The Secrets of Flight (23 page)

“Oh, Jane.” Aunt Andie rolled her eyes. “This isn't about what you want; it's about what Mom wanted. So don't be such a martyr.”

“Do you even know what it's like to work hard?” Mom asked. “To not have Mommy and Daddy pay for everything?”

“I've supported myself for years!”

“You can't even pay the rent on freezer space for your goddamn eggs!”

“Stop it!” I shrieked, bringing my hands to my ears. The book of poems slid off my lap and hit the deck, literally. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

There was a moment of silence, most likely of the stunned variety, before my mother said, “Elyse, honey—”

“If you don't have anything nice to say just shut. The fuck. Up!” I screamed.

The beer in Ray's hand seemed frozen halfway to his lips, and for a second I wasn't sure if there was a wave about to break over my head. I glanced behind me, at the rolling, dark water, and then back at Ray, still watching me with a silly grin on his face. Then he raised his beer bottle, as if in salute, and said, “Here, here.”

Aunt Andie stood up and began pacing the deck—or more like stumbling the deck, as the boat kept up its nauseating roil.
The breeze had escalated to a full-fledged, wet wind, and my stubby ponytail was whipping in the air.

“Watch it!” Mom said, when another lurch sent Aunt Andie tripping into her lap.

“I
am
watching it!” Aunt Andie said, untangling herself.

“Ladies, I'm just gonna toss this out there, but seeing the two of you together right now, you're actually a lot alike.” They turned and fixed their eyes on Ray, who was pointing back and forth between them with his beer bottle. “You both do this thing when you're concentrating where you look like you could kill whatever it is you're focusing on.” They continued to stare at him, until he slowly lost his smile. “Maybe I'll . . . go check on those permits.”

Mom waited until he'd ducked down below to say, “Elyse, I'm sorry. I know this is hard—”

“Don't apologize to me, apologize to each other!” I shouted, trying to make myself heard in the rising wind. With each pitch of the boat, my stomach bobbed up in the back of my throat.

“She's right.” Aunt Andie slumped onto the cushion across from Mom and exhaled. “Look, Jane, I'll pay you back as soon as I can.”

“This isn't about the money!” my mother said. “This is about Mom loving you more than she loved me!”

Aunt Andie craned her neck forward. “Are you—kidding?”

“You think if
you
had a baby, and your husband was diagnosed with cancer, Mom would've moved over a thousand miles away to party in Key West? I don't think so. She would've stuck around and helped you raise it. She would've been there for you. She was always there for you.”

“I'm a mess. I've always been a mess. You've always had your shit together. She knew you'd be okay.”

I was relieved they'd switched from fighting to talking; now if only I could push a button and make the boat stop its roller-coaster ride. The shore seemed so far away.

“Have you ever heard that story about the Prodigal Son?” Mom said. “There's the irresponsible son, who goes out and blows through his parents' inheritance partying like a rock star? And then there's the other son just working the farm, sweating in the hot sun and doing the right thing, and then his little brother gets home, and he's broke, and they throw him a goddamn party? It always seems like the wrong brother gets the fatted calf.”

“I think the point is that God always welcomes you back, no matter what you've done,” Ray said, coming up from down below.

Mom blinked. “Is that the point?”

“Jane, your whole life is the fatted calf,” Aunt Andie said. “You got the guy, the house, the kids, the career.”

“I have a little bit of everything,” Mom agreed. “And I am in pieces.”

When my mother began to weep, Aunt Andie put her arms around her shoulders and squeezed, murmuring apologies into my mother's ear, only the wind was taking away Aunt Andie's words, as the boat kept rising and falling. I wished Holden would've held me like that and told me he was sorry. I wished Daddy would come back home, and Grandma were still here. Sobs started to well up inside me, but when I opened my mouth to howl, the only sound that came out was vomit, spewing all over the deck.

“Whoa! Man down! Man down!” Ray said, quickly setting down his beer.

I hurled again, only this time the wind blew it back in my face. Aunt Andie and Mom—showered with stomach acid rain—shrieked from somewhere behind me.

“Oh my God! Elyse! Are you all right?” Mom asked, all concerned. Brownish, yellow puke was splattered everywhere; Aunt Andie was wiping it off the box of Grandma. “Oh, sweetie . . .” Mom said, smiling in spite of herself.

“I'm not feeling so good,” I said, woozily, stumbling back and forth with the boat. My front felt sticky with puke, but when Ray handed me a towel, I automatically started wiping off the deck cushions.

