I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries)
Read I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) Online
Authors: Jane Mendelsohn
Acclaim for
Jane Mendelsohn’s
I Was Amelia Earhart
“A poetic meditation on freedom and love and flight [that] stands on its own as a powerfully imagined work of fiction.… Ms. Mendelsohn invests her story with the force of fable.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“Haunting and delicate.… Mendelsohn’s universe is a sensuous and ethereal one.… Her novel is drenched in visual effects [which] continue to dance before the retina after one has read them.”
—
The New Yorker
“A tantalizing fictional biography of Amelia Earhart … slim and idiosyncratic as its heroine.… The pleasures of reading this book are many.”
—
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Mendelsohn’s rhapsodic language and shimmering, dreamlike imagery will carry readers along on her voyage into the many mysteries this work contains.… A sensual, intoxicating experience.”
—
Louisville Courier-Journal
“Conveys a sense of the sheer wonder of flying.…
I Was Amelia Earhart
contains an alluring element of fantasy for anyone feeling closed in by life. The book is about escape.”
—USA Today
“Compelling.… You can’t help admiring the boldness of a novelist who would make fiction of a legend.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Vividly imagined and complex.… A soaring prose meditation.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Exciting.… It’s testimony to the power of the Earhart myth, and to Mendelsohn’s sparkling prose, that the reader is quickly enraptured.… This is entertainment of a high order.”
—
Lexington Herald-Leader
“Mendelsohn [is] an exquisite crafter of prose.… Brilliant … is not too strong a word to describe what Mendelsohn has done.… Her novel will hold you spellbound.”
—
Newark Sunday Star-Ledger
“Fascinating.… The prose soars with lightness and imagination.”
—
Winston-Salem Journal
“Lush [and] mesmerizing … Mendelsohn gives us not so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of dreamlike images to float on.”
—
Hartford Courant
“Not to be missed … an immediately addicting book.”
—
Harper’s Bazaar
“Reads like a kind of dream.… Mendelsohn delivers a fantasy from deep within Earhart’s consciousness.”
—
Denver Post
“Sparely written, almost visionary … a paean to the ultimate escape.”
—
The Christian Science Monitor
“Elegant and sensuously beautiful.… A psychologically rich portrait of a highly unusual woman.”
—
Booklist
Jane Mendelsohn
I Was Amelia Earhart
Jane Mendelsohn is a graduate of Yale University. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the
Village Voice, Yale Review, London Review of Books
, and
The Guardian
. She and her husband live in New York City. This is her first novel.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH
1997
Copyright
© 1996
by Jane Mendelsohn
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mendelsohn, Jane, [date]
I was Amelia Earhart : a novel / by Jane Mendelsohn. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Earhart, Amelia. 1897–1937—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3563.
E
48212 1996
813’.54—dc20 96-4149
eISBN: 978-0-307-81420-3
Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
Author photograph © Pierre Dufour
v3.1
For Nick
But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer.
— VIRGINIA WOOLF
,
Orlando
T
HE SKY IS FLESH
.
The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It’s a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.
More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It’s always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn’t seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don’t know. What I know is that the life I’ve lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.
•
I know this: I risked my life without living it. Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. I had already been flying for a long time when he said that. It was 1937. I was thirty-nine. I was more beautiful than ever, but an aura of unhappiness traveled with me, like the trail of a falling comet. I felt as though I had already lived my entire life, having flown the Atlantic and set several world records, and there was no one to share my sadness with, least of all my husband. Charmed by my style and my daring exploits, the public continued to send me flowers and gifts, but the love of strangers meant nothing to me. My luminous existence left me longing and bored. I had no idea what it meant to live an entire life. I was still very young.
So, the sky.
It’s the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.
I’m flying around the world, there’s nothing but sky. The sky is flesh. It’s the last sky.
