The Invention of Flight (10 page)

When we were children we could say that we were good friends, close friends. At Christmas, the oldest girl cousin and I got matching dolls from our shared grandmother. There is a photograph at the bottom of a glass paperweight in my mother's bedroom where the three cousins and my brother and I are falling out of an overstuffed chair. We look like we know each other well. At age eleven I got very fat and had a permanent that was too tight; then I got tall and thin. Five years later, when she was eleven, my oldest cousin did the same thing. For a while she was like a spring following me. When we were children I knew them so well that I could have summed up each one of them in a sentence if I had been asked to, looking past those things that were contradictory until I found what was continuous. I could say that the oldest one cried tears without making a sound, the middle one cried with more sound than tears, and no one had ever seen the youngest one cry. If you knew these things about them, then you knew everything you needed to know.

But there seems to come a time when the relationship between individuals becomes set, a concrete wall, when past that point if one of the individuals changes it demands
change in all of the others, a recognition of the change, a breathing. And if the others refuse, the wall breaks down into separate blocks and that is all. In the case of my cousins and me, the breakdown is my fault, although it's possible that I am making myself too central, that actually, because I am five years older than the oldest of them, I am only on the periphery, an observer, unimportant. I admit that possibly each one of them and my brother and I would all rush to assign the guilt to ourselves, that it does underline our importance, but in this case I can't help feeling that it is truly I who have caused it because they are the ones who have stayed in the same place, the same houses, and done nothing more than grow older and I am the one who moved away and have tried to come back, but never for good.

The summer before I left for college was when our relationship was set for me. I was the only teenager; my brother and our oldest cousin were twelve. At dinner they performed for me and for each other. When it was my turn to perform, I gave them secrets: names of rock groups, clothing stores, high school teachers that would serve as passwords, keys to the exciting life they supposed I led. I grew used to being the sage, used to the openness of them, the transparency of children. Then I left for college, came back for brief visits, graduated, began to work in another state, and—returning for visits at Christmas and Thanksgiving—found that I was becoming obsolete, that the secrets no longer resided in me. I was no longer needed. I am ashamed to admit that I was hurt by this, found it difficult to speak with them. It was difficult for me to change. I suppose that I am selfish or too easily intimidated. Perhaps I am shy. They
were different people, aware of themselves, able to think about their actions secretly at the same time that they performed them—a definition, I suppose, of adulthood. It seems so much more alienating when you watch it grow, when there is suddenly something that needs to be broken down between people who were, at one time, close. I suppose that parents feel this, I'm not sure. I know that it is profoundly sad. With strangers it is more easily broken down. There is no false assumption that you know each other, that it is not necessary to begin at the beginning.

And worse, there is the feeling, unthinkable, that we are the seeds scattered by a single tree, in the hopes that one will take. William and Henry James are a rarity. There is only one Joyce, one Shakespeare, one Pasteur, one Michelangelo. Raised as we were, similarly, we cannot occupy the same space. As teenagers, all of our ambitions ran deep. Only mine are becoming tempered by the demands of practical things. I am slowly beginning to realize that teaching is not something that I make my living at temporarily until I become a famous actress, a playwright. It is what I do, what I am. My cousins do not want to hear this, that it might happen to them. I had been sent out to test the waters, and am no longer trustworthy. Perhaps I am exaggerating. Perhaps I am feeling, right now, the price of my restlessness.

Early this year their father died, my uncle, my aunt's husband, my mother's brother, my grandmother's son. It is important that he is understood in this way, how he was connected to all of us, because he had been the central bond. He had had a heart condition for years. Still, his death was unexpected. He was in his middle
forties, slender, handsome like one of the singers my mother loved, Perry Como—a slimmer Frank Sinatra. He had given up salt and Cokes and this was supposed to have protected him. My aunt found him slumped over a stove that he was moving into his appliance store.

