Flight (28 page)

“I wish we could just sit here in our pajamas all day and drink coffee,” Leanne says. She leans her head back so that it rests against Carol’s stomach, and with that touch, Carol’s anger evaporates. She puts her hands on Leanne’s shoulders and kneads them gently. The head grows heavier against her.

“That would be nice,” Carol says. “We could have a yazy day.” When Leanne was little, she liked nothing better than to crawl into bed with her mother in the morning, lugging a book. Carol would read, too, and sometimes the two of them would spend hours under the covers, reading and drinking hot chocolate. Carol called it having a “lazy day,” and Leanne, whose l’s were a long time in coming, rechristened them “yazy.” It’s funny how moments like that, when nothing actually happened, sometimes strike Carol as her fondest memories. As if stillness and empty time could be the high points of a mother’s life.

“I wish we could do it,” Carol says. She stops kneading and gives Leanne’s shoulders a pat. “But we have a lot to do today if we’re going to be ready for the big event.”

The sun is warm, and the weather is still humid. After all that rain, it feels as if there’s warm steam rising up from the ground. Margaret puts a hand up to shade her eyes and looks down the road. By nine it’s going to be uncomfortably hot. It’s good she got going early.

She heads west first, intending the same back-and-forth route as yesterday. She checks her watch as she starts out, determined to keep track of her pace. As she settles into her stride, breathing the slightly asphalty morning air, her mind cycles through her to-do list. Yesterday she set up the fax modem on her father’s computer, and with his help after dinner, she got it hooked into the house’s second
phone line, the one he uses for the Web. She told him Carol wanted it for the bed-and-breakfast, which was in fact true. Carol had been delighted to hear she was setting it up.

By the time they were fax-ready, Richard Guattari’s office was closed, but Margaret called anyway and left a message with his secretary, giving her the number. She’s expecting the paperwork this morning. She called Visa and established her own line of credit, with the new card to be sent to her departmental address. Once the bank opens in Illinois, she’ll call and move half the money from their joint account into her own. She’s hoping there will be enough to cover the retainer. In case there’s not, she has left her American Express card activated, so she can draw on its line of credit.

Once she has sent the money to Guattari, it will just be a matter of waiting. Divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Yes, David was cruel to her—at least briefly—but it’s strange to think of herself as someone who was suffering cruelty. It’s wrong, somehow. But it’s the only way.

Has he harmed you?

She reaches the first road and turns around, bouncing lightly on her feet, ridding her mind of the thought. Better to concentrate on the wedding, on the day’s specific tasks. Today is just a matter of following her mother’s instructions. There will be cooking and setup, Leanne to help get ready, Margaret’s own dress to be checked on and ironed if necessary. Other than that, there’s not a whole lot to do. Leanne has gone for a low-maintenance wedding: small, outdoors, casual. She seems unconcerned with the details that drive brides crazy—perfecting her hairdo, checking on the food, giving the photographer a list of shots. She’s drifting through the wedding the way she drifts through life: vaguely confident that things will work out in the end. Leanne has always seemed reluctant to make decisions about anything, as if she believes trying too hard will guarantee disappointment.

Still, it’s Leanne’s wedding, and if she’s letting things slide, it’s not Margaret’s place to set her straight. She wasted a lot of time when they were young, trying to convince Leanne to be different. If
Leanne is happy with things as they are, there’s no reason to intervene. Margaret’s only concern is to get herself through tonight’s party and tomorrow’s ceremony. It won’t be so bad. She can chat with her relatives, trot out her lame excuse for David’s absence, let them fawn over Trevor. It will be nice to see them, to engage in normal family niceties.

But nothing in her life is normal. Richard Guattari, David, all her arrangements—behind all of it hovers the figure of Vasant. Vasant with the hands, with the eyes that made her feel like a different kind of person, the kind of person who might do anything. She takes a deep breath and stops herself. She won’t think about Vasant. That’s her treat, the indulgence she’ll allow herself later, when everything is settled or at least under way. Now there are other things she should think about. For instance, Doug.

