A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (12 page)

Sarah is in the bed under the covers in the shape I will always identify. Her form is identifiable. “The hospital called,” she says. She’s awake. I button my pajamas and don’t answer. I don’t want to get started. I don’t want to get started on Harold and go over the whole thing. I climb heavily into bed. “Delores called from the hospital.” I weigh nine hundred pounds; sleep is coming up around my eyes like warm water. “Delores called from the hospital. She said Harold is going to be all right.”

I float in the bed by my wife Sarah’s side. I know she is going to go on. “I made reservations for Palo Alto, for Derec’s show. We’re going next Thursday, so get the time off. You want to go, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.” Sleep rises in me like sweet smoke. It is late here in Cooper. It kind of feels late everywhere. Maybe it is just late for me. My son Derec. We’re going to Palo Alto, California. We’re going to fly out there.

MILK

T
HEY ALMOST
fingerprint the children before I can stop them. Phyllis is making a rare personal appearance in my office to help me with a motorcycle injury claim, and I want to squeeze every minute out of her, and I’m taking no calls. We all call Phyllis “The Queen of Wrongful Death,” which is the truest nickname in the firm. She likes being a hard case, and she’s lording it over me a bit this morning, rereading a lot of the stuff that I’d summarized for her, when Tim buzzes and says Annie’s on the line.

I almost wave it off. She probably wants to meet for lunch and today there’s going to be no lunch, because I want to get this motorcycle case buttoned up so we can take the twins on a picnic this weekend. Now that they can walk, our house is getting real small. But it’s not lunch. Annie’s voice is down a note or two, stern, as she says she and my mother are going to take the boys down to Community Fuel, where there is another fingerprint program today. I listen to Annie tell the story and watch Phyllis frowning through the file. My mother read about the program in the paper and with so many children abducted and missing, etc. etc. etc. Annie closes with
I know what you think, but this is something we should do for your mother’s sake.

I don’t say anything.

“Jim?” Annie says.

“Ann. You said it. You know what I think.
No way.
Not the twins. Not for my mother. Not for anybody.”

“She’s coming over to get us in half an hour.”

“Ann,” I say again. “Take her to lunch, but do not fingerprint the boys. Okay? Under no circumstances. That’s all.”

“It’s no big deal . . .”

“Tell my mother that.”

“I’m going to tell your mother that you’re terrified and unable at this time to do the right thing.”

When I hang up, Phyllis looks up. At thirty-four she wears those imperious half glasses, which, in a drunken moment at the firm barbeque last summer, she admitted to me are just part of her costume, “dress to win”; and I admit now that they intimidate me.

“Fingerprints?” she says. “Are the twins being booked?”

“It’s that I.D. program at Community Fuel. My mother wants to take the kids.”

“And . . . ?”

“My kids are not being fingerprinted. I’m not caving in to this raging paranoia. It’s a better world than people think.”

Phyllis takes off her awful glasses and lets them drop on their necklace against her breast. “And you’re not scared in the least, are you?”

WHEN I
come home from work, Lee and Bobby laugh their heads off. It has become my favorite part of the day. I peek into the kitchen and say, “Oh-oh!” and they amble in stiffly in their tiny overalls, arms up for balance. They start: “Oh-oh!” as I pick them up and they laugh and laugh as we do our entire repertoire of sounds:
Dadda, Momma, Baby,
and the eleven or twelve other syllables, as well as a good portion of growling, humming, meowing, mooing, and buzzing. When I whistle softly through my teeth, they hug me hard to make me stop.

They are fraternal twins. Bobby has a lot of hair and a full face. Lee, though he probably weighs the same, twenty-two pounds, seems slighter, more fragile. Ironically, Bobby cries more and easier. They can lie on a blanket with fists full of each other’s hair, and only Bobby will fuss. They each have four and a half teeth and they call each other the same name:
Baby.

Tonight I lift them up and the laughing intensifies as I tote them into the living room where Annie is picking up the blanket and toys.

She starts right in: “Well, boys, it’s Daddy, the Rulemaker.”

“Annie . . .”

