Fly Me Page 15

  Dinner is a dinner they’ve shared hundreds of times growing up: four rib eyes from Mel Forman’s butcher shop, summer vegetables out of the garden, and the rice pilaf recipe that was handed down from an uncle of Wayne’s who’d been to the Middle East during the Great War. Grace sees the cuts of beef seasoned on the counter and informs her parents that she’s become a vegetarian. They regard her blankly, careful that the first reaction doesn’t spoil an opportunity to bring her back from the edge. But before they get in a word, Grace snorts and smiles: “Just kidding, not even me, guys—bridge too far.”

  After throwing the steaks on the Weber and dishing up the sides while they cook through, the four arrange themselves in their usual spots in the orange kitchen, beneath the cuckoo clock and the family of ficuses suspended from the ceiling.

  “We haven’t done this since graduation,” Wayne says. “The grill always looked sad with three, and sadder with two.”

  “Don’t you have the Morrisons over anymore?” Suzy says.

  “They’ve been in Maine most of the summer.”

  “Do you cook every night?”

  “We go into town more than we used to.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many restaurants have opened up,” Edith says.

  “Three?” Grace says.

  “Yes, three, exactly.”

  “Oriental, Mediterranean, and Barbecue,” Wayne says.

  “We have a nice little rotation,” Edith says.

  “How does Sam feel about it?” Suzy says, meaning their old boss at Borelli’s.

  “It’s been ages since we’ve been in,” Edith says.

  “We should stop by and pay our respects,” Suzy says.

  “Enough of this—tell me where you’ve been,” Edith says. “I can hardly keep up.”

  The girls look at each other, neither eager to lead off. “Well,” Grace says, “I went to San Francisco twice last week, Seattle on Saturday, Honolulu at some point.”

  “You went to Hawaii again?” Edith says.

  “Suzy went, too. Last week.”

  “Oh my God, how did you not tell us? We’ve always wanted to go,” Edith says. She has a long face and the same butter-colored hair as Grace, and she keeps it shoulder length still. She’s running her fingers down to the ends, like she tends to after a big meal. “It was never in the cards with Dad’s work. But we’ve got to make it. Maybe this winter.” Edith looks at Wayne for a nod of team accordance, but he only offers a tight smile and cuts a slice of rib eye thin enough to serve as a microscope slide.

  “We can probably get you something,” Grace says. “Maybe if you’re flying standby. Maybe even standby on both legs, New York–L.A.–Honolulu, something funky.”

  “I thought Honolulu was only for senior girls,” Edith says.

  “Someone called in sick,” Suzy says. “Fill-in. Night in the Royal Hawaiian.”

  “It’s pink like a cake, isn’t it?”

  “Some cakes, I guess,” Suzy says. “Pink like a pink hotel.”

  “How magnificent. Did you swim?”

  “I swam, I sat on the beach, I read a book and drank a drink with an umbrella.”

  “Did you meet any men?”

  “I meet men every day,” Suzy says.

  “Go on.…”

  “I met dozens of men on my way to Hawaii and dozens of men on my way back. Some of them are married and some are single, most of them are employed, and all seem to have robust self-confidence. At least on the surface. Oh, and they feel their coach ticket entitles them to a share of any woman’s ass.”

  “Suz, c’mon,” Grace says.

  “Girls, how’s your steak?” Wayne says, acting as though there are fingers in his ears.

  Grace, stuck chewing, shows an A-OK with her free hand.

  “I’m not dating anyone, if that’s what you mean,” Suzy says.

  “But she’s getting on just fine,” Grace says. “Slipped right into the groove out there.”

  “I still can’t believe we haven’t been out to see you. It can’t truly be the way you say it is.”

  “Come for Christmas,” Grace says.

  “We couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Grace says.

  “You know why—Nana and Pop and Jack and Mary and your cousins, what—”

  “They can do one without you,” Grace says.

  “I’m sure we’d love it, but I don’t know if this is the year.”

  “Well, how ’bout if Suzy and I make a pact not to come home?”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Suz?”

  “You should come out,” Suzy says.

  “We’ve never not done Christmas here,” Edith says.

  “Start of a new tradition,” Grace says.

  “You’re not meaning to suggest this is the first of many.…”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Grace says.

  “But you won’t fly forever,” Edith says.

  “See if they can stop me.”

  “But when you and Mike decide…”

  “We’re not having children.”

  “Don’t even joke about that.”

  “I’m serving Jack and soda till my skin’s sagging off my face. I’m going down with the ship.”

  “Why do you enjoy this so much?” Edith says to both of them.

  “’Cause it’s so easy,” Suzy says.

  Edith drifts, staring at the wallpaper as though mentally testing out a change of color. Her skin is so white and so soft, her lipstick is playing-card red. She makes herself up like the women in Yankee magazine.

  “You don’t mean the thing about the babies,” Edith says.

  “How ’bout we reconsider if you come to Sela for Christmas?” Grace says.

  “This is cruel.”

  “I’ll come,” Wayne says.

  The girls rap their cutlery on the table in victory.

  “Is that right?” Edith says, frowning.

  “I’m in.”

