Rosalinda's Eyes Ch. 02

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"We'll cover that next week," he said. "Keep scanning your gauges, then the sky. Six-pack, sky, then again and again."

"6-8 Romeo, maintain 3500 and cleared direct SBA, contact tower 119.7 and good day."

"6-8 Romeo," she replied. "Okay, now what?"

"Let's try one the old fashioned way. Tune 113.8 on NAV 1...okay, your drifting again. Scan!" I said, then I tuned in the VOR, set the display to overlay an old style VOR needle on the main screen, then swung the needle until it centered. "Okay, come to 2-8-9 degrees, and we're at 3500 now so cut power a little, and re-trim for level flight."

"Me?"

"You." She cut power a little, then reached down and turned the trim wheel until she didn't have to fight the yoke anymore.

"Keep scanning."

"So many things..."

"If it was easy a monkey could do it."

They landed at Santa Barbara twenty five minutes later, and Becky almost fell out of the cabin. "My knees are shaking," she said. "I can hardly walk!" Even Bettina was nervous now, and it showed.

So, I shadowed them as they chocked the wheels and tied-down the wings, then led them into the little terminal for private pilots, a so-called FBO, or Fixed Base Operator, and called a taxi. I sat and listened while Becky exploded in a torrent of excited recall – and anticipation – already critiquing her performance, looking for things she could do better next time. All you can do is sit and listen and watch, pick up on things, and I did until the taxi pulled up, then I took them down to the harbor and they talked all the while. We ate fish and chips and drank cokes and talked for two more hours, then rode back out to the airport and I told them to pre-flight the aircraft, then followed them, looking over every move they made. Becky sat in back this time, and I watched Bettina closely as she climbed in and buckled up. She moved with calm assurance, there was a snap in her voice and in the way she moved about once she was belted in, something I recognized in an instant.

Bettina was a born pilot, and I knew that after about thirty seconds watching her. It's something you can spot real fast, once you know what to look for.

On our climb-out she scanned better, she could multi-task better, manage distractions better. So much better I knew this was going to become a real problem, real fast. She'd be twice the pilot Becky could be, in half the time, and with competitiveness a given their friendship might soon grow strained, or worse. When we were driving home on the freeway, with Bettina in front this time, I looked at Becky in the rear view mirror, saw the indecision in her eyes, knew it was time for 'the talk.'

We drove to Tommy's and got a sack of burgers and some Cokes then drove over to the park, and the three of us walked over to a picnic bench. "How'd you think the day went?" I asked.

"I can't do too many things at once," Becky said. "It's like I get overwhelmed."

"What are you thinking when that happens?"

"It's like I'm thinking about how I'm supposed to be thinking, not doing it, and it's a..."

"It's a feedback loop," I said. "First you distract yourself, and then you start questioning everything you're doing. Pretty soon you're not in the cockpit...you're flying inside your head, like an a daydream. And you keep that up, pretty soon you're dead, too."

I paused, let the words sink in.

"So...what do I do? Quit?"

I shook my head. "Nope. We work on a few tricks I know, to help keep you focused."

"Like?"

"Actually, driving in a parking lot."

"What?"

"You'll see. Tomorrow, after Bettina's mother tries to kill me with her salsa."

We drove home a little later, and I tried not to watch Becky watching Bettina, but it was hard not to. Recognition hits first, and hard, then envy settles in, and I knew I'd have to stop this, and fast. I pulled into the driveway and then into the garage, and the girls went in and started getting the house ready for tomorrow, and I went next door, to the Parker house – because I knew Judd was waiting for me.

"How'd it go?" he asked straight away.

"Becky ever have any issues with ADD or ADHD?"

"No," he said, a little surprised by the question.

"Good, so it's just nerves. I need to spend an hour with her in the car tomorrow. Some multitasking exercises. Becky and Bettina...they're competitive and jealous, aren't they?"

"Since kindergarten. Best friends, and always competing off one another, pushing one another."

I sighed, knew I had to figure out a way to turn this into a lever, to help get Becky up to the next level. "Okay. About eight in the morning, my house."

He nodded. "Yeah. Can do. What's up with PJ?"

"I hope you aren't asking me, Judd, 'cause I'd be the last one to know. What's bothering you?"

