The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  “We’re going through the same program the male cadets go through, except for gunnery. There haven’t been any accidents since I’ve been here.” Not counting Ana, I think, who got ejected during a spin recovery when the floppy sleeve of her coveralls caught on the seat belt lever, unbuckling it and sending her flying. Luckily, she pulled her parachute cord and landed in a field, five miles off base. I wish I’d had my camera, she said of her descent. “I just want to fly. There’s really . . . no other way.”

  “But this is all only temporary,” Mr. Rubinowicz says. “Until the war ends.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “General Arnold just introduced a bill in the Senate to make us part of the air force officially. We’re going to be part of the military. It’s what they’re preparing us for.”

  “The military?” Uncle Leo repeats, the natural timber of his voice quaking, unless that’s disbelief. “Why should a woman volunteer for the service?”

  “She wants to fly, Uncle Leo!” Mrs. Rubinowicz enunciates and shouts. “Solomon wanted to fly, too, but they won’t take him,” she says, looking at me now. “Not with his heart like it is.”

  “My heart’s fine,” Sol says.

  “What’s it like?” Hannah asks me, and I like her for her quiet shyness. She reminds me of my niece, Rita.

  “We march a lot,” I say to her, and she giggles.

  “The food must be terrible,” Mrs. Rubinowicz says.

  “No, it’s really delicious,” I say and then regret it, knowing what her next question will be.

  “Kosher?”

  I think about my answer for too long before half-nodding, half-shrugging. The truth is, I haven’t tasted gefelte fish in months, and I haven’t missed it a bit.

  “So, what does your family think about this?” Mr. Rubinowicz asks.

  “They think—” I stop abruptly. “Well, my sister, Sarah . . .” The kugel sticks in my throat, mid-swallow, when it spasms. My eyes tear up, and I cough and cough. Sol’s parents look up, vaguely alarmed, and then glance at each other.

  “Water! Get her some water,” Mr. Rubinowicz snaps.

  I shake my head and wave at Sol to sit down, but he’s already gone. There’s a clang of glassware, a rush of water, and then a glass is banged down on the table in front of me with a small splash. I’ve stopped choking by now, but I drink quickly to be polite. “I’m sorry . . .” I clear my throat. “My sister was just diagnosed with TB. She’s quite sick.”

  There’s a brief pause, a drop of concerned eyebrows and shuddering shoulders, and then Sol speaks: “They’re close to a cure, you know.” I look at him gratefully. It feels like such a relief—both the words that he’s saying, and that I’m actually allowed to make eye contact. “Streptomycin. They discovered it last year at Rutgers University. They’re trying to get approval to do a study with actual patients.”

  “Solomon wants to be a doctor, but he can’t get in,” Mrs. Rubinowicz says. “Which is a great mystery, because his father and I have met plenty of idiots who are doctors.”

  “Thanks, Ma. Inspiring words,” Sol says.

  “It’s the Jewish quota. They only let in a few every year,” Mr. Rubinowicz explains. “He can’t get rid of the H for ‘Hebrew’ on his application.”

  “That’s how it starts,” Uncle Leo barks, so maybe his hearing is not so bad after all. “First the quotas, then your basic human rights, then your home. It’s difficult to be a concert pianist without a piano,” he adds, looking at me, and I nod, big-eyed and solemn.

  “Sol’s trying for the last time,” his father goes on, “and if they don’t let him in this fall, he has some important decisions to be making.”

  “Right, Pop. I know.” Sol puts his napkin down on the table.

  “Classes start in August,” Mr. Rubinowicz says, peering at his gold pocket watch as if it were a calendar. “If they wanted him, he should’ve heard by now.”

  “What time is curfew on base?” Sol asks with a noisy exhale, and I realize belatedly he’s talking to me.

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “How will you get back?” he asks, and I feel my face heating up again.

  “Oh, I think—Mr. Hendricks is coming for me,” I say.

  “I can’t leave the shop to anyone,” his father goes on. “Sol handles everything. All the purchasing. All the books. What’s gonna happen when I go?”

  “Frank, leave him,” his mother says.

