I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) (8 page)

He asks me what I’m thinking about, what I’m scheming. I can’t tell him, can’t put into words that all I
think about is my plane, my lost Electra, lost but still here, tormenting me. At night she gleams with a divine, alien majesty. On the beach, when the water washes underneath her, she is a barge of beaten silver. All my anguish is bound up in the plane, although even in this state I know that doesn’t make any sense. But it’s all I have, my Electra, my dreams, my secret flights, my visions of escape. I don’t want him to know about it. It’s too private. I need something for myself. His voice lowers, he’s confidential, trying to gain my trust, he wants to help me, but more than that he wants to know and I hate that, I hate that he wants to know, to take all of me, to leave me with nothing. Once, he hits me. He’s so frustrated that he hits me. Anything to bring me back. He hits me hard, he’s still strong. But I’m not afraid of him, I know he’s the one afraid of me, and so it ends, the violence ends itself, calms us down, and it’s over. He wants me to have forgotten everything that came before this, for me to be here, now, entirely.

I say to him, How could I be anywhere else? Where could I go? I’m stranded on a desert island.

We bicker constantly, for no good reason except to remind ourselves that we’re alive. We fight about anything. I’m bossy and he’s stubborn. Sometimes, when things get awful, we fight without words. This way we can both appear hurt.

We share a talent for pointless argument. When
we feel like talking, we drag out a debate, picking over every turn of phrase, every insult. You would think that we would have no time for this sort of thing. After all, we’re struggling to survive. But in fact we have all the time in the world, and we haven’t yet discovered how to fill it.

But they always make up by the end of dinner, over music. Noonan will take out his harmonica and she’ll sing. They sing ballads and ditties and advertising jingles, anything they can remember. Their favorite songs are “Home on the Range,” “Good Ship Lollipop,” and “Streets of Laredo.” She has a wavering, delicate voice, but she can carry a tune, and the harmonica gives her courage and helps her along. The reedy sounds of her thin singing and the mournful jauntiness of Noonan’s harmonica hang in the air long after they have put out the fire. The music keeps him sane when he is awake and the memory of it fends off bad dreams when he sleeps. In dreams the truth might be revealed to them, that they are each alone with their teasing glimmers and phantasms.

It takes us all evening to make dinner. We drag it out, like the bickering. Actually, it takes all day. From the first light of dawn we are concerning ourselves with dinner, with food, with survival. We check the water collection
tanks. Depending on the precipitation and the dew, we shake off the leaves. By now Noonan’s rigged up a permanent device for extracting fresh water from salt. It works slowly, but we treasure every drop.

Then we check on the crabs—we’ve built a coop and we’re fattening them up—and the fish colony we’ve created. Sometimes Noonan works on the boat he’s building, and I collect fruit, or work on my lean-to. Sometimes I write in my pilot’s log. We do what we have to to make the days fly.

He sets out every afternoon to catch fish for dinner, and sometimes she comes along, the two of them chatting about odd subjects as they make their way along the reef flat to the inlet. If she doesn’t come, he has a smoke by himself, and signals to her when he’s ready to start preparing dinner.

Then she will appear from the depths of the jungle, branches tangled in her wide-brimmed hat woven from dried leaves, carrying kindling for their fire. She has a flair for engineering, and so her arrangements of wood are always complex structures, and the more she misses flying the more elaborate they become. She builds replicas of the Hoover Dam, the Eiffel Tower, and then, when she is at her most despairing, a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge. This last one is too long and delicate to be efficient, and it possesses a sublime weightlessness
that prevents Noonan from being able to light it. She exasperates him with her lofty creations.

She feels that he uses too much sea salt in his cooking. She asks him casually, when she sees him measure out a handful, whether he is planning to put all of that in. Sometimes her criticisms are more direct, and usually his responses are bitingly defensive. But she has to admit that he’s an excellent cook. She’s too competitive to come right out and say it. Instead she lets the pressure of his expertise inspire her to create ever more inventive desserts. The last course has become her domain. They don’t have a wide variety of ingredients to choose from, and so she makes just about everything out of coconut.

How do you want your coconut tonight? she asks.

Medium rare, he says.

Hmm, an aristocrat.

