Kinflicks (2 page)

She grabbed the plastic card from the nubby green seat-back pocket and studied the operation of the plane's emergency exits, deployment procedures for the inflatable slide. It occurred to her that if use of the emergency exits were required, she'd be frozen by panic and trampled by all her frenzied fellow passengers as they tried to get past her and out the escape hatch. It also occurred to her that perhaps the reason every person in the plane didn't struggle to sit by an emergency exit, as she did, was that they knew something she didn't: that the likelihood of needing to clamber out the exit to safety was more than offset by the likelihood of the exit's flying open in mid-flight and sucking those near it into the troposphere.

But she knew that this pattern of blindly seeking out emergency exits was already too set in her to be thwarted with ease. Just as some people's eyes, due to early experience with The Breast, were irresistibly drawn to bosoms throughout their lives, so were hers riveted by neon signs saying
EXIT
. At the Saturday morning cowboy serials as a child, she had been required by the Major to sit right next to the exit sign in case the theater should catch fire. He told her about a Boston theater fire when he was young in which a crazed man had carved his way with a Bowie knife through the hysterical crowds to an exit. Ever since, she'd been unable to watch a movie or listen to a lecture or ride in a plane without the comforting glow of an exit sign next to her, like a nightlight in a small child's bedroom.

Nevertheless, on this particular flight, she first realized that the emergency exit, the escape lines coiled in the window casings, the yellow oxygen masks being playfully manipulated by the shapely stewardesses, were all totems designed to distract passengers from the fact that if the plane crashed, they'd all had it — splat! As eager as she was to deny the possibility of personal extinction while negotiating the hostile skies of United Air Lines, even Ginny was only faintly comforted by the presence of her seat cushion flotation device. She knew full well that the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia were below her should the engines falter and the plane flutter down like a winged bird. The sea was swelling some three hundred miles to the east. She tried to picture herself, stranded in a mountain crevice, afloat on her ritual seat cushion above a sea of gore and gasoline and in-flight martinis.

In the crush of the waiting room prior to boarding, Ginny had inspected with the intensity of the Ancient Mariner the visages of all her fellow passenger-victims: Were these the kind of people she'd want to be adrift with in a life raft? She could never decide how Fate worked it: Did planes stay aloft because of the absence of actively wicked people on board to be disposed of? Or was the opposite the case: Did planes falter and fall because of the absence of people sufficiently worthy to redeem the flight, people who had to be kept alive to perform crucial missions? Whichever was the case, Ginny had closely studied her companions in folly, looking for both damning and redeeming personality types and laying odds on a mid-air collision. With relief, she'd discovered three small babies.

Her fellow travelers had also scrutinized
her
upon boarding this winged silver coffin, Ginny reflected. In fact, one plump woman in a hideous Indian print caftan had studied her so closely that Ginny was sure the woman
knew
that she was the one who'd broken the macrobiotic recipe chain letter earlier that week. Which of the assembled Vermont housewives, they all must have wondered as they found their seats, would be the one to demand six thousand books of S & H Green Stamps and a parachute for a descent into a redemption center at a Paramus, New Jersey, shopping mall? Whose tote bag contained the bomb, nestled in a hollowed-out gift wheel of Vermont cheddar cheese, or submerged in a take-out container of spaghetti sauce? Ginny had often thought that she should carry such a bomb aboard her plane flights herself, because the likelihood of there being
two
bomb-toting psychopaths on the same flight was so infinitesimal as to be an impossibility. It was the mentality that fostered the arms race: Better to be done in by the bomb that she herself, in a last act of existential freedom, could detonate.

And, Ginny suspected, they were all — if they'd only admit it — inspecting each other with the care of housewives at a supermarket meat counter, as possible main courses should their craft be lost atop a remote peak in the Smokies.

