Freeze Frames Read online

  “Rico gonna grab his. Dunt worry.” Maggie licks her fingers, balancing the plate precariously in her other hand as she dances out of the room. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “What were we saying?” Amber is watching Maggie’s progress across the white carpets in the living room.

  “Roast beef. Mom finding stuff.”

  “Oh yeah.” Amber pauses, pushing a long wisp of hair back from her forehead with her little finger. “I guess I am tired, today.”

  “Long ride on the train, especially when you got kids.”

  They both nod again; Amber licks her own fingers clean.

  “There are towels, sweetie.” Mandi appears in the doorway. “In that niche by the blender. Yes, just there. Tiff, your Mark is being an absolute martyr, playing with the kids. They certainly toe the line when he’s here.”

  “You can take a man outta the Marines,” Amber remarks. “But you can’t take the Marines outta the man.”

  “I suppose so, yes.” Mandi’s smile wavers, fades. In the bright overhead light she suddenly looks her age as the wrinkles round her eyes fill with shadows. “Tiff, darling, give me that jacket.”

  “I can hang it up, Mom. No problem.”

  Mandi’s hand stays outstretched.

  “I’ll just take it into the bedroom for you. I’m going that way to the necessary.”

  Tiffany gives her the jacket, which she shakes, smooths, folds over her arm.

  “I was just going to do some wash for the kids. I can throw this right in, can’t I? No use you having to take it to the laundromat and use up your ration on it.”

  She is smiling, but Tiffany is suddenly aware that the jacket is dirty, that she really should have washed it last week sometime, that perhaps she never should have worn a sports-team jacket here to her mother’s house.

  “Mom, I got some stuff in the pockets.”

  “Of course you do, dear.” Automatically her manicured hand goes fishing through them. “What’s this? A card for a bookstore I’ve never heard of? You really have to tell me what it’s like when you go, sounds just great. Couple of notes. Put those in your pants pocket, dear, so you don’t lose them. And a tennis ball?”

  Tiffany snatches the squeezer back, covers the snatch with a grin.

  “Something to show you, Mom. Remember the bad hand?”

  Amber and Mandi both watch, wide-eyed, as breathless as children entranced by a trapeze artist, as Tiffany squeezes the ball, tosses it into the air, and catches it again.

  “All right!” Amber claps, solemnly.

  Mandi’s eyes fill with tears, wiped quickly on the corner of Tiffany’s jacket, but she keeps smiling, a natural grin, now, of pride, pure pride. It is at these moments that Tiffany remembers how much she’s always loved her mother.

  “That’s so wonderful. Oh honey, you’ve done such a good job. I knew you’d put yourself back together, I always knew it, no matter what that doctor said. I’m so happy. It’s just . . . ” She sniffs loudly. “Well. Be right back. You girls could even sit down, y’know.”

  While Mandi trots off to the rear of the flat, the two sisters trail into the living room, stand for a moment at the picture window, looking out and over the white wall, glittering with glass, then down the long slope of tangled streets and houses to the blue and misty bay in the far distance. The two former points, or brand-new islands, Hunter’s and Candlestick, rise from the swamps and mudflats of low tide at the edge of the view. From the comp room comes laughter and the sound of electronic music. One of the gamers has reached a new level, most likely.

  “Say, Ambi? What’s Mom got against Mark, anyway?”

  Amber winces, reaches out to straighten the folds of a drape.

  “Well, it’s something. Dunt lie to me, will you?”

  “Never. Dunt worry.” With a little sigh Amber goes back to studying the view. “Just that he was enlisted personnel, not an officer. Nothing more than that.”

  Tiffany lets out her breath in a sharp puff.

  “Shoulda guessed that.”

  The silence again, the things they daren’t speak here where they might be overheard at any moment. Across the sky, over the East Bay hills, an airplane writes a line of white.

  “Must be a Navy plane, if it’s based over there,” Tiffany remarks.

  “Hum? Oh. Oh yeah, I see it now. You know, something I wanted to ask you. You think you’ll ever fly again?”

  “I dunt know, but I dunt think so. Not well enough for combat, that’s for sure. I mean, ferrying planes into a combat zone. But I dunt think I could even be an instructor. Not the way I am now.”

  “Oh. That must hurt.”

  “Yeah. No use pretending it dunt.”