It smells delicious, the coconut frying up over the fire, sweet and sugary, sizzling in its juices.

When you think of life on a desert island, you get pictures in your mind of cannibals and pirates, of desolation and thirst. But at first it wasn’t at all like that for us. It really wasn’t bad. We dined on fresh fish and sea vegetables under a canopy of stars. I would throw another piece of coconut on the fire and Noonan would take up his harmonica. Anyone else stranded on a desert island would probably have wanted to die, but for
him the nights had never been more beautiful, the wind more gentle, the sea more calm. I missed my Electra, I missed it desperately, but I had to agree, we were lucky, in a way.

After dinner, he plays a composition he’s written for me. He calls it “Perhapsody in Blue.”

I remember that at around this time he returned to the navigator’s cabin of the Electra, which he had been studiously avoiding. He dusted off the navigational charts, which had rolled themselves up into gigantic cylinders, and the radio, which hung out of the dashboard by a wire. He brought them back to his shack. There he set about figuring out where we had landed, charting a course, and attempting to make contact with passing ships. There was only a tiny amount of gas left, but it was enough to let us dream. I said why don’t we take her for a spin around the block. But in his enthusiasm Noonan convinced himself that we could reach Australia, or New Zealand.

After dinner, I go to the lagoon. He comes with me. There’s a raft that I built, I like to lie there in the darkness, where my thoughts are more intense because they seem to be taking place on board a dock that has broken off and floated out to sea. But Noonan prefers the water
itself. The stars tilt and wobble on the surface when we enter. It rolls in folds like the back of a dog’s neck. And as we circle each other, our feet skimming the murky bottom, our legs beat languidly and the water slips through our fingers in endless sheets of silk. The lagoon isn’t large, but it’s enormous in the night, like a lake on the surface of the moon.

But I won’t let him sleep in my lean-to. I won’t let him spend the night. I leave him after we swim and I go to my plane. My once magnificent Electra.

E
DWIN EARHART
. My father—of humble origins, and later, a ne’er-do-well. He’d been poor and had worked for his education. He had tutored more-privileged students at law school, where one of his laziest but kindest pupils had been Mark Otis. Mark had brought Edwin home for his sister’s sixteenth-birthday party, and there, in the wood-paneled dining room of the house on the hill, he and Amy Otis had fallen in love. Years later, when he wandered the business districts of the cities he lived in, intoxicated and abandoned by all desire to persevere, the sight of well-dressed people would remind Edwin of the crystal chandelier that dangled over the Otises’ dining room like a gaudy earring, and the limpid, watery sparkle it cast across the table that first night he came to visit, sending rainbow shards through the long-stemmed
glasses and patterning the plates with mad diagrams. Dancing flames from the fireplace made faces in the windows. Mutton and puddings and warm bread were handled like fragile cargo by a regiment of silent maids. Mesmerized by the opulence and order, Edwin had a glint in his eye that gave him a deceptive air of success, and the wine he drank with dinner improved his already good looks. Delicate Amy, her father’s favorite, my mother, looked across the table at him adoringly.

I was bolder than my mother would have liked: I insisted on running around in my bloomers. But my pluck and mettle delighted my father, an apprehensive man with a cowardly nature who liked to tinker with mechanical things and harbored delusions of intrepidity himself. He taught me how to take apart clocks and bicycles, and later, with only a few illicit lessons in a motorcar, he taught me to drive like a professional.

In 1903, my father attempted to secure a patent for an invention he’d been working on for years. It was a holder for signal flags at the rear of railway cars, and he believed it to be revolutionary. He worked on it whenever he could, and when he was distracted or nervous he would excuse his behavior by saying, It’s the invention, Meelie, it never leaves me. He kept it a secret, but he managed to convince his daughter that it was the key to their future happiness. Finally, after much arguing with his wife, he went off to Washington, D.C., financing the trip with money that the family had saved to pay off debts
and taxes. He was gone for five days—he sent a postcard home with a picture of the White House and a message that arrived too blurred with rain or tears for us to read. As luck would have it, someone from Colorado had filed a patent on the same invention two years before.

When she thinks of her father now, she sees him at the end of the day. That’s his time of day, twilight, or just before. The late afternoon, when the sun is setting, when it feels sad and beautiful, like the last day. When the sadness is too unbearable to think about, and this makes you strangely cheerful.