But at least she still rode planes, Ginny reminded herself — unlike her mother, who in recent years had scarcely left the house at all for fear of being overtaken by disaster among strangers, insisting that it was vulgar to die among people one didn't know. How was her mother feeling about that now, as she lay in a hospital bed in Hullsport hemorrhaging like an overripe tomato? ‘A clotting disorder,' their neighbor Mrs. Yancy had called it in her note suggesting that Ginny come down and keep her mother company while Mrs. Yancy went on a trip to the Holy Land. ‘Nothing serious,' the note had assured her. Her mother knew she'd be out of the hospital soon and hadn't wanted to worry Ginny with the news. But if it weren't serious, why was her mother in a place that she would necessarily hate, feeling as she did about strangers? And why had Mrs. Yancy asked Ginny to come down, knowing as she must that in recent years Ginny and her mother had been hitting it off like Moses and the Pharaoh?

Before giving up flying altogether, her mother had gone on business trips regularly with the Major. His condition on her going was that they take separate planes so that when one of them died during landing, the other would remain to carry on.

Doesn't it just double the likelihood of one of your bags going to Des Moines?' Ginny had demanded of her mother one winter afternoon when she was in high school and was making her second trip to the airport, having taken the Major to catch
his
flight to New York that morning. They were in the Major's huge black Mercedes. Her mother had loved that car. Because it looked and drove like a hearse, Ginny suspected. Practice.

“Don't ask me. Ask your father,” she replied, closing her eyes in anticipation of a head-on collision as Ginny negotiated a traffic circle. Any time her mother couldn't be bothered with having an opinion on something, she'd say, “Don't ask me. Ask your father.” Ever since the Major had died, she must have been somewhat at a loss for words.

“I don't know why I go along with all this,” she mused. “I wouldn't even
want
to ‘carry on' if your father's plane crashed.”

“You'd just throw yourself on his funeral pyre, like a suttee?” Ginny didn't enjoy being sarcastic to the woman who had rinsed her dirty diapers, but it seemed unjust that she should be saddled with these passive-dependent attitudes simply because this woman and she had lived in the same house for eighteen years. After all, what about free will?

“Yes, I think I would. I don't think it's such a bad custom at all.”

“You don't,” Ginny said flatly, more as a statement than as a question, since she knew her mother didn't. “Does it bother you that you don't?” Ginny asked this blandly to conceal how much it was bothering
her
that the custom appealed so enormously to her too.

“Bother me?” her mother asked with an intense frown, working an imaginary brake with her foot.

“Please,
Mother, I'm a very safe driver,” Ginny snapped. “Bother you. You know. Do you sometimes wish that there were things in life that seemed important to you other than your family?”

“I'm not really all that interested in life. I mean, it's okay, I guess. But I'm not hog wild about it.”

“Well, why do you go on with it?” Ginny demanded irritably.

“Why not?”

“But if the only thing you're interested in is your great family reunion in the sky, why don't you get on with it? What keeps you hanging around here?”

Her mother looked at her thoughtfully for a while and then gave a careful and sincere answer: “It's character building. What does it matter what I might prefer?” As Ginny understood the lengthy explanation that ensued, her mother was saying that the human soul was like a green tomato that had to be ripened by the sun of earthly suffering before the gods would deign to pluck it for use at their cosmic clambake. It hadn't made sense to an impatient seventeen-year-old.

But that incident was why Ginny was so surprised several years later when her mother said, with great intensity, “Ginny, you must promise me that you will put me out of my misery if I'm ever sick and dying a lingering death.”

Startled, Ginny had looked at her closely. She had crow's feet at the corners of her eyes and frown lines; and her neat cap of auburn hair was graying here and there. But she was agile and erect. With the insensitivity of the young to the concerns of their elders, Ginny laughed nervously and protested, “But
Mother!
Your hair is hardly even gray or anything. I'd say you've got a few years left!”

She gave Ginny a sharp look of betrayal and said sourly, “Believe me, after age thirty it's all downhill. Everything starts giving out and falling apart.”