“The lawgiver.” She holds the bundle in her arms and stands to face me. She goes on in a gruff voice: “
No fingerprints. Not in this house! Not for anybody!
”

Bobby and Lee think this is wonderful and they laugh again. Each has a good hold on my hair and their laughing pulls my scalp in two directions. Annie comes right up to the boys and makes a mock frown, her nose against mine. She growls.
“Not even for my mother!”
She kisses me quickly and disappears into the boys’ room. The boys snap around to watch her and the hair pulling brings tears to my eyes.

Annie’s got me. We’ve been married nine years, and it’s been a good marriage. We’ve grown up together really, and only since the boys have arrived have I started with this rule stuff. Annie and I used to go crazy after visiting our friends Stuart and Ruth and their kids. Everything was rules.
No baseball in the backyard. No jackets in the basement. No magazines in the kitchen. No loud talking in the hall. No snacks during homework.
We promised then never to post rules. Driving home from their house, Annie and I would make up rules and laugh until we’d have to pull over.
No hairdryers in the bathtub. No looking out the window while someone is talking to you. No peeking at the answers to the crossword puzzle. No shirt, no shoes, no service.
And Annie even gave Ruth one of our ridiculous lists, typed up as a joke (their lists were typed and posted on the refrigerator door), but Ruth did not think it was that funny. She said, “Wait until you have kids.”

And now I have both kids in my arms when Annie comes back into the room. “Call your mother,” she says, taking Lee from me and putting him in his high chair. “She wants to know why you’re not looking out for the best interest of your children. Put Bobby in his chair before you call, okay?”

WE'VE BEEN
through this all before, but I can see this week is going to be worse. I watched the news programs on television and saw the troops of children being fingerprinted. I made it clear from the beginning that we did not want to do that. Annie watched my opposition grow over the weeks, realizing that this was probably the biggest disagreement in our marriage.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’re a lawyer, for Petes’ sakes. You like things nailed down. What’s the problem?”

But she said it as: what’s
your
problem? I watched the children, many babies, being fingerprinted. I couldn’t express what my problem was.

And my mother wanted to know why, in light of all the missing children and the recent abductions, why wouldn’t I do it
for their sake.

“Because,” I had explained to her at last, at the end of my patience: “Because the only use those prints will ever have is in identifying
a body,
okay?
Do you see?
They use them to identify the body. And my children will not need fingerprints,
because nothing is going to happen to my children.
Is that clear?” I had almost yelled at my mother. “We don’t need fingerprints!”

Then my mother would be hurt for a few days and then silent for a few days, and then there’d be another news story and we’d do it all again.

Annie tried to intervene. “Stop being a jerk. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to hurt the boys. They’ll forget it. Your mother would feel better.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I don’t know how many times we had some version of that conversation, but I do know that once I took Annie’s wrist and raged through the house like the sorry creature I can be at times, pointing to the low surfaces, “Because, we’ve got fingerprints! Look!” I made her look at the entryway door and the thousand hands printed there, at the car windows, and the front of the fridge, and finally the television, where a vivid hand printed in rice cereal made Tom Brokaw on the evening news look like he was growing a beard. “We have fingerprints. And I love these fingerprints. We don’t need any others.”

All Annie said was, “Can I have this now?” She indicated her arm. I let her go. She shook her head at me and went in to check on the boys.

AND THERE
was the milk.

I wanted Annie to change milk. We had been getting the Hilltop green half-gallon cartons. Then they started putting children on the back panels, missing children. Under the bold heading, MISSING, would be two green and white photographs of the children, their statistics printed underneath: date of birth; age; height; eyes; hair; weight; date missing; from. . . . The photographs themselves assumed a lurid, tabloid quality, and everytime I opened the fridge they scared me. I’d already seen ads for missing children on a weekly mailer we receive which offers—on the flip side—discount coupons for curtain and rug cleaning, optical services, and fast food, primarily chicken. And in Roy’s Drug one night I dropped the Archie comic I was going to buy for the boys (to keep them from ripping up our art books), when I saw two missing children inside the front cover. It was all getting to me.

