Girls Don't Fly

by Chandler, Kristen

“Not sure.”

  “You don’t look too old.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I give you two weeks, tops.” He looks at me, waiting for me to argue.

  “Why only two?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  He shuffles back out and turns to scowl at me again as he walks away.

  My cell goes off. “How’s the new job?” says Dad. He’s calling from the house.

  “Why are you home so early?” I say. “Did Andrew lose Danny again?”

  “Again? Danny’s fine. You going to be there all day?”

  “I work until five.”

  “If I feed the boys, do you think you could take Melyssa out?”

  “Does she want to go out?” Mel yelled at everyone in the house before I’d finished making pancakes this morning.

  Dad says, “You don’t need to take her bowling. Just get her out of the house for a few hours.”

  I have a ton of reading to do on my proposal and an English lit test in the morning. Not to mention that Mel told me I was a self-righteous Betty Crock-of-Crap when I asked her to stop yelling at Brett for giving her the silent treatment. I say, “I thought she was supposed to rest.”

  “Carson is threatening to run away from home.”

  “Gotcha,” I say.

  I take Mel to the Hungry Horse steak house. Her idea. Dad’s money. There’s a line out the door.

  “You sure you want to wait in this line?” I say.

  Mel pulls Dad’s T-shirt down over her stretchy jeans. “What else do I have to do tonight?”

  “You’re going to be on your feet.”

  “Oh, please. You’re as bad as Mom. I’m not going to keel over from standing up.”

  I go to the counter to put our name on the waiting list. A girl who graduated from my high school a year ago is the hostess. She’s thin and blonde and supposedly did the whole basketball team. We’ve never spoken.

  “I need a seat for two.”

  “Is an hour going to be okay for ya?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Could you seat us at the bar faster?”

  “Help yourself,” the girl says, and then loses all interest in me.

  I get Melyssa and we sit down at the bar. A bald bartender in his twenties comes over to us. He focuses on Mel’s stomach. “I’m sorry, ladies, we can’t serve you here.”

  “Hey, Steve,” says Melyssa unhappily. “It’s me, Melyssa Morgan.”

  The bald guy looks carefully at my swollen sister. “No shit.” Then instantly looks embarrassed. “It is you.”

  “No shit,” says Mel. “You can serve us. We aren’t going to drink. Not tonight, anyway.”

  He does the eye shift thing for a minute. “Yeah, I think that’s all right. How you been, Mel? I thought you were off at college getting famous or something.”

  “I went with ‘or something.’ How you been, Steve?”

  “Good. Well, sort of. Working here at night and for my dad in the day. Me and Hally just had our first kid six months ago.”

  “Congrats. Girl or boy?”

  “Boy. Hally would get a kick out of seeing you. You and your hubby should come by.”

  “No hubby.”

  He rubs the mug he’s holding with a bar towel. “Wow. Sorry, Mel. It happens, man. It happens.”

  “Apparently,” says Mel. “How are the cheese fries?”

  A waitress eventually shuttles us to a booth after Steve puts a word in for us. By the time we’ve eaten, three women from town have come over to wish Melyssa a happy baby. She’s about as friendly with them as she was with Steve.

  “Why do you do that?” I say after the last woman leaves to go back to her booth with her tail between her legs. “They’re just trying to be nice.”

  “Do you think so?” says Melyssa. “Or maybe they’re just rubbing my face in it.”

  “She was just being nice.”

  She eats another cheese fry. “If you believe that, you’re as stupid as they are.”

  “Probably,” I say. “And you’re probably better at taking tests and writing papers than most of the people in this restaurant. Maybe most of the people in this town, except Dad.”

  “If I have to live in this town for another six months, I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t make you smarter.”

  Melyssa scans the crowd. I watch her eyeball all the baseball caps and overprocessed hair. “You’re so trapped in this hole you don’t even know how bad it is.”

  “If it’s so bad, why’d you come back?”

  “I’m broke and pregnant, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “You could have stayed with Zeke.”

