Planes of Sunday Chapters 51 & 52

I'm posting 2 chapters today because I accidentally posted a misnumbered Chapter 51 a few days ago, so some of you might have already read it. xoxo robin

51.
“Ain’t it just like the night
to play tricks on you when
you’re trying to be so quiet?”
-Bob Dylan

One night long ago he’d showed up at the house where we first kissed, and I was there. I’d come to think of it as my place and not his – this was when I was popular, and the people who lived there invited my friends and me over all the time. One of my friends dated a boy who lived there, and another friend was dating a boy who lived with his parents about an hour away from the house, but he slept on the living room floor of the house more often than he called his willing, sloppy mom to come pick him up (the car rides home, they would each be stoned or drunk and absorbed in their separate, jumpy thoughts, but then at moments they would both notice the closeness of the other’s quiet body, the amoral therefore thrilling situation of being a mother and son, loaded together in the same cup of a night, the two generations fun-loving and instable in such a similar way. This occasional living-on-the-edge family unit they formed made them each feel like a pioneer on the frontier of kinship. At these moments, their separate thoughts would touch each other.) This boy, David, cared for the house in a way that none of the rest of us did. He brought by banners he stole from a skateboard shop and decorated the walls with them, only the banners with obscure drawings and phrases on them, like “Wild Air.” He called me a cunt one time, under his breath, when I sent a beer flowing onto the threadbare carpet. He’d been friends with the people who rented the house before my acquaintances moved in, and told us stories about the things that had gone on in the house when they lived there. We could sense that when it was no longer our place to sit and drink and kiss in, he would become friends with the new renters, and tell them stories of our nights there. But we, the characters, would be like ants making trails across the sand in these stories, and the house would be an entire beach, the house was and will probably always be the protagonist in David’s stories, and I personally don’t know why he loved the house so. Maybe it’s where he felt he’d earned a personality, or maybe the place made him feel independent. We were the age when we didn’t know what a burden independence is.

David also loved to tell stories about his childhood with Christopher. Christopher and he were from this city, while the rest of us were just passing through, and I can see, in hindsight, how vital that fact is, how much it means. I feel it, when I think of Christopher still back there living with his mom, after all his plans for London, San Francisco or L.A. I can see how the location where one is raised loses its curse of inanimateness and becomes to the people who were raised there and decided to stay there a third parent, a mute mom-dad who can never be abandoned. From the stories David told of growing up with Christopher in that city, I learned of a snowball spiked with glass and thrown at a retarded adult’s face at the bus stop, an action Christopher perversely chose to stand by, instead of showing remorse. I learned more about Christopher’s first girlfriend, a black girl named Pammy who’d broken his heart by embarking on that passé journey away from home, to college. I learned about the junked car David’s dad kept in their driveway, where Christopher and David spent so many of their nights, just talking and thinking. And the weekend they spent in Coney Island on acid and how they felt bad for the cop with the impractically thick accent, who found the boys huddled under the boardwalk and worried because he thought they were psychotic and homeless.

Christopher was never there at this house on the nights I was, but the things he owned and had left at the house were like a bookmark he’d left behind, so he could open the door at any second and read the collective mood we were in and maybe decide to wow us with a story, or he could point at me and ask, “What’s she doing here?’ and I would suddenly have no allies. He could disappoint us by only staying for a little while.

