2. My mother’s favorite phrase is “the Worst Case Scenario” as in, Let’s try and imagine, if not expect, ultimate disaster so that we might a) Never be disappointed when things go wrong and b) Occasionally experience the short-lived “pleasant surprise” when they go right. You might think she’s an insurance agent, but she actually makes a living as a lawyer, representing the asbestos companies who are always being sued by the millions of people who are riddled with cancer due to asbestos. When I asked if she had “considered the Pros and Cons” (her second favorite phrase) of defending a substance that kills people, Mom said she wasn’t actually defending asbestos, she was just making sure the right people got paid. Then she sighed and said, “It’s complicated.”
3. I have two little brothers, Toby and Hugh. Toby is two years younger than me and was selected to be in these Saturday classes at Carnegie Mellon for “Exceptionally Talented Youth” because he did better than I did on the PSATs, and he’s only in middle school. My mother says that even if he’s brighter than me, his social skills are lacking, and you can go farther in life with good social skills. I don’t see how this is supposed to make me feel better.
4. I call baby Hugh “Huggie,” which drives my mother crazy because it reminds her of changing a diaper. Huggie is the only person in the world who still snuggles me, usually while I read him books. Daddy stopped snuggling me when my breasts came in, and Mom will give kisses, but never just wraps me in her arms and lets me melt into her lap. Huggie is five now and is learning to read by himself, which means our Snuggling Days are numbered.
5. I’ve always wished I had a twin. One time, after Aunt Andie and I watched The Parent Trap, I told her my wish, and she said, “You did have a twin. It died.” Then she saw my face and said, “Oh, wait, maybe I shouldn’t have . . .” Later I asked Mom for the whole story, and she said there wasn’t much to tell: she had a miscarriage at twenty weeks. Daddy was the one who told me that my twin was a boy and his name was going to be Noah. Sometimes I like to imagine what my life would be like if Noah had lived. He’d probably play lacrosse. He’d introduce me to his friends and not let them date me. He’d tell me about sex instead of leaving pamphlets around the house—like Daddy and Mom did—with disgusting pictures of genitals falling off from sexually transmitted diseases.
6. Huggie almost didn’t exist, either, because Daddy didn’t want another child, he wanted to get a chocolate Lab, instead. When I was ten, I overheard them talking through the vent in my pink bedroom. My father was talking about how great things were with just two kids, one of each sex and disability-free. “But just imagine if something unspeakable happened to one of them—and then it would be too late for me to have another,” my mother said, which was all Daddy needed to hear. As a doctor, he is all about preparing for the Worst Case Scenario, which must’ve been the reason Mom married him. I was relieved when the new baby turned out to be a boy. I hoped it meant that God had intended for Toby to be replaced, and I would be spared.
7. My best friend Thea and I made a pact that we are not falling in love with Holden Saunders this year, like all the other girls in school. Even though we’re not falling in love with him, I always choose my hallway route between classes based on Holden’s class schedule—I know, for example, that if I linger at my locker outside of French, I’ll see him going into Spanish, and that he always buys a can of soda outside the Choir Room before his fifth period English. Thea heard that Holden Saunders is actually dating this cheerleader Karina Spencer—aka Adelaide in last year’s Guys and Dolls—and that she blew him on the first date, which is another reason we’re not falling in love with him. Now that he’s in our physics class, we can see him up close, and it turns out he actually does have some acne on his forehead, and the other day his left ear had a little honey-colored wax at the rim. We’re also not falling in love with him because of his name. His parents must’ve thought they were the first people in the world to love The Catcher in the Rye.
8. Thea and I love to shop at the Salvation Army, which gives my mom hives. Thea got her favorite camouflage jacket there, which she pairs with combat boots and a miniskirt, black eyeliner, and her nose ring. Since I’m not allowed to go Goth, my fallback look is a twinset from Anne Taylor from Mom and a kilt from the thrift store. Which is my way of saying that even if we were falling in love with Holden Saunders, he’s not falling in love with us—yet. Everything might change this year, because in psychology, Mrs. Desmond just announced that during the next month-long unit, we’ll be paired off, two by two, with mock marriages. All I have to do is convince her to marry Holden and me, and the first domino will fall.
