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The Bulk of Men’s Brains
By Melody Mansfield Gracie coughed on purpose. She wanted to tell the pilot to clear those orange cones, but she made herself cough instead. The man must know his business or they wouldn’t let him sit there in that cockpit, pushing buttons, lining up latitudes, probably, in perfect confidence, carrying all of them away. The men with orange wands were waving. Go that way, she wanted to say. West. Up. The jet crawled down the strip between the patches of swampland. Go straight, Gracie said, but only to herself. And you’ve got to go faster or we’ll never get off the ground. The pilot hit the accelerator then, she guessed, because they did go faster. On the runway, she watched the yellow and black lines streak into tiger stripes. Purple lights on metal stems lined their pathway like irises. The shadows of the jet wings blurred the runway lines and then the beast ran faster, roared louder, leapt up. She leaned back and savored the surge of the lift off. But look. Out the window. The whole jet silhouetted on the city. She wanted to point it out to someone but didn’t . You could see the whole jet even while you were in it. Too weird. Gracie watched alone as they shrank smaller, smaller. Then they disappeared. Something to consider. How much must a jet full of people weigh? Gracie turned her eyes from the shriveling roads and watched instead the heads in the seats before her. Shiny black man heads, wavy and slick, gelled heads spun into cowlicks, frayed heads bowed in reading, furrowed heads turned to speak. Consider the pounds of bone and blood. Lean muscle weighs more than fat. The bulk of men’s brains weighs more than that of women’s. She’d read that somewhere. The man in front of her reclined his seat. Sad blue fabric with beige rectangles pushed itself into her face. He pulled off his jacket, elbowed his companion in the nose. Quantity, but not necessarily quality, she thought, reflecting on the condition of his male brain. Leave your jacket on, she wanted to tell him. If we crash you will want that extra protection. She thought of her third grade teacher’s words when the atomic bomb drill sirens screeched outside their bungalow. They’d just come in from recess, she remembered, and were preparing for vocabulary. “Leave your sweaters on,” Mrs. Stuckenbrook said. “Just in case it’s real.” Gracie had reversed herself in a panic, shoved her thin arms back into the sleeves and wrapped her sweater tight across her chest where, she reasoned, her heart would need the most protection. Then she dove beneath her desk, laced her fingers behind her neck as directed, and cried, very softly. “Open your dictionaries,” Mrs. Stuckenbrook said, lifetimes later, when the all-clear blast finally sounded. Crashproof to creamy. The dictionary page headings came back to Gracie again. She pressed her forehead into the small window, trying to see more than blue. Clouds, oceans, quilted cities. Slippery babies, dangers averted. The reclined man’s head was close cropped and bristling. It had to weigh more than hers, even though her own hair was shuffled and wild, even though she’d patted it with wet hands before she’d left the hotel that afternoon. And he’d laughed at her-- that Tennessee man had-- just that morning. That man made her smile and sigh. He made her soft. His own hair, she remembered, had been sleepy and floating and caught in her fingers. The clouds outside were puffed, ridged, convoluted. Brains. Pure bulk without weight. The couples around her were dozing, men’s heads on top. Gracie noticed that wherever a heterosexual couple dozed, the man’s head would invariably rest on top. Something else to consider. When the scientific data so clearly contraindicated the wisdom of that positioning. But the wisdom of any positioning was questionable at best. Take, for instance, the wisdom of dislocating her life in California and repositioning it in Tennessee. Tennessee had no real bread, for one thing. Just the square white airy kind. Square cheese too--orange slaps of plastic sealed off from cows or goats or whey. And tired, flabby, sad fruit. Except for that one “pink lady” apple she bit into on that Tennessee mountain. He’d brought Cheese Nips and she’d brought apples -- perfect together, believe it or not. The salty with the sweet. But that whole day had been unreasonably and unexpectedly perfect. She thought of his beard cupped in her palms. Surprisingly delicious. But how did one live in Tennessee? All rectangles, trailers, dirt yards, cluttered porches. Except for the mountains, and forests, and trees, trees, the trees she loved. And she loved him too-- there was that-- his back a mountain in the morning, wide and vast, impenetrable and smooth beneath his t-shirt. She’d slid her legs up its face that mornng and rested them on its peak. And then the mountain moved, opened, and she’d found herself closed deep inside it with the smell of warm cotton and the comfort of his curling beard. Gracie caught the baby as she toppled off that slippery sink. Or would have, had the baby fallen. But the baby hadn’t fallen; she’d somehow kept her counter perch, head bobbing, arms reaching for the pre-teen caretaker who had plopped her there and told her to hold still. Very very still, the girl said, or you will fall and get really hurt. The girl said it kindly, pleadingly. That had been in the restroom of Ryan’s Buffet. It was hard to like buffets. Another strike against Tennessee. Rows and rows of stainless steel vats filled with soggy, dark, floating food. Only spot of light anywhere was the yellow corn, and even those little niblets were mostly sinking, only sometimes saved by slotted spoons. The rest