Separate Flights (25 page)

The sun would be coming through the sliding glass doors that opened to the pool and the lawn, those glass doors that one morning when she was twelve she opened and, looking down, saw a small rattlesnake coiled sleeping in the shade on the flagstone inches from her bare feet. As she shut the doors and cried out for her father it raised its head and started to rattle. Her father came running bare-chested in pajama pants; then he went to his room and got a small automatic he kept in his drawer and shot the snake as it slithered across the stones. Sunlight would be coming through those doors now and into the breakfast room and shining on her mother in a bright dress.

‘Fly home tomorrow,' her mother said.

‘Well, I'll be home at Thanksgiving. Michaelis said he'd arrange it for then.'

‘We'd like to see you before
that,
' her mother said.

‘And don't worry,' her father said. ‘You're not the first good kids to get into a little trouble.'

That night she fell asleep listening to her father's deep and soothing voice as it drew her back through October and September, by her long hair (but gently) dragging her into August and the house in Woodland Hills, the pepper trees hanging long over the sidewalks, on summer mornings coffee at the glass table beside the pool and at sixteen (with her father) a cigarette too, though not with her mother until she was seventeen; in the morning she woke to his voice and she heard it on the plane and could not read
Time
or
Holiday
or
Antigone
, and it was his voice she descended through in the night above Los Angeles, although it was Michaelis who waited for her, who embraced her. When they got home and she hugged her father she held him tightly and for a moment she had no volition and wanted none. Just before kissing her mother, Miranda looked at her eyes: they were green and they told her she had been foolish; then Miranda kissed her, held her, and in her own tightening arms she felt again her resolve.

They went to the breakfast room. Before they started talking, Miranda went outside and looked at the pool and lawn in the dark. Fog was settling; tops of trees touched the sky above the bluff. She went in and sat at one end of the table, facing her father and the glass doors behind him. They reflected the room. Her father's neck and bald head were brown from playing golf, his thin moustache clipped, more gray than she had remembered, and there was more gray too (or more than she had seen, thinking of him in Boston) in the short brown hair at the sides of his head. He was drinking brandy. Or he had a snifter of brandy in front of him, but he mostly handled it; he picked it up and put it down; he ran his finger around the rim; he warmed it in his cupped hands but didn't drink; with thumb and fingers he turned it on the table. He was smoking a very thin cigar, and now and then he cheated and inhaled. Her mother sat to his left, at the side of the table; she had pulled her chair close to his end of the table and turned it so she faced Miranda and Michaelis. Her hair had been growing darker for years and she had kept it blonde and long. Her skin was tough and tan, her face lined, weathered, and she wore bracelets that jangled. She was drinking brandy and listening, though she appeared not listening so much as hearing again lines she had played to for a hundred nights, and waiting for her cue. Miranda mostly watched her father, because he was talking, though sometimes she glanced at Michaelis; he was the one she wanted to watch, but she didn't; for she didn't want anyone, not even him, to see how much she was appealing to him. He sat to her left, his chair was pulled toward her so that he faced her parents, and when she looked at him she saw his quiet profile, his dark curly hair, his large hand holding the can of Coors, and his right shoulder, which was turned slightly away from her. She wanted to see his eyes but she did not really need to; for in the way he occupied space, quiet, attentive, nodding, his arms that were so often spread and in motion now close to his chest, she saw and felt what she had seen at the airport: above his jocular mouth the eyes had told her he had not been living well with his fear.

‘—so it's not Mother and me that counts. It's
you
two. We've got to think about what's best for you two.'

‘And the baby,' Miranda said.

‘Come on, sweetheart. That's not a baby. It's just something you're piping blood into.'

‘It's alive; that's why you want me to kill it.'

‘Sweetheart—'

‘Do you
really
want it?' her mother said.

‘Yes.'

‘I don't believe you. You mean you're happy about it? You're
glad
you're pregnant?'

‘I can do it.'

‘You can have a baby, sure,' her father said. ‘But what about Michaelis? Do you know how much studying there is in law school?'

‘I can work,' she said.

‘I thought you were having a baby,' her mother said.

‘I can work.'

‘And hire a Mexican woman to take care of your child.'

‘I can work!'

‘You're being foolish.'

