Driver's Education

by Grant Ginder

  “I went through this phase where I took up new hobbies. About one every two months.” Nancy removes something from her eye—an errant insect, some piece of the night. “I rock climbed at this indoor gym. I grew miniature bonsai trees on my windowsill.”

  “And . . . ”

  “They’d hold my interest in the beginning, they’d be something new. I gave them all up, though. I guess I could never shake knowing what they actually were.” And then, very suddenly, as if she’s just remembering me: “Where are you from?”

  “New York City.”

  “That,” she says, “must be nice.”

  “It’s all right,” I tell her. “It smells a little too much like people and nuts.”

  She half nods, strangely. “And you’re not John Carlisle.”

  “No, because he’s—”

  “Dead. So then why are you here?”

  I say, “I’m a circus performer.”

  She pinches the bare skin on the back of my arm and I jolt the camera. “Knock it off.”

  I rub the reddening skin. “For real. I swing from trapezes. I’m a trapeze artist. You wouldn’t believe how dangerous it is—swinging from the tops of poles and flying into midair. But then, I guess it’s not for everyone.”

  “Tell me something true.”

  “Who says that’s not?”

  “I do.” She leans back into the grass again, dissolving into the green, closing her eyes.

  “Something true,” I repeat. “Okay. All right.” And this is what I tell her:

  • • •

  The Spirit of Columbus was a 1953 model Cessna 180 with an apple-red nose and broad white wings. On March 19, 1964, an Ohio girl named Geraldine Mock took off in the Spirit from the Port Columbus Airport. Twenty-nine days, twenty-two stopovers, and 23,103 miles later, she became the first woman ever to complete a solo flight around the world. She flew east, across the Atlantic to Morocco, dipping over the Arabian Peninsula to India—Calcutta—finally bulldozing the Pacific’s blue until she reached America, until she reached home. It wasn’t an easy trip: Mock flew through blinding sandstorms as she crossed the Sahara. The plane was slammed with lightning and severe weather, both freezing and scalding. Still, she persevered, skating into the record books, stamping her inky thumbprint on history.

  All of this is true and totally verifiable. What’s truer, though: if it hadn’t been for my granddad, she wouldn’t have been the one to do it. There was someone else—another woman—who was poised and ready before her.

  She was a pilot and her name was Charlotte Sparrow—honest to God, that was her name. When my granddad first saw her, she was thirty-two years old. They met almost accidentally at the end of February in 1964, the first time he sailed into Columbus, about a year after he engineered his house of records in Pittsburgh. The sky the evening he arrived was elastic—stretching between red and violet and blue and black—and Lucy was all in. She’d been choking on fumes evaporating in her belly over the past ten miles. He’d been driving her on 161, past New Albany, and then south down 270 when she finally gave up ten miles northeast of the city, outside a box-shaped hangar a stone’s throw from the airport.

  The relationship between my granddad and Lucy wasn’t always an easy ride. Mostly he found her quirks at least amusing, maybe endearing: the way she got ornery on certain dirt roads; the way she griped and bitched on hills that were too steep. There were times, though, when she wasn’t just a handful, but a bona fide pain in the ass. She’d come unglued on a back road in Minnesota, a hundred miles from anything, in the middle of the decade’s worst snowstorm. Every time they crossed Death Valley, her windows would jam. He’d watch the pavement evaporate in underwater waves from behind the melting glass. Damn it, Luce! he’d cry. Of all times!

  But that’s just the way it goes, he’d always tell me. Half of loving someone is being okay with hating her—at least some of the time.

  It wasn’t sleeting and it wasn’t snowing, but they—both my granddad and Lucy—had fallen victim to this particular disposition when she called it quits near that hollow white hangar.

  “This is the way it’s going to be, is it?” he said once she’d stopped, once gravel no longer crunched beneath her tires. They’d been driving for more than seventy-two hours. “You’re something else, Luce. A real piece of work.” And her headlights blinked off. He stepped out onto the road and into the chilled Ohio night. To the southwest, Columbus’s abridged skyline shot up like a set of blunted fingers. He’d never dream of hitting Lucy—neither the wife nor the car—but if there was ever a moment when he wanted to club a tire with his heel, to put a dent in her hood, by God, he said, that was it.

