Flight (29 page)

“Margaret, hi!” Mare’s voice was raspy, like an actress’s. She came from Boston. Margaret had worked very hard upon meeting her to squelch the thought that no one who’d ever mucked out a horse stall would name a daughter Mare. No doubt that was exactly what Doug would think.

Mare’s greeting was so vigorous that there was nothing for it but to leave Doug waiting for the coffees while Margaret went to say hi.

Mare’s eyes flashed back and forth between Margaret and Doug. “Who’s the hunky guy?” she demanded.

It never would have occurred to Margaret that any of her Chicago friends would find Doug attractive. It wasn’t that he didn’t look good standing there, his work-muscled body accentuated by jeans and a Pennzoil T-shirt. He loved that T-shirt. Looking at him again, Margaret realized that Mare liked it, too, but for different reasons.

“A friend of mine from Michigan,” Margaret said, unable to think up a good lie. “He’s visiting for the weekend.”

“What kind of a friend?” Mare’s gaze was piercing. Her long, straight brown hair was pulled back in a perfectly smooth ponytail.

“A family friend,” Margaret lied. “Sort of an obligation. Nothing interesting.” She tried to smile conspiratorially, but it felt forced.

“Oh yeah?” Mare said. “Maybe you’re just trying to keep him from us.” She laughed a tight-sounding, short laugh, and Margaret was overcome with the fear that she was coming across as snotty or evasive. They’d always been friendly, but she felt as if Mare was a shark, circling her, and the only way to escape was to throw something in her jaws.

She gave in, of course. She introduced Doug to Mare, watched
with surprise as Mare tossed her hair and crossed her legs and giggled at the things he said. She didn’t seem offended by his reticence. They drank their coffees, and before Margaret could engineer an escape, Mare had invited them back to the coffeehouse that evening, for some sort of art event. Margaret was horrified when Doug accepted.

After that, Margaret convinced him to go downtown. She took him to Shedd Aquarium, and then on a stroll up Michigan Avenue. They ambled through the streets, exploring Rush Street, wandering north onto more interesting side streets, stopping at bookstores and record shops. They ate sushi for lunch, which Doug had never had, and he surprised Margaret by liking it. It was a perfectly pleasant afternoon, but all day she was tortured by the thought that they would soon be going out, socializing with Margaret’s new group of friends.

Why did it bother her so much? Doug was okay; at times she was even overwhelmed by the desire to tell him everything, to make him see the struggle she had undertaken, and the precarious nature of her success. She wanted to tell him how Mare and others like her had gone to prep schools—not some middling private school in Michigan but real prep schools, with recognizable names and traditions having to do with pranks and songs and dressing as Shakespearean characters. She wanted to tell him about their expensive shoes and their ski holidays and their fathers in the State Department or the office of the attorney general. She wanted him to understand how her mother had pointed her to this world, how she herself had desired it for as long as she could remember, and how she spent almost every second in it worrying she’d be revealed as the imposter she was, the girl whose father had earned some social credit being an airline pilot, and then squandered it trying to be a farmer. But then she looked at Doug, his solid shoulders, his unembellished gait, and she doubted he could understand any of it.

She checks her watch. Five miles; forty-four minutes. Not bad, but she could do better. Her heart is thudding in her chest, her face slick. She starts on another lap, walking to slow her heart rate. She
rests her gaze on the field, then on the tree line at its far edge. There’s a secondary horizon, an uneven, notched one, where the tops of the trees meet the sky. It looks like a graph line, the record of a stock price or the fluctuating value of gold.

Occasionally, the farm’s beauty strikes her. She used to love it. She can remember summer days lying in the field when she was little, watching Queen Anne’s lace swaying above her, breathing in the baked smell of the grass and hearing the occasional dragonfly fizzling by.
This is perfect,
she would think. It seemed infinite to her then, the fields and roads full of possibility, not the dead ends they came to be later. She can understand what drew her father back. But she can also see what drove him to leave in the first place, and that’s what she has acted on: a desire for more. It was what caused her to push Doug away, the first time and then again, when he came to Chicago. Somehow it felt as if he was holding her back, even though, in retrospect, it isn’t clear he wanted anything from her at all.