At one time he had wanted to be a pharmacist. Every man I knew who was his age, my father's age, had wanted to be a doctor or a pharmacist. But they had all gone into business. My own father, who started his studies in pre-medicine, spends his life writing reports on the viscosity of nail polish, the solidity of brushes. The only ones who remembered these ambitions, who spoke of them often as if they were still alive, as if they formed part of the characters of the sons, were the grandmothers.

I thought of pharmacy when my mother called to tell me of my uncle's death and I thought of my cousins as they had been when we were small children. This one's an actress, my mother would say, this one a doctor. This one's a poet, this one a composer, this one a politician, my Aunt Mary would counter. I asked how everyone was taking it and my mother told me that my aunt and my grandmother had both collapsed, but that they were doing better now. There are so many “I's” in this that it will be difficult to believe that the real action is going on elsewhere, where I am not. I can imagine the slumping, the collapsing, the initial grief, but I cannot convey it clearly. I am afraid of flying, of the loss of control, it is possibly the thing that keeps me in one place for any period of time, but I flew home that afternoon. By the time I arrived, people had begun to pull themselves together, to behave as though they were calm. No one
knew how to act as, here too, the real drama took place in the places where we are separate.

The funeral seems important in the history of my cousins and me. The funeral home was huge—subdued lighting, gleaming parquet floors. I had never seen such furniture, such carpeting and drapes. There were boxes with tissues sticking out like sails or pale limp hands, lying discreetly on marble-topped tables; hidden in odd corners, small private rooms for crying.

I can see my grandmother sitting on a pink velvet antique chair. She has chosen the lowest chair in the room and still her feet don't touch the floor. There are no longer any stores in town that carry her shoe size, and she is wearing a larger size with cloth stuffed into the toes and her white legs are swinging, ever so slightly. The last time I saw my uncle, a year and a half ago, she was buttoning the top button of his winter coat, turning up his collar. She and my mother are both wearing navy blue. It is proper, my mother says, but not as dreary as black. She is a few inches taller than my grandmother. Some day her shoe size also will be extinct. They are both sitting there holding white gloves, with their hands folded over their purses. Before we left the house they had come into my room again and again, asking whether this necklace was too gaudy or these earrings were becoming. For lunch we had cantaloupe and cottage cheese, carefully garnished with parsley. My grandmother leans over to my mother and asks if she thinks the cantaloupe will set well on their stomachs. My mother says she's sure it will and my grandmother sits back up, comforted. My aunt and my oldest cousin wear slacks, simple blouses, and when they first arrive the rest of us look overdressed, showy. Mary
doesn't own a dress, my grandmother whispers to me, a little too loudly.

We walk into the room where my uncle is lying in a mahogany casket. It is obvious from the way one cousin touches another's arm or the arm of my aunt that they have bonded together, that when they turn they put on their calm looks, the looks reserved for strangers. I feel like an outsider. We begin to look at each other, briefly, then at the flowers, and we move to the back of the room, away from the body. We circle the walls, looking at the cards as if we are at a museum. How lovely, I say to my oldest cousin, these roses. And these, she says, these apricot glads. I look at her shoes, half a size larger than my mother's, the same size as my own, and I wonder if the world will outgrow us also, as if everything contains some magical yeast, some incredible fermentation, and the women in my family are being left behind, and I almost say something like this to my cousin while looking at a brass goblet, some roses, some cut glass. The boy cousin leaves us, moves to sit in a chair near his father. He straightens his tie, is careful with the jacket of his suit. He will have nothing to do with our talk of flowers.

I see the room filling with people. Each of the family members is surrounded by satellites, friends, distant relatives. When friends come, we are animated. It is wearing, this talk, but we find ourselves interested; we are amazed at how some people are so young still, how some are so old. For long periods of time I forget that my uncle is there, my eyes never moving to the front of the room. I hear Aunt Mary laughing and watch her Indian wrestle with her daughter's boyfriend. My
words begin to come easily; I walk up, excited, to where the boy cousin is sitting, watching his father, but when I get there all I ask is the name of a flower, the waxy looking red bloom that is shaped like an ear. He shrugs, will keep his vigil, and I wonder why I did not say more.