Her mother hadn't been hog wild about living eleven years ago. Ginny wondered how she was feeling about it now that her bluff was being called. But
was
it being called? “Not serious,” Mrs. Yancy had said. And yet Ginny couldn't seem to prevent herself from leaping to all kinds of dire conclusions. Why was her mother in the hospital if it wasn't serious? How sick
was
she?

These questions, swarming through her head like fruit flies, temporarily distracted Ginny from the fact that she had survival problems of her own — both immediate, in that she was trapped aboard this airborne sarcophagus, and long-range with regard to the fact that she couldn't figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up. If indeed she did one day grow up, which was looking increasingly unlikely as she approached early middle age, with her twenty-seventh birthday recently behind her. The incidents in her life to date resembled the Stations of the Cross more than anything else. If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that now she could eat dessert without eating her vegetables.

Another problem was that the stewardesses were bullying the passengers that day. They kept parading past selling pennants and souvenirs, and requiring that everyone acknowledge their obvious talents with their lip brushes. Ginny finally concluded that the only way to get rid of them would be to throw up in the air-sickness bag and then try to find one of them to dispose of it.

And then there was the problem of the blond two-year-old in the next seat, imprisoned between her own mother and Ginny. The child kept popping up and down, unfastening and refastening her seat belt, lowering her seat-back tray and then replacing it, scattering the literature in the pocket all over the floor, putting the air-sickness bag over her head and then looking around for applause, removing her shoes and putting them back on the wrong feet, snapping the metal lid to the ashtray. It seemed a shame for all that energy to be going to waste, dissipating throughout the plane. Ginny suddenly understood the rationale behind child labor. Hooked up to a generator, this child's ceaseless contortions could have been fueling the plane.

She found herself unable not to watch the child, as irritating as all her relentless activities were. Ginny was experiencing the Phantom Limb Syndrome familiar to all recent amputees: She felt, unmistakably, Wendy's presence next to her. When she looked over and discovered that this presence was merely an unfamiliar child of the same age, she was flooded with an overwhelming misery that caused her to shut her eyes tightly with pain. Wendy was in Vermont now with her father, the bastard Ira Bliss, living a life that excluded her wicked, adulterous mother.

Ginny reflected glumly that that racy view of her behavior credited her with much more sexual savoir-faire than she actually possessed. Although in principle she was promiscuous, feeling that the wealth should be shared, in practice she had always been morbidly monogamous, even before her marriage to Ira. In fact, until the appearance of Will Hawk that afternoon, nude in her swimming pool in Vermont, she had always been doglike in her devotion to one partner. Even with Hawk, her unfaithfulness to Ira was spiritual only, not physical — although Ira had found that impossible to believe the night he had discovered Ginny and Hawk in his family graveyard in poses that the unenlightened could only identify as post-coital.

Ginny tried to decide if her transports of fidelity were innate — an earthly translation of a transcendent intuition of oneness, a kind of sexual monotheism. Or whether she'd simply been brainwashed by a mother who would have liked nothing better than to throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre. Or whether it was unadulterated practicality, a question of knowing which side her bed was buttered on, her bod was bettered on — a very sensible refusal to bite the hand that feels her. In such a culture as this, perhaps the only prayer most women had was to find a patron and cling to him for all he was worth. People knew a
man
by the company he kept, but they generally knew a woman by the man who kept her. Or by the woman who kept her, in the case of Ginny and Edna.

At one point the child's mother, noticing Ginny's self-punishing absorption with the little girl, leaned forward and asked with a smile, “Do you have children?”

“Yes,” Ginny replied with a pained smile. “One. Just this age.”

“Oh, well!” the mother said briskly. “Then you'll want this.” She took two index cards from her alligator pocketbook and began copying from one onto the other. When she finished, she reread what she'd written and handed it to Ginny with pride. It read: “Homemade Play Dough: mix 2
¹
/
₄
cups flour with 1 cup salt; add 1 cup water mixed with 2 T vegetable oil; add food color to water before mixing.”