Luminous Airplanes (24 page)
Imagine what it felt like to
be
a Millerite in the early fall of 1844: to go about your business with the certainty that the world was about to end. You’d have to live a kind of double life, supporting, with a minimum of effort, the outward person who still ate and bathed and wrote in the ledger, the one who admired the first tinge of red in the maples and thought, on the first frosty morning, how autumn paradoxically felt like the time when the world came to life, whereas in fact in three months it would be winter. You’d have to shine your shoes and you’d still be put out when the mail was late. But most of your attention would be on the inner self who in three months’ time would be in Heaven. You’d touch the white ascension robe (if such things ever existed) that hung by the bed, and look forward to the day when you would wear it: the dress in which regardless of your sex you’d wait for the Bridegroom to show up. You’d spend as much time as you could with the other people who were Going Up, because they were the ones to whom you could speak as your inner self, and be understood. You’d read every word of the
Midnight Cry,
even the birth and death announcements, the silly songs, the stories for children rewritten with the moral
And that’s the way the world ends
, not because you cared especially for the stories but because they belonged to the world in which your inner self lived. You’d send dollar after dollar to the newspaper society because without them your inner self would wither like an unwatered plant. And when the Millerites’ tent came to town you’d sing and shout and dance all night, your outer person utterly forgotten, and it would be as if you had already Gone Up, as if you were in Heaven already, except with bodies and grass and fog lying low in the valley at dawn. You would love it all. But, loving it, would you wonder, as you walked home, whether Heaven could be this good? Would you wonder whether you
wanted
this world to end?
be
a Millerite in the early fall of 1844: to go about your business with the certainty that the world was about to end. You’d have to live a kind of double life, supporting, with a minimum of effort, the outward person who still ate and bathed and wrote in the ledger, the one who admired the first tinge of red in the maples and thought, on the first frosty morning, how autumn paradoxically felt like the time when the world came to life, whereas in fact in three months it would be winter. You’d have to shine your shoes and you’d still be put out when the mail was late. But most of your attention would be on the inner self who in three months’ time would be in Heaven. You’d touch the white ascension robe (if such things ever existed) that hung by the bed, and look forward to the day when you would wear it: the dress in which regardless of your sex you’d wait for the Bridegroom to show up. You’d spend as much time as you could with the other people who were Going Up, because they were the ones to whom you could speak as your inner self, and be understood. You’d read every word of the
Midnight Cry,
even the birth and death announcements, the silly songs, the stories for children rewritten with the moral
And that’s the way the world ends
, not because you cared especially for the stories but because they belonged to the world in which your inner self lived. You’d send dollar after dollar to the newspaper society because without them your inner self would wither like an unwatered plant. And when the Millerites’ tent came to town you’d sing and shout and dance all night, your outer person utterly forgotten, and it would be as if you had already Gone Up, as if you were in Heaven already, except with bodies and grass and fog lying low in the valley at dawn. You would love it all. But, loving it, would you wonder, as you walked home, whether Heaven could be this good? Would you wonder whether you
wanted
this world to end?
As it turned out, I didn’t visit Yesim the next day. That morning a woman from Goodwill called and said she had received my message about a house of stuff to be donated. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the regional center is full.” Property prices were up, and people all over the Northeast were looking for ways to share their good fortune, only the people in need of good fortune were either ignorant of Goodwill or unwilling to visit. If I could wait until after Christmas, the woman suggested, they might be able to squeeze me in. Or if I could transport the goods to the national center, they would be happy to accept my donation.
“All right,” I said. “Where’s the national center?”
“St. Louis, Missouri,” she said.
I told her I’d try the Salvation Army, and she warned me that they hadn’t been accepting donations since August. Forgetting, in the face of this setback, that just the day before I’d decided to stay in my grandparents’ house indefinitely, I called Charles and told him that we would have to take everything to St. Louis. He laughed at me. There was no way he was going to drive a truck to St. Louis and back, he said, even if he had a truck the right size, which he didn’t. If I wanted to pay for a truck and drive it to Missouri myself he might be able to get a couple of his boys to help with the loading. For the unloading I would be on my own.
“Well then,” I said, “what do you suggest?”
“We could just leave it where it is. Let whoever buys the house deal with it.”
“Then what have I been doing, sorting the good stuff from the junk? Was I just wasting my time?”
“Calm down,” my uncle said. “We’ll figure it out.” He said something about taking it to Canada and dumping it there, just taking it over the border and leaving it in a field; after all, Canada was a big country, probably no one would notice if we left a little pile of things in a field where no one went.
“Absolutely not. This is American junk, it’s going to stay in America.”
“Then we’ll sell it.”
“To who?”
“Whoever wants it,” Charles said.
