Calamity and Other Stories (13 page)

And Rhea thought to herself that they all were, really were, everyone on the aircraft, full of dread.

“If we live through this,” she said, though she hadn’t meant to put it that way, “do you know what this whole experience will become?”

Gaylord shook her head.

“An anecdote.” Rhea knew that the sick feeling that they all had in their stomachs right now would not even return in the telling. It would be recalled and described but not felt.

Gaylord said, “We’re going to die together.”

“I cannot believe you just said that. Will you please not say that? Really. Do not say that again.” Rhea could hear the annoyance in her voice. “You may feel you’ve lived a full life, but I’m not finished yet, all right?”

“I apologize,” said Gaylord, sighing.

Behind them, a baby began to wail. All around was the snapping sound of rings, chains, and watches being placed in purses, sunglasses removed and folded.

Rhea opened up her little leather notebook. In all caps she wrote “REGRETS” and underneath, in lowercase, “Do I have any?”

She sat and thought.

“Well, do you?” asked Gaylord.

“Do I what?”

“Have any regrets?”

“You’re peeking!”

“So—do you?”

Rhea considered saying, “I regret not having flown first class.” But instead she found herself nodding. “Yes.” Before she could lose track of her thought, she wrote in her notebook, “I regret having spent the majority of my life trying not to offend others.”

Gaylord raised her eyebrows and said, “Could have fooled me.”

“You’re still spying!”

“What do you expect?”

“See, that’s what I mean.” What she meant was that Gaylord, unlike herself, dared to tell the truth. She had dared to admit she was looking over Rhea’s shoulder. Rhea rarely felt comfortable admitting what she was thinking. “I always try to keep my mouth zipped,” she told Gaylord, “I try to hide my true thoughts, but they always seem to pop out. And then I feel rude, when I say what I think. It’s just nerves today, freeing me up that way. And I resent that. I resent that it takes an emergency landing for me to really say what’s what. It’s only now that I see I’ve lived my life trying to be polite.”

“But why would you want to be impolite? What good is there in that?”

“I’ve just spent so much time holding my knees closed, you know? Clasping my hands on my lap. What good does that do the world? I’ve spent so much time and effort on trying to dress the right way, trying to say the appropriate things. Trying to fit in rather than be a person who accomplishes anything. That’s my regret.”

Gaylord seemed to be thinking this over. She said, “In other words, you regret having been a woman.”

This fact had not occurred to Rhea before, not in those precise words. But now she saw that it was true. “Yes, I regret not having been a man in this world.”

She thought of this now, and, returning to the memory she so often arrived at, asked Gaylord, “Any secrets you’ll be taking to your grave?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe I’m just thinking aloud. Wondering if I have a secret I’d rather die than tell.”

“Do you?”

“I have a secret. But I’d rather tell it than die.” And it suddenly seemed that she alone could save the airplane, that if she told just one person, they would all be saved. This feeling was overwhelming. She whispered to Gaylord, “When I was twenty-eight I had an abortion.”

Gaylord nodded her head and said, “When I was twenty-eight I had a miscarriage.”

“An abortion is different,” said Rhea, annoyed. “And anyway, that’s not the whole secret.”

Maybe, thought Rhea, Gaylord was one of those religious ladies who stand outside the clinics on weekends, holding rosary beads and photographs of bloody fetuses. But no, Gaylord with her bright stripe of hair simply wouldn’t fit in with those tedious, pale women. That shock of white. It suddenly struck Rhea as an incredibly bold thing, to enter the world each day with hair like that.

“So what’s the story?” Gaylord asked.

“It was two years ago. I’d known I was pregnant for nearly two months,” Rhea told her. “I went through everything you probably did, morning sickness, everything. But I had been awarded a travel grant, a research scholarship, actually, and I was supposed to leave in a few months, and I knew there was no way I could have a baby and go traipsing around Italy. And the father—he. Wasn’t my boyfriend. He was my friend’s boyfriend.”

She paused to bite her upper lip. “I finally convinced myself that everything would be better once I ended the pregnancy. So I didn’t tell anyone, and I went to have the abortion and felt completely prepared. Completely ready. And I got there and they did the final checkup beforehand, and you know what? There were two. I was carrying twins.”

