When I Was Your Age, Volume One Read online

  I watched carefully and copied whatever Ritchie did. I knelt down at the altar and put my palms together and closed my eyes, as if in deep prayer. But I made sure to peek out of my right eye so I could see the priest. He was getting closer and closer. Then it was my turn, and the priest stood before me and made the sign of the cross. I stuck out my tongue and tasted the wafer, as thin and sticky as a postage stamp. I was amazed that it had no flavor at all. My heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t move. But I took a deep breath and managed to open my eyes. Then I got to my feet and followed the others back to our pew.

  As I sat down, I felt a sharp poke in my side. It was Casilda. “Now you’ll go to hell for sure,” she whispered.

  “Stop chewing,” Wanda warned me. “You’re not supposed to chew the sacred body of Jesus, you know. Let it melt in your mouth!”

  They both scared me half to death. I sat and silently prayed for mercy while I waited for something terrible to happen to me. But Mass continued and nothing unusual occurred.

  Outside, the sun was shining and people stood around talking to each other. I was glad that no one had stopped me or recognized me. Secretly, I thanked God for my good luck.

  Joey was the first one to speak. “Wow!” he shrieked. “You did it, girl. I didn’t think you would go through with it but —”

  “Yeah!” interrupted Casilda. “But you committed a very big sin.”

  “For sure,” agreed Mary. “And when you make your real Communion, you’re gonna have to confess it.”

  “That’s right.” Wanda nodded. “And you’re gonna have to do a lotta penance. Girl, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes for nothing!”

  I felt pretty victorious now and ignored their warnings. After all, I had taken the dare and won.

  “It don’t bother me none,” I smugly answered. “You see I ain’t never going to confession. And I ain’t never taking Communion again! Never!”

  “Then you will just go to hell for absolute sure,” said Casilda.

  “Remember, my father says there ain’t no hell!” I responded.

  “But what does your mother think?” asked Casilda. “Tell us that!”

  I couldn’t answer with the truth, because I knew exactly what my mother thought. She would probably punish me worse than God. “I don’t worry about that,” I lied, then shrugged. “Anyway, I’m entitled to my own opinion, you know. This is a free country!” It was a favorite phrase from my older brother Gilbert.

  As we walked along, the argument dwindled and we got to talking about other things. We spoke about school, and the end of the latest serial of the Green Hornet in the movie theaters, and the most recent Batman and Robin comic book.

  Soon after, my mother took me to task and made sure I attended religious instruction. And about a year and a half later, I made my First Holy Communion. It was then that I finally owned up to most of my sins. These of course included lighting candles without contributing to the money box and receiving Communion without confession. I expected to be doing penance for at least a year. To my surprise, the priest mildly rebuked me and gave me a reasonable penance.

  Afterward, I admitted to myself that it was a great relief to be able to confess and remove those dreaded sins from my conscience. But I never once admitted my relief to Casilda, Wanda, Mary, and little Ritchie, or even Joey. After all was said and done, I had won the dare. My newfound clean conscience remained my secret.

  “From the moment my mother handed me some scrap paper, a pencil, and a few crayons, I discovered that by making pictures and writing letters I could create my own world . . . like ‘magic.’ In the small, crowded apartment I shared with my large family, making ‘magic’ permitted me all the space, freedom, and adventure that my imagination could handle. Drawing and painting were my first loves. Then, I began to write and to paint pictures with words.

  When I was asked to write a story for this anthology, I decided to describe an event in my childhood that had tested my religious beliefs and my regard for authority figures. The incident I wrote about forced me to make some important decisions at an early age. Because my parents had such conflicting views about religion and spiritual beliefs, I had to find my own way. Upon reflection, I realized that my rebelliousness had a purpose. By taking my friends’ dare, I was able to act independently, without taking either parent’s side.

