Falling Through Space Read online

  Love is a goddess. It is the honey to end all honeys. No one turns down Aphrodite when she comes to call. The old Greeks knew how to create a metaphor. The goddess of love with her satisfied, enigmatic smile. Her little son beside her with his quiver of arrows. He lifts his bow, he takes aim, he shoots, and a man or woman falls into a spell from which there is no escape.

  Perhaps I loved him because he was different from other men I had known. He never turned on a television set. He was a small-town boy and read the local newspaper and liked knowing what was going on in the place where he lived. He didn’t care what was happening in New York City or Washington, D.C. He wanted to know who was running for sheriff and what was on at the movies and who won the high school football games.

  I learned from him to love the place where we were, at that moment, on any given day. I had moved around a great deal as a child, and I had never learned to give my allegiance to a place.

  He taught me love. Not just romantic love, and God knows it was romantic, but love of place. He would drive me around and show me places that he loved. An old oak tree that had been split in two by lightning half a century before. Two trees grew from the split trunk with a view of the distant mountains in the space between them.

  He took me to the Confederate cemetery on a fall day with the maple trees golden above the graves. A few weeks later, he took me back to see the golden carpet the leaves had become. He never told me where we were going on these expeditions. We would just get into the car, and he would turn on the radio and drive slowly and carefully to something he wanted me to see. He took me out in the country to see his childhood swimming holes. He took me to see the place where his mother taught him to swim. He was very sentimental about that small, weed-bordered lake. He always spoke of his mother with love and praise and because of that I knew I was safe to believe he loved me. A man who loves his mother can love other women. A man who resents his mother will sooner or later resent you if he loves you.

  None of that had much to do with young and old. Love is liking to be with another person, having a good time in their presence, thinking you are good and valuable when you are with them.

  I remember the first time he saw my forty-four year old body in a bathing suit. He was taking me swimming in a beautiful clear lake formed by the dammed-up waters of the White River. As usual he did not tell me where we were going. We took bathing suits and a lunch and got in the car and started driving. We drove for more than an hour, going north and west from home, going deep into the Ozark Mountains. We turned finally into a park and drove around and up to an overhang and parked the car and got out and started walking.

  We walked down wide granite steps that had once been the top of a mountain. I have always loved to swim in lakes and rivers. I learned to swim in a bayou in the Mississippi Delta, and I love the taste and feel of brown river water. We changed into our bathing suits in a grove of shrub trees. “This is the body of a forty-four year old woman in a bathing suit,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think you look wonderful,” he said. “Hold my hand.”

  Then we walked down the granite steps to the water, and he watched as I slid into the lake and started swimming. No man giving a woman diamonds ever had more pleasure or self-assurance in their gifts than he did in giving me that blessed lake.

  Am I romanticizing all of this? Perhaps. I have had two great love affairs in my life. I don’t think either of them need romanticizing.

  I treasure the memory of that love affair, and I am always glad it happened. It made me understand my sons. It reminded me, at a time when many women are leaving such things behind, what passion is and does and causes, how it takes over and calls the shots and creates its own reality. It is a memory “never to be bartered against the hungry days.”

  How to have a small dinner party:

  I never cook anything, and I don’t like to cook things or clean up the mess it makes. I do, however, know how to cook several things. I know how to cook rare roast beef. You go to the grocery store and buy the most expensive rump roast you can find. You take it out of the paper and rinse it off and then put it in an old black skillet and cook it at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty minutes per pound. Don’t drink martinis while you are doing this or you will forget to take it out, and then you will have brisket instead of rare roast beef. While it is cooking, make some grits and stir in a pound of Kraft Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese and half a stick of butter. Put this in a casserole, and cook it in a different oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about twenty or thirty minutes. Cut up some lettuce and tomatoes if they are in season but not in the winter when you have to get those little sour hothouse tomatoes that are probably poison. Set the table. Use all the good silver and light some candles. Put some Bach on the stereo. Call the drugstore and tell them to send out the Sunday New York Times and a quart of chocolate ice cream in case no one wants any rare roast beef.

  Make some coffee. Bon Appetit!

  [Supersonic flight, passage through the air at speed greater than the local velocity of sound … The first supersonic passenger-carrying, commercial airplane, the Concorde, was built jointly by aircraft-manufacturing enterprises of the British and French governments. Traveling at Mach 2, or 1,200 miles an hour, it entered regular service on January 21, 1976.]

  Encyclopedia Britannica

  At the risk of bragging, I must begin this story with a piece of personal history. In 1984 I won the National Book Award for Fiction. In the light of this unexpected and dazzling event, I went to live in New York City for the winter. I rented a furnished apartment on the Upper East Side, certain I would soon be rich and famous and able to afford such luxuries. I spent the award money as though it would last forever. I have a strong imagination, but even I could not have imagined that all this would lead up to supersonic flight.

  The year before, I had been on an elevator at the Algonquin Hotel with Eudora Welty, her friend Jane Petty, and the owner of the hotel. I was there to see Ms. Welty and Ms. Petty off on the Queen Elizabeth to visit Ms. Welty’s European writing friends. As the elevator rose, the hotel owner was talking about her recent trip to London on the Concorde. “It was the single most luxurious thing I have ever done,” she said. “We were there in three hours. No jet lag and the food was marvelous.

