-Dazs as much as anyone I have ever known. His paternal grandmother, not the born-again one but his father’s mother who lives by the university, keeps coffee Häagen-Dazs in her freezer and anytime we go over there to clean her windows or rake up her maple leaves or any of the jobs I have helped him do when we want money for CDs, we finish up our work and then sit on the porch and eat all the ice cream in her freezer. She just sits in a swing and watches us eat it. She’d go down to the store and get some more if we’d let her. She worships Ingersol but she thinks she should teach him how to work before she gives him money so we clean a few windows or rake up half the leaves under a tree, then we eat her ice cream and get paid twenty or thirty dollars. Thinking it over I’m ashamed of how we never finish anything we start over there. The next time she wants us to work, I am going to do a better job.

  I was looking out the window thinking about how much nicer I was going to start being to everyone in the world, starting with old Mrs. Manning, when Moise stood up and said, “This is it. Washington Avenue, that’s where he said to get off.”

  We jumped off the streetcar and started across Saint Charles into the Garden District. Talk about mansions. This is like some sort of Disney World of mansions. But it’s peaceful and it’s beautiful and we walked along, Moise in front, Ingersol by me, crowding me off the sidewalk with his long arms but not meaning to, and then we crossed Pr
ytania Street and there it was, the most ghoulish cemetery you could dream up in a million years, with graves stacked on graves in a wall. I mean that place is full of the skeletons of dead people. This was not my idea of excitement. I have enough problems with the idea of dying without going around acting like I think a lot of graves is a place to sightsee.

  Moise loved it. It reminded him of France, he said, and we went on through the gates and began to walk around. Ingersol and I walked on alone back to the back of the cemetery because Moise was stopping and reading every inscription and even opened this little peephole to look inside and see a photograph of the dead person.

  I started menstruating. Wouldn’t you know it? Isn’t that just the way things happen? I had felt this quirky little pain when we got off the streetcar and about the time we reached the back wall of the cemetery I felt my pants getting wet. I was wearing cut-off blue jeans. This was not something that could be stalled.

  “I started menstruating,” I said. I sat down on a tomb and looked up at Ingersol and knew this was a test of friendship and of love. “I’ll be goddamned if I didn’t just start.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, moving closer.

  “How do I know? Because blood is getting on my underpants. I can feel it. Listen, you don’t have a handkerchief or something, do you?”

  “I think I do.” He produced a clean folded white handkerchief out of his back pocket and handed it to me and I went behind a tomb and stuffed it in my underpants and then I walked back out.

  “You are an angel,” I said. “I’m lucky to get to live in a world with you. Okay, let’s go over there to that restaurant across the street and see if they have a bathroom I can use. This handkerchief is great but it won’t last all day.”