Luminous Airplanes (6 page)
Kerem was four years older than I was; in the beginning he was my champion, my protector. In the stories I told myself, which were largely plagiarized from J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, Kerem was the prince and I was the squire. I trudged across the wilderness in his footsteps, because even my most fantastic daydreams involved a fair amount of trudging, and when the imaginary wind froze me, Kerem loaned me his cloak and I was warm. This went on until puberty stripped Kerem of his princely qualities. One summer he went away to a soccer camp and returned with formidable legs, a slouch and a new way of talking, or, more precisely, of not talking. I had no claim on his attention; the most I could get from him was “Unh,” as he noodled past on his way to some incomprehensible teenage activity. That summer I was friends only with Yesim, who was just my age. She was willing to try my games, but with her for a companion all our quests got muddled. We trudged across the landscape, but I didn’t know what we were trudging toward or what we’d do when we got there. Then it became clear that we were headed toward Yesim’s bedroom.
“You are Prince Charming,” she said, “and I am Sleeping Beauty.”
She threw herself onto her twin bed and closed her eyes. For a long time neither of us moved. Then Yesim looked at me and said, “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. What happens now?”
“You kiss me, and I wake up.”
She returned to her slumber. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Yesim burst out laughing. “That’s not how you do it.”
“You’re awake,” I pointed out.
“If you can’t do better than that,” she said, “I’m going to make you a dwarf.”
I didn’t have anything against dwarves, who were, in Tolkien’s work at least, noble and tough, dwarves who had their own runic alphabet and their kingdom underground, but I didn’t want Yesim to be unhappy. “OK,” I said. I leaned toward her.
Yesim recoiled. “What are you doing? You have to wait for me to go to sleep.”
We tried the whole thing again. I leaned in and kissed her lips. Yesim opened her eyes. “Finally,” she said. “Now, go out, and come back in.”
“Why?”
“Narcolepsy,” Yesim hissed, a word I didn’t understand. I knew we were playing a strange game, but I didn’t know what was strange about it until Mrs. Regenzeit caught me coming down the stairs and said, “You are a leetle beet in love with my daughter. That is all right. Just you do not try to marry her.”
“I’m not in love with her,” I said. “Besides, I’m too young to be married.”
“This is true, fortunately for us all.”
I asked if Yesim was engaged, which sent Mrs. Regenzeit into a coughing fit of malicious amusement. “No,” she said. “She is too young, also. But when the time comes, she will marry a Turkish boy.”
I accepted her proclamation dutifully. Besides, I knew for a fact that there were no Turkish boys in Thebes but her brother. I had time. So I played along with Yesim’s stories, which only got stranger as the summer went on. I sat for an afternoon at the foot of the forbidden tower (or bed), listening to the princess read aloud from
Nancy Drew’s Dos and Don’ts for Girls
; I stumbled around in the enchanted forest (Yesim’s bedroom, with the lights off) and was thwacked with cushions by spiteful forest creatures. Yesim and I drank “poison,” actually grape soda with a St. Joseph’s baby aspirin crumbled into it, and lay side by side on her bed, feigning eternal sleep. Even then I knew that something was wrong with Yesim’s imagination: it stored its kisses too close to its tears. But I had no idea how to tell her so, and would not have spoken if I could. I loved Yesim a leetle beet too much for that.
Nancy Drew’s Dos and Don’ts for Girls
; I stumbled around in the enchanted forest (Yesim’s bedroom, with the lights off) and was thwacked with cushions by spiteful forest creatures. Yesim and I drank “poison,” actually grape soda with a St. Joseph’s baby aspirin crumbled into it, and lay side by side on her bed, feigning eternal sleep. Even then I knew that something was wrong with Yesim’s imagination: it stored its kisses too close to its tears. But I had no idea how to tell her so, and would not have spoken if I could. I loved Yesim a leetle beet too much for that.
Earlier that year, I had stolen a book called
Man and Woman
from my mothers’ shelves, at least, I thought I’d stolen it. In retrospect I think they must have left it out for me, as no book like that existed during the era when my mothers could have learned anything from it.
