The Summer I Learned to Fly (2 page)

Robin Drew Solo.

That’s my real name. My father’s name was Drew, and I guess I would have been Drew too had I been a boy, but obviously I wasn’t, so I was named Robin after some long-lost relative nobody seemed to know or care much about.

Then my father died. I was only three. And from the black hole of her grief Mom couldn’t let go of that name. She changed my name so she could hear herself say his, countless times a day.

Eventually she did the paperwork and saw to it officially—and well after the fact of my birth—that despite being a girl, I be called after my father.

So I became Drew Robin Solo. Sometimes Birdie. Except for Emmett Crane, who was the only person in my life, then or since, who chose to call me Robin.

the book of lists

I found it one day while looking for a shawl. I’d never seen Mom wear a shawl, so I had no reason to think I’d find one in her messy closet, but I figured it didn’t hurt to look.

Shawls had replaced the hooded sweatshirts we all tied around our waists for the first half of the school year. Now it was all about knit woolen shawls, triangular in shape, so that the longest point conveniently covered your butt. That we lived in California, and that these were some of our hotter months, didn’t seem to matter at all. Like most of the kids my age, particularly the girls, fads were unpredictable and irrational.

I had to have one. And since the shop was still very new, and what we might have had to spend on something like a shawl had gone instead toward a hot-seal plastic wrapper for wedges of cheese, I went looking in Mom’s closet.

I never did find a shawl. Or anything with which to cover my butt. I found something so much better.

I found it under a pile of balled-up sweaters, which I figured hadn’t been touched for years, not only because I’d never seen them (I paid close attention to Mom’s fashion choices), and not only because they stank of must, but also because Mom wasn’t a tall woman. And the shelf that held them was up high. Too high for an ordinary chair. So high that I had to get the ladder from the garage to reach that shelf, and the ladder spit out rust as I creaked it open.

After holding up and then rejecting each musty sweater, I came to the bottom of the pile, where I found a composition notebook with a cover like TV static. The spaces for a name and subject were left blank, so I assumed the inside would be blank too.

But then I opened it.

I didn’t recognize the handwriting. It wasn’t Mom’s soft precise cursive, which I tried so hard to mimic. It was small and tight. Blocky. Leaning to the left. The handwriting of a man.

The handwriting of my dead father.

What other reasonable choice did I have but to re-ball Mom’s sweaters and return them to the too-high shelf? To refold the metal ladder and return it to the garage? To take that composition book to my room, sit down on my floor, and begin to read?

Lists.

It was a book of lists from my father. Lists of everything from favorite foods (
lobster
) to least-favorite bands of all time (
The Doors
). His favorite season:
winter, the real kind
. Favorite place:
San Francisco, at the break of day
. Regrets:
not taking up the motorcycle before it became a pathetic cliché
. Embarrassing
moments:
dinner at the home of my girlfriend’s parents, clogged toilet
.

I read that composition book from cover to cover sitting on my pink shag carpet, but I didn’t stop there. I read it most days. I returned to it like some people return to the Bible. And like the Bible, there were days I needed it more than others.

It’s hard to say whether there was something that struck me the hardest or surprised me the most. When you don’t know someone, everything you learn about him is its own sort of surprise. But I can say what it was I read that first afternoon that lodged itself inside me like a feather, so that only holding my breath would stop the fluttery, slightly sickening feeling.

Fears:
that I’ll never see my Birdie learn to fly
.

throwing caution to the wind

Nick Drummond drove a lime-green Vespa. One afternoon, just before school let out for the summer, I was getting off the bus when he pulled up to the curb and flashed his signature grin.

“Need a lift?”

I was born cautious. I never liked roller coasters or scary movies. I thought the girls who smoked cigarettes outside the minimart looked foolish, like kids who walk around in their mothers’ high heels.

I made every choice carefully. Until the afternoon Nick Drummond pulled up on his lime-green Vespa and offered me a ride, and without hesitating, for fear he might change his mind and speed off without me, I said yes.

We were only three blocks from the shop, so I didn’t need a ride. Need wasn’t the point.

