Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [55]
12
The Twilight Zone of Humanity
ALL THREE GENERATIONS OF ALICE’S family have been lifted into the air for the first time this summer: first Turtle and Taylor flew to Chicago and back, and now the first leg of Alice’s own flight is coming in for a landing. Alice feels this shows an unusual degree of togetherness. Her plane scoots under the clouds, revealing the Mississippi River and St. Louis far below. A huge metal arch on the riverbank stands higher than any building, put there for no purpose Alice can envision. As useful as spitting off a bridge, but people do such things, to prove they were here on earth for a time. The descending plane sweeps over the largest graveyard Alice has seen so far. Her neighbor in the window seat has spent the flight hunched in silence, and now remarks: “Well, that’s some welcome.”
“I can see the point of it,” Alice says, determined to disagree cordially with this cheerless woman. “If you have to make so much noise, you’d just as well pester the dead as the living.”
“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 travelers 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 incompatible 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