Taking Flight

by Solmonson, Sarah

  “It’s not Grandpa’s funeral. It’s Dad’s,” I said. I looked around for something that wasn’t awful, but they were all awful. Especially the tiny one in the corner that only a child could fit in. I spotted a plain casket, nothing special in the carving, dark wood. “This one. This is the right one.”

  Mom came over to me and held me to her side. “You’re right. This is the best possible choice.”

  That was all I needed to turn around and take the steps two at a time out of there. Mom signed a few papers and then we were done. You had forty-eight years on this earth and in just two hours your life was summed up, packaged and tagged with a price and a stupid prayer about acceptance that I never really believed, anyway.

  I did not go into the small office with Mom that sat in the middle of the lawn full of tombstones. That monument company had been part of Wentzville as long as I had been alive, and until you died it was always part of the scenery, the tombstones scattered out like they were on display at a garage sale.

  You grew up in Wentzville, and in many ways so had I. A million memories of family, home and happiness surrounded me. What were those memories now, without you here to take me to the ballpark you used to play at as a child? What was family now that you weren’t around to sit beside me after supper on the red swing in Grandma’s carport? Would I stop seeing Wentzville as a place I loved? Could your death change my reflexes, alter chemicals that kept my memories into my heart?

  I saw beyond the raw agony of the moment to the hollowness of life without you. Your death would undo everything I had known up until the moment I had walked through our front door on July 1. I was going to have to start over with a missing piece, disadvantaged and confused by phantom pain I could never ease.

  While I waited for Mom to finish I paced up and down the rows of marble and concrete. While I walked I sang to you. “Crazy” was the first thing that came to mind, and I sang the entire song by memory. I sing to you each time I visit your grave.

  I’ve forgotten so much since you left, but I still remember all the words to our songs.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After our move to Minnesota each of my aunts and uncle made the required pilgrimage in their trucks and mini-vans to see the home we had traded them for. One by one they arrived, and after a tour of the new house we would sit in the kitchen table sipping lemonade, realizing slowly but with certainty that we could never go back to the way things were. Dad would always be the sibling that left; when Grandpa got sick or Grandma needed help mowing her lawn, Dad could no longer be called upon for help. While I spent every waking moment longing for my cousins, they still had each other. Their lives didn’t change, ours did, and realizing this was the first step I took towards growing up.

  Dad’s younger brother, my Uncle B, and his wife and three kids were the last to make the trip.

  B was nothing like my father. Where Dad was soft spoken and gentle, B was loud and harsh. Once when I was visiting Missouri as a teenager B came over to me, gave me a hug and then said, “Good God, Sarah, what the hell happened to your face?” laughing brutally as I tried to cover up my painfully blemished skin with my hands. He continued laughing when I burst into tears and ran away from the house and down the street until the pain in my lungs burned more than the humiliation on my cheeks.

  B spanked my cousins and yelled horrible things at them, a prime example of “tough love” parenting. Grandma was always trying to get B to go easy on his children, but he would never change. My Aunt H was no better. Whenever she hugged me goodbye I felt like she couldn’t wait to get away from me, like I might look at her wrong and stain her fancy clothes.

  When B and H arrived at a family function, they dominated the room. I guess the rest of us let them because it was easier than telling them to shut up. B’s loud voice was the one that told the stories, H’s spoke on behalf of the wives about the incompetency of their husbands. Their children commanded attention in their own right; J, the oldest, because she was just like her mother. What is it about snobby people that make us want to be in their limelight, regardless of how much we can’t stand the burn? A, the youngest, had a rare genetic disorder that left him moderately retarded and always hungry, always needing someone to monitor his food intake. M, the middle child, never stood a chance in that family, so to avoid being ignored he threw temper tantrums and picked fights with the rest of us. They were a loud group, obnoxious, uncaring and above all of us. Only A kept them grounded; no labels or vacations or boisterous personalities could change the fact that A was damaged.

  B and H were the odd people out in our family, but I think they preferred it that way. The rest of us were never quite good enough, but they never had the nerve to say it out loud.

  When they came to Minnesota they were mildly impressed with our new house and developing subdivision. They complained about the drive and how horrible it was to have three children in a car that long, especially their kids. But they endured it all because the next day we would take them to Mall of America. The promise of a new fall wardrobe – purchased without sales tax – would make all their suffering worthwhile.

  We were one of the first cars at Mall of America that Saturday morning. H and my cousin J demanded that we walk every single floor, stopping in as many stores as they wanted. I was nine years old and bored to tears. M wasn’t the only one who threw a few tantrums that day. As a kid, the allure of Mall of America was Camp Snoopy. Sounds of happier children riding the rides and playing midway games in the indoor amusement park echoed throughout the mall, torturing us.

  When we reached the first floor of the mall B and Dad broke M and I away from the group, probably as happy as we were to get away from shoe stores and perfume samples being sprayed in our faces. We stood in a long line for tickets, and then we got into another long line for the Ripsaw Roller Coaster. As M and I anxiously waited for our turn Dad and B talked in the background. I don’t remember what they said to each other, but I do remember thinking that when they were alone they spoke differently. B was quieter and Dad made more jokes. They stood the same, arms crossed in front of their chests, feet spread apart, rocking on the balls of their feet occasionally. It was the same way I stood when I wasn’t thinking about it, a reflex that I must have learned from them.

