These 13 Certain Things

1

Robin lifts her feet off the floor as the plane leaves the runway. She heard a rumor once of babies born in space and she totally bought it, soaked it up like mollusks suck ships. She heard a baby was born in space and could never live on earth, that once adjusted to the weightlessness its bones were too fragile to ever return to earth. She thought this and held her uniform jacket sleeves tight as they drove through a low-ceilinged sky. The best part is take-off, forcing your way off the earth into the ozone. The passengers have their headphones in or their neck pillows on or their foreheads pressed close to the windows, but Robin has it pressed into her head what happens, pressed into her arms and legs and necklace: lift-off. She thinks, God, she thinks, Take me through the clouds.

2

Will was buried in THE POWER OF NOW and set his glasses on his napkin when he took his cup of ginger ale from her hand and lifted it to his mouth. Robin always liked men with glasses. She liked the way they took them off and set them on their nightstands. Men with wedding rings did it too, men with foreheads furrowed as lined paper. Later she caught Will photographing the clouds outside his window with his cell-phone, and it was then she wanted him. She always loved older men, men tall enough to duck inside the plane. She loved small talk and large hands. She took his cup and threw it in her garbage bag. “Is this home?” she asked him. “It is not. Ha. Not even close.” The plane began its descent. Now entering Tucson. The desert stretched in its brown-yellow way and she teased the collar of her shirt, her smile galactic, perfume radiating.

She rollered her way up to his rental car kiosk and yes, she told him, she would be overnighting in Tucson, and yes, Robin slipped in his Kia and directed him to the air and space museum, pointing out her window and saying, “Did you know they have a whole yard full of fighter jets here?”

“There must be eight hundred planes,” she said.

“There can’t be that many.”

“Well, maybe not. But they call it THE BONEYARD.”

Will looked out, cupping one hand over his eyes.

She said, “I wonder if any of them have gas in them.”

They were metallic with wings-outstretched, organized into rows, gleamed harshly in the omni-sun. The ground was brown and deathful. “The sun’s so bright here,” she facebooked. “Hashtag burning out my eyeballs.”

Will left THE POWER OF NOW on his nightstand and Robin ran her hands over his shirt, hunting for the place his heartbeat pumped strongest, thinking of those planes all aligned, imagined the men it would take (driven in roves, convoy cars with cloth camo ceilings) to fill all of them up. A roaring climbed up inside her when he couldn’t stay hard. He apologized, pawed her breasts. He came laboriously inside her mouth. His breathing grew deep and thoughtful while she labored to lie still. This wasn’t the sex she was hoping for. It didn’t fill her up or spilt her open or murder her. It filled her throat and made the dark seem bright, and no matter how hard she strained/stretched her pupils, it wasn’t settling – her body was still so elastic and wanted to stretch itself around a soul.

“I just turned twenty-five,” she had told him, earlier.

“God. My wife just turned forty.”

Pilots and co-pilots. Weren’t relationships like that? Wasn’t this moment in her hotel bed co-piloted? She sat up in bed, propped up by pillows, picked up her imaginary steering wheel and pulled back strongly, with both arms.

3

This was what attending meant. Wasn’t attending obliging, attentiveness, being spruce, punctual, sweet? She wanted to look like women in French films, or French women in films, the kind of women whose curled hair tumbled willfully across a pillow, their lips a red that smacked of sureness.

She lived in this desert, waited on her father while his mind turned to cavities. Suddenly at sixty alcoves appeared, lightless caves she couldn’t un-obscure. She slipped a DVD into the drive at his condo, an old black and white film he’d shown her one snowy winter when she was a child and living in Kansas. The trees and railings and lamposts turned glass overnight: and a girl stood on screen with a hassle of blond hair. Robin bundled in blankets. He couldn’t remember the story. The girl was the only child on screen. Every time they watched it was new. The way he squeezed her hand and said, “Oh!” was the same, because it began with a man talking into a grave. It was like watching a play of her father, him playing himself, and he was genuine and tired of stories, and she was tired of trying to tell them. He stirred a pot of oatmeal on a hotplate and peered through his reflection in the windows and wondered who he was.

His brain is turning to cotton, she thought. I could spin it and turn it to gloves. I could unspool it and let it follow me, a thread a mile long, spun around a pebble like inside baseballs.

