A Thousand Paper Airplanes
A new installment of "Boardinghouse Reach" and a poem
Allison knelt down next to me in the living room where I was writing.
“You have a moment, Jasmine?” She looked up at me with her lovely eyes.
“Sure—what’s up?” I set my notebook down and capped my pen.
“You’ve probably already guessed what I’m about to tell you. I’m sure you’ve seen it coming.” Allison’s eyes were shining with particular ardor today.
I shook my head, suddenly a bit nervous about whatever it was she was about to say.
She sat back on her heels, shutting her eyes and swaying for a moment as if in prayer. Then she smiled at me with a blissful look of self-satisfaction. “I’m moving out.”
I was dumbfounded.
“The universe has been telling me that it’s time, and Kath and Simeon want to find a place with me.”
“But you said you were permanent,” I said stupidly.
Allison clasped my hands in hers. “I can’t ignore what the universe says.” For a moment, I believed in this special line of communication between her and the powers that be.
And then I remembered myself at the age of twenty-one. I could hear the polished voice of the high-priced decorator who’d come in to redo the colors of the German company’s offices overlooking Central Park, where I’d snagged a summer job as a receptionist. While he waited for the manager to usher him into her office, he showed me an array of objects he’d brought to show her—a mussel shell, a feather, a piece of quartz, a rock from a streambed. In slightly patronizing tones, he lectured me about the relative merits and subtleties of their coloration. When he paused to ask me what I thought would be the best color for the walls, I pointed to the pearly bands of bluish-gray on the inside of the mussel shell, whereupon he nodded approvingly.
“I have a faultless sense of aesthetics,” I told him, just as one might say, “I was born in Los Angeles, or I have naturally curly hair.” I said it with perfect confidence, without any sense of comedy.
I was brought back to the present by the honeyed sounds of Allison’s voice. “It’s been a wonderful experience living here. I want you to know that, Jasmine.” I nodded, my hands still in hers. “But ever since Colby moved in—”
“Allison,” I interrupted. “Colby’s been here as long as you have. Longer.”
Allison sat down on the floor, crossing her legs and straightening her spine. “But he wasn’t living here.”
Was Colby living there now? He and I seemed to feel most comfortable keeping the entire set-up a little ambiguous. I liked the idea that it was my place; but I didn’t like the idea that Colby wasn’t paying rent—at least, not in any official sort of way. He paid for groceries whenever he accompanied me on shopping expeditions. We went out together several times a week, and he always paid. He paid for me to go to a dance workshop in Hawaii. He bought me a beautiful new computer. He loved being generous, just so long as his generosity was an impulsive act of heroism rather than a matter of duty or obligation.
He was still, from time to time, completely out of pocket, even though he was working a lot—just about every day, it seemed. Like a working stiff from the old days, he’d get paid and then he’d spend all his money—wildly, often selflessly—until he ran out of money and got paid again.
Saving wasn’t a concept that entered into Colby’s sense of the lifestyle he thought appropriate for himself. Saving seemed too stuffy—too much like something people of his parents’ generation would do. Something that might rob him of his own sense of the vividness of his life in the here and now.
I could admire this point of view on a philosophical plane. But in the practical world—a world in which I sometimes found myself subsidizing Colby’s sense of his own vividness in the here and now—I found it deeply and disturbingly irksome. What was it about me, I wondered, that found it so necessary to seek out men who had so little reverence or affinity for money? Did I consider it some sort of virtue to always be struggling financially?
“Colby’s guitars,” Allison was saying, ticking off her grievances on her fingers. “Colby’s magazines. Colby’s stuff… I just haven’t felt like it was my place any more!”
Her place. So, just as our cat felt that we were all in this house for the sole purpose of serving her needs, so Allison thought of us as the stage decorations for this era of her youth, just prior to her launch into stardom—before she became the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Before she discovered the cure to a disease that’s been killing millions of children every year. Before the television drama based on her life was written.
Colby, as was often the case, was completely correct in his insight: it was indeed the only-child syndrome. I wondered whether Allison felt jealous of all the attention I paid to Colby—of how popular he was in general among all the members of our household.
“So, when are you thinking of moving out?” I asked her.
