Authors: GINGER STRAND
“I was on the swings when the teacher rang the bell for recess to end. I jumped off my swing at the top of the arc.”
“Had you qualified for ejection seat yet?” someone asks, and there’s a rustle of laughter. Will grins but continues. The story is pressing against him like a river, sweeping him along with its current.
“I fell straight down like a stone. The ground was hard, because it wasn’t raining that summer. It was one of the worst droughts I ever saw. All the crops were dying. Hitting that ground was like hitting a rock. I put my arms out to break my fall, and I broke them. Both arms.” He pauses while the others absorb this. He picks up his drink and feels a rush of pity for himself, for his little-boy self, lying curled like a question mark on the ground. He couldn’t move his fingers.
“The bell was ringing, and everybody else—all the other kids—they just ran inside.” He’s tumbling toward the end of the story. The last sentence is like a waterfall, and he slips over it. “I lay there on the ground,” he says, “for fifteen minutes, until the teacher finally noticed I was gone.”
There’s silence. Will takes a deep breath. He clenches his teeth together, just as he did when he was eight, sure that if he opened them, something unbidden would come bursting forth. An animal howl or a girlish yelp of pain. His fellow pilots look at him. A burst of applause breaks the spell.
“You got it, Will!” Baz shouts.
“Call the barkeep,” Julep says. “You win that one for sure.”
Kit needs to understand that the war’s secret was randomness. That nothing but chance decreed whose plane was in front of the SAM, who got it in the belly with flak, who on the ground got pounded while tending his rice, who survived to man his guns for another day. Training, talent, discipline—they all mattered, but in the end it was about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And yet the pilots still watched every film intently, analyzed the details of each loss, hoping to see what went wrong.
He jinked left when he should have jinked right, sped up when he should have slowed down. I can avoid that mistake. I can stay alive.
The night he won
ad misericordia
, Will walked home to his
hootch. The air was hot and humid, as always. He kicked off his boots and shrugged out of his flight suit. He lay down on his bed in his skivvies and stared at the village on the ceiling.
“Human life is punishment,” he said out loud. The words hung in the heavy air. They weren’t quite right. He turned his head and looked at the picture of his daughter. From his prone position, he could see the picture and the clock but not the door. It was eleven PM. In six hours he’d be up for the morning briefing, to find out where he’d be going that day. He remembers lying still, so as not to disturb the moment. There was one more X on his helmet. He’d made it through one more day.
There’s silence when Will finishes talking. He wonders if Kit is taken aback or if he just doesn’t know what to say.
“How did it end?” the younger man finally asks.
Will shrugs. “The expected,” he says. “I got shot down. Ditched in the Tonkin Gulf and floated there for an hour before a navy boat picked me up. I was lucky. I broke an arm and a leg, that’s all. I always say the war cost me an arm and a leg.”
“And then you wanted to go home.”
Will nods. “And then I wanted to go home.” There’s silence in the car. It fills the air with its presence, as if it were noise or water. Kit looks out the window. Has Will answered the kid’s question?
What drew you back?
That’s what he wants to know. Will can answer, but only with another question.
What drew me forward? That.
“I’m getting off here,” Will says, pulling to the right. “We’ll swing by Meijer so you can pick up that can of paint.”
Crudité platter (vegetables—dip—olives)
Cheese ball (cheeses, horseradish, nuts—crackers)
Crab dip (crackers)
Deviled eggs (garnish with extras—parsley, red peppers, olives?)
Sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese on toast (recipe from
Bon Appétit)
Cucumber rounds with smoked-trout salad
Mixed nuts (use Mexican bowls)
THE LIST IS WRITTEN IN THE ORDER THINGS ARE TO
be made. Carol is working her way through a sink full of washed vegetables, cutting them up for the crudité platter. For now she is putting them in plastic bags. When the buffet is set up at five, she’ll arrange everything on plates. Two dozen eggs are heating up in a large pan of water, the cheeses have been taken out of the fridge so they can soften up for the cheese ball, and all the serving bowls, platters, and crackers are piled on the kitchen table.
