“I could go,” said a tentative voice, and we all turned to glance at Elyse, shyly raising her hand. “I mean, if no one else is ready.”
Everyone loved the idea—everyone, that is, except for Jean Fester, who asked what a girl would write about these days, when she’d never had her freedom threatened?
A short while later, after the group had dispersed early and I had time to peruse the stacks and select a few novels for my night table, I approached the librarian, a woman in her mid-fifties, who looked at me kindly when I produced the USA Today article from my pocketbook, inwardly cursing my shaky fingers.
“A friend of mine flew planes during the war. I’m wondering if she wanted to attend the ceremony how she’d be found—if someone was looking for her . . .” The librarian scanned the article, her eyes narrowed with concentration. “I’m certain she couldn’t just show up at Pennsylvania Avenue and expect to be handed a medal,” I added with a laugh.
When the librarian finally looked up and smiled, I decided I must be wrong: she was not a day over forty-five. She just needed to smile more often. “Your friend must be amazing,” she said.
“Not really, no. Just . . . an ordinary woman doing her part.”
“Let’s see what we can find out,” the librarian said. I followed her over to a nearby cluster of desks, each one with its own computer. She pulled up a seat for me and then plunked her bottom down in front of the screen. “Okay if I drive?” When I nodded, mute, she started typing words onto a blank page marked with a rainbow of colored letters: Google. After a considerable amount of tapping and clicking, she landed on a university website. “Here we go. It looks like some folks at Texas Woman’s University are verifying who the pilots were.” She scrawled down a number on a small square of paper and handed it to me. I looked at the number and then back to her face. “I bet if your friend called this phone number, they could help.”
“And if she doesn’t have a birth certificate or other forms of identification? I’m fairly certain she said everything was destroyed in a fire.”
“Oh, they have their ways. I’m sure if she just told them her name and Social Security number, they’d be able to verify that she was there.”
“Of course. You’re right. Thank you. I’ll . . . pass this information on.”
So, it was over before it had begun. Of course it was over. Had I really expected that I could just show them a black-and-white picture from the paper taken sixty years ago and expect them to recognize her? Did I even want Miri to be found?
On the way out of the library, I tossed the phone number in the garbage and then reached for the banister to steady my way down the steps, only to find Elyse sitting on the last two, down by the sidewalk on Forbes Avenue. Just coming upon her like that, lost in thought and looking like Sarah fiddling with her shoelaces, made my tremor start up again.
Elyse glanced over and smiled. “Hey, Mrs. Browning. My mom won’t be here for another hour. I should probably study, but the weather is so nice . . .”
“How about a cup of tea somewhere?” I suggested, forgetting that young people today only drink coffee. She hesitated, as if she were already committed to staying in that very spot of cement. “I have a business proposition to discuss with you,” I added, deciding in that very moment.
We settled on Panera Bread across the street, which certainly wasn’t the old-world charm I was looking for.
“So, tell me a little about your novel,” I said, once we were sitting down in a booth by the window. I had already purchased our tea and Danishes and was still struggling to get the sugar packet into the cup without spilling it all over the table. Finally, I gave up and decided I like my Earl Grey bitter.
“The plot sounds stupid if I say it out loud,” Elyse said, taking a sip from her mug.
“The best stories sound stupid when you say them aloud,” I said. “Let’s have it anyway.”
“It’s . . . well . . . there’s this mom, Larissa, who kind of travels around, falling in love and getting pregnant by men in different countries, but she always leaves the baby behind, right after it’s born.” She set down her cup. “So, these four half sisters—Eliona, Anastasia, Cordelia, and Mathilda—end up at the same boarding school in London.” She met my eyes. “Stupid, huh? Maybe it would be better if there were only two sisters?”
“It’s a perfectly fine plot,” I said, and her hunched shoulders dropped. “Look at Ballet Shoes: this archeologist stops collecting fossils and collects three babies instead who must earn money by dancing after he disappears for sixteen years. It’s just as far-fetched, but it works, as long as you can make your reader believe it. But,” I added, holding up a finger, “you haven’t answered the single most important question.”