  To this day, I continue to have a solid spiritual belief in a divine order very much like my mother’s. I also strongly believe in many of the practical things my father taught me. Like him, I think that people must work hard and respect each other on this planet. Good deeds and faith in the capacity of our fellow human beings are necessary for our survival.”

  When I was your age, I was flying. I wasn’t flying all the time, of course, and I didn’t fly by myself, but there I was, nonetheless, on Saturday afternoons in the 1950s, several thousand feet in the air over the state of Connecticut, which is where I grew up. I sat in the back cockpit of a small airplane and looked down at the forests and the fields and the houses and the roads below me from an intense, vibrating height and hoped that my father, in the front cockpit, would not notice that I had cotton balls stuffed in my ears.

  I always flew with my father, who had been a pioneer aviator in the 1920s and ’30s. I think that he wanted to share his love for the air and for airplanes with his growing family, the way sports-minded fathers took their children to ball games on Saturdays and taught them to play catch afterward. My father took his children to the airport instead and taught them to fly.

  Though he was the pilot on these flights, he did not own the airplane. It was a sixty-five-horsepower Aeronca, with tandem cockpits, that he rented from a former bomber pilot whose name was Stanley. Stanley managed the airport, including the huge loaf-shaped hangar that served as a garage for repairs and maintenance to the aircraft, and he leased out the group of small planes tethered near the building like a fleet of fishing boats clustered around a pier.

  It was Stanley, most often, who stood in front of the airplane and waited for my father to shout “Con-TACT!” from the cockpit window, at which time, Stanley gave the propeller a hefty downward shove that sent it spinning into action and started the plane shaking and shuddering on its way. The job of starting the propeller was simple but perilous. My father had warned us many times about the danger of standing anywhere near a propeller in action. We could list almost as well as he did the limbs that had been severed from the bodies of careless individuals “in a split second” by a propeller’s whirling force. Therefore, each time that Stanley started the propeller, I would peer through its blinding whir to catch a glimpse of any pieces of him that might be flying through the air. Each time, I saw only Stanley, whole and smiling, waving us onto the asphalt runway with his cap in his hand and his hair blowing in the wind of our passing — “the propwash” my father called it.

  My sister and my three brothers flew on Saturdays too. The older ones were taught to land and take off, to bank and dip, and even to turn the plane over in midair, although my second-oldest brother confessed that he hated this — it made him feel so dizzy. The youngest of my three brothers, only a few years older than me, remembers my father instructing him to “lean into the curve” as the plane made a steep sideways dive toward the ground. My brother was already off balance, leaning away from the curve, and hanging on for dear life. For my sister, our father demonstrated “weightlessness” by having the plane climb so steeply and then dive so sharply that for a moment she could feel her body straining upward against her seatbelt, trying to fight free, while our father shouted out from the front seat that one of his gloves was actually floating in midair.

  “See the glove? See the glove?” He called to her over the engine noise and explained that if this state of weightlessness could continue, everything inside the plane would go up in the air. My sister nodded, not speaking, because, she told me later, everything in her stomach was going up in the air, too, and she did not dare open her mouth.

  My oldes
t brother took to flying immediately and eventually got a pilot’s license, though he ended up joining the navy and becoming a “frogman,” spending as much time underwater with an aqualung and a wetsuit as he ever had spent in the air. What he secretly yearned to do during the flying years, though, was to jump right out of an airplane altogether, with a parachute. Finally, many years later, he had his chance and told me about it afterward. He stood at the open door of the airplane, with the parachute strapped to his back, wobbling back and forth at first, like a baby bird afraid to leave the nest. Then he jumped, fell about a hundred feet through the air, and only then pulled the cord that caused the chute to blossom around him like a great circular sail. Swaying under it, he floated toward the ground until he landed, fairly hard. I listened with astonishment; my brother’s daring thrilled me to the bone.

