He took her flying on her birthday, three hours she swallowed. After it happened Fay thought of the friend most likely to forgive and indulge her—a married man—and she imagined Rebecca Fuller into the room, Rebecca Fuller who had worked afternoons at the pet store and smelled indelibly of it, the shredded newspaper stained with chick urine, the warped salt lick that was the dominion of the ancient parrot. Never Becky, she had begun to say, one transformative summer after a factual lifetime of Becky. Fay could imagine how she would phrase it, circle her thumb and finger around a friend’s wrist, say, Oh Ms. Fuller, can I trouble you for a spell? Standing by the wood birdcages where Rebecca lazily ran a cloth, or shoeless but lipsticked in the orchards behind Fay’s house, they had addressed each other formally when talking about the things that were private. It was a way of rising to the occasion, of imagining themselves into the women they would be. Pinkies linked, they swore to keep their own names. Like many of the worst lies, it felt marvelous to tell.
She had decided not to mention it, October 17. It was a way, one of many she’d devised with Vincent Kahn, of avoiding disappointment. Certainly he had never asked, never sat up naked over her some afternoon in bed and demanded to know. Her middle name, her first word or memory. He had picked up her datebook while she was in the bathroom, plucked it from the pile of beads and cards and matches.
“What’s ‘crowning achievement’?”
“Oh, that’s my birthday. It’s something Charlie and I say to each other.”
He waited.
“As in then I crowned. As I emerged from the birth canal.”
He put two palms out as though weighing each and let them drop and rise in rotation.
“Clever, disgusting. Disgusting, clever.”
Two days later, her birthday began quietly. Charlie took her shift. Fay marked the occasion only by a new bar of soap, rose hip that she’d dog-eared and mail-ordered, unwrapped in the outdoor shower while the morning was still purple. He showed up at nine, two hands spread on her window, and tapped on the glass, her name in Morse code he said when asked, learned it the summer he was eight, and drove them away from the base, an hour, two, landscape that didn’t change from a long blink to the next. She was shocked by what she missed of her childhood, the sounds of a four-way intersection, radios on in mechanics’ garages, unseen children running piano scales. As a girl she had been entrepreneurial, inspired by her family’s wealth and defensive about it, had put her allowance into bonds. Some of her teachers rented from one of the buildings her father owned, and she mentioned to them how he wrote Christmas bonuses to the tenant farmers of his orchards. Her feelings about money changed when her body did, when she began to feel watched.
THEY PULLED UP TO THE tiny landing strip, a stretch of corroded asphalt that didn’t last a mile, the hangar a squat tin box with two walls that rolled up. On a door-mounted clipboard he scrawled his name. He tried a series of pale dented lockers until he found one that opened, and from it he took a bulky headset and a key that glowed in the noon flowing in.
He didn’t ask her to, but she followed him around the plane while he did his checks. Vincent dipped a knuckle into the fuel tank and sniffed, then pushed the whole thing back a foot, leaning into his grip on the wings as it rolled and he examined the tread of the tires. He didn’t ask if she was afraid, if she’d ever been in a plane, how old she was turning. She was nineteen. She felt she was entering an interstitial year, a string of months in which she would not be culpable for what her life enacted upon her. It was before her like a painting, something she could be alone with to consider but not to change.
Inside of it the instruments, the dials she could guess at by the way her sister had once talked of planes, gave the air of waiting.
“Put your hands on the controls,” he said.
“What?”
“Just enough that you can feel them. The plane is incredibly reactive, all-seeing and -knowing, though less like a god and more like a nun. You can’t sneak anything past her. She’ll punish you. Feet on those pedals there. Those are the rudders, and they coordinate your turns. Think of them as your colleagues. Respect them. Think of these”—he pointed to the raised handles of the steering column—“as being the assistant to the rudders, never the other way around. You can tell a bad pilot because he forgets he has feet. Remember your feet.”
He had buckled her in and was gesturing for her to lean forward, raising the cold metal teeth to loosen the tawny slip of strap, and she felt his fascination with her was representative of the world’s in general, an endorsement of her future.
“I’ll be helping you up. The propeller turns left, so you’re always up against a bias. The right rudder needs more from you.”
This was the last thing he said before slipping the headset over her and turning the plane on. Sound became something she could see and feel, the trembling altimeter alive with it, her body made smaller by the roar. In her ear on the radio his speech was clipped, only every third word and even that flattened.
—Rudders, was all she heard him say, spoken like an invective, so she put her feet down, mimicking the alternating pressure he had demonstrated with his hands, and she kept the fat of her palm on the throttle where he had arranged it, pulling it when he pointed. Soon the blades of the propeller were not separate and then she could see, the way she could the color of her own hair—the very edge of what one could know for certain—that the ailerons on the wings were down. They were two thousand feet up before she looked to him and saw that his knees were loose, his boots far from the ridged pedals. She had been flying alone. To keep from laughing he had a knuckle in his mouth. He threw a raised thumb in her general direction.
—To the asylum, then? she said. —Lunatic, she said, pulling the column back. In the half-second delay it took for what she’d barked to reach him in his headset, she surveyed what was spread below her. Everything was the color of fruit about to turn, the light, the two-room folk houses the size of buttons.
—Your first takeoff. Knew you could do it. Feather for your cap. Rudders.
He took over soon after and flew the rest of the way, keeping them in turns for longer than was necessary. —Birthday swim, he asked, when they kissed the coastline, yawning, unmoved by the total blue.
She would have told Rebecca Fuller about the two different colors of his eyes, then how much sense he made in a plane. How what she had noticed before—the slightness of his movements, how he drank a beer without tipping a glass a millimeter more than was necessary—was part and parcel of how he moved the control column, barely, the nose rising or dipping without her noticing, the change in altitude something she only sensed after.
She imagined relating this to Rebecca Fuller, how she would throw her open palms up by her ears, equally aghast, I know, I know, when Rebecca, pink with jealousy, upbraided her. They’d be sitting cross-legged, mirrors of each other in posture, devouring the last of something, rice pudding, applesauce, sharing a spoon. In girlhood you pretended you were part of the same body, the same itches and cravings. It was how you dealt with the pain of having to inhabit one.
Even in her imagined confession, there were things Fay could not tell Rebecca Fuller. It would be necessary to frame the transgression in romance, something filmic and orchestral, so she would exclude what happened after in the bed of his truck. There were the women men loved, Fay was coming to understand, those whose voices in the kitchen over running water were familiar, whose handwriting they could forge if pressed, and there were women like her. Reclassification, she suspected, was impossible. There was no door between those rooms, though you could hear each from the other.
He put down a sleeping bag and directed her so that she was on all fours, her overalls tugged down around her calves, twisting her back onto him like she was some stubborn part of a machine, necessary but prone to glitch. When she threw her head back to see his changed face, she saw that the legs against his, the waist he encircled with his trim fingernails—her legs, her waist—could have belonged to anybody.