Flight Behavior (19 page)

“You don’t know what?” Cub asked.

“I don’t know what those kids are going home to. So don’t act like you do.”

“Whatever. You’re the big shot.” He rolled his eyes toward the end of the aisle where they’d met Blanchie.

“What, because everybody saw I was in the newspaper? You
bragged
about that, Cub. You were ready to sign autographs at work for having a famous wife.”

He pretended to study an array of identical dolls dressed in different gauzy costumes. “I didn’t think it would turn into a full-time job,” he murmured.

She blew out through her nose, nostrils flared, feeling like a horse. “I didn’t even want to talk to them the second time. I told you that. I said they needed to interview Dr. Byron, but he was gone up the mountain. I only talked to them for about fifteen seconds. I just posed for that picture so they’d go away.” Also, the first one they’d taken was hideous. She was hoping to expunge it from the record.

Spider-Man socks, $3. Spider-Man underwear three-pack, $5.50. Preston needed both, but did underwear count as a Christmas gift? Cub kept saying he wanted the kids to have a “real Christmas,” but she felt off balance, wondering what those words could possibly mean. “Oh, and let me tell you, Cordie was screaming the whole time, with those reporters. Just like the first time. I don’t think she cares for publicity.”

“Not like her mother.”

“Will you quit being stupid!”

A shopper at the end of the aisle looked up. Dellarobia dropped her voice. “You started this, Cub. Announcing it in church. I didn’t even say half the stuff in that article, about the butterflies being on holy ground and everything. That’s your doing.”

“I felt the Spirit, Dellarobia. Something you don’t understand, I guess.”

His sincerity was untouchable, she knew that. Not just in church, everywhere. He’d even offered Ovid a place for his camper. For whatever else he was or wasn’t, Cub bore a plain, untarnished humanity. The fact of that now only cut her anger with more self-hatred. She found herself unable to give in. “
I
was there last Sunday, and you weren’t, thank you very much.”

She’d had to go it alone with Hester, bearing up under the stares. As a spiritual celebrity she was expected to shine with the Beacons, not slink off for coffee and carbs. The beatitude of Feathertown’s miracle had its perks, but some seemed to think Dellarobia was parading herself, and Hester was profiteering. Others weren’t keen on the outsiders, Ovid Byron and certain unspoken things he might represent. All this of course was filtered through a couple of screen doors before she heard it, but she could imagine. And she was still trying to figure Hester, whom she’d now seen buckle under three times: first in church under the wide gaze of Pastor Ogle, and again when she got so nervous about his impending visit. And third, when she cried and asked for help in Dellarobia’s kitchen. No, four times: up on the mountain when she declared Dellarobia was receiving the spirit. Hester was frightened of something, and she was starting to think it might be God. Church was getting too complicated for comfort.

“So did the spirit move you to agree with your dad?” she asked Cub. “About cutting our mountain down to the stumps?”

“You act like we have a choice. We need the money.”

“
He
needs the money. Bear didn’t ask us before he took out that equipment loan. Why is this balloon payment our problem?”

“He didn’t know he’d lose all his contracts when this economy crap hit the fan.”

“Well, but it was his risk.”

“And it’s his land.”

“And we have
nothing
? Whatever gets done on that farm, we help do it. Cub, look at me. Will you just look at me when I’m talking to you?”

He stopped and turned with exaggerated annoyance, looking at her with tired, flat, loveless eyes, as sick of this story as she was. She wanted what could not be. She wanted him to choose his team. Not mother and son. Man and wife.

“You know I’m right,” she said fiercely. “We work that farm, we’re raising our children to call it home, and we don’t even get a vote? What am I saying? We don’t even get any g-d Christmas ornaments! We just beg for your mother and daddy’s handouts. Damn it, Cub. When are you going to potty-train
yourself
?”

People were staring. The checkout lady in the red turtleneck looked ready to call someone. Having a marital knock-down-drag-out in public was the trashiest kind of humiliation. The whole tired tangle of her life disgusted her. Suddenly, like the flush in the back of her throat she always felt before a virus came on, she had it back: the bizarre detachment that had pulled her in October and November to run away from her marriage. Riding the crest of that wave that shut out everything but the thrill of forward motion. In this moment, here, she was sane enough to be terrified. That whole almost-affair had been like a dream. In real life there were no clean getaways. In
this
life, she had to line up a sitter just to have a fight.

