Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace.

These raspberry canes were a weird color for a plant, she noticed now, not that she would know nature if it bit her. But bright pink? The color of a frosted lipstick some thirteen-year-old might want to wear. She had probably skipped that phase, heading straight for Immoral Coral and Come-to-Bed Red.

Her betrayals shocked her. It was like watching some maddened, unstoppable, and slightly cuter version of herself on television, doing things a person could never do with just normal life instead of a script.

“For the folks that are still hanging on by wires,” Jimmy had told her with a wicked grin, and everything that came next was nonsensical, like a torrential downpour in a week of predicted sunshine that floods out the crops and the well-made plans. There is no use blaming the rain and mud, these are only elements. The disaster is the failed expectation.

The forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense.

She had no use for superstition, had walked unlucky roads until she’d just as soon walk under any ladder as go around it, and considered herself unexceptional. By no means was she important enough for God to conjure signs and wonders on her account.

Dellarobia knew any tone she took with Hester would be the wrong one. These conversations wore her out before they began.

Dellarobia’s insolence gave her a rush, like a second beer on an empty stomach.

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

She felt shamed by her made-up passion and the injuries she’d been ready to inflict. Hester wasn’t the only one living in fantasyland with righteousness on her side; people just did that, this family and maybe all others.

They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain behind them was aflame.

In the still evening she heard the dull, repeated thud of heads making contact, horn and skull. They must have some good reason; animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

Summer’s heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in its turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone.

Back before marriage, she’d known the power of being physically admired, changing the energy of a room by walking into it. She wondered if that was her problem, missing that. Falling for guys who flattered her. It seemed so shallow and despicable, she hoped that was not the measure of her worth.

A disappointed-looking Jesus eyed her from the wall. She’d ruined herself on these boots for sure, by donning them a month ago for the purpose of committing adultery. Look, look, her steps called out, here is a redheaded sinner on the move.

It was exhausting, to keep being sorry for everything.

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord. Unlike all those who called on Jesus daily, rain or shine, to discuss their day and feel the love. Once upon a time she’d had her mother for that. Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend.

What a mother-and-daughter pair, those two. Valia had no opinions of her own, apologized to her shadow, and did exactly as she was told, all of which signed her on as Hester’s BFF. Whereas Crystal lived the whole mistake-parade of her life as the majorette, bowing to the applause, ready to sign autographs. Crystal put the con in self-confidence. How could two people get the same set of parts and make such different constructions? But then, there was raising. That had to be taken into account. What could a doormat rear but a pair of boots?

Dear Abby had a smart mouth and a kind heart, that’s why people read her; the combination was rare. And rarer still, perfect grammar.

“Did he seem, I don’t know, insane?” “How would I know? I spend my life with people that want to eat thumbtacks off the floor.”

he looked like a “before” picture.

The arrangement seemed unreal to Dellarobia, like so much else that had arrived out of her initial recklessness.

Cordie’s ratcheting phone went on and on. Whoever designed toys, in Dellarobia’s opinion, at their earliest convenience, should be smacked.

Hester’s face was the customary knot of anger and disapproval, but the gray eyes seemed to be coming from somewhere else, two pools of expectation. Dellarobia glimpsed a younger person in there, someone who could have hoped for things and fallen in love. The girl who wore those clothes to the hoedowns for which they were intended.

People looked down on smokers nowadays, or these people would, she suspected, so she’d decided to go cold turkey for today’s adventure. To improve the odds of keeping her vow, she had not brought any cigarettes. Now, all of fifteen minutes in, she recognized the insanity of the plan and was ready to jump out of her hair.

She couldn’t even muster the strength for jealousy, given the size it would have to take.

Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.

Realistically, it probably wasn’t slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.

“When are you going to potty-train her, anyway?” When am I going to potty-train her, mouthed Dellarobia, to the imaginary audience of her soap opera.

The whole tired tangle of her life disgusted her.

Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.

Dellarobia grabbed a horribly made plush raccoon that didn’t even look like a raccoon, and threw it in her cart because it only cost a dollar. She wanted to punch somebody out. The world made you do this.

She wondered how many divorces could be traced directly to holiday spending.

She did recall what it felt like to turn heads every time she walked into a room, as small as she was, empowered somehow with solidity. Confident that she had everything in her that larger people contained, with no wasted space, and a whole lot more in mind.

So much human effort went into alteration of nonessential components. Especially for women, it could not be denied.

The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment.

She had made her peace with that mistake and taken pains to put it behind her. Yet he still had the power to wreck her. It never wavered, this bleak helplessness she felt when confronting her undignified obsessions.

She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing.

In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

People who hadn’t been through it would think it was that simple: just get back on the bus, ride to the next stop. He would have no inkling of the great slog of effort that tied up people like her in the day-to-day. Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. Even now, dread still struck her down sometimes if she found herself counting on things being fine.

“Oh, Christ, I am so sorry,” said Vern. “Somebody messed up.” He looked back at his papers as if the fault lay there, the same way people will turn and glare at a sidewalk after they’ve stumbled over nothing.

She’d asked him to tidy things up, but men and barns were like a bucket of forks, tidy was no part of the equation.

What she wouldn’t give for a smoke right now. But that was the regular formula, wasn’t it?

She envied forgetfulness, and simpler minds than the one she inhabited.

A road was to be driven upon. The candy in the dish was there to be eaten, money in the bank got spent, people claimed whatever they could get their hands on. Wasn’t that more or less automatic?

Finally Cub said, “They don’t call it global weirding.” “I know. But I think that’s actually the idea.” Cub shook his head. “Weather is the Lord’s business.” She felt an exasperation that she knew would be of no use to this debate. She let it rise and fall inside her, along with wishful thoughts. Every loss she’d ever borne had been declared the Lord’s business. A stillborn child, a father dead in his prime.

For all her worry about his lack of advantages, Preston would be like Ovid Byron. Already he seemed set apart by a devotion to his own pursuits that was brave and unconforming. People were so rarely like that, despite universally stated intentions.

“If you stop something, it stops,” she said, sounding a little too fine. “We used to think so. But there are unstoppable processes. Like the loss of polar ice. White ice reflects the heat of the sun directly back to space. But when it melts, the dark land and water underneath hold on to the heat. The frozen ground melts. And that releases more carbon into the air. These feedback loops keep surprising us.”

“Do you know, scientists had a devil of a time convincing people that birds flew south in winter? The Europeans used to believe they burrowed into muddy riverbanks to hibernate. They would see the swallows gathering along the rivers in autumn, and then disappearing. Africa was an abstraction to these people. The notion of birds flying there, for unknown reasons, they found laughable.” “Well,” she said. “I guess seeing is believing,” “Refusing to look at the evidence, this is also popular.”