The Angel on the Roof

  When he emerged from the elevator to the lobby, he quickly looked around for Frances and found her seated in a far corner of the room, slumped in a chair with her head on one arm and her eyes closed as if asleep. He sat down next to her, and her eyes fluttered open.

  “Did you see her?” Frances asked.

  “Yeah. I did. I saw her.”

  “She didn’t know you were there, did she?”

  “No. No, she didn’t,” he said. “But that didn’t matter.”

  “Where’re you going now, Vann? From here.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d wait here, Frances. Keep you company. If you don’t mind, I mean.”

  The girl didn’t answer him. They both knew that Irene was going to die, probably before morning. Like a father, Vann would wait here with her and help the girl endure her mother’s death. He thought of the big framed picture that Irene had sent him and that he had carted around with him these last few years from one job to the next, wondering what to do with the thing. Plains of Abraham. What kind of name was that, anyhow? The picture was of a mountain. Maybe he would give it to Frances. He’d just give it to her and say that her mother had bought it for him years ago because she knew he loved it, and he hoped that Frances liked it enough to hang it where she could see it every day, and he could see it sometimes, too, if she’d let him.

  People coming into the lobby were brushing snow off their shoulders and hats. Vann looked out the window at the parking lot and the lake. It had been snowing for a while, and the cars in the lot were covered with powdery white sheets. Sam Guy would fire him, no doubt about it, and both Vann and Sam would be lucky if no one sued them. Vann would go back to working locally out of his car, like he’d done when he first married Irene. He was coming in off the road, too late, maybe, to make anyone happy, but here he was anyhow, trying.

  Theory of Flight

  Her first day at Kitty Hawk, she stayed at the cottage with her mother and father and explained to them why she was leaving Roger. As if speaking into a tape recorder, the three adults stared straight ahead and talked to one another. They sat on the beach in canvas and aluminum chairs and watched the children play with shovels and buckets at the edge of the water. The sun was white, unencumbered, untouched, in a cloudless sky, burning at the center of the dark blue, circular plane.

  Bored with buckets and shovels, the two little girls—daughters and granddaughters—put the toys down and moved closer to the water to dodge the waves, tempting them, dodging again. At first laughing gaily, then, whenever a wave shoved their ankles and knees or as it receded caught them from behind, their laughter suddenly, momentarily, turned manic, and their small, brown faces shifted to gray, mouths gaping, eyes searching the beach for Mamma.

  “Jesus,” Janet said. “It’s like Greece, this sky and that sun!”

  “All week,” her father said. “It’s been like this all week. Can you believe it?” With his leathery, tanned skin, bony face, and round, wrinkle-rimmed eyes, he looked like a giant sea turtle thrown into a canvas beach chair. He lay there, rather than sat, staring at his granddaughters, fingertips nervously drumming knobby knees, toes digging into the hot white sand. “Maybe you can give it one last chance,” he said. “You’ve got the children to think about, you know.”

  “All I’ve done, for God’s sake, is think about the children! I mean, please, figure it out for yourself, Daddy. Are they better off with one parent who’s reasonably sane and more or less happy than with two parents, both of whom are crazy and miserable and blaming their craziness and misery on each other? Which would you have preferred? For that matter, which do you think I would have preferred?” Chewing her upper lip, she still did not look at him. She wondered about herself, her thirties: Would she become idly cruel?

  Her father started to stammer, then inhaled deeply, a reversed sigh, and talked rapidly about his own mother and father, reminding himself, his wife, and his daughter that at least once in this life there had been a perfect marriage. In the middle of his eulogy, his wife got up from her chair, wiped clinging grains of sand from her calves and hands, and walked back to the cottage.

  “Do you want a drink, Janet?” she called over her shoulder. The turquoise straps of her bathing suit were cutting into reddened loaves of flesh.

  “God, no, Mother! It’s only three o’clock!”

  “What about you, Charles?”

  “Gin and tonic. You know.”