So one night he showed up for his wallet, which he’d left behind, and when he saw me on the couch, he reached for a Pabst Blue Ribbon and sat in a partially gutted easy chair across the room. His presence made me want to be irreverent and sexual and spilling over like the two girls who’d made it possible for me to be in this situation of social contact. One of the girls, Emily, had the idea to give me a tattoo on my shoulder blade with her boyfriend’s tattoo gun. Flattered, I took off the tight, expensive mini-dress I’d worn with the hope of turning someone on. The dress, once on the floor, was transformed from something with shape and worth into a rag. My shoulder bled more than anyone had expected, because of the alcohol I guess, and the girl put a washcloth on it and told me that we’d wait until the bleeding stopped to finish the tattoo. Maybe an hour passed with everyone talking to Christopher and me sitting there in my slip, realizing that the project on my skin had been forgotten, and the half-finished heart on my shoulder would stay half-finished, looking the rest of my life just like a cursive letter C, an ironic and cruel little anecdote about my college years. It was obvious I had no real worth in the game that was being played around me, the romping cruelties that weren’t supposed to matter because youth is supposed to make one resilient, the cutting into of flesh that was all a joke. I stood up to leave, vowing “Tomorrow I’ll start having dignity,” when Christopher held out his pea coat to me, the one that fit him so perfectly, and said, “Poor Caroline. Your dress is trashed.” So he remembered me.

“Where have you been?”

He had broken up with me by disappearing from sight. From his friend who loved the house, I’d gathered that he was still living in the city, and that he’d just moved in with another girl. It’d been a few months that I had not seen or heard from him, and now all my waiting and self-flagellation had paid off; he had come back.

“Let’s go somewhere and talk. Do you like the basement?”
Wildly and generously he gestured with his arms as he paced along the basement floor, paraded around in front of me, describing the depths of the remorse he felt for having left me so suddenly and mysteriously. He grew more animated as the narrative of his past few months grew more intense, and he described the exact pitch of the voice of the girl he was living with, and a conversation he’d had with a drunk Vietnam vet in the park, this guy who had these great tattoos of people getting stabbed to death all over his arms. He was as detail-obsessed as a little boy, and since I did not know he was on drugs, I pondered while I watched him perform whether it was his upbringing or just a self-generating motor that made him such a fascinating talker. I grabbed on to his shirt and harnessed him to the stairs. “So you missed me then?” I asked, and he hesitated, stunned at how vastly I had missed the point of what he was saying, how he was describing his own self confidence and the adventures it had gotten him in to.

“Can we get back together?” I asked.

“Caroline, why would we-? I mean, I guess, if you think so. Yeah, I guess we should get back together,” he said. He looked at me and gave me a pat on the head. Then I was so forceful I have no way of knowing what expression was on his face or if he was hard or if the surface of his skin got bumpy when I took off his shirt and pants and he was exposed so entirely to the cold air of the basement. All I saw were my own hands as they pushed away fabrics and released the tautness of belts and elastics. The moth-eaten collar of a black cotton shirt as I pulled at it and it birthed a perfect head of black hair and an open mouth. A sock full of holes that my hand threw behind me into a tower of collapsed, mildewed boxes. My hands, my own hands, disappearing underneath me, pulling something towards me. Blind, panicky hands fluttering towards heat. Moth hands. Dusty pigeon-wing hands. Alighting hands. Clutching. Pushing.


When I graduated from college, I spent almost two years teaching in Seattle and acting as the Lattimores’ shy, surrogate daughter. Then I had what can be called a nervous breakdown, and all the delicate ties I’d established, the tender, slip-knot lassoes I’d thrown around people and routines, these things had to be instantly abandoned; I was desperate to return home to my family. I donated all of my furniture and clothing to the Goodwill and took a plane home to my mother and father, who I realized for the first time were really all mine. This was more safety than I could’ve imagined in my wildest dreams. I rented an apartment that was within walking distance of them and the house I’d grown up in. There was a law office across the street from the very same grocery store I’d gone to as a child, and I got a job as the receptionist for the law firm. Six times a week sometimes, I worked a ten hour day at that office, delighted to be kept too busy for lunch breaks, and when each hard day’s night approached, I walked to my parents’ house, where they had dinner ready for me. This was my short interval in Paradise. For after some short time of this minute routine, I started to find it a challenge to gather energy to walk over there. I only wanted to watch TV alone and fall asleep when I got home from work. On my rare days off, I wanted to stay in my pajamas all day with the shades drawn over the windows, waiting out the sunlight. Poor bored, housewife mother called me on my days off and left messages on my answering machine, “Call me, dear, just to say hi. I was thinking you might stop by for awhile today, if you get the chance,” and it seemed too hard a task to me to call her back. The only times I ever went to visit her were on the days I’d wake up seized with the desperation to be near her, and would irresponsibly call in sick to work with elaborate excuses, just so I could spend an afternoon with mom at McDonald’s, or at the movies. These outings were my stolen time. It was time stolen from the awesomely unfulfilling office work I performed, and time stolen from the unsettled stomach I got when I ate my T.V. Dinner each night. Time stolen from my heart-breaking remisiscings of the short life I led in New York City, how everything was beginning for me and I was at the zenith of youth, and I had just met Christopher.



