The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [84]
“Now, on a bigger plane,” Macon called to Muriel as the engines roared up, “you’d hardly feel the takeoff. But here you’d better brace yourself.”
Muriel nodded, wide-eyed, gripping the seat ahead of her. “What’s that light that’s blinking in front of the pilot?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s that little needle that keeps sweeping round and round?”
“I don’t know.”
He felt he’d disappointed her. “I’m used to jets, not these toys,” he told her. She nodded again, accepting that. It occurred to Macon that he was really a very worldly and well-traveled man.
The plane started taxiing. Every pebble on the runway jolted it; every jolt sent a series of creaks through the framework. They gathered speed. The crew, suddenly grave and professional, made complicated adjustments to their instruments. The wheels left the ground. “Oh!” Muriel said, and she turned to Macon with her face all lit up.
“We’re off,” he told her.
“I’m flying!”
They rose—with some effort, Macon felt—over the fields surrounding the airport, over a stand of trees and a grid of houses. Above-ground swimming pools dotted backyards here and there like pale blue thumbtacks. Muriel pressed so close to her window that she left a circle of mist on the glass. “Oh, look!” she said to Macon, and then she said something else that he couldn’t hear. The engines on this plane were loud and harsh, and the Pepsi can was rolling around with a clattering sound, and also the pilot was bellowing to the copilot, saying something about his refrigerator. “So I wake up in the middle of the night,” he was shouting, “damn thing’s thudding and thumping—”
Muriel said, “Wouldn’t Alexander enjoy this!”
Macon hadn’t seen Alexander enjoying anything yet, but he said dutifully, “We’ll have to bring him sometime.”
“We’ll have to take just lots of trips! France and Spain and Switzerland . . .”
“Well,” Macon said, “there’s the little matter of money.”
“Just America, then. California, Florida . . .”
California and Florida took money too, Macon should have said (and Florida wasn’t even given space in his guidebook), but for the moment, he was borne along by her vision of things. “Look!” she said, and she pointed to something. Macon leaned across the aisle to see what she meant. The airplane flew so low that it might have been following road signs; he had an intimate view of farmlands, woodlands, roofs of houses. It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he’d known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them—how intense and private and absorbing. He stared past Muriel with his mouth open. Whatever she had wanted him to look at must be long past by now, but still he went on gazing out her window.
Porter and the others were talking money. Or Porter was talking money and the others were half listening. Porter was planning ahead for income taxes. He was interested in something called a chicken straddle. “The way it works,” he said, “you invest in baby chicks right now, before the end of the year. Deduct the cost of feed and such. Then sell the grown hens in January and collect the profit.”
Rose wrinkled her forehead. She said, “But chickens are so prone to colds. Or would you call it distemper. And December and January aren’t usually all that warm here.”
“They wouldn’t be here in Baltimore, Rose. God knows where they’d be. I mean these are not chickens you actually see; they’re a way to manage our taxes.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Charles said. “I hate to get involved in things someone else would be handling. It’s someone else’s word those chickens even exist.”
“You people have no imagination,” Porter said.
The four of them stood around the card table in the sun porch, helping Rose with her Christmas present for Liberty. She had constructed an addition to Liberty’s dollhouse—a garage