  And so to stop himself from doing something he might regret, he busied his hands. He shoved them into his pockets. Went about digging out a bent pack of Lucky Strikes from the sports coat he was wearing. He had a cigarette pinched between his lips and was poised to light it when he heard a woman say, “What’s the problem?”

  She’d emerged from the hangar without my granddad seeing her, and she wiped her hands with a grease-spotted cloth, cleaning each finger like she was turning a screw. He said she wore a brown bomber jacket with the sleeves pushed up above her elbows; blue jeans with stains cupping the knees. Blond hair clipped at the shoulders. But it was her skin, he said, that got him. The moon that night was the brightest Ohio and the world had seen in sixty years; it had orbited so close to the earth that when you gazed up at it, you’d swear it was a hole that had been punched out of the sky. Cities turned streetlamps off and cars drove with no headlights—there was just no need for them.

  He told me how she was the only thing that was brighter. He told me how she glowed. How she threw out shadows at night. My granddad tipped his hat to her. Chivalry had already started in on its long death by 1964, but my granddad, he was still a man who tipped his hat.

  “It’s this car,” he called out to her. “She’s fed up with me.”

  When Charlotte Sparrow walked toward him, my granddad had to reach for his sunglasses. She popped Lucy’s hood and my granddad combed the hair that snuck out from underneath his hat with three wet fingers.

  • • •

  “My parents were around for that moon,” Nancy Davenport tells me.

  “So you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t remember them saying anything about streetlamps.”

  • • •

  Charlotte Sparrow told my granddad that the problem was the ring gear on the flywheel was damaged. When he asked if he’d be able to get a mechanic to fix Lucy that night, she looked up at the moon and shielded her eyes from its blaze.

  “Not at this hour,” is what she told him.

  She did, though, let him stow the car in the hangar where she kept her plane, another Cessna 180 that she called the Red Lady, after the famous sixteenth-century pirate. They pushed Lucy from the road’s shoulder and across the building’s pebbled lot; they both leaned their shoulders into her thick trunk. Twice she resisted, he told me: she dug her tires into the gravel and pressed her back bumper against their bent knees. So they pushed harder. Once they had her inside, Charlotte covered her with a thick canvas tarp.

  “It’ll be fine here,” she said to my granddad.

  “That your plane?” My granddad pointed to the Red Lady, which wasn’t red, but blue with yellow stripes.

  “It is.”

  “Where is it you fly her?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  In Charlotte’s Chrysler they drove into the city, where they ate dinner, and ordered coffee, and ambled along the trails of Whetstone Park in Clintonville. At midnight, they watched two men play an infinite game of tennis and listened to the ball ponging off the blue-green grass. They briefly joined a picnicking family, who offered them each quarters of a squashed ham sandwich. They walked to a jelly-bean-shaped pond where they fed it to ducks that swam happy and confused in the moon’s dayligh
t. As a mallard gorged himself on a bit of white bread, Charlotte Sparrow explained her around-the-world plans to my granddad.

  “All the way?” he asked her.

  “I’ll be the first woman ever.”

  “That’s really something. When do you leave?”

  “In two days.”

  The mallard swallowed the soggy chunk of sandwich with violent twitches of his head. He fluffed his feathers and shook his beak; he dove beneath the pond’s silver surface.

  “Really something,” my granddad said again.