9. My mother doesn’t know what it’s like to not have guys drooling all over her. One time, Aunt Andie and I were looking at an old photo album and she pointed to a picture of an exotic-looking woman with full, dark eyebrows and long hair. “This is the woman who was almost your mother,” Aunt Andie said. It was like she had no basic grasp of human genetics. “Your dad was engaged to this woman, Natalia, when he met your mom at a party in med school,” she explained. “He called off the wedding to be with Jane.” Then she saw my face and went, “Hold on, maybe I wasn’t supposed to . . .” Later, when I asked Daddy about it, he just laughed and said, “I saw your mom and boom. She blew me away.” That’s how beautiful my mom was. She’s still that beautiful now, when she smiles and laughs, which isn’t so often anymore.
10. Two years ago, when I was thirteen, my parents called us into the living room for a Family Meeting. When Mom said they had big news, I thought they were getting a divorce. But then I remembered that they never fight, and that we don’t have a housekeeper named Rocco with slicked-back hair and a hairless chest showing through his silk blouse, who would run away with Mom to California—like what happened to Thea’s mother. So maybe it would be the Best Case Scenario for a change. “We’re going to London?” I guessed, excited. And Mom said, “Daddy has cancer.” When Toby asked, “What exactly is cancer, Dad?” his eyes were squinting as if the information he was about to consume would be delivered at light speed. And Daddy said, “It’s when a group of cells in your body mutates and then proliferates—or reproduces—at an abnormal rate.” My father held up a hand. “Hang on. Let me back up. Let’s talk about normal cell death or apoptosis—” I interrupted to ask what the Worst Case Scenario was here. When Daddy said, “I die,” I felt like an invisible Darth Vader had just held up his hand and was choking me. As my mother insisted brightly that that would never, ever happen, I imagined us kissing my father’s coffin before we lowered it into the ground.
11. Later we learned that the Cancer was named Pancreatic Neuroendocrine—or, “the good kind,” if you ask Dr. Satinder Khaira—and after the surgery, it would make Daddy stay in his bathrobe and sweats and stop going to work for close to six months. But then Remission would move in, and Daddy would be known as a Living Miracle—at least by everyone at Fox Chapel United Methodist Church. Friends of the family just call him Really Lucky.
12. I still worry that something bad will happen to Daddy. And then I feel awful, because that means I have no faith or at least am part of the Ye with very little. When I told that to Mom she said she had no faith, either, but we had to pretend like we did. And I didn’t know if she meant pretend for Daddy or for God, so that He’ll keep giving us what we’re begging him for.
13. Mom is petite, blond, and Jewish, and Daddy is tall, dark, and Protestant, and they decided to raise us with the holy days of both traditions so that one day, when we come of age, we’ll be confused. I didn’t grow up with Hebrew school, a Bat Mitzvah, or a church confirmation, but apparently, sometime after my birth, there was some sort of Baptism/Naming Ceremony involving a minister and a rabbi. It took a tumor to make Daddy want to go to church on ordinary Sundays, when it wasn’t Christmas or Easter. One time after the service, I asked him if it was okay that I felt like the minister was the Queen from Alice in Wonderland encouraging us to believe six impossible things before breakfast, and he sighed
and said, almost to himself: “Maybe we should’ve picked one.”
14. Sometimes when I’m falling asleep I see people’s faces in my head, faces I’ve never met, and I wonder who they are, and if I will ever meet them. Aunt Andie says maybe they’re lost souls, looking for someone to tell their stories. Mom says this explanation is just one more example of Aunt Andie living “in a fantasy land.” Mom says Aunt Andie’s lying to herself by thinking she’s happy. When I said, “If she thinks she’s happy, then isn’t she?” Mom said, “It’s a deception,” as if Aunt Andie’s “happiness” were somehow sinister. “No one changes jobs, changes cities, changes apartments every year ‘just to try something new.’” Mom wants Aunt Andie to accept that she’s actually unhappy, so she can stop running away from herself.