“You mean, like, hasn’t Larissa heard of birth control?” Elyse asked.
“No!” I said, accidentally raising my voice. “What passion, what pursuit, keeps her traveling so much that she can’t possibly stay to raise her babies? What does Larissa have her heart set on?”
Elyse blinked at me, as if, in all her fifteen years, she’d never felt an aching desire to be anyone else, anywhere else, with someone else.
“I’ll have to think about it,” Elyse said, her voice thoughtful and intrigued.
“Well, think about it.”
As she stared off somewhere over my left shoulder, there was a hint of a smile on the corners of her lips. Finally, she shifted her gaze back to me. “So, what’s this business proposition?”
“Ah. Well. As you can see I suffer from a bit of a tremor,” I said with a laugh, even though nothing about the tremor was funny to me. “It is quite hard for me to write these days, and I’ve been looking for someone to type my memoir.”
“Is it written down somewhere?” she asked.
“Why surely,” I said, tapping my skull.
Elyse smiled again, a lovely smile that made me feel hopeful and young myself. “So, like, you’d just talk into a computer mic or something? And I would, like, take the flash drive home and type it?”
“No. No, that won’t do.” I wanted to figure out if Miriam Lichtenstein could ever exist again. For reasons I couldn’t begin to explain, I didn’t want to do it alone. “Perhaps you could just sit and listen to my stories and jot down some notes that might help me to organize my thoughts,” I said. “You would be more of a collaborator, of sorts . . . and certainly I would pay you.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to pay me.”
“Well, of course I would pay you. Isn’t your time worth something? Don’t ever give away your talents for free, my dear. Do you have an income now?”
“An income?” she repeated, her voice dubious. “I babysit my little brothers for, like, five bucks an hour, even though the going rate for sitters is ten.”
“That’s called ‘earning your keep,’ my dear. In my day, no one got paid for watching a sibling.” When she looked down at her Danish, I wished I hadn’t started a sentence with “In my day,” which is probably why I said, “I’ll give you fifteen.”
“Per hour?” She looked up in wide-eyed delight. “Just so you know, I got a C in typing last year.”
“I don’t care if it looks like rubbish,” I said. “Who’s going to read it?”
The words were strangely liberating—what was there to fear if no one was ever going to see these pages? We arranged a time for Saturday afternoon, a week and a half later. I invited her to my apartment and asked her to bring her laptop. “I don’t have one,” Elyse said.
“Doesn’t everyone your age have a computer?”
“I have a desktop. Which sits on my desktop.” Elyse rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone for emergencies until last year.”
“Well, good. Teaching a girl to think for herself.” When she shrugged, apparently unconvinced, I studied her for a moment. “So, Elyse, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A doctor and a writer.”
Now, that made me smile. A girl who had plans! There
was hope for her yet. I told her my simple rule, which I’d shared with the group: “Don’t write because you want to be a writer. Write because you have something to say.” She cocked her head to the side.
“My grandma Margot says that, too. She’s a writer—she published a novel when she was twenty-six. The Secrets of Flight.”
“Sounds intriguing.” I smiled.
“I’ve never actually read it.” Elyse shrugged and took a bite of her Danish. “She moved away when I was ten.”
“Well, I think any book written by a family member should be required reading—even if the author lives in Timbuktu.” Elyse stopped chewing, as if considering this for the first time. “And medicine?” I asked, picking up my mug. “Where does that come from?”
“I’m probably going to need a day job,” she admitted.
“My son Dave was supposed to be a doctor—just like his father,” I said, a confession. “He was an early microbiologist, you see. At the age of seven he would pull the agar plates out of the incubator to tell his father which were group A streptococcal positive. But Dave surprised us by falling in love with music instead. We forced him to pick a dual concentration, something that might assure his parents that he wouldn’t grow up to be a bum. So he picked computer science!” When Elyse smiled uncertainly, I thought, Dear God, I’ve said too much. “I fully endorse your plans for a dual career,” I finally finished.