“Next month.”
“Do you have a place already?” I gave her a chance to answer, but she was silent. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a place at this time of year?”
Allison gave her Buddha smile. “The universe will take care of me.”
I could only shake my head. I felt sorry to lose Allison. She was such an ebullient presence in the household, and I had grown very fond of her. I genuinely appreciated her good mind and the idealism she exuded. Furthermore, she loved my food and did a great job when it was her turn to clean up the kitchen, and did all her chores, sooner or later, depending upon her school schedule. She was wonderful with Kyle. And, like Daniela, she considerably took the pressure off me when it came to playing hostess to our shorter-term boarders.
I sighed. The time for Daniela’s return to Brazil was also approaching. “Oh, Allison,” I said, giving her a hug that welled up quite spontaneously. “I’m going to miss you.”
A week later, when she admitted that she hadn’t yet come up with any housing leads, I urged her to reconsider. “If you want to change your mind, it’s not too late. I’d love to have you stay.”
“I’ll find a place—I know I will.”
“Finals are coming up. Think how that’s going to be, moving in the middle of finals.”
I saw just the flicker of fear in her eyes, and maybe even a hint of tears.
“Allison, I know it’s hard to change your mind sometimes when you’ve been so sure about the rightness of a decision. But you can change your mind. It’s all right. No one’s going to think any less of you for it.”
Allison looked very much as if she’d like to change her mind. But then she sucked in her breath and I saw that she was determined to move on.
And it was understandable, too. Here I was playing mother to her when what she wanted most of all was to launch herself out into the world as an independent adult.
She looked at me with welling eyes. “I love you so much,” she said, giving me one of her extravagant hugs that I suddenly knew I’d miss when she was gone.
As the end of the month approached, I felt I had to break the news to Kyle. He studied my face for a moment before commenting, as if checking to see whether I was kidding or he’d heard me wrong. “But she said she was permanent!” he said quietly, his voice portentous with an outraged sense of justice.
I knew that he loved Allison, and that this marked—in a subtle, preliminary way—his first sense of romantic betrayal.
He allowed me to hold him close for a moment against me, while I murmured understanding, validating words. But I also knew that there was nothing I could say now—and there was nothing I would be able to say later, when he was himself a young man and another girl would hurt him—to bring any real comfort, or ease his sense of having been wronged.
After a moment during which I clung to him far more than he clung to me, he pushed me gently away and went back to the game he’d been playing when I’d interrupted him—something having to do with two rubber lizards, improvised dialogue and jumping from the couch to the floor.
I went over things with Colby, trying to figure out just what had happened with Allison and why. It wasn’t our scolding of her at the computer, because she’d obviously been planning the move at least since her birthday, when she’d appreciated but then carefully wrapped up my gifts to her. In retrospect, it was clear that even then they’d been destined for some other household, some other bathroom.
“Good riddance,” Colby said in his bluff way of making everything out to be for the good. “Let her go out there and see what the real world’s like. You don’t need that spoiled little fuck here.”
But I could tell from the silence that followed that he also felt a little bit sad. We both liked Allison, deep down, thought her extraordinary and wished the best for her.
I nestled my cheek against the place just between the back of Colby’s shoulder and his trapezius, well-padded and radiating warmth. My feeling then was that at least he wasn’t going anywhere—Colby, my island of warmth, acceptance and safety. I wondered whom we’d get to replace Allison, and thought to what extent my boardinghouse would be changed by her absence—how the rooms would all seem a little darker without her.
***
A Thousand Paper Airplanes If I could fold a thousand paper airplanes from the pages of poetry and prose stacked, one-sided, in the recycling box beneath my desk. If, when I launched them from a high place, bright white against the blue sky, they could—as in an animated film or fever dream— turn into birds. If those messengers, freighted with my words, could fly to lands where readers wait with cupped hands ready to hold each feathered ark, to feel the warm, fluttering heart encased inside. If all that I am and all that I’ve written could come to rest in soil that feeds a family of redwoods. If forest mushrooms could weave a silver cocoon of life over what remains of me. If in my transformation, I could give my skin, my flesh, my bones and all my printed words back to the trees. Copyright © 2024 by Barbara Quick
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