15. I love that Aunt Andie only rents and never buys. I love that she calls herself an artist, even though she’s never sold a single one of her weird paintings. I love that she still believes in Soul Mates even though she hasn’t had a “viable boyfriend” (Mom’s words) in years. Mom says if Aunt Andie would just lose thirty pounds, or maybe be willing to date “heavier” men, she wouldn’t have had to borrow ten thousand dollars to freeze her eggs before her ovaries shrivel up. Mom lent Aunt Andie the money three years ago, and since then, the only conversations they have—when they speak at all—are about when Aunt Andie is going to pay her back. Mom doesn’t know that I go to Aunt Andie’s place after school sometimes or that we’ve met at the mall for lunch. I don’t care what Mom thinks: I still love hearing about Aunt Andie’s hopeful First Encounters. She always says there’s nothing more romantic than being able to look back at that initial meeting so you could figure out where it all began. It’s the very reason I wanted to join the “Talent Not Necessary” Group.
16. My annoying brother Toby is the one who saw the ad in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Hey, guys, check this out: ‘Writers Wanted—talent not necessary!’ They’re talking about you, Elyse!” Daddy said they sounded like a pretty desperate group of people, and my mom was worried about the part that said “Open to the public,” which she thought was a euphemism for “Potentially Violent Wack Jobs.” But I had this fantasy that maybe I’d open the door to the conference room and Holden Saunders would glance up and pause—mid-pencil-twirl—to tilt his head to the side, trying to place me. I’d be tempted to tell him that we’ve gone to school together for five years and that, in fact, when my family moved to the Regal Estates last summer, it actually made us neighbors. At the end of the session, before I could tell him any of this, he would walk up to me and say, half-squinting, “Elyse, right?”
17. Mom, as usual, wanted me to consider the Pros and Cons of attending the group. Such as, if I write more, then I will have more insomnia and then my grades might suffer. The only Con I could imagine was from that old movie, Dead Poets Society, where one of us might be compelled to commit suicide for the sake of our art.
18. The reason I can’t sleep at night is because I am working on a novel about a group of four sisters who don’t know they’re sisters, who end up at the same boarding school in England. I have already finished writing one hundred pages, which means I’ll definitely finish my first novel before my sixteenth birthday, and hopefully be published before I graduate from high school!
19. When my mother read the opening of my novel, she told me that I shouldn’t have set it in the 1940s, because I’ve never lived in the 1940s, and that I shouldn’t have set it in London because I’ve never been to London, and that it doesn’t make sense that one woman would have four babies with four different men and leave them in four different countries. She couldn’t “suspend her disbelief” that they would all end up together at the same school in London, even if it was touted as the best girls’ school in the entire world. She said maybe she’d believe it if I kept it to two sisters who didn’t know they were sisters, but not four. Like it was that easy to say sayonara to Anastasia and Eliona. She told me to “write what I know,” which would make a terrible story: here’s me, going to school, and watching Holden in physics, and babysitting my brothers. The only way I would be able to have anything to write about is if I switched places with Thea, or if Daddy hadn’t miraculously been healed.
20. Everything that I hate about my mother is everything I hate about myself. So it’s really hard to hate her, and that makes me madder.
21. I have always wanted to save somebody’s life. One time, before Daddy got sick, we were at McDonald’s and a man inhaled a Chicken McNugget and was turning blue until Daddy did the Heimlich and saved his life. Toby watched and said, “Awesome!” and two-year-old Huggie was sort of fascinated and said, “What happened?” but I watched the whole thing and wanted to cry. It’s unfortunately how I react to any life-threatening situation, but I’m hoping that will change as I get older. Actually, I’ve never been in another life-threatening situation, but I have watched many on TV.