Their last real conversation was the night of the coffeehouse event. It turned out to be an impromptu poetry contest. They ate burgers at a campus diner, then walked to the Daily Bean. Margaret had been secretly hoping the place would be empty, but in nighttime hot-spot mode, it was packed. Everywhere she looked, there was someone she knew.

Mare was in the middle of a group of friends. She caught sight of Margaret and waved them over. They had to push through the crowd to get up front. Mare held out an arm when they finally made it, welcoming them into the fold.

“Did you know?” she cried in a voice so buoyant that Margaret began hoping she was blind drunk, not just trying to be heard. “Leah’s going to enter the contest. She’s over there signing up now.”

“Leah’s really good,” Mare yelled to Doug. “She’s a real poet. She had a poem published in
The Iowa Review.”

“Iowa has a review?” Doug said in Margaret’s ear. “Michigan better have one, too.” She couldn’t help but laugh. They were
standing right up against each other in the crowded café, and when she looked up, she caught Mare noting their proximity.

“I’m going to get something to drink,” she told Doug. “You want anything?”

“I’ll go,” he said, but Margaret quickly shook her head.

“I want to go,” she said. “I want to say hi to someone.”

She threaded through the crowd, relieved to be alone. At the counter, she lingered, making no effort to get the bartender’s attention. She was thinking of gambits that would get them out of there quickly when someone appeared at her side. His arrival had a purposeful quality. She turned, expecting Doug, but it was a man she didn’t know. He was tall and thin, with straight dark hair swept abruptly to one side over heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, the kind that are purposely so nerdy the end result is cool. He looked vaguely familiar.

“I don’t care where you’ve been all my life,” he said, smiling, “but where do you plan to be for the rest of it?” His tone was slightly elevated, just goofy enough to let her know he was joking without denuding the line of flattery.

“At this bar, apparently,” she answered. “Waiting for a beer.”

He struck a noble pose and made eye contact with the bartender, who came right over.

“Two Heinekens,” Margaret said.

“Why, thank you,” her companion said, grinning. “It’s always nice to be rewarded for rescuing a damsel in distress.”

“Excuse me, but do I know you?” Margaret asked.

“David Branford. I’m a TA in your Latin class.” She remembered seeing him then, sitting in the back of the room with the other TAs. They always seemed so confident, so in the know, smiling at one another as if the whole Latin language were a private joke engineered by them.

“You’re a grad student?” she asked, and he bowed his head, placing a hand over his heart.

“Guilty as charged.”

“In classics?”

“In physics.”

“You’re a grad student in physics, and you’re teaching introductory Latin?”

He grinned and leaned toward her. “I’m multitalented,” he said. “I also teach courses in horsemanship, ceramics, and lock-picking on the side.”

Margaret raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, I lied,” he said. “About the horsemanship. I’ve never been on a horse in my life. But my cousin once played polo with Prince Charles. Does that count?”

The bartender arrived with Margaret’s beers, and she handed him a five.

“I’m sorry, David, but I have to go,” she said. “The second beer is not really for you.”

David grinned, and she liked how his eyes sparkled. “Next time it will be,” he said.

She could feel him watching her as she shimmied back into the crowd, and she liked the feeling it gave her.

David’s appearance struck her as a portent. He had arrived to remind her that her future was full of choices. Watching Doug drink his beer, his thick arm visible through the clean T-shirt he had put on for dinner, she cringed at the thought of having slept with him. What had she been thinking? Doug had nothing for her. Her only objective, she realized, was to get through this night and get Doug back on the bus for Michigan, stripped of any illusions he might have about a future that included her.

She positioned herself as far from Doug as possible while the contestants did their thing. Leah was third. Each poet was given a first line from which they had to compose a poem, between eight and forty lines long, on the spot. Leah’s first line was “The swallows are gone again.”

