The Invention of Flight Page 3

  “You know,” Mrs. D. tries again, “you could get your husband to dig another hole for that post over there next to the redbud, and your dog would get more shade.” Mrs. Lovelace comes back up the steps, her dry, over-permed hair sprayed hard, a brush roller in the bangs and a metal clip in the back for no discernible reason. Mrs. D. doesn’t open the screen door, but talks to her through it. “That jerk,” Mrs. Lovelace says, and she looks away from Mrs. D. The sun makes her face look sallow, and Mrs. D. notices that parts of her face are twitching. Mrs. D. looks at her watch and notices it is two hours past when Mrs. Lovelace ordinarily leaves for work. “Don’t you work on Tuesdays now?” she asks, trying to distract Mrs. Lovelace from the crying that seems to be inevitable. But her face still twitches and finally, without looking, Mrs. Lovelace reaches up to open the door and Mrs. D. steps back into the kitchen as the woman enters and saying “I’m sorry, could I have some water?” sits down at the formica kitchen table that is covered with two sets of Mrs. D.’s crystal—the amber and the green, this being the day she had planned to give them a good dusting.

  Mrs. Lovelace picks up one of the amber goblets and hands it to her, letting out a large sob at the same time so that Mrs. D. lunges for the glass which she’s afraid will meet its irreplaceable end on the kitchen floor. She takes the glass over to the sink and reaches up into the cabinet for a plastic one which she fills with tap water. She gives it to the woman and then goes over to the coffee-maker to pour herself some coffee. She wishes her husband were here. Together, with their positive thinking and their collective wisdom, they’ve counseled a lot of poor souls, often transient people like this one who have followed the industrial revolution from Kentucky to Indiana and most of whom are now out in Texas. They’ve taken in three or four runaway children at different times and turned them from delinquents. “Just give them love and let them know they’re responsible for their own happiness,” she would say across cut-flower arrangements at dinner parties. Mrs. D. never heard of a woman giving birth to a defective baby without saying “She must have had too many drinks or smoked or taken drugs” or of a new case of cancer without tracing it to an earlier tragedy, improperly dealt with. Her own life has been flawless, her health, after the TB, perfect, and she believes she can take credit for that. A regular churchgoer, she’s proud she gives the Lord so little trouble. She never asks for anything when she prays, aside from world peace and other things she has little control over, and she’s sure that the amount of His time she frees up by causing so little trouble every day helps someone somewhere, the Kentuckians of this world who are always, it seems, so miserable.

  She takes her cup of coffee over to the table and sits down across the crystal goblets from Mrs. Lovelace. As frustrated as she’s been with that whole family, she’s excited by the opportunity to help them. “Now, tell me what’s wrong,” she says, “Mrs. Lovelace.”

  Mrs. Lovelace reaches inside her blouse and pulls out a Kleenex from somewhere among a tangle of straps, then starts tearing it apart distractedly and sniffing. “It’s that man,” she says, and in between sniffing and periodic sobs tells Mrs. D. a long story about her husband’s drinking problem, how he’s beaten her for years, but never badly, and how finally yesterday when he came home and started beating her fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter by her first marriage so that the poor sensitive girl had moved out to stay with a friend and said she wouldn’t be back until the husband was gone, Mrs. Lovelace had decided to kick him out and told him as much. “And he just laughed in my face,” she says, and she rips the Kleenex further as Mrs. D. watches the fibers hit the air and settle on some of the green goblets. “I decided that if I stayed home from work and I got me someone to help, I could move all his belongings out of the house and change the locks and then he’ll see who’ll fix his supper and who won’t.”

  Mrs. D. stands up and starts moving the glasses over to the counter. The beatings don’t shock her really, even incest, which in this case it occurs to her is probable, especially since the man is technically the child’s adopted father and not her real father and so could probably convince himself, if not the daughter, that it was all right, and especially since Mrs. D. has never seen any boys the daughter’s age over at that house—even that wouldn’t shock her. That’s the sort of mess people get themselves into, and now since this woman has asked for her help the only thing to do is to decide on the right course of action and follow it. She turns back to the table and finds out from Mrs. Lovelace how long the beatings have been going on, how severe they were, all the time shaking her head at the nerve, the cold-heartedness of the man until she finally decides that yes, Mrs. Lovelace is right, he can’t live there any more. “You do have to think of your daughter, Mrs. Lovelace,” and Mrs. Lovelace, affecting a martyred look says, “Yes, my daughter.”

