He had buckled her in and was gesturing for her to lean forward, raising the cold metal teeth to loosen the tawny slip of strap, and she felt his fascination with her was representative of the world’s in general, an endorsement of her future.
“I’ll be helping you up. The propeller turns left, so you’re always up against a bias. The right rudder needs more from you.”
This was the last thing he said before slipping the headset over her and turning the plane on. Sound became something she could see and feel, the trembling altimeter alive with it, her body made smaller by the roar. In her ear on the radio his speech was clipped, only every third word and even that flattened.
—Rudders, was all she heard him say, spoken like an invective, so she put her feet down, mimicking the alternating pressure he had demonstrated with his hands, and she kept the fat of her palm on the throttle where he had arranged it, pulling it when he pointed. Soon the blades of the propeller were not separate and then she could see, the way she could the color of her own hair—the very edge of what one could know for certain—that the ailerons on the wings were down. They were two thousand feet up before she looked to him and saw that his knees were loose, his boots far from the ridged pedals. She had been flying alone. To keep from laughing he had a knuckle in his mouth. He threw a raised thumb in her general direction.
—To the asylum, then? she said. —Lunatic, she said, pulling the column back. In the half-second delay it took for what she’d barked to reach him in his headset, she surveyed what was spread below her. Everything was the color of fruit about to turn, the light, the two-room folk houses the size of buttons.
—Your first takeoff. Knew you could do it. Feather for your cap. Rudders.
He took over soon after and flew the rest of the way, keeping them in turns for longer than was necessary. —Birthday swim, he asked, when they kissed the coastline, yawning, unmoved by the total blue.
She would have told Rebecca Fuller about the two different colors of his eyes, then how much sense he made in a plane. How what she had noticed before—the slightness of his movements, how he drank a beer without tipping a glass a millimeter more than was necessary—was part and parcel of how he moved the control column, barely, the nose rising or dipping without her noticing, the change in altitude something she only sensed after.
She imagined relating this to Rebecca Fuller, how she would throw her open palms up by her ears, equally aghast, I know, I know, when Rebecca, pink with jealousy, upbraided her. They’d be sitting cross-legged, mirrors of each other in posture, devouring the last of something, rice pudding, applesauce, sharing a spoon. In girlhood you pretended you were part of the same body, the same itches and cravings. It was how you dealt with the pain of having to inhabit one.
Even in her imagined confession, there were things Fay could not tell Rebecca Fuller. It would be necessary to frame the transgression in romance, something filmic and orchestral, so she would exclude what happened after in the bed of his truck. There were the women men loved, Fay was coming to understand, those whose voices in the kitchen over running water were familiar, whose handwriting they could forge if pressed, and there were women like her. Reclassification, she suspected, was impossible. There was no door between those rooms, though you could hear each from the other.
He put down a sleeping bag and directed her so that she was on all fours, her overalls tugged down around her calves, twisting her back onto him like she was some stubborn part of a machine, necessary but prone to glitch. When she threw her head back to see his changed face, she saw that the legs against his, the waist he encircled with his trim fingernails—her legs, her waist—could have belonged to anybody.
6.
He recognized her unhappiness as he would an aging relative, all its expressions familiar, and tried to keep his impatience with it a secret. As his wife was, and his mother though she’d never say it, Fay was hurt by the few words he used to sum up his life, certain experiences she might have assumed had carved something away, fashioned him inalterably. What did they imagine? It was no one edict booming from a uniformed chest, no one edifying fluke, a carrier landing on little fuel, the rear hook of his plane barely snapping into the taut steel and preventing his roll into ocean. Even if he wanted to, he could not tell the story of his life.
It was the sum of these hours, eating at other ways he might have gone. It was the model glue, fibrous and salty if you tasted it, left behind on his mother’s stiff embroidered doilies, on fat mugs and tall glasses, on the knobs on the radio and the rubber horn on his bike, in five points on the mesh screen door that led to the backyard. It was the models of planes, flawless, assemblies that took full weeks, which he hung from his ceiling. He watched them as he tried to sleep, how they twirled when a wind came across the flat town of small houses. It was the year he stopped buying them, twelve, so that he could save his dull pennies for flying lessons, and how it starved him to walk past the storefront downtown, the boxes stacked in a tantalizing stagger, inside them the concise instructions, a world explained. It was the job he worked to pay for the lessons, the trembling of his alarm before it was light out, the necessary extension of the wrist as he hurled the bundles, the newsprint now the thing on his fingers, impossible to truly excoriate. Even the bathroom soap bar turned ashy, and at dinner his father cursed this. Your own money, your own damned soap.
It was the veterans who gave him the lessons, men whose sleep never fully left their faces, looking out the thick glass, muttering clipped directions. It was all purchases thought of in terms of the instruction they cut into—an egg cream one-seventh the cost of an hour in the sky, a Jules Verne paperback one-fifth—and almost nothing worth it. He was fourteen, then fifteen, and he lived like a monk, an early bedtime so he’d be rested for his dawn lesson. He had only the most glancing interest in food. Television did nothing for him. He was unmoved by the pinups his peers kept in their lockers.