Rhea felt herself about to cry, but the voice of the head flight attendant came from the intercom. “We will now complete our descent. Please take your positions. We remind you that you are to have removed all headwear, eyewear, jewelry, dentures, retainers, and studs. Please take your positions.”

The air swelled with the eerie quiet of controlled panic. Only the screaming baby continued to complain. People spoke in whispery tones as they bent forward, heads between knees, and grabbed their necks.

“I guess this is it,” said Gaylord, whose face wasn’t quite between her knees.

“What about you?” Rhea asked, head down, voice muffled.

“What about me?”

“What’s your secret?”

Gaylord said, “I’m still wearing my false teeth.”

Rhea laughed.

“I look bad enough without my glasses. If I die I’m going to at least have my teeth in.”

“Top or bottom?”

“Bottom. I look ancient with my jaw all sunken in.”

“Accident?”

Gaylord sighed. “My husband.”

“Oh!”

“I guess that’s my secret.”

The captain came on. “Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”

Gaylord said, “I started gaining a lot of weight after my first child,” as if in explanation.

That was when the plane began heading swiftly toward the ground. No one dared to sigh or squirm. Even the baby stopped screaming. Rhea gripped her neck as tightly as she was able. Down, down, they went, and went, and went, and then hit the ground with incredible force. There was another popping noise, and the plane continued forward at great speed. But it was still in one piece, thought Rhea, at least it seemed to be, unless they were about to slam into something. Rhea supposed that was entirely possible. But then the plane began to slow. Rhea could feel it. They could all feel it, and the air itself seemed to relax, to refill with a collective exhalation.

Gaylord said, “I think we may actually be okay.”

Are you trying to jinx it? thought Rhea. But right then the plane came to a stop.

Without waiting for word from the captain, everyone sat up. Above them, oxygen masks dangled like piñatas. They must have been released on impact. Looking out the window, Rhea saw an array of emergency vehicles—fire trucks, ambulances, lights and neon colors. Nat the flight attendant was already making his way down the aisle, explaining that they should not use the oxygen masks.

“They’re just for dramatic effect,” said Rhea. Indeed, there was an odd air of festival, the hanging masks all around them.

Over the intercom, the captain stated that they were going to have to evacuate the plane via emergency chute. “Please leave all belongings on the plane,” he said. “Do not take your belongings with you down the chute. Follow the flight attendants, and leave your belongings on the plane.”

All around, women grabbed their pocketbooks. Gaylord had already put her glasses back on. Now she snapped her earrings into place. Her hands were shaking. “I can’t believe we made it,” she said. Rhea realized that her own hands were trembling.

The emergency exit had been opened, and from outside came the whine of a siren. It really was unnecessary, thought Rhea. But the siren continued as, row by row, passengers stood up to shimmy out of their seats, ducking through the vines of oxygen masks. It was already Rhea and Gaylord’s turn. As they waited in the aisle, shaky-legged, Rhea looked at Gaylord, at her astounding glasses and heavy earrings and bright makeup.

“What your husband did to you,” said Rhea. “It has nothing to do with your weight. You know that, right?”

Gaylord looked at her in a way that suggested she just barely knew this. But she nodded as Rhea said, “What I mean is—”

Gaylord said, “I know. It was just violence.”

As they moved up toward the exit, the siren became louder.
Just violence.
That those words should be allowed side by side . . . Rhea glanced at Gaylord and did not want to imagine her past. The situations people found themselves in on any day, Rhea reflected, were really no less absurd than the one she was in right now, standing here like a third-grader, about to go down a giant inflated slide. I must note this, Rhea thought to herself, and then realized that she no longer had her little leather book. She had left it back at her seat.

“Wait till I tell my grandkids about this slide,” Gaylord said, looking truly pleased. “Whoever would have thought I’d be given the chance to go down a slide again?”

The slide really was quite something, enormous and bouncy and neon yellow. Some people hesitated before jumping out. Women kept smuggling their purses along with them.

Rhea said, “Are we really going down that thing?” The airplane itself, improbability incarnate, suddenly seemed safer than that clownish slide. Gaylord did not appear at all worried. She took the flight attendant’s hand and then let go. Rhea watched her slide fearlessly down, her skirt hitching up to her waist. With clenched fists, Rhea stepped out to follow her into the world of sirens and lights.