Her father touched her mother's arm.

‘Wait, honey. Listen, sweetheart, I know you can work. That's not the point. The point is, why suffer? Jesus, sweetheart, you're eighteen years old. You've never had to live out there. The hospital and those Goddamn doctors will own you. And you've got to eat once in a while. Michaelis, have another beer.'

Michaelis got up and as he moved behind Miranda's chair she held up her wine glass and he took it. When he came back with his beer and her glass of wine he said: ‘I can do it.'

‘Maybe you shouldn't,' her mother said. ‘Whether you can or not. Maybe it won't be good for Miranda. What are you going to be, pussycat—a dumb little housewife? Your husband will be out in the world, he'll be growing, and all you'll know is diapers and Gerbers. You've got to finish college—' It was so far away now: blackboards, large uncurtained windows looking out at nothing, at other walls, other windows; talking, note-taking; talking, talking, talking…She looked at Michaelis; he was watching her mother, listening. ‘—You can't make marriage the be-all and end-all. Because if you do it won't work. Listen: from the looks of things we've got one of the few solid marriages around. But it took work, pussycat. Work.' Her eyes gleamed with the victory of that work, the necessity for it. ‘And we were older. I was twenty-six, I'd been to school, I'd worked; you see the difference it makes? After all these years with this guy—and believe me some of them have been like standing in the rain—now that I'm getting old and going blind from charcoal smoke at least I know I didn't give anything up to get married. Except my independence. But I was fed up with that. And all right: I'll tell you something else too. I'd had other relationships. With men. That helped too. There—' she lightly smacked the table ‘—that's my confession for the night.'

But her face was not the face of someone confessing. In her smile, which appeared intentionally hesitant, intentionally vulnerable, and in the crinkling tan flesh at the corners of her eyes, in the wide green eyes themselves, and in the tone of finality in her throaty voice—there: now it's out, I've told you everything, that's how much I care, the voice said; her smacking of the table with a palm said—Miranda sensed a coaxing trick that she did not want to understand. But she did understand and she sat hating her mother, whose eyes and smile were telling her that making love with Michaelis was a natural but subsidiary part of growing up; that finally what she felt that night and since (and before: the long, muddled days and nights when she was not so much trying to decide but to free herself so she could make love without deciding) amounted now to nothing more than anxiety over baby fat and pimples. It meant nothing. Miranda this fall meant nothing. She would outgrow the way she felt. She would look back on those feelings with amused nostalgia as she could now look back on grapefruit and cottage cheese, and the creams she had applied on her face at night, the camouflaging powder during the day.

‘You see,' her father said, ‘we don't object to you having a lover. Hell, we can't. What scares us, though, is you being unhappy: and the odds are that you
will
be. Now think of it the other way. Try to, sweetheart. I've never forced you to do anything—I've never been
a
ble to—and I'm not forcing you now. I only want you to look at it from a different side for a while. You and Mother fly to New York—' She felt sentenced to death. Her legs were cool and weak, her heart beat faster within images of her cool, tense body under lights, violated.‘—the pill, then you're safe. Both of you. You have three years to grow. You can go back to school—'

‘To be
what?
' she said. ‘To be
what
,' and she wiped her eyes.

‘That's exactly it,' her mother said. ‘You don't know yet what you want to be but you say you're ready to get married.'

She had not said that. She had said something altogether different, though she couldn't explain it, could not even explain it to herself. When they said married they were not talking about her. That was not what she wanted. Perhaps she wanted nothing. Except to be left alone as she was in Boston to listen to the fearful pulsations of her body; to listen to them; to sleep with them; wake with them. It was not groceries. She saw brown bags, cans. That was not it. She watched Michaelis. He was listening to them, and in his eyes she saw relieved and grateful capitulation. In his eyes that night his passion was like fear. He was listening to them, he was nodding, and now they were offering the gift, wrapped in her father's voice: ‘—So much better that way, so much more sensible. And this Christmas, say right after Christmas, you could go to Acapulco. Just the two of you. It's nice at that time of year, you know? It could be your Christmas present. The trip could.'