  Dad’s mood about his plane shifted when it was ready to be painted. He stopped calling it the little S.O.B. and threatening to chop it up. I think that the day that he realized the plane was ready to be painted was the day he stopped looking at how much he had left to do and started to appreciate all that he had done.

  Like so many projects along the way, Dad found himself stalled. As much as he would have liked to been able to do everything with his own two hands, building an airplane, even a single seat-er, can’t be an entirely solo effort. Sometimes a specialist was required to install a piece or build a gear. The same was true for painting. It wasn’t something Dad could learn, practice, master and do. He was going to have to bring in some outside help.

  That didn’t bother him, though, because B detailed cars, and from the start, B had agreed to paint his big brother’s plane.

  Of course, when he agreed to do the job we lived twenty minutes away in Missouri. Regardless of the distance between them Dad still assumed that B would be proud to contribute his talent. Dad had every intention of flying his plane to the annual Oshkosh Air Show the first summer that he was able, and when a fellow pilot would comment on his plane part of the joy he would feel would come from bragging about how his little brother had painted his plane, how the whole plane had been a family project from start to finish.

  Dad never imagined that B wouldn’t come.

  At first Dad thought B, H and the kids could come up for a visit. “Hell, they haven’t been up here in six years!” he said after B explained that everyone wouldn’t be able to make it. A few weeks passed and still a date hadn’t been set for B to visit. Every weekend Dad would call B and after each call he would hang up sounding more frustrated. The weather was getting
nicer and he was just so close. The only thing stopping him was B.

  After several calls it became apparent that B wanted to come, but the timing was never right for H. She wanted their carpets replaced, their patio finished, a vacation to Miami, someone to watch A while she threw a party.

  I never heard my father talk so poorly about anyone as he talked about my aunt and uncle after those phone calls.

  “That woman...she’s got my brother by the balls, Jan,” Dad would say, not caring where I was or how loud he was talking.

  “He lets her do it,” Mom reminded Dad.

  Dad would sip his coffee. “It’s not right. He shouldn’t be such a pussy. Stand up to her, just once, and come help me.”

  “How quickly do you think you guys can get it finished, if he is able to come?” Mom asked after a couple of weeks of watching Dad mope.

  “At least three days. And that’s if we work non stop.” He sighed. “That’s all I’m going to get, isn’t it?”

  B was finally given from Thursday to Sunday night to come to Minnesota. Dad picked him up from the airport and they headed right into the garage. There were no smiles on their faces. I would bet Dad gave B an ass chewing he will never forget in that car ride – or he gave him the silent treatment. I’ve had both from my father and I honestly couldn’t say which is worse.

  The design for the plane was simple, just like Dad: a white body with some deep red stripes along the sides and on the tips of the wings.

  By Saturday night they were crazed from paint fumes and lack of sleep, but they were laughing again. Mom and I were taking advantage of the bigger couch in the living room, usually reserved for Dad, and every so often we would mute the television so we could listen to their laughter. The pictures we took of them working show two exhausted men, but in their goofy grins and five o’clock shadows they managed to finish the job.

  After Dad brought B to the airport for his return flight, my parents and I stood in the garage, silently admiring what was before us. Dad took a seat on his stool, propping his feet up on the rungs and resting his hands on his legs. Mom and I didn’t move, waiting for Dad to speak first.

  “Well, what do you know?” he finally said, a smile creeping onto his face. “It’s a real airplane now.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Basketball hoops are commonplace on suburban streets, as if houses with kids should automatically have a place to shoot free throws. It’s easy to forget that even cheap hoops cost money. A basketball hoop was a luxury I went without as a child.

  My parents were not like my friends’ parents. They didn’t go out to dinner often. They didn’t buy new clothes or cars. In my entire life we only went on one family vacation to Yellowstone. Maybe they didn’t mind these differences, but as I got older, I was keenly aware of the things I didn’t have and the places I wasn’t traveling to. I felt like the only kid living in Chaska who didn’t get to go to Florida or Mexico over spring break.

  My best friend, Emily, was part of a family that had everything and went everywhere, courtesy of a father who needed to make up for his long hours at the office and extended business trips. Clothes, game systems, fancy bikes, nice vacations – Emily and her siblings wanted for nothing.

  When Emily and I were thirteen, her father put a basketball hoop in their driveway. I was playing at her house the day it was installed, and when I biked home that evening I was excited to go back the next day to play with the neighborhood kids.

  When I got home Dad was working in the garage. “Hey kiddo. How was Emily’s?” he asked, setting down his tools and leaning against the fuselage while I parked my bike far, far away from the plane.

  “She got a basketball hoop today. Well, her family did. The cement should be dry tomorrow. I can’t wait to play!”

  Dad sighed. “They got a basketball hoop?” He sounded annoyed.