Wedding at Rockport

The Maid of Honor was a disgrace. Everyone said so. A delayed flight had delivered her too late to fulfill any of her duties and with much of her luggage lost, so that she was wearing not the proper dress but a slinky blue thing of Indian silk, with many tiny bells hanging from the hem. She had jingled the entire way down the aisle—a clearing of grass that led to a rocky bluff—and the unnerving sound, recurring with each intermittent breeze, made the guests glance away. Now that the ceremony had ended, she was telling everyone about an emergency landing and how her nerves were still shaken—but she had been saying this since the morning, so that now it just seemed like an excuse to drink too much.

“And they say this is a dry town,” Annie, a guest on the groom’s side, commented to her best friend, the groom’s mother, Eileen. They eyed the Maid of Honor and sipped white wine. Cocktail hour, for which the bride’s family had paid a pretty penny, was coming to a close. In fact, it was a half hour only, since the caterers claimed the town’s dry status made alcohol—at private engagements only—that much more expensive. Guests milled about the majestic patio and looked out at the sun-and-windswept ocean. The water was rough today. “The girl jingles every time she moves,” Annie added, even though she knew perfectly well that Eileen—whom she had known for four decades—wished her son would have married the Maid of Honor instead.

Not that there was anything wrong with the bride. She was a tall, blonde beauty with glowing skin and a generous disposition. “Quite a catch,” everyone called her. She had been a swimmer back in high school and still had the body, strong in a buxom, shapely way. For the wedding today she wore no jewelry or veil, just a fitted white dress that showed off her figure. From the right angle, in the late-afternoon sunlight, you could see her underpants through it.

Eileen held nothing against her new daughter-in-law, who was bright in a way that had more to do with mood than intellect. The problem was that Eileen’s son needed someone to be hard on him; men were so rarely hard on themselves. He needed someone like the Maid of Honor, who, with her wide, questioning eyes and unruly bob of dark hair, had, everyone knew, nearly won his heart a few years back. Eileen had sensed the energy rather than ease, the storm rather than calm, that stirred within her. Her son needed someone like that. Someone to force him into a role to play, a position to fulfill. Keep him from sliding into disuse.

Watching waves tumble headlong, Eileen hugged herself against a gust of salty air. She had always been extremely thin, and today it was a blessing; there was less of her to brim with emotion, less of her own tongue to bite. Abnegation was precisely what these occasions so often required. Here they all were, an assortment of travel-wearied people thrown together at some inconvenient date, but Eileen could float along. A decade ago, when she was in her fifties, an alarmed doctor told her that because she was so skinny her constitution was nearly 70 percent water. When she asked him what that meant, the doctor looked momentarily stumped before saying, “Nothing.”

The wind rustled Eileen’s shantung skirt-suit, which the bride’s mother had talked her into buying (since it matched nicely her short gray hair and made her eyes look bright). “Just look at that,” she said in her ex-smoker’s whisper to Annie, admiring the majestic structure hosting them, a Georgian mansion overlooking the ocean. Its broad, ornate widow’s walk had been featured prominently in three movies. “Can’t you picture some worried fisherman’s wife pacing back and forth up there, looking longingly out to sea?” Eileen was herself a widow and could imagine it easily.

Annie said, “I doubt any fisherman’s wife ever lived in such a swank joint.”

“What about rich ship captains? Someone in whaling.”

This former fishing village, where men once risked their lives for mackerel and cod, now flexed its dimples for day-trippers browsing boutiques and art galleries. No sign of the rough existence that put it on a map. Inside the mansion’s parlor hung a seascape by Fitz Hugh Lane: Gloucester Harbor posing serenely in warm, comforting colors.

Now they were being ushered by caterers in white bow ties toward the big, rustling tent. Annie and Eileen followed the small crowd past trees with leaves blown backward like dogs’ ears. It was a shame about the weather, suddenly cool, with occasional clouds slipping in and out, so that the magnificent sun kept dipping away and then back, on what should have been a warm September day. Abandoned wedding programs—listing sonnets by E. B. Browning and W. Shakespeare next to the names of various bridesmaids—kept blowing across the lawn. And yet everyone said, “You couldn’t have asked for better weather!” as if to convince themselves it was true.

