Taking Flight

by Solmonson, Sarah

  Mom stared at him, trying her best to stifle a laugh. “I have to ask. Why did you put a candy bar on the door frame?”

  Dad shrugged. “You said to put it up somewhere high. Seems like a good, high spot to me.”

  The Mars bar remained out of reach for years. After Smokey gave up hope of ever claiming his prize my younger cousin, Steven, tried to convince my Dad to let him have it. Steven would stand on his tiptoes and stare longingly at the treat. “Can’t I have it, Uncle David?” he would ask.

  “Tell you what. You can have it” – he would tap Steven on the head – “when you can reach it. Deal?”

  Years later, when Steven had grown into a tall young man, he couldn’t bring himself to take it down. The Mars bar became an iconic point of interest when we gave grand tours of our house. We didn’t have a lot of nice things, but we had a candy bar on the ceiling and a plane in the basement. These things tended to make first impressions of my Dad a little more accurate – I mean, how scary can someone be if they put a candy bar above their bathroom door?

  Dad’s wit was calculated and well executed, and often involved a practical joke. Everyone near and dear to Dad was on the receiving end of a prank at one point or another.

  Dad’s best friend, Chuck, was probably the biggest target. Dad and Chuck were roommates in their bachelor days. Dad had the brilliant idea to sneak into the bathroom whenever Chuck was showering and switch the clean underwear he had waiting for him on the counter with the dirty pair he had just taken off and left on the floor. This went on for weeks until Chuck finally started to smell himself. When he asked my Dad if he noticed any funky smells, Dad cracked up, not caring that his prank had cost Chuck a date with a pretty girl.

  Whenever Dad told the underwear switcheroo story he would interrupt himself at the crucial moment of discovery, unable to control his deep belly laughs. Those laughs were infectious; even if you were angry with him, even if you had been the target of his most recent prank, you just had to laugh along with him. The stories always ended with Dad and his audience wiping tears from their eyes.

  If you were part of the immediate family you had no hope of escaping Dad’s pranks. There is a videotape of my cousin Steven, his brother Robert and myself sleeping peacefully on our living room floor. Mom is holding the camera while Dad is spraying shaving cream on our cheeks and foreheads. Dad snorts from time to time as he tries to hold in his laughter. One by one he tickles our faces and eventually we stir awake, not from the cream smeared across our eyes and noses but because Dad couldn’t stay quiet anymore.

  When my Grandpa was weeks away from death, his cancer had spread into his throat and taken away his ability to speak. He would sit like a ghost in his recliner and watch with wide, weepy eyes as we lived around him. Grandpa never said, “I love you”, but you knew he did, because every time one of us grandkids walked by he would use what little strength he had to try and trip us with his cane.

  Tormenting us with varnish, shaving cream, dirty underwear – these were Dad’s ways of tripping us up. As annoying as he could be, I know he wouldn’t have bothered if he hadn’t loved us so much.

  When summer came to Minnesota my family would bring the plane out of the basement to spend a day assembled in our backyard. My parents would pop out the basement window and screen and then Dad would feed Mom whatever parts of the plane he had finished over the previous year. Piece by piece his years work would take shape in our backyard, propped up on sawhorses and lawn chairs. While we worked our neighbors would appear on their decks, sipping their morning coffee, not shy about gawking at our annual ritual.

  In the beginning it was hard for me to make sense of what came out of the basement. The naked slabs of wood just looked like...well, wood. Once everything had been secured on sawhorses Dad would shift the pieces around, take notes, remove his hat and wipe sweat from his brow, then move the pieces around again. He obviously saw something we didn’t, or maybe he didn’t see a thing and he meant it every time he threatened to take an axe to his work.

  As the summers passed and the fuselage grew I began to see a plane. The VP-1 was a single seat-er, which meant Dad would be the only passenger. It reminded me of a rectangular kayak. He would climb in the seat and his legs would rest inside the nose.