I remember: I’m flying around the world. I’m flying over the Pacific somewhere off the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I’m lost. I watch the sky as it curves and swells, and every now and then I think I can see it shudder. Voluptuous, sultry in the naked
heat, it seems to me to be the flesh of a woman. But then suddenly the light illuminates a stretch of more masculine proportions—a muscular passage of azure heft, a wide plank like the back of a hand—and I have to acknowledge, although I hate to admit it, the bisexuality of nature. I purse my lips a little when I realize this, and scrunch my nose up to rearrange my goggles. My eyes and my eyes reflected in the windshield hold the sun in them, and it burns. I blink and reach one arm directly overhead. My fingers grasp a dial. Out of the far corner of my field of vision, I catch a glimpse of the underlying sea. Thinking to myself that this might be the last day of my life, that I’m hot, and that I am hungry, I adjust the dial and lower my arm. The sea is dark. It is darker than the sky.
This is the story of what happened to me when I died. It’s also the story of my life. Destiny, the alchemy of fate and luck. I think about it sometimes, under a radiant sun. The tide laughs. The light swims. I watch the fish-skeleton shadows of the palm leaves on the sand. The clouds ripped to shreds.
Today when I think of my former life, I think of it as a dream. In the dream I am another person. In the dream I am the most famous aviatrix of my day, a heroine. I am Amelia Earhart.
A
S FAR BACK
as she could remember, she always wanted to be a heroine. She settled on her vocation in the nickelodeon, where bathed in the mechanical shadows of earthly stars, she fell under the spell of Cleopatra and Joan of Arc, their silent swoons and voiceless battle cries calling her off to distant lands. Even before she understood what a heroine was, she knew that she wanted to be one. Not on a screen in a dusty old vaudeville house, but out in the real world. The painted goddesses ruling countries and fighting wars weren’t at all like the women she knew. The women she knew did what men expected of them. Heroines, they did whatever they wanted. They smoked cigarettes on horseback under silken skies. They carried guns and had a multitude of lovers. She was seduced by the vision of an imaginary world where women led extraordinary lives, and when
the picture was about factory workers or men kissing their secretaries, she snuck behind the stage and played checkers or penny poker with the manager’s one-handed son.
Sometimes my thoughts are clearly mine, I hear them speak to me, in my own voice. Other times I see myself from far away, and my thoughts are ghostly, aerial, in the third person.
When I was very young, six or seven, I already wanted to die. I already had the dream. I wanted to escape, to go higher, to leave my body, and this made me seem ambitious, greedy for life. When I was young, people hated my greediness, but they enjoyed it too. A little girl filled with desire is a beautiful sight, ugly, but very beautiful.
My father gave me a gun for Christmas, against my grandfather’s wishes. It was a .22 caliber rifle. I used to hunt for rats in my grandparents’ barn, the milky winter light falling down between the rafters, scraps of hay dust floating like lazy planets. I’d lift my rifle slowly, like a cowboy on the plains, and press my eyelashes up against the barrel. When you shoot a rat, it falls over in a soft heap. I liked the look of a dead rat, so peaceful.
•
The sky is flesh. I’m flying around the world. A fine perspiration laces my face and neck. It begins to seep down my back. Twisting my left arm around behind me, I locate a can on a shelf. I grab hold of the screwdriver and steadying the can in my lap, I poke two holes through its metal skin. When I poke the holes, I hear a tiny pop, like the release of a toy gun. Inside the plane, the mindless roar of the engine plays a dull accompaniment to my snack. When I finish the juice, I put the can back on the shelf and lick the last drops of salt from my lips.
This is what’s happening: I’m flying over the Pacific somewhere off the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I’m lost. This is my predicament. I fiddle with the radio the way I have fiddled with it so many times before, only this time I receive nothing. I look down at my fuel gauge and my eyeballs tremble rapidly as they follow the small, significant movements of the indicator. My radio is useless, I’m running out of gas, and I’m suffering from dehydration and fatigue.