A fleeting anger makes her speed up her step, but she quickly slows back down, checking her watch. Slightly ahead of pace. She slows down more. She doesn’t want to exhaust herself. There’s really no reason to be angry. Her mother was acting like she always does, wanting everyone to partake in her triumph. And it is a triumph, getting Leanne married. For a while it had looked like Leanne was going to let her life go down the drain. Margaret doesn’t know the details, but she does know that it was Carol who helped Leanne get back on track. Carol once admitted to Margaret that the seed money she gave Leanne for her store was everything she had saved to open her own children’s clothing store. It might be why she’s so interested in getting the bed-and-breakfast going now. She’s always wanted a business of her own.

As for Doug, there’s no reason Margaret shouldn’t enjoy seeing him. When she dumped him just before graduation, after a year together, he never threw in her face what he must have known—that she got rid of him like a bad haircut, in preparation for going off to college and becoming a different kind of person.

As for her mother inviting him to the cocktail party, there’s no reason to think she was being hostile. She always hated the fact that Margaret was seeing a farmer’s son, but as soon as it became clear
that Margaret was headed for the University of Chicago—with Doug playing no part in the plan—Carol’s relief, in spite of her efforts to hide it, was palpable.

Carol never knew about the time Doug visited Margaret at Chicago. It was during her first semester, and Margaret had been shocked when he called and proposed the trip. She suspected his motive was to have it out with her for dumping him the year before. Still, she couldn’t think of how to say no. The prospect of Doug’s anger was remote to her, strangely unaffecting. She had just taken three midterms, her history professor had mentioned a summer archaeological dig Margaret might want to join, and she was in the midst of a flirtation with a guy in her “Greek Thought” class. Doug and his broken heart—in fact, everything about Michigan—seemed very faraway to her.

Now it’s that trip, more than anything else, that haunts Margaret. She remembers seeing Doug arrive, watching him amble toward her and thinking with dismay what a stereotype he was. He even made his entrance like a country boy in the movies: by Greyhound. He came down the narrow bus stairs with a blue canvas satchel and a scowl that announced his intention of despising city life.
Bulldog,
Margaret thought as he moved through the crowd. Her roommate, Alexis, loved dogs, and she saw a breed in everyone. She had declared Margaret a Border collie. Doug was a bulldog: squat and solid and ready for a fight. “Look at you,” he growled when he saw Margaret.

But it wasn’t animosity, at least not toward her. As they rode the city bus to Hyde Park, she could sense his disapproval, but it was for the dilapidated neighborhood gliding past. It was one of the university’s conundrums: reconciling its ivory-tower appeal with the urban wasteland encircling it. Margaret liked the contrast. Both worlds—the ornate neo-Gothic buildings of the college and the dilapidated row houses of Hyde Park—summoned in her a rush of gratitude. Both were as far from rural Michigan as they could be. Walking across the quad to the library or watching a homeless man pushing a shopping cart along the street, Margaret often stopped,
elbows tight to her side, to hold in the thrill at having finally laid hands on her life.

So if he wasn’t going to chastise her, why had Doug come? Even now his reasons are murky to Margaret. At the time, she was less inclined to concern herself with the question of his motives. She took him to the dorm room she shared with Alexis, who was on the swim team and active in intramural soccer. She had a desk planner spidery with color-coded entries to keep track of her highly scheduled life. Early on, she had started calling Margaret “the Brain,” and Margaret responded by nicknaming Alexis “the Brawn.”

“Where is she?” Doug asked after inspecting Alexis’s desk—the planner, the corkboard jammed with notes, the postcards and photos of her Corgi back home.

“Away at a swim meet. They’re in St. Louis or somewhere.” When Doug had called to propose the visit, Margaret had checked Alexis’s desk calendar and chosen a weekend when she’d be away. The thought of introducing Doug to any of her Chicago friends had made her cringe.

Doug looked her up and down. His gaze fell on her feet, and his brow furrowed, puzzled. She had on her new shoes, clunky men’s-style oxfords. They were part of her freshman-year uniform: a long knit skirt, a white shirt, and a men’s jacket from a used-clothing store. She liked to think it was an appealing intellectual look, half
Breakfast Club,
half
Annie Hall.

