Flight

By J. Boyer

For Rosie

The walk she took up and down Bath's Kingsdown Hill was ever-so beautiful, which Rosalind found occasion to remark on several times, and the walking partner who had been arranged for Rosalind by her solicitor Mr. Dymer was very companionable in this regard, each time agreeing that it was certainly a lovely day, adding once a few remarks about a smarter resort up the coast he knew of, leaving her believing by the end of their outing that not only had it been a beautiful day and a beautiful walk but also an unexpectedly long one, as well as leaving her feeling at the moment that hers was a mind struggling against lost hopes and  low spirits, like someone willing herself into a serious illness while everything about her person was well, as if she were hurrying herself to some tepid old-age actually, eager to reach the point when she could look back on  this period as her autumnal years, to whit,   a time of no particular pleasant--much less happy--event. Then all that would be left her to do before going to her grave was accept the woman she'd become and no doubt been meant to be to begin with, a woman who having raised her family was now unequal to her husband and unwelcome to her children, a woman alone, to whit.

And as for Mr. Dymer, where was he as all of this was transpiring, and was he upset as well? He was. He certainly was indeed, for he'd been from governmental office to governmental office still wearing his moth-holed, blue Kent running shirt after going for his jog. He'd agreed to finalize her divorce papers just as she'd asked, but what he hadn't foreseen was that a clerk he was expecting to find at his desk was out sick for the week with croup and a headache. In the clerk's place was someone who didn't know heads or tails about the duties before her. A little whiff of a thing, she'd been trained at an estates agency and could distinguish between a sell and a let, no doubt, but could not distinguish at all between a High Bench stamp and anything else. She gave a very favorable account to this Dymer of a twin-gabled house in his neighborhood that was going for a song as she hunted through an octagonal box of stamps and sealing wax, complaining that her mother, a woman who was as amiable in public as she was disagreeable at home, had fitted her out as a child in thick grey flannels of that prickly material, which explained why she never wore flannel today, and why her mother and she had very little to say to one another, but she did not, in the end, find the seals or the stamp he required, and the solicitor left her company not one bit better off than when he'd begun. So there was Dymer, who thought he knew every civil servant in the resort town of Bath, who specialized in quickie divorces, some “quickie-er” than others apparently, feeling depressed and fidgety, thinking he'd have to come back late that afternoon when the little ninny was away for a tea, wondering what he'd say to Rosalind in the meantime, with no hint at all that his client could fly.

Raised near Stratford-On-Avon, midway as the crow wings between Warwick Castle and Shakespeare's home and birthplace, she had been fat and fair as an infant then become a thin and sickly child with wan cheeks and shrewd eyes and pale unblemished skin, the third child of five and the family's only daughter, a sensitive and clever girl who was amiable but quiet, gifted in the sciences, her parents suspected, but somehow unrealistic and therefore lacking what was needed to channel gifts into grades. She was only a passable student, and while unremarkable in any number of ways as well, she had discovered at the age of ten that she could hover several inches off the ground for moments at a time for no more trouble than closing her eyes and willing her arms into furious, breathtaking rhythms. This caused her to be removed from the earth, not far at first, of course, but later, with practice, allowed her to hover midair for moments at a time like a hummingbird might before a flower's full blossom. This, she did not disclose. A ten-year-old   wants nothing more than to be like every other child her age, after all, for this is a time when other little girls named Thais or Andromeda demand of friends and family alike to be called Tiffany or Nancy Jo, and boys who can translate Homer with the skills of savants would much prefer dribbling a football, hence, she kept this to herself. No ten-year-old likes being a freak to their friends or a parlor trick to parents, particularly a British girl in a plaid school blazer with bands on her teeth and a brother who enlists in the Navy, and as the years went on, she found herself taking flight only when it was safest to do so, always when she was completely alone with no chance of detection, and generally when she felt quarrelsome to a great degree or thought there was nothing wrong with being unrealistic since her life seemed so hopeless and bleak, this often having to do boys unaware of her presence on earth with whom she had fallen in love, or, predictably enough, her own mother.

By twenty, she was earthbound, and married to a draftsman.  A mother herself by twenty-two, twice again by the age of twenty-five. And by thirty, thirty-five, all thoughts of flight were forgotten, so overcome was she by children and husband both. When she met him sober and sensible, her husband became ambitious, optimistic and gregarious, rising in the architectural firm for which he worked, joining health clubs, entertaining, a man who spread his affections thin, as if their value increased for being so widely affordable, while her teenage daughters, as stubbornly themselves as silver-winged ponies, and at least as full of their own lives, were self-consumed and demanding, and with so many voices to be heard from, this became another silence in her own, as fully out of mind as to have never been thought to begin with.