  “Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

  “Of course not, Silly,” she answered and fixed me with a haughty stare.

  I had been in New York a month when my British publisher called and asked me to come to London to meet the British press and tour the building that houses Faber and Faber. Being published in England by Faber and Faber was another dream come true, and I accepted the invitation with alacrity. “Go on the Concorde,” my agent advised. “It’s a once in a lifetime experience.” I thought it over. I remembered the elevator conversation and the hotel owner’s haughty stare. I’ll do it, I decided. Damn the torpedoes and all that.

  A week later, on a beautiful clear Wednesday morning, I took a taxi to JFK and went into the elegant Concorde lounge to await the flight. I was dressed up in my best tweed jacket, my lucky yellow scarf, and a pair of high-heeled leather boots. The flight was scheduled to leave at nine. We would be in London at six in the evening, a flight of three hours given the time difference.

  The flight was announced, and I boarded the airplane and found myself sitting across the aisle from the president of Lloyd’s of London, the company which insures the plane. Aside from us, there were only ten or eleven other passengers. We had the Concorde to ourselves.

  It was a beautiful cabin. The plane was still relatively new, and the seats were twice as wide as they are now and covered with hand-tooled pale gray leather. Two stewardesses served coffee in china cups and gave us the first of many small gifts of candy and mementos. I have forgotten what they were except for one very small cut-glass battery-operated clock. But the thing that interested me most was a clock-size meter at the end of the aisle leading to the cockpit. “It records the speed,” the president told
me. “Keep your eye on it. You’ll see it hit Mach 1 and then Mach 2.”

  The Concorde takes off vertically at six hundred miles an hour. When it has reached its altitude, which is high above commercial airline routes, it levels off, the nose cone realigns itself, and you can look out the windows and see the curvature of the earth. Then the real fun begins. Within fifteen minutes, the meter recorded that we had reached Mach 1. As that happened the plane seemed to stretch out, and I seemed to stretch out too. We were going faster than the speed of sound. In another fifteen minutes we passed Mach 2. The stewardesses moved up and down the aisle serving an elegant meal in five courses. The excitement was so thick you could taste it. I ate lunch, felt like an explorer, and chatted with the president of Lloyd’s of London.

  About two hours out from JFK, he asked if I had ever been to England. “No,” I answered. “Although my ancestors all came from the British Isles.”

  “Then come along,” he said. “I think you should go up to the cockpit.”

  A minute later, I was being ushered down the aisle and into the cockpit. Inside were the pilot, the co-pilot, and the first officer. They offered me a fourth seat across from the first officer. In front of me was a wide curving window. Out of it, I could see the British Isles just coming into view through the evening mist. We were breaking the Concorde record and arriving in London in less than three hours. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your letting me come in here,” I said. “I promise not to touch anything.”

  The pilot turned around in his seat and smiled at me. “Actually,” he said, “it might be better if none of us touched anything.”

  I sat strapped into my seat, so thrilled it’s a wonder I can remember any of this, as the computers landed the Concorde on the island of my genes. The Concorde now weighed two thirds less than when it took off. We had burned up the weight in fuel which is why this experience will soon be a thing of the past. I was lucky to have been there and to have thought I was rich enough to buy the ticket. The memory of that flight, of that moment when I went past my experience of myself, will be with me always. I was a golden Icarus who did not fall to earth but went gently gliding down.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE in the world who do not love the hot heat of summer. They are the same people who never read The Bobbsey Twins in the Country, who never had Fourth of July parades around their neighborhoods, whose brother never set off a whole package of firecrackers in a culvert and lived to tell the story. I love the heat. I know how to turn the air-conditioning down to sixty without a trace of guilt. It’s survival of the fittest in the mortal world, and I come from a long line of men and women who knew how to fill a room with fans. Ceiling fans, rotating fans, tall fans that blew a steady breeze into my face when I was five feet tall. I was destined to grow up to be a woman who could turn the air-conditioner down and pay later. Best of all were hand-held fans, with which people of good will fanned each other. My six-foot-four inch grandfather used to fan people with his hat. I have a vivid memory of him standing on a country road fanning the man who was changing the tire on his Ford.

  In the Deep South of my childhood we worked summer the way people in Minnesota work their frozen winters. We knew how to find shade, how to sleep away the hottest hours, how to kill flies and mosquitos, how to fish and barbecue, and use the heat to prove our mettle and our skills. We did not complain all the time about the heat. We moved the fans around the rooms to create breezes and watched the skies for rain and laid down on clean white bedspreads and read books.

  I am always nostalgic during summer. Every summer brings memories of the ones that preceded it. Only yesterday I looked up and noticed the tulip vine was blooming beside my mailbox. Another year has passed. I had forgotten that scraggly vine produced those exotic, indescribably beautiful flowers.