  My father on the other hand, along with most of the early aviators, was not impressed by the growing enthusiasm for parachute-jumping as a sport. Young daredevils like my brother could call it “sky-diving” if they wanted to, but the aviation pioneers referred to it disgustedly as “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.” In their day, a pilot only jumped when he had to: if it was absolutely certain that the airplane was headed for a crash and the parachute was his only hope for survival.

  I was considered too young for aerial adventures when I flew, so I did not get dizzy or sick or worry about whether my parachute would open. It was only the noise that gave me trouble. I have never shared other people’s enthusiasm for loudness. I don’t like sudden sounds that make you jump with alarm, like the noises of fireworks or guns, or endless sounds that pound in your head so hard you can’t think about anything else, like the commotion made by jackhammers and the engines of small airplanes. My sister felt exactly the same way. In fact, she was the one who showed me how to stuff cotton balls in my ears, secretly, for takeoff — when the engine noise was loudest — and for as long during the flight as we could get away with it.

  Our father frowned upon the cotton balls. If he saw them, he would make us remove them. He claimed that they diminished the experience of flying and were in any case unnecessary: The engine noise was not so terribly loud that one couldn’t get used to it; he certainly had done so. But my sister and I agreed that the only reason he and the other early aviators had “gotten used to” the noise of airplane engines close to their ears was that they had been deafened early on. We were not about to let this happen to us!

  My mother, who had also flown back in the early days, always told us that she had loved her experience as a glider pilot best, because there was such extraordinary quiet all around her. In the absence of the usual aircraft engine noise, she could hear the songs of birds and sometimes even the trilling of insects, crickets or cicadas, on the grassy hillsides below. She said that because there was no noise, she could actually feel the power of air, the way it could push up under the wings of a glider and keep it afloat — like a boat on water — with the strength of unseen currents. She talked about “columns of air,” stretching like massive tree trunks between earth and sky. “Just because you can’t see the air doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it,” she said. “Most of the really important things in our lives are invisible, anyway.”

  When it was my turn to fly with my father, I sat in the back cockpit and enjoyed the view all around me while he, in the front cockpit, flew the plane. I had a duplicate set of controls in back, with rudder pedals, a stick, and instruments, so that if I had been a true student pilot, I could have flown the plane myself, if called upon to do so. But since I was too young to understand or even to reach most of the controls in my cockpit, I just watched them move as if by magic, with no help from me at all, in response to my father’s direction and will.

  It looked easy. The stick in front of me, exactly like the one in front of my father in the forward cockpit, looked like the gearshift on our car. If it moved backward suddenly (toward me), it meant that my father had decided we were going up. There would be a rushing in my ears, in spite of the cotton, and as I looked over my father’s head, through the front window of the aircraft, I would imagine that we were forcing our way right into heaven, higher and higher through ever more brilliantly white banks of cloud. I sometimes daydreamed of bumping into angels, assembled on one of these cloud banks with their halos and their harps, or startling St. Peter at the pearly gates, or God himself in his sanctuary.

  But then, as I watched, my stick would point forward again, toward what I could see, over the front pilot seat, of the back of my father’s neck, with its trim fringe of gray hair and a khaki shirt collar. Then the airplane would nose down, giving a cockeyed view on all sides of blue sky and wooded hillsides and little tiny roads with buglike cars creeping along them, so very slowly. When we were flying, I was struck always by the insignificance of the world we had left behind. Nothing on the ground had speed, compared to us. Nothing looked real. Once I had climbed into the airplane, all of life seemed concentrated inside the loud space of it, shaking but steady, with my father’s own hand on the controls. We were completely self-sufficient, completely safe, rock-solid in the center of the sky.

  It was also a bit monotonous. My father did the same things and said the same things, loudly, over and over. I knew by heart that a pilot had to fly with a steady hand, with no sudden or jerky movements, just a little throttle here, a little wing dip there, always a light, even touch, always a calm approach. I knew all the stories about student pilots — those not already dismembered by propellers — who “froze” to the stick in a panic and could not let go, forcing the plane into a tragic nosedive. There was no room in my father’s lessons with me, his youngest and least experienced child, for soaring like the birds — no wind in the hair, no swooping and circling. We just droned along, my father and me.