Sam Chapman. He was my first real beau. He was a boarder in my parents’ house in California. He was an engineer, a college graduate from back East, with a dimpled, charming, carefree face and sloped, solid shoulders. One night, not long after we first met, he told me his life story on the darkened porch, as the sun set over the empty street, the smell of the desert blowing in on a dry wind. It wasn’t anything special. It was an American life, with a pleasant childhood, a family, an accident, a stint in the war. It was actually fairly dull. But no man had ever opened up to me that way, it was my first taste of intimacy. That night, I felt a ribbon of warmth work its way up the back of my neck, and later I noticed in the
mirror that my cheeks were flushed fuchsia. I had trouble going to the bathroom: I was too excited to pee.

Sam escorted me to movies, and to amusement parks, and once we held hands at a Wobbly meeting, where, fired by the fury of the workers of the world, we almost kissed in public, but suddenly the hall was flooded with police. There were people in those days who believed the world could be a better place. Sam was one of them, but like many people who want the world to be better, he didn’t really like change. Instead, he wanted the world to change around him, while he kept his basically old-fashioned views.

Once I started flying seriously, he let me know what he really thought of women pilots, and so our time together became strained. I attempted to take him up in a plane before I had my license, but when we crashed on the beach I was so unperturbed that he called me a selfish menace.

As the shy skinny girl he first met grows into a woman, Sam begins to consider the possibility that their future together is not something to be taken for granted, and so he drives into downtown Los Angeles, withdraws his savings from the Western Bank, and purchases a diamond ring, all during the course of his lunch hour. Walking with her on the beach the next day, the light softly tangled in her blowing hair, her face seen very
close and clearly for a moment like a shell suddenly uncovered by the tide, he feels that he is loving her for the first time, and his heart stops with dread when he hears her voice. It reaches him as if it were spoken from inside him.

Oh, Sam, she says, I’m so flattered.

He looks out at the water when she says this. He sees two sailboats moving at opposite ends of the ocean.

What does that mean, flattered? he says to the water.

It means that I’m honored you would think of asking me.

It means no, that’s what it means.

Years later, when she tells him before she tells anyone else that she is flying across the Atlantic, she recognizes the pained expression, the pinched eyes, the tightened mouth, from that day on the beach. She wants to laugh and pretend that he’s only pouting. Before she leaves, she asks him to tell her mother and sister for her as soon as she’s taken off. She gives him two letters to give to them. In the letters she writes that she knows what she’s doing. She accepts the hazards. She has to go.

He watches her lips promise to send him a postcard from somewhere. Waving goodbye, he says to himself that that is her style: intimately heartless. He can tell by the way she smiles at him, that she has no idea how unhappy he is.

•

The temperature exploded. There is no other way to describe it. The heat rose steadily all day, but there was a breeze in the morning and so we didn’t notice the change at first. The jungle was as quiet as on any other morning. The birds were by the lagoon. But what we did not know was that they were drinking the water, getting ready for the heat. They had a way of knowing what was coming up, a way that eluded us. They congregated around the lagoon in strange formations, like supplicants of some exotic religion.

On the first day of the heat wave, I hear the birds talking to one another around the edge of the water. They have been at the lagoon since the earliest light of dawn. They are gathering force. The vicinity of the lagoon is exceptionally buggy. The insects also are preparing for the heat.

When I see Noonan for the first time that morning, he’s taken off his shirt, like a soldier stripped for combat.

A bolt of lightning that announces the heat wave strikes about a mile out to sea. We catch sight of it as we emerge from the jungle onto the beach. It sizzles in the distance, a sinister line of yellow in the sky, and it leaves a dark impression in its afterglow. I see the bright flash for a few more seconds, hanging in the bright white sky. By the time it has faded completely from my vision, there is such a noticeable change in the weather, which had
been hot but bearable a minute before, that Noonan has wrapped his shirt in a turban around his head, Arabian style. Heat seems to rise around us on all sides, and over the beach we see the air ripple in waves, as if the sand had turned to flames. The sky is cloudless. In the sky we see only the rays of the sun beating down on the sand and reflecting back.