by Daniel Riley
Grace offers to do the dishes and ends up cleaning most of the kitchen in the process. Mike finds the flyer, and Suzy describes the encounter on the beach. Mike hates being approached by the born-agains, but he has a different reaction to the language these folks use. The from-scratch-ness of it. The race dynamic. He asks Suzy if he can keep the flyer and she says sure, laughing a big, low laugh like Grace’s.
Mike skates to the record player and drops the needle on Ziggy Stardust, and the three of them sing the chorus and first verse at each turnover. Mike helps clarify some mondegreens by consulting the printed lyrics on the liner notes: the pink monkey bird, the tigers on vaseline—the animal lines. Mike and Grace dance together in the kitchen, and Suzy—hot in the chest and cheeks and shoulders, physically radiating heat from her burns but also puffed up with a sense of domestic harmony—announces over the music that she’s going to get some MoonPies. And in the darkness of the side yard, she retrieves her skateboard and hits the alley. When her board runs out of steam, she drops her bare foot to the road and rows her way onward toward dessert.
Millikan holds the results of the first flight exam till the end of class, and keeps Suzy’s for last. He squints as he hands her the blue book. She hasn’t missed a single question.
“I didn’t even get all these,” Millikan says.
“You should’ve studied harder.”
“You were kidding about the not-being-able-to-read thing, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“I wish I could give you a real prize.”
“Let me sit in the cockpit.”
“You want to sit in the plane?”
“Sneak peek.”
“Um…”
“Fine, nice offer.”
“No,” he says, “hang on. Stick around a sec till things clear out. Nobody else needs to see.”
Ten minutes later he’s helping Suzy into the cockpit. The glove fits. She knows what everything means now, but from a faintly reproduced diagram—a faded mimeo with basic descriptions. She hasn’t put her hands on the yoke before, hasn’t even sat at the simulator. She slides down in the seat and places her sandaled feet on the pedals. She eyes the throttle. What if she just rolled onto the runway and tried taking off? She knows the ground speed at which she’s supposed to pull up, the angle of ascent. She could probably do it. And she could climb to a couple thousand feet, tool around pretty easily. She just might not be able to get back down. That’s how it was in the trees in the yard growing up—she could always get high and then would have to call out for Wayne to provide a couple of arms to leap into.
She imagines herself taking off and failing to land. She plays the whole thing out, just sitting there, dreaming with her eyes open—Suzy up in sunlight with a register like a piccolo, so bright it might make a sound like a dog whistle.
Millikan looks around, a little anxious, and asks her to step down, but she’s still midflight in her mind, plenty of fuel left for the tour over the South Bay, and the thing she thinks when his voice comes into clarity, when she returns to earth, is a simple thought but one that touches her body the way the only thoughts worth having do: This will not be boring.
August is almost gone when she makes a third run, a run that’s weirdly smooth, devoid of the heat. Takeoff and land and swap and takeoff and land. And suddenly she has cash enough not just to move out, but to pay a whole year’s rent if she so desires, with plenty left over for lessons and concerts and beer and pretty much anything else she wants. She keeps the money in an envelope shoved down the leg of a pair of maroon hose she’ll never wear in warm weather. Balled up in the back of her clothing drawer in Mike’s office, looking as though they conceal a severed foot.
Suzy sees an apartment on Twenty-Ninth Street, ten blocks from Mike and Grace, up the hill, in the shadow of the oil refinery. It’s even closer to the airport, in and out with ease, off in a notch of Sela that wedges itself between the beach and the refinery and the butterfly sanctuaries beneath the flight path. It’s a small apartment, but an apartment with a view. There’s a wooden staircase that’s twice as tall as would seem permitted, rickety like an Escher, that leads to the top apartment, a bedroom and bathroom, living room and kitchen, with a long look out over the water, about as high as the hill at Nineteenth, the same view she got on the Fourth before bombing the descent on her skateboard. The thickness of the stroke of neon blue on the horizon is the same weight, and the peninsulas, both visible from this height, are still bookends on the bay. There’s sand in the carpet when she drags a flip-flop from one room into another, but it will never not be there, the agent says. Two hundred bucks a month. More than Grace would ever let her spend. But given the new reality it’s more than affordable. She gives the woman cash and they agree to sign something later. Suzy moves in the next day. And that first night, when the sun goes down, it’s rose gold through the big window without drapes, the sky and the water reflecting each other, blurring their opposition.