  And then, one Saturday afternoon, we didn’t. I don’t remember now exactly what made me understand there was something wrong with the airplane. I think there may have been a jerking sensation that repeated itself over and over. And I think too that there was a huge stillness in the air, a silence so enormous that it took me a moment to realize that it was actually the opposite of noise and not noise itself. The silence was there because the engine had stalled. Perhaps the most profound moment of silence occurred when my father realized that it was not going to start again — no matter what he did. We were in the middle of the sky, on a sunny Saturday afternoon over Connecticut, in a plane without an engine.

  I don’t think there was any drop in altitude, not at first. What I noticed was my father’s sudden alertness, as if he had opened a million eyes and ears in every direction. I heard him say something sharp on the airplanes’s two-way radio to Stanley down below, and I could hear the crackle of Stanley’s voice coming back. I knew enough not to say very much myself, although my father told friends later that I asked him once, in a conversational way, “Are we going to crash?” And when he told this part of the story, the part where I asked that question, he would laugh.

  I don’t remember being afraid of crashing. In fact, I don’t remember fear at all, but I do remember excitement. At last something different was going to happen! I quickly took the cotton out of my ears because my father was talking. He told me that he was looking for a good place to land. We would have to land, he explained, because the engine wasn’t working, and we could not land at the airport, because we were too far away to get there in time. (In time for what? I wondered.) He was looking for an open area to put the plane down in, right below us somewhere. We were now over a wooded hillside, dotted here and there with cow pastures: It would have to be a cow pasture. He spotted one that looked possible and circled down toward it.

  There was nothing resembling a runway below us and no room to spare. He would have to tip the plane sideways and slip it into the pasture that way, somehow righting it and stopping its movement before it could hit any of the trees at the four edges of the field. We circled lower and lower, barely clearing the treetops, and then he told me to put my
head down between my knees.

  “Hold on!” my father said.

  I didn’t see the landing, because my head was down, but I felt it: a tremendous series of bumps, as if we were bouncing on boulders, and then the plane shook and rattled to a stop. Then we took off our seatbelts and opened the doors and got out. I didn’t see any cows in the pasture, but there were a bunch of people coming toward us from the road, and it looked as if one of them might be Stanley from the airport. I was careful to stay clear of the propeller.

  Nobody could figure out how we had landed safely. They had to take the plane apart to get it out of the pasture, a week or more after that Saturday afternoon. But my father and I got a ride back to the airport with Stanley and drove home in plenty of time for dinner. We didn’t talk much on the way home. My father seemed tired, though cheerful, and I was thinking.

  I had found out something about him that afternoon, just by watching him work his way down through the air. I held on to the knowledge tightly afterward, and I still hold it to this day. I learned what flying was for my father and for the other early aviators, what happened to him and why he kept taking us up to try flying ourselves. As we came in through the trees, he was concentrating hard, getting the rudder and the flaps set, trying to put us in the best possible position for a forced landing, but he was doing more than that. He was persuading and coaxing and willing the plane to do what he wanted; he was leaning that airplane, like a bobsled, right down to where it could safely land. He could feel its every movement, just as if it were part of his own body. My father wasn’t flying the airplane, he was being the airplane. That’s how he did it. That’s how he had always done it. Now I knew.

  “In the household where I grew up, writing was a kind of family habit, something the adults around me did every day without thinking too much about it, like taking a walk or brushing their teeth. I can’t recall any time during my childhood when one of my parents was not engaged in writing a book. Most often, they were both busy writing books. This made us believe that the best thing you could do with an interesting idea or experience was to write it down. My sister Anne and I caught on to this notion early, and because of it, I think we both became writers before we grew up, though neither of us really believed we were writers until we had published books of our own, when we were parents ourselves.