“The swallows are gone again,” she chanted. “They left with the rain. The days are quiet now, inviolate, the empty sky burnished to a sheen.” Her voice was slow and almost hypnotized, as if she were channeling the poem from another world. Margaret was struck with
admiration. To be able to take a first line and move forward into the unknown like that, so quickly, with confidence to spare. She was suffused with envy.

“They just say whatever comes to mind?” Doug spoke into her ear. Margaret nodded neutrally. She couldn’t help but wonder if David was nearby, watching.

“That doesn’t seem so hard,” he said. Margaret gave him an incredulous look. The man of few words thinking poetry came so easily? She was annoyed. It was so typical of country people to undervalue whatever they didn’t understand.

One more poet took a turn, and then the MC took the mike. Margaret had seen him around campus. He was the editor of the college’s alternative poetry magazine, and a regular presence at all literary events.

“Folks,” he said in an admonishing tone, “those four poets are the only people who signed up for tonight’s contest. Four people!” The crowd “aaaaawed” in mock dismay. “Surely there are some other budding poets out there who can help make this evening worth our while!”

“How about you, Mare?” one of the girls nearby said, leaning over and jostling Mare’s elbow.

“Oh, I couldn’t.” Mare laughed. “Have Margaret do it. She’s the Brain.”

“What about it, Margaret?” Several pairs of eyes turned to her.

Margaret shook her head. “On the spot like that? I’d get stage fright.”

“Come on people,” the MC said. “Remember the prize: one hundred dollars and publication in
Threnody.”
He held a copy of the poetry magazine aloft.

“A hundred bucks?” Doug said. “I’d do it for a hundred bucks.”

“Yes!” Mare squealed. “There you go, Doug! Go for it!” She waved an arm vigorously at the stage. “We have a taker over here!”

Horrified, Margaret put a hand on Doug’s arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

Doug grinned. “How bad can it be?”

For you or for me?
Margaret thought. But things had gotten out of control: the MC was giving Doug a warm look as the audience cheered. Mare was elbowing some of her crowd aside to clear Doug’s path to the stage. She and her friends were riding a swell of importance at having provided another contestant.

“All hail, hearty fellow!” the MC said as Doug stepped onto the makeshift stage. He reached out and put a hand on Doug’s shoulder, turning him to face the audience. Doug pinkened slightly at the contact. “Tell the nice folks your name.”

“Doug,” Doug said, leaning in to the mike. He blinked, almost fearful, when his amplified voice reverberated through the room. Margaret felt a surge of pity that only compounded her anger.

“Are you a student at Chicago?” the MC asked, and Doug looked at him as if he didn’t understand the question.

“No,” he said after a moment. “Just visiting one.” He glanced out into the crowd, and Margaret shrank down, hoping not to be seen.

“Well, Doug, the contest judges are going to give you your first line. You have five minutes to speak your poem. Remember—no fewer than eight lines, no more than forty. Are you ready?”

Doug nodded. Margaret noticed that he avoided the MC’s eyes. He looked at the stage floor while the other man exited the stage, then shuffled his feet and stepped toward the mike. The judges were at a table near the front of the stage, to Margaret’s right. She couldn’t see which of them spoke.

“Your first line is: ‘I came over the hill and saw it.’”

The crowd “oooohed” dramatically, their involvement now boosted. Doug squinted toward the person who’d said the line. He seemed too wide behind the thin mike. His broad shoulders and his full chest only accentuated his awkwardness. Margaret wanted to look away.

“I came over the hill and saw it,” Doug repeated. There was a pause, and Margaret was gripped with fear. As bad as Doug improvising poetry was, it would be even worse for him to stand up there and fail in front of a roomful of people who had seen her come in with him.
Say something,
she pleaded silently.
Say anything at all.

“I came over the hill and saw it,” Doug said again, but this time his voice was perfectly normal, as if he was simply telling them about something that had happened.

“
Down in the little hollow.

We call it Paulson’s hollow

’Cause his tractor got stuck there once.

It’s a little dip in the field,

Hard to plow.
”

He paused and cleared his throat. His eyes flickered toward Margaret, but then quickly away, as if reading her desire.

“
That day there was something in it.

A little brown lump.

When I got closer I saw it was the calf,