The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (18 page)

“Like the soul leaving the body,” said Humdinger. I think he had a dry sense of humor that he kept under wraps most of the time, the same way he never treated anyone disrespectfully or said anything contrary. I could never live like that myself. That kind of patience went with an ability to keep still and, of course, it was imperative, had been since I got here, to keep moving. You didn't find airplane parts by being patient. You had to have a mission.

Uncle Marten seemed to have his own mission. For weeks he had gone into Christmas overdrive. He was like an elf in a dressing gown, padding from room to room. He had further accessorized himself with a long silk nightcap, which with the maroon velvet dressing gown and carpet slippers made him look like Scrooge. Although, of course, he was the anti-Scrooge. He had stopped sending Humdinger out for packages and started scrounging the grounds for them himself. I was sitting by the fire, Jocelyn was up in her bedroom, and Mrs. Mendelbaum groaned softly but audibly down the hall from her. I watched as the small hunchbacked figure of my uncle went purposefully back and forth, hanging garlands, opening wet boxes full of candles and fruit and ribbon candy and port and glasses and linens and rugs. “Oooo, lookee, lookee!” he squealed once when unpacking a box of special Christmas dishes with gold rims and little Christmas trees printed on them. Because his steps were sort of shuffling, to keep on the backless carpet slippers, he did indeed look like some kind of strange large scurrying rodent. Occasionally he threw on a wool scarf and overcoat and scuffled outside—he kept a pair of carpet slippers just for the outside and would then come in and throw them off where Humdinger would collect them and put them in the dryer quickly in case Uncle Marten decided to forage out again for more boxes in a few minutes. His comings and goings were spontaneous and impulsive and unpredictable. He was like a toddler with new toys inside and candy strewn outside, unable to stay anywhere long with such temptation everywhere. Some of the things he unpacked he whisked immediately out of my sight as if I cared whether or not I saw my gifts ahead of time. Then one day it was time for the tree.

“My dears,” Uncle Marten announced at dinner, raising his glass of port ceremonially and not noticing that it was only me at table, but then “my dears” was less a term of endearment than a verbal accessory that went with his new Victorian-gentleman-of-largesse persona that he had adopted for the holidays.

“My dears, it is time for the tree. I propose we all equip ourselves appropriately with axes and saws and similar equipment necessary to the task, and foray out to the steep rise of the bluff, the wooded one with all those lovely little baby Douglas firs, and cut ourselves a tree. The tree-gathering expedition is a time-honored one in North American families.” I was pretty sure this was a direct quote from something he'd read about Christmas somewhere.

“Well,” I informed him, slowly cutting my meat into teeny tiny pieces and taking my time with my pronouncement in the off chance it would sink in, “Mrs. Mendelbaum is bedridden and Jocelyn still has a fever and I'm not so pert myself, but I
suppose
I could drag myself up a bluff to cut and haul a tree if it was a very small one.”

“Oh, we can't have small. We can't have small at all,” said Uncle Marten, who had changed from Scrooge into Dr. Seuss. “After all, there's that large dolly you wanted. We must have room underneath for that, mustn't we?”

I'd given Uncle Marten my Christmas list as requested, and if he thought it odd that it consisted entirely of tools, hardware, and a large dolly he hadn't given any indication. Now he seemed to be making jovial allusions to it, but unless he came out and asked me just what I needed all this stuff for, I planned to ignore him.

“Besides, we'll get Humdinger. Humdinger, I'll be bound, can drag anything.”

So the next day, muffled and bundled, the three of us set out across the meadow and up the steep hill to the Christmas Tree Bluff. Humdinger and I kept trying to point out smaller, more manageable trees at the foot of the bluff, but Uncle Marten seemed set on the really huge fourteen-foot ones toward the top of the hill, and we couldn't talk him out of it.