  “You won’t be able to come back here,” Grace says. “The first taste is free.…”

  “The first taste of what?” Edith says.

  “Freedom from an upstate winter,” Suzy says.

  “I love Christmas in the snow,” Edith says.

  Grace tosses her vegetables with her fork and knife. “That’s a sure sign of denial.”

  The next morning Wayne and Suzy head to the racetrack. Wayne is fuzzy. After three or four glasses of scotch, he played the piano till midnight, around which point he slumped on the bench into the shape of a croissant and bowed out midsonata. Still, he rose early, picked blackberries off the bushes in the yard, made pancakes and eggs, and brewed black coffee, and they sat around the dining room table and did it all over again, the four in harmony in a way that was beginning to make Suzy anxious.

  “You and Mom seem particularly even keeled. Not a single tiff last night about work hours, the television, drinking…”

  “I’ve been cutting back to a pretty reasonable nine-to-five,” Wayne says. “And I’ve been taking the sailboat out a little more. It’s been a nice summer. Lovely weather.”

  “Does Mom go with?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Which lake?”

  “Keuka usually. We’ve even stopped by a couple of the vineyards up on the hills above the lake. At Cayuga and Seneca, too. It’s been a funny summer—with you wrapping things up at school and taking the job you did, Mom and me not having terribly firm plans. And work being pretty regular.”

  “What do you mean, me taking the job I did?”

  “Just you starting work.”

  “You didn’t mean ‘that job that you took’?”

  “All I meant was, your mom and me, we never thought it through this far. It was the war, then a wedding, then one girl, then a second girl, then planning to just keep those two plates spinning for as long as we possibly could. Then suddenly you had a diploma and that was that.”

  “But this job is very weird.”

  “It sounds l
ike you like it.”

  “But you couldn’t have imagined me…”

  “Is that what you want me to say?”

  “I certainly couldn’t have.”

  “I guess I’d never really thought of what it would be. You weren’t interested in being a doctor or engineer, so I suppose I wrote those off—but nothing else would’ve surprised me. You were endlessly capable.”

  “But this is a little weird.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, I’m saying it: it’s a little weird. Especially being back here—it slams everything into context. Everything that had built to whatever. The good grades and the books and the racing—that was building toward something. And then one day it wasn’t. And I was in training and then at the beach and everything’s sort of reset its frame of reference. I’m sure it happened with Grace, too, but that’s one of her defining qualities: she can wake up each morning in a new situation and immediately adopt its sights and smells and standards of practice as though they’re her own.…”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is being here all of a sudden makes me realize how strange it is that I’ve started to regard all that ridiculousness out there as totally normal.”

  “Maybe for someone like Grace and someone like you—and I don’t mean to suggest that that’s the same person—but maybe for girls like you it is normal to make it work wherever you end up. I couldn’t have done it, your mother couldn’t have done it. But what’s so strange about it being possible for you? I mean, what’re we even talking about that’s so strange?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not, like, ‘surfing’ or ‘burritos’ or something like that. It’s that so many of them have only known the one thing. It’s like they don’t realize how different they are. How alien the entire mise-en-scène is…”

  “The what?”

  “The arrangement of everything. The setting, the characters, the dialogue, the ambitions. So many of them have only Sela. Apparently, they grew up only learning California history—and bad California history at that. They have no sense of what’s going on anywhere else. What the rest of the country and the world are about—some of them haven’t even ever left California before.”

  “There are people here who haven’t been on an airplane, Suzy.”

  “But we’d at least driven to Pennsylvania! I just mean, they were born into this bright, quiet little world and never even had to be convinced of their exceptional good fortune. They’re just like, ‘Duh, we know, dude.’”

  “It sounds charming,” Wayne says. “And I want you to know I’m serious about Christmas.”

  “Oh, I can tell you are. You said it twenty times at the piano last night. Good luck with Mom.”

  “Nothing would make me happier than to be outside in the sun on Christmas.”

  “It’s not just ‘be outside,’” Suzy says. “It’s actually go to the beach, from what I’m told.”

  “I take that back: nothing would make me happier than missing one year of coq au vin with Nana and Pop and the greater Rochelles.”

  “I feel like it’d be breaking the law or something.”

  “Oh, it will definitely be a thing. It will be an irrevocable statement. A breaking apart into Before and After. And it is something that I’m happy to engage in. More doing, less talking—that’s what we’re after.”

  “This is what I mean—there’s something up with you.”

  He considers this for a moment and then starts, quietly: “Your mother and I started trying…The Weed.”

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s very, very groovy, if you ask me.”

  “Stop.”

  “Us and the Morrisons. Saturday nights in the basement. We groove out.”

  “You don’t say that anymore.”

  “What’s the word, then?”

  “I don’t know anything about drugs.”

  At the racetrack they head halfway up the bleachers near the finish line, where they used to sit among the eighty thousand during the Grands Prix. Suzy drifts her eyes from the starting grid across the bobbing asphalt to the hard uphill right of turn one, from which the cars disappear onto the far side of the course. She moves, in her mind, through the languorous esses of turns two, three, and four, out onto the back straight, kicking up through the chicane and into the heavy Gs of the Loop, downhill through the Chute and into the downshifting speed trap of the Big Bend, and finally into the final ninety and the sprint to the line. She relishes the way the track feels to her eyes, the natural flow. Suzy could race with a blindfold. She could picture the track from a hundred vantages at once. From up high, to a bird, she always imagined it looking like a discarded garden hose.

