The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (7 page)

“
I'm sorry,
Mrs. Mendelbaum. You must believe me when I say I had no
idea
that book was going to give you such ideas. Please throw it on the fire immediately or get rid of it in any way that satisfies you. I don't remember half of what is in this house. All you have to do is clean it to find that out.” I thought this was a very satisfactory and ameliorating thing to say, but it only seemed to ruffle Mrs. Mendelbaum all the more.

“So now you are suggesting I don't clean properly? I'll clean it all right!” shouted Mrs. Mendelbaum threateningly.

“She told me earlier she wasn't feeling well and her feet hurt,” whispered Jocelyn to us from mid-table.

“Please come eat with us. I beg you to eat with us. I'm
dying
for you to eat with us,” I said, now stuck in a landslide of cascading and escalating entreaties, each one more insincere than the last.

This is what comes from having people living with you. It all comes down to doing strange things, crazy things, such as entreating someone to do something which clearly neither one of you wants in an attempt to convince that person of the affection you do not feel for them and which, in any case, they don't want, in a further attempt to do no harm or ameliorate the harm you unknowingly did. We should all live alone on islands.

There was a long pause from the kitchen as if Mrs. Mendelbaum was thinking it over. Finally she said, “I don't like sitting down to such big heavy meals. Es brent mir ahfen hartz. I bloat.”

Well, that certainly made me sorry I had brought it up. When I wasn't feeling vaguely sorry for Mrs. Mendelbaum, another victim of bad luck and circumstances, her whole family having predeceased her, she drove me crazy. Then I felt guilty for being driven crazy. What kind of heartless man is driven crazy by someone like poor, unfortunate Mrs. Mendelbaum? And why should I have to think of her at all? All I really needed to do was pay her salary. It was all so inconvenient. I had gotten her so I wouldn't have to think about food and could keep my mind on my research, but now I found myself thinking about Mrs. Mendelbaum. I would never get any work done this way. And all because my nieces had to eat. And what kind of thoughts were
these?
To be unable to sit down to dinner with my own nieces without resenting it? To resent having to think about feeding them? “I'm a
monster.
A
monster!
” I said aloud to myself, forgetting as usual what was in my head and what could be heard. Forgetting even anyone's presence at the table with me. I had already forgotten the girls, the dining room was so dark, ill lit, with its massive table, Meline a good twenty feet from me and pale, washed-out, little bony Jocelyn hardly noticeable in any setting, so thin and watery-looking. I pushed my chair out from the table and stumbled off to bed.

Mrs. Mendelbaum came in as I was leaving. “Cake, anyone?” she asked.

 

MELINE

S
IX WEEKS AFTER LANDING
on the island, when the fog of our suddenly changed circumstances had had a chance to clear out of our heads, I realized Jocelyn and I would have to find something to do. The helicopter kept dropping off books and school supplies from the distance education program that my social worker had enrolled us in when she was making our arrangements with Uncle Marten. It was what most of the island-raised children did, she reported. But, given Sam's hit-or-miss delivery system, sometimes we found the supplies and sometimes we didn't. Neither one of us felt competent to hit the books yet, so the books and workbooks tended to sit around the house, still wrapped in plastic, wherever we tossed them after finding them on the ground by the house. When Uncle Marten came across them, more often than not he heaved them on the fire that was always roaring in the huge fireplace in the living room. Keeping the fire stoked was supposed to be one of Mrs. Mendelbaum's jobs, but she was too delicate to spend the day heaving giant logs in, so we all, even Uncle Marten, took turns. Uncle Marten didn't recognize the books as our schoolbooks and only saw them as rather cheaply bound things and wondered why he had gotten them. “What's this garbage?” he would say, picking up a math workbook and chucking it into the flames. So even when we did periodically pick up a book and halfheartedly start a course of study, we'd find bits missing, textbooks or workbooks or worksheets, so that it was impossible to piece together where you were in the lesson and what you were supposed to do next, and eventually we just gave up. Giving up seemed like the logical conclusion for every endeavor in those days. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Everything ended eventually anyway.