It was his first solo, announced to him only by the unbuckling of the other man’s belt, a clap on the shoulder, all the air in the cockpit suddenly just his to breathe. No chance to call home first. Pilot’s license, age sixteen. A drunk friend of his father’s spread out in the living room, feet high on an ottoman, swiping at his wet eyes and howling: But he can’t drive my Ford five blocks to the drugstore? He had little interest in the automobile, where it could go and how it got there. He wanted the blue that was spotless and matchless.
It was the package from the Navy, propped up on his mother’s dining table when he came home from school: four years of university, paid, cut in half by three years of service. It was the chalky air he breathed in the low-ceilinged college classrooms where the courses in engineering began at seven, right where they’d left off, so he learned to arrive with the coffee already angry in his system. Tight capitals in graphite, headings and subheadings, scatter diagrams he made to pop with colored pencils, one red and one blue. The other classes he attended like some errant father, squinting to grasp their return on his future, turning away from the heart of the conversation. Friends were a hobby other people had. It was each day closer to the time he would be flying again.
And then he was in training in Pensacola, in the company of other boys who were also always looking up to identify planes, spitting out makes and models, good news and bad. The air in Florida was alarming, thick to an extent that breathing felt like a choice you might forget to make. Add the suit, an inner inch of fluff like what kids wore to careen down snowy hills, the outer shell like tractor tire.
It was his first solo in the Navy, six hundred horsepower, and the difference was an occasion. He wrote in ink in his journal: like the difference between an out-of-tune fiddle and an orchestra pit. When he flew, so far from his Ohio boyhood, he was no longer aware of where his house was, the roof under which his mother was making meals go further with the liberal use of bread crumbs, or his younger sister’s school, where she might be stationed on the blacktop, peering up, hoping to signal to him, moving her arms in elab
orate formations, the meaning of them known only in her little-girl mind.
Alone in the SNJ for the first time, his first monoplane, he heard the gruff strictures of his superiors. He’d made their voices a part of his thinking. Kahn, if you treat a change of altitude like an emergency, then it will become an emergency. When he landed, parking the thing without so much as a bump, disrobing did little to cool him. His whole body was a source of heat, pride bigger for knowing fear. In the cafeteria later, giggling like the children they’d recently been, all the other pilots in his class came at once, drooling to perform this act of tradition. He didn’t protest, didn’t say the tie had been a gift from his Scout leader, a man who had taught him to read stars and carve a tent from snow. He just grinned as the blades of the scissors came in, coruscating, and felt the lightness, the small shift in his weight, as they waved the bottom half of his tie around like just-killed dinner. In his bunk at night in the lined composition notebook he taped it in with two strips he’d borrowed from the office. FIRST SOLO USNAF, WITH APOLOGIES TO ERNIE, it said.
How could he have written that for anyone else? And Korea? He couldn’t have told Elise, who needed the radio on the whole time she slept, what it was to suddenly get your funeral suit cleaned ahead of time, to make a practice of imagining your bunk the one made in the morning and never returned to. That it actually came recommended, from the few older men who would speak about it—that you envision yourself ejecting too late, a soaring, newly soulless thing on fire, practice thinking out the morbid possibilities while on god’s earth so that when the choice came, when the awful moment knocked high over a country not your own, it was not these images you saw but your training that you felt.
If he had told Fay that he once flew over a squadron of Korean officers exercising, that any of his colleagues would have shot or bombed, that he watched the perfect synchronicity of their jumping jacks and couldn’t—if he had revealed this to her, would it have explained anything?
He took from her only what she gave so freely, he told himself, along with certain lies about her youth. She was fourteen years his junior. Experiences only passed over women that young, he thought. Whatever went on between them was something she could afford. He’d be a blip in time, something as small as a dress she’d once worn and only vaguely remembered. A color, a shape. He wasn’t in the way of anything, he thought. All her life was open.
7.
What James Fern wanted, in the weeks movers packed up the Spanish Colonial where he had raised her, was to corner the precise moment Fay had ceased to identify as his daughter. The closer to the minute he could pinpoint it, the further from blame he would feel. He spent this obsession physically, walking often, behaving as though it were a visible imperfection he was going to locate somewhere on the estate, a fissure in the peach stone courtyard. With Christine—he had refused to call her Charlie—the reasons had been much easier to see, a girl from school in her room too late too many times, the two of them caught naked in the orchard by a farmhand sent to check on a busted valve in the water line.
As a Christian I won’t tolerate it, he had said to Christine, fingers steepled, speaking to her in a part of the house that was never used, a sitting room where velvet teal shell chairs surrounded a low glass table. She had been sixteen, brawny but not heavy yet, the pride of the local equestrian chapter, always a little sunburned, a delight to his friends who called her the Wabash Cannonball. A reg’lar combination.
As a Christian I will not tolerate it.
As a goddamn person, she had said, splayed far out on the edge of the chair, her baby fat gone though he couldn’t say when, I cannot help it.
For her last competition the month before, he had given her a six-piece luggage set, monogrammed Peruvian calfskin with brushed nickel padlocks. It was no small irony. He heard her say goodbye to the cat.