“Thanks?” She took a bite of her apple Danish, wiped her mouth, and then asked, “So what’s your book about?” This time it was my turn for my face to cloud over. For a second I thought she meant my essay collection, Miss Bixby Takes a Wife, which had seen the light of day but just barely. But then I realized we were still talking about my “memoir.” It seemed like such a ruse, when I wasn’t even sure I could bring myself to tell the story.
“The book? Oh. Me, my life, the family secrets,” I said breezily, and the corners of her mouth turned up as if she were intrigued. It was odd that I called them family secrets, when the family was long gone, and the secrets were important to no one but me.
THE NEXT DAY I RODE THE BUS OVER TO WALNUT STREET AND ambled down the sidewalk, peering in the windows of shops along the way. Headless mannequins wore silk dresses and precarious heels. Sarah, graced with good balance, strong ankles, and a tiny waist—even without a corset—would’ve been in seventh heaven among the racks. Meanwhile, the fruit in the window of the little grocery store looked like it might’ve been genetically engineered to look superior to any other fruit I’d ever seen.
The Apple Store was probably spectacular too, for someone of Elyse’s age. There were display stations of computers and cell phones throughout the store and a line was forming at the front for the “Genius Bar.” My son Dave—and I say this with only the smallest amount of bias—is smarter than all of those geniuses put together.
“So, is this a present for someone?” asked the salesman, a sloppy youth with a mop of red curls, khaki shorts falling so low that I could see his undershorts, and a blue Apple T-shirt straining at a beer gut. Still, I liked his earnest smile.
I thought about saying the computer was for Elyse, but what would I call her? My writing colleague? And besides, the model I was looking at would cost me over a thousand dollars. It didn’t matter that I had money to burn, money that it would be a sin to waste: the girl had balked about accepting payment for typing my memoir and was distinctly uncomfortable when I insisted on buying her a Danish at Panera. “The computer will be for me,” I said.
“What kind of capabilities are you looking for?” he asked, and I blinked. “Email? Sharing pictures on the Internet?”
“I would like to type,” I said.
“Gotcha,” he said, guiding me toward a laptop on the display table. After he talked me through the “word processing” feature, I told him I’d take it. It was probably his easiest sale of the day. When he couldn’t accept a personal check, I handed him my never-used-before debit card, issued against my will by the bank, and he slid it through a handheld device that turned out to be a cash register of some sort.
“You want to sign up for lessons to learn how to use the computer?” he asked.
“I have a little friend who can help me out,” I said, and he nodded, punched a few keys on his device, and gave me back my card and a receipt.
So, that’s what she is, I thought, leaving the store. My little friend.
Returning to my apartment, I made the unfortunate mistake of bumping into Selena Markmann just exiting the building in her usual purple splendor—wind pants and a jacket, which meant she was probably on her way to Jazzercise. She was always pestering Jean Fester to join the class to “get healthy,” to which Jean would reply, full of venom, “Do you know what it feels like to have your internal defibrillator go off when you’re not even having a cardiac arrest?” Selena eyed my Apple bag and said, “Well, well. Look who’s joining the twenty-first century and going online after all. Mary Browning, the others won’t believe it.”
“Oh, this? It’s for my great-granddaughter’s birthday. My grandson Tyler and my son Dave are visiting with Hazel and Josie next week. Dave hates to fly and insists on driving all the way from Seattle,” I added with an exasperated sigh. Selena’s eyes turned to slits, reminding me of a very perceptive cat.
“Where are they staying?” she asked.
“The Sunny Ledge.” The bus had zipped by the quaint little bed-and-breakfast that afternoon.
“The Sunny Ledge? They let children stay there?”
“Well, the twins are very well behaved. It’s not as if anyone has to worry that they’ll wreck the place. Josie’s the only twelve-year-old I know who actually likes to sew,” I added.