One night late, I went into Smith’s Food King and turned all the Hilltop milk to the back panel so sixty children stared out from the dairy case. I started it as a statement of some kind, but when I stepped back across the aisle and saw their group sadness, all those green and white poor resolution smiles, wan even in the bright Food King light, I lost my breath. I fled the store and sulked home and asked Annie if we could buy another brand.

When I told her why, when I told her about the two kids taking a little starch out of the world for me when I opened the refrigerator at two
A.M.
to grab Bobby a bottle, those nights when he still fusses, Annie just said
No.

TONIGHT AFTER
I have the fifteenth version of my fingerprint call with my mother, I am out of tolerance, reason, generosity, and any of their relatives. I never swear in the company of my mother, and as I sit down in the kitchen and watch Annie spoon the boys their macaroni and strained beef, I think perhaps I should. I might not have this knot in my neck. There on the table is the Hilltop milk with somebody’s picture on the back.

I don’t know why, but I start: “Annie, I don’t want this milk in the house.”

She’s cool. “And is there a reason for that, oh powerful Rulemaker?”

“I’ve told you the reason. I’m not interested in being depressed or in having my children frightened by faces of lost souls in the refrigerator.”

Annie says nothing. She spoons the macaroni into Bobby’s open mouth. After each mouthful, he goes: “mmmmnnnnn!” and laughs. It’s something I taught the boys with Milupa and bananas, but Lee’s version is softer, almost a sigh of satisfaction.

“What is the point? There is no point in publishing these lurid photographs.”

“They’re not lurid.”

“What’s the point? I am supposed to study the carton, cruise the city, stop every child walking home from school:
is he missing? would he like to go home now?
Really, what? I see some girl playing tennis against the practice wall in Liberty Park, am I supposed to match her with my carton collection of missing children?” I’ve raised my voice a little, I can tell, because Annie looks narrow-eyed, stony.

She hands me the spoon for Lee, who is smiling at me for yelling. Annie rises and takes the milk and puts it in the refrigerator. “Missing children don’t get to play tennis,” she says quietly, wiping Bobby up and putting him on the floor. Bobby goes immediately to the one cupboard I haven’t safety clipped, opens it, and pulls a large bottle of olives onto his foot.

He watches the bottle roll across the floor and when it stops against the stove, he looks up into my face with his beautiful face and he starts to cry.

“Bobby’s first,” Annie says, plucking him from the floor. “Bobby’s first in bed tonight!”

When she carts Bobby off, I let Lee out of his chair. I hand him his bottle out of the fridge and he takes it with both hands as if it were an award. He starts to walk off, then realizes, I guess, that Mom isn’t here and he doesn’t really know where to go. So, he looks up at me, a child who resembles an angel so much it is troubling. Then Annie is behind him, lifting him away, and I am left alone in the kitchen.

I wipe up the chairs and the floor and cap the macaroni and strained beef, but when I put them away, I see that green Hilltop milk carton.

“You want to close the fridge?” Annie is behind me.

“No, look. Look at this.”

“Close the fridge door.”

“Look!” I point at the child, his green and white photograph so grim in the bright light of the fridge.

I take one carton of milk out and close the fridge. I read aloud: “MISSING: Name: Richard Tarrel. D.O.B.: 10/21/82. Age: 4. Height: 2 feet 8 inches. Eyes: blue. Hair: light brown. Weight: 27 pounds. Date missing: 6/24/86. From: Omaha. . . .” I mean to make a point by reading it, but the
twenty-seven pounds
gets me a little, and by the time I read
Omaha,
I stop and sit down and look across at Annie. She looks like she is going to cry. She looks a lot like I have made her cry again.

She firms her mouth once and shakes her head as she stands up to leave the room. “Nebraska,” she whispers. “Omaha, Nebraska.”

I SIT AT
the kitchen table listening to Bobby and Lee murmuring toward sleep in their room, and I look at little twenty-seven-pound Richard Tarrel. Even in the poor quality photograph, he is beautiful, his eyes huge and dark, his lips pouted in a coy James Dean smile. There is no background in the photo, but I’ve been to Omaha. I can imagine the backyard somewhere out near 92nd Street, the swingset, the young peach tree Richard’s father planted this summer, after the man at the nursery told him that though it was small, there would be peaches next fall.