"Moody. Up one minute, down the next. She ever been to a shrink?"

"I don't think so."

"Mind if I take her to someone I know?"

"You're asking me?"

"Well, seems she won't do anything you don't approve of."

"Who's your friend?"

"Not a friend. A department shrink who helps out with other problems that come up."

"He any good?"

"She. And yes, very."

"You have my blessing. Need me to talk it over with her?"

"Could you?"

"What are you thinking? Bi-polar?"

He shrugged. "No clue, man. Not my pay grade."

"Okay."

"So, Becky? You think she has what it takes?"

"I think so. This stuff comes easier to some than to others..."

"And Bettina? She's got it nailed?"

"You've seen this before, I take it?"

He nodded his head again. "Still, you think she can do it?"

"If she doesn't give up, yeah."

"She's not a quitter. Never has been."

"You gonna quit on PJ?"

"Nope. Not doin' that again. By the way, you been by your place yet?"

"No...why?"

"Madeline's back."

I think I raised my eyebrows at that. "Really?"

"She had suitcases. Note I used the plural."

"Really?"

"You better go. I heard a meltdown in progress an hour ago."

Madeline and I went way back. She was my oldest sister, born a year or so after me. If PJ was a hellion, Maddie had been the family angel. She was soft-spoken, demure, brainy as hell and not the cutest girl that ever walked down the aisle, but she'd been the first person I'd called after Brenda passed. She'd married an economist who currently taught at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and she had worked as an administrative assistant of some sort for the past twenty years, wherever her husband had happened to land a teaching gig. When I walked across our lawns I saw an Arizona plate on the back of an old Ford Focus and sighed, then walked into a Mexican restaurant.

My new kitchen had been turned into something straight out of Like Water For Chocolate. Cutting boards loaded with chopped herbs and spices, peeled avocados and chopped tomatoes, pots on the stove bubbling away, meats on the counter marinading in pyrex bowls full of complex organic compounds – and there, presiding over all this sorcery: Rosalinda.

"Sure you've got enough food there?" I asked, incredulous.

"I hope you don't mind, but I have relatives in town for just a few days, so I've asked them over."

"Oh, no, more the merrier," I think I managed to say, black steam pouring out of my ears. I heard wailing from one of the girls' rooms and took off down the hall. Bettina and Becky were vacuuming and dusting my room, casting wary glances towards PJs old digs – so I ducked that way, expecting the worst.

And there she was, Madeline, curled up on PJs bed, bawling like a three year old. With her head in PJs lap, and they looked up when I walked in – and Maddie flew off the bed and into my arms – and then the crying went off the scale, sounding like police cars in the distance, coming closer every second.

"Divorce?" I mimed to PJ, who simply, and curtly nodded her head.

Maddie's was always the hard luck story, and I don't know how she did it. She wanted kids, so of course he couldn't, was as sterile as a cuckoo. He couldn't hold down a job, something, I think, about him not being a very good teacher. She'd drifted from menial job to menial job, paycheck to paycheck, and even Dad wondered how long it would last. Implosion had been considered inevitable for years, and now it looked like things had come to pass – and the residue was all over the house now.

"Tell me what happened," I sighed, because really, what else are big brothers for?

Something about despair and suicide and how she was dragging him down, how she had to leave now or he'd simply end it all. So, she'd packed her bags and run home to LA, for the old house, hoping someone would be here.

Boy, had she hit the mother lode.

"Come on," I said, "I know just what you need."

We tromped through the house and out the door, piled into the old Datsun and made the run over to Tommy's. Let's not mention my farts were starting to smell like chili-cheese-fries, this was an action rooted in dire human need. When a human being, even a Los Angeleno, is in such need, food is an obvious route to succor and solace, but for someone who grew up near downtown Los Angeles, there are few places that scream comfort food more loudly than Tommy's. If you live in a certain zip code it's Nate 'n Al's further out Beverly, but for the rest of us it's Tommy's. Trouble was, my last two meals had been at Tommy's, and my gut was already rumbling; one more Tommyburger with chili and cheese and I was sure I'd blow like Vesuvius.

But such is the measure of a brother's love, right?

Need I say more?

