The Secrets of Flight (3 page)

  
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.

1938

T
he 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
clothe
s,” Mama says with disdain, which is ironic considering our family livelihood 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
F
REELAND, 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.

Cradling my doll Molly and peering out the window, I waited in our room until, eventually, Sarah ran across the backyard in the fog. I saw her scrambling up the planks Papa had nailed to the twisty trunk of the apple tree. Then she climbed higher and her long legs disappeared inside the branches. I put Molly on the night table next to Sarah's copy of
The Secret Garden
and tiptoed downstairs. Unlike the workaday week, when Papa was out peddling crops from our half-acre garden, he was reading in the front room and smoking his pipe. I loved the smell of his pipe and just knowing he was home, relaxing—unlike Mama, who hit him with a dish towel and yelled, “Up! Up!” if she found him in his chair too long.

In the kitchen, Mama was braiding the challah on the counter. I could smell the meaty
cholent
in the oven. When
her head whipped around, I was already crouched under the table. “Sarah?” Mama called. “It's time to help! Miri, come and set the table!” she added, yelling over her shoulder. Then she walked out of the kitchen with an exasperated sigh.

As soon as she was gone, I ran out the door and into the backyard. By then it was so foggy that I could barely see the apple tree on the edge of the yard. I thought of the evening when the mist rolled in so low and white that Papa called me into the backyard at dusk. “See, Miriush, now you can say you've stood in a cloud,” he'd said. It felt the same that night, too, the hazy moisture on my face, as I felt my way up the planks and crawled into the tree.

“Mama's looking for us,” I said, making my way higher until we were both completely shrouded by branches.

“
Sh
,” Sarah whispered. “Let's see what happens.”

All at once I realized this was as far as we were going; this was the adventure.

In the distance, the roar of a faraway plane grew closer, but I couldn't see it, despite the slowly lifting mist. Minutes passed that seemed like hours, and shadows began to lurk in the grass and the trees turned purplish. Through the window, I could see tiny flames flickering: Mama had lighted the candles. Still, no one came outside to get us.

I glanced back, away from the house, and saw a man falling from the sky. I blinked. Not fifty feet from my back porch, he landed without so much as a thud, like in a dream. Sarah inhaled, as she grabbed my hand and sat up straighter. Together we watched his parachute spread out on the field, watched him stumble, roll and lie still, and then, after a moment, he untangled himself from the mounds of white material, got up, and
started walking. I squinted at the ghost in the fog wearing a flight suit and prayed that he wasn't squashing Papa's blueberries. “Come on,” Sarah said, climbing down. The ghost kept walking right into our backyard and seemed headed straight for our back door, until we both jumped down out of the tree, startling him. It wasn't until the man gasped that I knew for sure he was real.

Somewhere in the dark, there was a high-pitched careening sound followed by a sudden, shuddering explosion. The pilot looked back, over his shoulder, and then at the lights of my house. “Are your parents home?” he asked Sarah, and she nodded, as I took him by the hand.

“There you girls are! Who is this?” Mama shrieked when we got inside, and we all got to hear the story of how the pilot, having lost his way in the fog with an empty tank, jumped from the plane. The fact that his blond hair and face were covered in blackish grit was nothing short of glamorous to me. He smelled like motor oil and cut grass.

Mama gave him towels, and the pilot, whose name turned out to be Charlie, washed up and joined us for the Shabbos meal. When Mama closed her eyes and sang the blessing, I snuck a look at the pilot, bowing his head, and then at Sarah, who was staring at him, unabashedly. She caught me looking, and we both smiled.

That night, Charlie slept on the sofa in the living room and the next morning Papa took me along to the crash site in the field a couple of miles away, so that the pilot could extract the mail from his plane and send it on by train to New York. On the car ride, Charlie told us that he first wanted to fly when he was my age. He saw an air show and was hooked.

“Were you scared last night—before you jumped?” I asked him, and he shook his head.

“Maybe for a minute. I just didn't want the plane to land on anyone.”

“Looks like you did all right,” my father said, pointing to the twisted pile of metal still smoking in the field miles from our house.

Driving back, I was still thinking about the pilot emerging from the fog with the calmness of an angel, when I said to my father, “Papa, when I grow up, I want to fly, too.”

“You will then,” he said, and I looked at him and smiled. “
Matuka sheli,
” he added, brushing my cheek with the back of his hand.

When we got home, Mama met us in the driveway, holding a letter from Papa's stepbrother, Uncle Hyman. He needed us to move to Pittsburgh
now;
there was no putting it off or he would fill the positions at his shop with someone else.