She smiled before she knew she was smiling; slightly she shook her head, feeling the smile like a bandage: they were giving her a honeymoon, her honeymoon lover in the Acapulco hotel after he had been sucked from her womb. She would have cried, but she felt dry inside, she was tired, and she knew the night was ended.

‘I was afraid on Mulholland Drive. I was afraid in Boston. It was the most important thing there was. How I was afraid all the time.' Her parents' faces were troubled with compassion; they loved her; in her father's eyes she saw her own pain. ‘I kept wanting not to be afraid, and it was all I thought about. Then I stopped wanting that. I was afraid, and it was me, and it was all right. Now we can go to Acapulco.' She looked at Michaelis. He looked at her, guilty, ashamed; then he looked at her parents as though to draw from them some rational poise; but it didn't work, and he lowered his eyes to his beer can. ‘Michaelis? Do you want to go to Acapulco?'

Still he looked down. He had won and lost, and his unhappy face struggled to endure both. He shrugged his shoulders, but only slightly, little more than a twitch, as if in mid-shrug he had realized what a cowardly gesture the night had brought him to. That was how she would most often remember him: even later when she would see him, when she would make love with him (but only one more time), she would not see the nearly healed face he turned to her, but his face as it was now, the eyes downcast; and his broad shoulders in their halted shrug.

It was not remorse she felt. It was dying. In the mornings she woke with it, and as she brushed her hair and ate yogurt or toast and honey and coffee and walked with Holly to school as the November days grew colder, she felt that ropes of her own blood trailed from her back and were knotted in New York, on that morning, and that she could not move forward because she could not go back to free herself. And she could not write to Michaelis. She tried, and she wrote letters like this:—
the lit exam wasn't as hard as I expected. I love reading the Greeks. The first snow has fallen, and it's lovely and I like looking out the window at it and walking in it. I've learned to make a snow angel. You lie on your back in the snow and you spread your arms and legs, like doing jumping jacks, and then you stand up carefully and you've left an angel in the snow, with big, spreading wings. Love, Miranda
. When she wrote love she wanted to draw lines through it, to cover it with ink, for she felt she was lying. Or not that. It was the word that lied, and when she shaped it with her pen she felt the false letters, and heard the hollow sound of the word.

She did not like being alone anymore. Before, she had liked coming home in the late afternoon and putting on records and studying or writing to Michaelis or just lying on the couch near the sunset window until Holly came home. But now that time of day (and it was a dark time, winter coming, the days growing short) was like the other time: morning, waking, when there was death in her soul, in her blood, and she thought of the dead thing she wouldn't call by name, and she wished for courage in the past, wished she had gone somewhere alone, New Hampshire or Maine, a small house in the woods, and lived alone with the snow and the fireplace and a general store down the road and read books and walked in the woods while her body grew, and it grew. She would not call it anything even when she imagined February's swollen belly; that would be in June; the second of June. Already she would not think June when she knew she would say: Today is probably the day my baby would have been born. So she could not be alone anymore, not even in this apartment she loved, this city she loved.

She thought of it as a gentle city. And she felt gentle too, and tender. One morning she saw a small yellow dog struck by a car; the dog was not killed; it ran yelping on three legs, holding up the fourth, quivering, and Miranda could feel the pain in that hind leg moving through the cold air. She could not see blood in movies anymore. She read the reviews, took their warnings, stayed away. Sometimes when she saw children on the street she was sad; and there were times when she longed for her own childhood. She remembered what it was like not knowing anything, and she felt sorry for herself because what she knew now was killing her, she felt creeping death in her breast, and bitterly she regretted the bad luck that had brought her this far, this alone; and so she wanted it all to be gone, November and October and September, she wanted to be a virgin again, to go back even past that, to be so young she didn't know virgin from not-virgin. She knew this was dangerous. She knew that nearly everything she was feeling now was dangerous, and so was her not-feeling: her emptiness when she wrote to her parents and Michaelis; in classrooms she felt abstract; when people came to the apartment she talked with them, she got high with them, but she was only a voice. She neither greeted them nor told them goodbye with her body; she touched no one; or, if she did, she wasn't aware of it; if anyone touched her they touched nothing. One night as she was going to bed stoned she said to Holly: ‘I'm a piece of chalk.' She thought of seeing a psychiatrist but believed (had to believe) that all this would leave her.