  The wings were the most impressive feature in their skeletal state. Before they were encased in fiberglass, row after row of the paper thin wood that had been delicately cut into intricate circles were visible; this was where the nerves of the plane would be fed. The circles were precisely measured and cut with no room for error. More than once I heard Dad curse, followed by the sound of snapping wood. A sixteenth of an inch could be the difference between success and failure, and if he thought his work wasn’t perfect he would destroy it.

  The plane was like a baby in our family, the sibling I never had but always wished for. Just like a child that you see everyday, it can be easy to miss the subtle way that the child is changing. It takes an out of town relative to come for a visit and exclaim how much the baby has grown before you step back and see for yourself that progress is happening. The same was true with the plane. It wasn’t until we brought everything out into the backyard that we would all see how much had been done in a year.

  Some families take pictures for their Christmas cards in front of trees bursting with fall colors or with Mickey Mouse on a trip to Disney World. Not us. We took pictures beside the plane in the back yard. After the pieces were assembled, we took turns posing individually with the plane, then my parents together, then me with each of my parents. We would ask one of my friends or our neighbors to take the family photo. Jan, David, Sarah and the airplane (which Dad frequently referred to as ‘The Little S.O.B.’), completed our happy family.

  I grew up alongside Dad’s plane; from age ten to sixteen those annual pictures show both of our awkward stages, including but not limited to bad haircuts, skin malfunctions, missing pieces, gangly limbs. I often teased Dad that the plane was the favorite child in the family. We kept pictures of the plane on the coffee table instead of family photo albums.

  Mom explained to me once that the airplane wasn’t more important than me but that, perhaps, it was as important. “You’re not going to be a kid forever. When you’re gone, living your own life, Dad will need something to keep him busy,” she would say, reminding me that like the plane, I too was growing up.

  The airplane resided in our basement from 1994 to 1998. All my friends had finished basements with foosball tables and televisions. They had pull out couches for sleepovers and extra refrigerators with soda and Capri Suns. I didn’t know anyone else besides us that didn’t have a family room for entertaining in their basement.

  In 1998, when the plane finally outgrew our basement, I was sure we would remodel to have the same fun basement my friends had in their homes. I spent a lot of time daydreaming about the sleepovers I would have now that there would finally be a place where we wouldn’t wake my parents up at 3:00 a.m. with our talking and laughter. Whether they didn’t have money or didn’t see the need, once that plane moved out, the basement remained a bare room with a cement floor and walls of pink insulation. It was as if the plane went off to college and we weren’t making changes right away so it would always have a place to come home to.

  The plane wasn’t ready to go to a hanger at an airport, so logically, we moved the plane into the garage. For two years, throughout two Minnesota winters, my parents and I parked outside while the plane was comfortably shielded from the elements. Mom would curse Dad and Dad would curse his plane on the mornings that they spent twenty minutes chiseling their windshields out from three inches of ice in -25* weather.

  Winter aside, I think Dad really enjoyed having the plane in the garage. For the most part it stayed assembled year round, and once set up in the garage it truly looked like an airplane. Instead of taking apart windows and setting it up piece by piece, when the summer rolled around we just slid everything forward a few feet on to the driveway. “Now you get to
meet the neighbors that live on this side of the street,” Dad would say, lovingly patting the nose of the plane.

  Having an airplane in your driveway is a sensational conversation piece. When the weather was nice Dad would work with the garage door open and neighbors on their evening walks would slow down and stare, eventually inching their way up the driveway to ask what exactly he was building. Some conversations would last a couple minutes while others would take hours, with Dad giving a technical breakdown of everything he had built.

  My father was not one to brag, but having an airplane on display is just asking for friendly Midwestern interactions. The people he spoke to were in obvious awe of what he had accomplished, and I imagine those conversations, the unbiased appreciation of outsiders, gave him the encouragement he needed to see his work through to the end.

