The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (11 page)

After the cat had scratched my back, whenever she came anywhere near my head, I would say, “Get away from me, you evil feline scratchy thing.” Then I would open a tin of pull-top tuna I kept just for the kitty in my room. Imagine, I thought! Now I'm preparing meals for a cat! I supposed I would be making her her own goose for Christmas. Christmas!

I suddenly realized that Christmas would be in several weeks and I began to plan for it. Despite the fact that to most people the celebration of Christmas, if it involves anything, involves other people, and I, I must admit, don't
like
other people, I have a deep and abiding affection for Christmas. Every little Dickensian thing about it is splendid. I'm partial to plum puddings and deep Victorian purples and gold angels and Christmas tablecloths with red-and-green plaids and those candelabra where the reindeer antlers hold a dozen votive candles. Give me port and roasting chestnuts and spiced cider and gaily wrapped packages and stockings hung by the chimney with care and girls in velvet dresses and shiny patent leather Mary Janes and Handel's
Messiah
and Christmas carols and church music booming majestically through cathedrals. And bad weather and snuggling by the fire and unwrapping new books and eating too much candy and homemade cookies and old bad movies that I remember vaguely from my youth, since I'd never owned a television myself. I was very fond of all of it. Unfortunately, I never had any of this because you just don't do it when you live alone.

However, keeping one jaundiced eye on the cat that rainy windy November afternoon when the fire was crackling and I watched out the window as Jocelyn and Meline tripped about the island peering into trees and bushes, which seemed to be their daily demented pursuit—you wouldn't catch me out on such a blustery day—it occurred to me that I now had a houseful of people, all of whom, presumably, would be wanting Christmas. Later it was pointed out to me that Mrs. Mendelbaum was Jewish and might prefer Hanukkah. It was the type of detail that often escaped me.

I was unusually happy and excited at the thought that I could finally have a nice old-fashioned Victorian Christmas. I would be indulging not just myself but the entire household. Perhaps my nieces wouldn't want green and red velvet bows attached to their heads, but there was always the cat … Yes, the cat. Perhaps we should get more cats. A … a
flock
of cats. All with velvet bows.

Christmas was the first upside to having a household that I had come across. And, of course, it is so nice to find an upside to
anything,
I always think. So every time I got stuck on the paper I was writing, and I seemed to get stuck quite a lot, perhaps because my mind would keep drifting back to Christmas, I would go on the Internet, which later would prove to be a thing of the Devil, so tempting was it, and order things. “I'll keep old Sam busy,” I said to myself, ordering six velvet stockings, one for the cat (well, she was really an exceptionally
nice
cat), tree decorations, and a box of petits fours. As I really got in gear, the helicopter started dropping packages all over the place constantly, but unfortunately the wind carried many away or they got stuck in trees and rocky crevices and sometimes floated out to sea and were never seen again, and I would think months later, I wonder what happened to that box of popcorn balls I ordered, and where are the snowmen candles?

Meline and Jocelyn found quite a few boxes on their walks and would give them to Humdinger, who delivered them to me, and I would be forced to complain to Humdinger about the stupidity of companies sending me boxes of broken tree ornaments.

“You can't get good help anymore,” agreed Humdinger.

It was becoming perfectly clear that Humdinger was the only person in the house besides myself with any sense. In fact, I really felt quite lucky to have found Humdinger. When I could remember who he was. Unfortunately, I did seem to run up against him in dark hallways quite a bit, and you really couldn't blame me for shrieking. The man does look like he walked straight out of one of those horror movies. What was the name of them, they were all alike, and they all seemed to have Boris Karloff in them somewhere. At any rate, it clearly never bothered him, although the girls seemed to think I might control myself, and you don't want to hear what Mrs. Mendelbaum had to say on the matter; after all, for years I had run into no one in my halls, so I could hardly be blamed for reacting when I seemed suddenly to be transported into
The Night of the Living Dead.
“Anyhow, go on now, keep Mrs. Mendelbaum out of trouble,” I urged him.

“Very good,” said Humdinger and padded back downstairs in his size-twelve Frankenstein shoes, which he nonetheless managed to make soundless.

