Flight Behavior (21 page)

The scientists knocked off early that afternoon, a rainy day, big surprise, and came right over to partake in the cheer, leaving their jackets and muddy boots on the back porch. Ovid came in with two wrapped gifts for the kids, which could not be opened before Christmas, he said, rendering them thrilled and manic. Ovid was wearing his all-star smile that showed his dazzling, slightly lapped eyeteeth. Dellarobia had gone a tad manic herself, baking multiple trays of cookies shaped like stars and bells, which she’d set up for the kids to decorate at the kitchen table. Cordie stood on a chair while Preston knelt on the one beside her, smearing on the icing with the back of a spoon and micromanaging his sister’s use of the sprinkles. Preston went immediately into show-off mode in front of the students, announcing he was doing an experiment. He mixed the red and green icing together, yielding a brown-colored product that was not going to be a big seller in any household familiar with diaper changes. Dellarobia just laughed, scraped it out, and started over, no big deal. Powdered sugar was about the cheapest of edible substances. It was one of the mysteries of grocery store economics.

Dovey cranked up Shakira and lured everyone into the living room, dancing around in her slinky silver sweater and a Santa hat bobby-pinned onto her mop of brown curls. The children quickly abandoned the cookies for the living room too, bedazzled to witness a celebration in their home involving adults. Cordie anchored herself to the middle of the floor, bouncing to the music, and loudly sang “Rudolph” over whatever else was playing, hamming for applause. Dellarobia felt young and fearless again watching Dovey snap her fingers and pump her elbows, walking around tipping bourbon into everyone’s eggnog. And flirting, Dovey being Dovey. Applying a full-court press to Pete, even though fully apprised of his marital status. They were just having fun, and if someone ended up with the SpongeBob glass, Dellarobia didn’t care. She hadn’t had a cigarette for hours, and did feel at a certain point as if she might chew up the carpet, but this was overshadowed by her sense of accomplishment. She’d thrown a party.

They had a Christmas tree, too. She went off-road on that one. She’d scoured the house for cash, shaking out purses and jeans and coat pockets, digging through rubber-band drawers, even running her fingers around all the grubby cupholders in the car. Her search had turned up a thrilling number of small bills, eight ones and a couple of fives, which she pleated into little fans. Not butterflies exactly, she didn’t want to go there, but they looked festive. The students got into helping her fold the dollars, and pulled more from their own pockets for the cause. Mako knew how to make a bird with a long neck and bill. As a kid he’d helped with a project of folding a thousand of these little birds, which they were led to believe would contribute to world peace. It was that kind of school, he said. The birds looked pretty. When her family saw what Dellarobia was doing here, she would need some world peace. Hester would go through the roof.

Dovey produced a twenty, on loan, and circulated herself. She dropped Pete like a hot potato when she found a partner who could
do
the Mashed Potato. The bump, the pony, the jitterbug, the two-step, holy smokes, Ovid Byron could even moonwalk. They rolled up the rug so he could slide backward across the floor in his wool socks, his head thrown back, eyes closed, smooth as silk. Preston nearly swooned. Mako danced like a robot, and Bonnie just flung her arms around and had a good time. Dovey had brought her iPod and cable, the girl was truly a party in a box, so they went from Michael Jackson to Coldplay to Diamond Rio to Chumbawamba, and that’s how things were going when Cub got home from work. Dellarobia heard him drop his lunch cooler and open the fridge before fully registering the commotion. He appeared in the living room doorway.

“Dellarobia, what in the heck?”

“Merry Christmas!” they all yelled.

Dellarobia had fended off Dovey’s bourbon, as she had her kids to think about, and the half Valium she’d taken for courage had definitely expired. Yet something made her weak in the knees. She gripped the stepladder carefully and turned around to give Cub a wide smile, showing some teeth. “We’re celebrating the true meaning of Christmas.”

She was covering the tree with dollars. After they ran out of bills, they bent paper clips into hooks and taped these onto pennies, dimes, and quarters in endless supply. Preston dashed from the tree to Mako and Bonnie to collect the taped coins and hang them on the branches, reaching so high his flannel shirt hiked up, showing his skinny little belly. Preston didn’t know about Money Tree industries, and was as hazy as anyone else on the connection between Christmas trees and Baby Jesus, probably too young to grasp the full extent of Dellarobia’s insurrection. But maybe not. Between the contagion of his mother’s mischief and the showing off, he was acting a little crazed.

