by Josh Weil
On Fridays, after work, she would wonder the same. Abner would pull into the Libbey-Owens lot, take her back to a home that all weekend they would pretend still felt like theirs. The wall calendar Allis-Chalmers always sent her, now swapped for one his students made. The sink corner that had once held her hand cream, now crowded by his shaving mug. He’d move it over, turn the month. Sometimes by Sunday they could almost feel like them again. Though more and more she worked the weekend shifts—overtime, extra pay, Saturday night out with the girls—Sunday coming every other week, then once a month, then not. On the phone, Abner would speak things he’d never said before—how much he’d wanted children; how he used to lose himself in his guitar; all he’d given up for her, would, still wanted to—as if the distance between them made him brave. But it was just distance.
Weeds, scrub willows, the driveway buried somewhere beneath the grass. She stood in the sun, seed heads scratching at her stockings, looking at the house. He’d written her: moved out, a simple flat nearer the school he worked at now, she could stay in the house, or sell it, it’s up to you, he’d transferred the deed to her. But not the car. She’d walked the last two miles. Such flat land: the whole way she’d watched the house grow near, the road to town slip out of sight, its tree line dwindling to distant shakings, far-off Toledo disappearing from her life. The air grew thin. Her stomach dropped. Her juddering heart: she might have been taking off, climbing up, seeing the earth fall away below. Except she wasn’t looking down. Instead, on every side it seemed the world was drawing itself away from her. Once, long ago, in a dim Dayton stairwell, her arms beneath her father’s arms, dragging him down, flight after flight, fast as she could, she had felt it—in his eyes on her, in the thud, thud, thud of his heels on the steps, in the desperate heartbeats of his departing life—had felt the world withdraw like that. There, on the landing where they’d stopped, he had watched her with such hurt, such hope, so much understanding (selfish? selfless?), such loneliness suddenly inside her.
Standing in the hot sun in front of the abandoned house, she set her suitcase down. Hiked up her skirt. Peeled away her stockings. They ringed her shins like thick black shackles. But God the breeze on her legs felt good.
It gusted all the time. Flat fields like runways for the rushing wind, windbreaks bent by its launch against them, the stolid brick house huddled close to the ground, Clara leaning forward, dress and coat and hair afloat behind her, her whole body seeming about to lift off into the sky. These days no more mail planes flew by. Just clouds and birds and the bellies of DC-4s, their fuselages perforated with passenger windows, their cargo holds carrying the mail alongside luggage now. How high up they flew! How far away they seemed! How fast they grew—Comets and Constellations and Stratocruisers—big as blue whales swimming through the sea above. Sometimes it struck her as strange: the way their shapes—so much larger than the biplanes of before, but so much higher, too—seemed from below to stay the same size to her. She hung tobacco in the barn to dry, stuffed advertisers’ envelopes all winter, barely scraped by. Even with the checks Abner still sent her. She knew he couldn’t afford to give so much, knew she should tear them up, just as the one time she’d seen him in Maumee she’d known she should leave him alone. But she had crossed the street to the lunch counter window, watched his shape stiffen at sensing her, his face furrow with the effort of staring into his shake. She’d turned away, gone farther down the street, glanced back: there on the sidewalk her still husband stood, his hat pushed up from his eyes as if to keep the brim from blocking even a sliver of her in his sight.
And the next time an envelope came from Abner it contained not just the usual check but a story clipped from Life. Is he the greatest living painter in the United States? Photographs of splattered paint, scattered color. To Clara they looked like her field when she’d first come home: a bird’s-eye view of what nature could do without her. Sometimes at night lying alone in her bed she could hear the airliners droning overhead. Sometimes, midday, sun-bright rooms would dim for a second, go bright again. Their shadows passed over her there in her field, and she watched them sweep away, disappear, didn’t even look up.
But look down. Out that oval window. There, on the ground—what is that?
“I’d like to buy it,” the gentleman said. He stood on her doorstep, pinstriped pants aflutter in the breeze, voice like the news on CBS. News of a collector out in California who’d sent this man to hunt out art.
She looked past him to the field, the barn, the shadow of the plane. She’d stitched the tar paper together scrap by scrap, covered it with black painted muslin that wavered, rippled, gave the sense of the shape moving. Though it was nailed down, glued, painted midpass atop the barn, the yard, the plowed-under field, its wingspan nine hundred feet long, its fuselage distorted as a real shadow’s would have been by the slant of the sun. It had taken her three years.
“The barn?” she asked.
“That too,” he said, in his Edmund Chester voice.
Now Chester was off the radio and everyone was watching television instead and her barn was gone to some hangar outside LA, and she was in a magazine. Some writer spurred by word of the sale had done some digging, discovered a defense department file, photographs of her early ’40s shovelings, revealed the message she and Abner had sent the Japanese:
Clouds drift back and forth
Over my fields—I wonder:
Can you see them too?