  “The United States may look very different by then,” Uncle Leo says. “Who knows what’s going to happen to any of us?”

  “You have a point, Leo.” Mr. Rubinowicz sighs and leans back in his chair, finally looking at me with such kindness in his brown eyes, I am once again reminded of Papa. “Miriam, is this too much trouble? Coming all the way to Abilene for Shabbos with us?”

  “Not at all,” I say, glancing around the table, at everyone except for Sol, because I can’t stop blushing. “It was a really wonderful meal.”

  “She’ll come back,” Mrs. Rubinowicz says, a verdict.

  “Maybe next time you don’t wear the uniform,” Mr. Rubinowicz adds.

  LATER, HANNAH SHYLY TAKES MY HAND AND LEADS ME INTO the backyard to show me “Papa’s Tree of Life.” I blink at the green branches, laden with inexplicable, tiny melons and watch as Mr. Rubinowicz reaches up and cuts one down with a sly wink, instead of waiting for it to fall.

  I look at the fruit in his hand then back up at his face.

  “Mango,” he explains. “I’ve been cultivating this little tree for years. Every time I thought it was dead, it came back to life.”

  We take it back inside and I peel and eat my first mango—eat it all the way down to its core. It is, by far, the most delicious piece of fruit I’ve had since the war began—the most delicious piece of fruit in possibly my entire life, which reminds me of Papa and his vegetable cart. “You should sell this,” I say, mango juices still dripping down my face, while, in the front room, Uncle Leo plays the piano in a rapid tinkling of high notes that reminds me of soft rain coming across the blueberry fields, punctuated by booming chords that sound like soldiers storming a concert hall. He plays and plays as if he’s making a desperate plea, and Mr. Rubinowicz only replies, “I can’t sell a miracle.”

  IT’S DARK AND DRIZZLY WHEN MR. HENDRICKS DRIVES ME BACK to base. “It must’ve felt good to finally get a chance to worship,” he says. “And they’re such a nice family—the Rubinowiczes.”

  It’s so strange, the things I never cared about, silly things like kissing. Who needs it? I always thought. There’s Sarah, falling in love with a starving actor, and here’s Grace, who worries sick if she hasn’t heard from Teddy in a few weeks, because who knows what’s happening on the shores of France, and just when I am one hundred percent certain that I never want to clutter my mind with anything but avionics, I am suddenly equally certain that I want to be kissed. I want long, I want slow, I want fingers in my hair.

  “Yes,” I finally agree, after a moment of silence, save the slap of the windshield wipers, back and forth. “Nice family.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Marriage Project

  Tuesday morning at breakfast, as Mom was frantically slapping peanut butter on slices of bread for all of our lunches, Toby asked her what the deal was with Dad. She stopped for just a second as if debating whether to lie and say he had an early morning surgery. “We heard him leave last night,” I added, when Toby glanced at me.

  “Dad’s fine,” Mom said, squirting some jelly onto each open sandwich. “He just wants to spend some time by himself, thinking about things.”

  “Thinking about what things?” Toby asked levelly, but Mom reminded him he was about to miss his bus. “Why didn’t Daddy say goodbye to us?” he added.

  “It was late, and he thought you were asleep.” Then she scooped up Toby’s cereal bowl, even though he wasn’t quite finished. “I have a deposition today, so no one can miss the bus. Hugh Strickler? Where are you?” she added in a piercing shout, just as m
y baby brother appeared from the living room holding up his Lego creation, some sort of half-car, half-boat, equipped with missiles on the side.

  “It’s the Generator Sixteen Thousand Thirteen. Can I take a bath with it?” Huggie asked, which made Mom start shrieking again about getting dressed for kindergarten.

  I waited until the boys were gone to ask her where Daddy went when he left to go “think about things.”

  “Daddy is staying in the very nice apartment that he decided to rent while I was in Key West—it’s fully furnished,” Mom added, like I’d been worried he was using milk crates for chairs. I hoped that didn’t mean Natalia was staying there, too. “He’ll be back, but in the meantime, I’d really prefer that no one in the community know about this yet. We’re still trying to reconcile the situation. Oh, and Elyse? Can you clear your dishes, please?”