She watched Cub study the domestic scene, taking everything in, working up to whatever he was going to make of it. Irony would never be Cub’s long suit, but religious blasphemy he could probably pick out of a lineup. He seemed to be getting incensed.

“What the hell kind of priorities are you teaching those kids?” he finally asked.

Preston jumped up and down. “Dad, lookit! We put a twenty on top.”

8

Circumference of the Earth

S
anta brought Preston the watch he wanted, just like Mako’s. It
was
Mako’s. He’d knocked on the kitchen door the morning he and the other students were leaving town, and handed her the watch as a gift for Preston. Dellarobia was floored, but Mako insisted. His thanks for the repaired zipper. He claimed it was not an expensive watch. He had a better one at home, he said, and showed her some of the functions on this one that no longer worked. As if she could tell. He wanted it to go to Preston, who called it the “science watch.” Dellarobia had worried about her son being a pest, but now could see the flattery angle for Mako, who must not have little brothers at home pining for his hand-me-downs. She promised she would tell Preston on Christmas morning that the watch was from Mako, his hero.

But the day came, and she broke the promise. Preston tore into the wrapping paper, shouting, “Yesss! I
knew
it! Santa’s real!” Stammering a little, overexcited, he said he had done an experiment: intentionally, he had not told his parents what he wanted. It never occurred to him that a kindergarten teacher might leak information, or that Mako might have guessed. The watch in his hands was Preston’s proof that Santa had read his mind. Dellarobia found she could not revoke a delusion that made him so happy. “So fantasy won the day,” was how she put it to Dovey.

“As usual,” Dovey agreed.

“He’s so smart, it’s scary,” Dellarobia said. “What kind of child does experiments to test the existence of Santa Claus? Next he’s going to ask me how Santa gets all the way around the world in one night.”

Dovey folded the last towel in the laundry basket. “Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That’s so random. It’s like this whole shady setup.”

“True. At what age do you cross over the line and say, ‘Now I’ll face reality?’ ”

“When you get there, send me a postcard,” Dovey sang.

Dellarobia thought, but did not say: There’s usually a pregnancy test involved. She rarely acknowledged the gulf between her life and Dovey’s, but it did exist. She separated the clothes into stacks on her bed and tucked hers and Cub’s into the bureau drawers. She and Dovey were spending a morning together in the same spirit that had brought them together since childhood, shoring up one another’s psyches against routine wear and tear. Even in the old days they mostly hung out at Dellarobia’s house, without all those wild little brothers to contend with. After fifth grade, Dellarobia’s household only had the late father and the sad mother, so it was quiet and they could rule.

Now of course it came down to which house had the childproof electric outlets. Dovey lived ten minutes away in a duplex owned by her brother in what passed for suburban Feathertown. This morning she’d helped Dellarobia knock off a pile of year-end tax documents and two loads of laundry, with more to go, plus the deconstruction of the weird Christmas tree, which made the kids whiny.
No, mine, no,
Cordelia shrieked as Dellarobia wrested nickels from her little paws, to discard the hooks. She asked Preston to unfold the dollar bills and flatten them for future use, but he was sentimental about Mako’s birds. “We have to keep them for next Christmas!” he wailed as Dellarobia pocketed them one by one, criminally hoping they’d add up to a carton of cigarettes.

“We’ll make more next Christmas,” she said.

Preston threw himself on the couch. “Mako probably won’t even
be
here.”

Dovey asked if some law of physics made children apply equal and opposite energy to both ends of the Christmas season. They made no real protest when Dellarobia sent them to their room. Cordie made a nest of toys on the floor and Preston sat on his bed attending to The Watch, pressing its buttons and holding it to his ear, an activity that might engage him into his teenage years, from the looks of it. He was also fond of his gift from Dr. Byron, a calendar with a huge color photo of a different endangered species for every month. Preston could not yet name all the months in order, but had memorized these animals in a day.

Dellarobia fetched the next load of laundry from the dryer and dumped it on the bed in her cluttered bedroom, where she and Dovey could hide, out of the kids’ line of sight. She turned on the radio to cover their conversation, keeping it low enough she would still hear a slap fight, should one arise. Cordie was always the instigator. Dellarobia began dismantling the octopus of warm, stuck-together clothing, pulling out socks, while Dovey tried to fold tiny flannel shirts whose seams puckered like lettuce.