  “Yeah. So?”

  Dad walked past me and opened the garage door that led into the house. “Jan, Sarah and I are gonna run to the store quick,” he hollered to Mom.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “It just isn’t right.” He looked at me in a strange way, like he wanted to apologize for something. “Every kid should be able to play basketball in their driveway. You’re almost done being a kid. We should be able to play, too.”

  With that, Dad and I got into the car and drove to Target. I had never been on an impulsive shopping trip. A couple of hours later we had our very own basketball hoop parked in the grass alongside our driveway. It was the only time I know of that Dad let what other people had get the better of him.

  Dad and I quickly took to challenging each other to games of Horse. We were big fans of complicated trick shots. We missed as often as we made them, but it was an awesome feeling to sink a basket backwards over my head from the opposite side of the driveway. Dad perfected a shot from behind the net, the ball going almost straight up into the air with a nearly undetectable curve that caused it to swish into the net at the last second.

  After we got the basketball hoop Dad was a little easier to coax away from his plane. Some evenings he skipped time with the plane all together, choosing instead to play ball with me until it got too dark outside to see. Mom was our photographer, capturing me in my painfully awkward phases, wearing long jean shorts and shapeless t-shirts, braces, frizzy hair, playing basketball with Dad.

  I don’t know that Emily played more than a handful of games with her father, but I do know that she played hundreds with mine.

  Washers is a very simple game: two wooden boxes with a hole in the center are set up several feet apart. You stand next to your opponent beside one box and throw large washers at the other box. If you make it in the box you get one point, if you get it in the hole you earn two points. Opponents with good aim can cancel out the other team’s points.

  Dad made our family a washers set after I took a liking to the game at a family reunion in Missouri. I went to the hardware store with him to buy the washers and the spray paint. While Dad painted the boxes white I sprayed yellow paint all over one set of the heavy washers.

  Washers became another novelty at the Norton house, up there with the Mars candy bar and the airplane in the garage. Our homemade game provided hours of entertainment for my friends, relatives and neighbors.

  Ideal washer conditions came right after dinner, in the early evening twilight. I was always played barefoot, constantly swatting at bugs and shielding my eyes from the sun between tosses. I loved that I didn’t throw like a girl, and I fully enjoyed the looks on my opponents faces as they watched me effortlessly sink a two point shot without ever hitting the box.

  I never thought my father wished he had a son instead of a daughter. I could be myself around Dad, a girl who liked to fish and play sports just as much as she liked to draw and sing along to pop music on the radio. Washers and basketball games smoothed the transition between youth and adolescence. They kept a young woman connected to her father. No matter my stage of life, I was always enough for my Dad.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As far as the Norton family is concerned, Mom and I died with you. It took ten years for things to reach a point where we had done everything we could do to make them happy. When we cut our ties we didn’t leave a thread of hope that we would be back.

  Sometimes I forget they were ever a part of my life, my heart.

  And other times, when I least expect it, I feel like I can’t breathe, when I remember the family I used to have.

  Here’s why it ended, the ugly truth: I should have died instead of you.

  I will never forget the dark eyes that glared at me, the clenched fists, the words burning hate into my memory. The one person who had the nerve to tell me what everyone was really thinking.

  Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was just mean. Maybe I shouldn’t listen to something someone said without thinking. I can’t help it. When your niece, my cousin, said those awful words, something inside me knew it was true.

  Since I couldn’t r
eplace you, I spent years trying to fix what I hadn’t broken. I wanted so desperately to win back the figures that faintly resembled the aunts, uncles and cousins I had before you died. They were all gone, and the credo in the Norton family was hung on every wall: I should have died instead of you.

  You wouldn’t believe how often I wished to take your place, just to make them happy again.

  B promised me that he would be there for me in all the ways that you couldn’t be. He would be at my high school graduation, he would walk me down the aisle. B was inconsolable after you died. I think, at the time, that he believed he would really do those things with me, for you.

  I didn’t participate in my high school graduation. Mom was the one who walked my down the aisle. It doesn’t make me mad that he wasn’t the stand in for these milestone events; I didn’t want to be a pawn someone else uses to relieve their guilt.

  It was during a visit to Wentzville on my twenty-sixth birthday that I snapped. And I mean I really snapped. I had had enough of the cold shoulder, the self-righteous punishments, the rolling eyes and the pressure to make another attempt to fix the Norton family.

  Mom and I decided to let them go. We each wrote a letter and sent them certified mail so there was no doubt that they had gotten the message. Mom let loose in what I can only describe as a testament to her love for you and her sense of protection towards me. She let our family know what we had been thinking for all the years since you’d died. It was the first time that I felt like Mom was back, like there was someone in my corner again, like someone had finally heard me clanging in the cellar and had come to set me free.

  After the break, or whatever you want to call it, I felt twenty pounds lighter. I’ve moved on more in my grief for you since letting them go than I managed to do in all the years I tried to keep us together. I guess, right or wrong, we are bad for each other without you. Grief eradicates what was, and memories of an unbearable weight become the only proof that life was once different.