He never wore a helmet, so he didn’t have one to offer me, and even this didn’t give my careful heart pause, because
without a helmet, somebody might actually know it was me riding around on the back of Nick Drummond’s Vespa.

I glanced over my shoulder at the school bus, but it was already departing. We took off in the wrong direction.

“I’m not due at the shop for half an hour,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Let’s go for a spin.”

I grabbed tighter to his waist. His shaggy golden hair whipped me in the cheek, a strand catching in my mouth. We rode all the way to the coast and then arced north.

He took one hand off the handlebars. I didn’t panic. He pointed to the ocean. “Check out those barrels!”

I had a vague sense this had something to do with surfing, but I wasn’t totally sure.

I shouted back, “Cool!”

Nick had graduated from high school the summer before and was taking a few classes at the community college. He’d had a job pumping gas until he came across Mom’s ad in the newspaper. Now when he wasn’t in the Cheese Shop or at school learning mechanical engineering, he could always be found at the beach. He smelled like the sea.

Nick’s mother had followed a man she met in a bar all the way to Argentina and never come back. She’d left Nick the apartment, a year’s worth of rent, and her old Vespa. He’d been taking care of himself since age sixteen, and from what I could tell he was doing a bang-up job.

He was Mom’s first hire and she adored him. She wanted more for him than his current existence. She wanted him to go to a real college. Get more serious. Stop wasting his natural talents. Come fall, she’d harass him daily to fill out applications to schools he couldn’t possibly afford, especially
after everything he’d been through, but that was still a ways off.

On this early June afternoon I could count the days until summer vacation on one hand. Other kids had plans for sleepaway camp in the High Sierras, or visits to grandparents in far-off towns, maybe a local class in oil painting or photography.

Not me.

I had a job lined up at the shop. I’d sweep floors and wipe countertops. Take out the trash. Wash windows. Sometimes I’d even have to stock the walk-in freezer. And I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect.

As Nick fishtailed his Vespa, bringing it to a screeching halt, I couldn’t help thinking that he was showing off. (
Showing off for me!
) I grabbed on tighter and buried my face in his back. I also couldn’t help thinking that maybe this was how I would meet my end, with my arms around Nick Drummond’s waist, and I guessed that there might be worse ways to go.

He turned off the engine. I released him finally and caught my breath. Only then did I think of Hum.

He was where I always kept him: in my backpack. Inside his wire cage. I’d stopped carrying my books in my bag and had lined the bottom with rags and old T-shirts so he wouldn’t knock around too much. Inside his cage I’d put a sock with the toes cut off that he liked to burrow his way through and a few macadamia nuts in the shell, his favorite snack. I took my books to school in a brown paper shopping bag, but school was almost over, and I didn’t have much use for books anymore.

I undid the zipper, carefully lifted out Hum’s cage, and peered through the wire mesh. “Hum?”

Rats can’t vomit, but I didn’t know that yet. I’d learn it later, as I came to know everything about rats. So when I took Hum from my pack after this wild ride up the coast and back again, I expected to find him coated in his own sick.

Instead I found a rat, dead asleep.

I glanced up to see Nick entering the shop. He’d left me in the parking lot alone with my rat and my unnecessary worry, and this struck me as the cruel and inevitable part of loving someone like Nick Drummond from a distance. To him I was only a kid with unnecessary worries.

I returned Hum’s cage to my bag and zipped it shut. Mom didn’t know I took Hum with me everywhere, and she certainly didn’t know that he accompanied me to the Cheese Shop in the afternoons after school. I’d never looked in the large spiral notebook that contained the county health code, but I was pretty sure it said something about not keeping a rat in your store.

My face was still flushed from the ride. From my sudden lack of caution. From my fear about Hum. From the taste of Nick’s golden hair in my mouth.

I knew this all showed. My face didn’t know how to keep secrets.

I found Mom sitting at the desk in the back room, furiously punching numbers into a calculator. A long ribbon of paper spilled down to the floor, tangling around the legs of her chair.

She reached out without looking up and touched my windswept hair.

“Hiya, Birdie,” she said. “How was the day?”