So for the second time in my life I found myself making signs and taping them to lampposts, tacking them to bulletin boards in the laundromat and the public library, setting them by the door to the Kountry Kitchen and the Kozy Korner and the organic grocery, to say that the Rowlands were having a garage sale. Hundreds of antiques priced to move. Everything must go. I took a photograph of the house and used it to illustrate the sign in the hope that the historic exterior of the Rowland home would create the illusion that the items for sale were equally impressive. Now and then someone who saw me putting up a sign would nod and say, “The Rowlands? That must be quite a sale,” and they would laugh.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s going to be quite a sale.”
Like a Millerite, I knew that I was carrying out two incompatible plans: on the one hand I was going to live in my grandparents’ house, and on the other I was selling their stuff. I was preparing for both cessation and survival, but somehow the incompatibility didn’t bother me. The house wasn’t livable as it was, with everthing in piles; maybe Yesim would move in with stuff of her own. Maybe it was important to create an empty place for the child. Anyway, having sorted my grandparents’ things, it would have been a step backward to unsort them, and if I did I would never have the energy to sort them again.
“You might as well go ahead with it,” Yesim said when I mentioned the sale to her. “Who knows, you might even make some money.” She lay back on the sofa and groaned. As if deciding to keep the child had hastened her pregnancy into a new phase, she’d been having morning sickness. The smell of coffee made her want to throw up, but everyone at the Pines drank coffee. Everyone smoked, too: it was a pregnant woman’s nightmare. She had told her nurses she had the flu; she was afraid that if she told them she was pregnant, they wouldn’t let her leave. Or that they’d advise her to have an abortion.
“Only two more weeks,” I said.
“Twelve days,” Yesim sighed.
I asked if I could bring her anything: flowers? Something to read, to take her mind off of the Pines? I still had that copy of
Norwegian Wood.
Norwegian Wood.
“I don’t think I could read.” Yesim made a face. “Am I going to have baby brain? What will I do about my work?”
“You’ll manage. I’ll help you.”
“Be careful what you offer.”
I squeezed her hand. Yesim squeezed back. “It’s funny,” she said. “My body feels more like it’s mine now that something else is growing in it.”
“It’s paradoxical,” I agreed.
“I’m not going to think about it now,” Yesim said, and closed her eyes.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m not going to sell anything we might be able to use when our child comes.” That was the first time I’d said
our child.
Yesim smiled, but didn’t open her eyes.
our child.
Yesim smiled, but didn’t open her eyes.
We had the sale a couple of days later. With the help of an off-duty driver from Rowland Towing and Salvage, Charles and I carried everything out of the garage and set it on the lawn. My grandparents’ things looked even less appealing by daylight than they had in the house; like an accusing finger the sun found the scratches, the stains, the chinks in the enamel, the hidden spots of rust. Charles asked if we should put prices on things, but I said no, it would take too long, we’d just let people pay what they wanted. For what we hoped would be the last time we arranged the shadeless lamps, the plastic ladle with the half-melted handle, the trunk missing a hinge, the fire tongs, the skis, the ancient after-dinner drinks, the calcified colander, the immersion coil, the trunk of curtains, the mound of towels, the gardening tools, the gardening gloves, the straw hat, the box of matchbooks, the boat-shaped ashtray, the pot holders, the wicker wastebasket, the vases, the planters, the paperbacks, the paperweights, the party napkins, the coatrack, the boot scraper, the sweaters, all five letter openers, the humidifier, the dehumidifier, the fans, the dolls, the plastic boxes that covered kleenex boxes, allowing my grandfather to buy cheap generic tissues, the bird books, the china shepherd and milkmaid, the playing cards, the road maps, the old magazines, the beer stein, the coasters, the cookbooks, the kitty-kat clock, the box springs, the napkin rings, all the lost things.
Soon the first people from Thebes arrived to see what we were selling. “Wow, look at all this stuff,” said the owner of the Kountry Kitchen. I said she might be able to find some things to round out her collection.
“My collection!” She laughed, but when I came back a few minutes later she was kneeling by the mixing bowls. “How much do you want for these?”
“How much do you want to pay?”
“I’ll give you five dollars for the set.”
“Hey,” said her husband, holding up my grandfather’s binoculars, “are you letting these go?”
Already another car had pulled up to the curb. The driver introduced himself as Cal, the owner of Stuff n’ Things Antiques in Saugerties, and he paced through the collection, touching one or another piece of furniture, saying to himself, “I remember this, I remember this.” The neighbors who lived on the other side of my grandparents’ house, the non-Regenzeit side, Dr. and Mrs. Karman, bought a drawer’s worth of forks and spoons, which were almost the same design as their own depleted set, for three dollars. “Look around,” Charles told a stranger. “You might find something to round out your collection.”