“He spent the last few days on the beach thinking they might just stroll up to him,” Grace says.
Suzy’s invited Grace and Mike to dinner at her apartment. She hasn’t bought much furniture yet, but she has a card table and folding chairs and a radio hooked up in the corner.
“He’d heard an interview with Reverend Jones about the new temple downtown and thought he could just sit there in the sand and they’d flock to him to spill the secrets.”
“Suzy made it look so easy…,” Mike says, numb to the ribbing.
“No luck?” Suzy says.
“They’re obviously only ever around when you don’t want them to be,” Grace says.
As Suzy waits for the potatoes to boil, Mike and Grace debate the merits of a vacation to Hawaii, and Suzy finds herself lost in the river of the baseball game on the radio. During an endless at-bat, Vin Scully slips in a Bobby Fischer update. Suzy’s taken interest in the Fischer thing since reading the article about him in Rolling Stone. She follows along in the Times sports section each day, the strange code—almost a Cyrillic-numeric—of the scoreboard: 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6, etc. After seven weeks, Scully says, Fischer has clinched—the first American world chess champion. Reykjavík on the dateline in every newspaper on Earth. A place where American accents are banking some cachet. Reykjavík, a place for Suzy to go. A place to escape to should she ever need it—should she accept a desire to go on vacation with one of those full-$50K envelopes of cash.
After dinner Suzy meets Billy at his house to pick up a payout, and she ends up staying to watch Mark Spitz swim the 100-meter butterfly. Two lengths of the pool, he wins by nearly a second and a half, sets a new world record, his fourth gold and fourth world record of the Olympics. Suzy makes a joke about Owen, Los Sandcrabs’ manager, the one who lost his girl to the fantasy of a world-class athlete. Billy says it’s not funny—he’s still banged up about his ex-lady.
“I wonder,” Suzy says, “if she’s there.”
While Suzy’s on a flight a few days later, the story breaks: eleven Israeli Olympic team members have been taken hostage. That’s what the captain says to the passengers, a move Suzy rules a mistake. She and the girls spend the rest of the flight struggling to answer the questions being asked of them. When they land and she watches the television in the Grand Pacific lounge, she learns she’s not the only person in a bind. There are Cronkite and Brokaw and Nixon and Golda Meir. They’re not answering the questions, either, and she feels a little lifted by the company.
She’d been thickly adding to her stash those first few runs, her cut, two grand each go. But before the flight to New York in September, her fourth, she makes a deal with Billy—trusts him to hold her money as collateral. She’s gonna take the entirety of the new payment up with her to Schuyler Glen and give her father whatever he needs. Billy doesn’t like it, says she should just deal with what’s hers, not theirs. Suzy still hasn’t met anyone above Billy. He insists they’re not so bad themselves, but they deal with guys who it’s better not to know. J
ust regard them the way they regard you, he says—as an idea. No name, no face. It’s better that way.