Man and Woman
was written in simple, direct language, and illustrated with pencil line drawings, carefully shaded, of men and women who were supposed to look ordinary, but in fact, because of the changes of hairstyle that had taken place since the book was published, seemed to have come straight out of the 1960s. For the first time, I saw clearly the difference between the sexes: the woman’s arms were crossed over her stomach, while the man rested a confident hand on his buttock. Late that summer I shared this information with Yesim. I told her solemnly that she had a uterus, as though I were a scout returning from a mission to a forbidden city.
Man and Woman
from my mothers’ shelves, at least, I thought I’d stolen it. In retrospect I think they must have left it out for me, as no book like that existed during the era when my mothers could have learned anything from it.
Man and Woman
was written in simple, direct language, and illustrated with pencil line drawings, carefully shaded, of men and women who were supposed to look ordinary, but in fact, because of the changes of hairstyle that had taken place since the book was published, seemed to have come straight out of the 1960s. For the first time, I saw clearly the difference between the sexes: the woman’s arms were crossed over her stomach, while the man rested a confident hand on his buttock. Late that summer I shared this information with Yesim. I told her solemnly that she had a uterus, as though I were a scout returning from a mission to a forbidden city.
Yesim nodded regally. “Let’s see,” she said, and we did. Our bodies looked nothing like the illustrations in
Man and Woman
, so I put my hand on my buttock and told Yesim to cross her arms over her stomach. The likeness wasn’t even approximate; I thought it would be better if Yesim wore her hair in a braid, but it was cut too short. Still we touched, and retreated, neither of us certain what had happened. Yesim pulled her pants up and we sat on the floor, not talking, because
Man and Woman
didn’t say what we were supposed to do in that moment, although it had a certain amount of information about what would come later, not all of it incorrect, as it turned out. And that was all. We didn’t take off our clothes again. The game of men and women ended and another began, I don’t remember which, maybe it was the game of Life, which Yesim liked, or Uno, which she also liked, but which I liked less than Life because it had no finely molded pieces.
Man and Woman
, so I put my hand on my buttock and told Yesim to cross her arms over her stomach. The likeness wasn’t even approximate; I thought it would be better if Yesim wore her hair in a braid, but it was cut too short. Still we touched, and retreated, neither of us certain what had happened. Yesim pulled her pants up and we sat on the floor, not talking, because
Man and Woman
didn’t say what we were supposed to do in that moment, although it had a certain amount of information about what would come later, not all of it incorrect, as it turned out. And that was all. We didn’t take off our clothes again. The game of men and women ended and another began, I don’t remember which, maybe it was the game of Life, which Yesim liked, or Uno, which she also liked, but which I liked less than Life because it had no finely molded pieces.
For years afterward Yesim came to see me at night. She touched my imaginary hair, and in time she learned to do other things as well, but by then she wasn’t Yesim anymore, or not only Yesim; she had put on other faces and become general, a warm weight by my hip, a hand on my chest, she could have been anybody. I didn’t even remember what she looked like with her clothes off, I thought. But apparently I was wrong. As I lay on my grandparents’ sofa, drunk, my knuckles rubbing against the waistband of my underwear, I thought of Yesim again, not the woman but the girl, standing with her arms crossed over her stomach. I imagined myself placing my hands on her shoulders, kissing her, moving her arms out of the way, pressing myself to her flat chest. Was I grown up in this scene, or was I a child? We were both soft, I know.
The phone rang just as I was falling asleep. It was Alice. She wanted to know if I was all right.
“I’m dead drunk,” I said.
“Your message was scary,” Alice said. “Are you losing your mind?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It sounded like you were going through some kind of
Shining
thing.”
Shining
thing.”
“Ha. I’m not even alone up here. My childhood friends live next door.”
“But you’re drinking. You’re going to start seeing the twins.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m trying to go to sleep.”
“Redrum, redrum.”
Alice was coming home from a party too, it turned out. Her friend Raoul …
“Raoul? Who’s Raoul?”
