“Could you tell me again why your grandparents hate your father?” she asked. “I know you’ve told me, but I can’t remember exactly.”
“Mostly because my father is more adventurous than they are. When my father worked for my grandfather, he had a lot of ideas. He wanted to expand the business into something bigger than this little local thing, and my grandfather just wanted to keep it the way it was. They were arguing about it, and then my grandfather found out that my father was expanding certain lines without telling him. So he fired him.”
“Really? I thought it was something different. I thought you told me that your father lost the company money, and that’s why he fired him.”
“I told you that’s what Grandpa said. You weren’t listening to me.”
She tilted her head toward her plate in a vaguely deferential way. “I always wondered how your father could possibly be angry at them.”
Daniel pushed the little table away. “Because they tried to emasculate him. What they did would’ve really fucked up another man. But not my father. That waiting room incident is a perfect example of the difference between them. He was the one who took control of the situation, he made things happen, and they just sat there like jerks.”
She looked at him as though she was coming to a new conclusion about him; it seemed that pity was part of the conclusion. He fought an urge to strike her.
“I want to ask you something,” he said. “Why didn’t you send my mother a card?”
She blinked. “Well, from what you said, I thought she’d be too bad off to read it or even know about it. Actually I looked at some cards today, but they were all really ugly. I’ll look at a better store tomorrow.”
“You think she cares what the card looks like?”
“If I’m going to send a card, I want it to be a good one.”
“You don’t understand at all.” He stood. “You’re just thinking about yourself and about the impression you’re going to make. The point isn’t a cute card and a cute comment inside it. You’re right, of course, she’s too bad off to look at it. She can hardly fucking move.”
“It wasn’t about making an impression.” Jacquie’s voice was going high and stricken. “Sending cards isn’t something I usually ever do. I was going to send one to your mom because what else am I going to do? But it’s a stupid, inadequate way of saying anything to anybody.”
“That’s not the point. The point of all those stupid cards on her table is one thing. They’re all signed ‘Love.’ That’s it. Every time she sees another card signed ‘Love,’ she knows somebody else is behind her, caring about her. That’s what counts. And last week was the time to send it. Of course it’s inadequate. It’s still better than nothing. Do you know how much pain she’s in? They’ve got her so sedated she can hardly talk, and she’s still in pain. And you don’t send her a card?”
She hovered between emotions, then went into an afflicted flinch. She covered her face with her hands, and he knew she was crying. This was what he had wanted to see, but now he felt sorry, even though she wasn’t crying much.
“It’s not that I don’t care about your mother. I just didn’t want to send a card that didn’t mean anything. I hate cards. I wanted to send her a letter, but I knew she couldn’t read it.” She wiped her face, lifted her head, and faced him. “I was going to send her a book after she gets better. I have it picked out. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking of her.”
He sat down next to her and put his arm across her shoulders. “I know,” he said. He paused. “You’ve just never been in this kind of situation before, and you don’t know how to respond.” Her quivering slowed, and he felt her listening. “I used to be like that. Something like this is so awful that you don’t know how to react, and part of you is worried about how you’re going to look. But the important thing is just to say that you care, somehow. It doesn’t matter if it’s not exactly right. You just do it.”
She looked up at him. “But I can’t think that way, Daniel. If I make a gesture, I want it to be real. Especially if the situation is really bad. It seems insulting to act out of convention. It’s like saying ‘Have a nice day.’ It isn’t connected to anything.”
He dropped his arm from her shoulder and turned away. There was a stretched-out silence with nothing in it.
He separated into two pieces. Part of him sat square in the middle of pain and held on, knowing that he could endure, knowing that his mother could endure and his father too. But another part of him was extended in darkness, reaching for something without knowing what it was.
“Daniel?” She embraced him from behind. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her heart moved in loud, hyperextended beats against his back.
He turned into her embrace and held her head against his chest, locking his legs around her hips. He felt her intensely in the solidity of her little body, felt who she was under her words. She was good inside. She just didn’t know how to show it. She didn’t know how to look outside herself. He wanted to care for her.
She shifted in his arms and reached up to hold his face in her hands. “You’re so cute,” she said.
She disengaged herself, got up, and went into the bathroom. He heard the dull ruffle of toilet paper unraveling from its roll, the hiss and squish of a nose blow. She emerged into the room again, moving with familiar authority. But her face, half turned away from him, was strained, diminished, and searching for something that he didn’t know, something that had nothing to do with him, nothing at all.
The Girl on the Plane
John Morton came down the aisle of the plane, banging his luggage into people’s knees and sweating angrily under his suit. He had just run through the corridors of the airport, cursing and struggling with his luggage, slipping and flailing in front of the vapid brat at the seat assignment desk. Too winded to speak, he thrust his ticket at the boy and readjusted his luggage in his sticky hands. “You’re a little late for a seat assignment,” said the kid snottily. “I hope you can get on board before it pulls away.”
He took his boarding pass and said, “Thanks, you little prick.” The boy’s discomfiture was made more obvious by his pretense of hauteur; it both soothed and fed John’s anger.
At least he was able to stuff his bags into the compartment above the first seat he found. He sat down, grunting territorially, and his body slowly eased into a normal dull pulse and ebb. He looked at his watch; desk attendant to the contrary, the plane was sitting stupidly still, twenty minutes after takeoff time. He had the pleasing fantasy of punching the little bastard’s face.
He was always just barely making his flight. His wife had read in one of her magazines that habitual lateness meant lack of interest in life or depression or something. Well, who could blame him for lack of interest in the crap he was dealing with?
He glanced at the guy a seat away from him on the left, an alcoholic-looking old shark in an expensive suit, who sat staring fixedly at a magazine photograph of a grinning blonde in a white jumpsuit. The plane continued to sit there, while stewardesses fiddled with compartments and women rolled up and down the aisles on trips to the bathroom. They were even boarding a passenger; a woman had just entered, flushed and vigorously banging along the aisle with her luggage. She was very pretty, and he watched her, his body still feebly sending off alarm signals in response to its forced run.