Who is that man? I thought, already back to work on negative density. Oh, and I must remember to order a dozen crystal punch cups. There was, after all, a great deal to be done in the universe, and matter to be rearranged by ordering it from one place to another via the Internet. Our lives are full, only we never think about it, busy displacing matter from one place to the next, constantly rearranging the order of the cosmos with computers and mailboxes and money and little blips, making contact with people who fill these orders without ever knowing it, changing the shape of their days, changing the shape of warehouses, we are constantly affecting everything around us in the most mundane ways. We are all part of everything that moves, and most of it is so trivial. We think a sand dollar's life is trivial or a fly's, but look at our own. Why, it's all completely ridiculous. Oooo, I wonder if I remembered to order the marzipan fruits? They say there's a limited supply. Order soon. Why don't they just make more? People are extraordinary.

 

MELINE

A
S THE SOGGY DAYS
went on and no airplane parts were found, I could see that Jocelyn was getting discouraged. She traipsed back into the house at 5 a.m. one morning, covered in twigs, and said, “Honestly, Meline, if we don't find an airplane part soon I'm going to stop this. It's too cold and I get too tired.”

“What else are you going to do with your time?” I asked. “What are you saving your energy
for?
We'll just have to look
harder!
”

We didn't speak all day after that. She tired me with her languid negativity. She drooped about. I felt I constantly had to prod her to keep her on track. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that the important thing was to BUILD THE AIRPLANE. And I was certain there were airplane parts out there. After dinner that night, which was silent because Uncle Marten was working on negative density, Humdinger never spoke unless spoken to, and Mrs. Mendelbaum had gone to bed early with a cold, Jocelyn and I had our dessert in the wing chairs by the fire.

Uncle Marten had suggested it as a way of getting rid of us in the oblique way he suggested things, saying, “Dessert together in the wing chairs before the fire. Now, that's what I'd do if I had a cousin and nothing better to do with my time,” and had taken his up to his room, and now we sat there three feet apart but not speaking. I could have put my feet up on her chair, it was that close. I longed to do it if just to exasperate her. How could she sit so close to me and yet pretend so convincingly I wasn't even there? I wasn't looking for any kind of profound connection, but I didn't want her to act like I didn't exist. That was just weird. She ate her rice pudding methodically, and by the expression on her face she could have been sitting in a bus terminal, creating boundaries and fences around herself with the set of her body. You had the sense that if you tried to move in within three feet you would be zapped by invisible force fields.

“Have you noticed there seems to be a lot of new
stuff
around lately?” I asked suddenly, as my eyes moved away from her to the wing chair. “These chairs, for instance.”

“These chairs were always here,” she said calmly, wiping her mouth with the napkin she had brought from the table and placed upon her lap.

“Chairs were always here. These are new. The old ones were black or blue or something. These are cranberry and green and they match all those new candles on the mantel. And look, the bottom of the chairs still have leaves and twigs on them. These chairs have been
dropped
by helicopter.”

“So Uncle Marten got some new chairs. So what?” asked Jocelyn.

“It's part of it all. There's new Christmas crap everywhere.”

“I really wish you wouldn't use that word. My father really disliked it.”

“My father used it all the time. You know, I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that our fathers were brothers.”

“Or that Uncle Marten was brother to either of them,” said Jocelyn.

This was true and opened up a whole new line of speculation for me. “Why do you suppose our fathers became pilots and Uncle Marten didn't?” I asked her. “And don't you think it's
strange,
now that you think of it, that Uncle Marten would move to an island where the chief thing that happened was that pilots crashed their planes there? Doesn't that seem a little
odd
to you when his own brothers were pilots? Doesn't that sound like it might be wishful thinking? Doesn't that say something about him?”

“Like what?” she asked. Sometimes it was like talking to a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

“Well, I don't know. Like maybe he
liked
the idea of pilots crashing.”

“Why would he like that?”

“Well, I don't know, Jocelyn. People like strange things,” I said vaguely because I didn't know either.

“Don't be ridiculous. He already told us he bought the island because it was convenient and for sale. I'm sure the fact that pilots crashed on it was neither here nor there as far as he was concerned.”

“And another thing I'd like to know is why Uncle Marten keeps filling up the house with Christmas crap!”

“There's that word again,” said Jocelyn.