  Seeing the track for the first time in a year, she is reminded of something she read during the spring semester, something Camille had given her to look at. Rodin, it said, had regarded sculpture as the incantation by which the soul of man was brought down into stone, the awakening of stones. To capture a man’s soul in stone, to imprison it there for centuries—that was the point. Or, in the case of someone like Michelangelo, the point was to strip away excess stone to reveal the figure that had been enclosed therein all along.

  Suzy considers the track here—this site of her adolescence, the endless circuitry of one long race stitched across several summers—to be a sort of sculpture. She always felt this way, she realizes now; she just didn’t have the language. Whether she ever articulated it to her parents or her sister or her friends, it felt as though she was, on a daily basis, in communion with something very much alive, something living but trapped in asphalt. She had always regarded the track as the variable—the dynamic thing. She, Suzy Whitman, stayed the same, while the track changed, in near-missable ways, each day. The same chemical elements, the same order of turns, the same pitch and roll—but shifting ever so slightly in the light, in the rain, in the heat and cold. Just barely breathing: a prone body rising and falling in sleep.

  A pair of race cars, a red 3 and a blue 6, turn onto the flat and sprint across the start line, accelerating into the next lap, where the intention is not to beat the other but to beat the course, a victory defined by besting one’s own top time. As the cars pass—two years sleeker than they looked her last run on the track, with shaved wings, a longer nose, a narrower cockpit—Suzy keeps the inquiry alive: is it really the track that possesses the soul, or is it the car? Those sculptures of physical dynamics. Modulating each year, applying the trickle-down advancements of the Formula One engineers. Maybe the Glen twitches in subtle ways—but the cars really are altered. The cars move in a modern direction. They advance. And they push the envelope until someone dies. Bandini at Monaco. Schlesser at Rouen-les-Essarts. Death on the racetrack defined the end of one avenue of progress and forced man and his mechanic to explore another.

  Suzy hears Red and Blue on the backstretch, the faint racing drone of cicadas, and then they appear over the grid again, another loop, as fast as Suzy’s ever seen a lap clocked outside of the Grand Prix. How was Suzy never afraid of dying?

  “These guys are moving,” she says.

  “I think they’re the kids from Connecticut that the guys in the garage have been talking about. Live way out on the sound but come over here to stretch out.”

  As they vanish again out of turn one, the track quivers. She can barely detect it but knows it’s there, finds it by looking through it—like the fluttering gas from a stovetop. Like a guitar string that seems to have stopped making sound but hasn’t. The track moves with the fescue of the infield and the pines at the edges.

  “You gonna come home for the Grand Prix this year?” Wayne says.

  “I dunno,” Suzy says. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on it, but maybe if I’m here with work. Getting home’s just that much farther than convenient, ya know? Plus, I haven’t been following any results this year.”

  “Ah, me neither, not much. I saw that Emerson Fittipaldi won in Belgium and England. And that Mario
Andretti started a few races at the beginning of the season.”

  “Bored of Indy.”

  “Guess so.”

  Suzy hears a new engine rev in the concealed pit lane. She’s surprised to see so much action on a weekday morning. She used to run in the evenings, once Wayne was home from the glassworks. He wouldn’t even head into the house. He’d pull up to the curb and throw open the door and tease her by pulling away ever so slowly so that she’d have to chase after him and hop into the moving car like a double-0 agent. Palmer would follow her to the curb, obedient to the property line, and they would play out the scene on repeat every weeknight from June to September.

  That new car appears at the end of the pit lane and merges onto the course where turn one dumps out, a little shaky shifting, from what Suzy can hear. The red 3 and the blue 6 whip wide onto the outside lane of the homestretch and hit the line moving even better than before.

  “They’re in a nice fight, too,” Wayne says as Red clips the inside and retains the lead out of turn one. “That little guy that just went out better keep close eyes on his mirrors.”

  “Hey,” Suzy says, “there’s something I want to let you guys know about, not ’cause it’s a big deal, but just ’cause it’s a thing, and I feel like I’ve been bad about keeping you up.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We had a close call last week,” she says. “Almost had one of those hijackings.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I mean, I guess when you do the math, it shouldn’t be that surprising, there’ve been so many this year, but it took me by surprise a little. I just sort of figured that thing would fade out.”

  “Christ, what happened?”

  “Guy on the flight back from Hawaii. As soon as we were off the ground, he gave one of the other stews a note. Note said he wanted to talk to the pilot and that he had a gun and that he’d shoot up the plane if the message wasn’t relayed and the demands weren’t met. So Marion, the stew, took it to the pilot, and the pilot waved the guy up, and when the guy knocked at the door, the pilot opened it and punched him in the face. Knocked him flat. First-class passengers screaming. Pilot on top of him, punched him again, knocked him out. Took his pistol. Cleared out the back row and tied him to the seat. Flew to L.A. just like that.”