52.
“The Nest”

Pammy found herself walking to the subway station with a petite, vicious girl her own age and with two boys she knew she would think about, with an interchangeable hoping, when she eventually returned to her own apartment. She would be alone in the single room with the Halloween decorations on the wall. She would sit down, just to fully absorb the pleasure of having her own place, and then for a moment she would miss living with her dad, and would consider how gentle the big man was, who moved furniture from penthouse to penthouse for a living, cringing with embarrassment when he worked for delicate, pretty white women, who couldn’t help but watch him lift their dressers and desks with awe, like they were watching a bear put his paw in the ocean and withdraw with it a flopping, desperate salmon. Then Pammy would stand, and would shed her white dress like a snake’s old skin, and out of the corner of her eye would glimpse her own spectral reflection on the window’s surface. Then she would wish to be observed at that moment by Jenkins, with his blonde, satisfying approval. Or for Christopher to be sitting on a corner of her bed and for them not to have yet made love on this night of their reunion, so that the span of his attention illuminated by longing was still to come.

And then like a bad surprise she was not satisfied with anything, and wished to start all over.

The underground parking garage of the apartment building she worked in was three story’s deep, and when she walked from her car through the subterranean rows of other people’s cars was when she tried hardest to transform the mundane into something poignant, imagining how distant and novel even the yellow-painted columns of an underground parking garage would seem to her someday when she was more established somewhere else, and maybe how she would even wish to be back there again. She would hint to her dad that she wanted him to tell her she should quit working there, that she was too smart and pretty for such a job. She’d tell him how she was scared of her adult male co-workers, the drug addicts or former drug addicts whose fun lives had turned them into losers and amnesiacs. But she would show up to work stoned herself, and often slink around the parking garage for hours instead of going where she was supposed to, feeling delinquent and inattentive. It was the paradoxical way many young women act, who feel both corrupt and innocent at the same time, cradled.

One night Jenkins was suddenly there, sitting at the security desk where she was supposed to sit. Jenkins smiled at Pammy with one corner of his pink mouth, and Pammy felt that involuntary function of her body that responded to physical interest switch on. It seemed practically impossible to her, standing there, that the coupling vignette was about to begin all over again, but it always did, ever since she’d grown into her looks as a young adult, with her two full breasts like precarious glasses of wine she had to shield from shattering by sometimes pushing ahead of other people in public places, scooting in front of slower walkers through doorways.

