The Invention of Flight (6 page)

Alma sits alone at the table, watching her family line up for food. She will go last when the line is shorter. A daughter complains to her husband that every Oktoberfest banquet is the same, that it takes weeks to rid her clothes of the sour odor of kraut. The husband laughs, squeezes the daughter, and whispers something, Alma's sure, about humoring the old woman. Eat the sweet sausage, he's saying, buy the children cloth toys stuffed with some old lady's hose, cast-off shoes covered with macaroni sprayed gold. Alma says nothing, knows they care for her really, these older ones who feel the relationship, knows they're frightened and sometimes angry at what she might have passed on to them. Lately they give her pats instead of hugs. She has lived the last twenty-five years of her life with only one breast. It has been months since anyone kissed her on the mouth.

A great-grandson sits to her left, gives her an extra roll he's picked up in line, a sweet sticky roll with the fresh taste of yeast. Across the table a younger great-grandson's first scribblings dig through the paper cloth in places to the wood, drawn with his grandmother's pen, another of her daughters. Soon the table will be filled, a whole tableful of people there because of her. She never
did, finally, teach school but she did something, didn't she? A granddaughter standing in line wears blue jeans, a flannel shirt. Alma never at church without white gloves, tight between the fingers. But doesn't say anything, remembers her mother saying
Change with the times, grow old with grace.
Earlier that same granddaughter bragged of how she would remain single until she was thirty-five, love a thousand men, and backpack in Europe, then become a mother and a nuclear physicist, said, Grandma, why did you never teach? Looked at her condescendingly, thinking, you could have done all this and you did nothing, poor woman. Alma explained again, the old story, about World War I, about German being taken from the schools as she was coming home on the train, filled with stories of school chums to tell her brothers, a degree from the small-town Indiana college in her lap, wrapped in leather, the degree that would allow her to teach children to speak her mother's language. And then rolling bandages, making socks, John back from the war, marriage, children, but the granddaughter didn't really listen—thought, years have passed between then and now, you could have done something.

This granddaughter wants to move away—to Paris, San Francisco, New York—says there is no continuity, only her freedom, will waste much time fighting her own mistakes, mistakes that Alma could point out. What are generations for if not for that? Alma, amazed, wonders how you face death alone in New York, her own father having told her that the family is like the revolving spokes on a wheel, that you see the spokes rising up behind you and falling in front of you, and when it's your turn to fall you're not afraid because
more spokes are rising and the rest of the wheel keeps revolving.

The granddaughter walks over from the line, gives Alma an extra roll, then sits at the other end of the table, afraid to be like her. Can't be helped. And maybe she doesn't remember as much about being young as she thinks she does. Earlier, at the bazaar, she called the eleven-year-old grandson
Schnikelfritz
and kissed him as he stood talking baseball with a friend. He blushed and said, Oh Grandma, and now he comes and sits near her, red at the neck. Like the granddaughter, he spends much time deciding what he will be, though not in as much turmoil, knows everyone will expect him to be something. He talks of space shuttles, atomic power, thinks she knows nothing but memories of tin pails of beer carried to her father in the summer, ice carts pulled by horses. Alma thinks, no, too much emphasis on style, not substance. Widows eating the noon meal after church on Sunday. One had been a doctor, one a secretary, one a housewife. One had been crazy. All talk about the ocean, a pain in the joints, the color yellow, the taste of coffee. It comes down to that. There is that connection between friends. Alma watches her family ladling kraut from the huge kettles to their plates. All of the grandchildren standing unaware of the things that have come from her, a gift. A certain twist of a certain chemical causes the reddish hair, they know that. But there are things that they don't know.

