9
It no longer surprises her how much information you can get from bureaucrats simply by asking for it. After two hours at a pay phone she knows the easiest order in which to obtain identification.
She applies for a Social Security card, using the birth certificate from Tucson, and when the clerk seems puzzled that she’s never had a Social Security number she explains that she has spent her adult life nursing her invalid mother, who recently died.
“I’ve been taking extension courses at UCLA but I’ve never had a regular job, you see, so I never applied before, but the people at the employment agency told me I should come and fill out an application.…”
The clerk stamps the forms, uninterested in hearing any more.
On her way out she slips another application blank into her handbag.
The card for which she’s just signed will be mailed in about ten days to the street address of her motel. In the meantime there’s a great deal to do.
On the Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday she removes the red wig in a restaurant ladies’ room and drives down to Orange County to have her hair done in a place where they’ll never see her again and never remember her. “So hot this summer,” she says. “I’ll be cooler if it’s cut short, don’t you think?”
The hairdresser is an inquisitive man, sixtyish and overweight, gay and garrulous: Haven’t seen you before, my dear; such lovely cheekbones; do you live around here?
She has to think. Now who am I going to be today?
She becomes the wife of an aeronautical engineer who’s been unemployed for nearly a year and finally just landed an aerospace job here in Santa Ana so they’ve just moved down from Tacoma. Two kids and they are fighting the bureaucracy of school transfers this close to opening day.…
It is the sort of thing she’s done for idle amusement in the past when she found herself on an airliner seated next to a stranger she knew she’d never see again.
From childhood on she’s taken pleasure in harmless lies: they exercise the imagination. Now it is a talent she is going to have to cultivate permanently. That’s an aspect of this thing that frightens her especially: the chance that she’ll slip and misremember her own lies.
It means she needs to stay aloof-no efforts to make friends or steady companions. Not until she is comfortable in a new identity with a past so well rehearsed that it comes to mind as readily as if it were real.
The hairdresser sends her away in a wheeling cloud of advice about the most fabulous little places to shop and the most divine sushi restaurant.
10
She has destroyed her old credit cards but still keeps the old driver’s license; she’ll need it one more time.
The plan is based in part on the cautionary advice with which she was endowed inadvertently by that dreadful little investigator, what was his name? Something aquatic, like his sharkskin clothes …
Seale, that’s it. Ray Seale.
From the outset she has implemented the plan with businesslike thoroughness and she’s applied a ruthless concentration to the details-because she can’t afford to make mistakes, and because for at least some of the time it keeps her mind off her fears for herself and for Ellen.
Much of the time she feels as though she is trying to walk underwater. There seems to be a haze over her vision: a translucence that separates her from reality. The things that she requires of herself are things that she accomplishes with prompt inventive adroitness but it is as if someone else were accomplishing them. Feeling dreamlike, trancelike, she knows she must keep moving briskly because, like a bicyclist, she’ll fall down if she stops.
11
Wednesday morning there is rain but she drives to Van Nuys Airport anyway. The storm has brought road oil to the surface and she feels the car slide when she makes the turn into the parking lot, going too fast. A blast of wind strikes; the car shudders and she has a queasy sensation when the seat seems to pitch to one side under her.
There is the throat-tightening awareness that the car is out of control. She sees the metal chainlink fence skidding toward her in the rain; she remembers to lift her foot off the gas and waits in dread for the tires to find their grip.
Managing narrowly not to hit the fence, she rolls into a parking space and sits precariously still with the windshield wipers batting, wind rocking the car, afraid to breathe while she waits for the pulse to subside and reminds herself that none of this is going to be any good if she totals herself in a stupid careless accident.
If you can’t remember to care about yourself, she thinks, care about Ellen.
She sucks in a deep lungful of air and waits a while, hoping the rain will quit or at least let up; she has no umbrella. It’s a long way to walk and she doesn’t see a parking area any closer than this one. Between gusts she recognizes the place down the field from his description on the phone: “I’ve got a little office in the hangar next door to the Beechcraft Agency. You can see it from the parking lot.”
She remembers his voice now: coarse, a whisky-cigarette baritone with a rough resonance of barrooms and card games; on the phone it made her think of lumps of rock rattling down a metal chute. She’d telephoned five flying schools and in each case she’d asked to talk to the instructor. She’s picked this one because he answered his own phone and his intonation suggested he might not mind doing something a little out of the ordinary for a price.
He says his name is Charlie Reid.
The rain doesn’t look as if it wants to depart. She makes a face and gets out of the car, fashions a tent over her head with the morning paper and runs toward the hangar, trying to dodge the puddles.
The open runway area presents no obstacles to the wind, which gropes for her in gusts, blasting rain into her face under the newspaper. By the time she reaches the door the newspaper is disintegrating and her hair is a sodden mat.
She hopes it is the right place. She goes in.
A man sits in a swivel chair at a cheap metal desk. Steam drifts from the Styrofoam cup in his hand; coffee makes a strong smell in the tiny office. The sign appended to the wall is in cardboard and appears to have been lettered with crayons by a meticulous child: “Reid Air Service and Flying School.” Nearby are Visa and Mastercard emblems.
He is huge and unkempt in work boots, dungarees and a faded mustard yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway back to his elbows. There are bags under his eyes; the lived-in face is creased and amused. It is evident he’s been watching her through the window. He says in his rumbling voice, “You must want to fly awful bad.”
“I do.”
It elicits his skeptical grunt. He lifts a large metal wastebasket onto the desk.
She drops the sodden newspaper into it. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” He secretes the wastebasket under the desk. Then he stands up. He is big.
Six-two, she thinks; probably six-four if he’d stand up straight. He towers. The shoulders belong on a water buffalo.
“You’re ten minutes late,” he says. “Not that it matters. Nothing out there flying right now except a few skateboards and umbrellas.”
