The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (9 page)

 

MELINE

“J
OCELYN
,” I said the next day at two o'clock. I had followed her across the meadow to join her as she sobbed on her hillside. “I've been thinking we need something to do, and it might interest you to know that I know how to build a plane.”

She stopped weeping for a second and glared at me. “You do not.”

“Yes, I do. And I know how to fly a plane and I know you do, too. Now, what kind of possibilities does that bring to mind?”

“Oh, you do not know how to build a plane. Maybe you've seen the mechanics in your father's company
working
on a plane—”

“I can. I can build a vacuum cleaner, too. So could my mother. My father believed that if you used a tool you should understand it, and the best way to understand it was to know how to build it. We could build a plane. I could show you how. Now, according to Uncle, there are plane parts scattered all over the island. And we've got a lot of time and nothing to do.”

“How are we going to move the parts even if we find them?” Jocelyn asked. “How are we going to get a bunch of scattered plane parts to one place?”

“I don't know. The first thing is to find them.” I watched the wheels turn in Jocelyn's head, and for a second I saw a glimmer.

But even so she wasn't immediately available for the project. She had to rethink it constantly. She spent lots of time turning it over in her mind. We would be sitting by the fire and she would be staring intently at the flames and suddenly say, “Well, where are we going to build it without it being seen?”

“The barn back behind the house is empty.”

“How are we going to get the parts through the doorway?”

“Well, gosh, Jocelyn, it's a
barn
door.”

“I don't think it can be done.”

And I'd have to go over it all again slowly with certainty and confidence because she was always half a step away from backing out.

“It can be done. We find the plane parts, we take them into the barn, and we put them together.”

“Again, why would your father teach you to build a plane?”

“To be ready for anything. Suppose I flew a plane alone and crashed somewhere? I should be ready to fix it. I should know how to survive.”

“My father didn't teach me that when he taught me to fly,” said Jocelyn. I shrugged. Her forehead was screwed up. “My father didn't seem to think he needed to prepare me for such things.” I shrugged again. Then her tone stopped being ruminative and became shrill. “And he was right! Because nothing like that happened to me. And what happened to you and what happened to me couldn't be prepared for, so it's a waste of time trying to prepare anyone for anything. Anyhow, we build the plane and then what?”

My mind went to the moment of liftoff. That second when miraculously you leave the earth behind. When you're up above it all. Removed. Out of reach.

“And also,” she said, her shoulders slumping, folding in on herself again, “do you have any idea how much plane parts weigh? Even very small planes?”

“We'll need some kind of dolly. We'll need all kinds of things, Jocelyn. Soldering irons probably. Or, who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and find a plane that's not in such bad shape and just needs some repairs. I mean, until we start looking, we don't know what we'll find.”

“Even if we make a plane, we might not be able to fly it.”

My mother had taught me that if you could think it, you could do it. That's why my mother had such hopes for the guesthouse in Zimbabwe. It never occurred to her that she couldn't make it happen. She wanted it so badly that that in itself became a kind of faith. My mother's faith had been so strong that her beliefs created my universe, too. I realized that what we may think is incontrovertible knowledge of what is, is only made up out of our beliefs. When she died with all those things she was so sure she would do undone, all these beliefs collapsed for me. The universe was not what my mother believed it to be. I could not hang my hat there anymore. I didn't know what to believe in now. Somehow, as much as I had been sure about my mother, my mother who was so loving, who surely must be in touch with what was, so clear-sighted, so good was she, despite all that, she had gotten it all wrong. She hadn't known any more than anyone else. Because I found it hard to believe that this was possible, I harbored a half hope that it had been a mistake, they hadn't died, it must be that my mother and father had somehow survived without anyone knowing, that they weren't buried in foreign soil but were perhaps making their way through the Zimbabwe countryside to me and anytime now I would see them again.

“Jocelyn, suppose our parents aren't dead?” I asked suddenly and, as soon as I said it, was sorry.

“They're dead,” said Jocelyn flatly and got up and left the fire.