  Forty years ago this summer, I ran away and got married. In a borrowed Chevrolet, with an eighteen year old boy from Georgia, wearing a white dress with pearl buttons down the front, in a fever of curiosity, I got married. The boy and I bought a license and found a judge and promised to love each other until we died. Perhaps we do. Perhaps we will. It would never have happened in January.

  One of my favorite things about summer is that the neighborhood children don’t have to go to school. They have time to cut the yard, wash the windows, and accompany me on bicycle rides. They bring me up to date on the lyrics of Pearl Jam, the desperate politics surrounding election to the cheering squad and the dark side of the personalities of various high school and junior high school teachers. If you think adult life is fraught with peril, spend some time talking to people in the ninth grade.

  Summer is always rich in children where I live. My grandchildren come to visit. Since I am fortunate in having married and bred at an early age, I am still sufficiently ambulatory to accommodate them when they wish to learn to ride bicycles and horses. This summer I am thinking of taking the thirteen year old out to a country road and teach him to drive. In honor of the summers long ago when my uncle let me drive trucks and farm equipment on my grandmother’s farm. Also, in honor of Eudora Welty’s great line, “Oren was eleven, a wonderful driver.”

  There are, of course, dark sides to summer. Lying in wait for the fine, fat arms and legs of the children are the bugs of summer, the flaw in paradise, the mistake that proves that if there is a God he is far from perfect, maybe even daft.

  Who would make a tick? There is no conceivable, earthly use for a tick. A tick is not going to turn out to contain a cure for cancer. The tick is at the top of a list of reasons I might conceivably be glad when autumn comes. Ticks, wasps, flies, gnats, mosquitos, chiggers, maggots, fleas. To be balanced against butterflies, fireflies, dragonflies, honeysuckle, gardenias, robins, and the long days.

  It is June 26th as I write this. We are past the zenith; we are on our way to winter. But first the real heat will set in. Drought will scare me into watering the trees; midday will be impossible; the interiors of automobiles will be too hot to touch. I will desire naps and wear shorts, even though fifty-nine year old women should probably be jailed for exhibiting their sun-damaged legs to the general view, or, even the uncritical eyes of their grandchildren.

  I will lie down in the sun in the swing. I will add another layer to the subcutaneous damage to my skin. Who cares, I will think, drunk on the sun, what am I saving anything for? I will take a radio outside and play it on the back porch. I will watch a seven year old tirelessly hammering open hickory nuts for the squirrels to eat. I will feed the dog my son brought home to visit and promptly forgot.

  “You want to go swimming?” the child will ask.

  “Not till your food digests,” I will answer. There is nothing I like better than passing on an old wives’ tale to a child. “The chlorine will turn my hair green,” I will add.

  “Do you want it to?” she will answer. Seduced by her candor and her patient dedication to the welfare of the squirrels, I will rise from my lethargy and take her “to the pool.” I wish I could take her on the great summer swims of my youth. Once I sneaked off with my cousin and went swimming in a cow pond. Once we sneaked off at night and swam in a borrow pit. Once I swam across a lake without a rowboat or a lifevest. If it was summer I was in the water. Only once in all that time did my hair actually turn green.

  One never to be forgotten summer, I discovered a stash of magazines in my grandmother’s attic. This was long ago when magazines routinely published continued stories. I was reading a continued novelette in The Ladies Home Journal. I had finished the first two installments and couldn’t find the conclusion. I searched everywhere. I tore the attic apart. It was the story of a war wife whose young husband was shot down in the South Pacific. He crawled to safety in a cave but was reported missing in action. After three years, the wife has given up and is engaged to marry a naval officer. The young husband has been found and taken to a hospital in California. He has amnesia. All he can remember is the name of his wife. Angela Jane, he keeps repeating. A woman doctor who is in love with him i
s hot on the trail of a cure and an identification but she is conflicted. If he recovers his memory she will lose him. The young wife is picking out her blue dress for her second wedding. To be continued.

  There were wasp nests in the attic. I was in constant danger as I searched for Part Three, which I never found. For years I asked magazine readers about that story but never found a soul who had read it or knew the ending. This tale makes a fine metaphor for summer. All that heat and drama, all those unresolved conflicts.

  I have never wasted a summer, and I do not forget them. The heat imprints them on my brain. Winrers all run together in my mind. I am wearing turtlenecks, building fires, turning up the thermostat, stamping my feet, locking doors, thinking, it can’t be dark yet. It’s only six o’clock.

  In dreams of summer, I am always on a sleeping porch. Crickets and tree frogs are singing. It is the middle of the night. I am wide awake, scratching my chigger bites, thinking of wasp nests I will destroy with my broom, grateful another day has passed without my being bit by a tick carrying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, or, other, yet to be named and identified, diseases.

  I TURNED AROUND the other day and realized that summer was beginning to end. Late August, early September. The leaves will change and I will return to my books. Time to learn something. Time to study stars or atoms or time itself. Not that time exists. It is a construct, like language or belief. I intend to stop believing in it.

  It has been a wonderful summer in the small university town where I live. Children came to visit and stayed for weeks. They had parades and sang to me and slept without moving through the long, hot nights. I slept near them, dreamless, timeless, caught in the wonder of their lives.