Once the girls were married, her husband suffered headaches, backaches and spasms. From a stoic family, he suffered stoically and as a consequence seemed surprised to receive so much attention from his children, each and every time he received it. She recalled how his suffering was so great toward the end of their marriage that he would have to go directly to bed, particularly after eating a hearty evening meal it had taken hours to prepare, announcing in an animated voice as he climbed the stairs that it had been the single best meal of his life, if he never ate again he'd still fared better than most, which, she should have seen, was simply to tell her he was lovelorn, a penitent.  Or he might decide on a walk after dinner, so as not to be a bother to her, and sometimes, confiding he was fearful for his life itself, he'd feel compelled to return to his office to put the finishing touches on a blueprint, so that should he die in the night all could go ahead as planned without him. She could forgive him all that, she supposed, though she did wish the reason he'd withdrawn from her had been more than a simple affair, particularly one with his secretary. A middle-aged man with a wandering eye. His secretary? It seemed so uninspired, for the woman was half his age, a widow with children, who read him plays aloud in bed, romances chief among them, apparently believing while architecture was the agency of permanence it was fiction one looked to as the agency for change. Had Rosalind learned of this earlier, Rosalind would have met with the woman over lunch and explained to his secretary that not only could she have him--if she was sure he was who she wanted, Rosalind would be only too happy to throw in their cottage, which, like him, was old and not in very good repair. Though the woman should then understand that she couldn't bring him back.

Rosalind boarded a bus, in any case. On impulse, she boarded a bus rather than return to her hotel room and ring up her solicitor and find herself divorced, particularly after such a long, long walk on such a beautiful day, and rode it past the Bath city limits to a spot from her honeymoon she meant to revisit, the Roman remains of a promontory, as well as one particular event she meant to revisit, then sat on a hill, spending the good part of an hour looking down on the resort town of Bath where people walked, incapable of getting things wrong, apparently, for life was always so easy. 

Forty years before, still wearing her wedding gown, she'd left him alone in their honeymoon suite, slipping away as he bathed himself for bed.  Helping herself to a bike behind the hotel's dismal kitchen, she'd ridden in a panic here to this point, the highest she could reach without bursting a lung. What a sight she must have been in that gown!  Where had she perched? Over there? What remained of the promontory was on the edge of things, and she moved her eyes to where a creek made a strange figure-eight of grey water and brown mud and slowed to a trickle as it curved through the silty brown then faded into the shadows that were thrown by the trees.  The creek then ran south toward a ditch that was hidden by a canopy of overhanging branches that arched toward the sky from two banks, meeting in the middle as if reaching for the clouds. Never had a woman wanted wings so much as she had that night. Why had she not taken flight, for fear of the fall? The weight of the gown? 

Later she walked the fields below. She combed them, thinking to herself that she could have survived a fall had it come, the fall was not nearly so dreadful as it had seemed in the dark. What was really dreadful, at the moment at least, was the rest of her life.  A settlement, no matter how equitable, left a woman her age disadvantaged, as if it were a law of nature that women of sixty who were left on their own after years of married life must have a chromosomal propensity to live as modestly as possible. Then too there'd be her daughters. When they were young, she feared some horrific accident might befall her girls and she'd find herself   surviving her children. What if she now survived their affection?  Would she be expected to endure with a warm heart and a smiling face their concern for her welfare, her, a woman alone? Would she be required to make resolute statements about her health and well being?  Her diet? She could do without their quiet supervision, testing to see if her energies flagged. Would she find upon coming to their houses now that they'd invited an elderly man to be her dinner companion, or worse, when later he dodged a second invitation   would there be affectionate jokes about her having broken the heart of her suitor, as if she wasn't their mother but instead a maiden aunt? 

Climbing back to the top of the hill, flushed but by no means extended, thinking the world saw her now as the sort of woman for whom a companion is suggested when it comes to mind that she might take a walk to get her thoughts off her troubles, she made one last try at finding out what could possibly have possessed her to become enamored of her husband in the first place or to have lived her life as she had, the way a girl might have brought various rows of figures into random conjunctions as she learned to master a slide rule, without knowing a way to prove the solution without using the slide rule itself.

The bus ride back seemed twice as long as the bus ride going. Walking she thought might be preferable. In the work of a moment she lowered the thin upper section of the window letting in a quartering gale that caused a few of the passengers behind her in the rear to mutter to one another and buffet their hats with their hands.  The air was cold against her cheeks. She reached into her bag for a scarf, which she tied beneath her chin. Feeling as if she had felt gravity's effects only too gravely, she felt as well a buzzing which ran along the skin of her forearm, then a sting. What stung, she supposed, was how her husband had broken the news, for he'd broken the news that he wanted a divorce by putting all the blame on himself, telling her now that their children were grown and with families of their own, he'd lost all interest in marriage, when, in fact, what he'd lost interest in was being married to her.

No, what had stung her was only a bee that had been sucked inside the bus when she'd opened the window. Husbands she thought were a bore, as was most of what was good for you, including fresh air and exercise.