Clara Lowell. There on the page her name seemed like another person’s. She read the story of herself as if from far away, from before she’d taken Abner’s name, a Purdy girl again who might tear out a page, pin it to her bedroom wall. She read it all until, halfway, she hit a thing she’d never heard: soldier, bullet, how her brother had died. Facedown in a ditch it said. Shot from the air by a strafing ace. Her eyes kept moving along the page, her mind making out the words, but she was seeing Larry again: running, running, engulfed by the onrushing shadow of the plane.
And there went her phone again, ringing, ringing. The Garner Agency, the Fineman Gallery, funding from an arts foundation in San Francisco where she spent the first year of the new decade peering down from the Golden Gate or up from a boat beneath it, devising a way to make the bay look as if the shadow of fuselage and wings had been painted on its waves. Across the ocean, over Pyongyang, jet fighters screamed into the sky. She couldn’t hear them. No more than Jackie Cochran, three years later, could have heard the sonic boom she left behind along with all the other aviatrixes still shackled to sound. Clara was in New York City, affixing the faux reflection of an onrushing airliner to the steel and glass of the Empire State—a tragic trompe l’oeil. Haunting, critics called it, heart-stopping. They said her work rang of the grim reaper, contained a sense of the moment made permanent, and yet seemed fleeting, too, as if to offer a possibility of reprieve. And so was also hopeful. And so when, high above the Colorado Plateau a DC-7 struck a Constellation, she was commissioned to commemorate the lost souls, spent the fall of ’57 marking the Grand Canyon with two immense shadows facing each other across the chasm, their shapes distended exactly as the sun had stretched them the morning of that last day.
It would be known as Clara Lowell’s final shadow piece. Even in the moment, hovering above in the helicopter the Park Service pilot flew, she knew it: the silhouettes were old shapes cut from the woman she used to be, not who she had become. Down in the station everyone else had moved on, too. They were crowded around a shortwave radio, listening to a faint, steady beep. That’s it, one of the rangers said. It must be passing over us right now.
Back in Ohio she stood in the spot where her barn had once been and watched the tiny glint arc along its orbit. She had seen pictures of the Soviet’s sphere. She wondered what, from that height, it could possibly see down here.
Old ovals found in dusty bureau drawers, age-spotted hand-me-downs, rearviews salvaged from crashed cars, castoff skyscraper panes from construction lots in Cleveland: she collected shards of a
ny size, from all over, carted them back to her small square of earth, slowly, piece by piece, resurfacing her old canvas in glass. Ten entire acres. Half as many years. Hundreds of thousands of seamless fits found from a million broken sides. By the time John Glenn radioed down Oh, that view is tremendous! he might have meant the flash of glinting land she’d covered.
Or the sight of all the others who’d come to help. From the beginning she had watched in wonder—these young seekers fleeing their old lives, stopping by on their way to wherever, stepping out of dusty cars, parking in her driveway for a day, a couple, crashing in her guestroom, on her couch, men on motorcycles with their plaid shirts unbuttoned, wind-wild hair, women wearing jeans, scarves in colors more vibrant than anything for miles—but as they crouched by her side, helping find a fit for a piece, holding a glued edge together, she had begun to think of them as somehow akin to her. These kids who were a third her age! Who drove up blaring bands with names like the Del-Tones, the Animals, the Stones. “Can’t you hear my heartbeat?” The girls sang it while they worked. Girls who said things like out there it’s trying to bury us alive, and can’t let it stifle your voice within, who laughed when she insisted she was still married. Well, she said, it’s true I haven’t seen him in, let’s see, oh jeeze…. And they told her she couldn’t continue like that, it was a new era—all that matters now is what will make you happy, what’s the point in living if your life isn’t true to you—an age of self-fulfillment, of our own happiness not just pursued but caught, kept, held perpetually near all our hearts. They could have been her children, her grandchildren, but standing amid a group who’d helped her put the last broken piece of glass in place, she felt as if she had at last found her generation, kindred spirits, a moment in time in which she fit.
Only the babies gave her pause. The ones brought into her home on the hips of girls younger than Clara had been when she’d first entered the house herself. In their sounds she would hear her long-gone husband’s late-night voice, his telephone pleas. And, watching the stare the babies settled on their mothers, she would wonder if Abner—another’s husband now?—had felt enlarged by that enamored gaze. She hoped he had. Though whenever an infant was handed to her, she felt the opposite: the child’s need tight as its fist around her finger, squeezing her down to fit its purpose, herself made small as the reflection in its unblinking eyes.
Instead, she kept her sights on the work before her. There, in the field of mirrors, the sun shone up out of a sky in the ground. Clouds crept through the grass along the edge, floated into twin squares of blue, followed themselves. Soon, she knew, a contrail would cut across like a line of chalk. A 727 on its way to Chicago, or coming east, a hundred and more passengers peering out their windows. Staring down at the sky beneath herself, she tried to imagine what they would see.