*   *   *

Mrs. Mendelbaum began interviewing butlers shortly after that. Although when Sam delivered
us,
he put me and Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum on the ground, a sop to our femininity perhaps, he treated the butlers as milk and dropped them wherever he felt like it from a hanging insubstantial-looking ladder. Jocelyn and I would be scouring the fields for airplane parts and hear the whirring blades of a chopper, and down a butler would come, bowler hat and all. At first the hats startled me and Jocelyn, and then we read Mrs. Mendelbaum's ad:
Butler wanted for large household of Mr. Marten Knockers. Must have experience. And proper clothes. Including the butler hat.

I was amazed at the number of men who showed up to be interviewed. I don't believe I would go to an interview for a job in which they asked you to bring “the butler hat.” I told Mrs. Mendelbaum that she had a better chance of getting a higher-class butler if she called it a bowler. “You know, Mrs. Mendelbaum, so many of these bowler hats look brand-new. I think they buy them just for the interview. I think what you've got here is not a lot of experienced butlers but a lot of out-of-work waiters with new hats.”

“But you zee! Zey come. Zey all want the work,” she said, pointing out the window at a newly arriving candidate who was hanging from the helicopter ladder, calling imprecations up to Sam. His fist was raised and his face was red, and really you couldn't blame him, it wasn't one of Sam's better hoverings. The ladder skimmed the ground around and around in a ten-foot radius.

“I hope he doesn't fall,” I said to Mrs. Mendelbaum. We were sipping tea and she was getting out her list of interview questions from the kitchen table drawer.

“Never mind them, they are all alike,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum.

“Haven't you found one you like?” I asked.

“Zey are little pansy boys dressed in their daddy's clothes. I need a man who can VORRY.”

I didn't know what “vorry” was, and the butler was quickly approaching the door, so I left. It never did much good to talk to Mrs. Mendelbaum: half the time it was as if she wasn't listening and the other half she didn't seem to know what I meant. But she always offered us cake and tea.

I winced when I saw Mrs. Mendelbaum's list of questions. Jocelyn and I overheard several of Mrs. Mendelbaum's interviews when we were sitting by the fire. Interviewing made Mrs. Mendelbaum very nervous and caused her not only to lapse into her German accent but to speak a strange mix of German and English. “Site vem haf you butlering began?” and “Vee feel housen haf you been butler at?” If you spoke a bit of German, you might be able to figure out what she was asking, but so far none of them had. Some courageous souls, after trying to get her to paraphrase her questions, gave up altogether and simply made a stab at any kind of answer at all.

“Zey are all idiots,” Mrs. Mendelbaum would moan after they left.

It didn't help that many of them were still shaking from the helicopter ride and circus-ladder-type descent. One fellow, obviously thinking his arrival might be witnessed, as indeed it was, made a daring leap off the ladder, but he misjudged the distance and landed on his face in a large mud puddle from which there was no reclaiming his savoir faire. Mrs. Mendelbaum said nothing and gave him a dry pair of Uncle's pants and, after an extremely perfunctory interview in which none of us had a clue what she was asking, sent him back to the hill to wait for Sam. We saw him shivering there in the rain for an hour, holding up his too short, too wide pants. “She might at least have given him tea,” sniffed Jocelyn.

“It's like she's looking for something specific in them and when she doesn't find it, she gets
angry,
” I said, but I did not want to think about who people really were. All I wanted to do was keep busy and not think at all.

The butler interviews continued for two weeks. Some candidates handled them better than others. One threw up. Many of them lost their bowler hats in the descent from the helicopter and, when they weren't hired, wrote to Uncle Marten demanding he replace them or reimburse them.

Uncle Marten, who wasn't paying attention, as usual, came into dinner one night and said, “What are all these letters demanding hats? Money for hats? From perfect strangers. Is this some new kind of charity or someone's idea of a get-rich-quick scheme? Bilk the poor unsuspecting rich fellow for hat money? Is it a prank? Well, I won't have it. It's very annoying.” And he threw them all in the fire. It would take a lot to get hats out of ole Marten Knockers, he told us, and right there made a vow he would
never
send anyone money for hats, no matter how plausible-sounding their claims. He rewarded himself with an extra piece of cake at dinner. “Girls,” he said, “I am having extra cake because some days one is especially pleased with oneself. Some days one simply congratulates the universe for having one in it.” Then he dug greedily into the cake, chocolate this time, and was so excited that he missed his mouth with his fork and actually stabbed himself in the chin. He had tine marks for a week.