of the vats were brown: boiled, fried, stewed, creamed, flaked, sliced, chopped, hashed, chunked and shredded brown. Aisles of brown. Miles of brown. All you could eat. All brown, all the time. There were very few toilet seat covers in Tennessee either. That was another thing. And it was in that Ryan’s Buffet restroom stall, while sitting on a toilet covered with carefully folded strips of tissue, that Gracie heard that young voice entreating sweetly, repeatedly, with just the smallest hint of panic, to hold still , hold very still, please hold still for just one more little minute. Gracie had hurried then, opened the stall door to find a pale-cheeked, balloon-headed baby seated cross-legged on the wet Formica and trying, really, to hold still. The Tennessee man had bought her a ring. He’d come out of Big John’s Mini-Mart and handed her a blue and copper ring through the rolled down window of his black Cavalier. “All I’m asking for is a shot,” he’d said the night before, beneath that street lamp, and what he meant by that was a chance to show her how much he could be. And that had made her almost cry, because his kisses had already scraped at something deep and raw, and because he had already shown her more than she could hold. “A good luck ring,” he said then. And it had been. Hadn’t they scored that free dinner in the lava lamp booth at the Hard Rock Cafe? And hadn’t that baby stayed put on that slippery sink? Gracie had held out her arms just in case, but in spite of everything, that baby did not fall. Gracie twisted the blue ring on her finger. Ring finger. Right hand. She’d been careful to remember, when he gave her the ring, which hand meant what and she’d tried, without ceremony or obvious deliberation, to place it on her right hand. Marriage was a touchy subject. He, willing. She, not so sure. Did all of that before, and forever. Right hand. Sweet kiss. Enough said. Gracie was inside the clouds then, instead of over them, and you can’t see any edges at all when you’re right there inside. All the convolutions and spaces were whipped together and homogenized. Think then. Think first. Men. Was the extra bulk in there the water soluble kind, like in oatmeal? Or was it a dense, sinewy, protein-laden muscle, like in the knotty bulk of men’s biceps, or in that long beautiful bulk of their outer thighs? Gracie sighed. Was her Tennessee man tooling along on the freeway just then, or had he gone back to their hotel room, showered and used her towel to dry himself, found the Pantene Pro-V she’d forgotten, missed her? The jet lurched in the sky. Pull her up, she told the pilot. That’s it. Nose up and hold on. Good job, Captain Galaxy, or whatever your name is. Most likely, the girl had picked the baby up in her plump but unstrong arms and carried her into some other peril, plopped her onto some other slippery counter. But Gracie would never know where or when and so Gracie would never get another shot. She would never be able to catch that child. Gracie’s ex had fallen. Off wagons, off tracks. She’d tried to catch him, stood beneath him with her arms extended, braced herself. But the force of his falls finally sent them both crashing, like cartoon characters, through the roofs and floors of many-storied buildings, pulling lamps and bathtubs down on top of them, losing limbs along the way. She’d lost a breast that last time. She’d coached and pleaded for decades, but that time, and the cancer, made her stop. She folded her arms over her missing breast and just closed her eyes. When she opened them again she was in the air, flying. Defying gravity and expectations both. She let herself be lifted up, in jet planes, in new words, in the arms of that unlikely man with the pointy boots and the soft “I”s. She hovered at his ear, dropped worlds from her mouth into the starry promise of his diamond earring. She’d let him catch her that first time. But then he caught her again. And, bulky brains or not, he always kept his feet, even in those pointy boots. Gracie sneezed, but didn’t want to. Atchoo. Bless you, said a frowning man with a stiff ripple of gray hair. Thank you. Atchoo. Eschew. Eschew to espouse. Laughter to lawyer. Sabotage to sacrifice. She spent so much of her life flying now. Always going, never staying. But that would change too. For better or worse. Tadpole to taillight. Choppy air ahead, the pilot said.. He said it cheerfully. Resist the urge, Gracie coached herself, to give too much. Nice is not the same as right. Don’t give it all. Don’t fill this space with delusions. The snaking rivers carved unreasonably sharp crevasses in the earth beneath her. There was no symmetry in that beauty. No peace. T E N N E S S E E. She wrote it with her plastic knife in the last puddle of marinara sauce. “Brisket of beef or penne pasta.” The flight attendant had given them their choice. “Both delicious, both nutritious, and they both taste the same anyway.” That had gotten a laugh. Relaxed the bulb-headed man with the Raider’s cap. He didn’t take it off the whole flight. Gracie watched as a doughy hand in the row next to the emergency exit reached up to pat his comb-over. That made her inexplicably sad. Just let it go, she wanted to tell him. Either shave it off or let it fly. T E N N E S S E E. She pictured the letters floating-- one on each cloud that slid beneath the belly of the jet. And then she felt again that empty ache and filled it again with the remembered warm, mountain nearness of that bearded man, there in the Tennessee woods, his head heavy and right on top of hers as they smiled together for the disposable camera. He’d held it at arm’s length in front of them and then he took his shot. |
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