The Invention of Flight (7 page)

The great-grandson on her right leans over to her, blonde hair like John's brushing her arm, and says, Grandma, I'll trade you this hot dog for that Jello, and he pushes a plate of kraut and applesauce and a hot sausage with one bite missing toward her. She gives him two red Jello salads and a sweet roll, saying Take this sweet roll and remember that yeast is an animal that causes flour to rise, and the grandson laughs, Funny Grandma, and takes a bite of the roll, dripping caramel on his clean white shirt.

All that Illinois winter she'd been afraid of a coming ice age and now here they were where the last one hadn't touched, where dinosaurs had fled and shrunk in the comfort, the ease of the life, to ruby-throated lizards which skittered across sidewalks, where prehistoric birds dove at the water for fish and plants looked like ancient and protective clusters of swords. She sits here now, in a fresh early-morning restaurant behind a glass wall looking out on the Gulf, on a small peninsula so she can watch the sun rising higher on the water as if she is in Mexico, not Florida. With clear lime water glasses on the tables, oranges in baskets and some on the ground outside rotting, dolphins arcing through the water, and white birds and sails both the transparency and lightness of communion wafers on the tongue, she feels something rising in her, an excitement, a joy in her that is almost difficult to contain. In Illinois the colors had been drab—wheat colors, dirt colors; here they are outrageous reds, greens, yellows. And here the warm air and moisture bathe her, close in around her like a pot so she feels, strangely, aware that she lives. (Her first memory involves water, warm air, and this same feeling. They're by a lake, her mother and father and she. The air that day was greenish-gold,
mid-summer, a pleasant lake smell of rotting weeds, still water, and gasoline. Her mother had on a black one-piece suit and the legs cut into her thighs and her arms were round and her skin was blue-white. Her father stood in the water by a motorboat and tried to start the engine, but it kept dying. Later they would get it going and he would give her a ride around the lake, and that was exciting and full of action and she remembers the texture of her father's bare knees and the sticky smell of plastic seats and cool water, but that isn't her first memory, her first memory is the moment right before the engine starts, and it felt, and still feels, like before that she was unconscious and she chose that moment to wake up.)

When the waitress comes, her husband orders coffee, eggs, fresh-squeezed juice, a newspaper. She sees Eggs Benedict on the menu, something she's never had. When it comes and there's a slice of orange and a stalk of asparagus alongside, she feels dizzy from the happiness, as though the orange and the asparagus are signs, another symptom of the goodness here. She tries to explain this to the waitress and to her husband, and they smile at her, her husband turning slowly to his paper, the waitress no doubt thinking she's a tourist, giddy from the climate. She leans back in her chair, rubs her hands over her bare arms, and thinks no, I live here now, this is my home, cold weather will not touch me, nor the cold seasons of the heart. She drinks her coffee, watches a tree full of wild parakeets outside the window, the silver watch on her husband's left arm, his cheekbones tensing and relaxing as he reads. Last night they had gone outside, around midnight, and gone swimming
in the warm water of the Gulf. They had gone far enough away from shore that it felt as though there were only water and sky, both the same shade of blue-black, and holding onto one another, treading water and looking up at the stars, both of them had the same sensation, as though they were swimming through space, like a dream of falling and there's no end to it, but a safe, euphoric falling, like flying. She reaches over now and touches his hand, asks him if it hadn't been wonderful, swimming in the Gulf at night, and he puts the paper down, apologizes for not paying enough attention to her. He says he'll be sorry when his job starts next week, that he might get too tired for a while to do anything like swimming at night, and she says she can't imagine that it could really be like any job he's been used to, not here. He laughs, and they begin to eat. My eggs taste like lemon, she says, sweet lemon. (Days before she had, automatically, tried to remember what she needed to be worrying about, a holdover from the way she used to feel, and she had found that there was nothing, nothing she was worried about. She'd even begun to forget old worries—the dreariness of Illinois, problems as a child—and could remember only the good times, the comfortable times, as though she had taken thread and made a stitch in every pleasant memory she had and drawn them together with the dark places hidden in folds, gone. And she herself is expanding, infinitely, a balloon that is not brittle, that will not break.)