  Charlotte Sparrow rolled down the sleeves of her bomber jacket. After far too many moments, she said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”

  • • •

  Nancy Davenport rests her blond head against my shoulder and says, “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

  • • •

  He was a criminally easy man to fall in love with, and he loved to fall in love. This was, as he explained it to me, a very real problem. Once, in Memphis, a set of Siamese twins who were connected by their pinkies tied him to their bedposts and showered him with kisses till his skin blistered. When he finally managed to escape (it was while the two girls were showering), they were so desperate to find him that they severed themselves with a paring knife so as to double their search efforts. Another time, in the Florida Everglades, a spurned alligator wrangler of disproportionate strength threw my granddad into the pit that held her most ferocious beast when he politely declined her advances. It would’ve ended terribly had he not managed to charm the gator—a thousand-pound mother of forty-seven dubbed Debbie—as well. That night, when the wrangler refused to grant him use of her telephone to call a tow truck (Lucy, keen to act up at inopportune moments, had come undone again), he pocketed himself between Debbie and her babies, his head rising and falling in time with their scaled paunches as they slept beneath the strange Floridian sky.

  With Charlotte Sparrow it happened as it always did, which was quickly, and with very little warning: a clear sky suddenly darkened, and before he could blink he was up to his knees in love’s slough, wading through it in slow mired steps. He was that sort of person: humble, and a polymath, and above all a hero, but also—also amorous. My granddad loved facilely and adeptly and with fantastic longing. Always, though, there was a feeling—a barely noticeable squeezing near the base of his spine—that reminded him that while his women were dancing and somersaulting through love’s thick muck, he was incapable of giving all of himself. Because all of himself had been reserved for—and had expired with—someone else.

  Whenever he was telling the story and he reached this part, he’d take off his hat and hold it against his chest. “I hope you never have to do that.”

  “Sleep with a family of alligators?”

  “Give all of yourself to someone,” he’d say.

  The day that Charlotte Sparrow was scheduled to fly around the world, she woke up early and poached two eggs for my granddad. He’d stayed there—in her one-bedroom apartment on McKee Street—for the past two evenings. The sun hadn’t fully risen yet, but as he speared one of the yolks and watched as the yellow mess wetted a piece of toast, there wasn’t any need to turn on the kitchen’s lamps: Charlotte sat across from him and the luminescence of her skin was enough to eat by. It was enough by which to read the headlines of the Dispatch to her, to wash his plate and stack it in the cupboard, to kiss the spot where her neck curved into her radiant shoulder.

  He spun her till she faced him. He squinted his eyes and he said to her, “We’d better get you to the airport.”

  And her smile became tarnished, falling at the corners of her mouth. “Yes,” she said. “We better.”

  Instead, though, they watched the sun rise from a small oval window above the bathroom sink—the only one that faced east. It painted the bathtub tangerine and Charlotte Sparrow told my granddad she’d be the first woman to fly around the world tomorrow.

  “It’s not as though it’s going anywhere,” she said while the dawn fought to be brighter than she. “The world I mean.”

  But she didn’t become the first woman to fly around the world the next day, because on the next day there was always the next day. Each morning she would cook my granddad eggs—fried, poached, scrambled, sunny-side up. Each morning he would bring the Dispatch close to her skin and read the headlines aloud; each morning he kissed the same soft groove in her neck, where eventually he left a darkened tattoo of his lips. And after they had crowded into her bathroom to watch the world wake up, there was always this: there was always tomorrow. Until two and a half weeks later, on March 19, when Geraldine Mock guided the Spirit of Columbus out from the hangar next to Charlotte’s—and suddenly, there wasn’t.

  They’d read about Jerrie’s pending departure (she was known in certain high-flying circles as Jerrie) the morning before, and they drove to Port Columbus to watch her lift her wheels from the earth. While the previous nineteen mornings my granddad had been in Columbus had been cloudless—the sky so clear it looked breakable—dawn on the nineteenth was particularly overcast. The fog formed a low ceiling that suffocated the light, and without the competition, Charlotte’s skin dulled.

  Small crowds had gathered near the runway from which Jerrie Mock took off. They grouped together in shapeless clumps of hats and knit sweaters and gloves, and when the red and white plane spun and vanished up into the fog, they cheered and they stretched their hands toward the sky. They waved signs and banners bearing slogans painted in stark letters. Messages like: GOD SPEED, JERRIE. Or YOU’RE FLYING HIGH, MOCK! And, YOU’RE MY HERO, CHARLOTTE! JERRIE!