In front of the tent was a table dotted with place cards, each listing a guest’s name and a Cape Ann geographic location. Behind the table an usher stood making sure none of the cards blew away. Annie located her card and flipped it over eagerly, as if it were a lottery ticket. “Did you get Magnolia? Tell me you got Magnolia.”

Eileen had wanted to sit at Salt Island with her friends the Colliers, who were sure to tell bawdy jokes and perhaps even break out in song, but status had indeed placed her at Magnolia, where the bride’s parents were already seated.

The table was laid with thick linen and oversized silver cutlery. In the center was a bushy cluster of tall flowers so colorful and healthy they seemed embalmed. The bride’s father, Tom, who was a good bit older than his wife and was trying to catch the attention of a caterer, had to lean to the side in order to see around them. He waved to a server and asked for more wine.

Next to him was a wheelchair, and in it his ancient mother-in-law, whom most of the guests had given up trying to chat with, since she didn’t hear well. “It’s a shame she doesn’t do something about her hair,” the old woman was saying now, referring to Eileen, who was walking toward them and, with no makeup and that wispy figure, even in silver shantung managed to look— Annie had already told her outright—like an underfed prison inmate.

But Eileen couldn’t help glancing toward Folly Cove, two tables away, where the Best Man stood joking with some ushers and their dates. Ten, fifteen, years ago she had seen him on an almost daily basis, he and her son spent so much time together. After he went out to the West Coast, she didn’t see him for years, and now here he was again, a man, thirty years old, suddenly somehow transformed. Funny, she thought, how people drift in and out of your life like waves, large and smaller and then suddenly larger again.

“Hello, there!” Annie, ahead of her, was smiling down at the bride’s family. Finding her seat, she exclaimed, “What enormous flowers!”

In a crumbling old voice, the grandmother said, “There is fruit hanging from your ears.”

Annie’s large earrings, caught slightly in the graying frizz of her hair, dangled happily: from the right earlobe, bananas; on the left, a cluster of grapes. She wore a red skirt with black and white polka dots, and a white blouse with a collar of red and black stripes. She told the grandmother, “I’ve never been a big fan of vegetables.”

In her hollowed voice, Eileen said, “At last the party can begin!” Taking her seat, she felt the slightly rough rub of silk shantung. When, a full five months ago, she had stepped out of the Lord & Taylor dressing room, Helen, the bride’s mother, had told her, “Oh, it’s you, it’s absolutely you,” and then set about looking for her own suit of shantung, so that the two of them would match. Helen’s was gold and showed off her fair skin, so that she nearly sparkled, with her shimmery lipstick, twinkling eyes, and frosted hair. Every time someone complimented her, Helen said, “To tell you the truth, I never even would have looked at it if Eileen hadn’t found that silver one. I mean, usually it’s the mother of the bride who’s supposed to choose her dress first, but Eileen just looked so stunning in that silver one, I had to let her set the tone.” Eileen had heard this for hours now, so that the silver suit was starting to feel like a badge of selfishness; she was a woman who hadn’t even let the mother of the bride choose her own dress.

Now she said, “Heck, we survived the ceremony.”

Helen said, “I had a stash of Kleenex, just in case.”

“I had to work to keep her mind off things all morning, let me tell you,” her husband put in.

Helen agreed. “We took a beautiful walk down to the end of Bearskin Neck. They have such nice shops there. Have you had a chance to explore a bit?”

“This morning some friends and I went on a whale watch,” Eileen offered, though they hadn’t seen any whales, just a young pregnant girl vomiting over the prow. The brief drive to Gloucester had been beautiful, with nearby detours to anything that Pierre-Luc’s guidebook had allotted a star. They saw Beau-port and Hammond Castle and the memorial to all the Gloucester fishermen who had gone “down to the sea in ships”—over ten thousand of them lost at sea, the guidebook said. At Norman’s Woe, Pierre-Luc, reading from his Blue Guide, had quoted Longfellow:

“It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company. . . .”

