The Summer I Learned to Fly (3 page)

I wouldn’t, as it turned out, have to hold it too much longer.

friends: a history

It’s not like I didn’t have friends. I did. It’s just that I preferred the company of Swoozie and Nick to pretty much anybody else on the planet.

I know how that sounds, like I was one of those kids who didn’t know how to talk to her peers. Whose jokes fell flat. Who never wore the right clothes or listened to the right music. But I’d always had friends.

I can prove it:

Stephania Allessio
.

Born three weeks after me in a house two doors away. We moved after my dad died, and like most things from that time in my life, I don’t remember Stephania Allessio. But Mom always said she was my first friend. That we spent hours in each other’s company. We shared a babysitter who called us Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

I thought about her often, more than you’d think someone could of a person she didn’t remember the first thing about. I wondered whether if we’d never moved, if Dad had never died, maybe Stephania Allessio and I would have grown up the best of friends. The kind who finish each other’s sentences. The type that makes people say, “Just look at those two.”

Because even though I made other friends, somehow I always felt like a
one
. Singular. Alone. A Dee without a Dum.

Aaron Finklestein
.

Kindergarten. The Blue Room. We napped side by side. His orange curls would sometimes spill over onto my mat. He sucked his thumb. I sucked my index finger. We had so much in common.

But by second grade, when a boy wasn’t supposed to have a girl as a best friend, I lost him to Gavin Bell.

Georgia McNulty
.

My research partner on the Eiffel Tower. Fourth grade—Ms. Sherman’s class. We had to work on the project outside of school, so she came to my house. This was before the Cheese Shop when Mom worked from home trying to launch a mail-order business selling holiday decorations.

We came home hungry and Mom served us éclairs and used an embarrassing French accent, but Georgia McNulty laughed and whispered
Your mom is so funny
, and later she confided that she had a crush on our science teacher.

The project lasted a month or so during which Georgia
McNulty came over seven times. We built a replica of the Eiffel Tower out of paper clips and got an A, and then a few days later I heard that she’d told a bunch of people that my house was small and messy, both of which were true, but I stopped speaking to her anyway.

Alison Samuel
.

Kids said Alison Samuel ate her own boogers, and I have no proof that this was true, but once you become known as the girl who eats her own boogers, it’s a reputation that’s hard to shake.

I felt sorry for Alison, which I now realize is not the greatest foundation upon which to build a friendship. We started sitting next to each other in fifth grade, when we were finally allowed to choose our own seats. Choice might be a generous way to put it considering nobody wanted to sit next to Alison Samuel, and nobody seemed all that interested in sitting next to me, which got me wondering what I was known as.

The girl who …?

Alison hated school and she hated everyone in the school, and she hated the way our art teacher tucked her shirts into her skirts and the way our PE coach chewed his gum. All this started to rub off on me—hate has its way of doing that—so I spent most of fifth grade in a fairly miserable state.

Then her parents decided to send her to a private school where she could start over, though I have my doubts that even without a reputation for ingesting the contents of her nose, Alison Samuel was any happier.

Georgia McNulty
.

Georgia returned to my life without apology, which was fine by me, because over the intervening years my decision to stop speaking to her struck me as rash.

As usual, Georgia was standing by her locker with Beatrice and Janice. It was just before lunchtime. I stopped to tie my shoes. My laces were new; rainbow ones I’d swapped out for the usual boring white ones, and intended for roller skates, they were way too long.

“Hey, Drew,” she called. “Wanna come with us to Antonio’s?”

I paused, waiting for her to add
Just kidding
, a favorite joke of the moment among the girls in sixth grade. But she just let the invitation hang there.

“Sure,” I said.

So I walked with Georgia and her two best friends off campus to Antonio’s for lunch, which those of us with permission from our parents were allowed to do, and I sat with them as they talked and laughed. Occasionally one of them would address a question or a comment to me and I’d say something back, and sometimes they’d say
Shut up
, which actually meant that what I’d said was interesting, and then sometimes they’d act as if I hadn’t said anything at all.