“Aw, buddy, that towel's for you. If you feel like you're gonna throw up again, maybe don't aim right into the wind.”

“You feel better now?” Aunt Andie asked, as Mom scooted next to me and wrapped me up in a new, fresh towel, and I nodded, feebly. “Wow. I haven't been puked on since Emmett Socoletti drank too much at prom,” Aunt Andie added, and I felt Mom's shoulders shaking with laughter, even while she was hugging me.

“He drank something red—grain alcohol and Kool-Aid, right? You should've seen the front of her dress. Grandma thought she'd been stabbed,” Mom said, and she and Aunt Andie cracked up, giddy tears rolling down their cheeks.

It seemed hard to believe this was the miraculous reunion designed by Grandma when my eyes stung and my throat burned. But then again, it had been years since I'd seen Aunt Andie and Mom laugh at the same time.

“What do you say we head back, kiddo?” Ray asked me.

“What about Grandma?” I asked, just as swell of wave sent the bow of the boat crashing down and the box of Grandma toppled right off the side and into the ocean.

Mom jumped up with a yelp, and Aunt Andie made some weird sort of utterance—almost like a moan—and even Ray stood there, his mouth sagging open as he scratched his head. I joined them at the rail and peered into the green water. It was amazing how quickly the wooden box had been swallowed. The ashes made tiny explosions under the surface of the sea. The four of us stared at the water for a long time as if the ocean were one of those Magic Eight Balls, and we were waiting for an answer.

“Can we go home now?” I finally asked.

Ray nodded slowly. Then he moved back to the steering wheel and fired up the engine.

1945

F
ive months after leaving Beacon Street, I am in New York hanging clothes to dry on the fire escape outside my window and half-watching the children playing stickball in the street when I notice Mrs. Prospero, a perpetual fixture on the stoop of our building, chatting with a woman on the street below. I squint and then gasp, realizing belatedly that the woman in the checkered dress with the velvet hat who's been talking to Mrs. Prospero for the last five minutes is none other than my own mother.

“
Mama!
” I call, but she doesn't seem to hear me. Mrs. Prospero nods her head and opens the door to our building, so I climb back in the window and slam it shut. I have eight flights. Eight flights until Mama crosses the threshold into my new, married life; eight flights to hide everything. Suddenly frantic, I toss clothes into the closet and dishes into the sink. In the
bedroom, I slip off my penny loafers and then bounce across the mattress to reach for the crucifix hanging over the bed. After shoving the wooden Jesus into a drawer of my night table, I rush back into the kitchen again, where Mrs. Prospero's voice is trailing in from the hall. She's saying something about what a fine couple we are, so nice to have as neighbors, how proud of us Mama must be—a son-in-law who's going to be a doctor! I unlatch three locks and then stop, take a deep breath, and push my little gold cross under my ruffled blouse. Then I fling open the door and smile and thank Mrs. P before quickly pulling Mama—who's still panting from the steps—into the apartment.

“You're here!” I say, hugging my mother before latching the door behind me. Her face looks older and wearier than when I left last spring, and her hair more gray. “Why didn't you tell me you were coming?” I add, breathless.

“I sent you a letter.” Her dark eyes dart around like dragonflies, looking for a lovely place to rest on, as she unbuttons her wool coat. I would tell her that the letter just arrived yesterday, that I'm still in the middle of writing her back, proposing I visit her in Pittsburgh rather than put her up in our tiny apartment right now, but Mama keeps peering about as if searching for something. I show her the tiny space like a real estate agent hoping to make a sale. It's a one-bedroom apartment with a bathtub in the living room. The entire tour takes about a minute.

“. . . And this is where Rita will sleep,” I say, cracking the door to our bedroom and then quickly closing it again, suddenly self-conscious about the unmade bed, the impropriety it represents rather than sloppiness. Since we eloped last spring,
I still have the feeling that Mama doesn't believe Sol and I are actually married.

“But that's your room,” Mama says. “She can't stay in there.”

“Sol and I will sleep in the living room,” I say.

“Where? In the bathtub?” she asks, and I manage to laugh as if she's joking.

Moving back toward the stove, I put on the kettle without even asking if she wants tea. “Once Sol has finished his training, we'll be able to move to Wakefield—still the Bronx, but there are three-bedroom houses with yards. I already saw where she'll go to grade school. And I put in an application at Queens College. When I finish my degree I can get a job teaching English.” This is my new, practical plan since piloting is no longer an option.