  The mother turned and waded through the deep sand, over the low ridge to the cottage. The daughter and the father continued to sit in the low-slung chairs, side by side, watching the girls play. For several minutes, the old man and the young woman said nothing.

  Then the man sighed loudly and said, as if to a friendly bartender, “Jesus, what a goddamn shame.”

  She turned slowly and looked at him. “A shame that it took me eight years. That’s all I’m ashamed of!” she snapped. She got up from her chair and jogged down to the water, pounding through the surf until she was waist-deep, and dove into a breaking wave, disappearing and after several seconds popping up beyond the wave in smooth, dark green, deep water.

  She poked one hand up in the air and waved to her father. He lifted a skinny brown arm and slowly waved back.

  Stalking past the bunch of teenage boys and men in T-shirts with sleeves rolled up to show off biceps and tattoos, Janet hurried to a place about halfway down the Fish Pier. Out at the end of the pier, the serious fishermen had gathered, fifteen or twenty of them, red-faced white men in duck-bill caps, short-sleeve shirts, and Bermuda shorts, all of them leaning like question marks over the waist-high wood railing, peering out and down at their lines, silently attentive.

  Janet was what they used to call a looker—neat, trim, sexy if tanned and wearing carefully selected clothes, a fashionably casual haircut, and minimal makeup (but not without makeup altogether), the kind of woman whose attractiveness to men depended greatly on the degree to which she could reveal that men were attractive to her. If, when it turned out that for whatever reason or length of time she was not interested in a particular man, her boyish, physical intensity was capable of frightening him, and on such occasions she was sometimes thought to be a lesbian, which, on these occasions, pleased her. It’d serve the bastards right, she thought.

  Slipping in between two small groups of black people, men and women, she found a spot at the rail and broke out her fishing gear. She stuffed a cold, slumbering bloodworm onto a hook, leaned over the rail, and flipped the tip of the rod, casting underhanded, sending the weighted hook and worm forty or fifty feet out and twenty feet down into the dark water. Slowly, she reeled the line back in, watching the people around her as she worked.

  “How you doin’ today?” a man with an enormous head asked her. He flashed a mouthful of gold-trimmed teeth.

  “Can’t tell yet. I just got here,” she said. She heard the words clicking in a hard, flat, Boston accent. She never heard her own accent, except when speaking with black people, regardless of where they were from. Southern whites, strangely, only made her conscious of their accent, not her own. The same was true for Hispanics. The man was with two women, both of whom seemed to be older than he, and two men, also older than he. None of the others was fishing. Instead, they drank beer and ate fried chicken legs and chattered with each other and with the various people passing by and standing around them. The man fishing was, by comparison, a solitary. He carefully ignored the others. His very large head was almost startling to look at, all the more, for a white person, because of his shining blackness. Janet didn’t realize she was staring at him, at his head, the considerable force of it, until, smiling easily at her, he said, “You know me, Miss?”

  “No. No, I guess not. I just thought, I … you do look familiar to me, that’s all.”

  “You prob’ly seen me around,” he said, almost bragging.

  “Yes.” She noticed that whenever he spoke to her the others immediately lapsed into silence—but only for as long as he wa
s speaking. When she answered him, they went back to their own conversations, not hearing her. It was as if she had said nothing, as if she were a creature of his imagination. It made her nervous.

  Nevertheless, the two continued talking idly to one another while they fished, with long periods of thoughtful silence between exchanges, and soon she no longer noticed that the others watched her in attentive silence when he spoke, then switched off and ignored her altogether when she responded. Suddenly, they both finally started catching fish—spots, small, silvery white fish with a thumbnail-sized black dot over each gill. “The tide comin’ in,” he explained. “We gonna get us a mess of fish now, you wait,” he said, and as he spoke, she felt the deliberate tug of a fish on her line. She yanked with her left hand and reeled with her right, swiftly pulling in a small fish that glistened in the sun as she drew it up to the pier and over the rail. The fish she caught, one after another, were only a bit larger than her hand, but the man declared that they’d be the best fish she’d ever caught. “You fry up a mess of them little spots in the mornin’ an’ that’ll be your best breakfast!” he promised and grinned at her and reeled in another for himself, slipped it off the hook, and shoved it into the burlap sack at his feet.