As usual, he finishes eating before she does and sits drinking coffee and pointing out articles in the paper. There are new color photographs in here of Venus, he says. He shows them to her. The joy rises and settles in
her chest like something tangible. She feels that she could run, climb mountains, and still it wouldn't be released. How amazing that those colors have been there all along, she says, and no one to see them. Yes, he says, amazing. He says that he might get a telescope, that he might make astronomy a hobby. He had never talked about hobbies in the North, had been so involved in his work there. She touches his hand again, knows she can't begin to explain how wonderful his saying that makes her feel. She turns to watch a dolphin, eats a piece of toast, and listens while he calmly talks about theories of the edge of space, the birth and eventual death of the sun, colliding galaxies, in between sips of coffee. Many scientists now think, he says, that the universe is expanding and will some day fall back into a cosmic egg and then explode again into a new one, will pulsate, which makes time stretch infinitely and allows cataclysmic things to happen, as they do biologically, which we can understand, but only so long in the future that it doesn't concern us and helps us feel less responsible. Some theories, he says, are more reassuring than others. She nods, smiles, thinks that sounds as logical as Superman and the planet Krypton and other science fiction, wonders if she plants a poinsettia now if it will bloom this Christmas, wonders when their grapefruit tree will bear fruit that she can pick in the mornings with a wicker cesta. She can find the Big Dipper and the North Star, and she saw them last night and she's seen them in Illinois, and the Indians saw them, and the Greeks saw them, and that's what she knows about stars. She reaches for her coffee, knocks over her water glass, the water darkening the cloth on the table. She takes the
chipped ice in her hands, puts it in the glass, says just the same, tell me it isn't true, what you said, about galaxies colliding, the universe erased and redrawn. It isn't true, he says, laughing. Thank you, she says, I knew it couldn't be, and she looks out at the water, the palm trees, a blue heron walking like a cat. She wonders how he can so calmly think about such terrifying things when they're so happy here, and safe.

The waitress brings a basket of small pastries shaped like sand dollars, places it on their table, fills their cups with coffee. They both lean back in their chairs. Her husband looks calm, thoughtful. The cookies taste like anise. She breaks one in half to look for the doves that real sand dollars have in the center, but the baker hasn't put them in. She thinks that she would like to open a bakery herself and make sand dollar cookies with sugar doves in the center. People would bite into them, unsuspecting, and discover the candies, and in that way she could, possibly, begin to communicate the joy that she feels now. Her arms feel good to her, the soft cotton of her dress, the sandals on her feet, her hair, the way the edge of the tablecloth brushes her knees, the bitter taste of the coffee, the gritty texture of the cookie in her hand, the hardness of her husband's legs, his arms, the soft hollows at the base of his neck, beneath his cheekbones; all of these things are good. We'll swim or fish all afternoon, she thinks, watch the pelicans dive for fish while we eat dinner on the beach, and swim again at midnight.

The check comes and her husband pays it. I drank too much coffee, she says as they leave the restaurant, I feel like I've been drinking ether. Outside it is hot already,
this early in the day. Everything shimmers. This is heaven, she says. I want to stop in the bait shop next door, he says, so we can fish this afternoon.