Mama sinks into a kitchen chair, slides some bobby pins out of her hair, and removes her hat. When she doesn't say anything for a while, I wonder if she's still thinking about the unmade double bed in our room or how we will all fit. Sol has half a mind to ask if Rita can stay with Mama and Uncle Hyman a few more years, just until we move out of the city, but I'm afraid that if we put it off, she'll never let my niece come join us.

“Where
is
Sol?” Mama finally asks, glancing around.

“The library. He has to study all the time,” I say, slipping my hands into my pockets to hide their sudden trembling. “He's really looking forward to having Rita come and live with us. He wants to have a big family.” I turn and meet her eyes. “How is she?”

At least that gets her talking. She chats about Sarah's daugh
ter, who loves to read and draw and wants to be a writer someday. Frankly, I'm distracted. At any moment Sol might come striding through the door, and I want to warn him up front that Mama is here. She might wonder why his old clothes are spattered in paint and Sol, never inclined to lie, might tell her he's been helping the Lutherans paint their new fellowship hall, which still strikes me as odd: enlisted to work for the church on their Sabbath? When do they rest? I sit down next to my mother and let go of the breath I didn't realize I was holding.

“You look well,” Mama says, without a trace of scrutiny in her voice, which makes me relax for a second, until she adds quietly, “Your neighbor, the woman in the hall . . . why did she call you Mary?”

“I—don't know.” The kettle starts to howl, so I jump up to take it off the burner. “I introduced myself when we first moved in, and she must've misheard me, and—I keep meaning to correct her but it seems too late now. She's been calling me Mary for months.” From the cupboard, I take the saucers down before rattling the teacups into place on top.

“And Sol? Has she been calling Sol ‘Thomas' for months as well?”

My heart seems to stall in my chest. I swallow and turn.

Mama reaches down into her pocketbook then and takes out a letter—addressed to her and Uncle Hyman—which she hands to me. It's from Sol's mother and in it, she reveals everything: how Sol changed his name to get into medical school, how ever since we eloped and moved to New York we have been acting as gentiles, and how they are in despair. Sol is dead to them; they have lost their only son, and Hannah, the older brother she looked up to. “Is this true?” Mama asks, and finally
I understand why she's shown up unannounced: she wants to catch me in the lie of my life—unless it's the opposite, and she's here to reassure herself that there isn't a bit of reality in that letter. Either way, she has to see for herself.

I shake my head, but my eyes are giving me away, wide with fear and guilt and shame.

“Because I can't have Rita wrapped up in your lies.”

“Nothing's changed,” I say. “It's just a name on a paper to get around the quotas.”

“They're lifting the quotas now!” Mama says, which makes me think of Sol telling me just last week about the clinical trial for streptomycin.
What good is a cure when she's already gone?
“You do read the newspapers, don't you?” Mama adds, reminding me of my sister. “You realize the Jews were kept in camps, marched into—”

“I don't want to hear about it! I don't want to talk about it!” I say.

“Who are you?” Mama says, leaning forward. “What is your name?”

“You know who I am,” I say, looking down at my hands.

“Think of Papa,” Mama says, her voice quiet and pleading.

I think of my father. In my mind, he is young again, building the
sukkah
for the festival of Sukkot, working outside in his undershirt. How young and strong he looked, wielding his hammer for hours in the hot sun. When he finally finished, we drank lemonade under the flimsy roof covered in green branches, and I showed him the story I'd just written about a little girl who could fly through the seasons without a plane. He read without pausing and then looked up from my pages.
“I built a flimsy little hut,” he said, pointing to the walls of the
sukkah
. “But you, Miriush—you've built a whole house with your words.”

I tell Mama that I think of Papa often. “I imagine them together—Sarah and Papa. I'm sure they're together.” Then my cheeks burn when Mama glances up at me. She knows. She knows there's a cross under my shirt.

“I don't want you taking this road,” she says, and her eyes are shiny with tears, which reminds me of the last time she almost cried—in the weeks after Papa died, when she'd found a library book that I'd drawn a picture in. “Look what you've done, Miri,” she kept repeating, her voice breaking with disappointment. “How are we going to pay for this?”

She never loved Uncle Hyman, I realize now. She married him so we would still have a home after Papa's death. Then she gave up her own dreams, whatever they were, to send me to college and then to flight school. Surely she wanted more out of life than a clean house.
Look what you've done, Miri.

I want to cry in her arms and be held. I want her to promise me that I will be safe no matter what my name is. But of course I don't, and she can't.

“This is just a means to an end. It won't last forever.” I don't tell her the whole truth, which is that I don't even know what I believe anymore. I am caught in the shadow of two worlds, feeling cold and uncertain.