The rhythmic but slightly varied nature of her task is soothing. Each vegetable begins in its natural state, then gets transformed to something more regular. Carrots, celery, and red peppers become neat multicolored planks. Zucchinis, cucumbers, and radishes turn into rounds. She bought yellow summer squash instead of green, even though it doesn’t taste as good, because yellow looks better with the other colors, especially the red of the radishes. She focuses on the visual effect as she cuts and stacks the pieces, ignoring the endless question throbbing in her head.
How could he do this to me—again?
The eggs begin to boil, and she steps quickly to the stove to turn the heat down, taking them to a lively simmer. She flips the egg timer stuck to the fridge, then goes back to her cutting board, checking the clock. It’s just after one. Will and Kit should be back from the airport any minute now. Trevor is safe in the basement, watching a video. Upstairs, Margaret is doing Leanne’s nails. There’s a lot to finish, but for now Carol is content to have the kitchen to herself. She doesn’t feel like chatting or listening to Margaret explain how to cut a carrot more evenly or describe a fancier way to garnish a cucumber round. She has her own routine.
How could he do it again?
She could throw parties in Hong Kong. She grapples a red pepper under her knife, slicing it across the equator, and allows a vision of life in Hong Kong to form in her head. She’s heard about it from other pilots’ wives. It’s crowded and busy. The harbor is lined with expensive hotels, shops, restaurants. Westerners live in apartment complexes in the hills above the harbor. Down in the city, there are shanties, street people, urchins eating soup from illegal pushcarts and making a living by snatching purses and jewelry from tourists. But pilots and their families live well. They have elegant apartments and hand-tailored clothes. They have drivers and cooks and nannies if they need them—servants come cheap.
“It’s only freight,” Will said, “and I haven’t even made up my mind yet.” But she could see from his face that he had made up his mind, that he would be taking the job and plotting the move to Hong Kong. And he would expect her, once again, to go along.
She has finished all the easy vegetables. Now she takes up her vegetable brush and starts scrubbing radishes. They seem especially dirty. She holds each one under the water and scrubs around the top, near the stem. The brush is made of brittle plastic, and it abrades her fingertips when she accidentally scrubs her own hand. Probably she should cut off the tops before scrubbing them, but she hates to do that. She can’t stand to open a vegetable until all the dirt has been removed from its exterior.
Twenty years ago, ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, she would have been overjoyed. She would have asked when she could pack. That’s what’s so frustrating. Why couldn’t he have planned
something like this when it would have done them some good? Now it can only come as an interruption of her own plans. She suspects that might be the point. An attempt to foil her project, the first project that was going to come to fruition. Picking up a radish and attacking the ring of discoloration at its neck, Carol bites her lip. That’s the foundation of her anger. Will has devised this Cathay Pacific scheme to block her bed-and-breakfast.
But why?
she asks herself, moving her radish from the sink to the cutting board and taking up the knife. It’s not as though there was going to be anything unpleasant about a bed-and-breakfast. It would give Will an excuse to putter around the farm and fix things up—the very thing he loves to do. Yet he has taken every possible excuse to stand in its way; and now, when it was actually going to take off, he has thrown up a giant barrier, stopping her dead in her tracks. It’s as if he hated her plan from the start.
“Damn!” The word is out of her mouth before she realizes what has happened. There’s a sharp feeling—not pain exactly, more of a shuddery recoil—in the tip of her thumb. Instinctively, she puts it in her mouth. On the cutting board, the tiny butt end of the radish rolls to a stop. The knife slipped off the end of it and into her own hand. She waits until the jittery feeling stops, then removes her thumb from her mouth to see how bad it is.
A little flap on the top gapes open. She bends her thumb back farther, and the cut opens more, the mouth of a stubby man getting ready to speak. Blood blooms up from the spongy inside and courses down in little rivulets. Carol puts the tip of her first finger on top of the flap, pushing it back into place. It throbs gently, and she can feel the beat of her heart in it, a tiny drumming.
“Damn,” she says again. She isn’t a swearer, but sometimes it helps. With her good hand, she runs water in the sink and moves the cutting board into it, washing off the splatter of blood. Then she rinses both hands under the stream, still holding the flap down with her index finger, and rubs them as best she can on the dish towel. The Band-Aids are in the bathroom.
