Some Things About Flying (7 page)

Later she thought, tuning out the minister's rambling, beaming eulogy at the funeral, by which time she'd become much calmer, more removed, that probably her mother had finally burst from compressing too strenuously her true thoughts and emotions. “Dead of repression” crossed Lila's mind as an epitaph. She heard herself laugh, quickly covered the sound with a cough. Even a sob; she wasn't proud at that point.

Sheila the flight attendant rushes past, fighting her way to the front past harsh frightened voices and flailing limbs, not stopping for anyone. Her blouse is untucked at one side, her dark hair is no longer quite smooth. Seeing her eyes might tell them something: whether she is scared and doomed, or only determined to get someplace.

She is past before Lila can get a glimpse of her eyes. Anyway, people both show and conceal feelings in different ways, and unless Sheila is actually panicking, it would be hard to define her emotions on such flimsy acquaintance.

If there is a good time for either repressing or concealing rampant emotion, this must be it.

Still, Lila can't believe that things like this happen. People like her don't die; not this way. They die the way her mother did: plainly and privately.

Lila and Don and his recent second wife, Anne, saw the family lawyer, chose and sorted possessions, arranged to put the house up for sale. Don took the television set and the dining-room furniture. Lila took the pink-and-gold-flower-rimmed china her grandmother had passed on to her mother. “That's all you want?” Don asked.

“I think so.” Certainly not the embroidery hoops with which her mother stitched pillowcases for the poor or newly married, or the wicker baskets she packed with soups, breads and casseroles for the sick, bereaved or hungry.

An astonishing number of people turned up for the funeral. “She was always so kind,” people said, touching Don's black elbow, embracing Lila's black shoulders. “She was a very good woman, your mother.”

And so she was. Lila, who has not followed her example, will have many fewer people, with many fewer benevolent memories, at her own funeral. Which may be dreadfully, surprisingly soon. Oh please, she thinks again. I'll do better. I'll be better.

Back home, when Geoff asked about the funeral and its attendant events and characters, she found herself looking at his hands resting with apparent concern on hers. “It's too late and too little, just to describe it,” she said. “Too many feelings in a short time. I think it's like a bad joke—you had to be there.”

She thought, Those stumpy, porky fingers, I've had them on my body, how could I? And think where else they've been.

There are moments when the eye, or something, is caught, turns over, and everything changes.

“Geoff,” she began carefully, “I know you save lives, and have a lot of demands and a lot of people wanting your attention.” She wondered what the word was for his expression—preening, she thought finally. He found this flattering, and looked like a plumpish, proud—oh, she didn't know quite what, but some creature that preened. Not a parrot, exactly; a parrot's features were sharp.

“And that's very nice for you, and well deserved, but it's not, as it turns out, very compatible with love. Or with care, for that matter.”

She thought that was clear, but apparently not.

“What are you saying? I don't understand what you're talking about.”

“I'm saying it isn't a matter of fault, but I'm tired, my mother's dead, I have no more room for generosity, or even understanding, and I'm done.”

“With us?” He still wasn't getting it. “With me?”

“You sound astonished.”

“But no warning? That's not fair. To come out of the blue, springing this on me.”

“Oh, Geoff, there's been plenty of warning. You just haven't heard it.” He had many virtues, not all of them public ones: energy, focus, desire, intensity. And love, he said. But he had also been deaf, it turned out.

“Lila, be reasonable! I thought you were better than that. This is what I went through with my wife, for god's sake. I never expected to go through it with you.” His finest shot, a comparison with the odious, frivolous, uncomprehending wife.

At least Tom has never done that. Rather the reverse, in fact, and just as upsetting.

“I've done the best I could,” Geoff said, and no doubt from his perspective he had. He looked as if he wanted to shake her, or strike her. Had he ever hit his long-gone wife with those ham fists?

He is still giving speeches and doing good work. She still reads his name in the papers, his story continues. Just over a year later—a pleasant, unstrenuous period Lila spent mainly teaching, reading, researching, and playing with Patsy and Nell, going to movies and plays and bars, telling secrets and sorrows and jokes—she met Tom, another good man with much of his attention elsewhere.

These percentages and decimals and tiny increments of love are hard to calculate. Hard, as in both difficult and wrenching. Lila has certainly had much delight from the ways words wander off in different directions.

How do some people stick in one life when even a word can have so many existences? Lila expects that, absorbed in stories of various real and fictional sorts, she has fallen easily into the idea of alteration and flux: that a multiplicity of characters in a multiplicity of situations must have a multiplicity of responses.

That makes today especially unpredictable and volatile. Except for Tom, these are strangers, and at that, who knows about him? Or herself? There's no real telling what the two of them contain, never mind anyone else.

How long has she managed to avoid pictures of what's happening and how they are doing? It feels like forever. If it's even been quite a while, that must be a good, hopeful sign. But it may be a matter of seconds. The mind flies in a crisis. Is time flying?

Is the plane? Well, she does have to laugh.

And again that offends Tom, although she can't see why, it's not aimed at him. “Lila!” His voice slices through the buzzing and din. His fingers, shockingly, burn on her face. “Stop it! You mustn't.”

She stares at him, surprised not by pain, but because she never dreamed Tom had it in him to strike her. One way or another, sometimes deliberately, generally not, he has now and then caused her grief, but she has never had a moment of fear he would turn on her that way. Stupid, surely, to start now. How could he imagine frightening her, or punishing her? What does he suppose he could do?

“I'm sorry, Lila, but we have to keep our heads.” What on earth for, when they may lose everything else? She keeps that tiny joke inside.

What's wrong with her? Because he's right, this is awful, not funny. “What's the matter with you?” he asks, and it's a very good question, as well as an amazingly stupid one.

