The Invention of Flight (11 page)

In the morning we watch two young boys in paint-splattered
jeans and khaki jackets try to crank the casket into the vault. They have difficulty getting all four sides level and I think that if we weren't there they might let it fall and be done with it. They get it down finally, with much banging and chipping of mahogany, and there is silence, a green wind, and I think that I can hear my cousins' voices but am afraid that I am only hearing my own. And then my cousins and my aunt get into their car. My brother gets into his, Aunt Mary's father into another. My mother and grandmother take me to the airport and they return to their homes.

At Christmas we all get together, but it's built up again and we've lost the stimulus to break it down. We rush through dinner, gifts are sparse, several of us have the beginnings of a cold. We are dressed carelessly. Later we will all wash our hair to go out with friends. When it's time to leave we feel relief. It is a scene we will repeat many times.

I live in a town slowly turning into dust. Choked, finally, by the fields which surround it and by a larger town a few miles west which kept growing like a fat old man adding chocolate to chocolate who, one night in bed, rolled over and gently, quietly crushed his wife. The dust is from the houses rotting, the streets unpaved and rotting, pollen thick as fog, grain elevators pouring out the slick sweet dust of rotting corn until that time in the fall when the fields become white and brittle as bleached bones and the corn is cut close to the roots.

There are only a few stores left in town: one small grocery which doesn't sell perishables, one store full of seed spilling out of bags, one store of dubious nature selling only bait and red cream soda and run by a man known as Cowboy with dust like black seeds in the creases in his neck, age cutting into his face, who dreams he is popular with the farmer's daughters. They in turn dream of winning 4H ribbons at the state fair, of dances at the Legion where boys, farmers' sons, dress in tight pants with silk shirts and sing rock and roll, hoping to be discovered and eventually see mythical places like California. Instead, always, marrying one of the girls when they're sixteen, seventeen, moving into a house that
someone has left vacant, buying one car that runs and one without wheels that they put in front of the house on cement blocks, for years keeping the dream alive that they will work on it, make it hot, take it to a drag race in Kentucky. For some reason there are refrigerators on all of their porches.

The county boasts two or three of the rarest denominations of churches, churches where the women never cut their hair and have it done up once a month in the most elaborate tall beehives, the back woven like a checkerboard, churches where the people believe that the walk on the moon was a hoax, something done with mirrors and special animation, that soap operas are more real than the news. A photographer from the capital drove through the town last year and took pictures, looking for quaint and not finding it but taking the pictures anyway, called it a village at peace with itself and in the article placed us in the wrong county and none of us corrected him. It also didn't mention in the article that we are perhaps the closest town to where Wilbur Wright was born, that the air is filled with planes and we have no tourists. Often I feel that I am the only one in the town who remembers that Wilbur Wright began with a bicycle and he rose.

I own a home behind the Holiness church, have lived here for years but am planning on leaving. I'm waiting for the right time. I rent two rooms in the back of my house to two women—a mother and a daughter—and their rooms are stuck like barnacles on a house which is for the most part airy, white, uncluttered. The mother fills her room with Wilbur Wright memorabilia—photographs,
clippings from magazines, chrome airplane mobiles, airplane ashtrays, airplane soapdishes, airplane models—in hopes of opening a small museum when the tourists find us, which she is sure will happen in her lifetime. On the wall is a reproduction of a clipping from a local newspaper at the time of Lincoln's death:
Lincoln! The Savior of a Race and Friend of All Mankind! Triumphs over death, and mounts victoriously upward with his old familiar tread!
When I die, she often says, I want the news greeted with this kind of optimism.

The daughter, Melissa, has painted her room a dark moss green and keeps the blinds drawn so that it is barely possible to see the lace bedspread and flowered dust ruffles. A thirty-five-year-old virgin quite tied to her mother, her hair cut with less care than I take to cut the nails on my dog, shapeless faded dresses, she has rounded shoulders and her eyes are always to the ground or red with what, despite her silences, has to be caused by private dramatic bursts of weeping. Her room too is full of objects and, in fact, the only time that I have ever seen any of the feelings which are kept so completely below the surface is when she came out of her dark room one day and, watching to make sure no one saw her, placed a cupid from the vast collection of winged creatures which filled her room on a nightstand in her mother's room and left, thinking her mother would never notice, as if it had flown there on its own. But her mother found it, ran her hands through her hair and across her large thighs, and huffed and said,
Oh these cupids, I hate these cupids, these damn fat little angels
, and picking it up, placed it inside Melissa's door—not on a shelf but in the dust under the bed.