We sat in the truck's bed and munched away, talked about all the times Mom and Dad had hauled our asses down here, wondering how many burgers we'd put down on just this spot over the decades. There were a few more Korean signs down here than in 1960, but other than that not much else had changed. They probably hadn't changed the grease they fried their potatoes in since 1965 – 'cause the food tasted exactly the same that night as it had fifty years ago.

So, Maddie talked and we listened. It was time, she said, for another new start, another reinvention of the self, and that's when what she said kind of penetrated.

We'd grown up accustomed to the idea that our lives would be a little like Tommy's. It would be the same, from one generation to the next, that our lives would be just like Mom and Dad's. Just like Tommy's. We'd grown up, probably one of the first generations in human history accustomed to something like this idea we had of the American Dream, but it hit me just then how rare this moment in time was. America had won the war, true enough, but we'd won the peace, too, if only for a couple of generations, and now we expected that History was just going to roll over and play dead, that change was all dead and gone. What did that guy write? The end of history?

Wow. What a moron.

This is what change feels like, I said to myself. For everyone else around the world, that train had left the station a long time ago. Change was happening again at a blinding pace everywhere else, but we'd been slow to get back on that train, happy to stay off for as long as we could. And now, here it was, Change, and we had been stupid enough, or careless enough, to think that change was about recognizable things. Predictable things, even.

Tommy's was all about that moment, all about hanging on to the past. In my mind's eye, I could still see crew-cut boys driving by in BelAirs, see their girlfriends' bobby soxed feet hanging out the window, still hear the Big Bopper and Wolfman Jack on the radio, so the bangers driving by with Mac10s and trunks full of 'product' just didn't register on my radar. What did register was a brown dude and black one getting into an argument in the middle of the street, words heating up quickly, then the brown dude's friends pulled them apart and everyone drifted away. Until the brown dude got to his car.

A white guy standing there asked the brown dude what was happening, and the brown dude reached into his car and pulled out a Mac10, and then started hosing down the parking lot with 9mm bullets, hitting the white guy in the neck, and my sister Madeline in the left shoulder.

I told you her luck was never the greatest.

By the time paramedics got her to County SC she'd lost a lot of blood, and after surgery she was listed in 'Critical' condition. By that time, of course, Rosalinda's first backyard party was a wash, my Sunday taking Becky driving was as well. Life happens, I guess.

We brought her home a week later, thankful she hadn't officially quit her job – yet – and still had insurance, and as soon as her husband heard about the event he drove over. They had a tearful reunion, and it looked like there was still some hope there so I tried to help them both along as best I could.

Something else kind of remarkable happened. Well, two something elses.

The first, Judd was as good as his word. He took PJ to see the police departments shrink, and after just one meeting PJ was on a regimen of antidepressants and bi-polar medication, as well as huge doses of Vitamin C for a week and some sort of 'hormone thing.' Judd passed-on word that we probably wouldn't see any changes, dramatic or otherwise, for at least a few weeks, but no, by the time Maddie came home from the hospital I could see little differences emerging.

The second was a little more consequential, for me, at least.

Rosalinda camped out in my kitchen that week. She came over early and got breakfast going before we trooped off to the hospital, and when she got in from work she came down and got dinner going. I, for my part, resumed ground school, with only one class missed. Stan Wood had about a dozen students lined up and waiting for me, but he understood, put that off for a couple of weeks.

I opened by mentioning divergent dichotomies, and I need to pause here, talk about the second divergence that came to my life that week.

In the aftermath of 911 my hate for all things Arab knew no bounds, yet for many Americans I think hatred became more pervasive, and more exclusive. Us and Them, I think, as in whites vs the world. At least that's the way it felt to me within a few months. I percolated in that mess while my folks fell away, and then while Brenda came undone. My son's death, on the other hand, led me to the precipice, and I could feel a palpable anger directed towards everyone after that. Seriously, I was an equal opportunity Hater, no matter the race or gender. I was burning up with Hate.

And one day I looked in the mirror and saw that Hate in my eyes, and the feeling of revulsion was overwhelming. And now, suddenly, I Hated myself, too, and I remembered looking in the mirror and wanting to claw the eyes out of that mother fucker's skull. I was full of seething hate, and it was beginning to boil over.