Up in the air, as they’re settling into the speed chute over Pennsylvania, Suzy sits for the first time all flight. She’s up front, facing the passengers, and the time off her feet, the proximity to the luggage compartment, draws her mind back to Billy’s opaque warnings, the resistance to her heading home with the haul. The way they regard you, he said. No name, no face. But she can’t help but wonder if they know more. Especially as her eyes move along the aisle to the back of the cabin, passenger after passenger who know something about Suzy, who know this stew, know just enough about her without knowing what she’s got stuffed away in her bag. She presses herself back up to her feet and moves to the rear of the cabin, looking over each occupant of each seat in each row, checking their faces and dismissing their threat to her. Near the back, though, there are two men in suits, hair product and neckties, tan enough that they shade toward vague ethnicity, large enough that they seem to spill over the armrest and into each other’s space like the circles of a Venn diagram. The pair of suited men, Suzy thinks. The pair of suited men from the Fourth of July. The pair of suited men following Billy from the beach to the parties at night. Maybe? She passes them slowly, waits for them to react, to turn up. But they are lost in the stock index of their shared business section. They seem to pay no attention to Suzy.
The handoff is frictionless. Cassidy seems in a rush. The purse and the envelope are Suzy’s before she traces her anxiety back to the suited men again. But even they’re off the plane and out of sight before she can really track them. This time, clear, she heads not for the lounge but for the exit, rents a car, and points it toward Schuyler Glen.
She spends the first night at home catching Wayne and Edith up on her new apartment and the soon-to-be-announced Grand Pacific routes to Mexico. They tell her that a new doctor they visited in New York says they can try to nuke the tumor. Intensive chemotherapy, with an aim toward reduction to an easily operable size. Easily in quotes—at the very least upping the odds of success. It’s expensive, but they’re talking about it.
When Edith heads upstairs to read in bed, Suzy pours two glasses of Macallan. Wayne is slumped in his chair, watching golf on Wide World of Sports. Wayne called Suzy “a Masters baby,” born as she was in early April during the first major of 1950, and Suzy has always associated the game’s whispered commentary with the comfort of home. But she’s happy to see the programming switch over to the Olympics, a replay of the gold-medal basketball match between the US and the Soviet Union, a game Wayne’s already heard the Americans lost.
There’s been a lot of nice normal all evening, so she cuts to it:
“How much, all told?”
“What’s that?” he says.
“I said I could help with the money.”
“I remember that.” He straightens up in his chair and grimaces. “And I appreciated you saying it. But we’re gonna do this on our own and not lean in any way on you and your sister. I think we’re talking about money that is much greater than any of us could scrounge up anyway.”
“How much did they say?”
He pushes air through pursed lips. “Five, ten, fifteen grand, I don’t know. It depends on a bunch of factors. But insurance covers only so much. And then we’re looking at measuring the benefit versus liquidating the house, you know?”
“You promised me you’d try.”
“I did—and we drove way down into the city and we saw a specialist and all that. It’s just, there are insurmountable elements that are still factoring into all this.”
Suzy has been alert for this cue. She walks to the foyer and picks up her carry-on, thumbs out ten grand in twenties and hundreds, and tucks the wad into her waistband. It’s more than she’s earned—she’s dipping into what’s not yet hers.
She sits back down in the living room and waits for Wayne to say something. He watches her and then, bored, sips his drink. That’s when she places the money on the table, four short stacks. He still doesn’t say anything, so she straightens the edges and the stacks are like a low-lying skyline.
“What is this?”
“I told you I could help with the money.”
“Whose is it?”
“It’s mine.”
“What do you mean it’s yours?”
“I found a way to make some more money.”
“I don’t…” He rubs his face. His body fell asleep sometime in the last hour, and now his head’s been called to response. “What are we talking about here?”
“I’m flying extra legs and I’m racing again on the side.”
“Please don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. I’ve been saving up, plus I’ve borrowed a little from people I can pay back no problem. It’s all very under control, and it gives us options.”
“Suzy Ames Whitman: I know you’re lying to me.”
Suzy leans back. Her eyes drift across the table to the walls behind Wayne’s chair where the gallery of family photos begins. She can’t make them out in the dark, but she’s aware, keenly, painfully, that the fate of those photos has everything to do with tonight. Either her father dies and there’s nothing left to add to that wall. Or he lives and they’re forced to sell the house to cover the cost, nothing physical left of the life Suzy lived before college. Racing is gone. School is gone. Now, without an intervention, the house might vanish, too. She leans forward and speaks before she’s worked through the thought.