  I would meander into the garage from time to time, because I needed to ask Dad a question on my math homework or because I wanted to take the car, and it was easy to forget what I had going on back inside the house. I would climb onto his stool with the overstuffed leather cushion and watch him work. It was like getting sucked into one of those “Come Paint With Me” televised classes on PBS. When the wings were completely attached I would step on them to climb into the plane. It was a very comfortable place to read a book, or to just sit and think for a while.

  If I happened to be outside when a new passerby stopped at our house to talk to Dad about the plane, he always made a point of introducing me. “This is Sarah. She’s my co-pilot. Been flying with me her whole life.”

  I know he was proud of his plane. But I also like to think that some of the pride in his voice came from the way I chose to spend time with him, in his world, even as a teenage girl with better places to be than in a dusty garage with her Dad.

  Before we would take the plane apart and bring it back to the basement or garage for presumably another year of work, Dad would always have a showdown between him and the plane. He would sit down in the grass or on the steps and just stare good and hard at his plane. I know that he was afraid he would never finish. He was afraid he was wasting all of our time and family money on something that would, in all likelihood, never make it into the air. Instead of seeing all that he accomplished he only saw how far he had left to go.

  I can only imagine how overwhelming it was to build an airplane from scratch. There are hundreds of kits you can buy that would have produced an airplane in a fraction of the time it was taking Dad.

  But Dad thought the kits were cheating. He was doing it the right way.

  Sometimes I would sit beside him in the grass while he stared at pieces that he had worked so long and hard for.

  “Hmmm,” he would murmur to himself, the noise carried past his lips on an exhausted sigh.

  A daughter’s belief in her father can make anything possible. “It looks like a real plane, Dad.”

  “You think so?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  He would look at me. Or maybe he was looking to me. “I guess so.” His arm would wrap around me. “Do you think I’ll finish this thing some day?”

  I would lean back into him in reply. Then we would stare a while longer, pilot and co-pilot, while the possibilities of the day settled all around us.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As Mom and I stared blankly at the weepy faces of your family, faces that held traces of your reflection that I wasn’t ready to see, I felt like I was in a room of strangers. No one knew what to say to Mom or I. No one wanted to talk about how you’d died or what we’d been going through before coming to Missouri. Worst of all, no one wanted to admit that your death hadn’t been real until we had arrived to Missouri without you. Seeing us would always bring a new shockwave of pain for your relatives. We would never come home again, David, Jan and Sarah.

  Jan and Sarah. Could we ever be enough?

  Mom was a widow. But what did that make me?

  I realized that the people who had curled my hair, watched my dance recitals, read me stories, tucked me in, kept clay imprints of my handprints on their dresser were pulling back when I approached them. When I needed them the most.

  Mike broke the tension by asking me to go on a ride with him. When I asked where we were going, he said, “Young lady, you need to blow some shit up.”

  Fireworks were sold year round in Missouri and I had grown up playing with these miniature explosives like some children grow up playing with dolls. On my summer visits to Grandma’s we always stopped at a firework stand where we loaded up with sparklers, bottle rockets, poppers and colorful packages that promised to spit and shoot brilliant sparks of light. We would take them out to Aunt Diana and Uncle Marty’s house and spend an entire night sitting on blankets in front of their burn pile, eating junk food and catching up while we took turns lighting off fireworks.

  I was happy to go with Mike, to get away from awkwardness of my family. Mike didn’t talk around what was going on in the car ride but he didn’t talk about it, either. It was the first time I felt like I could breathe since seeing our family. I hadn’t expected for things to be worse in Missouri – naively, I had thought they would be better.

  I started to fear myself then, the unfamiliarity of my mind inside my own skin. When your parent dies you have to remember to grab on to what you knew. What once was. I hadn’t held on tightly enough, and with every unexpected feeling I was forgetting how things had been before. Before was as place in time that I wanted to return to. I would spend many years trying to fit myself into ‘before’.