  “I’m real sorry about that, but Tiff? You’re gonna hate me for saying this, but I got to. I’m glad you’re not going back. I’m glad nobody’s ever going to be shooting at you again.”

  “Well, hell, I ain’t gonna miss that part myself.”

  The plane disappears into the sun. The vapor trail remains, an arc across the sky. A lonely impulse of delight drove to this rapture in the clouds. Another line of poetry whose source she cannot remember. In this world does that poem even exist? The question strikes her like a blow. If the rabbi and Nick should, by some vast stretch of the reality she’s always known, be real themselves in the different and terrible reality they have spoken of, if this world is not the actual world into which she was born, then any number of things she’s been taking for granted may or may not have changed.

  “What’s wrong?” Amber says, and sharply.

  “Oh, uh, muscles in my arm just cramped up. Just a little.” She makes a show of rubbing the bad arm with the good hand. “Say, Ambi? Do you remember where this line comes from? It’s a poem, I think, a real old poem. ‘A lonely impulse of delight drove to this rapture in the clouds.’”

  “This tumult in the clouds.” Mandi trots back, a glass of mineral water in her hand.

  “Not rapture?”

  “Well, I think it’s tumult. We can look it up when the kids are done with the comp. Willy Yeats wrote it, darling, and you always loved it so much. The only poem you ever memorized, and you were what? thirteen, that’s right, and Miss Rodriguez was so pleased. Do you remember Miss Rodriguez?”

  “No, ’fraid not. Long time ago now.”

  “Such a good teacher. I was amazed at how many poems about airplanes she managed to find. I don’t remember how the Yeats starts, I’m afraid, but there’s this bit: ‘Those that I guard I do not love, those that I fight I do not hate.’ Then there’s a bit I can’t remember. And then ‘Nor law nor duty bade me fight, nor public men nor cheering crowds, a lonely impulse of delight’ and so on. I think that’s how it goes. I can’t remember the title, though.”

  “It sure fits, dunt it? My life, I mean. Weird, how a little kid would sort of know. What was in store for me, I mean. Though I dunno about that line about not loving those you guard. I liked Israel a whole lot.”

  “Yes, you always said so in your letters.”

  They stand together, watching the vapor trail turn soft and dissolve. In the bay below red-and-white grain tankers crawl along, heading north toward the channel out and west. Tiffany is so relieved to find her memory confirmed that she could laugh aloud. All at once more returns to her.

  “Hey, I remember the title! ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.’”

  Amber and Mandi turn just a little pale, just a little tight around the mouths.

  “Uh, well, sorry, I forgot how that would sound to you guys. It’s not like I did die. Not permanently, I mean.”

  “Close enough, dear. Would you two like something to drink? There’s mineral water. And cola for the kids. Amber, do you mind them having all these sweets? No? Well, it is Veterans’ Day, after all. I’ll just go see if they want something to drink. And Mark. Poor dear Mark, trapped in there all this time. I’m sure he’d like a beer. I’ll just go get him one.”

  And she is gone, gliding across white carpets, one hand
automatically touching her hair, tucking under a random curl. Just as automatically Tiffany and Amber drift from the window and sit down on the sofa—just in time, Tiffany realizes. The bad leg is aching, and she can feel her back tightening as well. Amber is watching her closely.

  “Want something to drink? I’ll get up and get it.”

  “You know, if you wouldn’t mind?”

  “No problem. Just sit there and rest.”

  When her sister goes into the kitchen, their mother’s voice greets her. As she listens to them chatter about drinks, Tiffany finds herself thinking of another Mandi, another Amber. Do they really exist, there in that other world which also includes Owens Air Services Base? Is there a Mandi and an Amber sitting in a flat just like this one in that world, remarking to one another that they wished Tiffany were alive to join them while the children route imaginary trains with no Uncle Mark to watch?

  “Over a year, now.” Tiffany has spoken aloud again. She looks up to find Amber standing in front of her, holding out a glass of mineral water. “Sorry. I dint mean—”

  “It’s okay, Tiff.” Amber hands over the glass and sits down. “You thinking about, well, the accident again?”