  Mrs. D. pours some coffee for her, fixes her a slice of buttered bread, and says, “I’ll go change and then we’ll start moving,” and she leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs. She puts on an old house dress and tennis shoes and looks at herself in the mirror, thinking as she does so that she’s never looked better. Her hair is still naturally dark, her makeup perfect, her eyes as lively as when she was younger. Nothing bad, nothing really out of the way, has ever happened to her. She shivers with excitement, runs her hands down her arms, smoothes her dress. You never know what a day will bring, she thinks, and she runs downstairs like a girl.

  “Let’s go,” she says to Mrs. Lovelace, taking charge, and the woman, grateful, gets up from the table, her face red and splotchy, the brush roller hanging precariously. They go across the back yards and up the back stairs into the house. Mr. Lovelace’s clothes are already in a pile on the living room floor. Mrs. D. picks up a stack of things on hangers, Mrs. Lovelace picks up a drawer full of underwear and a pair of shoes, and they take them out through the front door onto the porch and dump them on a swing. They go back in and get the rest of the clothes in one more trip. All the while Mrs. Lovelace’s tongue has loosened. In her own home, she seems particularly superstitious. “Mind you don’t spill that salt,” she says each time Mrs. D. passes through the kitchen. “Oh, I spill whole canisters of the stuff,” Mrs. D. says, but Mrs. Lovelace acts like she doesn’t hear. “Do you have any masking tape?” Mrs. D. yells out to Mrs. Lovelace, who is in the bedroom pulling out a quilt that was Mr. Lovelace’s great-grandmother’s, and dragging it to the door. It has become obvious to Mrs. D. that everything in the house that has any connection to the woman’s husband at all, including wedding presents from his side of the family, are going out on the porch. “I want to be generous,” she says, “don’t want to argue about it later.”

  Mrs. Lovelace looks in her sewing box and brings out a roll of tape. “Just put a piece on things in the living room you want moved out,” Mrs. D. says, “so I don’t have to keep asking you; it’ll be quicker that way.” Mrs. Lovelace says that’s something she would never have thought of in a million years, and she falls to it with relish, putting bits of tape on half the furniture and knickknacks in the living room. “That’ll get me started,” Mrs. D. says, and she asks the woman to help her with an old rolltop desk that’s too heavy for her to get by herself and then she helps Mrs. Lovelace with an overstuffed chair from the bedroom and then they both take out smaller chairs and little wooden figurines and whiskey bottles they find hidden and old pipes and belt buckles, and one or two books. When they finally get all his things moved out, Mrs. D. looks back around the house and realizes that half the objects left scattered around the rooms are either crocheted or made of nylon net, including a giant nylon net chicken in the kitchen that’s filled with soap. “It looks more the way I like it now anyway,” Mrs. Lovelace says, “without his stuff.”

  The locksmith comes and changes the front and back door locks, and the two women go out onto the front porch, Mrs. Lovelace locking the front door behind them. Looking around them, they giggle like children. “Well,” Mrs. D. says, still laughing, “I guess I’d better go on home.” She w
ipes her hands on her skirt and walks down the front steps, then looks back at Mrs. Lovelace, who has stopped laughing and is looking at her husband’s things. “What are you going to do now?” Mrs. D. asks her, and watches Mrs. Lovelace pull the clip out of the back of her hair and the roller out of the front and put them in her apron pocket. “Well, come on then,” Mrs. D. says aloud, “we’ll watch from my house,” and Mrs. Lovelace gratefully follows her home.