  She let her own caught fish accumulate inside the tin tackle box she had brought, her father’s. She could hear them rattling around inside, scattering the hooks, sinkers, and lures in the darkness. Her heart was pounding, from the work as much as from the excitement. She pictured the large, gray blossoms of sweat that she knew had spread across her back and under her arms. Her arms and legs were feathery and full of light, as she felt the shudder and the familiar, hard tug of one fish after another hitting the bait, felt it pull against the steady draw of the reel, then fly through the air, up and over the rail onto the pier. She wanted to laugh out loud and yell to the man next to her, Hey! I got another one! and another one!

  But she said nothing. They both worked steadily in silence, grabbing the flopping, hooked fish off their lines, jamming fresh worms onto the hooks, reaching over the rail and casting the lines underhanded in long arcs back down into the water, feeling the weighted hooks hit the water and sink a foot or two into it, feeling them get hit again, and then reeling the fish back toward the pier, lifting them free of the water into the air and drawing them up to the pier and the rail again, and again, until, sweat rolling across her face, her arms began to ache, the muscles of her right hand between thumb and forefinger to cramp, and still the fish kept on hitting the lines. There was a grim, methodical rhythm to their movements, and they were working together, it seemed, the young white woman in blouse and shorts and blue tennis shoes and the middle-aged black man in T-shirt and stained khaki trousers and bare feet.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Her line drifted slowly to the bottom and lay there, inert, as if tied to a rock. His line, five feet away from hers, did the same. The two of them leaned further out and watched, waiting. But nothing happened. The fish were gone. The tide had moved them closer to the beach, where the school had swirled and dispersed in silvery clouds, swimming with the current along the beach, away from the pier and parallel to the breaking waves. She watched surf casters scattered up the beach one by one begin to catch fish, their long poles going up like tollgates as the schools moved rapidly along.

  She lay flat on her back in the sand, no blanket or towel beneath her, feeling her skin slowly darken, tiny, golden beads of sweat gradually stringing her mouth along her upper lip and over her chin, crossing her forehead just above her eyebrows, puddling in the gullies below her collarbones and rib cage, between her small breasts, and drifting, sliding in a thin, slick sheet of moisture down the smooth insides of her thighs. It was close to noon, and the sun, a flat, white disc, was almost directly overhead, casting practically no shadow.

  “Mommy, you’re really getting red,” Laura quietly said. She stood over her mother for a moment, peering down with a serious, almost worried look on her face. She was the older daughter, temperamentally more serious than her sister. They had always called her Laura, had never tried giving her a nickname. The other child, named Eva, was called Bootsie, Bunny, Noosh, and Pickle—depending on the parent’s mood and the expression on the face of the child. Most people found the two girls attractive and likable—as much for the differences in their personalities as for their physical similarities. Four-year-old Eva was in appearance a smaller version of seven-year-old Laura, and both girls looked exactly like their mother.

  This morning the three of them wore purple two-piece bathing suits, and while the mother sunbathed, the daughters, with their pails and shovels, played in the hot sand beside her. The grandmother had driven into the village for groceries and mail, and the grandfather was on his regular morning walk, three miles up the beach to the old Coast Guard station and back.

  “Look, Mommy, sharks!” Laura cried. Janet propped herself up on her elbows and squinted against the hard glare of sand and mirror-like water. Then she saw them. Porpoises. Their gray backs slashed the water like dark knives.

  “They’re not sharks, they’re porpoises, Laura.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “No. They’re supposed to be very bright and actually friendly to humans.”

  “Oh,” she said, not believing.