All day, people came from Thebes, Maplecrest, Hunter, Catskill, Hudson and beyond. They took things, they gave me money, they left, and slowly, as the day passed, the driveway and the lawn uncluttered themselves. Just before dark, I saw Carrie with an older woman, looking through my grandfather’s records.
“Oh, hi!” She beamed at me. “I want you to meet my mom.”
“I know you,” her mother said. It was Shelley, Kerem’s old girlfriend. Her blond hair had streaks of gray at the roots and she’d put on weight, but even so she didn’t look very different from when I’d last seen her, twenty years ago. “You’re Kerem’s friend.”
“Oh, my god, Mom, you know him?”
“What are you doing back in Thebes?” Shelley asked.
I told her about my grandfather. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “And how do you know my daughter?”
“Mom,” Carrie said, exasperated, “he’s the one who comes into the
grocery
.”
grocery
.”
“Oh?” Shelley raised a pale eyebrow. “I thought you were talking about someone younger. Not someone who’s basically my age.”
“Mom,”
Carrie said.
Carrie said.
“So, tell me,” said Shelley, “what have you been up to?”
I gave her the shortest possible version of my life story while Carrie stood by sullenly, looking at me as though I had betrayed her. “How exciting,” Shelley said. “You’ve really moved around.” She told me that Mike, her brother, owned the grocery, and she had a farm in the mountains, which she was turning into a kind of artists’ retreat.
“For all the truly great people,” I said.
Shelley laughed. “That’s right.”
“You told me about it twenty years ago. It was your dream, you said.”
“Did I? How long are you in town?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to come up next weekend?”
“Dad has the farmhouse next weekend,” Carrie said.
“Right,” said Shelley. “Well, you could come up during the week, if you don’t mind a simple dinner.”
“Don’t invite him for dinner,” Carrie said.
“Shh, sweetie. Have you seen Kerem?” Shelley asked me.
“A couple of times.”
“I think it’s sad, what happened to him. All he does is drink and worry about his crazy sister.”
“Yesim isn’t crazy.”
Shelley laughed. “You don’t know her. Did you know she tried to set fire to the ski lodge? It’s true, it happened last summer. The police caught her pouring gasoline all over a wall. They should have arrested her, but since it was her place, and her dad was already gone …”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Everyone knows. Ask Kerem if you don’t believe me.”
Whether it was true or not, this story left me with not much interest in talking to Shelley. I asked her some inane question about the farm, and she gave me an equally inane answer, and repeated her invitation to dinner.
“Mom, I’m freezing,” Carrie said.
It had in fact become much colder, as if Thebes had gone from fall to winter in the course of the afternoon. Shelley gave me her number and Carrie hurried her back to their minivan. I watched the two of them go, two backs, two heads of dirty-blond hair framed in the minivan’s open door, then the door closed, they were gone. Everyone else had already left, and I helped Charles carry the things we hadn’t sold back into the house. We’d done better than we expected: more than half of my grandparents’ possessions were gone, off to begin new lives in the houses of people we didn’t know. I thought about what Shelley had told me about Yesim. What was I getting myself into? Thebes was microscopic, a cuckoo clock where the same people came around and around again, none of them really changing, only getting older, and having children who you also ran into, over and over. How long would it be before we ran into the math teacher and his wheelchair-bound father? If there was this one story about Yesim seting fire to Snowbird, how many other stories were there that I didn’t know yet?
As soon as my uncle was gone, I went upstairs and packed my clothes. I carried my bag out to Norman Mailer’s car, then went back into the house and took
Progress in Flying Machines
. I got into the car, then I realized that I’d forgotten the charger for my cell phone, and when I came out with it in my hand Kerem was standing on the porch.
Progress in Flying Machines
. I got into the car, then I realized that I’d forgotten the charger for my cell phone, and when I came out with it in my hand Kerem was standing on the porch.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asked.
“Just over to Maplecrest,” I said. “I’m taking some stuff to my uncle.”
“You going to be gone long?”
“Maybe half an hour.”
“When you get back, will you come over to my place? I need you to sign some insurance forms.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I can’t believe winter is here already,” Kerem said.
“It’s good for business, right?”
“So long as it snows, it’s good for business.”
I drove away. I was glad Charles wasn’t there: I didn’t need him to tell me that, thirty years ago, Richard Ente had done what I was now doing, running away from the mother of my unborn child. I drove slowly down the hill, then picked up speed as I got out of town. By the time I got to the place where Route 56 joins Route 23, hard little snowflakes were falling, and even as part of me wondered whether I was making a terrible mistake, another part decided that I was leaving just in time.
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