The Angel on the Roof

Theory of Flight

Her first day at Kitty Hawk, she stayed at the cottage with her mother and father and explained to them why she was leaving Roger. As if speaking into a tape recorder, the three adults stared straight ahead and talked to one another. They sat on the beach in canvas and aluminum chairs and watched the children play with shovels and buckets at the edge of the water. The sun was white, unencumbered, untouched, in a cloudless sky, burning at the center of the dark blue, circular plane.

Bored with buckets and shovels, the two little girls — daughters and granddaughters — put the toys down and moved closer to the water to dodge the waves, tempting them, dodging again. At first laughing gaily, then, whenever a wave shoved their ankles and knees or as it receded caught them from behind, their laughter suddenly, momentarily, turned manic, and their small, brown faces shifted to gray, mouths gaping, eyes searching the beach for Mamma.

“Jesus,” Janet said. “It’s like Greece, this sky and that sun!”

“All week,” her father said. “It’s been like this all week. Can you believe it?” With his leathery, tanned skin, bony face, and round, wrinkle-rimmed eyes, he looked like a giant sea turtle thrown into a canvas beach chair. He lay there, rather than sat, staring at his granddaughters, fingertips nervously drumming knobby knees, toes digging into the hot white sand. “Maybe you can give it one last chance,” he said. “You’ve got the children to think about, you know.”

“All I’ve done, for God’s sake, is think about the children! I mean, please, figure it out for yourself, Daddy. Are they better off with one parent who’s reasonably sane and more or less happy than with two parents, both of whom are crazy and miserable and blaming their craziness and misery on each other? Which would you have preferred? For that matter, which do you think I would have preferred?” Chewing her upper lip, she still did not look at him. She wondered about herself, her thirties: Would she become idly cruel?

Her father started to stammer, then inhaled deeply, a reversed sigh, and talked rapidly about his own mother and father, reminding himself, his wife, and his daughter that at least once in this life there had been a perfect marriage. In the middle of his eulogy, his wife got up from her chair, wiped clinging grains of sand from her calves and hands, and walked back to the cottage.

“Do you want a drink, Janet?” she called over her shoulder. The turquoise straps of her bathing suit were cutting into reddened loaves of flesh.

“God, no, Mother! It’s only three o’clock!”

“What about you, Charles?”

“Gin and tonic. You know.”

The mother turned and waded through the deep sand, over the low ridge to the cottage. The daughter and the father continued to sit in the low-slung chairs, side by side, watching the girls play. For several minutes, the old man and the young woman said nothing.

Then the man sighed loudly and said, as if to a friendly bartender, “Jesus, what a goddamn shame.”

She turned slowly and looked at him. “A shame that it took me eight years. That’s all I’m ashamed of!” she snapped. She got up from her chair and jogged down to the water, pounding through the surf until she was waist-deep, and dove into a breaking wave, disappearing and after several seconds popping up beyond the wave in smooth, dark green, deep water.

She poked one hand up in the air and waved to her father. He lifted a skinny brown arm and slowly waved back.

Stalking past the bunch of teenage boys and men in T-shirts with sleeves rolled up to show off biceps and tattoos, Janet hurried to a place about halfway down the Fish Pier. Out at the end of the pier, the serious fishermen had gathered, fifteen or twenty of them, red-faced white men in duck-bill caps, short-sleeve shirts, and Bermuda shorts, all of them leaning like question marks over the waist-high wood railing, peering out and down at their lines, silently attentive.

Janet was what they used to call a looker — neat, trim, sexy if tanned and wearing carefully selected clothes, a fashionably casual haircut, and minimal makeup (but not without makeup altogether), the kind of woman whose attractiveness to men depended greatly on the degree to which she could reveal that men were attractive to her. If, when it turned out that for whatever reason or length of time she was not interested in a particular man, her boyish, physical intensity was capable of frightening him, and on such occasions she was sometimes thought to be a lesbian, which, on these occasions, pleased her. It’d serve the bastards right, she thought.

Slipping in between two small groups of black people, men and women, she found a spot at the rail and broke out her fishing gear. She stuffed a cold, slumbering bloodworm onto a hook, leaned over the rail, and flipped the tip of the rod, casting underhanded, sending the weighted hook and worm forty or fifty feet out and twenty feet down into the dark water. Slowly, she reeled the line back in, watching the people around her as she worked.

