Flying Lessons

by Peggy Webb

  I hear the bathroom door creak open, then quietly shut, before Howard sneaks stealthily into the other bed.

  “Well…good night, Elizabeth.”

  If I open my mouth for one word, even good night, I’ll get on a roll again about Jenny and not be able to stop, so I don’t say anything.

  Maybe my attitude has to do with menopause. Along with PMS, it gets blamed for everything else, so why not this? Instead of explaining what’s wrong I could just say, Don’t mind me, I’m menopausal.

  Jane says when hers started, she completely lost interest in sex. Since Howard obviously has, life would be simpler if that had happened to me; but oh no, I have to be the one in a million who gets a jolt to the libido.

  “I know you’re awake over there,” he murmurs.

  Clearly Howard’s not done talking, but you can bet your bottom dollar he’s not trying to start anything exciting, or even halfway interesting. I give a loud snore to prove him wrong.

  “Tomorrow we’ll get an early start,” he adds.

  Now I’m trapped. Since I’m pretending to be snoozing I can’t ask, How early? Instead I squeeze my eyes shut and fall heavily into the blessed oblivion of sleep.

  Howard wakes me up while it’s still dark outside.

  “We’ve got a thousand miles left to drive, Elizabeth, and I’d like to make it tonight.”

  In the motel’s bad lighting his skin looks yellow, and the lank strands he tries to comb over his bald spot hang around his ears like silvery noodles. He looks like a grieving man who has suffered a horrible loss. And maybe he has.

  Maybe we all lose things that are precious to us when we stop paying attention.

  Look at Howard and me, enemies on opposite sides of the bed. We’ve lost us. We’ve lost sight of what’s dear and wonderful in this life, this marriage, this family. We’ve lost fun and laughter and joy and conversation and respect and connection. But most of all, we’ve lost love.

  Of course that could be fatigue talking, but still when I climb out of bed, full of loss and my own culpability, I’m carefully cheerful and helpful, determined to be the kind of helpmate a hurting man needs. Like that quintessential steel magnolia, Scarlett O’Hara, I tell myself today is a new day, and I decide to make it a good one. No more bickering in the car. No more guerilla tactics that give Howard a headache and me indigestion.

  Oh Lord, I already have a stomachache. That’s what I get from an overdose of junk food and too much introspection. Today I’m not going to think a single, soul-searching thought…except this: I ran all the way to Florida and all I changed was my weight and my hair. Howard came after me and all he changed (temporarily) was the clothing he wore. Externals. We thought by changing appearances, we could change everything.

  How foolish. How shallow. Real transformation starts on the inside and slowly works its way to the surface. It’s like making a pot of soup: the aroma wafts upward only after all the ingredients are mixed and stirred and simmered.

  “I suppose if I suggest an Egg McMuffin, you’re going to want a Hardee’s sausage and biscuit,” Howard says.

  “Truce.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes. I’m tired and grouchy and my stomach hurts. I don’t want to fight. Actually, I never did, Howard. All I want is us to make sure Jenny’s going to be okay, and then give her some space to grow up.”

  “Both of us grew up by the rules, and we turned out all right.”

  “No, we didn’t, Howard. I’m fifty-three years old, and I don’t have the least idea who I am.”

  “You’re my wife and the girls’ mother, that’s who you are.”

  How can he dig around in other people’s heads to extract the perfect truth and not have the slightest clue what goes on in his own family?

  Remembering my resolution not to fight, I just sit still while he pulls into Hardee’s (aha!) and orders breakfast at the drive-through window. While he’s explaining how he wants two biscuits with sausage and eggs, jelly added, and one with only sausage, no jelly, I wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t married Howard.

  For one thing, I wouldn’t be sitting bleary-eyed in a car trying to keep him from destroying our relationship with Jenny. Of course, I wouldn’t have Jenny, or Kate, either, for that matter. Nor my precious Bonnie.