  Janet lay down on her back again and closed her eyes. She studied the backs of her eyelids, a yellow-ocher sheet with a slight, almost translucent scratch, like a thin scar, in front of the lid, between her eyeball and the lid. Every time she tried to look at the scar—which seemed to ride across the surface, moving slowly, like a twisted reed floating on still water—it jumped and disappeared off the edge of her circle of vision. A tiny scratch on the retina, she decided. The only way she could actually see it was if she tried not to look at it, but looked past it, as if at something else located in the same general region. Even then, however, she found herself eager to see the line (the scar or scratch or whatever it was), and she searched for it, caught a glimpse of it, and, chasing with her gaze, watched it race ahead of her and out of sight.

  Janet realized that the girls were no longer close beside her. She sat up and looked around for them. A small flock of gulls loped over the water, dipping, dropping, lifting, going on. The porpoises still sliced the water a few hundred yards from the beach. As far as she could see in both directions, the beach was deserted. She called, “Laura!” Then called again, louder, and stood up, looking back toward the cottage.

  “Listen, Mommy, wake up! You’re really getting a terrible sunburn!” Janet opened her eyes and looked into Laura’s worried face. Eva was sitting a few yards away, humming to herself while she buried her feet in a knee-deep hole she had dug in the sand. “Did you fall asleep?” Laura asked.

  “No.” She stood up and brushed the sand off the backs of her slender legs, shoulders, and arms. “C’mon, let’s walk up the beach and meet Grandpa,” she said cheerfully. She reached a hand to Laura, leaned down, and helped Eva pull herself free. The three of them started down the beach toward the Coast Guard station. Offshore, the porpoises cruised alongside, headed in the same direction, and, above them, the gulls.

  The third night in the cottage, listening to the radio, a top 40 station from Elizabeth City, Janet drank alone until after midnight. She situated herself on the screened porch, gazed out at the ridge of sand that lay between the cottage and the beach, milky white until almost ten o’clock, when it slowly turned gray, then black, against the deep blue, eastern night sky. She drank Scotch and water, and each new drink contained less water and proportionately more Scotch than the previous, until her face felt like a plaster mask slipping forward and about to fall into her lap.

  She was alone. Her mother and father had done their drinking before dinner, as was their habit, and had gone to bed by nine-thirty, also their habit. Janet had almost forgotten their routines, and a flood of sour memories swept over her, depressing her, separating her from her own life sufficiently to make her feel sel
f-righteous sitting there on the porch with the bottle of Teacher’s, a pitcher of water, a tub of ice cubes, and a small transistor radio on the floor beside her. She poured and drank one glassful of Scotch and water after another, letting the sweetly sad songs from that summer’s crop swarm over her past and present lives. At one point she told herself that she was very interested in the differences between the way her parents drank and the way she drank—meaning that she was interested in making sure that there were differences.

  As the land behind her cooled, the wind blew steadily and strongly, and the sound of the waves crashing in darkness on the packed, wet sand filled all the space that lay behind the sound of the radio. Janet thought in clumsy spirals backwards in time, of her husband, Roger, his years in graduate school, and their town house in Cambridge, where the children were born, and the years before that, when she and Roger were in college, the years she’d endured while in high school in Connecticut, living at home with her parents, and then she was a very young girl visiting her grandparents, here, at Kitty Hawk, where the family had been coming for summers for as long as she could remember and before she was born. And now here she was again, back where she had started, where they had started, too, her parents, and she was placing her own daughters where she had been placed, even to the point of sleeping them in the same room she had used at their age. Her chest and throat filled with a hard knot of longing. And as soon as she was aware of its presence, the knot loosened and unraveled and regathered as anger—anger at her life, as if it were an entity distinct from her, for all the cunning ways it had trapped her and her children.

  Momentarily satisfied with this object for her emotion, she flicked off the radio, stood slightly off-balance, rocked on the balls of her feet like a losing prizefighter, and wound her way back into the living room, bumping curtly against the maple arm of the couch, grabbing at the light switches, dumping the house finally into darkness, and made her way down the hall to the stairs and up the stairs to her bedroom, the “guest room” at the end, moving in spite of the darkness with pugnacious confidence, but off-balance, inept.