  Melyssa sits back in her seat and sizes me up. I guess she’s not used to the doormat asking questions. “He moved out, remember?”

  “Only after you told him he was a loser,” I say.

  “Look.” She stares past me, done with my little sister commentary. “If I make mistakes they’re my mistakes. I’m not trying to please anyone or buy into anyone else’s idea of what’s right, including Zeke.”

  “So why’d you get pregnant with him?”

  Melyssa doesn’t answer for a few seconds. She’s counting baseball caps again. “It happens.”

  21

  Screech:

  A group of gulls. Not just the sound they make.

  “Today we’re going to take a field trip to Antelope Island. This is going to take a few hours. Everyone up for that?” Pete looks at me. It makes me feel like such a project. I nod. He looks around the rest of the class, minus the last Megan. We’re becoming endangered applicants.

  “You’re going to want to bundle up in the blankets I keep in the van. It’s breezy.”

  We pile in. There are three seat belts and two moth-eaten blankets. The seats are ripped in two places with the stuffing bulging out. The whole van reeks of french fries. Pritchett says, “Nice ride,” as he grabs one of the blankets. Dawn gets the other one and they both move to the back. Erik gets in with them. I’m sandwiched between the twins in the middle row. I get a loose seat-cushion spring in my backside to keep me warm. I could sit up front with Pete, but he has his equipment stacked on the seat and I’m trying not to be the teacher’s pet/project.

  “Fuel inefficient,” says Ho-Jun to his brother over the top of me. I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard him speak in English, except to say his name, which isn’t in English, but at least I know what it means.

  Pete leans back. “It runs on grease.”

  “That explains the smell,” Pritchett says. “Or almost explains it.”

  Ho-Bong says, “How many miles per gallon?”

  “Sixty, some days,” says Pete.

  I try squeezing my butt so I won’t feel the spring as much. Ho-Bong gives me a sideways stare.

  “Yep, it’s a sweet ride,” says Pete. “I go by the Chicken Little Drive-Thru every weekend and fill up. They don’t charge me anything. I guess it cuts down on their waste output.”

  “That’s disgusting,” says Dawn.

  For the next half hour, we drive while Pete explains alternative fuels over the bang of his engine. Only Ho-Bong and Ho-Jun look interested. But Pete chatters on like he’s telling us the plot of a sex-driven murder mystery. I try to listen, but between the piece of metal jamming in my rear and freezing to death, I have a hard time concentrating. I look back once and see Erik texting. I know there is an exhibition track meet today. This class must really be cutting into his Ariel time.

  When we get to the causeway, the island looks bleak and barren. The sulfur stench of the low tide competes with the rotten smell in the car. The gray sky blends with the water and dull hills of the island. I’ve been to Antelope Island before, so I know what’s here—a few trapped buffalo and antelope and a whole lot of nothing else.

  As soon as we pass over the causeway, Pete stops talking about engines. “Everybody get to a window and stick out your hand. Hurry up.”

  We all look at each ot
her.

  “Come on,” says Pete. “I’m going to give you a flying lesson.”

  We push around each other and stick our arms out of the cranked windows. I wedge myself on the floor and lean out. It’s not comfortable.

  “Now make your hand like a wing and surf the current. Hopefully you’ve done this before.”

  I angle my hand like a plane in takeoff, then bend it in and out of the wind. The speed of the van makes the air bitter cold, but at least I’m not sitting on the spring.

  Pete shouts over the engine and the wind. “This is thrust. A bird flies by moving forward with strong muscles and a light, aerodynamic body. But they also need lift. That’s when the bird sets its wings in such a way that air can’t flow through them and the airflow on top is faster than underneath, making the bird rise. Hollow bones and hinged, multipurpose feathers were some important adaptations that probably allowed birds to survive when their prehistoric buddies were dropping like stones.”

  “So we can’t fly because we’re fat and don’t have wings?” says Dawn.

  “Not fat so much as heavy. We’d also need gigantic chest muscles, hollow bones, and a bigger heart. But there’s always evolution, baby.”

