The Secrets of Flight (5 page)

“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.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I
RODE THE BUS OVER TO
W
ALNUT
S
TREET 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 build
ing 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 the 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.

T
his 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.

In the lobby of the high-rise, there were wheelchairs against
the wall and a small line of old people were waiting to have their blood pressure checked by a lady in pink scrubs, who was making them laugh. Once Mrs. Browning buzzed me up, I took the elevator to the sixth floor and got off feeling a little uneasy and wishing we'd decided to meet at Panera again. The hallway was dark and smelled kind of funny, like ramen noodles. I suddenly felt dread in my stomach, like maybe it was a bad idea to come here, especially if she wanted to dissect my novel again.

I had handed out the first two chapters to the group on Tuesday night, and everyone said that they loved them, and what a great job I'd done for someone so young, and I thought I could really trust them since they're so old. Old people usually have opinions worth listening to, unlike people my age who like to waste a whole English class—after reading
A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen—debating the possible influences on modern women's roles in society. I mean, that question could've been a topic for some graduate student's thesis; it shouldn't have been posed as a free-for-all to a bunch of kids, who say random things like, “Oh! Oh! I know a girl whose mom left on the back of a motorcycle for two years, but then she came back.” And then Mrs. Kindling acts like this information is really useful to the discussion, when really she's just thrilled somebody raised her hand. Participation is actually a portion of our grade, even if the only thing you have to say is totally stupid. Sometimes I think,
If I had enough information about this topic I would destroy you, but since I know nothing, I won't say a word
. But it's different when people are old. I actually want to hear what they have to say.

Except that on Tuesday night at the library, they couldn't
come up with anything bad about the pages I'd turned in. Jean Fester actually said she thought it was “surprisingly sweet,” which didn't give me a lot to work with. That's when Mrs. Browning kind of snorted and said, “I'm sorry—a woman gives birth to four different children by four different men and abandons them in four different countries, and you're calling it sweet?” Selena Markmann spoke up then: she said she thought it was handled very
whimsically,
that the author clearly wasn't
worrying
about the
psychology
of being left behind.

I didn't want to side with Jean and Selena, who seemed to be ganging up on Mrs. Browning, so I said sort of quietly, “I just liked the idea of being found.”

“I would like to reiterate my point,” Mrs. Browning said, which was that Larissa, the mother in the story, needs to have a passion that makes her run away. It had been two weeks, and I still couldn't come up with anything.

After I tapped lightly on the door to Mrs. Browning's apartment and waited, I heard keys jangling down the dimly lit hallway and then polyester parachute pants swishing toward me. “Elyse? Is that you?” came an astonished voice. I turned to see Selena Markmann, the one in the group with the blue-black hair, who was wearing a purple tracksuit. I smiled and waved hello, even though her eyebrows were scaring me a little since she'd drawn them on like black McDonald's arches. “What are you doing here?” she asked, but before I could answer, I heard the latch on Mrs. Browning's door, and we both watched it open.

As soon as Mrs. Browning saw who was standing next to me, her smile darkened. “Selena,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

“Mary,” Mrs. Markmann replied, looking like a detective who'd just cracked the case. “I was just asking Elyse what on
earth she could possibly be doing inside this apartment building on such a beautiful Saturday afternoon.”

Mrs. Browning yanked on my arm and said, “She's helping me move some furniture.” Then she pulled me inside, slammed the door, and sighed. “I don't mean to shock you, my dear,” she said, “but that woman drives me crazy.” I said I wasn't shocked, but maybe she could've come up with something better than “moving some furniture,” which made both of us laugh. And just like that, I wasn't uneasy anymore.

Her apartment smelled normal, meaning it didn't smell like much of anything at all. It was so small that the kitchen and living room were actually one room with two different floors, linoleum switching over to carpet. Everything on the rug was squished together in a half circle: a love seat touched an end table which touched an easy chair which touched another table which touched a rocker which touched bookshelves and another end table. There were clocks on basically every surface that didn't already have a book on it. While Mrs. Browning put a kettle on for tea, I browsed around her shelves for a little while. Most of the books I'd never heard of, except for
Franny and Zooey
and
All of a Kind Family
.

Next to one of the clocks there was a black-and-white picture of a tall man in a dark suit who had a full, broad smile, like somebody caught him in the middle of the greatest joke. It was sort of hard not to smile back, which was weird, like he was watching me discover Mrs. Browning or had even been waiting for me to arrive. There was another color picture on the wall of a shaggy-haired guy and a pretty blond woman leaning against a VW bus. In her arms was the cutest, chubbiest baby.

“Is this you?” I asked, pointing to the pretty blond woman.

“Actually, no, that's my daughter-in-law, Carrie, with my son, Dave, and my grandson, Tyler. The other picture is of Thomas, my husband,” said Mrs. Browning.

“Hey! Who is this?” I picked up a black-and-white photo of three young women standing beside a small airplane on a dusty-looking strip of land. They were wearing leather bomber jackets, baggy pants, boots, and, resting on the top of their helmets, goggles. When I glanced back at Mrs. Browning, she seemed to be holding her breath.

“That's me,” Mrs. Browning finally said with a noisy exhale. “With Grace Davinport, my best friend from flight school during World War II, and Murphee Sutherland, another pilot. Grace is the tall one, on the right. We were fly girls.”

I studied the picture for a few more minutes, trying to pick out white-haired, glasses-sporting Mrs. Browning in the smooth-skinned teenager squinting into the sunlight, with her dark hair blowing in the wind. It wasn't hard to figure out that she was the short one in the middle. I finally found her in the smile, a version of the one she owned now, except in the picture, her whole face was radiating joy. Grandma says she likes to imagine that when you die, you get turned back into your best self, and if I were Mrs. Browning, this is the one I'd choose. When I finally looked up, Mrs. Browning was standing in the kitchen studying me studying her.