“You met him, he came to the salon a couple of times.” No hair parlor this but a group of writers who met in a bar in the Tenderloin. When the salon started, a year earlier, there had been a lot of them, but as people found work or left the city their number shrank, until the salon became a group of bar friends like any other, who played pool and gossiped and argued about who owed whom a drink. I didn’t remember anyone named Raoul. “He works for Petopia, the pet-supply people,” Alice said. “He wants me to write copy for them.”
“How glamorous,” I said.
There was a beat of silence. “I just called to see if you were all right,” Alice said. “Not so you could cut me down.”
“I’m sorry.” Beat. “Was it a good party?”
“It wasn’t bad. There weren’t enough people and there was too much to drink.”
“And this Raoul, he’s a nice guy?”
“Will you be jealous if I say
yes
?”
yes
?”
“Not at all,” I lied. “I want you to be happy.”
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I feel like I’m floating. You know? It’s like I’m floating in the dark, in a sensory-deprivation tank, and nothing I see is really happening.”
“Maybe it’s just that we’re drunk.”
“Maybe. But,” beat, “I just feel like that’s what we’re all doing now. Like we’re all just, like, floating.”
Beat. “Maybe we are.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish you were here.”
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.
“I guess we’ll find out then.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Beat. Beat.
My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.
Charles laughed. “I know that car.”
He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”
“I was at the Regenzeits’.”
“Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.
I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?
“Why are they our enemies?” I asked.
“Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”
“Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”
“Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”
“The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”
“But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”
“That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.
“Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”
“You must be thinking of the Cold War, although even there—”
“You don’t get it,” Charles interrupted. “Snowbird is their revenge.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Snowbird is a ski resort, and this is the late twentieth century. You aren’t going to convince me that Joe Regenzeit and his family have been holding a grudge ever since Mustafa Pasha’s defeat at the gates of Vienna, or, even if they did, that they would take their revenge here, in Thebes.”
Charles growled at me that I didn’t understand a damn thing about Thebes, and I said I understood enough, Thebes was just a small town in the mountains that no one cared about, and there were more important things happening in the big world, and wasn’t it time to think about something else, and he said, what something else did I mean, which something else did I want him to think about, when every day they ruined Thebes a little more, and the old families were dying out, and people were tearing the old houses down and building Swiss chalets, and a barn sold for two hundred thousand dollars, a
barn
, and I said, you wanted to move to California anyway, don’t tell me that you love Thebes, and he said, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want this place to die, and I said, it wasn’t dying, and he said, you don’t know what dying is, then he started coughing in a way that left little doubt that on this subject at least his knowledge was vastly greater than mine.
barn
, and I said, you wanted to move to California anyway, don’t tell me that you love Thebes, and he said, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want this place to die, and I said, it wasn’t dying, and he said, you don’t know what dying is, then he started coughing in a way that left little doubt that on this subject at least his knowledge was vastly greater than mine.
“Do you want some water?” I asked.
He waved me away, stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard him washing his coffee cup. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he shouted.
“Packing up the house,” I said.
“Then pack up the house, and don’t get mixed up with people who hate us.”
The screen door banged shut. I sat in the living room, hurt by my uncle’s words. Was he really so confused, I wondered, that he thought the Regenzeits were out to get us? It was ridiculous. People like Charles were the problem, I thought, intolerant people who can’t let go of the past.
After a while, I went up to my mothers’ room and opened one of Celeste’s trunks. It was full of magazines and newspapers heaped up roughly according to size, the raw materials of her work. What the Rowlands had accumulated, Celeste cut up: worn back numbers of
Scribner’s Magazine
,
McClure’s
,
Harper’s
,
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, mixed in with issues of
Life
and
Vogue
and
Look.
I used to look in the trunks when I came to visit in the summer, each time stealthily, as though I were breaking a rule; in fact no one said anything to me about the trunks and I don’t think my grandparents would have minded if they’d known. I liked the way the holes Celeste had cut in the pages of the old magazines acted as windows onto the pages behind, so that where the head of, say, a Bohemian fortune-teller was supposed to be, you’d see words or parts of words:
Scribner’s Magazine
,
McClure’s
,
Harper’s
,
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, mixed in with issues of
Life
and
Vogue
and
Look.