“I'm just not very good at reality, I guess.” It's hard to keep her eyes from dancing. Her grandmother used to say, telling Aunt June some event, “I don't know whether to laugh or cry.”

Lila is tempted to tell him, “Really, it's one of my gifts, not facing facts very well, and aren't you lucky.” Nobody good with facts, for heaven's sake, would spend precious time with a person with firm attachments elsewhere. Only someone with barely an acquaintance with reality would tempt fate with a two-week trip to another country with such a person. What does he think?

One thing she does know something about is fate. She teaches whole lectures on it, as it unfolds in various stories and plays, here and there, over time. She can point to many examples, beautiful words for fate's sad victims.

No doubt the concept runs contrary to the views of a historian. And for a politician, hope, not fate, must be the carrot dangling just ahead.

One thing about fate is that it's a very grand concept. A huge idea to fit oversized characters. Far too big to apply to someone like her. Or to Tom, for that matter. There must be someone else on this plane great enough to warrant fate.

Or maybe it's a cumulative thing, and this is a whole planeload of ordinary people who've been tempting fate in smallish ways, being brought down together. How efficient.

Nobody good with facts would have spent her career fiddling about with ideas and stories whose reality, unlike Tom's, was only in the mind.

She notices her own past tense. As a teacher, she knows that is a significant alteration in style.

She's so goddamned cold. This can't be happening. There is nothing she can think about, or do, that can make this not be happening.

“Look,” says Tom, touching her arm. Yes, there's Sheila, she's made it to the front of their set of rows in this frenzied cabin, and she's standing on something, a seat, waving her arms in broad sweeps like one of those ground crew people guiding a plane to a halt at an airport terminal. In night landings, Lila recalls, there are lights at the ends of those wide, sweeping arms.

And there are terminals. Ground. Warmth and lights. Long waits at customs and at luggage carousels. The slightly odd, stiff feeling of legs moving, feet touching, after so long in the air. The small disorientation of being in one place after so recently being elsewhere.

Barely imaginable. Infinitely desirable.

Not everyone is quick to abandon panic. How ungainly and inelegant people become when they're frightened—where exactly do they think they can scramble to, with everyone sealed up in this soup can? What do they think would happen if they did get out? Are they in such a hurry for that dark, frozen instant? It's a few moments before Sheila, and presumably the other attendants elsewhere, gain some silence and order. Sheila looks, to Lila's eye, scared but holding on. No doubt flight attendants are trained in crisis and control; but the classroom, as Lila well knows herself, isn't preparation for much of anything beyond more classrooms.

If Sheila is scared, must this not be real?

Susie is sobbing, that's one of the remaining sounds. Her mother is stroking her hair and rocking her but looks inattentive, staring blankly ahead. Can Susie tell that her mother isn't quite with her? Does she know there are limits to her protection?

Even so, it would be nice to curl up in protecting arms. Tom's arms would be nice. Ideally, they could cradle each other.

“I'm scared,” Susie is wailing. “Make it stop.” She speaks, no doubt, for everyone, but Lila wishes she'd be quiet. Some things, it's too much, hearing them said out loud.

“Please,” Sheila is calling out, in a carefully non-panicky way. “May I have your attention, please. Could everyone take your seats, please, and listen.”

How polite, all those pleases. What a nice child Sheila must have been, so well brought up by, Lila imagines, doting, careful parents. Did they, unlike Tom, want their daughter to be a flight attendant, or would they have preferred law or medicine or motherhood? Were they disappointed by her choice, or proud? How sad they will be to have trained their daughter to such responsible politeness, and to have it come to this.

So many people don't hear authority in the voices of nice women. Would it help if Lila stood up and shouted, “Everybody, shut fucking up”? Lila had a fairly dainty upbringing herself, but has overcome it.

Still, Sheila's labours have their effect. Most people, both eager and fearful for word, do settle well enough. Lila's hands tremble and Tom takes one of them, it hardly matters whether to comfort or be comforted himself.

Everyone is looking at Sheila, but the voice, when it comes, is not hers. Nor is it the thin voice of the pilot that they heard after takeoff. What's happened to him, is he just very busy?

No, this voice is deep, soothing and calm. Disembodied. Like God beginning to speak all around them.

Well, whoever is up there in the cockpit will have to be pretty god-like, that's for sure. All those hands will need to be terribly adept, their brains unclouded and sharp. They will require a keen sense of reality indeed. Lila is glad she hasn't met or even seen them. It leaves her free to hope and imagine they are much smarter and more powerful and shrewd and rational than anyone she knows.

Anyone who gets them out of this is more than welcome in her living room. They could be her best friends. Anything. She no longer has frivolous criteria, such as affection, for who may enter her house. She just longs to be there herself. Given the chance, she would never leave it again.

“Ladies and gentleman,” the voice is saying, slowly and firmly, “may I have your attention.” Lila notices he doesn't say please. Most people are quiet, and some, like the big man by the emergency exit, even tip their heads towards the sound. Still, there's whimpering and sobbing here and there, and away on the other side of the cabin and off to the back, somebody is crying out, “No, no, no,” over and over. It sounds like an elderly, tremulous, female voice, but might well, in these circumstances, belong to a young, muscular man.

Lila imagines all sorts of appearances boiling away, leaving behind only essences.

“Ladies and gentlemen. This is your co-pilot, Frank McLean, speaking. As you are aware by now, we are experiencing some difficulties.” Difficulties! Does he think they are fools? Still, how would Lila put it, in his place? He can hardly say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we've got a nasty little fire going here, and we're about to plummet ten thousand metres, and if the fall doesn't kill you, the landing certainly will.”