“Murphee was a Chicago girl with orange hair, straight out of the bottle. Grace was from Iowa, so her worldview consisted of endless prairie and fields of corn and open sky, whereas almost all I'd ever known were steep hills and plunging valleys, winding rivers and at the heart of it all, the steel mills, turning everything overhead black.”

“Wow.” I snapped my fingers. “That sounds good. I should write that down.”

Mrs. Browning smiled and handed me a tiny tape recorder off the end table. “Actually, I already started.” My face must've gone screwy, since she added, “It's my husband's old Dictaphone for dictating chart notes. I was looking at some old pictures the other day and discovered this at the bottom of the box. So, I found some old tapes and started . . . remembering. You can listen later. But in the meantime . . .”

The kettle started to whistle, and we moved back into the kitchen, where the table seemed set for a special occasion: there was an embroidered tablecloth, a vase of dried flowers, a plate of lemon-ginger cookies, a china tea set covered in painted pink roses, and the real shocker of all: a sleek, white Apple laptop.

“Hey, where did that—whose computer is that?” I asked.

“I figured we'd need it for our project,” Mrs. Browning said, looking a little sly. “Go ahead. It's yours to use,” she added.

I ran my fingers across the lid of the MacBook, like it was the side of a Porsche. “Do you know how to use a computer?” I asked without thinking.

“Well, it's a Mac,” she said, pouring me a cup of tea. “It just works.”

“So . . .” I said, sliding a cookie off the plate. “Who were the fly girls?”

Mrs. Browning explained that while the men were busy flying planes abroad, dropping bombs on Germany and Japan, the women were needed to, as Mrs. Browning put it, “Protect the Zone of Interior.” So she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of civilian flyers trained by the military.

“Wait a second—my social studies teacher was talking
about this during ‘Current Events'! Aren't you getting some award from the president?”

She nodded and smiled. “The Congressional Gold Medal. There's going to be a ceremony in Washington, D.C., next March. It's going to be quite an affair.”

“Wow! Who's going to be there?” I asked.

“Heavens, I don't even know. It'll be a surprise to see who's still alive.” She laughed lightly. “Dave and Carrie will fly in from Seattle, and Tyler and his wife and daughters will come all the way from California. So if nothing else, when the president shakes my hand, my family will be there to see it. Come, I have something else I'd like to show you.”

We got up from the table, and I followed her into the little bedroom off the kitchen. “Now where is that thing . . .” she said, opening the door to her closet and rifling through the clothes.

I was kind of cringing since her hands were shaking so much with each swipe of the hanger. Finally, she found what she was looking for: her old leather bomber jacket. When Mrs. Browning touched it, she got a funny look on her face, too, like the jacket contained the greatest secrets of all.

“Who's the blond cartoon character?” I asked, pointing to the patch sewn onto the shoulder—of a little gremlin girl with blue wings and big, red boots.

“Fifinella, the patron saint of the fly girls. And she's not blond, my dear; that's her golden helmet. Go ahead, try it on,” she added, holding out the jacket.

I hesitated for just a second and then allowed her to slip it over my shoulders. I pushed my arms into the sleeves. The jacket fit perfectly.

“Look at you,” Mrs. Browning said, watching me settle into the jacket. “A real Women Airforce Service Pilot. It was always too big for me.”

“Larissa should fly,” I said, and Mrs. Browning laughed. I could just imagine that same thrilled burble coming out of her, back in the days of this picture.

“It would certainly give your main character a reason to leave her family behind. She wants to be pilot, not a mother.”

But then I realized something. “The thing is . . . if Larissa's a fly girl, then I'd have to set the whole book in the United States instead of London.”

“Oh, well, that won't work—you've probably never even been to the United States,” Mrs. Browning said. And that made us both laugh.

“H
OW
'
D IT GO, KIDDO
?” D
ADDY ASKED, WHEN HE PICKED ME UP
outside the library at four o'clock. I almost told him what I'd really been researching, but he seemed preoccupied, like the only right answer was “Great!” and silence. He and Mom were going out to dinner, which meant that I was babysitting my brothers, which I do almost every weekend. After we ate leftover Chinese food, I read to Huggie for a while and let him fall asleep in his Batman pajamas, even though Mom said he'd worn them all day and had to change into something else. Then I made sure Toby was in his room fooling around on his desktop, before I watched
Be My Next Wife
. I was glad to watch the show without Mom, because she always feels bad for Thea's dad, who has to watch his older daughter as a contestant “fool around with a sex offender on national TV.” And, “They've given a rapist his own show!” she always says. Then Daddy
reminds Mom that the football star wasn't even convicted, but Mom always says that doesn't mean he wasn't guilty. The way Mom talks, you'd think Dr. Palmer had lost Stacey to drugs and prostitution instead of reality TV.

Afterward, I went back upstairs and checked on Huggie, who'd kicked off all his covers in his sleep. I covered him back up before going across the hall to Toby's room. “Stop surfing and go to bed,” I said, nodding at the computer screen.

“I'm programming,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. “Seriously. It's my homework.” If the FBI were to show up and accuse Toby of hacking the president's email, it would shock everybody but me.

After closing his door again, I snuck across the hall into Mom's nook, which is this little office attached to her bedroom that has windows overlooking the backyard. The builder meant for it to be a walk-in closet, but Mom made it into her private little space, with a desk, a swivel chair, a chaise longue, and a wall of bookshelves. Mom likes to call it her Room of One's Own, as in, Get the hell out of my Room of One's Own.