  The fireworks tent was packed with families buying last minute toys for their Fourth of July celebrations. Even with all that was going on I still got a kick out the little kids running around in their overalls, most without shoes, reaching into cardboard boxes to pick out their favorites. Children as young as four were holding onto lighters and matches, excited to help their older brothers and sisters ignite the tiny fuse at the end of the flammable plaything that was the social norm in Wentzville.

  Mike grabbed two crates, set up at the front flap of the tent for the serious pyros, and handed me one. “Fill it up,” he said. I didn’t have any money but I was sure Mike knew that. I watched as he reached for the big explosives on the top shelves, some costing $20 a piece. He’d grabbed several handfuls when he noticed that my crate was still empty. “We aren’t leaving here, Sarah, until we’ve got enough to blow up everything that sucks right now. Fill it up.”

  I was the envy of every child in that tent. They watched as we loaded up our crates with a sampling from every table, never once checking price tags. Those barefoot kids probably wished they could trade places with me. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we don’t see beyond the surface of peoples’ lives. How we never even try.

  We stopped only when we couldn’t carry anymore. A toothless man and his very fat wife finished ringing us up and handed Mike a receipt. “That’ll be $192.48.”

  I was certain that we would put some of the fireworks back. Without hesitating Mike pulled out his wallet handed the cashier a stack of twenties. “Keep the change, sir,” he said. Together we carried our crates back to his truck.

  Angela was not pleased when she saw that receipt, and under normal circumstances she would have probably chewed his ass out for spending so much money on fireworks. But nothing was ordinary since your plane crash. I think she knew how much the gesture meant to me.

  We had our bonfire that evening. I ran back and forth from fuse to fuse, blowing up as much of my fear and anger as I could. For the briefest of moments there was color in the darkness. All I had to do to get the colors back was light another fuse. I threw bottle rockets carelessly into the flames, sending them shooting out in every direction in unpredictable angles. Our family sat silently around the fire, doing their best not to get burned in the wake of my destruction.

  Several years later, Stephanie called me as I was on my way home from work with some big family news. “You won’t believe this. Mike has been having an affair!” Apparently, Angela’s n
eighbors had busted him bringing a woman back to their house. Angela did some snooping and found receipts proving one of Mike’s business trips was actually a romantic weekend with his girlfriend to Mexico. “He is such an asshole. No one ever liked him,” Stephanie said. I opened my mouth to argue, but I stopped myself.

  “I mean, I know he was nice to you or whatever after David died. But he was a jerk to everyone else.”

  I stopped at Target that afternoon and bought Angela a bag of chocolate candies and a card. But even as I filled out that card, even though what Mike did was wrong, even though I supported Angela completely, I have never forgotten how Mike, the asshole, was the first person to make me feel better.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In eighth grade homeroom I sat behind a boy named Cole. We had been friendly throughout elementary school, so I was surprised when I felt my face heat up when he asked me how my summer had been. His eyes, the way he turned his head when he smiled – how hadn’t I noticed these things before? I was startled by my crush but didn’t think much of it because there was, in my mind, no way Cole would see me as anything but a friend. I am the girl that guys are quick to be friends with while they chase after the pretty girls who can walk in heels without tripping.

  Cole and I were talking one morning, joking around before the bell rang. When I went to open my mouth to speak a spit bubble of epic proportions formed between my lips. It was as big as if I had intentionally blown a bubble with gum, and when it popped a little fleck of spit landed on his hand.

  Just as I was contemplating crawling under my desk to die from embarrassment, Cole burst out laughing. “That was awesome!”

  Soon afterward, Cole started to pass me notes. He would try to color on my hands with his pens. He would catch my shoe under the desk and try to slip it off of my foot. There was always a reason to playfully bump into me. Every bit of contact was exciting, sending tingles down my neck. To my knowledge I had never been flirted with before, not until that spit bubble explosion.