I was suddenly overcome with curiosity for the first time since the accident. And Jocelyn didn't seem to care at all. Sometimes I had the almost irresistible urge to take a crowbar and pry open the closed doors to her brain. “Well,
think
about it, Jocelyn. Why do you
think
he would do such a thing?”

“What are we speaking about now—buying the island or decorating the house?” she asked imperturbably, lifting her teacup off the little side table and taking a sip.

“Take … your … pick!”
I said.

“I dunno,” said Jocelyn, looking into the fire as if it were all the same to her, which I'm sure it was. She looked sad again. She always looked sad or absent or annoyed. But there was never, ever any spark. I wondered if there had been any before the accident. It was hard to like someone who was like a pile of wet logs that never caught fire. Had anyone ever liked her? Had her parents? Perhaps they looked on her as she grew up and
wished
they could like her. I imagined them locking their bedroom door at night and whispering to each other, “Do you like her yet?” “No, do
you?
” “No. Do you think we ever will?” “All our friends seem to like their children.” “At least nominally.” “You're
supposed
to like your children.” “Are we beasts?” “I blame Jocelyn.” “She
did
turn out to be such a wet dishrag, didn't she?” “Let's not let on to anyone that we don't like her.” “God no, then no one will take her off our hands.” “We'll be stuck with her forever.” “Let's pretend she's got some likable qualities.” “And send her to college in Australia.”

I found such thoughts comforting as I sat in the chair sniggering to myself.

“Maybe he's just goofy about the holidays,” suggested Jocelyn, taking another sip of tea languidly, ignoring my sniggers.

“Well, Canadian Thanksgiving came, and you didn't see any turkeys around or Pilgrim decorations.”

“People don't really decorate for Thanksgiving the way they do for Christmas.”

“They hang Indian corn.”

“Oh well. Indian corn.”

“That's not an argument. You can say, ‘Oh well, Indian corn,' about anything. It doesn't mean anything. It just sounds like it does.”

“I mean people don't get excited about Thanksgiving the way they do about Christmas. You don't see year-round Thanksgiving stores like you do Christmas stores. People don't start getting ready for Thanksgiving in July the way they do making things and shopping in July for Christmas. My mother's guild made decorations all year. They had craft fairs in September. Christmas is a bigger holiday because it's baby Jesus' birthday.”

When she said that, “baby Jesus' birthday,” I was afraid that the gulf between us was too huge to bridge and I stared into the fire. Christmas was so full of family tradition, I didn't understand people who wanted to make it all about the baby Jesus. Wasn't your family just as important to you as the baby Jesus? I'm sure he wouldn't have thanked you for it. The last time I looked, the baby Jesus had his own family and traditions, and I don't think one of them was Christmas. My parents never went to church, so I don't know if they believed in Jesus or not. It wasn't a hot topic in our house, and I could tell this was going to be an eyebrow raiser for Jocelyn.

The week before Christmas my mother would make little almond sprinkle cookies which we didn't have the rest of the year and which my mother would, in the spirit of the season, refrain from eating all herself because these were
Christmas
cookies, and my father would insist on getting a live tree that we could plant in the forest again afterward and visit in the summer, although every summer when we returned to the forest to check on our tree it was always dead, and my father always walked away scratching his head, with my mother begging him to save the earth another way and instead have an artificial silver tree. But we always had a live one again in the end. The argument about this became a cherished tradition in itself. We hung felt stockings we had decorated together when I was in kindergarten, and my mother insisted on telling me stories from all the traditions, Jewish and African and Tibetan and Buddhist and Hindu, and I sat patiently waiting for the part about Santa Claus. Christmas was my holiday, and what was sacred about it was my family, and when Jocelyn said “baby Jesus' birthday” like that should be the important part for good people, I wanted to throttle her. It was smug. As if she were part of some big club where all the members were privy to information the rest of us, crying in the wilderness, were not. As if anything were certain. Like her certainty in itself were virtuous. If there was one thing I thought she would have learned by now, it was that you cannot be certain. Baby Jesus had grown up and gotten himself killed. My parents had followed suit. So had Jocelyn's. Christmas was gone. But I didn't say anything. Instead I got up and went to bed. Over the stair railing as I went to my room I saw Humdinger watching Jocelyn from the kitchen doorway and, as I reached my door, pad silently over to her and offer her a mint.