The furrows, p.12
The Furrows, page 12
“I hope you never have to join Vigil, Evie,” she said. “I hope your baby stays safe.”
Eve paused. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t, Evie. And of course I still have hope,” she said, moving to sit up. “My baby—” Her hair caught under my foot. “Ow!” she said with a wince. “What’re you—?”
I lifted my foot, shrugged. Every piece of vengeance between us was small and deniable like this these days. My mother was too drunk to care and collapsed back again. After a moment, Eve returned to her complaints about motherhood. It felt like a penance for expressing her love for her daughter. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she seemed to say. Let’s all feel bad together now. I was just thinking that I should really go to the bathroom to tend to my period when I realized that I’d become the target of advice from both women.
“Blessed are the barren,” Evie said again and again.
“Yes, they really are,” my mother said.
They formed a chiming chorus of misery and warning: Never fall in love, but if you do, never commit, but if you do, never marry, but if you do, never have a kid, but if you do, have only one, no matter what, you must absolutely never have more than one.
12
I’m on a plane. So dreary, so cold. I generally don’t speak to people on planes. I’m the unfriendly woman gazing out the window, the wearer of earplugs, the bearer of novels, willful dozer, spurner of all contact. How docile everyone becomes in that chilly roar! But the truth is I, too, come when called, stand behind and before numbered strangers, move right along, buckle up, eat what I’m given, the moment it’s given, sit and quietly endure. So much abeyance. So much obedience. Maybe that’s why I don’t say anything when the smell of shit breezes across my face half an hour into the flight.
I peer between the two seats in front of me and catch sight of the infant, its damp and hapless air. It reaches its hand at me through the gap, gurgling, flashing its toothless gums, which resemble the pink ridges of the mountains I saw out the window earlier. I turn to check—yes, they’re still there, redder now—then glance at the passenger in the seat to my right. Does she smell it? The girl, earbuds plugged in, is engaged in a private battle with her broken touchscreen, which is crying white code down its black face. She doesn’t seem to notice the aroma puffing toward us from the gibbering baby and I wonder why I want her to.
The girl looks like she’s about seventeen. Earlier, she was reading a creased paperback of To the Lighthouse. No doubt watching a movie was to be a reward for finishing her homework. The book has vanished back into her bag and now she jabs at her dead touchscreen, her mouth flinching, and glances enviously at my functional one, which flashes advertisements. A minute’s worth of tapping through a maze of menus already told me that nothing watchable is free except the news, and the news is always either a familiar disaster or an empty miracle these days. There’s another world in which I offer to switch seats with this girl since I’m not going to use my touchscreen anyway. In this world, however, I tug my scarf up to blinker me from the smell as it thickens and ripens. When I look over again, the girl has returned to Virginia Woolf but is holding a tissue over her nose like a hankie. She widens her eyes at me and I shake my head to consolidate our commiseration. But I say nothing to this pretty white girl, who will waltz through life, I’m sure of it, who will be rescued at every falter.
I turn to look out the window again. There are fields below now, cast in the sunset’s last gold, like shiny green scales on the face of the planet, this careful human portioning of the land. So clean and calm compared to the rumpled, gathered skirts of the mountains earlier. I lean closer to the window and my nose steams the glass like a puppy’s and I feel a creaturely tenderness for myself.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see an adult’s arm reach up to hand a folded white lump to a patrolling flight attendant. He receives it stoically, concealing the automatic crinkle of his nose by smiling up into it, and hastens to the back of the plane. I venture an inhale. The smell has dissipated. I feel grateful for the parent’s disposal of the diaper, then incredulous at their presumption that someone else should carry their child’s shit.
The man sitting across from my row stands up and moves into the aisle, casually stretching. He’s lanky in a handsome way. His hair is shaved close and etched into precise corners. His skin, the color mine will be in the winter, looks healthy. This hints at money and time spent considering what ablutions to perform. He’s wearing a dark blue button-down and has a salesman’s smile—quick and promiscuous. He’s standing ahead of my row now, his hand on the seat directly in front of the student of modernism beside me. He leans down.