  Tiffany has a sip of water. The accident. Neither her mother nor her sister have ever been able to face the truth that the crash was no accident, that the Emirate pilots had every conscious intention of blowing her plane out of the sky. The only accidental factor was her unarmed plane happening to be in their way . . . but in that other world, that event was no happenstance. If that world exists, her fully-armed plane was meant to be there, on deliberate patrol. In that world, in some dusty white city in the Emirate, where it’s now the middle of the night, there are mothers and sisters lying awake, perhaps, to mourn the sons and brothers she shot down.

  “I mean, like,” Amber is still talking, picking over each word. “A year, it’s not that long. To get over what you’ve been through.”

  “Not me I’m thinking ’bout. Can I ask you something? What if I’d died in that crash, really died, I mean, like there wasn’t enough left to resurrect? How would you feel now? After a year, I mean? Would it still bug you?”

  “What? Damn right we’d still miss you.” Amber sounds completely taken aback. “I mean, look at Mom, when you remembered the title. She turned white, dint she?”

  “But look, you wouldn’t be . . . well, I dunno. You wouldn’t be like, crying all the time and stuff, would you? And Mom, either. Especially Mom. I mean, life’s gotta go on.”

  “Of course it does.” Amber frowns, thinking. “Everyone loses somebody, sooner or later, everyone, and you can’t just stop living.”

  “Right. I was hoping you’d feel that way.”

  “Well, it’s like when Dad was killed. Do you remember any of that?”

  “Only a little.” Yet of course Tiffany wonders if she remembers anything at all that happened with this Amber, this Mandi. “I was too young.”

  “I was afraid Mom was going to die.” Amber’s voice turns flat and weak. “I really was, she cried so much. And the preacher came twice a day, just to see if we were okay and she was managing. I mean, she was alone and everything, really alone, with her own mom . . . well you know.”

  Tiffany does not know. She realizes in a kind of panic that her mother’s mother, Grandma Janet as she remembers her, has in this world some new story, some unknown shame judging from the drop in Amber’s voice, that she has never heard.

  “Tiff, what’s wrong? Something is.”

  “Yeah, but I dunt know how to say it. I was just. Ah hell, forget it. I feel so dumb, all of a sudden.”

  Amber stares over the rim of her glass for a long moment, then finally drinks, looks up with a smile as Mandi comes to join them, perching on a chair nearby. Tiffany feels a sudden need to make amends, to repair the moment that she blames herself for shattering.

  “Mom, how’s work treating you? Must be pretty good, if you got a new comp.”

  “Well, yes, I’ve been pretty busy, and it looks like old Paula Bronowski’s going to retire at last. I mean, my dears, she must be eighty if she’s a day.”

  “And you got a chance at a promotion?”

  “Oh.” Mandi smiles delicately. “I’m working on it.”

  “In the bag, then,” Amber says, grinning. “In the bag.”

  For some while they talk of work, of Amber’s research and Mandi’s role as advocate for those denied veterans’ benefits on one pretext or another, yet both of them seem on edge, glancing Tiffany’s way, speaking in chopped sentences, as if they realize that this talk of their important jobs, the succoring of widows and orphans here at home or developing new sources of food for a teeming, starving Latin America, leaves Tiffany out, moves her to the edge of their lives, where her only job is recovery at taxpayers’ expense. Everyone is grateful when a blare of sound interrupts them: Maggie trotting in, the office door left open behind her.

  “I be sick of Space Rebels,” she announces. “’Sides, this way Uncle Mark gets to play.”

  “That’s nice of you, darling,” Mandi murmurs. “Going to sit down with us?”

  Grinning, Maggie flops onto the couch between her aunt and her mother. Amber reaches out, only half-thinking, to run her fingers through her daughter’s hair, to draw her into the circle of women that has always been the real heart, the real center of their lives, that unmoving point on which they may stand and watch the comings and goings of men temporarily loved. With a sigh Tiffany leans back, listening to the honks and beeps, the bursts of music and simulated voices, the simulated bombs and laser fire coming from the other room. Once she ventured out beyond the circle, but the fortunes of war have thrown her back again, for good this time, she supposes. Eventually she will have to figure out what she will do here. Unless of course she chooses to move on to another world entirely.

  “Tiff darling?” Mandi’s voice, a slash of worry through her thoughts. “Are you all right? You look so pale, dear.”

  “Do I? Well, sorry. Just a little tired, that’s all. Put in a long week at the clinic.”