Our grandmother, suddenly afraid that there might be something to religion and wanting him to be comfortable, her son, asks my aunt if we shouldn't have a proper funeral. My aunt says no, a small gathering at the gravesite, maybe a psalm, and after that no dinner, no gathering. I overhear the middle cousin whispering to a friend. What is this called, what we're doing? Is this a wake we are having? We have no names for tradition.

I see my middle cousin, her hair the color, the cut of Jean Harlow's. I show her where there are Cokes downstairs. We sit on a sofa and I ask her where she's going to go to college when she is through with high school, what she'll do after that. She shakes her hair, stretches her long legs in front of her, says that she plans to go into music, that she hopes to write a Broadway musical, an opera, a symphony. She says that she will keep her father's name, that she will never change it for any other man. She tells me that she changed the spelling of her first name two years ago, from a “y” on the end to an “e.” She says she noticed that I spelled it the wrong way on all the Christmas cards I sent the family, but that I can keep spelling it that way because she is changing it back to “y.” I feel absurdly angry at this. I want to tell her, of course, that I should have known, that it was the same thing her older sister had done at her age, the same thing I had done, that it was
not, as she felt, original. I want to tell her that she may not have the strength for that, that her talent may not be as great as she suspects. And because I hesitate before I wish her success and because I find, when I do say it, that I do not at that moment mean it, I suddenly am convinced—even though for me the idea of sin has little substance—that what I am feeling is somehow, inexorably, sinful. My cousin leaves and I wonder if everyone becomes this confused at funerals, and I remember a cousin of my mother's who, at the death of their grandmother, seemingly bothered less by the presence of death than by the realization that she was, herself, fully alive, left her husband and children and became legendarily promiscuous for a time.

Later, six or seven of my grandmother's friends come in a group. They have been at a birthday party of the oldest one of their friends. They are all my grandmother's height. They had walked together on the first day of grade school. They tell me these stories. The phone wires flame between them, every day, in different patterns. Each day they make a connection. Here I am surrounded by people who know each other well. Most of the people I have known keep friends for three or four years and then someone moves, or everyone moves. At first we write letters and then we stop. And if we run into each other a few years later, we are different people. I can't imagine what it would be like to have a friend for over sixty years, if I would begin to know what is the same about me from decade to decade, if I would have the depth that is necessary when you're not always starting over. Two of my grandmother's cousins are in the group. They have grown up together, gone
the same ways, belong to the same clubs and women's groups. One would not join without the others.

The time for visitation ends and two men in black suits clear the room of people and we are forced once again to stand by the casket. My aunt stands by her husband, looking like a girl, face flushed from the talk, excited. The muscles melt as one of the men from the funeral home puts a crank into the casket, waiting for us to take a last look at his handiwork before he lowers the lid, as nonchalant as if he's offering us, please, one last chocolate. I remember that my uncle's blood has been drained from him, that he has been denied even the comfort of his own blood, and I think of that same blood in all of us, bits of tubing cut and fastened, then unfastened.

He looks so pretty, my grandmother says, still holding onto my mother, he looks so peaceful. He's dead, my aunt says, just dead and that's all. Her shoulders slump forward. The man in the black suit begins to lower the lid slowly and we all huddle together, touch arms, bits of glass coming together finally in a pattern. On my arm I can feel the texture of skin through the soft blouses of my oldest and middle cousin and it feels like my skin. I feel my face and it is a cousin's face; my mother's voice is in my throat. And I think that there is no one I love more than this.
Please God, let them be as great as they can be. Keep the old ones strong and the young ones strong, and when one goes, as this one, please God, let him live within us so that we are greater, not smaller, from his passing.
Then cousins break forward, a last look. And then we all break apart, head for separate cars.