A blinding glare, according to the FAA. Clear the mirror off the ground: the agency’s order that at last turned Clara Lowell into a household name. The destruction on the evening news, the documentary about the flood of youth answering the artist’s call, the image censored around the world: all that mirror-cleared ground blanketed now by a thousand bodies stripped bare, a ten-acre square of naked flesh flashed upwards in an act of irreverence so communal it seemed to capture the entire decade’s mood. By the ’60s end she had lit an entire rural county’s roads, spidering bright veins across the nighttime dark; she made a color photograph of one square mile of the earth, shot from a mile high, then blew it up to actual size, printed it in pieces, put them back together over the spot, so from the air it almost looked like life, but not.
Still, it was her Long Bright Line that Clara meant to be her masterpiece. She had convinced the postal service to loan her the antiquated airmail beacons for one night. Coast to coast, every twenty miles, they stood rusting, signals extinguished long ago, last remnants of an idea once pioneering, now obsolete. Until, for sixty seconds on the night of July 20, 1969, she would bring it back to life. All her funding had gone into the purchase and installation of a hundred and forty first-order Fresnel lenses, powerful as any lighthouse beam, mounted atop the towers, aimed straight up. The volunteers who manned the stations wanted only to share in what would happen at her signal: starting in New York the first would flare on, followed by a second to its west, and the one that was next, and the one after, a constellation untangled across the country into a single strand of terrestrial stars, a gleaming necklace laid atop the earth’s dark breast. Seen only by the moon. And the astronauts on it.
Sometime early that afternoon the TV would show the lander touch down. Around sunset it would show Armstrong or Aldrin stepping onto the surface. By dark they were supposed to be done. And she would call the beacon in New York and start her signal to them.
But in between the landing and the moonwalk, her phone rang instead. She picked it up, heard breathing.
“Wasn’t that incredible?” the voice on the other end said.
Even after all these years she knew him. While he talked all out of breath about the surface of the moon seen coming close, and closer, the shadow of the lander growing (that beep, beep, beep, he said, can you still hear it? and, for some reason, laughed), she slid open the deck doors, let the scent of the ocean in. She stood there trying to smell it, trying not let him hear her inhale. Her old nose. Her old mind. Him? He must have been approaching eighty. He must have been becoming senile: how else could he have just now asked her to come see him?
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Tonight,” he said.
“I live in Los Angeles now.”
“Clara …”
“I’m busy, Abner.”
“I’m dying,” he said.
She sat on the couch, in the salt-sticky breeze, feeling it on the loose skin of her neck, her scalp beneath her thinned-out hair, remembering the scent of peanuts, engine oil, the soft fleece of the aviator cap, the warmth of the earflaps—on winter days his fingers had brushed her chin, buckling the straps, just so she wouldn’t have to shuck her gloves—how he’d gazed up at her astride him that winter night, his face full of bonfire light, the way he’d looked at his new wife in the picture he’d sent so many years ago to share the birth of his first child. A daughter? A son? She sat in the breeze, trying to remember (what do you think I do all afternoon?), listening to Armstrong speak from the moon.
There seems to be no difficulty … Definitely no trouble …
Gee, Cronkite said, that’s good news.
And she leaned forward, turned the volume down. She sat in silence, staring. A gray, grainy picture. A pale blur she knew was the shape of a man but might have been anything that moved. The longer she watched, the more strange and beautiful and unworldly, unreachable, it seemed. The longer she looked, the more it broke into its parts—stillness, shadow, something stirring—the more she felt her own shape blurring too. If anyone had looked away from their TVs, glanced up at her window, aglow with the light broadcast off the moon … but who on earth would?
She was still watching the fuzz of the screen when, a long time later, the broadcast done, the window for her beacons passed, the phone rang again.
“What happened?” The volunteer’s voice came all the way across the country. Some young woman high up in her tower, finger on the switch. “We’re waiting,” the voice said, crackly with distance, beginning to doubt.
In the hospital she meant to tell him it hadn’t been his fault, but stepping into his room, she found herself unable to utter the words work, or self, or matter. Instead, she sat gazing again, this time at her once-husband’s face. Someone had turned his sound off, too. When the nurse told her he could no longer speak, Clara asked what his last words had been. The nurse didn’t know. She wondered: would they have even been meant for her to hear? She wondered: would she have even been able to? There was just the beeping of the EKG. The blinking of his eyes. Even when they were open, she could tell they didn’t see her. But she watched them: blink, blink, blink.
Flying home, she could
not stop feeling her own lids opening and closing, even as she leaned towards the window, looked down. The lights of Dayton dwindling. The lights of its outskirts spread as far as she could see. Somewhere down there it struck her was what used to be her father’s farm. It was smothered by suburbs now, buried beneath the unrelenting burn of each house’s separate star, but once it would have been unlit, all of it, house and barns and trees and field and little girl looking up, all indistinguishable, dark as sleep. When the moon went behind the clouds the balloon must have seemed suspended in pure blackness. They must have held the basket tight, peered over its edge, thought, How beautiful! So strange, she thought now, what we have done to the surface of the world. She shut her eyes—simply paused her lids, stopped them from opening. And, taking in the emptiness before her, wondered how many seconds of each minute she’d spent like that, how many minutes of each day, how many hours, how many years.