*   *   *

The last time Jocelyn and I had seen each other was when I was nine. Her family had taken a vacation and visited us on Cape Cod. I remembered little about her from that except that she was lean and blond and quiet and not much fun. Heading out to the island to live with her, I had expected we would like each other much better than originally because we now had our shared tragedy as a common bond and would be in sympathy with each other in a way no one else could quite understand. But we were not. Jocelyn didn't seem to be in need of any sympathy and she certainly didn't want mine. Most of the time her face was hard and tight and her lips appeared set in cement. If I smiled at her she looked mortally offended as if I were trying to lure her, seduce her to join me in my slovenly ways. So now, after six weeks of stilted, uneasy conversation when it took all my self-control to keep from chucking things at her, we kept a polite distance.

I spent a lot of time pacing around the house, itching for something to do, anything to keep me occupied but nothing that required too much concentration. Meanwhile every day at two o'clock precisely, Jocelyn put on her winter coat, which like mine was wool and completely inappropriate, and went trudging out into the driving rain.

At first I paid no particular attention, but as the days dragged on I got curious. What did she do out there? Why always at two o'clock? Was she meeting someone? No, that was ridiculous. There was no one else on this island. It was just the four of us and a lot of rain. Still, it was odd, and I hadn't pegged Jocelyn as the type to do odd things, so one day I decided to follow her. I waited until she was across the meadow, then put on my heavy wool coat and slipped out behind her. By the time I had made it to the cover of the woods I was drenched and muddy. I had to race a bit after that to see where she was going, but even though I made a lot of noise she didn't seem to notice, so intent was she on her mysterious, intensely purposeful mission. She looked very melodramatic and
Wuthering Heights.
She
could
be a gothic heroine, I thought to myself, one who came to no good end. Then I decided she wasn't sympathetic enough to be the heroine. She'd make a better head of orphanage or strange housekeeper entrusted with the master's dark secret. She had the pinched expressions for it. When we got to the top of a hill, she sat down in the clearing, pulling her knees up to her chest. Then I could not have been more surprised by what came next: she put her head down on her knees and started to sob. Did she come here every day to this spot, getting soaked, just to sit in the mud and weep?

I thought about speaking to her. Telling her that sobbing on a hillside at two o'clock every day was about as bad a habit as a person could fall into, but even that seemed to take more energy than I had lately. And it only underscored for me the painfully obvious fact that if she had time for this, we simply didn't have enough to do. I turned to go, but
that,
in the annoyingly contradictory way she did everything, was when she finally noticed me.

“You! Are you following me?” she asked, tapping me on the shoulder from behind and causing me to cry out. “I didn't mean to startle you, but I don't want to be spied on.”

“You know, Jocelyn, if we had more to do, you wouldn't have the luxury of sobbing on a hillside every day at exactly two o'clock. I was thinking we should find something to do because crying doesn't do any good.”

“You ate all your chocolates in just a few days. I suppose you thought that was going to make it all go away?”

“I was hungry.”

“Leave me alone.”

Eating all the chocolates like that
was
an indulgence in grief. But it seemed pointless to bicker about these things. We didn't talk to each other at all after that. Sometimes, when politeness doesn't work, bluntness finds a way into the heart and a friendship is formed. But this time I could see nothing; not even a pile driver was going to break down the wall between us. We had no real relationships, any of us. We had no one on the island. We were each of us entirely alone.

 

MARTEN KNOCKERS

A
LL THIS SILENCE
suited me fine. My take on it was that the girls had finally settled down, and I ate my way quite happily through the silent dinners, the better to think about where Einstein had gone so irrevocably wrong. As no one seemed to want to talk, I felt justified in reading at the table again, a practice I had sorely missed. But Mrs. Mendelbaum apparently didn't
like
silence and came to me at teatime in my study. She was always coming to me with problems during tea because she brought my tray to me and clearly thought it was the perfect opportunity to ambush me in my lair. It almost made me abandon my afternoon tea, and I would have if I wasn't so badly in need of caffeine and sugar at that hour to keep my brain pumped until dinner.