She takes one of the sweet rolls from the pleated and waxed container. The amber liquid sugar settles in a pool at the bottom. Some sticks to her fingers. A grandson has a bead on the tip of his nose, the Reverend
stands by the banquet table and smiles, a bit of caramel on his tooth. She smiles back. Clean German Protestant, enormous thighs, she's heard he sweeps the snow off the driveway of the manse every twenty minutes as it falls, and never has to shovel. She had a crush on him once, before the fat covered him like mounds of potatoes. Of course she never told him and never told John, decided not to feel guilty about it as long as it didn't hurt anyone. They were her thoughts and she had a right to them. It made her happy for a whole summer when she was twenty-four and John was thirty and working too hard. She would come into the cool dark church in the afternoons to cut out pictures from picture books for the bulletin board in the cradle room, hoping she might catch a sight of him pacing at the end of a high-ceilinged hall, working on his sermon. She wore a cotton print dress and sat on the cool green linoleum by a crib, very aware of herself. She often laughed at this, knowing that he wasn't aware at all, and glad of it. She would see him in one of the dark halls, first a blur of dark suit and light brown hair, then her eyes would become used to the dark and she could see the serious features of his face in the same way, she thought, that the babies in the cradle room would see the picture of Mary she was cutting out for them, first as a blur of blue that was part of the brown corkboard, then as something separate and finally at the end of two years, as something resembling a real person.

That was many years ago but she still thought of him with gratitude, could sometimes see the young man in the old. He helped her in the years after John died, told her to look for a sign, and she began to sit long hours in
the sanctuary washed by the light from outside died deep blood colors as it filtered through the stained glass windows. A ray of royal blue that had once been white warmed her hand as she sat in her pew all that spring after John's death. The sign was this: things change form with ease, with abandon. There was much comfort in that.

Another granddaughter comes to the table, brings Alma a square of dark red Jello, half a pear trapped in the bottom like a small white turtle. Alma thanks her, wants to give her a gift also, points out the steam in the kitchen, a gas that had once been liquid, crowding against the window in the swinging door which leads into the banquet hall, leaving a film of moisture on the glass. But the granddaughter says, That's nice, accustomed to her excesses, doesn't know that Alma's trying to save her years of searching, goes down to the other end of the table and sits by the granddaughter in the man's shirt.

Other grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to the table. Some bring her Jello, others bring her rolls. One laughs, says, We're the Jello brigade. Alma knows she will remember that phrase forever, that that grandson will always be the leader of the Jello brigade. Never one to think of a phrase, she is always the one to make it stick. One of the women at Sunday dinner looked at the table of widows and said, We're the go-go grannies. From that point on, Alma had never issued an invitation to coffee or games of Manipulation or chicken dinners at the Hollyhock Hill without saying, It's the go-go grannies, We're the go-go grannies, The go-go grannies are getting together. Long after the rest of the women had
forgotten where the phrase came from, Alma could have told who said it and where, on what Sunday of what month of what year.

Another grandchild comes with a roll for her. He sits and wraps a transparent ribbon of kraut around the tines of his fork, doesn't want to eat it. A son sits across from her and begins telling her how much he's always loved her music cabinet with the hand-painted picture of a man playing a lute on the front. He guesses it must be worth hundreds, a real antique. Sometimes Alma welcomes these comments, wants her things to go to those that want them. At other times she's resentful, thinks they pay much more attention to her things than they used to. She grows suspicious that they're all waiting for her to die, holding their breath. On days like this it seems that they're all talking at once, saying Grandma, I like your monkeypod tray from Hawaii, I like your cloisonné lamp, but you didn't really sell the Tiffany, did you, you do still have the humidor and the cranberry glass? When this happens she can feel her lips getting tight and thin, her eyes getting narrow, and she hears herself ask in a scratchy voice that can't be hers, Why do you want to know? There are things she can't bear for anyone to have. And they're not the important things—her Bible, her pictures of John, the china and cut glass. It's silly things like her rolling pin, the mammy and pappy salt shakers, a metal coffee can where she keeps her saltines, a cotton slip. She knows they won't fare well. She can picture her daughter saying of course
these
things we can throw away. She can see them looking at her earrings—how tasteless, how quaint, how oldfashioned. She can see them laughing at her supply of
wine that the doctor told her to drink to build up her blood, a joke almost slapstick, the old lady drinking wine for medicinal purposes. She's told them often enough that she enjoys the wine, has had it for dinner all her life, that the doctor only told her not to
stop
, that it was good for her. The one son who loved to make jokes found her wine the richest material he'd had in years. It was this same son who, when he was twelve and obsessed with being pure and wanted to become a saint, when he stopped eating for a week, had thought her wine was wicked and wild and poured a bottle out in the gravel driveway to save her soul. Alma thinks that she hasn't changed, that if her wine has to be interpreted she would rather be thought of as slightly wicked than as feeble and silly.