“I've got simply boxes of ornaments, you see, they've been arriving all month. Of course, a lot of them, well, most of them, got crushed when they were dropped from the helicopter. You'd think that they'd pack them better, wouldn't you?” When we didn't answer—me because I was breathless already, and Humdinger because he never said anything unless he said something polite and encouraging and agreeable, which must limit even
him
on occasion—Uncle Marten just nattered on. “In this day and age.” Again there was no word of encouragement from us. The ground was muddy and steep, and if most of the ornaments were broken, it really seemed pointless to spend the morning dragging an enormous, hard-to-hold, prickly, sappy monster of a tree all the way back to the house. “I mean with modern technology. Bubble wrap and all.” We were silent still, which seemed to disappoint Uncle Marten, who never paid much attention to others himself but obviously found it upsetting when people didn't respond to
him.
“I mean, I know they aren't thinking the boxes will be dropped from helicopters. They don't pack them with
that
in mind. But can that really be much worse than the wear and tear of being shunted in and out of trucks and trains and planes?” Silence. “I think not.” Silence. “I think not indeed. Careful you don't trip over the fuselage.”

I, who was in a trance slogging ever upward through the mud, woke up a few seconds later, it having finally registered what Uncle Marten had said in the midst of his diatribe, and I stared back down the hill. Sure enough, I saw the corner of a fuselage peeking out from under some fallen trees on the side of the path. Then I caught Humdinger stopped in his tracks as well, staring at me staring at the fuselage, and I gave him an irritated look, running up the hill to catch up with Uncle Marten, who had finally found a tree to his exact specifications and was standing in front of it, his arms held wide as if to hug it.

“Great, let's chop it down and get out of here,” I said, going for an ax, but Humdinger took it gently but firmly out of my hands and began to chop himself. He was really being awfully pushy if you asked me.

That evening, after we had cut and dragged the ridiculously large tree back to the house and then been unable to get it in through the doors until Humdinger took them off their hinges and removed them, letting a blast of cold air through the house in the process, and after dinner, through which I had to bear Uncle Marten going on endlessly about Bohemian glass ornaments from the thirties, which it seemed he had decided to start collecting, spending thousands of dollars to have them dropped from the helicopter and broken, when I was safely ensconced in my cranberry chair by the fire with a book and a glass of cranberry juice—all the beverages in the fridge were now red and green; currently we had lime Kool-Aid and cranberry juice going—while Uncle Marten ran around with boxes of things muttering to himself and unpacking ornaments and preparing everything for the tree-trimming party he was putting together with hot chocolate and eggnog and cookies and fruitcake, which nobody wanted after such a large dinner, Humdinger made his way over to my chair and I thought,
finally,
because when Jocelyn had been alone while I was ill, he was always sneaking up behind her offering her mints. Finally, he is offering
me
a mint, and I couldn't wait to tell her, but instead he said, “I've taken the liberty of washing and drying all the wet clothes behind the freezer.”

Was I being baited? Was he trying to tell me he knew what we were up to with the airplane parts? I couldn't think of anything to say to this except thank you, but by that time he was already padding out.

And where's my mint, I thought.

I don't think the tree trimming was quite the festive occasion Uncle Marten had anticipated. Humdinger was washing dishes and taking trays up to the ill. Uncle Marten kept falling off the ladder into the branches, knocking the whole thing over. He got scratched up and covered in sap and he kept trying to keep himself from swearing mid-swear, so that he said things like “Da!” in deference to me, I suppose, although I had hung out with my father and his pilot and mechanic friends enough to be inured to such things and in the end it just annoyed me, the idea that I could be so easily shocked with everything else that could go wrong in the world, and finally it irritated me so much, it seemed so oblivious to any of our real situations, that I went up to Jocelyn's room, leaving Humdinger, who had finally joined us, and Uncle Marten with only seventy or eighty ornaments still to hang and roughly fifty or so to break still. There I sat on the edge of Jocelyn's bed and said to her sleeping form, “There's a fuselage, or at least part of a fuselage, on the Christmas Tree Bluff.”