  Charlotte watched the spectacle from the open entrance of the hangar while my granddad waited inside. He tripped about in the half dark and listened to the echo of his footsteps say things to one another in the empty space. When he came upon Lucy and slipped a hand under the canvas tarp that covered her, her hood was cold and lifeless and sticky with a wet coat of dust. The fresh mud that’d been caked on her wheels when he first arrived in the city had crusted over and fallen off; it lay like ash at the base of the tires.

  “Well,” Charlotte said to him from behind. “That’s that.”

  He turned to face her and even though he could hardly see her through the fog and the dark and the dullness of her skin, he was 99 percent certain their expressions mirrored each other. Because he knew that while loving someone means hating them part of the time, it also means quietly resenting them for keeping you from all the things you were supposed to do.

  That afternoon he found a mechanic who’d fix the ring gear on Lucy’s flywheel, and the next morning he told Charlotte, sweetly and absolutely, that he was leaving.

  They stood on the bank of the same pond where they’d fed ducks ham sandwiches in Whetstone Park. They’d rolled their pants up so the cuffs pinched just below their knees; their toes sank into the silt as they tossed pieces of crust to the mallard. From across the pond another younger duck made a move for a slice of bread and the mallard squawked and flapped and lunged for the intruder’s neck.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Or, maybe not. I suppose the problem is I understand, but I also don’t.” Then: “But what will I do?” She’d just begun crying when she asked my granddad this.

  He tore the heel of a loaf in two and hurled both pieces to the birds. “You’ll fly. You’ll go around the world twice.”

  “Will I?” Then: “No. No, I don’t think I will.”

  She continued to cry and the tears turned from streams to tributaries to full-blown rivers. They fell from her cheeks to the crooks of her arms to her knees, where they splashed—rapids hitting boulders—waterfalling into the green pond. The torrent persisted. My granddad held Charlotte while the ducks fled the scene. The pond’s surface rose, bubbling and spilling over the park’s trails and lawns, over its eleven thousand rose bushes. She cried until the Olentangy River flooded, swallowing the
bridge that crossed it along West Broad Street. And the residents of Columbus bailed Charlotte Sparrow’s tears out of their homes with plastic buckets as she said to my granddad, “If I can’t grow old with you, I don’t want to grow old.”

  So, she didn’t.

  • • •

  Nancy Davenport adjusts her dress, and when she speaks it’s directly into my neck and it gives me chills. “She didn’t what?”

  “Grow old.”

  • • •

  Over the years, my granddad made a habit of swinging into Columbus to pay visits to Charlotte Sparrow, and each time she looked exactly the same, with the exception of her skin, which would never glow again. In the 1970s, while the flesh on my granddad’s hands began to loosen around the knuckles, her fingers stayed smooth, uncallused, porcelain. In the 1980s, when the first streaks of grey found their way into his auburn hair, hers stayed blond, ungrown, unchanged. In the 1990s: no new freckles and no new spots.

  The last time my granddad was in Columbus was in the spring of 2002, from what he’s told me. His bones had become dry and weak, and six weeks earlier he’d snapped his ankle during a nasty fall—an injury that left him walking with a steel cane for half a year. Charlotte held his arm as they made their way to the pond, the taut young muscles of her bicep flexing each time he tripped. When the ducks—who were not the ducks of 1964, but rather the duck children’s children’s children, who’d been told stories by their predecessors—saw Charlotte and my granddad approaching, they took to the sky.

  “You’ve got to stop this,” he said to her when they reached the pond’s edge. “You’ve got to get older. You’ve got to change.”

  She told him, “I think I’ve forgotten how.”

  • • •

  There’s more to the story. There’s the part about how every time my granddad would leave Columbus, Charlotte Sparrow would flood the Olentangy with her tears—because while my granddad was humble and a polymath and amorous, he was also incredibly tear inducing, particularly for the women who loved him.