22. #21 is the reason I stayed when I discovered that the Public from the “Open to the Public/No Talent” group was just a bunch of senior citizens. I thought about turning around and pretending I was in the wrong room, but then I started dreaming for a moment. Maybe someone will fall out of his chair, and I could help him up. Or maybe I could do CPR on one of them, which I learned in a babysitting course. I wanted to be an unexpected hero. I wanted to be the kid interviewed on the Today show.
23. I thought about telling Thea that the group was elderly, but later, when she was asking me if there were any cute guys in it, something made my mouth say, “Just one. But he’s older.” When she asked if he went to Pitt, I said, “I’m guessing he’s like . . . thirty,” and she gasped, so I couldn’t make my mouth say, “Times three.” I thought about telling my mom that the group was not what I had expected, not in the slightest, but when she picked me up at the library and noticed I looked disappointed, she was worried that it was from criticism I might’ve received on my novel. “Oh, honey,” she said, patting my knee. “It’s not easy hearing painful truths from people who don’t love you,” she said. That’s when I decided that I wanted something to happen to me that my mother couldn’t protect me from.
PART 1
CHAPTER 3
Miri Wants
1938
The first secret starts with Elias Glazier, the wavy-haired lead actor from Hamlet whom my sister falls in love with in the winter of 1938. If it weren’t for Sarah making me her accomplice—entreating me to go along for their dates at the diner, or to lose myself in the library while she visits him after the matinee, pretending to our parents, all the while, that she and I are together—their affair would’ve never taken flight.
The morning after my sister announces her elopement—“To an actor?” Mama screamed, as if he were a gentile—my mother tells me that she’s made a decision: in two years, when I turn eighteen and graduate from high school, she’s sending me to college.
“But that costs too much,” I say, which is what Mama usually says about everything I want. Specifically, flight lessons at six dollars an hour, which we can’t possibly afford, which I may not “save up” for because it’s dangerous and frivolous, and Uncle Hyman says that girls don’t belong in the cockpit of an aircraft. The path of my life has been laid out for me with the precision of a hemline: I’ll live in the house on Beacon Street, and work in the family shop mending and making dresses. No one seems to care that I don’t know how to sew.
“There are savings.” Mama stops pacing to study her hand for a moment—at the chip of a diamond on her finger, which I realize she must be intending to hock. When she looks over at me, I’m surprised to notice the new wisps of white and gray in her dark hair that frames her face. “Just not enough for both of you girls.”
“But then that won’t be fair.” Sarah is nearly twenty to my sixteen. If anyone should get the chance to go, she should be first.
“Sarah never cared about school. She spends her pocket money on clothes,” Mama says with disdain, which is ironic considering our family l
ivelihood depends on such consumerism, albeit cheaper frocks than the ones Sarah saves for. “She’s a dreamer,” Mama adds. “She picked a starving artist.”
I think of Elias, with his equal penchant for scotch and comedy, particularly that of the Marx Brothers. “Emily, I have a little confession to make,” he likes to say, being Hackenbush from A Day at the Races, as he wraps an arm around my giggling sister. “I’m actually a horse doctor. But marry me, and I’ll never look at any other horse.” His eyes are cerulean, his smile devilish, and he’s nothing like the type of man we imagined, specifically Dickon from The Secret Garden, charmer of animals and healer of the lame, a character whom we both adored as girls. “He seems to really love her,” I offer.
“Love!” Mama scoffs, throwing up a hand. “What do they know about love? They have no money and no education.”
As my mother resumes her pacing again, I imagine starring in my own real-life version of a Kitson Career Series novel, the ones Sarah and I check out from the library where the young woman always moves to a new city to start a career, only in my story, it’s not a man who’s going to sweep me off my feet when I arrive. It’ll be an airplane.
I’VE WANTED TO FLY SINCE WE LIVED BACK IN FREELAND, SINCE A pilot dropped into our backyard and stayed for dinner ten years ago. It was a Friday, which meant Mama was preparing for Shabbat, and Sarah was cooking up an adventure. “Meet me outside, by the tree. And don’t let them see you!” Sarah opened our bedroom door a crack before inching it wider. Then she gave me a smile and slipped away.
The Secrets of Flight Page 2