  But I might have had other children. I might have married Jerry Luther, the high school quarterback who took me to the senior prom, and had his twin boys. He went on to play pro ball and he still has all his hair. True, his muscles don’t look real. On the way home from the last class reunion, Howard asked me if I thought they were implants, and I said, “What in the world does it matter? He still has a wide-open smile and the kind of personality that naturally attracts people.”

  “Yeah, women,” Howard muttered.

  That’s the only time I ever saw him jealous.

  I picture myself as Mrs. Luther, sitting in a reserved seat at the Astrodome, cheering my husband as he makes his team’s winning touchdown. Of course, Jerry’s no longer playing ball. He’s too old, but I know that he and his wife—his third, I think, and far too young for him—travel all the time. Perhaps if I were Mrs. Luther we’d be on our way to China, our good walking shoes packed so we could traipse along the Great Wall, admiring the exotic view.

  Or I might not have married at all. If I hadn’t met Howard, I might have continued my breaking-away-from-Aunt-Bonnie-Kathleen Bohemian ways and ended up in a loft in New York playing with the Philharmonic and writing lovely Pachelbel-like symphonies on my much-admired rooftop garden.

  Thinking what might have been doesn’t change what is. That’s something I’m going to have to figure out, probably the hard way. Looking on the bright side, I have a thousand miles to Arizona and fifteen hundred back to decide what I’m going to do about my currently untenable situation.

  CHAPTER 17

  “Do I still know how to dance, even when there’s no music?”

  —Beth

  “Mom! You look great.” Jenny races into my arms and then leans back to get a closer look. “Your hair’s cool.”

  Jenny’s own hair is streaked purple and blue and her skin is tanned the earthy color of the gigantic rocks that surround us. We’re in the parking lot of a restaurant perched high atop rocky red bluffs near a vortex. Typically, she chose to meet us here instead of in our hotel room at the Comfort Inn.

  Although Howard complained about her forcing us to drive another ten miles out of our way after driving fifteen hundred, he agreed because he knows she could have refused to see us altogether.

  Jenny’s a free spirit with a heart-connection to the Earth, something Howard may never appreciate about his younger daughter. And truth to tell, this is partially my fault. As compensation for not having more to say about Kate’s upbringing, I took over Jenny’s and shut Howard out. No wonder he never bonded with her the way he did with Kate.

  He gets a cooler greeting from her, an A-line hug that puts a polite distance between them. Afterward we say hello to the Clark boys and Jenny introduces us to their aunt Angel.

  This is another of Jenny’s clever ideas, bringing her support team, knowing full well that her father would never make a public scene. In the company of a virtual stranger, he’s more likely to agree, however grudgingly, to her bold new plans for the future.

  “It was nice of you to come all this way to check on Jenny,” Angel Clark says, leaning across the table, openly friendly and smiling.

  “We’re her parents,” Howard says, and I immediately try to smooth over his abrupt, almost-rude statement.

  “What Howard means is that we want to make sure Jenny has everything she needs and that her staying with you won’t be an inconvenience.”

  Howard kicks me under the table, but it’s easy to ignore him because I’m fascinated by the woman he said probably grew pot in her backyard and hung out with criminal types. Maybe she does grow pot (I haven’t seen her place yet), but I’m willing to bet she also grows culinary herbs and bloomin
g cacti in a gracious garden next to a red-stone water feature.

  She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, with eyes the color of the Mediterranean Sea and white hair pulled into a loose, curly knot on top of her head. In her flowing purple skirt and clunky silver-and-turquoise jewelry, she could be forty or seventy. It’s impossible to tell because she’s one of those ageless women with sculpted lips and cheekbones who make time irrelevant.

  Angel. The name fits her.

  “I’m looking forward to her company,” Angel says. “Dean’s, too. I haven’t had young people in the house in quite some time.”

  I wish she hadn’t plowed so quickly into the assumption that our daughter would be staying, because somewhere between the Mississippi River Bridge and Little Rock, Arkansas, Howard decided that “this Angel person obviously has some sexual issues because she’s never been married and lives out in the desert with nothing but cacti and rattlesnakes to keep her company.”

