Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge

Author:Paul La Farge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-09-26T21:00:00+00:00

REGENZEIT

This is the good part: it’s the story of Yesim calling me at midnight to say she’d changed her mind, I ought to keep Mary’s sewing machine, and me saying, you’re calling at midnight about the sewing machine? And Yesim saying, I couldn’t sleep, I was worried that you would throw it out. It’s an antique, you ought to hold on to it. And me saying, I promise, I won’t make any rash decisions about the sewing machine until tomorrow morning at the earliest. And going back to bed, pretending to be annoyed that Yesim had woken me up for something so unimportant, but actually happy that she was thinking of me at midnight, that she was thinking of me and my grandmother’s sewing machine. It’s the story of Yesim calling me breathlessly in the middle of the afternoon to say she just saw a moose on the ski slope, a moose, can you believe it? And me saying, it couldn’t have been a moose, and Yesim saying, you don’t believe me? Come over and see for yourself. It’s the story of the two of us walking all over Mount Espy looking for a hypothetical moose and coming back to the lodge almost doubled over with laughter and not being able to tell Kerem what was so funny. It’s that story. You know how it goes.

But here are a few surprises: one afternoon when we were tired of packing, we sat on my grandfather’s porch, watching yellow leaves skitter past on Route 56, and talked about things we’d done when we were kids. It was just like the fantasy I had right after that first dinner with Yesim and Kerem—months ago, it seemed, although it had actually been less than two weeks. I told Yesim the story of how I was expelled from Nederland, and Yesim laughed, and said, if she had been expelled from high school her father would have strangled her.

“He wouldn’t let us do anything wrong,” Yesim said. “If I got a B in school, he would shout, Aren’t you ashamed?”

“That’s pretty harsh,” I agreed.

Yesim looked at me sidelong. “You have no idea.”

Even before he came to Thebes, Joe Regenzeit had figured out that here, in America, there was no room for error, and no one to catch him if he fell, an impression that his experiences with the Thebans did nothing to dispel. If his shirt was wrinkled, it was because Turks were slovenly; if Snowbird failed to file for a permit no one had ever mentioned until the deadline for it had passed, it was because Turks thought everything could be settled with baksheesh. What Joe Regenzeit received as prejudice, he transmitted to his children as obsession. He expected Yesim’s and Kerem’s lives to be as spotless as the glass-topped table in the dining room. His demands were all the harder to satisfy because he wanted his children to be perfect and Turkish, to show the town what educated Turks could accomplish in the New World.

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