The mother sells Tupperware, Amway, Mary Kay Cosmetics, her afternoons spent in front of a television and most mornings and evenings spent with gray hair perfectly curled and sprayed, going from door to door and from one gathering of women to another, selling things on the home party plan, leading the obligatory word games to give the illusion of camaraderie before bringing out the collection of plastic boxes or creams. The mother is happy, content. She belongs to many clubs and is the one who always insists, at the formation of a new one, that bylaws should be the first order of business. She is, I believe, absolutely without any inner life and without any sensitivity to Melissa, cheerfully bringing up subjects which pain her—the state of Melissa's appearance, the way the world is filled with evil. The mother is so happy and the daughter in such obvious misery that I am convinced the mother has in some way made Melissa the way that she is, that it is she who is completely responsible for what Melissa has become, as if she gave birth to her to absorb her spirit; I am certain there is no love between them.

I sit at the breakfast table with Melissa, trying to engage her in conversation. She smiles, nods, spills tea on her bathrobe as she listens to me talk about the weather, movies, gardening, comfortable subjects.

“This town was once world famous for a type of rose,” I say. “They were used to cover the ceiling of the Hilton in New York when Prince Something-or-Other of England came to visit. The roses had buds as big as fists and stems as tall as a child. An adult woman could attach a rose to her waist and the stem would drag the ground.”

I am repeating a story I heard from an old woman who was probably lying, but it's a good story and it seems to cheer her.

The mother comes into the kitchen holding an old ventriloquist's dummy away from her body, says, “Look at this filthy, disgusting thing,” and puts it in the middle of the table. The dummy is unclothed and sexless, pinched in where the arms and legs meet the body and again at the knees and elbows. The body itself is cloth and stained badly, the head fitted with goggles, an aviator cap. “Found it at a yard sale,” she says. “It's going to be Wilbur Wright.”

She pours herself some cereal and begins eating. Melissa looks away from the dummy, which is directly in front of her. The mother brings up the years she lived in Florida near Sarasota where circus freaks go to retire. She fills the kitchen with vivid descriptions of the odd people, the deformities that she saw, a 500-pound woman who lived next door to her whose yard was filled with broken clown equipment, tiny bicycles and masks and miniature cars, the mother never able to figure out why. When she begins to describe a dwarf she saw once in a drugstore, how he kept his freezer filled with squirrels, a delicacy, Melissa excuses herself, turns pale. She starts to leave the kitchen, turns at the door and asks me what happened to the roses. I say I heard they were some kind of hybrid and they reverted. They were the only roses known to have reached that size and no one could grow them now. Melissa holds onto the doorknob, turns herself around and leaves. The mother says, “When I was carrying that girl she turned every which direction, you wouldn't believe. I'd say, ‘Get down, you
son of a bitch,' push her away from my ribs, give her little smacks. I thought she'd have more spunk. When she was born the doctor had to whack the hell out of her to get her to take in air.”

I ask the mother to please take the dummy off the table and she does, putting it on the floor beside her chair. I clear my cup off the table, watch as the mother finishes eating and gets up, re-forms a curl of hair near her ear and picks up a pink sample case from behind the door. “The dummy,” I say, and the mother comes back to her chair, picks the doll up, slings it under her arm. By this time Melissa is back in the kitchen waiting for her ride to work, her hand shaking as she fumbles with her collar. The two of them leave and I finish getting ready, straightening, finally getting into my own car and driving through town. I watch the old women sitting on front porches. Fuschia plants with globular pink flowers, the florist's tags still on them, hang obscenely above their heads; sharply angled front porch steps have crumbled overnight into dust. If I'm not careful I will think about Melissa during the day, remember the way she looked when she came back into the kitchen, the chalklike powder to cover the redness around her eyes, the way she was bent over and dressed in an old woman's flowered dress and old cardigan sweater, a graying handkerchief showing in the pocket. I know I will not be able to understand why Melissa affects me so deeply, why I can't simply let her live her miserable life in the back of my house and go on feeling comfortable about my own life, the possibilities for the life I am creating for myself. I remind myself that I can move freely in the world, that I have the beginning of a
good career and a small circle of friends, and that the only failure, the only possible failure or limitation is the failure of imagination. But there is something in me that needs to release Melissa, to shake her, make her spin. And I'm not sure why I myself am here, how I ended up here, why I stay. I grew up in a city and my inner resources depend on external things; I'll be the first to admit that. I begin to feel a heaviness, fear the morning will come when I'll wake up certain there is nothing beyond this town and so nothing in it, and the dust will begin to replace the air as I breathe, less deeply every day.