  “Jenny won’t be staying,” Howard says. “She’s going home with us.”

  “Daddy! How could you?”

  Jenny bolts, and I race after her without even pausing to excuse myself. She’s younger and faster in addition to being well rested, and by the time I clear the door I’m panting.

  It’s all I can do to croak, “Jenny, wait.”

  Luckily my daughter doesn’t lump me in the enemy category along with Howard, because she backtracks and puts her hand on my arm.

  “Mom, are you all right?”

  “Let me catch my breath.”

  “Not here. I don’t want to be around Daddy.”

  “He’s just trying to do what he thinks is best, Jenny.”

  “Yeah. Best for him.”

  She leads me across the parking lot and up a rocky trail toward the top of a sky-saluting bluff, while I stumble along like somebody eighty-five instead of a woman with big plans and plenty of fire left in her belly.

  By the time we get to the top, I have to sit down.

  “Feel that, Mom?” Jenny spreads her arms and lifts her face to the soul-soothing blue of a sky that reaches forever. “Feel the energy? You can reach up and touch your dreams.”

  Oh, my heart hurts with joy. At least we did something right with our daughter.

  “So, tell me about yours, Jenny girl.”

  She plops beside me on the sun-warmed rock, and we link our arms.

  “Well, it’s certainly not what Daddy thinks. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being a waitress. Some of the nicest people I’ve met on this trip are waitresses.”

  I’ve never been prouder of her. She picks up some twigs and starts making a small circle on the rocks—a little altar, I think, to the goddess of dreams.

  “What I really want to do,” she adds, “is be a photographer, and I thought I could stay here till I make enough money to buy a really great camera, and on my days off, I’d see what I could shoot. I mean… Mom…look at this place.”

  She stands up, dusts off her shorts and twirls around as if she’s dancing. And I think she is. I think she’s hearing music that no one else can hear.

  “Isn’t this the most spectacular scenery in the world?”

  I try to see with my daughter’s eyes, to look around me and visualize possibility instead of loss, but all I can see are red bluffs and wide-open spaces.

  My daughter continues dreaming and planning, twirling and talking about a famous photographer Aunt Angel knows. Jenny has the opportunity to learn from him, to find out if photography is really what she wants to do before she goes to college and we spend all that money.

  All of a sudden I see my daughter’s dreams rising out of the vortex-driven winds. I close my eyes and see my own, not as clearly defined, but still beginning to take shape.

  Grabbing my hands, Jenny says, “Don’t you see, Mom?”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Jenny pulls me up, and we spin together on top of the world.

  “You make me want to dance. Even when there is no music.”

  “You’re amazing, Mom.”

  With sunlight and wind choreographing our movements, we twirl in wild abandon, sending forth dreams that spin into a net of hope.

  “Elizabeth!” Howard’s sharp reproof cuts through our joy. “I’m trying to talk sense here, and all you can do is run off. Have you lost your mind?”

  He’s standing there scowling, his disapproval almost palpable. But this time, I will not compromise; I will not negotiate. There’s too much at stake here, both for Jenny and for me. Indeed, for Kate and Bonnie and women everywhere.

  “No, Howard. I’m just beginning to find it.”

  My wings unfurl, and without a backward glance, I jump into the net.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 18

  “If my walls are purple is my soul singing?”

  —Beth

  “I’m leaving you, Howard.”

  The wind is at my back and the dream-inspiring red cliffs of Sedona rise around me, giving me courage. There will be no running away for me this time, no fleeing without prior notice and with only a vague notion of what I want. This time I’m taking a stand.

  While my husband stares at me dumbfounded, I say, “I won’t let you drive Jenny away and ruin her life. She’s staying here, and so am I until I’m absolutely certain everything’s all right. Then I’m flying home, packing up my things and heading to Ocean Springs. And I’m taking the dog with me.”

  “Elizabeth, you’re tired. We’re all tired. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying, Howard.”