And last week in the middle of the night she suddenly couldn't bear the thought of someone throwing away the tiny clear glass bird with the air bubble in one wing and the broken wire sticking out of its breast that John brought her as a peace offering at the end of that same awful summer when she had the crush on the pastor. When he brought it into the dark entry hall, the wire was longer and embedded in a piece of driftwood. They knelt in the hall to put the driftwood on the floor and a thin wedge of light through the letter slot in the door lit only the glass bird, the round glasses on John's face, a lock of his blonde hair, and the diamond on her hand as she touched the bird's left wing. And filled with white light, the wire hidden in the dark and bending, the bird looked as if it flew away from her on its own power, then back to her hand. And she decided that she loved him again, through that bird. Then John placed the bird on
her dresser where two days later one of the children, she'd forgotten which one, snapped the wire and left the bird lying in an ashtray. She told everyone she'd thrown it away then, but she kept it in an embroidered handkerchief in her nightstand, ashamed of being so foolish. Then last week she started thinking about it, and she put the bird and the handkerchief in a velvet-lined ring box and went outside in her nightgown to bury the box in the yard. When she came back into the kitchen and poured herself some wine and sat at the table she started to giggle, couldn't stop, wondered how she'd become exactly what they expected of her, a crazy old woman drinking medicinal wine, going outside at night in her gown with a shovel, burying things in her back yard.

The table fills. Everyone eats, the younger ones push the kraut to one side of their plates, wrinkle their noses. One great-granddaughter takes a napkin and dries the kraut juice from the knockwurst she chose instead of sausage, because it tasted the most like hot dogs. One granddaughter, the dancer, taps a tune on her plate with a knife. A son wolfs down his sausage, spears his wife's uneaten sausage with a fork, finishes that, and looks around for more. Alma eats a roll, some Jello, wonders if any of her married children will notice that she doesn't have anything else, decides she'll wait to get more food until someone mentions that she doesn't have any. Before her illness they would have noticed, now they're afraid to look at her too closely. They talk to her of things around her, look at that car, at that photograph, and that's where their eyes rest. A four-year-old great-grandson sitting on her right leans over and says,
Grandma, are you sick? and his mother, putting her arm around him says, No, of course Great-grandma's not sick, she's fine, she'll live forever, and Alma wants to stand up, make a speech, say, Listen it's true and today I'm not all that afraid, things change form, why are you all ignoring it? But she doesn't say anything, because she knows it's hard not to be afraid. She wants to say that it's only something about cells growing too fast. She knows enough to sound scientific about it, she can talk knowledgeably of organs and glands, but she doesn't know enough to stop it from feeling like black magic. And it hasn't been that easy to live with it. A few cells having a grand old time at the expense of her body, not just her body, but her self and everything she saw through her eyes in her own way. One consolation there. Revenge if she wanted it. The earth would lose one way of looking at it. No one would ever listen to her back yard quite the way she did. And that's all the earth has required of her after all—a pair of eyes, ears, a nose, nerve endings in the skin, another organism to sense that it all exists. God required more of her, her husband even more, or sometimes it seemed that way. But the earth required only that she touch, and the earth contained the cell in her that was going wild. For a while she tried thinking of it in another way, that those cells in her throat were life, growth in a knot. The only recourse, she decided, was to feel herself as the cancer, to become the cells, cheer as she felt the explosions in her neck, as each cell lit a new cell, eating a vacuum through her body. The grandson in the khaki coat back from Vietnam, short hair he wouldn't grow so he wouldn't forget, talked about lighting up an enemy, not death. That lighting up was real to
her, but she couldn't carry it off. She was wherever the cancer wasn't, it was as simple as that. She couldn't contain it. She couldn't ignore it. She wants to tell her children that, that she didn't will it, that she doesn't want it to happen to them, but that if it does, they can stand it, that things change form with ease, that they should remember the family. She wants to tell them that, but they don't want to talk about it, each one of them positive that he is the one human being in the history of the earth who will never ever die.