I used to look in the trunks when I came to visit in the summer, each time stealthily, as though I were breaking a rule; in fact no one said anything to me about the trunks and I don’t think my grandparents would have minded if they’d known. I liked the way the holes Celeste had cut in the pages of the old magazines acted as windows onto the pages behind, so that where the head of, say, a Bohemian fortune-teller was supposed to be, you’d see words or parts of words:
little known epis
the remarkable discover
ich it directly and indirectly
properly be regarded as m
the progress of thought
The central figur
young woman
ome scoundrel
oor of her cot
Now that I was looking at them again, the effect was completely different. The magazines seemed to me typical of Celeste’s angry way of dealing with the world: she took what she needed with no regard for anyone else.
I opened the second trunk, where she kept her collages. Each white sheet was kept safe in a big black sheet of paper folded in half. I unfolded the top sheet and picked up the collage beneath. It had a woodcut of a feather, angled as if drifting toward the bottom of the page; above it a slender hand in a lace cuff reached down, either to let it go or to pick it up again. Below the feather, at the center of the page, set between quotation marks that had been pasted down separately, was part of a typewritten phrase: “ollow me.”
Follow me
, it must have been, or, just possibly,
hollow me
. The date was penciled in the bottom right corner, in neat, small letters, July 1970. I was about to be born. I had seen the collage before, but something passed through me as I sat on the floor, looking at the paper, a cool dark something like the shadow of a cloud. It was as if Celeste were about to tell me something. I opened the second folder. This collage was from April of the same year; it showed a pair of hands on the keys of an enormous typewriter, and, emerging from the top of the machine, the prow of an airship. Cherubs beckoned to the airship from above, while from the bottom of the page a Chinese dragon rolled its eyes angrily. The references to birth, to my birth, were easier to spot than in the other: the cherubs, the round head of the zeppelin poking out of the typewriter’s slot. The dragon might have been my grandfather. Still, I was disappointed.
Ollow me
, the first picture said, and I wanted to ollow, to follow, but how could I follow when I didn’t know where it went? The collages led backward, further into the past, away from me and my time. Celeste’s style devolved, words and blocks of text appeared, floral borders, dancers, neckties and the heads of famous people. The collages retained their formal elegance but became, unmistakably, the work of a young person. Ollow me, ollow me. If only there had been another collage to show me where to go, but there was nothing, because, in May 1970, probably no more than a few days after she made this collage, Celeste and her sister left Thebes. They were seventeen and a half years old, and they took with them nothing, or almost nothing: a warm protrusion that would in a few months become a child.
Follow me
, it must have been, or, just possibly,
hollow me
. The date was penciled in the bottom right corner, in neat, small letters, July 1970. I was about to be born. I had seen the collage before, but something passed through me as I sat on the floor, looking at the paper, a cool dark something like the shadow of a cloud. It was as if Celeste were about to tell me something. I opened the second folder. This collage was from April of the same year; it showed a pair of hands on the keys of an enormous typewriter, and, emerging from the top of the machine, the prow of an airship. Cherubs beckoned to the airship from above, while from the bottom of the page a Chinese dragon rolled its eyes angrily. The references to birth, to my birth, were easier to spot than in the other: the cherubs, the round head of the zeppelin poking out of the typewriter’s slot. The dragon might have been my grandfather. Still, I was disappointed.
Ollow me
, the first picture said, and I wanted to ollow, to follow, but how could I follow when I didn’t know where it went? The collages led backward, further into the past, away from me and my time. Celeste’s style devolved, words and blocks of text appeared, floral borders, dancers, neckties and the heads of famous people. The collages retained their formal elegance but became, unmistakably, the work of a young person. Ollow me, ollow me. If only there had been another collage to show me where to go, but there was nothing, because, in May 1970, probably no more than a few days after she made this collage, Celeste and her sister left Thebes. They were seventeen and a half years old, and they took with them nothing, or almost nothing: a warm protrusion that would in a few months become a child.
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