Selena brought a finger to her lips and screwed up her eyes again, as if contemplating other preteens with an interest in thread. “How on earth did I forget that they were twins? Because I had twins, you know,” she finally said, as if I could’ve forgotten the tale of how Selena had single-handedly breastfed two babies, one on each side, when nursing was not the fashion, when, in fact, it was usually a sign of poverty. The only person who enjoyed that story was Gene Rosskemp, who said he never minded imagining Selena’s “gazoongas.”
“You should bring them to the group next Tuesday night,” Selena suggested.
“They’ll be gone before then. I really must go.” Oh, how I wished that Dave had forgiven me, and that they really were coming.
“What was the name of that publishing house you worked for in New York?” she called after me. “I was trying to search for it online, and—”
“I already told you,” I said, stepping onto the elevator, “it went out of business years ago.” When the doors finally shut, I shut my eyes and exhaled.
Back inside my apartment, I set the Apple bag gently on the floor and fell into my recliner with a sigh, thinking that I used to be a better friend, back when I used to have friends, back when I was still Miriam Lichtenstein.
Reaching over to my little bookshelf, my hand found its way to the picture in USA Today of the three women and the plane. Just looking at it again made the old impulse rise up—the one that made me want to take a black, permanent marker and blot out the name in the caption, Miriam Lichtenstein, keeping her safe in her anonymity.
In the back of my bedroom closet, I pulled out an old shoe box before returning to the living room recliner once again. An hour passed as if a minute, as I rifled through the three-by-five photos inside: the one of Papa and Mama, leaning against his peddler’s fruit cart—Mama smiling in spite of herself, as if she can’t believe Papa’s laughing when disaster looms; Sarah and Elias, looking like Hollywood royalty after one of his performances; Sarah holding baby Rita on the front steps of the house on Beacon Street; and the one that takes my breath away: I am in my Santiago blue uniform standing with Thomas—the picture I mailed to my mother only months before she cut me off. Oh, Mama, did you have any regrets about me at the end? I wondered, a pointless question after all this time. Water under th
e bridge; such a stupid cliché, I thought with a sigh. Especially in Pittsburgh, where the bridges are everywhere, each one arching over the water you thought you’d already left behind, your history always chasing you.
At last, I found the one I was searching for: one of the original photos of Murphee, Grace, and me in the middle, standing in front of Murph’s Fairchild PT-19, taken sixty-five years ago on Ana Santos’s Leica. I took the framed photo of Thomas and me in our later years—somewhere between grown-ups and grandparents—and swapped it with the fly girl snapshot. Then I set it on the shelf beside the one of Thomas, my son Dave, his wife, Carrie, my grandson Tyler. Miri was up there too, nameless but present. If Elyse noticed her, it was a sign to keep going.
After lining up the picture frames, I pulled back my hand and studied my bare fingers, gnarled by arthritis and wrinkled like the pages in the newspaper. None of us were getting younger, even Selena, fighting decay with her Jazzercise, even Elyse, who wouldn’t recognize what it meant to be fifteen until it was all over. But, oh, to become the woman that Thomas might recognize once again, a woman running through the tall grasses and holding his hand. Here I come, my love. I closed my eyes for a little catnap in the recliner. It won’t be much longer now.
CHAPTER 5
Fly Girl
This Saturday was my first meeting with Mrs. Browning since she said she wanted me to be the transcriptionist for the memoir of her life. Mom dropped me off at the Squirrel Hill library, so I could work on a “research project,” and then I walked the three blocks to Mrs. Browning’s high-rise apartment. If it had been Daddy driving, I might’ve told him about my new job as Mrs. Browning’s assistant, but I didn’t feel like hearing Mom say, “Should you really be taking on extra commitments when you only have one month left to design and create a bridge made entirely out of toothpicks? And if so, what about volunteering at the hospital, like we talked about?” Besides, it was kind of exciting, walking up the library steps from Mom’s car and then sneaking out of the lobby as soon as she’d driven away. The way the security guard was eyeing me, like he knew I was up to something, made me wish I was up to something much, much worse.
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