Melissa changes into her bathrobe as soon as she gets home from work, lies down on her bed with the blinds drawn. I fix myself a glass of wine and a tomato sandwich, sit and read the paper. The mother arranges samples of soap in a black cardboard box. Every few minutes I hear the springs squeak on Melissa's bed and the water run in the sink in Melissa's bathroom and then again the sound of the springs. After an hour, I put down the paper and knock on Melissa's door. I hear the sound of the faucet again and quick movement and Melissa is at the door, bathrobe buttoned unevenly, squinting in the light, the impression of the bedspread on the left side of her face. I ask if I can come in and she laughs nervously, backs into a shadow, says, “Of course, please.”

The room smells of old lady lavender and plastic roses. I go to the window and open the blind, raise the window to let in some air and immediately I feel better, look around to see if Melissa feels it too, this release, but
she is huddled against the headboard of the bed, a pillow clasped to her stomach. “How would you like to go to a movie tonight?” I say. Melissa bows her head, smiles, says she has other plans but thank you very much. I pick up a white china cupid from the dressing table and press my finger on the point of the wing, decide to face things directly and say, “Melissa, won't you tell me what's wrong?”

Melissa looks concerned, reaches out toward me as though I'm the one who needs comforting, says in a soft voice, “I hope I'm no trouble to you.” She gets up from the bed and goes to the closet, takes out an old wool skirt and lace blouse, picks up her thick glasses from the nightstand and puts them on, smiles showing the pink gums and hastily put-in teeth, the brown hair absolutely without highlights around her shoulders, the child's body. “I must get dressed now,” she says. “I hope you'll excuse me.” And she pulls the bathrobe tighter around her waist. She smiles like a nun, holds her hand to her throat as I leave and shut the door.

The mother's room is wide open and filled with light. She stands looking into a mirror, applying red lipstick, a flowered pantsuit tight across her rump. She turns to the side and pulls in her stomach, hits her hip with the flat of her hand, says, “Too fat, all Pentecostal preachers' kids are fat, can't be helped,” and she backs into a chrome mobile of biplanes.

“Why does she turn on the faucet all the time?” I ask, and the mother shakes her head, says, “Beats me, she's a strange kid.” I pinch myself, think: you could do more to help her, you old witch. The muscles tense around the dimples in the mother's fat arms and she turns to
me, says, “She's fine, honey, she's living her own life,” and I say, “That's no kind of life,” and I leave the room.

Later the mother leaves with her sample case. The door to Melissa's room stays shut. I go out into the back yard to water down the dust in my garden, see a vague outline of Melissa sitting by her bedroom window in a straight chair, dressed for the evening.

I drive to work the next day and notice the trailers and small boxy houses folded in among the fields. It seems impossible for anyone to live in those things. I wonder what those people do with their time, what they enjoy. I hate it, the meanness of it. The artificially too-pink cupcakes in grocery stores, women with pasty faces going through the cheap clothes in a K-Mart, the heartbreaking way a woman will suddenly squeal over some hideous plastic flower arrangement, plastic grapes, a conch shell spray-painted phosphorescent green and wired up as a night-light, saying isn't this beautiful or isn't this cute until I want to scream or to cry. I close my eyes and imagine a cloud in a champagne glass, a rose in a bell. I am doing well in my job; in another year or two I will be able to sell my house and find a better job in a city where I can wear fine silk blouses in the daytime, dance at night, never get the deep lines in my face, live the mean existence.