Because the plane had come from New York there was a long wait for the passengers and their luggage to be cleared through the State Police Inspection Station. Daniel thought that several of the women who came through the white formica doors might be his mother, but when she finally did appear, all frazzled and frayed, the very last passenger to be processed, there was no mistaking her. She wasn’t the mother he’d imagined over the years, but she was undoubtedly the one he’d tried and never quite managed to forget.
She was pretty but in the direction of vulnerability rather than of zest and health, with big tired brown eyes, and a tangled mass of horsetail hair that hung down over her shoulders as if it were meant to be a decoration. Her clothes were plain and pleasant but not warm enough for Iowa in the middle of October. She was no taller than an average eighth-grader, and except for big, bra-ed-up breasts, no more fleshed-out than the people you saw in advertisements for religion on tv. She’d let her nails grow weirdly long and she fluttered her fingers when she talked so you were always noticing. One arm was covered with dozens of bracelets of metal and plastic and wood that clinked and jangled all the time. To Daniel she seemed as bizarre as an exotic breed of dog, the kind that no one ever owns and you only see in books. People in Amesville would stare at her. The other people in the airport restaurant already were.
She was eating her hamburger with a knife and fork. Maybe (Daniel theorized) her long fingernails prevented her from picking it up by the bun. The fingernails were truly amazing, a spectacle. Even while she ate she never stopped talking, though nothing that she said was very informative. Obviously she was trying to make a good impression, on Daniel as well as his father. Just as obviously she was pissed off with the inspection she’d gone through. The police had confiscated a transistor radio and four cartons of cigarettes she hadn’t had the cash to pay the Iowa Stamp Tax on. Daniel’s father was able to get the cigarettes back for her but not the radio since it received stations in the prohibited frequency ranges.
In the car on the way back to Amesville his mother smoked and chattered and made lots of nervous not very funny jokes. She admired everything she saw in a tone of syrupy earnestness, as though Daniel and his father were personally responsible and must be praised for the whole of Iowa, the stubble of cornstalks in the fields, the barns and siloes, the light and the air. Then she’d forget herself for a moment and you could tell she really didn’t mean a word of it. She seemed afraid.
His father started smoking the cigarettes too, though it was something he never did otherwise. The rented car filled with smoke and Daniel began to feel sick. He focused his attention on the odometer’s steady whittling away of the distance left to go to get to Amesville.
Next morning was Saturday and Daniel had to be up at six a.m. to attend a Young Iowa Rally in Otto Hassler Park. By the time he was back home, at noon, Milly had been shaped up into a fair approximation of an Amesville housewife. Except for her undersize stature she might have stepped right out of a lady’s clothing display in Burns and McCauley’s window: a neat practical green blouse speckled with neat practical white daisies, a knee-length skirt with wavy three-inch horizontal bands of violet and lime, with matching heavy-duty hose. Her fingernails were clipped to an ordinary length and her hair was braided and wound around into a kind of cap like Daniel’s fourth-grade teacher’s (he was in fifth grade now), Mrs. Boismortier. She was wearing just one of yesterday’s bracelets, a plastic one matching the green in her skirt.
“Well?” she asked him, striking a pose that made her look more than ever like a plaster mannikin.
He felt dismayed all over again. His hamstrings were trembly from the calisthenics in the park, and he collapsed on the sofa hoping to cover his reaction with a show of exhaustion.
“It’s that bad?”
“No, I was only…” He decided to be honest, and then decided against it. “I liked you the way you were.” Which was half the truth.
“Aren’t you the proper little gentleman!” She laughed.
“Really.”
“It’s sweet of you to say so, dear heart, but Abe made it quite clear that the old me just would not do. And he’s right, it wouldn’t. I can be realistic. So—” She struck another shop-window pose, arms lifted in a vaguely defensive gesture. “—what I want to know is: will the new me do?”
He laughed. “For sure, for sure.”
“Seriously,” she insisted, in a tone he could not believe was at all serious. It was as though just by doing any ordinary thing she parodied it, whether she wanted to or not.
He tried to consider her freshly, as though he’d never seen her the way she’d arrived. “As far as what you’re wearing and all, you look just fine. But that won’t make you…” He blushed, “… invisible. I mean…”
“Yes?” She crinkled her painted eyebrows.
“I mean, people are curious, especially about Easterners. Already this morning kids had heard and they were asking me.”
“What about, exactly?”
“Oh, what you look like, how you talk. They see things on television and they think they’re true.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“I said they could wait and see for themselves.”
“Well, don’t worry, Danny — when they do see me I’ll look so ordinary they’ll lose all their faith in tv. I didn’t come here without a good idea of what I’d be getting into. We’ve got tv in the East too, you know, and the Farm Belt gets its share of attention.”
“They say we’re very conformist, don’t they?”
“Yes, that’s certainly one thing they say.”
“So why did you want to come here? I mean, aside from us.”
“Why? I want a nice, comfortable, safe, prosperous life, and if conformity’s the price I’ve got to pay, so be it. Wherever you are, you know, you’re conforming to something.”
She held out her hands in front of her, as though considering the pared-down nails. When she started talking again it was in a tone of unquestionable seriousness. “Last night I told your father I’d go out and get a job to help him take up his indenture a little faster. It would actually be a joy for me to work. But he said no, that wouldn’t look right. That’s my job, looking right. So I’ll be a nice little homebody and crochet the world’s largest potholder. Or whatever homebodies do here. I’ll do it and by damn I’ll look right!”
She plunked down in an armchair and lit a cigarette. Daniel wondered if she knew that most Amesville housewives didn’t smoke, and especially not in public. And then he thought: being with him wasn’t the same as being in public. He was her son!
“Mother… could I ask you a question?”
“Certainly, so long as I don’t have to answer it.”
“Can you fly?”
“No.” She inhaled shallowly and let the smoke spill out of her open mouth. “No, I tried to but I never had the knack. Some people never do learn, no matter how hard they try.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Only a fool would deny wanting to. I knew people who flew, and from the way they talked about it…” She rolled back her eyes and pouted her bright red lips, as if to say, Pure heaven!
“At school there was a special lecture in the gym last year, an authority from the government, and he said it’s all in your head. You just think you’re flying but it’s a kind of dream.”
“That’s propaganda. They don’t believe it. If they did they wouldn’t be so afraid of fairies. There wouldn’t be fans whirling everywhere you went.”