It really was an awful poem. Eileen at least found comic relief in Pierre-Luc’s Québecois accent as he read it:

“Come hidDER! come hidDER! my leedle dudDER,
And do nut dremble so;
For I can wedDER de roughest gale
Dat ever wind did blow.”

Helen exclaimed, “Oh, here they come!”

The Best Man had taken the microphone to announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Callie and Mack—the new Mr. and Mrs. Rivlin!”

People leaned right and left around the gigantic flowers to glimpse the bride and groom.

“She’s taking Mack’s name?” Annie asked, clapping.

The grandmother said, “Why wouldn’t she?”

“After everything we fought for.” Annie gave a sigh but kept clapping. Her attention was drawn to Folly Cove, where one of the ushers had stood up and was shouting, “Speech! Speech!” in the bellowing voice of a fraternity brother. Annie had to shake her head at the fact that men—the species—simply hadn’t, as far as she could tell, changed a bit. Next to him, the bride’s brother whistled a catcall, and the bride and groom stepped onto the dance floor.

Annie thought to herself, Men really can be awful.

One had given her, for her fifty-fifth birthday, a bottle of white truffle oil that, it turned out, his former wife had given
him
for
his
birthday a year earlier.

The bride’s brother whistled again.

One had said, “What’s that?” and pointed at Annie’s puckered thighs. Until that day—a good fifteen years ago now—Annie had believed cellulite to be a creation of the cosmetics industry. Now it existed, and was part of her own body, all because some man had pointed it out.

The couple began dancing to Duke Ellington. Furrowing her brow, the grandmother asked her son-in-law, “Isn’t the bride supposed to dance the first dance with her father?”

Tom said, “Good question.” He couldn’t quite see over the flower arrangement. After straining for a moment, he picked the entire thing up, spilling some water on the table, and placed it on the ground behind his chair. “I don’t get the sense they’re necessarily following all the traditions,” he said good-naturedly.

“If that’s the case,” Annie said, “why did they go ahead and have the quartet play that boring Canon in D just like the rest of the universe?”

Eileen elbowed Annie, and Tom, who had paid for the quartet, gave a genial shrug. The caterers had begun making their rounds, doling out roasted vegetables and filet mignon on porcelain plates, each slab of meat topped with a little floret of butter. The servers were still at the far left side of the tent, so that everyone toward the right felt suddenly hungry, realizing how long it would be until they were served. There was hushed talk about buffets and the many benefits of having no sit-down meal at all. The Best Man announced that those at tables whose food was not yet served should feel free to jon the bride and groom on the dance floor. People rose from their seats.

Over at Annisquam, the Maid of Honor leaned toward two couples she had never met before. This wasn’t her assigned table; she just happened to have alighted there. Propping herself up on her bony elbows, she hunched forward and opened her dark eyes wide. They were slightly bloodshot (lack of sleep, all that time spent in various airplanes, and now too much alcohol) as well as mildly asymmetrical, as if something inside her were skewed, too. “You know what they told us before we finally got on the plane? That the technical problem was repaired ‘to the best of our knowledge.’ To the best of our knowledge!” The two couples nodded awkwardly as she took a gulp of wine. “And we went ahead and got on the plane anyway!” She shook her head, and the bells of her dress trembled.

The skin below her eyes was puffy and splotched; she had cried unstoppably watching the bride and groom take their vows. Some guests on the bride’s side said this was because Callie was the first best friend she had ever had. The two of them had grown up right next door to each other—until Callie’s parents bought a bigger house in another part of town.

“I saw one of the repair guys step off the plane,” she added seriously. “And do you know all that he was carrying? Duct tape!”

She was observed by the bridesmaids at Halibut Point as they discussed what they had purchased as wedding presents. “Nothing from her at all,” they whispered, reveling in disgrace. As much as any of them liked her, it was always a relief to have someone else to be ashamed of.

“You’d think she of all people would at least get them a decent gift.”

“Well, she has a full year from the wedding date, remember.”

“You think they’ll last that long? Just kidding.”

They were eager to return to the captivating details—how even after Mack and Callie had gotten back together there had been something between him and the Maid of Honor, you could tell. None of them could have said why they found this story so fascinating, except that it had an element of tragedy as well as familiarity; they had all, at one point in their lives, been in the Maid of Honor’s shoes.