The next two years continued in pretty much the same fashion.

They were my friends, but they weren’t people I could ask about what was happening in the bathroom with Geraldine Moore and all those boys, and I certainly couldn’t ask them about the things in Dad’s Book of Lists.

Still, I was grateful to have a group of friends, though I never quite got over the suspicion that if I’d done a better double-knot that morning with my rainbow laces I might have spent sixth and seventh grades alone.

This summer I would get a taste of friendlessness.

They were all gone. Georgia and Beatrice and Janice were off to an eight-week program together on the campus of a boarding school near London. Georgia to study acting. Beatrice and Janice to study the same, because that’s what Georgia was doing.

I didn’t mind. I was relieved, even. In a way, they’d started leaving me behind before buying tickets to London. They had boyfriends. They hated their parents. They didn’t get why I liked hanging out after school in a shop that stank like sweaty feet. Rats made them squeal.

Anyway, I still had Swoozie. I still had Nick. I still had Hum. And I thought I still had Mom.

mom, a vanishing act

The first sign should have been that coiled snake of calculator ribbon. Or maybe that Mom was doing less yoga, eating more cheese, and still losing weight.

I’d never bothered to think about the challenges of opening a new business. How stressful that might be. To me, the shop was all fun and adventure. It was a place to hang out.

I’d been dreaming all year of escaping school: the narrow hallways, the smell of lead and chalk, the crushing weight of my own invisibility. All I wanted was to be with Nick, to watch him work the new pasta machine. He’d promised to teach me to make squid ink linguini, which came out black and left your hands ash-gray for days.

That this new machine had cost the equivalent of several months’ rent on the shop didn’t matter to me. Nick loved it;
he became not just the guru of broken electronics, but also an artisan of the lightest, most delicate pastas. The way I saw it, the investment paid for itself. But what did I know?

If I’d heard the words
recession
or
economic downturn
I didn’t take them in. They were the sorts of things deep-voiced men on the radio droned on about when all I could think of was how to switch the dial back to KISS-FM. I didn’t understand that those words struck terror in the heart of a small-business owner like my mother.

All I knew was that after the close call with the freezer and the Belcher the year before, things seemed to be going fine. We were about to start carrying desserts! It was shaping up to be a perfect summer.

On Monday, my first day of work, Mom had already left by the time I woke up. The shop didn’t open until ten, and I’d always assumed that was when Mom went in, with her gigantic ring of keys, and opened the front door to a waiting customer or two.

On school days, the bus picked me up at 7:42. Mom waved goodbye from the window. And on weekends I’d sleep until eleven (this was a new phenomenon, my love of sleep), so on Saturdays it was no surprise to me that Mom was already gone by the time I got up. We were closed Sundays. Sunday was our day together.

On this morning, when I came downstairs at nine, there was a note on the table beside a hardened English muffin. It was timed in the top left corner—Mom always timed her notes to the minute.

7:51

Birdie—

off to the shop. Come in whenever you like. or don’t come in at all. It’s your first day of summer. You’re free! Enjoy yourself! whatever you decide, keep me in the loop. Love you madly
.

She always timed her notes and she always signed off
Love you madly
, even when the notes weren’t so cheery. Like the kind that would appear on the top of a pile of dirty dishes.

3:27

Birdie—

Exactly whose job do you suppose it is to wash these? Mine? I think not! stop treating this house like a hotel. Last time I checked we had no cleaning staff
.

Love you madly
.

Why would she suggest I take this day off? It was my first day. She needed me, didn’t she? Nick needed me. Monday was ravioli day. He’d make enough to sell fresh for the next three days and then some more for the freezer.

I took a shower, then thought too much about my outfit.
I put on a brand-new pair of socks. From the list of Ways to Start the Day Off Right:
socks, fresh from the package
.