Cub picked up a sippy cup shaped like a frog, two dollars. She grabbed it from him and tossed it into the cart. So the cashiers wouldn’t think they were here to shoplift.

“What did he say, on Sunday?” Cub asked.

“Who?”

“Pastor Ogle. About the mountain.”

Cub would go with the prevailing wind, whether it was Bobby Ogle or his mother. He wanted an ally. So did Hester, her ferocity notwithstanding. Everyone wanted to be inside the fold rather than out; maybe life was that simple. “Would that settle it for you,” she asked, “if Bobby came out against the logging?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would it make a difference if Hester did? Or anybody else on the planet, other than me?”

“Everybody on the planet doesn’t know about it,” Cub said.

“Well, just about. You can’t keep a tattoo on your butt a secret in this town. If Bear even wanted to keep it quiet, which he doesn’t.”

“He’s got nothing to be ashamed of. He says it’s wrong to break a contract.”

“Are we speaking of Bear Turnbow’s morals? Oh, just a minute. Let me wave some money in the air and see which way his morals turn.”

Cub picked up something called a “whip-around sound wand,” just to look at it, but she yanked it from his hand and threw it back at the shelf. A toy whose sole purpose was to drive mothers insane.

Cub was starting to shrink from her temper, the predictable course of things. Whipped, she knew what men called it. All roads in her marriage led to this, the feeling she’d stepped into Cub’s life to take over where Hester left off, and that was the most wretched thought of her day. “I’m sorry,” she said, handing the wand back to him. He waved it around with no real enthusiasm, and put it back.

“So what does Pastor Ogle think?” Cub asked her again. “About what we should do up there.”

“Why should Bobby Ogle decide what we do with our own land?”

Of course she knew why. Why did people ask Dear Abby how to behave, or take Johnny Midgeon’s word on which men in D.C. were crooks? It was the same on all sides, the yuppies watched smart-mouthed comedians who mocked people living in double-wides who listened to country music. The very word
Tennessee
made those audiences burst into laughter, she’d heard it. They would never come see what Tennessee was like, any more than she would get a degree in science and figure out the climate things Dr. Byron described. Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.

Cub had left the toy aisle but returned carrying the ugliest object she’d ever seen in her life. A big planter box shaped like a swan. “Should we get this for Mother?”

She looked it up and down. The shiny orange beak, the cheap molded white plastic that would fall apart in a season. The seam that ran up the neck and down the middle of its hateful, beady-eyed face. “Sure,” she said. “Hester will love it.”

He vanished again, leaving her to push that blooming swan in her cart for all to see. The close-set eyes made it look like that killer in
Psycho
. A gift that would go on giving, she realized, after Hester filled it with petunias on her porch, and she’d meet that evil gaze every time she pulled in their drive. She felt guilty about despising Hester. Even that was getting complicated. They were allies in some sense, given the new backbiting in the flock. Bobby himself might be on the fence. Last Sunday he’d spoken of a throwaway society and things of this world taking on too much importance, and naturally she thought of Bear and his logging, though she could have been reading into it. He said the Old and New Testaments together had over a thousand passages about respecting God’s earth, which seemed pretty direct. But later he blessed all those present in the hope of many things including prosperity, which kind of undermined his point. It made her feel hopeless. Not even Bobby Ogle could read those thousand passages and figure things out on a case-by-case basis. In a world of wars and religious fracas, prosperity might be the sole point of general agreement. Honestly, if you waved a handful of money, whose head
didn’t
turn toward it? Only those who’d already paid off their houses, was her guess.