And she loved her father, and she loved the whole world. “I want to circle it,” she told him, romantically, before becoming a stewardess. She hadn’t flown much before she got the job. But once, over the Atlantic Ocean, her plane hit an airpocket and fell for ten long seconds, unencumbered as a stone. She didn’t die. She knew she wasn’t going to. No sentences floated up in her except for “I’m falling.”

4

Her glasses are broken and everything looks like spheres. The rocks don’t look like rocks, they look like ovals. The sun is a punched bulb and the grass is a river she finds herself swimming through, avoiding the ovals, crawling in a long peach dress across the ground. It’s midday in summer, the sweat on her back turning her dress red. A bee lands on her shoulder. It is too small to register as an image, but she can feel the pinpricks of it crawling over her collarbone. She presses her face into the grass and holds her glasses in her hand. This is crazy, she thinks. I’ve never been so tired in all my life. The other side of her thinks, Hey, lady. LADY. The bee encircles her neck and the grass is firm and hardy like it gets in true midsummer. The sun is burning her shoulders. She grabs the grass with one hand. Her name is Robin. A monolith, a daughter. A camera hangs from her neck, nosing its glass eye in the ground.

5

The quarry wasn’t always the plan. The plan was, Will told her, cupping her body in his body, to wash her hair and dress nice, to rest elegantly as an image in his eye. “I just need some stock photos for the website,” he said. Me? she thought, biting into a large seeded bagel. The other side of her thought, I don’t even remember what he does for a living. Robin wore a t-shirt and black panties and sat Indian-style on the hotel bed, felt unwashed and careless in the morning. Robin was curvy and moody with large glasses and breasts. She wanted the sort of man set in his own sort of largess, who spread wide into five different selves like a banyan tree.

She drew him a map to her home on his palm and he followed it. After breakfast he rose to take a shower while she excused herself and hiked her skirt back on and then quickly taxied home.

6

A plane took off from China and never landed. It disappeared, rather. Robin read about it, by phone-light in bed, after Will was asleep face-first into a pillow, a beam of streetlight laying crookedly across their legs. A plane took off from China and lost contact with radio transmission. It sunk into a cloud, it hasn’t resurfaced. It hasn’t landed. It hasn’t crashed.

She held the phone practically up to her eyeball she was so blind without glasses.

“Did you know,” she could feel herself saying in the morning, in bed, in a face-palm of sunlight.

“Did you know you say ‘did you know’ a lot?” Will would tell her.

There were a lot of ‘woulds’ with Will. He was future-tense, she was imperative. She would stay awake as long as she could next to him, memorizing the purple-blue contours of his body. He would breath almost silently. He would smell like redwood all his life. He was visiting Massachusetts for research purposes and had a wife named Laura and was a cartographer. Robin heard him talking on the phone with her. Sometimes he answered his phone in bed and told Laura about the botanical garden he’d visited earlier that day (with Robin) while reaching inside her with one finger. She squeezed her muscles around him and daydreamed she met him in a mapstore. She daydreamed she was there to spin globes. Lost people did this. Yes. They wandered into niche shops, they scared bookshop cats from tomes, they leafed through men they could sink their teeth into like fruit.

7

There was something dirty about it which made her like it, that she was a landmass for desire, an outlet (an inlet).

8

And it was a surprise to be stranded in a rock quarry the next day. It was a surprise that Will told Laura where he would be, a surprise that Laura was deft with exact coordinates, a surprise that it really was normal pretty Robin, not slutty-leaning-her-cleavage-out-of-her-dress, a surprise and nothing more, a surprise that Laura flung a small rock so perfectly it cracked the center of Robin’s glasses and sent her spiraling to the ground, a surprise Laura took off in Will’s car and Will chased after, literally running through the dust, a surprise the shapes her eye was making, a surprise he lifted her car keys from her purse to chase this woman, a surprise he left his camera behind. A tripod. And her in the grass.

9

The rule is this is not a sad story, the instructor tells Robin, years later, when she is taking a Writing for Therapy class.

The rule is you are in charge of your story. Which means you are in charge of your endings.