“First kid, right?”
His voice is like fingers running through gravel. I can’t hear the parent’s answer.
“Yeah, that’s tough,” the handsome man replies with a politician’s inflection. “I feel you…” He interrupts himself to beam at the baby, who is startling up. He reaches down and pats the little head. “Was that you earlier? Stinkin’ up the whole damn plane?” Laughter. “It’s an uphill battle, I tell you. But you learn. You do. You’ll get the hang of it.”
I roll my eyes up and away. I have no patience for this kind of folksy talk. What’s the use of language like this, words you pass back and forth between your grinning mouths, clichés like the twice-chewed gum of teenage smoochers? The specific topic grates, too. I’ve spent too many years regretting being the specific daughter of my specific mother to feel optimistic about parenthood.
I was a psychology major but during my senior year of college, I took an elective course on women’s rights. The course was difficult—the professor was concerned with presenting things “dialectically,” she said, “not Socratically.” But I remember the history: Sojourner’s breasts, the raging fire and smashed glass of the suffragettes. The eruptive violence of feminism had surprised me and appealed to me. All that wounded flesh and antic activism added substance and color to a history heretofore trapped in black and white for me. I wrote my final paper about something Grandma Rose had told me once, cigarette smoke curling around her mocking voice: how these women in nineteenth-century France had called for a boycott on reproduction. No new babies, no new workers.
The baby in the row ahead is again standing on its parent’s lap, ignoring the man in the aisle and reaching for me through the gap between the seats instead. I send a scathing look at its slimy hand but when I catch the young woman beside me doing the same, I feel annoyed with her and unaccountably fond—as I had of my own puppy nose a little while ago—of the baby’s refusal of my disgust, its happy and plain indifference. How silly and cruel disgust is, how much it relies on what we assume to be disgusting…
“You can always tell who the other parents are,” the man in the aisle says in a rough stage whisper to the parent. “Other people just don’t get it. So quick to judge.”
The man is looking directly at me over the back of the seats. He’s already smiling but the second our gazes touch, his smile changes ever so slightly. I glance at his left hand pressing into the top of the seat. Ringless. He seems young to be a father himself. Is this man going to these lengths, talking all this babytalk, just to flirt with me? Could it really be for my sake? I suppress a smile and look down. I feel my ears heating up, the only part of me that ever blushes. But when I look up again, he’s back in his seat across the aisle, staring at his touchscreen, which lights up his handsome face. I guess not.
The possibility stirs me nonetheless, this sense that everyone on the plane is oblivious to a game for which I alone have been chosen. I feel buoyed by it. It reminds me of the man on the D.C. Metro that time, years ago, who wanted me to watch while he hit on another woman. It’s like being drawn into complicity, being triangulated like a magician’s assistant or a partner in crime. A web of silence and glances—I know that you know that I know. Where’s he from? I find myself wondering. What’s his name? I shake these thoughts off. I crumple them up and scold myself: You’re too grown for this, C, each vision of Wayne giving way to another, and another, a rack of sharp thin images shuttling uselessly in the chasm of death. If you keep imagining him alive this way, those visions may take over. And then you’ll be no better than your mother, with her grotesque and funded delusions. Yes, you, too, work for Vigil now—it was inevitable, wasn’t it?—but at least you don’t believe in it.
I look out the window and watch the outskirts of San Francisco at dusk rise to meet us. It’s a tailor’s heap down there now: smooth gray swaths of tarmac stitched with dashed lines, buttoned with cars, the highways’ looped exits like masses of ribbon somebody forgot to tie. The rush-hour headlights are red and white sequins, and when the cars move, they loosen gently and fall.