  “How about buying a plane ticket?” says Erik.

  Pete says, “That’s probably fastest.”

  I keep my hand moving in the wind.

  We drive to a lookout point and emerge from the van. Pete jumps out ahead of us and hands out a brochure-looking thing along with tiny pencils. “Here is your birding list for the birds you are likely to see in the Great Salt Lake and the surrounding area. Every time you see one of these birds, you check it off.”

  I look through the columns of bird names. There must be two hundred birds listed. Ruby-crowned kinglet, sharp-shinned hawk, pine siskin, canvasback, Lapland larkspur, willet, and black-chinned hummingbird. Birds I have never heard of before, and they live in, or at least they travel through, my backyard.

  Pete starts talking in his National Geographic baritone. “The stinky, salinated water you see before you is the lifeblood of this state’s ecology and the four to six million birds that migrate through here every year. It makes up eighty percent of Utah’s wetlands. It creates the weather for the Wasatch Front, better known to the locals as the lake effect. In addition to bison, mule deer, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, and antelope, there are two hundred and fifty different species of birds and plenty of insects in and out of the water for all the birds to eat. Some people call this America’s Dead Sea, but as you can see, there is nothing dead about it.”

  Behind me I hear Dawn say, “Could it be any colder out here?”

  Pete keeps lecturing. “This time of year we can see California gulls, of course, those recycling beauties, but also bald eagles, winter ducks, and prairie falcons.”

  “Where are the cormorants?” I ask.

  “Probably not going to see any cormorants, at least not for a few weeks. They need the ice off the freshwater. Plus they like to tan in Belize.”

  “Well, who wouldn’t,” mumbles Dawn.

  Two hundred and fifty species of birds fly through this airspace and he suggests a bird to me that doesn’t even check in until my proposal is practically due? I’m not actually writing on this kind of cormorant ... but still.

  Pete looks at me. “Don’t look so sad, Myra. You can still write about the ones in Ecuador.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, I just feel that way.

  After we spot an ibis and are mobbed by five gulls, we get back in the unmagical school bus and head down the road to a tiny outcropping. We pile out into a parking lot surrounded by large boulders, which I assume are supposed to be like a seawall. The rocks may keep the parking lot from going in a storm, but they don’t keep out the wind or the spraying water. It’s freezing.

  Pete climbs the rocks like a mountain goat. When he’s on top he yells, “Straight ahead, Egg Island!”

  Nobody moves toward the rock Pete’s posing on. It looks cold up there with the wind blowing and the water spraying.

  Erik says, “This guy drinks way too much coffee.”

  “Too much sumpin’,” says Pritchett, pinching his fingers together like he’s smoking.

  Erik shakes his head. “Sure glad I’m missing a meet for this crap.”

  Ho-Jun and Ho-Bong nod in agreement. Ho-Bong says, “We’re missing baseball. And our coach takes it out of our butts.”

  Dawn looks at Pritchett. “What team are you on, big guy?”

  “I’m on my own team, small-town white girl,” says Pritchett.

  “Sorry,” says Dawn, going pink in her ghostly cheeks.

  Pete yells above us. “Don’t leave me hanging!”

  I bolt for the rocks with Ho-Bong and Ho-Jun right behind me. All this peer bonding is making me crazy. My tennis shoes slip beneath me on the salty film that covers the rocks. I taste the salt in my mouth from the wind. I get to the top of the rock first, and Pete grabs my arm to help me stand up.

  Instantly I feel Erik watching Pete hold my arm. I right myself and stand a few steps back from Pete. I don’t even think about it. I just do it. “What’s up here?” I say.

  Pete drags his arm across the horizon like he’s invented the sparkling gray panorama just for us. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Little Galápagos.”

  “The what?” says Ho-Bong.

  “The Little Galápagos. That’s this little island’s nickname.” Ahead of us is a small patch of earth covered in huge boulders that jut up from the lake’s shallow surface. The mound of gray rocks is about a mile away. Around it the lake water sparkles like a cheap bike in the March sunshine. “Do you know what’s out there, campers?” Pete looks goofily happy.