One of the last interviews that Jocelyn and I overheard began with Mrs. Mendelbaum challenging the poor fellow, “ZO! You ZINK you vant to VORK on an
ISLAND?
??”

The butler, who was somewhat less intimidated than the dozen who had gone before, perhaps because he was British and had maybe even
been
a butler at some point, turned to us, who were sitting not far away by the fire, and said, “Good Lord, do you have any idea what she is trying to say?”

“Don't talk to ZEM. Zey are just silly gells,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum.

“Seagulls?” said the poor man. “See here now, they are not seagulls. Dropped from a helicopter, told very ordinary young ladies are seagulls. I demand to speak to Mr. Knockers. It was Mr. Knockers's name on the advertisement.”

“You vill zee NO ONE. NO ONE. I am in charge!” roared Mrs. Mendelbaum, getting up and putting her hands on her hips and for emphasis throwing on the floor the wet dishrag she'd been wiping down the kitchen with when he arrived. This seemed to stymie the man, who was swiftly losing his composure. He was at the mercy of a mad German woman on an island with no apparent way off. I could see his point completely. If she would only relax and offer them tea and cake instead of getting so nervous and shouting at them.

“Now listen, I'll just go, then,” he said, getting up.

“Mit out your tea?” asked Mrs. Mendelbaum sweetly, sitting down again. She knew there weren't many applicants left, and whereas usually she would have been happy to see the back of this one—she never liked ones who quaked in the face of her fierceness, or gave up—she knew she had to choose someone soon or be out of luck, and who knew who would follow this one, so she was willing to make allowances.

“You're raving mad,” said the butler and turned to me and Jocelyn again, asking us where the helicopter pickup was. We pointed to the hill, although we warned him that Sam wouldn't be back for another three hours. He looked at Mrs. Mendelbaum and looked at the rainy hill and chose the hill. I thought this showed good judgment, and she should have hired him on the spot. Jocelyn, when we were discussing this later, said that it showed a complete lack of character and anyone who couldn't deal with Mrs. Mendelbaum would be completely undone by Uncle Marten.

“But Uncle Marten is kind,” I argued. “I don't think Mrs. Mendelbaum is exactly.”

“I don't think it's that she isn't kind,” said Jocelyn.

“She throws the butlers out into the rain,” I said evenly.

“She doesn't.”

“Well, they always end up choosing the rain over her before she has the chance, but you know very well that
given
the chance she would throw them out into the rain.”

“I don't think it's that she isn't kind,” said Jocelyn, staring absently into the fire. “I think it's that she is afraid.”

But when the quaking butler got back to the mainland he turned out to be one quaking butler who was not ready to let bygones be bygones. He e-mailed Uncle Marten and told him he planned to sue. He had been traumatized. He had been almost kidnapped as far as he was concerned and made to wait on a rainy hill, fearful for his life. Even Uncle Marten knew this was overstating things, but it still caused him to go downstairs to the kitchen and speak to Mrs. Mendelbaum. “You mustn't
scare
them, Mrs. Mendelbaum,” he admonished. “It isn't nice.”

“I? Scare them?” asked Mrs. Mendelbaum, snorting with derision. “A frail little Jewish lady? Pansy froufrou boys. They should know from scary.”

“Nevertheless,” said Uncle Marten, coughing gently. But that was all he could think of to say, and he returned to his room defeated. Later at dinner Mrs. Mendelbaum, who felt unjustly accused, tried to bring it up again as she carried in the soup. “I shouldn't ask interview questions? I should maybe let them interview
me?
”

Uncle Marten gazed into his soup bowl with exaggerated interest. “There, there, what kind of soup did you say this was?”