  “We can watch from in here,” Mrs. D. says, and she leads Mrs. Lovelace out to her living room. Mrs. Lovelace sits down and bounces in Mrs. D.’s good needlepoint chair. Mrs. D. feels more energetic than she has in months and, leaving Mrs. Lovelace in the living room slumped down and pale, she moves quickly through her house straightening, getting things right. Each room pleases her; she’s spent much of her adult life making this house. Not a single out-of-place object, not a single knickknack or chair that doesn’t fit in with the color scheme or style of a room, and the color of one room fades thoughtfully into the next—her aqua living room, the light green dining room, the pale yellow kitchen. Only one crocheted anything in the whole house, a placemat she bought in Europe from a street vendor, and she doesn’t own a scrap of nylon net. A corner of the basement is packed with things she has bought out of duty at church bazaars or been given as gifts—hideous plastic flower arrangements and macaroni paintings as well as nice figurines and vases, things that just will not fit in no matter where she puts them. She thinks that maybe she will tell Mrs. Lovelace to go down there, to help herself.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. D. washes the crystal and puts it away. She comes back through the dining room and dusts a set of ornamental plates her grandmother had painted. She feels ecstatic; every once in a while she goes to the window by Mrs. Lovelace and looks out, but the things are still there, the husband hasn’t come. Now and then Mrs. Lovelace breaks out of her lethargy to ask Mrs. D. a question: “How many sets of dishes you got?” she asks when she sees her dusting the plates and learns that they’re never used. “Five,” Mrs. D. says, “no, six, including the painted. Four sets of china and two everyday.” Mrs. Lovelace is impressed. “I’ve always loved china,” Mrs. D. says, “and so my husband every once in a while surprises me with a new pattern.”

  “How long you lived here?” Mrs. Lovelace asks a half an hour later, and Mrs. D. says, “All my life. I was born in this house,” and she tells Mrs. Lovelace what parts of the house were added on, what parts have always been there, and what she and her husband have done to improve the property. Mrs. Lovelace asks her didn’t she ever want children and Mrs. D. tells her that the good Lord didn’t see to bless them with children and it wasn’t her place to question that. “Instead of children,” she says, “He made every day with my husband like a honeymoon.” Mrs. Lovelace, bored, turns back to the window. “Of course,” Mrs. D. says, “you have to work at it.”

  Mrs. D. feels generous and she tells Mrs. Lovelace about the pile of things in the basement and then tells her that she has to go to the service station to get a new right rear tire for her car; she’d promised her husband that morning that she’d do it today. “Is it busted?” Mrs. Lovelace asks. “Just worn,” Mrs. D. says. She goes upstairs to change, comes back down and sees Mrs. Lovelace into the basement, picks up her purse, and heads out the back door to the garage. She sees Mrs. Lovelace’s dog lying hot and breathing heavily, no water in sight, and thinks my God, I forgot about you, and runs back inside and in her hurry picks up a bowl from her every-day dishes and fills it with water to take out to the dog who drinks it and licks her hand. It’s a tiny dog, female, and it’s started into heat; already enormous male german shepherds and labradors are starting to loiter around the edges of Mrs. Lovelace’s yard. “Something else to worry about,” Mrs. D. thinks, and she gets into her car and drives out the driveway, bouncing as she passes over the uneven sidewalk.

  She hurries because she doesn’t want to miss seeing Mr. Lovelace. It’s possible that he might make a scene, be so distraught that he’ll throw a tantrum or he’ll sit down on the steps and cry, and she will have to go out and talk to him, make him see the rationality of his moving, tell him how if he looks at the whole thing in a more positive way, he’ll see it’s for the best, that this may be the catalyst he needs to get over his drinking problem, that someday he’ll be grateful that this happened. She sees herself talking to him, her slight figure reasoning with the tall, muscular Mr. Lovelace, almost handsome in some lights, but insolent, the way he lounges around the back yard outside her kitchen window all weekend, drinking beer with his friends, their laughing and talking that sometimes keeps her and Mr. D. awake on Saturday nights, the sound of car engines and motorcycles at two in the morning, all of them needing mufflers, all of the tires low on air and squealing. As she thinks about it, she can feel the excitement get stronger in her chest and her throat, the same place she feels the rare need to cry. Her eyes in the rearview mirror are animated, and she has to admit it, attractive for her age, maybe even beautiful.

  She talks cheerfully with the couple that run the service station, sits inside with a cup of machine coffee talking with the wife while the husband puts her car up on a lift to change the tire. The wife goes outside to pump some gas and Mrs. D. sips the coffee, watches the wife through her own reflection in the window, now and then holds the paper cup with both hands to warm them, now and then runs the rim of the cup over her lower lip. A rusty pickup truck pulls into the station and three scruffily dressed men get out the back, and while the driver goes over to talk to the woman pumping gas, the other three men come into the office and walk around restlessly, picking up cans of oil and candy bars and pens on the desk, and putting them down. One of the three goes out to the garage to talk to the husband. Mrs. D. deliberately looks out the window and doesn’t acknowledge them. For some reason the tension in her throat turns without any change in the way it feels from euphoria to fear. A robbery, she thinks. She’s sure of it. The other two men will keep the couple occupied, and these two open the cash register and probably take her hostage.