* * *
I find myself searching for the man from the plane at the baggage carousel. There he is, waiting about a dozen feet away. He seems thinner and taller, his skin duller in the fluorescent light. His clothes still look crisp and clean but there’s a little street to his stance. Past the information booth behind him are the automatic doors leading outside, and above them, a sign inscribed into the concrete wall reading T E R M I N A L O N E, with massive, angled windows on either side. I tap my foot to summon my patience. Finally, the siren light above the carousel flashes. The machine grunts to life and starts to rotate, the silver scales grating over each other as they pivot. At the center of the carousel is a mouth, its black tongue the automatic belt that pulses forward now, vomiting up bags. The passengers crowd in, occasionally reaching forward as if to shake hands with their suitcase handles.
I recognize the child from the plane, in its mother’s arms on the other side of the carousel. The mother, in cutoffs and a striped shirt, looks more tired and more attractive than I had pictured. She has her hand wrapped around the baby’s forearm. She forces the clenched fist to wave at the man. He returns the wave with a nod, a smile. He turns his head and catches my eye. After a twinkling beat, he makes his way toward me. Surprise and anticipation skitter in my chest.
* * *
—
The carousel stops abruptly, with a shudder. An older white man in the middle of pulling his suitcase off the belt loses his balance and falls to one knee, and the handsome man pauses to help him up. Those nearby coo and assist. A child gleefully shouts “Whoa!” just as the machine starts back to life. It has reversed direction for some reason and there’s a terrible screech and the black tongue buckles with a thumping sound. The flat lights in the ceiling shiver weakly. The anxious murmuring of the crowd rises a notch. The carousel is speeding up, shrieking unevenly, and is soon giving off a burning smell. Suitcases tumble off it into a cluster of passengers. A girl—the student who was next to me on the plane—yelps as a big Samsonite strikes her, knocks her flat. In the hubbub, no one helps her, no one rescues her. The carousel seems to tilt, but no—that’s the ground beneath us, my own unsteady legs.
I reach for the column beside me to steady myself, gripping my purse strap to my shoulder. The escalators up to Departures slow to a halt, people stranded on the sudden stairs. The information screens go snowy and the automatic doors in the distance begin gnashing open and closed. There are titchy zapping sounds like electrical shorts. People are yelling. Babies are crying, at first in unison, then in a lopsided round. The intercom shouts fiercely and cuts out. Someone says, What about the planes, what about the bombs, and as if in reply, there’s a faint boom. T E R M I N A L O N E trembles. The baggage carts rattle in their nested embrace. The overhead lights give a last spasm and die. All is dark but for the siren lamps.
We stand perplexed and hushed in the pulsing red glow, like we’ve accidentally entered a darkroom. The sound of sirens drifts in from afar as though the flashing red lights have beckoned them. Another boom, louder this time. The building shudders again. And now everyone is swarming, starting to run. Very soon, we are a torrid mass, cascading toward the automatic doors, which some brave souls have wedged open. I, too, am running to join the scramble out! out! out! when the ground before me ripples and I slip.
I fall backward into something, someone, who cradles me by the elbows until I regain my footing. I look up and see the man from the flight, who had been coming toward me when this all began and has managed to get in place just in time to save me. He lifts and spins me and I’m in his arms. His brown eyes look green under the swinging red lamp. A light twists between us, a gyred light, and I know. It’s him. It’s Wayne. This is our reunion.
Passing
We take the same ambulance. We sit gingerly on thin ledges across from each other, on either side of a white woman on a gurney. The woman’s skirt is riding up. Tubes and cords spill from her body like veins and there’s a breathing mask over her mouth. The EMT is next to me, his hand on the woman’s forearm, which is slowly, visibly bruising. I look over her body at the man from the plane. It seems impossible that we’ve only just met. The interior lights are palsied by jolts from the uneven road. Our bodies rock and sway as the ambulance swoops in and out of traffic. The siren is on but the sirens are everywhere now, in overlapping and continuous folds. We’re lucky we got this ride.
At the hospital, we stick together, as if by habit. He’s lost his wallet, so doesn’t bother to fill out the forms but stands with me at the counter while I fill out mine. I managed to hold on to my purse but I stand tilted in my lone pump—the other one dropped somewhere along the way and I’m loath to lose this one. The pantyhose on my shoeless foot crisps against the linoleum. When I’m done with the forms, a harried nurse points us to a bench on her way through thick doors with crash bars. On the other side of those doors, it’s clear, there are patients in far worse condition than we are.