  They are all watching her, even young Maggie, slewing round on the couch in imitation of her mother’s concern. Mark appears in the door, Rico trailing behind him, clinging to his hand. He must have overheard Mandi’s remark, Tiffany supposes.

  “You need to go home, hon?”

  For her own sake she would say yes, but Rico looks so heartsick at the thought of losing his uncle’s company, the attention of one of the few men he knows well, that she manages a smile.

  “Not yet, no. I mean, Mom went and got this dinner, least we can do is eat it, huh?”

  “Well, darling, only if you’re sure. . . . ” Mandi is leaning forward, her eyes searching her daughter’s face.

  “Tell you what? Think I could lie down for a little while?”

  A flurry, a wave breaking, a wave fashioned of concern, of voices, of children’s hugs, of standing up and feeling dizzy, the wave sweeping her with Mark’s help down the hall to Mandi’s own room, where her mother plumps pillows and brings out an afghan—and then, at last, she is alone, the wave spent, lying in the semi-dark behind a closed door, watching mottled shadows from the curtained window fall across the pink and white afghan, across the peaks and valleys formed by her own body. The land of counterpane, another poem, she thinks, one her mother read them when they were small, if indeed this mother did read poems in this world. She must’ve. She knew the Yeats. Yeats not yeets, Keats not kates. Told us that, too. In other rooms, old flats in those days, with windows that often stuck, and doors that hung all angled to the floor, flats that a widow with two children could afford on her Civil Service salary, small then, before the promotions. But every night, stifling yawns, pausing to rub aching eyes, she would read to them before they went to sleep, read poems and stories of other times, wonder tales, rather than the sad stories that Tiffany can tell herself now.

  In another world a mother has put her loss behind her, or, as much behind her as any mot
her can ever put a daughter’s loss, and gone on with her life. In that other world a mother no doubt will go to the opening ceremonies for the base named after her daughter. She will wear a grey suit and sit on a wooden platform near a podium while the Air Services Academy band plays. Right behind her will sit the hero’s sister and her two children—her two beautiful children, the newspeople will call them. The mother will receive a folded flag, the Bear Flag of the California Republic, from the commander of her daughter’s squadron and hold that flag decorously upon her lap during the speeches. She will bring the flag home and put it away in the cedar chest with the similar flag that came home from Rumania over her husband’s coffin. No doubt she will cry while she does so, sob out loud for old grief remembered, then wash her face and take comfort in the presence of her beloved grandchildren.

  Unless, of course, this next story becomes true. In that world a dazed mother, still in something like shock from being reunited with the daughter that she’d long given up for dead, will put on a pink suit to sit on the platform, but in a chair slightly behind that of the daughter herself. The Bear Flag will be flying free in the wind, rather than folded in a lap, as the Air Services Academy band plays. There will still be speeches, but the last of them will be delivered by the daughter, standing straight and proud, since she will be able to lean on the podium. Unfortunately, that story has its logical correlate: in this world, in America, a mother does not know that she is on the verge of losing her daughter yet once again, that some mysterious and utterly unforeseen event, engineered by the Prince of Lies, is about to sweep her daughter away forever, the same daughter that was already snatched twice, not once but twice, from the jaws of death by medical science. In this world, no officer will hand her a folded flag. The Air Force Academy band will not play. She will not have the Stars and Stripes and Maple Leaves to lay into the aforementioned cedar chest with the politically outdated, unfoliated Stars and Stripes that came home from Rumania.

  The daughter lies on a flowered bedspread and decides that none of these stories can possibly be true. Their truth depends for its existence upon another, even more peculiar story, that the Devil and Reb Akiba have come to earth to tell the daughter tales in the first place. As much as she enjoys the story of Owens Air Services Base and her brilliant performance in her last dogfight, she will have to label it wishful thinking. Or compensation? Not quite that word, but a fancier label, one she heard from the psychotherapist assigned to the resurrected in their first weeks back alive. Compensomething. Compensatory fantasy. Wishful thinking dressed up to go to dinner. If only she’d been given a fully armed plane. If only they’d let her fly combat the way she knew she could fly. If only. And Old Nick came to tell her that it was indeed true. But the rabbi? Why would he come to reinforce a lie? Because he wasn’t really there. Neither of them.