  The men talk to each other. Construction workers, they’ve been out all day working on a pipe. Their hands are filthy, their faces and necks embedded with dirt. She looks down at her own clean hands holding the cup. Outside, it’s clouding over for a storm. If I’m to be killed, she thinks, at least it could be sunny. As if he can read her mind, the wildest-looking of the two pulls a gun out of his shirt. He holds it up to the light and looks at it, a crazy smile on his face. The other man smiles just as hard. He points the gun at Mrs. D. “See this?” he says, and he shoots it into the wastebasket. “Air gun.” He shoots it out the open door, and into the wastebasket two more times. He brings it over close to her, looks her in the eye. One of his eyes looks at her straight, the other points to the opposite wall; he smells like soil. “Beauty, aint it?” he says. “I use it to kill squirrels.” He walks back to the wastebasket and fires it once more. “Bet you could kill somebody with this if you got up real close,” he says to his friend. The third man, who had been out in the garage, comes in, and the three of them get into a discussion about whether you could in fact kill someone or not. The driver comes in from outside and makes a phone call. The crazy man shoots his gun into the wastebasket again and Mrs. D. jumps up, spilling the coffee on her dress, sure she’s going to be shot in the back as she runs out to the garage but too terrified to sit and wait for him to shoot her at his leisure.

  “That man has a gun,” she whispers to the mechanic. “He’s shooting it,” and the mechanic just smiles and says, “Oh them, they’re harmless. They come in here all the time,” and Mrs. D. feels like she’s going to cry or make some kind of a scene, she’s so incensed that the couple would let people like that hang around their station and incensed that the man would smile at her, actually almost laugh instead of allowing her the dignity of her fear, which was real and what any sane person would have felt when confronted with a crazy person, probably a Kentuckian, shooting a gun, even an air gun, into a wast
ebasket—a gun that a second before had been pointed at her face. “Is my car done?” she asks, furious, as she watches the man put the hubcap back on. “Yes,” he says and lowers the car from the lift, still smiling at her.

  She pays him out in the garage instead of in the office, gets in her car with the doors locked while she waits for him to go in for her receipt, and when she gets it, she backs out as quickly as she can, her hands shaking on the wheel. She can’t understand what makes people behave like that, why anyone, when given a choice, would choose to be uncivilized. When she gets home she runs past the dog, who is out of water again, shoos away a graying golden retriever, and goes to the living room sofa and sits down, closing her eyes. She forgets for a minute about Mrs. Lovelace until she hears her coming up the basement steps with an armload of the most hideous church bazaar rejects. “I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “A couple of things were so pretty, I just knew you’d like to have them out.” Mrs. D. looks around and sees, in the living room alone, at least ten different objects crammed into places where they don’t fit. Mammoth candlestick holders with ceramic dolphins and giant ashtrays carved out of rocks and all of a sudden her living room looks more like Mrs. Lovelace’s living room than her own. It’s beginning to thunder. “Gonna storm,” Mrs. Lovelace says, needlessly. “When we was kids, Mommy used to put us all on a big old feather bed whenever there was lightning. She said it would keep us from getting hurt.”

  Mrs. D. starts to say something but is interrupted by Mrs. Lovelace squealing and running over to the window. “It’s him,” she says. “The bastard’s home.” Mrs. D. jumps up and stands behind her. Again, the same feeling in her chest. This time she refuses to interpret it. She wonders how he’ll act, prepares herself for the confrontation. They watch him get out of his pickup. He looks tired from working, his jacket slung over his shoulder. He pushes his hair away from his eyes. There are sheer glass curtains hanging in the window and Mrs. Lovelace, impatient with watching through a film of fabric, pushes them aside a few inches. He walks toward the porch, with his head down. It isn’t until he has his foot on the first step that he looks up and sees his things. For a second he looks puzzled. Now, Mrs. D. thinks, now. Mrs. Lovelace pushes the curtain aside another inch or two, her hand shaking. Mr. Lovelace reaches down to get a handful of clothes and a pair of shoes, and he takes them out to the truck. When he comes back up to the porch, he’s smiling.