“Some choices are irrevocable,” Mama says.

I
DON
'
T FULLY APPRECIATE THE WEIGHT OF HER STATEMENT UNTIL
after she's gone back home and the envelopes, scrawled with my
own handwriting across the front, start to arrive one by one—unopened and marked “Return to sender.” It must be Uncle Hyman's idea to cut me off, I decide, which makes me more determined. Every Wednesday, I send out another letter like a heartbeat, letting her know I'm still alive. I imagine Rita prying open the mailbox and the thrill of seeing her own name, so I address one to Margarita Glazier. Inside, I write that I love her, and I can't wait for her to live with me, and for two, whole glorious months the letter doesn't come back, but then a box arrives from Pittsburgh. In it I find my beloved Patsy doll, every card I've ever made for Mama, the letters I sent to Sarah from flight school, and the last eight weeks' worth of correspondence. The letter I wrote to Rita is right at the top of the stack, still sealed.

I
WAIT UNTIL
J
UNE OF THE FOLLOWING YEAR, 1946, TO TAKE THE
train back to Pittsburgh. Sol offers to go with me for moral support, but I need to go alone, to make Mama forgive me and to claim Sarah's little girl for my own.

Walking from the trolley on Forbes to Murray Avenue, I pass the candy store, and the butcher, and the five-and-dime, noticing glances and smiles along the way from the shopkeepers and pedestrians, anyone who likes the sight of a young pregnant woman in a sundress. I smile back as if I'm still wearing the uniform, hoping that motherhood is what I've been missing and not just the sky.

My last flight took place a year and a half ago on a sunny day in Houston. (How often is life like that, where it's only after you look back that you realize it's over—that no matter how many times you walk outside on a clear day and think,
Today is a good day to fly,
you've already taken that final flight?)
I round the corner of Beacon Street where boys are playing stickball and swinging their yo-yos and mothers are walking their baby carriages, and girls are playing hopscotch and then I huff and puff up the hill toward the narrow, falling-down, three-story colonial that, in my mind, is still home.

After unlatching the metal gate, I make my way down the sidewalk to the front porch, when a harried blond woman sees me and gasps.

“Miriam?” she asks, stricken, as she lays a hand over her heart.

“Mrs. Byrd?” I ask, equally startled. Have I wandered into the wrong yard?

“You're . . .” she trails off, speechless, looking me up and down.

My hands fly up to my pregnant belly. “Almost six months along—I'm married now,” I quickly add. “We just had our year anniversary in May.” It occurs to me that is the longest conversation I've had with my former next-door neighbor.

“Congratulations,” she sounds out slowly. When she nods, her hair swishes back and forth. “I was just leaving some ginger bread for your mother,” Mrs. Byrd adds hastily, as if I've just caught her leaving some Christian literature wedged in the screen door. “Is this a surprise?” she says, finishing her descent down the front porch steps.

“A—surprise?” I ask, with a glance at my belly, before I realize she's talking about my visit. “A bit of one, yes.”
On both accounts.

“Well, it's wonderful to see you looking so—
well!
” She rushes past me, down the walk. “Tell Rina I'll stop by another time. I didn't want to wake her up.”

Since when is my mother
“
Rina
”
?
I wonder, glancing at my watch. And it's ten in the morning.

Inside, the house is shockingly quiet, save for a multitude of clocks measuring out their discordant ticks as I step from room to room. “Hello? Anyone home? Mama?” Still clutching Mrs. Byrd's ginger bread, I make my way up the stairs to Mama's room thinking,
She's sick, she's dying, she never got my letters—it was Hyman who sent them back
. Except that inside her room, the bed is empty and neatly made, and her night table is free of medicines; there's only a deck of cards for playing solitaire. Fanning myself in the stuffy air, I move across the hall and push open the door, as thoughts of Sarah come flooding back. “This was our room,” I whisper to the baby inside me. It's still set up for a girl: the pink carpet, Sarah's Patsy doll on one of the bedspreads, the paintings of rainbows and horses. I think of our nighttime whispers in the dark, during the air raids, and the secrets we exchanged and kept. I consider leaving the journal and stuffed bear I've brought for Rita on one of the beds, until the sound of footsteps overhead startles me into leaving.

I head back to the hallway, just as Mama comes down the attic steps. Even in her housecoat, I can see that she's thinner than the last time I saw her. She stops short when she sees me. “
Miriam?
” she asks, unmistakable horror in her voice. “Did anyone
see
you?” It's only then that I understand why Mrs. Byrd was so shocked: she must've been told I was dead.