“I forgot to tell you, I have a date,” Dovey said. “You can do my hair. I brought over this new flatiron I bought. It’s got, like, an earth’s-core setting.”

“You’re straightening your hair for some guy? Must be love.” Dellarobia yanked on a twist of threads that connected two unmatched socks like an umbilical cord. “Is this Felix? I thought he was just the flavor of the month.” Felix was a bartender in Cleary, allegedly hot. Dellarobia had not met him and doubted she would.

“Scam potential,” Dovey said. “It’s this big bartender-wait-staff blowout, so other guys will be there too. They all worked long shifts last night, so tonight they rage.”

New Year’s Eve was the occasion of their long shifts the previous night. Dellarobia and Cub had put the kids to bed and split one beer on the couch watching a CMT special while waiting to watch that sparkly ball drop for reasons no one seemed to recall anymore. Cub agreed to stop changing channels for nearly an hour, which for Cub signaled high romance. The girl hosting the CMT show in her teetery high heels was one of those national talent-search winners they couldn’t have named, young enough she probably thought having to work on New Year’s Eve was awesome. Cub had declared that women who hadn’t had children weren’t really sexy, they looked like dresses on a hanger waiting to get a body in them. Dellarobia was touched. One thing about Cub, you knew he wasn’t faking a compliment. He could also declare your new sunglasses reminded him of a frog, with no offense intended. All that entered his mind’s highway went straight onto cruise control. Somewhere between Toby Keith and Kitty Wells they’d both conked out, and a few hours later woke up couch-racked and disoriented, having missed the big event. She dragged herself and Cub to bed feeling achy and sad, hung over without cause. The mood had followed her into this day.

It wasn’t that she envied Dovey’s social life. Felix was already history, she suspected, certainly no impetus for special preparations. Hair was a long-standing recreation between herself and Dovey that allowed them to preen and tuggle each other like beagle pups. “Beauty shop,” they used to call this, with increasing irony in high school, but still rising faithfully to the challenge of curling Dellarobia’s arrow-straight hair and straightening Dovey’s ringlets. Which, in all honesty, struck Dellarobia as part of the same unending march of uselessness that had occurred to her in the dollar store that day, the factory workers and shoppers canceling each other out. So much human effort went into alteration of nonessential components. Especially for women, it could not be denied.

They flipped a coin for the first turn at bat. Dellarobia won, which meant she sat at the mirrored dresser while Dovey clicked on the hot rollers and went to work. She held the metal clips in her mouth and hummed with the radio, classic country, the stuff they’d loved in high school: Patty Loveless on “Long Stretch of Lonesome,” Pam Tillis with “All the Good Ones Are Gone.” Dellarobia wondered how her favorite music got declared “classic” while she was still under thirty. The sight of Dovey with the clips in her mouth made her homesick for her mother, who used to spend afternoons with that same mouth-full-of-pins frown, pinning pattern pieces to a bolt of fabric spread over the dining table. The more expensive the fabric, the deeper the quiet and that frown, lest she make a wrong cut and have to swallow the expense. Dellarobia would pull up a chair and read her library book,
A Wrinkle in Time
or
It’s Me, Margaret
or
The Name of the Rose
, depending on the year. The oak table had been built by her father, a broad, smooth-grained surface underpinning the family endeavors long after he was gone. She missed that too, the table. Where was it?

Unlike her mother, Dovey had no stamina for silence. After a couple of minutes she spit out the clips and tossed them on the vanity. “So what happened to Ovid, Lord of the Dance. When’s he coming back?”

“Next Tuesday.” Dellarobia blushed.

Dovey lifted her eyebrows. “What hour and what minute? Have we got butterflies over Mr. Butterfly?”

“Dr. Butterfly to you.”

“Excuse me? I got him to moonwalk.”

“Because you’re a ho. I totally saw him first.”

“We can share,” Dovey said. “Like we did with Nate Coyle. Remember that?”

“Wow, poor little Nate. Was that sixth?”

“Fifth. I bet he’s in counseling to this day.” With convincing expertise Dovey used a rat-tailed comb to nick out each long strand of tomato-colored hair, raise it high, and spool it down, a process Dellarobia found entertaining to watch without her glasses. Gradually her head grew enlarged by the corona of rollers. From time to time they heard the thump of Cub’s pipe wrench under the house as he made himself useful down there, wrapping the pipes with new insulation tape. The temperature had finally dropped to something close to winter range.