*   *   *

Of course, what Humdinger knew or how much was the question. “I don't see how he can know what we have planned. It's not like you'd expect two girls to build an airplane and fly away in it just like that. That would be quite a leap of logic.” I had taken a bowl of nuts into Jocelyn's room and was sitting on the edge of her bed cracking and eating them. Jocelyn was in the kind of comalike sleep this flu produced, so she wasn't actually hearing any of this, but I didn't care. In fact, I preferred it. I didn't keep a diary and I found coming in and airing my thoughts to a comatose Jocelyn to be extremely relieving. I found myself wishing that Jocelyn, if she must recover, would continue to fall into regular comalike states. It was talking to someone without the bother of having to listen in turn. “Anyhow, you'd better perk up soon. Christmas is coming and Uncle Marten seems to have high expectations about the whole thing. I think he may have plans to tie you to a chair in an upright position if you can't maintain it by yourself.”

 

JOCELYN

I
WAS AWARE
that Christmas was coming and I was hoping that they would all let me skip it. I was feeling worse and worse and I didn't like to leave my bed even to use the bathroom. I knew my hair was filthy. It hung in long, loose oily strands, but I didn't have the strength to wash it. I couldn't stand the thought of that moment of cold when you get into a bath or a shower before your body adjusts to the change in temperature. It was bad enough when I did have to get out of bed to use the bathroom, my feet touching the cold, bare floors, the energy it took to put on a bathrobe and pad down the hall. And when I coughed now it felt as if my lungs were going to expire afterward, fold up and be good no more. And really, I thought, that might be the best thing.

One night at three in the morning when I was coughing terribly and trying desperately to keep at bay thoughts of how my mother used to sit with me when I was sick, I thought that now there was no one ever to come care for me, no one who would
really
care in that way if something happened to me. I wondered, if no one cared, could you really care yourself if something happened to you? Would you have the strength to care, would it make sense to care, it was almost as if you needed a second opinion about this. Perhaps, I realized, we take our strength without knowing it as much from the people who love us as we do from any resources of our own, and I knew no one in that house loved me. They might like me all right, although I hadn't really detected any of this either, but there was no love there. I sank my hot head in the cool pillows and decided to expire quietly, when there was a tap at my door.

I startled, sat up rigidly, and stopped breathing. Who could be there? It wouldn't be Meline. Meline never knocked. It was as if my mother had heard my thoughts. Could she come to me like this? I had secretly hoped all these months that she would find a way. That her love was so strong that even death couldn't keep her from me if I needed her. But did ghosts make physical noises? Well, of course, they could. There were poltergeists, after all.

“Oh, come in, come in,” I pleaded, croaking hoarsely, all the hope I had left in the world pinched painfully into that invitation, but it wasn't my mother who came through the door and I felt once again I had been cruelly led on by the universe to create this terrible moment of expectation and disappointment. It was Mrs. Mendelbaum.

Mrs. Mendelbaum was hunched over, wearing a black bathrobe. Who buys a black bathrobe? It was funereal, and funereal and bath attire weren't congruent. It seemed wrong and bizarre, especially for someone like Mrs. Mendelbaum, whom you'd expect to find in something pink and fuzzy. It was bad enough to have comfort and hope wrenched from me, but now I had to deal with the wrong and the bizarre. Even the newly familiar was unsure. Not what you really thought. Changing before you had a toehold. I fell weakly back on the pillows and stared unseeingly at the ceiling.

“I hert you!” said Mrs. Mendelbaum. “You were coughing batly.”

“I know. I'm sorry,” I said, thinking, Oh, leave me alone, leave me alone!

But Mrs. Mendelbaum approached slowly across the floor, her tiny arthritic steps and the black bathrobe making it seem like some strange religious rite. “I brought you some of my meticine.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks, but the doctor said it was just the flu. I'm not taking anything except some Tylenol. For the fever. And aches.”

“Yes, I know, maideleh,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Oy, these doctors, oy, these men. You've no one to take care of you proper, no? Es iz a shandeh far di kinder. If your mother was here she would give you this meticine. A mother knows. It's for the cough. So you sleep. You can't get better if sleeping you don't do.”

“I don't know…” I said, stalling. I didn't want to be rude and I felt too deflated to argue, but I couldn't just swallow anything this old woman pushed on me. Who knew what was in it? What it was she believed in. It looked like thick black ink. Meline was right, I had no trust, no faith. But why would I?