As a young adult watching her own beauty develop, she worried that her personality was being corrupted by these new advantages her attractiveness afforded her, and these advantages seemed things bestowed on her due to very temporary luck. She’d had an auburn-haired, well-off, beautiful best friend named Julie in high school, the type of girl who grew into a women the pharmacists fell in love with and wanted to care for when she came into drugstores to get her prescriptions refilled. Julie went home with moody adult men she met at bars who would tell her that she was perfect, Julie’d tell Pammy. These men took Julie to their apartments to have sex with her even when she felt dry inside and her flexed feet got cramps in their arches. For days after these single nights of attention, Julie would sit in the living room, where the phone was, waiting, watching television with her father, too paralyzed with expectations to do her homework. She’d hope for calls from men who hadn’t even asked for her phone number. Maybe, she thought, the men would remember her full name, which she liked to call herself by when she was drunk and flirtatious, and they’d looked her up in the phone book. She’d smoke cigarette after cigarette, sometimes thinking of her mother who lay wilting with emphysema in a hospital. “Hey Pammy, what’s up? I just called to say hi. I’m feeling a little down,” she’d say, and the conversations were always absent-minded, like she was treading air, waiting for Pammy to say something satiating like, “Julie, that guy you like is going to be at a party tonight. Do you want to go with me?” Pammy cringed and observed as the beautiful women and girls like Julie broke the bones in their thin ankles just a little bit more with each high-heeled step they took through hallways littered with unfamiliar belts glowing in the sad morning light of the morning-after. She was afraid that to be beautiful was to be weak.

Eventually, however, Pammy grew comfortable with the advantages of beauty. She began to realize that her beauty was an absolute redemption for everything she said or did, something like an ornate suit of armor, which would last for at least twenty more years. Shielded by beauty in this way, she learned to utilize her heightened position by being thoughtful towards others. She felt that in wearing old-fashioned or home made clothing she was standing for other people and herself as a symbol of that obscure prettiness in the world so hard to remember to appreciate, like two red threads and a blue piece from a plastic bag woven into a bird’s nest. When she went home with boys she wasn’t attracted to, it was often in the service of helping human contact look like a sanctuary, instead of the letdown she privately felt it mostly was. She tried to make sure everything she said was interesting and everything she did was done slowly, with care. She was trying to charm the human race.

But on this night I’m telling you about, it descended on her that this precious, internalized plan would not be sustained. One instance one day of getting too upset with herself for not leaving a big enough tip at a restaurant, or a few more boyfriends who hoarded their thoughts from her like jewels would make her want to surrender to the ordinary. For a second her disappointment lifted when Christopher kissed the light brown dome of her shoulder and whispered, “Hi.” But then Jenkins appeared in front of her and slapped her hard across the face, and she knew she had to run, to the bird’s nest with the two red threads and the bit of plastic bag, if she was going to save it. So she ran down the street, turning her head only once in their direction to scream with a heavy tremor in her voice, “Fuck you. Fuck you. I’m a fucking artist and you never even knew it. No one ever asked me what I liked, because you never even fucking cared about me. Fuck you!”

The two men were already fighting by this time. Christopher only got in one punch to Jenkins’ ear before his arms were pinned down on either side of his immobile ribcage on the cool pavement. Jenkins pounded over and over again at that bloody mass of pale wet flesh with its shadowy divots and peaks, until that electric-feeling cloud over his vision lifted and he could see that the boy’s nose was mashed shapeless and that he had stopped moving. Carefully, ashamed, he rose from his position over the body and looked apologetically at Christina, who was screaming and sobbing. He slowly walked back to the pink wreckage of his home, trying to slowly, coaxingly walk off the nausea and the fear of his home being empty when he finally made it back there from whatever hostile, blurry street he was on right now.

Jenkins never saw his three young friends or his girlfriend again after this night. A couple weeks later, he was bringing home a pretty, quiet girl with a lazy eye, who looked like an album cover from the nineteen sixties and who shot up between her toes, and they were waiting across the street for a jockish couple to walk out of sight, and the girl whispered to Jenkins, “Do you like fucking under the stars?” Jenkins watched as the jockish couple’s pit bull stopped in front of his palace and sniffed out all the drowsy secret habitation of that place.

The dog was an omen. The next day, a construction crew arrived and Jenkins snuck away, bringing with him only his money. The crew built scaffolding along the building’s façade and attached a large blue tarp to part of the scaffolding. One night, an unsure, lonely girl walked past the building and thought to herself, “How beautiful,” as she watched the blue tarp swell in the wind, like an ocean’s wave.