“You promised me you’d try. And part of that meant letting me help. I’m not going to tell you any more about where the money came from. And you’re not going to tell anyone about it, either. The glassworks found some funds for you—they found a loophole in your insurance. Whatever you want to say. There’s more money available than they anticipated. Enough for you to get through chemo and get through surgery. However much that takes.”
“I’m not taking the money.”
“Then you lied to me. Because this—this here—is trying to live.”
Suzy gets up to move to her bedroom.
“I want you to stop whatever this is. I’m not gonna ask you about it again. I don’t want to know. But you’re gonna get rid of this money and you’re gonna go back to your regular routes doing your regular work.”
“You can’t just get rid of ten thousand dollars.”
“Is that really how much is here?”
She holds still and makes her mouth small. There’s forty more in the envelope.
“Suzy, I didn’t ask for this.”
“But it’s here—you don’t have to ask.”
“Promise me you’ll stop.”
“Think of it as payback for things growing up.”
“This must end.”
“I’m going to keep bringing you cash until you spend every bit of it and start to get better.”
“I’m demanding that you stop.”
Suzy shakes her head and sniffles.
“I’ll stop if you take this and do all the things you said you’d do,” she says.
“I’m not taking the money.”
“You can either take the money and get better, or I’m gonna pay the doctors up front in New York.”
“You can’t spend this money on me.”
“You can either take the money and get better, or I’m gonna buy the ’54 Maserati from that calendar in the garage.”
“You can’t spend this money.”
“Either way, by the end of the day tomorrow it’s gonna be gone. You can either take it yourself, or I’m doing something stupid with it for you.”
Suzy sees his jaw pulsing and she prepares herself for the breaking of the dam. She steps back. But instead he sips the rest of the whiskey water and whispers, defeated: “You have to listen to me.”
“That’s not the case anymore.”
“You are not the daughter who doesn’t listen.”
“There’s nothing for me to do except try and help.”
&
nbsp; “You’re not helping, you’re making things worse.”
They hang their slack in the room, with the basketball commentators working through halftime analysis.
“Take the money and I’ll quit,” she says.
Wayne is silent and Suzy is unconvinced she’s made a dent. But he rocks out of his chair and gets to his feet. He gathers the cash off the table, searches the room, moves toward the bookshelf. He takes short stacks, ten or fifteen bills each, and places them between the covers and the flyleaves of the uncracked Penguin classics.
“You’re taking this with you tomorrow,” he says without looking up. “I just need to get it out of my sight for now.”
“No more,” Suzy says, answering to the bargain.
“Don’t forget to collect it all before you leave.”
“Don’t forget,” Suzy says to herself, tapping the memory center of her brain.
At flight school, at Zamperini, they work on the simulators. The eggplant backdrop and the lime-green vectors of the runway and the horizon. A contour drawing of the edges of flight. It’s a silent simulation, yoke in hands, foot pedals plugged into the computer in the wall. Suzy has a display of altitude and airspeed. Millikan moves them through a basic series of motions, of pitch and yaw. It’s the second session on the simulators, and the ease with which she’s taken to the dynamics has made her confident, maybe overly so. She knows it’s another month until they’re up in the air, but after class Suzy asks Millikan if there’s any chance that she can get another preview with him. Hers is a posture she rarely deploys. It wasn’t taught in stew school, but any target might assume it was: a reversal of spine curvature, hips open and chest high, one hand on her waist—a teapot-shaped Suzy. Millikan says no without acknowledging the effort.
“How ’bout this, then,” Suzy says, and Millikan turns to her, rubbing his temples. He’s looked like shit all evening. “Let’s move this off the books: you take me up in the air, and I’ll take you for a spin around that racetrack in Ontario. I’ll show you how to drive a race car.”