  “A pile o’ rock,” says Erik.

  “No. You have to look at what’s on the pile of rock. Use your binoculars.”

  I put up my borrowed binoculars to see the birds dotting the island. “Aren’t they just gulls?”

  “Not them. The black ones.”

  I cup my hand over the lens and look again. “Are they ... double-crested cormorants?”

  “Ding, ding, ding!” Pete grabs my hand and throws it up over my head. “We have a winner.”

  I drop my hand so fast I nearly drop the binoculars.

  The other students crowd close to see what we’re looking at. Pete yells over the wind. “They came early. What are the odds? That hasn’t happened in years.” He spins and drops down through the rocks, then runs for the van, I guess to get gear. Erik stands nearby, intermittently watching Pete and glaring at me.

  Pritchett stands behind me and whispers, “And we have a winner.”

  Pete races back with his tripod and spotting scope and is set up in a split second.

  “You can all look through this. I am calling my buddies at Audubon as soon as we get home. I mean, I guess this isn’t exactly a good sign. It’s kind of a bad sign if birds are coming in this early. Suggests that global warming has thrown off their schedule. But maybe it’s just a freak thing. You know, an irruption. Maybe ... Maybe we should just watch them. There aren’t many of them yet. I might not have even looked if it wasn’t for Myra.”

  When it’s my turn, I look through the glass scope. My eyes aren’t used to the lens and it’s hard for me to steady myself in the wind. Salt water stings my face and mouth. I can’t make out more than black lines, and then the whole lovely bird comes into focus. One bird fills the circle of the scope. It’s long, dark, and curved. Like a black S with a yellow hook on its face.

  The gulls and cormorants shriek. Over the ridge of the first set of rocks I see nests made of bleached grasses and sticks. They’re everywhere. So is white bird crud. Heaps of it. Boulders poke out in angry angles, rocks in the pocket of the lake. I adjust the lens for detail. Feathers and spare bones litter the ground everywhere. I see a few intact skeletons decaying on rocks. It makes the place feel haunted.

  “Why do people call it Little Galápagos?” I ask. “Just bec
ause both places have cormorants?”

  “That island may not look like much, but it actually has a huge significance. Birds come through here by the hundreds and nest on the island. It’s too small to sustain life, but it’s a perfect place to be from. Unlike the cormorants in the Galápagos, who have lost the ability to migrate, these cormorants travel huge distances. Without this safe nesting site they’d be in huge trouble. Their numbers have already vastly decreased.”

  I look through Pete’s scope at the nests of bleached grass everywhere. Some look old and abandoned, while others are already occupied by the slender black birds.

  I say, “It’s weird to me that these cormorants fly from Belize to Canada, but the birds in the Galápagos don’t even leave their island.”

  “When you’re six hundred miles out to sea, it’s a much longer trip in between rest stops. The birds that tried it either didn’t make it or didn’t come back. The birds that stayed found what sustained them and evolved into their niche.”

  I’m embarrassed to be talking so much. Not my MO. But I can’t help asking one more question. “Why are they here? So early?”

  “Maybe they’re just horny,” says Pete.

  I look away so he won’t see my face. Everyone laughs, but Pete changes into his normal professor voice. “I mean, they are here to breed, but I don’t know why they’re early. Maybe the weather has them baffled. We could paddle out to them if I had my kayak today.”

  Dawn says, “Doesn’t that bother the birds when they’re nesting?”

  “Great point,” says Pete. “The birds come here to breed and the last thing they need is human interference. But with these cormorants, if you keep a reasonable distance, they couldn’t care less about you. In that way they are a bit like their cousins in the Galápagos.”

  “The birds on the Galápagos really don’t run off when you walk up to them?” says Pritchett.

  Pete says, “Nope. Europeans killed birds and other wildlife by the shipload when they first came to the islands, but the birds still didn’t develop a fear of humans.”

  “So in a way, the animals haven’t evolved,” says Erik.