Doug’s eyes traveled back up the length of her to her face, and Margaret remembered, in a shivery rush, what had attracted her to Doug in high school. It was the way he projected a feeling of baffled desire. He made her feel like an exotic creature, a bird he followed because he couldn’t name it.

“Come here,” he said, sitting down on the bed, and Margaret almost laughed. The country boy—a man of few words and simple desires. When they were dating, she had always stopped just short of having sex. Several months into college, she had slept with more than one fellow student. “The Brain’s a slut,” Alexis would say when Margaret came in late on a weekend morning, rumpled in the
previous night’s clothes. They called each other “slut” and “tart” all the time. It was a badge of their newfound freedom.

Thinking of who she used to be and of who she had become, Margaret had a giddy sensation of power. She had always liked Doug, the way he felt and smelled. She had dumped him not out of revulsion but because she was moving on, from him, from the life he stood for. He was completely incongruous, standing in her dorm room, but he was the one out of place. This was her world, and she was comfortable in it.

“No,” she said.

A tiny spark of electricity ran through her as Doug stood up and walked over to her. Without even looking at her face, he began undoing her shirt buttons, moving quickly, like a man who doesn’t want to lose his momentum. He slid her shirt and jacket backward down her arms with straightforward, almost clinical intent.

It wasn’t like sleeping with other guys. There, the excitement had always been the unfamiliarity, the sense of moving into uncharted territory. Doug felt familiar. They knew each other well, like childhood friends. He didn’t seem awkward, or even eager, so much as focused. There was something flat and almost childlike in the way he proceeded along her. Margaret felt, for the first time, the thrilling sensation of letting someone else’s desires—whatever they were—take over.

She reaches the next road and turns around, raising her eyes from the asphalt. The sky is clear and sunny. The ground is giving off an earthy smell as it warms up. She wants to get in five miles before it gets too hot. She can see a car, a tiny black speck, wavering slightly in the distance.

Has he harmed you?

Not yet.

She shakes her head. The earthy smell is tinged with the familiar, syrupy scent of something rotting. She glances around, but there’s no obvious culprit. It’s strange that decay should smell sweet.
There’s a thin buzzing sound, a nearby swarm of flies. She picks up her pace, moving past it, and the scent is gone.

That first evening she showed Doug around the campus, the dorms, the neo-Gothic library, the large open space called the Midway. On their way back to the dorm, Margaret noticed some people she knew walking toward them. Quickly, smoothly, she turned onto another path, averting her head.

“I thought the dorm was that way,” Doug said, his sense of direction infallible as a draft horse’s.

“Yeah,” Margaret replied, “but I wanted to show you the library. Where I spend all my time.”

Back in her room, they ordered a pizza, sitting on the floor to eat it. Margaret found herself telling Doug about her classes: the tight mathematical precision of a Latin sentence, the astonishing events of the Athenian war against Persia.

“This tiny colony of democrats,” she told him, shaking her head in awe. “And they just attacked the most powerful empire on earth!”

She told him how her plans had shifted from doing pre-law to majoring in history, how her adviser had suggested a museum internship, how she was thinking of grad school. Once or twice she stopped, convinced he must find it boring, but he shook his head.

“It’s not boring,” he said. “It sounds exciting.”

Margaret was surprised by his interest, and by how comfortable she felt talking to him. “It is exciting,” she told him. “It’s a whole new world. I feel like I can finally be who I am.”

She was surprised when they didn’t have sex again, even though they slept in her narrow single bed. She lay on her side to make more room, and Doug’s body curled around hers, warm but distant, as if he were thinking of other things. His arm was draped over her body, and Margaret moved her head toward his hand, which rested near her chin on the pillow. He smelled loamy, like newly turned earth.

On Saturday, Margaret wanted to go into the city. But Doug insisted on seeing more of her university world. It was early, so she
took him to her favorite of the coffeehouses that skirted the edge of campus. At night they morphed into bars and filled up, but she figured no one would be there at this hour.

She was wrong. When they walked into the Daily Bean, someone called her name. It was Mare, one of Alexis’s friends, a captain on the crew team. She was sitting in back, saying goodbye to a cluster of teammates, who waved to Margaret as they threaded their way out through an obstacle course of chairs. Each of them glanced at Doug.