That's when the whole move back to California thing grabbed me by the throat. The California I remembered, that I knew I was longing for, had always been the antithesis of Hate, and I knew I had to reconnect with that vibe – soon. This was an act of self-preservation...nothing less than a last desperate attempt to turn away from Hate.

The first time I saw Rosalinda's eyes all I saw was her anger, her own brand of Hate, and I slammed the door shut to keep that Hate away from me. Like an alcoholic pushes away from the bar and walks out into the night before he falls. I didn't take time to understand her fear; I just slammed the door shut and turned away, and in a way, she gave me my second chance. She came to me, to apologize, to help set things straight.

When Rosalinda came to help after Maddie went down, when I looked into her eyes that night, love came to me – like an epiphany. Not lust or attraction. Love, the antithesis of Hate. Reaching out, caring; that kind of love. She took care of me, and us. She wrapped her soul around me, all of us, and carried us past our anger, through our despair, and by weeks end I was so profoundly in love with this other person I hardly knew it left me breathless. She left me breathless. And feeling alive, like I hadn't in years.

And it was as Spring around the old house. Love was everywhere Rosalinda happened to be, and when she fed us, her love found it's way into our bodies. Yeah, sure, PJ was dosed up to the gills on psych meds, but the change was in her eyes too. When Judd came over the night Maddie got back, her's wasn't a juvenile love anymore. It was this new, serious thing; now all manifest purpose, not simple adolescent lust. The way she held his hands, the way she listened when he spoke...we all knew something was up, some kind of big change had finally hit her where she lived. Maybe she was finally growing up, but if so I think it had something to do with whatever it was in Rosalinda's eyes.

Rosalinda and the girls had turned Maddie's old room into a fairyland by the time I carried her into the house. Canopies and candles, something out of the Arabian Nights, and Maddie cried when she saw the results, but the point of all this was simpler still.

When I watched that banger shooting up the parking lot across the street from Tommy's, I watched someone shoot my history, my comfort, right in the heart, and I felt my world filling with Hate again. And I found my way away from that darkness in Rosalinda's eyes.

Need I say more?

+++++

PJ and Judd didn't announce any kind of engagement. They just got in the car, drove to Vegas and did the deed, came back and told our little world what they'd done. End of discussion. By that time PJ was like a cactus flower blooming for the first time. Everyone was in love with her happiness, even Becky.

Maddie went back to Tucson, in love with life for the first time in years.

Flight school started in earnest, the girls sweating academics for the first time in their lives, living for Saturday morning and all the joy that entailed.

A few days after Maddie came home I loaded Becky up in the Porsche and she drove us over to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium, Judd waiting for us by an unlocked gate, and we drove in, set up some orange cones.

"Okay, here's the deal," I began, once she was behind the wheel again. "See this old radio? You tune-in new stations by turning this dial. You try it."

She turned the knob slowly, moving from station to station.

"Okay," she said. "Got it."

"These buttons underneath are used to pre-set a station. You punch it and hold it a few seconds, then release it. Understand?"

"Yup."

"So, see these cones? Set in a circle? Go in and drive around the inside of the circle without hitting a cone."

"Right now?"

"Now."

She entered the circle and started driving round and round, and she found it wasn't as easy as she thought it would be, but she managed.

"Now, without taking your eyes off the circle, I want you to tune in your five favorite radio stations."

"What?!"

"Don't take your eyes off the cones, Becky. And don't hit one."

Within seconds she blew the cones and we stopped, and I let her reset the cones with her father, look over the scene and take a breath.

When she was behind the wheel again I resumed. "Now, look at the radio again. Look at the buttons, think about how they function, what they do, and what you have to do without being able to look at them."

"Got it," she said a minute later.

"Okay, eyes closed. Now, tune in five stations, and see your actions in your mind's eye while you do it."

She set about tuning them, and did so quickly.

"Now, open your eyes and reset them, retune five more stations, and this time, look around out there, everywhere but inside the car."

She did it, and a little faster this time.

"Okay, now back into the circle. Once you've got a nice smooth turn going, retune back to your five favorites."

It didn't take her a minute.

"Okay, now out of the circle, loop around and re-enter, only going in the opposite direction this time."