  I sighed and picked up my bowl and carried it to the sink.

  The thing is, when I thought about who I wanted to call about Daddy leaving, it wasn’t Grandma, because I didn’t want to worry Grandma when she was sick. And it wasn’t Aunt Andie, because Aunt Andie was the last person Mom would want to know. I did think of calling Thea, but Thea had been acting weird with me ever since I got paired up with Holden for the marriage project. Just as Mom was saying, “It’s really no one’s business that Daddy is gone,” I knew I would tell Mrs. Browning. She was like a safety deposit box for secrets.

  But just as I was planning on getting dropped off at the library before six and then sneaking over to Mrs. Browning’s high-rise, Mom asked me if I could babysit after school, since she would have to work late and Daddy wouldn’t be here to watch Toby and Huggie. “I have my writers’ group tonight,” I said.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” Mom said, which really pissed me off, even though her voice was kind of quaky when she said it. I wanted to tell her that I’m not the one who wants to spend some time apart and maybe have sex with other people. But it seemed better to lie and say that I had handed out my next chapter for critique and that everyone was counting on me to be there so they could discuss it. We were actually discussing Gene Rosskemp’s story about being a captain of the truck brigade in World War II. You wouldn’t expect it from a man like Gene, who swears like crazy and makes such stupid puns with an exaggerated wink in case you missed it, but he actually wrote an amazing story about rescuing a truckload of wine during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

  Mom sighed. “Never mind. I’ll figure something out.”

  LATER THAT MORNING, I WAS STANDING IN THE SCHOOL LOBBY waiting to file onto the field trip bus with the rest of Mrs. Kindling’s English class and thumbing through emails on my phone when I looked up and saw Thea, who was weaving her way through the crowd. Her face contorted in surprise or repulsion, it was hard to tell which.

  “Hey, thanks for the ride,” I said, meaning later on—from writers’ group. After Mom’s mini-meltdown, I’d texted Thea from the bus about picking me up from the Squirrel Hill library that night.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” Thea asked, nearing me. A couple of kids turned to look. If they hadn’t already noticed my new skinny jeans, they were now.

  I could feel my face getting hot. “Just . . . clothes.”

  “You so look weird,” she said.

  “Well, that’s nothing new, right?” I said, and Thea still didn’t smile.

  “We’re partners for the toothpick bridge, right?” she asked. “Because I heard Holden telling one of his dick friends that you were his partner.”

  “Well, he did kind of ask me, and it’s not like we started yet—”

  “But we did start!” she said. “We started when we planned to be partners! You can’t just go switching now, when it’s due in three weeks.”

  Mrs. Kindling started shouting at us to form a line for the buses. We were on our way to see Our Town, the play by Thornton Wilder that we’d read earlier in the year.

  “You know he’s going to want you to build it for him, right?” Thea said, backing away from me. “While you’re blowing him.”

  “Well, that would be difficult . . .”

  “Maybe you can have a threesome with Karina Spencer—now that you’re twins.”

  “Thea—” I started, but she was already gone.

  After the buses pulled up at the Public Theatre, we filed off two by two. I was worried I’d end up stuck next to Carson Jeffries until the AP class mixed with the regular English classes in the lobby, and suddenly Holden and I were side by side, which made it easier to forget about the fight with Thea. Inside the theater, he let me go into the row first, and then he sat down next to me—he even stayed there after some of his lacrosse buddies were waving at him to move down where they were sitting. “This is my wife,” he called, pointing at me, and I tilted my head back and laughed so loudly that one of the parent chaperones turned around and glared at me. Then the lights dimmed, and the actors brought out two tables and a couple of chairs and started miming their morning rituals as the Stage Manager explained them, and Holden leaned over and whispered, “Is that supposed to be the set?” and “Where’re the props?” which made me so giddy that for the whole first act, I could barely do anything but contain my spasms of laughter.