Carol sits on the edge of the bathtub to wrap a large Band-Aid
around her thumb, pinning the flap closed. It will slow her down. But at least it’s her left hand. She holds it up and moves the thumb around. Stiff but workable. She can deal with this. The party is in four hours. A minor injury is not going to stop her.
Still, she sits there for a moment, heavily. Why should Will hate her bed-and-breakfast? Why, for that matter, should she want it so much?
“There’s just no reason for it,” she says out loud. She stands up to go back to work. She glimpses a darkness in the mirror, her body moving past, but she looks away.
“You bite your nails.”
Margaret has Leanne’s hand in her own, inspecting it. Her voice is less scolding than surprised.
Leanne looks down at her own hand. “Yeah, it’s ugly,” she says.
“Have you tried one of those polish things that tastes bad?”
Leanne tightens the corners of her mouth. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Those remind me of things you spray on carpets to keep dogs from peeing on them.”
“That would work, too.”
There’s a pause, and then Margaret smiles. It’s not going to be a lecture after all.
“Okay, what do you want to do with them?” Margaret has dropped Leanne’s hand and opened up their mother’s bathroom cabinet. She pulls a bottle of nail polish off the shelf and frowns at it. “God, when did she buy this, 1978?” She unscrews the top and pulls the brush part of the way out. “Ick. It’s completely gunked up.” She closes it with two fingers and tosses it in the garbage. It lands with a shrill metallic thunk. “So what are we doing?”
Leanne holds her hand up next to her face, so she can see the back of it in the mirror. Her hands, she notices, are darker than her face, which is pale. Her forehead seems almost preternaturally white. “I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t care. Whatever you think would look good.” Her eyes wander from her face, down her
neck, to where her T-shirt tightens over her breasts. People always tell her she has a good body. She never knows what she’s supposed to say to that. Sometimes she feels like a stranger in it.
Margaret stands next to her, surveying the cabinet. She’s shorter than Leanne, with larger hips and a clearly defined waist. She’s heavier but seems tighter and more compact. She might be considered pretty, except she always looks so intense. And her style of dressing always seems like a studied attempt to resist being seen as sexy: tailored pants, boxy jackets, understated jewelry. She sticks to a single style that suggests “elegant” and “unavailable” in the same breath. It’s hard to get past that to see anything as ephemeral as beauty in her. Because that’s sort of what beauty is, a lack of clear direction or shape. You can impose whatever you want on it.
“Well, you shouldn’t do anything bright to draw attention to your nails when they’re in that shape,” Margaret tells her. “Let’s just clean them up a bit and put on a nice matte pink.” She rifles through the cabinet, picking up bottles and examining them before putting them back with a decisive clack.
“You don’t have to do this,” Leanne says. “I can do it myself.”
“Yeah, I know,” Margaret answers, her face still in the cabinet. “But this is some kind of fantasy of Mom’s. A moment of sisterly bonding.” She rolls her eyes and holds up two bottles. “Which one do you like best?”
The colors look exactly the same to Leanne. She starts to say so, then stops herself and points to the one on the left. “That one,” she says.
Years ago their father installed a vanity in the master bathroom. Leanne sits on the small gold-painted stool, and Margaret perches on the edge of the vanity surface. She has found an emery board and starts filing Leanne’s nails. Her stroke is regular and brisk, like that of women in nail salons. Leanne had a professional manicure once, at a salon in New York. It had been her friend Julie’s idea for a fun Saturday outing. Leanne didn’t find it fun. She felt weird sitting there, frozen like all the other white girls, while dutiful Asian workers hunched over their hands.
“Do you think Mom and Dad will move to Hong Kong?” Leanne asks.
Margaret snorts, not lifting her gaze from Leanne’s hand. “Not in a million years.”
“Why not?” Leanne is a little surprised at her sister’s certainty, as well as at her scorn. Leanne was always her mother’s baby, but Margaret and Carol would scheme together. They were the ones pushing to remodel the living room, deciding which private school the girls should attend, complaining about the paltry selection at local stores. Margaret absorbed their mother’s dissatisfaction, and then she surpassed it.