It began when Fay was fifteen and Charlie was already six years gone: what came first with her were questions, posed at lunch at the country club, where her food went mostly untouched, watercress fallen, pink ice cream melted. She wanted to know how much her nanny was paid. The maid, the groundskeeper, the gardener, the men who picked their oranges. James caught Fay in town wearing clothing from a box in the attic, his own old Army-issued thermal chopped at the sleeves. Their daughter refused, her last two Christmases at home, to compose a wish list.
In her senior year—she was sixteen then seventeen, had skipped the third grade—the packages from all the Seven Sisters colleges had come like holiday visitors, bringing news from different places, their arrivals staggered until the table was full of them. She asked to borrow his letter opener and brought each to a place outside, a reclining patio chair she liked to drag from among the potted ferns and into the sun on the lawn. He had spied on her with some pride, watching how carefully she held the blade, the glossy brochures she touched lightly so as not to smudge them.
She waited until the last had arrived to cry. They found the congratulatory letters and embossed pamphlets in the waste bin, images of books spread under centuried oaks, lecture halls lit only by sun, stairwells where bobbed girls in pearls linked arms. At first they could not understand the word she was repeating into her pillow in her bedroom, still painted the eggshell lilac she’d chosen as a girl. Scholarship, they mouthed to each other, scholarship? And then when they had heard it clearly there was a kind of dumb relief, a leap to a conclusion about her plans that excluded who she had become. Honey, you didn’t have to apply for a scholarship. They were laughing, clutching at each other’s elbows as she turned over onto her back, why would you apply for, only a thousand a term, her face setting around the hard line of her mouth that was its organizing principle. Everything else about their daughter, the rest of her body on the bed, was flushed, boneless.
The next weeks had been like a deathbed vigil, each of them taking their turns growing simpering and then apoplectic by her locked door. The few times she chose to respond she did so calmly, with the same perfectly turned phrases about the injustice of wealth, and for as many times as he yelled, furious, about how many people dreamed about being in a position like hers, there were twice as many occasions when he stood begging, knocking with one curled finger, bargaining, calling her names he hadn’t since she’d been a giggling figure in tulle on the piano bench at their cocktail parties, peaches, gripping a stick of celery all night like a wand for reasons unknown, daisy, entreating guests to visit her room and collection of abalone shells, my sweet bird. He started to believe that there was a smell coming from his daughter’s room, from her, and this unnerved him beyond all else, that the change in Fay had entered other parts of the physical world. As many times as he asked her to, Claudette could not agree. It was like yeast and also like sap, he told her. Sniff again. One of these evenings he pinned Claudette under him and was rougher than he meant to be. He wanted to make things move, to make her breasts fight their way up to hit her chin. She was in the bath after for a long time.
After a week their daughter emerged for dinner, looking somewhat recognizable, her hair combed, half of it pushed back with a blue headband the width of a pencil. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin and thanked Libett for the posole and looked, again, like a young woman who knew the art of being with people, could recite the relevant Milton or fox-trot across the room.
Claudette’s chignon flashed high as he began to speak, chin sewn to her neck, a hint about her unhappiness he ignored. Had she considered what they talked about, had she decided on a school.
Fay cleared her throat, a womanly noise he couldn’t remember her adopting, and put an elbow on the table and a palm to her jaw, a transgression in etiquette he once would have corrected immediately. Daughter daughter strong and able, take your elbows off the table.
Libett, she called, a name she had known before all others, one she had screamed the summer she’d fallen from the roof, where she’d been going in secret. Her first kiss, eight years old in the pantry, had been Libett’s son Joaquin who did b
eautiful impressions of birds and trains. He had taught her how to put two fingers in her mouth and whistle.
Libett was at her side in a minute. Libett, how is Joaquin, she said. I haven’t seen him in a year I think.
They all knew the answer and Libett tried to leapfrog her confusion at this being spoken, head it off at the pass by saying only, He is well, taking a table brush and sweeping it in a practiced arc to remove any crumbs.
Where is he now, for instance.
There was Brahms on the phonograph, the last light of the day filling the wineglasses. Through the open balcony doors they could smell the ocean, warm and amenable and ignorant of what happened in houses like these. Flanking the dining room, hallways led to rooms that were confections, tasseled bed skirts and oil paintings of mountains, perfect and empty and useless.
She looked like she had the autumn she mastered backgammon, a game he had taught her in the study he forbade anyone else to enter. He remembered her lunula on the felt, white as milk, her fingertips tapping to imagine her next move, her posture, every part of her curved toward the chips and dice and darted fabric. When she finally beat him she did not look surprised.
Where is he now, for instance.
Libett had stopped looking for a task to hide inside of and answered the girl’s question. Resting, I think. He worked today.
Worked? Worked where? She was feigning ignorance like a true criminal, he remembered thinking at the time. She was admitting nothing of what she knew into her eyes.
That’s enough, he said. He was holding his fork with every muscle in his hand, he noticed, maybe every muscle in his body.
For your father. Picking fruit.
I see. And where’s he going to university?
You can clear the plates now, Claudette said. Please. No dessert tonight.
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