  He looks as scared as I feel. Standing there running his hands through his thinning hair, Howard is the picture of frightened dejection.

  “Are you saying you’re leaving me permanently?”

  “I’m going back to get my house in order, but I won’t be returning unless there are some real changes. Not just in you, but in me, as well. If you can accept that, fine. If you can’t, go ahead and do what you have to do.”

  In a last desperate move Howard goes to our daughter and puts his arm around her.

  “Come home with us, Jenny. I know I can act like an overbearing ass…”

  “Daddy!”

  “I’ve heard you call me that, Jenny. And I admit it. Sometimes it’s true.”

  I’m surprised and moved and even a little bit proud of Howard. But, still, I’m not fixing to change my mind. If I don’t take this one last stand, I’ll not only lose myself but something strong and precious for my daughters, as well.

  “Honey,” Howard tells her, “all I want is for you to be safe and get your education and get a good start in the world.”

  Jenny looks toward me for support. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” I say.

  “I’m staying, Daddy.”

  Howard left Sedona that day, but I stayed a week longer getting to know Aunt Angel, my daughter’s boss and new circle of friends and meeting the photographer who is going to mentor her. When I left I was satisfied that, instead of repeating the mistakes of Aunt Bonnie Kathleen—God rest her soul—instead of stifling my child with rules and tight reins, I’d given her a chance to fly.

  And now I’m standing in my own kitchen with my packed bags upstairs while Howard slumps on the bar stool.

  “You won’t change your mind, Elizabeth?”

  “No.”

  He crushes a paper napkin in his fist, unfolds it and refolds it, then stands up and says, “Then I’ll bring your bags down.”

  “Thank you, Howard.”

  “Call me when you get there? Just to let me know you’re safe.”

  I nod, and he trudges upstairs. I can’t stand to prolong this goodbye. By the time he gets to the car with my bags I’m already behind the wheel with Rufus lying on the backseat on his traveling pad.

  When Howard leans in the window I smell his aftershave and have to blink back tears.

  “Drive carefully.”

  “
I will.”

  “And…Beth…I’m not going to do anything in haste…not until you tell me it’s…over.”

  This is the first time Howard has ever called me Beth. That combined with the catch in his voice undo me, and by the time I’m out of the driveway and out of sight, I’m crying. Change is more than hard: it’s heart-wrenching.

  The sunswept cottage by the sea welcomes me. Before I even unload the car I race to the beach with Rufus for a spirit-restoring walk. No warm-ups, no purposeful hurry, just a lovely stop-and-go meandering that lets Rufus sniff every sand dune and allows me to watch as the sun sets over the water.

  Afterward I grab my overnight bag, and we go inside. I put Rufus’s bed beside mine on the rug, and we settle down for the night, two old friends finding comfort in each other’s company.

  The first thing I do the next day is buy red fringed lampshades and buckets of bright paint, and then I wait for Jane’s arrival. She’s in Ocean Springs by two o’clock and in typical fashion, immediately helps me pack Aunt Bonnie Kathleen’s clothes for Goodwill.

  When we stop for a tea and chocolate break, I don’t beat around the bush about what’s on my mind.

  “Maybe I was wimpy not to just go ahead and make a clean break.”

  “No, Beth. A thirty-year marriage is not so easily tossed aside. And besides, what’s the hurry? Redo the house, sell it, rent it, whatever you want, but there’s no need to make a hasty decision that will affect the rest of your life.”

  Aunt Bonnie Kathleen’s plain, functional lamps topped by my sassy new shades are a metaphor for my life: I’ve only halfway emerged into the woman I want to be. I want to recapture joy, rediscover passion. Unless I feel and know those things, how can I give them?

  With my best friend, of course, this is easy.

  “Do you know why I love you?”

  “Maybe,” Jane says, “but a woman always likes to hear these things.”

  “Because you’re always supportive and you always let me have the biggest half of the Hershey’s bar.” I savor a bite of chocolate with almonds before adding, “Oh yeah, and you don’t think my fringed red lamp shades are tacky.”