Cub had abandoned her in the toy aisle, still having found nothing that would please Preston. Cordie was easy, she would make wrapping paper a festivity, but Preston was another story. She felt haunted by her son’s hopeful gaze and inevitable disenchantment as she looked down the row of married Potato Heads and knock-off Barbies. Her eye landed on a set of green plastic binoculars, shrink-wrapped onto a bright cardboard backing. “Funtastic!” it said. Explore, discover, get close to nature, all for $1.50, carry strap included. Made in China. She held the plastic package sideways up to her eye, trying to peer through, and couldn’t even make out the items in her own shopping cart. The quality was exactly what you’d expect for a buck-fifty. It was so tempting to buy a horrible thing you could afford, just because the package said “Explore nature.” You could pretend it actually worked, and make your kids shut up and do the same. Child-rearing in the underprivileged lane. She put back the binoculars, feeling so desperate for a cigarette she considered lighting up right there in front of Mrs. Potato Head. She could get in a few good hits before someone made her stop. She knew they wouldn’t kick her out of the store. They wanted her damn fifty dollars.

A girl from church, Winnie Vice, entered the toy aisle from the other end with her toddler in the cart. Winnie was a Crystal or Brenda relative, she couldn’t remember which. That was another snafu at church: now that Crystal’s kids were blackballed from Sunday school, she brought them to the café, so forget about sneaking in there for quiet time—the place was bedlam. Other mothers of the out-of-control were lining up behind Crystal, hanging out together while their young were trained by Jazon and Mical in the art of using the juice machine as a spray gun. The congregation was definitely dividing into pro-Crystal or pro-Brenda factions, and it was hard to guess what might compromise your neutrality. Winnie hadn’t seen her, so she could make a clean break if she got out of the toy aisle. Still toyless. Dellarobia grabbed a horribly made plush raccoon that didn’t even look like a raccoon, and threw it in her cart because it only cost a dollar. She wanted to punch somebody out. The world made you do this.

Food, here at least was something sensible to buy. She loaded up on two-dollar boxes of mac and cheese, and picked through the cereal looking for those with fewer marshmallow-caliber ingredients. Down the aisle she spied Cub standing near the coffee, and there was Crystal Estep, good night. With her boys nowhere in evidence, Crystal was all smiles, beaming up at Cub’s great height, leaning against her cart in a backward tilt that threw her pelvis forward like a kindergartner doing stretching exercises. Crystal spotted Dellarobia, waved at her, and shoved off, leaving Cub to peruse the coffee. Dellarobia steered toward her husband, vowing to try and be sweet, but of course he picked up the can of Folgers. “Put it back, Cub,” she said. “Get the store brand.”

“I thought we liked the Folgers.”

“Six dollars. The store brand is one seventy-five. Which one do we like?”

They arrived together at the Last Chance section at the end of the aisle, ridiculously low-priced items that had gone past their expiration dates. She got a canister of lemonade mix and some fruit cocktail. Who knew canned fruit could expire?

“How’s Miss Crystal?” she asked.

“Motormouth, like always,” Cub said. “Somebody needs to adjust her idle.”

Dellarobia laughed. “That’s not nice.”

“She says she wants you to look at her letter she’s writing to Dear Abby.”

“Oh, for crying out loud. Again? You should see that thing, it’s like twenty pages long. She ought to apply some of that stick-to-itiveness to getting her GED.”

Dellarobia was amazed to see what wound up in the Last Chance section, not just food but also strange hair products and such. Packs of gum. And a packet of condoms! Who in their right mind would buy expired condoms? she wondered. It seemed like the very definition of a bad bargain. Cub naturally went for the hot-fudge-sundae toaster pastries, which she wanted to snatch from his hand and smack against his big belly. But she decided not to add Cub’s weight issues into today’s fun lineup. If she could pretend ice-cream-flavored breakfast snacks did not cause obesity, he might overlook the less advantageous aspects of lung cancer.

“Hey, buddy! Who’s this pretty little lady?” A tall, narrow man in a raincoat and old-fashioned fedora reached across their shopping cart, evil swan and all, to shake Cub’s hand. Cub introduced her to Greg, his supervisor at the gravel company.

“So what do you think?” Greg winked at her. “Is it time to start building an ark?”

Ha-ha-ha-ha. Dellarobia was ready for her world to get some new material. Cub chatted with him about how busy they’d been at work. She wondered why the boss would be shopping at the dollar store. Sometimes it seemed nobody at all had any money. But he was
management
, wasn’t there maybe a small step up? A two-dollar store? She hung around long enough to seem polite before waggling her fingers good-bye and pushing on. Cub caught up to her in the dog food aisle.