“Hey, here’s one for you,” Dovey said. “I saw it on the way over here. ‘Lukewarm Now, Burn Later!’ ”

“The thing about you and church, Dovey, is you think everything is about hell.”

“Hell yeah!”

Dellarobia found it hard to resist the idea of her parents together in some other sphere, maybe rocking the grandbaby that never got loved in this one. But she had no heart for a system that would punish Dovey and reward the likes of herself, solely on the basis of attendance. “I don’t think I believe in hell,” she said. “It’s kind of going out of style, like spanking kids in school. Pastor Ogle never even mentions it.”

“Wait a sec, they canceled hell? Man, will my mom be pissed off.”

“I’m serious, Dovey. Who do you know that’s inspired by the idea of burning flesh? People our age, I mean.”

“Mmm-hm,” she said, holding the comb in her teeth for a two-handed maneuver. “Too campy. Like some Halloween drive-in movie.”

Dellarobia realized this was true, exactly. The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment. “I’ve heard people say Bobby Ogle is a no-hell preacher,” she said. “Like that’s some official denomination.”

Dovey took the comb out of her teeth and pointed it at the mirror. “You know what? I think Ralph Stanley is one of them. Now that you mention it. I read this interview with him in a magazine.”

“Wow.” Dellarobia could not quite imagine the magazine that would probe country legends for gossip about their spiritual lives. But Dovey was a wellspring of weird facts that turned out to be true.

“So you’re saying this famous Bobby Ogle is like a new-millennium preacher? I pictured him kind of played out. Way older.” Dovey lifted a strand at Dellarobia’s nape, making her shudder.

“No. Early thirties, I’d guess. Don’t you remember his picture in the hallway, in high school? He was part of the football team that went to state.”

“Whoa, that was recent history.”

“Well, not anymore it isn’t, Dovey. But it was when we were in high school. I guess he just seems more ahead of us in spirit. His parents were old—maybe that’s part of it. They were sixty or something when they adopted him.”

“He’s adopted?”

“Like Moses. A basket case.”

Suddenly Cub was at the back door, calling out from the kitchen. “Hon, do you know where my truck keys are at?”

Dellarobia bugged her eyes at the mirror. “No more sex till he quits ending every g-d sentence with a preposition.”

Dovey crooned, “Do you know where my truck keys are at,
bitch
?”

“What’s funny?” he asked from the bedroom doorway. His face was unreadable, backlit as he was from the bright living room, but Dellarobia could see in his posture the reluctance to enter their zone. Cub was a little afraid of Dovey and herself in tandem, a fact she felt bad about but would never change. Their communal disloyalties were like medicine: bitter and measured, life-prolonging.

“You going over to Bear and Hester’s?” she asked. His key ring was on the dresser. She reached to toss them and he caught them out of the air one-handed,
chank
. He was surprisingly coordinated, for someone who moved through the world as if underwater.

“Yeah. I think Mother wants to worm the pregnant ewes today.”

“On New Year’s Day, how festive.” It hadn’t been much of a holiday. Cub had spent his days off with Bear repairing the High Road after the floods. He’d brought in two truckloads of gravel on the employee discount. Hester would be able to resume her tour business, and Bear was keen to get the road in shape for the logging trucks, though technically that was the company’s job. Bear felt they would make a mess of it.

“She’s been after me to help drench them,” Cub said. “It’s been so warm. I don’t know if this cold snap changed her mind, we’ll see.”

“Okay. See you at supper.” She kissed her fingertips and waved them. Cub pointed his finger like a pistol, winked, and was gone.

As habitually as a prayer, Dellarobia wished she were a different wife, for whom Cub’s good heart outweighed his bad grammar. Some sickness made her deride his simplicity. Really the infection was everywhere. On television, deriding people was hip. The elderly, the naive—it shocked her sometimes how the rules had changed. A night or two ago they’d seen comedians mocking some old guy in camo coveralls who could have been anybody, a neighbor. Not an actor, this was a real man, standing near his barn someplace with a plug of tobacco in his lip, discussing the weather and his coonhounds. Billy Ray Hatch: she and Cub repeated the name aloud, as though he might be some kin. It was one of the late-night shows that archly twisted comedy with news. Somehow they’d found this fellow and traveled to his home to ask ridiculous questions. After each reply the interviewer nodded in a stagy way, creasing his eyebrows in fake fascination. So the whole world could see Billy Ray Hatch made into a monkey. Cub changed the channel.