The bus returned Rosalind to the area of her hotel and after that, and when it was quite dark, on her way to her quarters she passed a lounge near the gift shop where a little strain of music seemed to tremble like the flame of a candle and she recalled a long-forgotten tea she'd taken in that very room, or one very much like it, a honeymoon's bride. Sitting in shadowy solitude were several of her fellow hotel guests, only two of them at the same table, a pair of women in high spirits and very good color, an older woman and a girl who was saying “Is there nothing, aunt, I might do--” until her eyes met Rosalind's, at which time she looked at Rosalind stubbornly and refused to complete her thought. Rosalind took a table of her own. Her table was in the corner, as far away from the women engaged in their animated conversation as she could choose.  She ordered an Amaretto but before it came changed her mind, asking for a double whiskey instead. This was served to her by the bar man himself, put out apparently that he'd poured one drink then been asked to pour another.

It was in this self-same room she took her breakfast the following morning. While buttering a piece of wafer-thin toast, she found herself being approached by a man.  She thought she recognized him from the night before as a man who had begun to light a cigar and been told by the bar man, “None of that, sir, not in here. You'll have to take it outside, I'm afraid.” He came toward her in degrees, then changed his mind, she could see, as if he had meant to meet one woman at her table and had found Rosalind there instead, then re-traced his steps and in little more than a whisper said, “Rosie?” 

She searched his face. “Do I know you?”

“Why, my God, it is you, Rosie. How long has it been?”

“Wally?”

“How good it is to see you after all these years. Do you mind if I sit down?”

“Of course not. Please do.”

“Where was it Rosie, Ipswich or Dublin?”

“Brighton, I think.”

“The Palladian porch. You're right.”

“And there were glow worms that night.”

“In the lane.”

“Didn't you have a stammer?”

“With you I might have. No girl had ever scared me before. Are you still keen on gardening?”

“I haven't gardened for years. Forgotten I ever had, actually, until you just mentioned it.”

They had met one summer when Rosalind was seventeen and Wally a year or two older, a point in their respective lives when nothing could have been more dreadful than a holiday with one's parents. So dreary are such times that a girl of seventeen is prone to falling in love with the first boy who asks her to dance, since so much of the work of a romance can be done in her head. In Wally's case, however, it was little short of chopping firewood. He'd been barely five feet tall and made up for this by the single most overwhelming ego of any boy his age. He'd looked down on her as if from on high, teasing her about her figure, dismissing what she had to say as if it were as light as air, criticizing her outfits as clothes for the needy. He was ferociously condescending at a time when she felt at once half-done and unsteady, remote when she was needy, ignored what she had to say as thin and impractical, and told her to behave as a grownup but affirmed that she had only once it was clear to them both she'd behaved as a child and given him his way. He was, in every form she could recall, insufferable. He was pig-headed, and self-concerned, and loud in ways which could drive one to distraction, incapable of delight for anything she had to say which he had not thought of first, and even if he had been rich and handsome—which, of course, he was neither—she could not see why any girl in her right mind would have given him so much as the simple time of day. He was, in other words, the first boy she'd cared for. Ever.

“You can't remember the jetty.”

“Of course I do. It was famous. You were short and wore bow ties and were generally impossible.”

“I don't think that's so!”

“Being short, or impossible?”

“No, wearing bow ties. You, I recall, were thin as a pole.”

“Yes. I was, you're right. But you were disagreeable. Well? Admit it.”

Pity the poor woman who is never looked at the way Wally just looked at her.  For every woman, at least once in her life, should feel so adored.  “Ah, the same old Rosie,” he said.  “You don't know how many times I've thought of that summer.”

“I've often wondered what became of you as well, Wally.”

No, she did not re-marry. They spent a very pleasant morning instead in one another's company, and never saw one another again. For if a woman who divorces at sixty does not look forward to the autumn of her life, neither does she care for a second chance at spring. She's much too wise about the pass of the seasons.

After suffering a stroke the next year, Rosalind was sent by her daughters to Castringham Home, a misdirected attempt on the part of Prince Charles to preserve an ever-increasing population of pensioners, while also preserving Bath's architecture.  Rosie was just such a pensioner.
   
And what became of Rosie, the heroine of our story? Some of the nurses say in the last months of her life she became slow of mind and fearful of anything feathered, while others say, quite to the opposite, actually, she went through long demented periods during which she tried to flap her arms and fly, twice jumping from an odd turret affair between the second and third stories of a freshly added annex. One goes so far as to report she succeeded, if only momentarily.  It's still there, I believe. That turret. But none of the rest can be verified, and the majority opinion among those who remember her at all is that she enjoyed what is commonly known as a "western outlook," meaning, I suppose, a belief that the sun sets in the west when and how it chooses, and there's little to be done to effect either one, hence, one simply stands one's ground for as long as one can. She was then, by most common report, a modest, unassuming woman whose heart had never been broken, and whose death was of no particular consequence to anyone but those she left behind. Someone not given to flights of great fancy, certainly; dare say, someone not given to any flights at all.

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J. Boyer teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.