  Even after the intermission, when he might’ve found his way to a new seat, Holden stayed by me. He smelled good, too, like maybe he was wearing his father’s cologne or a really spicy, masculine deodorant. Somewhere, during Act II, Holden kind of shifted in his seat and straddled his legs a little, and I must’ve been sitting funny instead of crossing my own, because suddenly we were touching, calf to calf. My face heated up, but I didn’t pull my leg away; I just stared straight ahead and pretended I couldn’t feel the pressure of Holden Saunders’s jeaned calf against my own. Onstage, the actors were pretending to slog through the rain and mud on Emily and George’s wedding day, and all I could think about was that we were finally, finally touching.

  When I’d read the play by myself for school, alone in my pink bedroom, the end had actually made me tear up, and I wasn’t even sure why except that when Emily wants her mother to stop and look at her—to realize that nothing bad has happened yet, and they don’t even know it—a terrible sadness welled up in me when I imagined the future, terrifying and tragic, unfolding without my control. But in the theater, when the cast took their seats and stared straight ahead, expression-less, and Holden whispered in my ear, “Are they supposed to be dead?” my shoulders shook with silent laughter. The Stage Manager was saying, “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . .” and I suddenly thought of Grandma, inexplicably suffering so far away, and of Daddy, moving out without saying goodbye, and laughing-tears kept squeezing out of my face, until I realized I was actually crying. Luckily, a few minutes later, when George collapsed, weeping at Emily’s feet, Holden pointed out that the actor had a big string of snot coming out of his nose, and then my grief turned back into giddiness again.

  After school, I asked Holden if he could drop me off at the Squirrel Hill library for writers’ group. I couldn’t go home, because even if Mom had found another babysitter, she probably wasn’t authorized to drive me across town to the library right at dinnertime. Holden shut the door to his locker and glanced down the hall. “Um, sure,” he said, and I followed his gaze behind me, where Karina Spencer was rummaging through her own locker. I wondered if it was true that they’d broken up.

  “We’re getting issued our flour baby on Monday,” I said. “So . . . that’ll be interesting. I guess we have to keep it ‘alive’ for two weeks?”

  “Uh huh.” He zipped up his letterman’s jacket, still staring somewhere over my left shoulder. When I glanced back at Karina again, she looked me up and down before slamming her locker door shut. Then she flipped her curly hair over her shoulder and walked away in the direction of the gym, where the cheerleaders were warming up.

  I felt like the emperor in his new clo
thes.

  AFTER HOLDEN DROPPED ME OFF, I ENDED UP ACROSS THE STREET from the library in Panera with two and a half hours to kill before the meeting, so I bought a bagel and some coffee—which I’m actually not allowed to drink until I’m eighteen, according to Mom—fit the headphone jack into Mrs. Browning’s Dictaphone, and pressed PLAY. She’d let me take her laptop with her last time so that I could keep working on it, since typing each sentence took forever.

  Just as Mary was arriving in Abilene to meet Sol for the first time, Mom called, but I didn’t answer it. Instead I texted Thea and asked her if she was still coming to pick me up outside the library at eight thirty. She texted back: “Ask Holden.” I groaned. He’d actually already told me he had a student government meeting that night. “I told him we need to talk,” I wrote instead and then went back to typing. Fifteen minutes went by without a message except from Mom: “Where are you?” Suddenly, it was three minutes after seven, so I silenced my phone, quickly gathered up my trash, and reloaded my backpack. Outside, the clouds were hanging low and gray, and I rushed across the street, uneasy about Toby and Huggie, just because Toby always gets headaches on cloudy Tuesdays, and Huggie was upset last week because he’d accidentally wet the floor during rest time at kindergarten. But then I felt mad at Mom for always making me feel like another mother, so I ran up the steps of the library two at a time instead of calling home. I hoped Mrs. Browning wasn’t going to be upset that I was six minutes late. She never specifically talked about the importance of punctuality, but she didn’t have to. Whenever somebody straggled in after seven o’clock—usually Gene Rosskemp—she’d just pull down her cat lady glasses and give him a look.

  But when I got inside the conference room, the group was already assembled around the long table and two plastic chairs were empty, one for me and one for Mrs. Browning. I slipped into the seat next to Selena Markmann and whispered after a couple of minutes, “Where’s Mrs. Browning?”