I opened my mouth, but then the front door jingled, someone wandered in for a wedge of St. Nectaire, and Mom didn’t stick around for my answer.

swoozie

She came from Wisconsin, the state famous for its cheese.

I’d decided that Wisconsin, in addition to dairy farming, must be in the business of growing the largest breasts known to humanity, because Swoozie had a major pair.

I had nothing to show for myself yet, not that I was in such a hurry, but breasts were very much on my thirteen-year-old mind. Most of the girls in my class were wearing bras, and complaining about it in a way that sounded suspiciously like bragging.

I was hoping that when my time came, I might split the difference someplace between Swoozie and my mother.

Swoozie was freckled and doughy, a year older than Mom, going through a divorce. She had no kids.

“I came out West to start over, to reinvent myself, to get away from my Wisconsin roots,” she liked to say, although not so far away from those roots that she steered clear of cheese.

She hugged me when she saw me. Every time. They were the sorts of embraces others might reserve for people they hadn’t seen in ages. She’d push my hair back from my face and say, “Tell your aunt Swoozie something she doesn’t already know.”

She was the type who took the role of aunt seriously. It’s how she got her name, from a nephew who couldn’t pronounce “Susie,” and she had a fattened wallet filled with pictures of the freckled, doughy nieces and nephews she’d left behind in Wisconsin. I was the only youngish person she knew in her new life, and so I received the full bounty of her auntlike energy.

Swoozie fancied herself a matchmaker. Her own failed marriage inspired her to find love for others, and this annoyed me because I had no interest in watching Mom or Nick Drummond fall in love, and they were her two primary targets.

There were men who came in regularly, twice a week or more, and engaged Mom in long discussions about soft French cheeses versus Italian ones. The difference between virgin and extra-virgin olive oils. They’d talk wines too, and mom would write a list of recommendations they could take next door to Fireside Liquor. I thought they were just men who loved food, but Swoozie insisted they came to catch a glimpse of the “Cheese Babe.”

It was hard for me to see Mom as anything but devoted to cheese and to me. As far as I knew, and I liked to think I
knew
, she hadn’t dated anyone since my dad died.

And Nick, well, I was pretty sure Nick didn’t need any help from Swoozie when it came to girls, but that didn’t stop
her from pointing out the cute ones. Especially as summer approached. Cute girls were everywhere, wearing spaghetti-strapped sundresses, sometimes even less.

I found Swoozie easy to talk to. We’d sit in the freezer where nobody could hear us, and while she shelved sauces I’d hold Hum on my lap and feed him ice chips. She kept Hum’s visits to the shop a secret. It was understood that if Mom ever caught me I’d take full responsibility. I’d never throw Swoozie under the bus. We trusted each other.

I’d ask her about the things I couldn’t ask anyone else. Like, for example: What’s a Fu Manchu?

That came from the List of Biggest Mistakes. I never asked Mom about anything from Dad’s Book of Lists because it made her too sad to talk about Dad. And there was the fact that Mom didn’t know I’d stolen Dad’s book, or that I kept it under my mattress, and that on more nights than not, I’d read from it with a flashlight, under my hand-stitched quilt, before going to sleep.

“A Fu Manchu is a mustache,” Swoozie told me. “A very thin, unfortunate-looking mustache.” I imagined it was especially unfortunate on a redheaded Irishman like my father.

I asked her about things like Geraldine Moore, a girl in the eighth grade who was two inches shorter than me and wore black eyeliner and cork-soled sandals. I’d heard something about her sneaking into the boys’ bathroom with Doug Jensen, Peter Mason, and Eric Strauss. I wasn’t totally certain what this was about, but I was supposed to know. Everybody knew. And I learned to nod and sigh like I got it, which I totally did not.

“Oh, Bird-girl,” Swoozie would say. “Junior high is a
strange land inhabited by strange creatures. The best you can do is keep your head down and your nose clean, and hold your breath till college.”

This pretty well summed up what I was already doing. Waiting. For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure.

All I knew was that nothing ever happened to me, at least nothing that counted. Nothing mattered to me in the way cheese mattered to Mom. Or surfing to Nick. I was holding my breath, waiting for my life to begin.