The bait shop is a shack, gray weathered wood, filled with plastic lures and the smell of shrimp and glass cases of fileting knives. Thousands of hooks tangle and gleam on the walls. She looks at her reflection in the glass cases, notices that she is smiling and that she doesn't stop. Two men come into the shop. They look alike—short unruly beards, sunbleached hair, leathery skin, sandals, cutoff shorts, T-shirts. They smell like gasoline, the smell of her father's outboard motor that day on the lake, her awakening, all her life, she thinks, comes to this slow awakening. She stares at the hooks on the wall while her husband buys shrimp. She holds onto his arm for balance. Water from his shrimp bucket sloshes onto her hand and she brings her hand to her nose, breathes deeply, to calm herself, the happiness becoming too great somehow, too large. Her husband takes her hand, but he's talking to one of the fishermen about the fishing that day, the good spots, the best type of bait. The other man shows her husband a shark's tooth on a chain around his neck, talks about shark fishing, how a shark had taken the leg of his brother when he was snorkeling in the Keys and how he and his brother try to kill as many of them as they can now, how they take the teeth and give them away as gifts. She looks at the tooth lying on his neck, bleached and white as milk glass. She tries to be frightened of it, to imagine it coming after her, after her husband, but she can't, doesn't believe in it. The man tells her husband that if he'd like to go shark fishing with them sometime to leave a message at the bait
shop in the morning and her husband says yes, he'd like that, and asks what time they usually go out, and the man says at night of course, at midnight, that's when all the man-eating fish—the sharks, the smiling barracudas, but the sharks especially—come in near shore. They're hidden by the black water then, he says, but the water is thick with them. Wherever you throw in bait, he says, especially around here, you'll find a shark. Her husband thanks the man, holds onto her as they leave, tighter than he's ever held her, thinking no doubt of their swimming the night before, of the plans they'd had to swim again. She holds his waist as they walk to the car. He is pale but she is ecstatic, thinking only that they had made it through the danger, that last night they'd been swimming in sharks, swimming in them. That what she'd thought was the current brushing her legs could have been the smooth body of a shark, the smooth caress of a tooth, a fin. And her head back, her arm feeling the warmth of her husband, the world pulsing and glowing from the sun, something leaps up in her, finally, like a blind fish that rises and breaks through dark water for one, brief, clean taste of air.

He told me that his ancestor had left his hard black seeds in neat rows where scrub pine or thistle, cockle or thorns would have grown and that when people stopped just long enough to eat the apples he had planted they felt their feet become like iron and their heads become drugged and when they tried to move, found that they, like the trees, couldn't. And in turn, he said, the people planted squash and corn and ate the apples freely, spreading more black seeds whose roots joined under the earth in dark rivers which spread under the houses which also grew from the seeds, wrapping around children's knees, strangling pipes until they had to dig more and more wells.

And he told me I was still under the spell of those trees of his ancestor and I said I didn't believe that until he said would I leave in the morning with him for Zanzibar and I said no. And he pointed to the trees behind my house, black as obsidian against the darkening sky, and he said the black branches were the rivers from the apple trees, spreading out like sap at this time of night, and that to him they were a cutout in the sky. If I looked closely I could see stars where the bark should be. I looked closely and didn't see stars, but there were stars
outlined with gunmetal on the hat he wore and I liked it when he stroked his beard a certain way and I didn't care about the trees or the bark or his illusions. He said he was a direct descendant of Johnny Appleseed, that he had the same name, and that once he had even seen him in a bar in Kansas City, the original Johnny, toting glossy catalogs, posing as an undergarment salesman so he could say “negligee” and “brassiere” to the women who came in. He said that he himself was an itinerant magician, specializing in appearing and disappearing, that I'd already seen one-half of his act. He put his arms on my shoulders and asked was I anxious to see the other half and I said no, I wasn't. Then he asked again if I would leave with him for Zanzibar and I said no, but I'd put him up in the garage for the night. He said that was a trick question; since I'd said no I was in need of help and he would stay around until I said yes. I told him he sounded crazy, I thought he was just a tramp, but he pulled his beard and bent his knee slowly so that rings of cloth crawled up his leg and I thought, what could be the harm? Stay, but only for one night. By that time the cut-out trees had bled into the rest of the sky; there were stars around his head as well as on it.

I pulled a mattress into the garage while he sat crouched on a high shelf watching, hanging by rakes, shovels, hoes. His eyes the same silver gray as the gun-metal, they glinted in the dark unevenly, like crumpled tinfoil. He mumbled while I worked, eyes always on me while he mumbled. I covered the mattress with fresh sheets, sprayed lavender between, set a Chinese enameled lamp on a short table, asked him if he needed a
blanket. I tried to ignore his incantations. They started low.