“Jobs for both of us and a real community,” she said, and Papa sighed. I told Mama that Papa said I could fly, and she gave Papa a sharp look.

“When she grows up,” Papa said. “If she wants.”

“I want,” I said, jumping up and down and clapping. “I want, I want, I want!”

“Oh, Rina,” Papa said to my mother, when she threw up her hands. “Let her dream. Who's it gonna hurt?”

B
UT NOT EVEN TWO YEARS LATER, IN THE WINTER OF 1930,
P
APA
was dead, along with my visions of flight. We'd moved to Pittsburgh by then, to the land of steel and honey, according to Mama, where we wouldn't need a Hebrew teacher to drive over
once a week from Hazelton, because there was a Jewish school right in our new neighborhood. I remember walking back from the playground that day, how the house on Beacon Street was bustling with people, including the rabbi and all the men from the synagogue except for Papa, who I later found out was in the long box in the living room surrounded by all the little chairs. “There was an accident,” Mama said and nothing more. It was eleven-year-old Sarah who explained in our beds that night that he'd slid off the third-story roof while chipping away at an ice dam after breakfast. I hugged my doll and whimpered with fear, until Sarah whispered in the dark that we must be strong like the Spartans of Greece, who never cried. At eight, I didn't know much about ancient Greece or what these Spartans had against crying, but from then on, I learned how to squeeze my face closed and let myself soundlessly shudder, imagining my tears deep inside, dripping off my organs.

All at once, Papa disappeared from our daily conversations, as if he never existed at all. At first I thought it was because Mama felt guilty for having ordered him to fix the leaky ceiling in the first place. Later, when I was ten and she married Papa's stepbrother Hyman, I wondered if she was always in love with him, a man whose neck hung over the collar of his shirt and whose face turned red at the slightest provocation. Later still, at thirteen, I noticed the way Mama and her lady friends gathered around the kitchen table to drink tea sweetened with jam and talk and talk, artfully avoiding topics of tragedy in front of the person to whom the catastrophe had struck. When I asked Mama about these conversational omissions, she told me that no one wanted to be reminded; no one wanted to risk crying and never being able to stop. I understood then that
pain should only be briefly experienced in private, never to be mentioned again.

I cataloged all the things Papa missed—like the first blizzard of the winter, or the first Yom Kippur without him, or my first piano recital, or, when I was sixteen years old, the first country to be invaded by Nazi Germany—Czechoslovakia, followed by Poland and then Denmark, before Norway, Belgium, and Holland, and eventually France. He also missed his first daughter's marriage, but then again, it seems we all did.

T
HE MORNING AFTER
S
ARAH
'
S ELOPEMENT, AS MY MOTHER CON
tinues her restless pacing, I'm lost in a daydream of myself piloting an open cockpit plane—wearing a leather bomber jacket and a white scarf, tied jauntily around my neck—when Mama says, “You'll take a secretarial course and learn bookkeeping.”

I look up, feeling disappointment crashing all over my face. “But . . . what about flying?”

“
Flying?
” Mama repeats, as if I mean trapeze artist. “Miriam, please. Be practical. I'm offering you an opportunity. The least you could do is show some gratitude.”

Then she stalks out, leaving me alone with my guilt and some unnamable disquiet:
Sarah
. If she really is married now, I'm the only one left. What difference will a degree make if my world matches my mother's? At the sound of a tree branch scratching against the kitchen window, I glance over and sigh. Maybe she's right. Maybe my dream should've died when Papa did.

T
HAT NIGHT,
I'
M IN THE PARLOR LISTENING TO THE RADIO BY
myself when FDR's voice comes over the airwaves. Uncle Hyman is still at the shop, and Sarah has already left with her
things for the North Side, but I imagine Papa by my side, his blue eyes growing wide with wonder, as the president proclaims there will be a brand-new, federally funded Civilian Pilot Training program designed to build up the pool of available pilots. When FDR explains the four-month course will be offered through participating colleges, giving twenty thousand college students an opportunity to fly, I see Papa slapping my knee and exclaiming with glee, “Here's your chance, Miriush!”

Upstairs, Mama is on her knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor. When she doesn't stop to even wring out her sponge for a full five minutes, I say to her back, “I'm sorry for being ungrateful. I really do want to go to college.”

She hesitates for just a moment before resuming her toil. “I already talked to Hyman about it. He says there's no point when you can learn bookkeeping on the job,” she replies, her face turned toward the base of the toilet.

“But I want an education,” I say again, and Mama finally twists around and looks up at me, her hazel eyes strangely vulnerable. “I'll get my secretarial degree,” I tell her. “I promise. Please, Mama. Give me a chance.”