about the other one—in Peking?” He tilted his teasing head.
Why? Why?
“It hasn’t been called Peking in over twenty years, one,” Chloe said, swatting him like a harassing fly, “and two, my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother never set foot in China. How many times do I have to say it?”
“What? No. I’ve never heard this story. Do tell.”
They didn’t want to go back to their seats so they loitered near the food cart and verbally abused the awful cookies to pass the time.
The flight dragged on. When Chloe thought they must be halfway around the world, in Singapore or someplace, they finally landed—but not in Riga. In Paris. Hannah was excited, but did they see Paris? No. They saw a Parisian airport. Four-hour layover. They wandered around, washed their faces, split two breakfast buns and two coffees, perused the duty free, put on some makeup (girls) and examined the liquor bottles (boys), then checked how much time they had left: three more hours. Having slept on the plane, Mason was refreshed, having fake-slept, Hannah sore and silent. Blake was exactly the same as he had been seven hours earlier, fourteen hours earlier, nineteen years earlier.
They bought a newspaper and Hannah pretended she could read French. Five minutes of mocking her passed the time. It would have been longer if she’d had a sense of humor. They checked out the naughty magazines, not even decorously covered up by brown paper. They were so progressive in Europe, Blake said, so advanced. Bless them, said Mason.
The girls were getting more and more impatient. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” Blake said. “It has to take a long time to get where we’re going, because we are leaving our old life behind. By the time we arrive in the new world, we are reborn. It’s supposed to take a long time, don’t you get it?”
“This is torture,” Hannah said. “What’s wrong with you that you don’t see it?”
“This is fantastic,” Blake said. “I’ve never been on a plane before. Or in an airport terminal. Never met a French person. Or seen a French blue magazine.” He winked with delight. “I’m writing down my impressions in the back journal. Who has time to be ornery?”
Hannah asked if Blake could write down his impressions silently, mutely, off.
Blake didn’t think he could. On the flight from Paris to Riga, the brothers sat together and the girls sat in front of them. The guys kept throwing paper over the seats, pulling the girls’ hair, whispering, laughing.
Questions of Punishing Stupidity Part II: Customs control.
Are you bringing anything into Latvia? Are you carrying contraband? She didn’t even know what contraband was. How could she know if she was carrying it? Are you carrying drugs?
What is your business in Latvia?
What is your destination?
The Latvian customs control were philosophers! Did they mean today? Where was she headed after she left the airport? Or did they mean the destination from which she would fly home? Or the destination to which she was headed in five short weeks, not in Riga, not in Maine, not in Spain, but far far away, in a distant land of saints, palms and stucco. What was her destination indeed, damn them.
Mason
Last month when Blake and I went to fix Lupe’s rotted-out pantry shelves, she said to us that we all float on a boat down a river of Truth that keeps dividing and dividing into tributaries that reunite, and once we reach the sea, we die. We spend our whole existence arguing with each other about which tributary leads to the main stream. “But they all lead to the same place,” she said.
I saved it for later to understand. The later is now. Because I’m trying to look out the window, and all the others are doing is arguing.
Lupe also told Blake that a wise man does three things. First, he does himself that which he advises others to do. (I don’t know if I do that.) Second, he doesn’t do anything that contravenes the Truth. (What is this river of Truth?) And third, he is patient with the weaknesses of those who surround him. (I am definitely not that.) She said Blake was all three.
Blake says he loves that woman. But I don’t know if I agree with her. He keeps borrowing Mom’s car to drive over there and take her to the doctor. There’s always yelling at home now because the four of us are trying to make do with one car and a loaner, a beaten-up jalopy with pistons that misfire in two of its four lousy cylinders. Blake causes strife in our house. I ask you, how wise is that? And how tolerant of it am I? He says Lupe needs a new fire pit. I tell him Mom needs her car, Dad needs a new back, and I need to get to a varsity reunion. Everybody needs something.
I thought that in Europe there’d be no yelling. Silly me. Here I am, in the cab from the airport, my face to the window. Please tell me I will find something here other than strife.
Hannah doesn’t like to travel. Oh, she talks a good game about how she’s going to travel all over the world for some job, translating or something, but I truly believe it’s a fantasy. She hates to go anywhere. I don’t know why she wanted to go to Europe with Chloe. When Chloe told me she and Hannah were heading to Barcelona, I wanted to remind my girlfriend of the few days the previous winter when the four of us went to Franconia to ski. The lift had broken after our first run. There was a blizzard, followed by an avalanche. We were snowed in for four days, with no power, no TV, no radio. Hannah nearly went mad, and we were an hour away from home.
No one lost a limb. No one starved. No one froze. We were just stuck. It hadn’t gone as we planned. But we had a fire, we shoveled snow, we went sledding and snowboarding until they came and cleared the road. We sang songs, and ate cans of Campbell’s soup from the cupboard, stale cereal, almonds, pretzels, pork rind, and talked about life. We played Scrabble and charades and cards, and Risk. It wasn’t glorious skiing, but three of us thought it was fun. Not Hannah. She said it was the worst four days of her life.
Blake laughed it off. He thinks she’s a sugar plum and a candy cane and doesn’t take anything she says or does seriously. I tried to counsel him. She wasn’t joking, I said. She was utterly unmoved by my beautiful Franconia.
Getting from Boston to Riga is another good example of what I mean. We did have to wait a long time. So what? The seats weren’t the most comfortable. So what? The food wasn’t as good as Burger King. But so what, and what is? We are on a three-week joyride together. To Europe! That’s amazing. During the Franconia snow-in, we were with our mom and Chloe’s mom. You know, to keep an eye on things. Make sure we didn’t get out of hand, and um, out of some things, and into other things. This time we’re motherless, and the girls still aren’t happy. Chloe keeps calling Riga her penance. I hope she is joking. And Hannah doesn’t care about anything but Barcelona. She also thinks we’re going to swing over to Paris for a few days. If I didn’t know that Hannah doesn’t have a humorous bone in her body, I’d swear she was joking. To explain why we couldn’t “swing over to Paris,” Blake tried to show her the map, to talk through the twenty-one days of our trip with her, every one accounted for, but she ignored him. To pay her back, Blake and I now ignore every mention of Paris. It’s like we can’t hear her. Every time she says Paris, we say, what? She says PARIS, and we say, what? She says Paris!!! We say, what?
I can’t tell you how much that annoys her and amuses us.
It’s warm in Riga, and the fields are pretty.