Ambulances come and go, their sirens swelling then receding as they go back to fetch more of the wounded. Every few minutes, EMTs hustle in with their tempered panic, bringing in outside air redolent with smoke, and gurneys shuttle up and down the corridor, hospital staffers racing alongside like bobsledders. After a couple of hours, the helicopters and the sirens fade to a background like crazy birdsong. Now we can hear the hospital sounds: the tight buzz of the fluorescent lights, the muffled coughing, a lottery of beeps. There are still people busying about, staff and patients, but we’re alone together. We’re growing accustomed to it. In this pause between chaos and calm, it’s easier to batten down now, to talk.
I tell him I feel the urge to look at a screen, to find out what happened. Our cellphones are dead and the TV looming from an upper corner of the room is off, too high up to turn on without a remote. I forlornly wipe dust from my watch—my father’s old Seiko. The man is fretting over his lost wallet. He stares at his feet, elbows on his knees, hands clasped on the back of his neck.
“Without ID, I doubt they’re even gonna see me.”
“It’ll be fine,” I say automatically. “I mean, I could…”
He gives me a sidelong glance. He seems amused, even now. It’s like a reflex, his smile. “You could what, exactly?”
“I could…vouch for you.” I smile back. “I’m just saying.”
“Vouch for what?” He sits up.
“He exists. He definitely exists,” I say, practicing. It feels good to laugh, mostly. My leg hurts and blood has made a Pollock of my pantyhose.
“And where does he do all of this…existing?”
“Somewhere. Definitely somewhere.”
“What’s his date of birth?”
I look at him. He’s covered in an offwhite powder, crumbled plaster maybe. It crusts into the creases around his lips and gives his hair a salt-and-pepper look. “Hard to say.”
“What’s his occupation?” He licks his lips and spits on the floor between his shoes. It doesn’t bother me. It looks clean and delicate, like a cat licking itself.
“Judging by the makeup, I think he might be a performer of some kind. A mime?”
He gives his raspy laugh. “And what’s my name?”
“Williams?” another voice says. We both look up. A nurse stands in the doorway, holding a clipboard. “Mrs. Williams?”
“Ms. Williams,” I correct her as I stand up unsteadily in my one pump.
I lurch toward the doors. The nurse’s uniform is rumpled against her skin, which is a syrupy brown. She doesn’t say anything to me until we’re on the other side of the doors in a small examination room. Only then does she remark that I could take off my shoe. It’s the sort of perfectly logical thing one forgets to do in a situation like this but she says it as if she’s been waiting for the two of us to be out of earshot. Womanly advice, the kind that defers to but cannot be spoken around men. Behind a green curtain, I uncup my heel out of my dusty pump, abashed but annoyed at her presumption.
The nurse motions for me to sit next to her and takes my vitals perfunctorily, avoiding eye contact. I feel chastised by this woman, who implies with every brusque gesture that I’m not injured enough for this much attention. The fingers resting on my wrist to take my pulse are polished neatly in a shimmery maroon, close to Grandma Lu’s favorite shade. I stretch my sore leg out and wince as dried blood crinkles and unsticks the pantyhose over my knee.
“I see it,” the nurse says, still looking at her watch. “We’ll get to it.”
“I just—”
“The doctor will be in to look at your leg.” She stands. “Then you can join your friend,” she says over her shoulder as she exits, her tone pinning the last word with quotation marks.
The door shuts behind her and heat streaks into my ears. I feel eighteen again; I sense the same judgment in the air I felt at that Vigil meeting at the rec center: coffee and doughnuts and sad women raking their eyes over my miniskirt and bloody nose piercing. The nurse is right. I have been flirting with that man. How surreal. Even in the rattling ambulance, glancing across at him, I’d been flirting. And I hadn’t been aware of my leg back in the hallway only because it hurt.
