“We won’t have far to be carried if we don’t make it,” the woman says dryly. She has a surprisingly small head, and auburn hair that looks artificial, and for the whole trip from Lexington she has been wearing an aggrieved little face as if her shoes are on the wrong feet. Alice is dismayed. She’d expected everyone else on the plane to be experienced trav-elers from big cities slouched back in their seats, snapping open their papers to the Money section. But here she is as usual, bearing up those around her. To change the subject from graveyards she asks, “Is St. Louie the end of the road for you?”
The woman nods faintly, as if the effort might be incom-patible with her hairstyle.
“I stay on till the next stop, Las Vegas,” Alice reports. “I’ve got a daughter and a little grandbaby out there that have fell on hard times.”
The woman perks up slightly. “She divorcing?”
“Oh, no,” Alice says, “my daughter’s never been married.
She found the little girl in her car one time and adopted her.
She’s independent as a hog on ice.”
The woman turns back to the window and its outstanding display of graves.
“Somebody just left the baby in her car and said ‘So long, sucker!’ What could she do?” Alice reaches for the pictures in her purse. “It turned out all right, though; that little girl is a pistol. Whoever left her off had no eye for good material.”
Alice flatters herself that she knows how to get a conversation going, but for this woman it’s the subject of divorce and graveyards or nothing; she snaps the window shade down and closes her eyes. Alice leaves the pictures of Turtle in her wallet, dreading the picture in her mind’s eye: an old woman talking to herself. She offers a peppermint LifeSaver to the man across the aisle but it’s the same story over there, he barely shakes his head. They are a planeload of people ignoring each other. Alice has spent her life in small towns and is new to this form of politeness, in which people sit for all practical purposes on top of one another in a public place and behave like upholstery.
She can’t remember when she was ever around so many people at one time that she didn’t know. They look strange: one is shrunken-looking with overblown masses of curly hair; another is hulky and bald, the head too big for the body; another has the troublesome artificial look girls get from earrings, glasses, a glint of braces, too many metal things around the face. It’s as if these people were all produced by different manufacturers who couldn’t agree on a basic design.
Alice saves this up to tell Taylor when she gets to Las Vegas.
Whenever she used to mention to Harland anything more than life’s broadest details, he thought she was cracked. But Taylor will know what she means.
Alice takes off her glasses and lays her hands on her face, feeling her eyes like worried, wet marbles under the lids.
Taylor in trouble is not something Alice knows how to think about. Everything she’s done before now, however crazy-quilted it might have seemed, always ended up with the corners square. The first time Taylor took a step, she walked right out the door of the Pittman P.O. Alice was at the counter buying stamps and asking the postmistress, Renata Hay, when her baby was due; Taylor was eleven months old and hung on the hem of Alice’s coat until she felt she’d grown a heavy tail back there. Suddenly a grand round of applause went up among the old men waiting for their Social Security checks, and Alice turned in time to see her baby headed out into the street. Old Yancey Todd held the door for her like a gentleman.
Some people would say a headfirst child like that was bound to wind up headfirst in the mop bucket. Alice doesn’t think so. In her heart, she knows her daughter would have looked both ways before she went out to play in East Main.
Or Yancey would have flagged down the cars. When you’re given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine. The universe makes allowances. When Taylor called from a phone booth in Las Vegas with her soul broken in twenty pieces, Alice felt deeply betrayed. The universe has let them down.
The seat-belt sign dings on, and Alice opens her eyes. A stewardess is coming slowly down the aisle taking people’s plastic cups away, like a patient mother removing toys her babies might try to swallow. Alice watches, marveling at the outfit: under her navy blazer she wears a buttoned white shirt and a paisley silk tie with, even, a fine gold chain fastened across it. How long it must have taken her to get it all just right, in spite of her busy life. Alice is a passenger in need of comfort and she takes some from this: the touching effort some people put into just getting dressed in the morning, believing a little gold chain fastened over a silk tie will somehow make a difference.