10

The rock quarry is beautiful. Ovals are beautiful. Having sex in a car with the radio on is beautiful, and the headlights are on is beautiful, and with your boots on the ground is beautiful, and with a police man tapping on your window and you covering your enormous chest with your Modcloth dress is beautiful, being asked for your ID as if you were underage is beautiful, being the right age to have sex is beautiful, having Will covering your crotch and his crotch with his pants is beautiful, having the cop turn his back so you can get dressed crowdedly in the backseat together is beautiful, getting out of the neighborhood while the night is still satin and catching a redeye together is beautiful, landing and driving fast until you pass through Rhode Island and its mists is beautiful, the donuts you eat cowardly in your lap while he drives is beautiful, the way the rain dapples the windshield and the heaving ocean and he has to sing in harmony to Bon Iver to stay awake is beautiful, and his wife calling him with her voice hard and Texas through his phone in his lap is beautiful, and it being morning and him balancing the phone on his leg with speakerphone on and how he says ‘I love you’ towards his crotch at a stoplight is beautiful, and remembering all this now in the grass is beautiful, and being a woman with a real ass is beautiful, and this is the penultimate love of your life is beautiful, and this isn’t actually a love of your life at all is beautiful, and this is just beautiful sex and a beautiful road because your mind made it pretty for you is beautiful, and everything is an oval and everything is so bright and a plane’s roaring overhead and you’re not going to die here, not even close, beautiful.

11

Then I, Robbin writes in Therapy Class:

Then I stand up and start photographing. I document this. And I’m using real film. And I use it all up.

She pictures the True Story of it not being a quarry, it not being grass, it not being beautiful. Being left alone in the desert is a scary thing. She held her glasses up to her eye and winced through the good lens and followed the road.

I still have the film, actually. When I developed it, I discovered he had taken a photo of me sleeping in his hotel bed, my body curled around a pillow. I look pretty unfabulous.

And then the other side of her thinks.

I mean I look pretty. Good.

The other side of her thinks:

I can see what he wanted now.

The other side of her thinks.

I can see what he wanted in me.

12

During the photo shoot, she had left her sandals on the flat back of a rock. If she had her glasses she would have found that rock again easy, but now, everything was fuzzy, soft and muted as rabbit fur. Every step was jagged; the rocks looked like sand, but jutted like broken bowls.

Overhead, she heard a plane roar, the boom long and growing, and when she heard the plane engine stretching over the sky like a tablecloth fanning out, it didn’t seem so important that she couldn’t see the trail leading back to her car, and she had forgotten completely that her car was not even there, but instead was careening after some other car, some other woman, some other life that she only vaguely imagined. (Did you know? her friends, her mother will ask her later, and to just about all of them, she will say Absolutely not, I would never, not with a married man. THAT is just ASKING for trouble as she takes a sip of coffee, or bats a fly away, or puts on her sunglasses to dim the bright light of day in her eyes.) She stopped aiming her face at the rockbed and arched her back skyward, the camera strap digging into her neck. The small rocks in the grass bite at her feet, and her eyes burn from staring up, looking—is that the plane that was missing? Thank God everyone survived. Welcome to America, my foreign compatriots. There is so much freedom here. Thank God you have found a place to touch down.

13

The first therapist said that Will was probably a pathological liar—she disputes this, saying he was, in fact, too honest.

Another said that he was manipulative. No, she said. He never tried to trick me.

How would your life be different if you had never met Will? one of them asked. I never would have become a flight attendant, she tossed off, and she giggled as he underlined something on his notepad with a quick flit of the wrist.

What do you dream about? the only lady therapist once asked her, and she told her about how when she dreams, she is looking for her glasses in the quarry and the missing plane lands and all those missing Chinese tourists deplane with flowers for her, and Will is the pilot, but he gives her the keys to the plane, and she climbs in and flies away. She can feel the engine rev, feel the strange lift of the plane, and thinks this is what death feels like as the plane takes off. That’s when she wakes up.

Only now, in filling up the legal yellow pads with her memories of Will bent over his maps and her black panties drying on the towel rack and those broken glasses and the plane roar that wakes her up at night, does he seem more lost then her. She wasn’t a bird, not a bit like one. Birds were sharp, had metal in their brains which told north and south apart.

She’s a good flight attendant, can cure airsickness and pour coffee miles above the earth without spilling.

I’ve never known where I was going, she confesses to the lady therapist, who is recording this session and has rows of pillows lining her windowsill.

I suppose I’m not supposed to, she adds. Will was nothing and yet in her dreams she is helping everyone from China off of the plane, and they are photographing themselves in the quarry, and the plane is nose-down in the ground. No one is injured in her dreams. Once, in dreaming, she thinks, I can’t believe how vivid this is. This is just the back of my eyelids.

And the image turns to watercolors, and her mind is a deep, soothed, red.