I got Hum settled into my bag and started to walk. It was a little over two miles. I could have ridden my bike, but I worried about what the helmet would do to my hair.

When I arrived Mom was on the phone. She waved and made a
Shoot me now
sign with her fingers and rolled her eyes back in her head, which I took to be all in fun, and didn’t read as any sort of commentary about tough times on the business end of things.

I went over to the bulletin board and looked for my name on the time sheet. Not there. I turned to ask Mom, but she gave me the flat of her hand—the universal symbol for
Don’t even think about interrupting this phone call
.

I grabbed an apron. I did a quick under-the-radar check inside my backpack to see that things were cool with Hum before hanging it up on the hook by the door and joining Nick at the pasta machine.

We kept it in the front window. People loved to stop and watch Nick make pasta. Mothers with their children clutching dripping ice cream cones. Women in sweat suits with small dogs straining at their leashes. Girls in Brownie uniforms, clustered together like a swarm of bees.

Nick had flour in his hair. “Hey, kiddo,” he said.

God, how I hated when he called me kiddo.

He patted a stool and I climbed up.

“Hands?”

I showed him my clean hands. Front and back. He gave them a quick squeeze. “Let’s do this thing.”

We were making pumpkin ravioli; I loved the sweet cinnamony smell of the filling. But first we needed something to hold that filling in.

I rolled up my sleeves. As the first yellow sheet of egg pasta emerged from the machine—it always reminded me of my much-loved Play-Doh factory—Nick cut it and laid it across the twelve-inch span I made with my forearms. If I could look down and see the shape of my feet, we knew it was too thin.

“Perfection,” I said.

I didn’t just mean the pasta, but this day. The days that would follow. This was it. This was what I’d been waiting for: a summer in the company of Nick. Someplace I could be useful. Who else would check the thickness of the ravioli if not me?

The morning went as expected. Mom never did get off the phone. Swoozie manned the counter. I got to scoop the pumpkin filling into the little squares. Nick sealed them shut with the tines of a fork.

And then his lunch break came.

She was waiting for him out front, wearing a tank top and peasant skirt, right where strangers stopped to watch him work the pasta machine. Maybe that was how they met. Maybe she watched him from that window for weeks, months even, before gaining the courage to come in and ask him how long to boil angel hair.

He’d have told her that its proper name is capellini.

They’d have shared a smile.

Today he grabbed a baguette and a triangle of Brie. He took the remains of a jar of fig jam we were offering as a sample. He stuffed them in his messenger bag, threw it over his shoulder, and walked out the front door with its maddening
jingle, right into her bare arms. She climbed onto the back of his Vespa and wrapped those arms around his waist, and they disappeared. He was allowed thirty minutes for lunch. He took thirty-three.

I used all of those minutes to give myself a pep talk.
Nick has a girlfriend. Of course Nick has a girlfriend. How could he not have a girlfriend?
I sat in the freezer in a too-big parka, trying to hold myself together.

That was where Swoozie found me. Talking to myself, which I was able to pass off as talking to Hum, which struck me as slightly less pathetic.

She put her arm around me.

“You know, Birdie, this isn’t something you should worry yourself over.”

“I’m not worried.”

“This is grown-up stuff. And you’re”—she reached over and stroked my frozen cheek—“still a child.”

Swoozie had never talked down to me like this before, and it stung more than the cold.

“I’d like to be alone.”

Still, she sat.

“So unless there’s something you need in here …” These were the most unkind words I could find with which to strike back.

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

She left, and it wasn’t until I came out again to find Mom still sitting at her desk, writing checks, that it occurred to me that maybe Swoozie wasn’t talking about Nick and his new girlfriend. Maybe she was talking about Mom and the business.

sunday

I knew it wasn’t fair to blame Nick for my disastrous first day on the job, but that didn’t stop me from sulking all week and leaving Nick stranded, alone with his machine and his sidewalk admirers.