“Sir,” she began.

“I told you not to call me that,” I said irritably. “My name is Marten. Or if you must, Mr. Knockers. But
not,
I beg you, ‘sir.' It makes my skin crawl.

“A little word—”

“You always want a little word with me about something,” I groaned. “And it's always when I'm in the middle of some perplexing problem like trying to find the missing ingredient in the unified field theory.”

“Oh, who can think of such things!”

“Well, I can, Mrs. Mendelbaum, I'd say that's rather obvious. But you'd have me switch from thinking about something important like trying to discover the force that ties together all the energy in the universe and instead think about something like we're out of sugar again and the milk hasn't arrived.”

“It arrives. It arrives squashed. Milk everywhere in the ground but not in the carton. By you this is a small problem?”

“All right, whatever it is, get it over with. I don't want to argue about the milk endlessly. I contracted for a helicopter to make my deliveries, and if there are bugs in the system, well, there are bugs in any system. The house is the system I hired
you
to fix. The universe is the system
I'm
trying to fix. If everyone would just stick to their own system, I'm sure everything would turn out just fine. But I can see you are going to invite me in to solve another problem that I hired
you
to solve. So go ahead. What is it this time?” I asked, putting down my pen with a great deal of dramatic resignation, which seemed to be lost on her.

“There is something wrong with the girls. Such quiet!”

“Well, that's hardly any of our business, Mrs. Mendelbaum.”

“Not our business? Whose business should it be, I'd like to know? The thin one, what's her name?” Mrs. Mendelbaum was always forgetting people's names. She seemed to know who people were, so I wondered if the North American names simply didn't register on her. Perhaps she would remember them if she could rename us familiar names from her youth. Did we all have a data bank of familiar, easily accessible information garnered in our youth and not added to after, say, our teens? I made a note on a piece of scrap paper about returning to this idea with a possible end to writing a paper on it. This seemed to infuriate Mrs. Mendelbaum, who barked, “Hert zich ein!”

“Jocelyn, I think,” I said, absentmindedly, still scribbling away, not a clue in the world what she'd just barked.

“Is she sick, I wonder? She hardly eats, that one. A bird she's the size of.”

“Well, girls
like
to be thin, don't they? They watch their figures. Do it on purpose, I believe. When they're not cramming chocolates down their gullets like Strasbourg geese, they starve themselves. It's not a nice way to live, I admit, but it's apparently what you have to look forward to if you've been born without a Y chromosome. I didn't create the system. You must have been a girl once, Mrs. Mendelbaum, surely you can remember. Besides, I don't know what else to do for them. I
gave
them chocolate,” I said, putting my pen down.

“They don't like each other, those two,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, ignoring me.

“Well, we all have to make adjustments, my dear woman,” I said, very nearly adding, After all I don't like
you.
But I caught myself in time.

“Go. Go and have a little talk with them.”

“Me?”
I yelped, horrified.

“Who else?”

“Well, you're the one who noticed it,” I argued. “If it's even true. I prefer to think that things are just in a calm. Yes, a calm ebb. Everything ebbs and flows. Soon it will flow and there will be noise again. Right now we are experiencing a calm ebb.” I hoped that this sudden new theory could be true. It would keep humans manageable for me. But Mrs. Mendelbaum would not let me have it.

“Are you CRAZY?” she screeched. “ZEY ARE AT VAR!” When Mrs. Mendelbaum became particularly agitated, her German accent grew thicker and stronger. It seemed to be tied to her emotions, and the stronger her emotions, the stronger it became.

“Well, then
zey,
I mean
they,
will have to work it out. If you don't agree, then
you
go talk to them,” I said, quite reasonably.