“How you doin’ today?” a man with an enormous head asked her. He flashed a mouthful of gold-trimmed teeth.

“Can’t tell yet. I just got here,” she said. She heard the words clicking in a hard, flat, Boston accent. She never heard her own accent, except when speaking with black people, regardless of where they were from. Southern whites, strangely, only made her conscious of their accent, not her own. The same was true for Hispanics. The man was with two women, both of whom seemed to be older than he, and two men, also older than he. None of the others was fishing. Instead, they drank beer and ate fried chicken legs and chattered with each other and with the various people passing by and standing around them. The man fishing was, by comparison, a solitary. He carefully ignored the others. His very large head was almost startling to look at, all the more, for a white person, because of his shining blackness. Janet didn’t realize she was staring at him, at his head, the considerable force of it, until, smiling easily at her, he said, “You know me, Miss?”

“No. No, I guess not. I just thought, I … you do look familiar to me, that’s all.”

“You prob’ly seen me around,” he said, almost bragging.

“Yes.” She noticed that whenever he spoke to her the others immediately lapsed into silence — but only for as long as he was speaking. When she answered him, they went back to their own conversations, not hearing her. It was as if she had said nothing, as if she were a creature of his imagination. It made her nervous.

Nevertheless, the two continued talking idly to one another while they fished, with long periods of thoughtful silence between exchanges, and soon she no longer noticed that the others watched her in attentive silence when he spoke, then switched off and ignored her altogether when she responded. Suddenly, they both finally started catching fish — spots, small, silvery white fish with a thumbnail-sized black dot over each gill. “The tide comin’ in,” he explained. “We gonna get us a mess of fish now, you wait,” he said, and as he spoke, she felt the deliberate tug of a fish on her line. She yanked with her left hand and reeled with her right, swiftly pulling in a small fish that glistened in the sun as she drew it up to the pier and over the rail. The fish she caught, one after another, were only a bit larger than her hand, but the man declared that they’d be the best fish she’d ever caught. “You fry up a mess of them little spots in the mornin’ an’ that’ll be your best breakfast!” he promised and grinned at her and reeled in another for himself, slipped it off the hook, and shoved it into the burlap sack at his feet.

She let her own caught fish accumulate inside the tin tackle box she had brought, her father’s. She could hear them rattling around inside, scattering the hooks, sinkers, and lures in the darkness. Her heart was pounding, from the work as much as from the excitement. She pictured the large, gray blossoms of sweat that she knew had spread across her back and under her arms. Her arms and legs were feathery and full of light, as she felt the shudder and the familiar, hard tug of one fish after another hitting the bait, felt it pull against the steady draw of the reel, then fly through the air, up and over the rail onto the pier. She wanted to laugh out loud and yell to the man next to her, Hey! I got another one! and another one!

But she said nothing. They both worked steadily in silence, grabbing the flopping, hooked fish off their lines, jamming fresh worms onto the hooks, reaching over the rail and casting the lines underhanded in long arcs back down into the water, feeling the weighted hooks hit the water and sink a foot or two into it, feeling them get hit again, and then reeling the fish back toward the pier, lifting them free of the water into the air and drawing them up to the pier and the rail again, and again, until, sweat rolling across her face, her arms began to ache, the muscles of her right hand between thumb and forefinger to cramp, and still the fish kept on hitting the lines. There was a grim, methodical rhythm to their movements, and they were working together, it seemed, the young white woman in blouse and shorts and blue tennis shoes and the middle-aged black man in T-shirt and stained khaki trousers and bare feet.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Her line drifted slowly to the bottom and lay there, inert, as if tied to a rock. His line, five feet away from hers, did the same. The two of them leaned further out and watched, waiting. But nothing happened. The fish were gone. The tide had moved them closer to the beach, where the school had swirled and dispersed in silvery clouds, swimming with the current along the beach, away from the pier and parallel to the breaking waves. She watched surf casters scattered up the beach one by one begin to catch fish, their long poles going up like tollgates as the schools moved rapidly along.

She lay flat on her back in the sand, no blanket or towel beneath her, feeling her skin slowly darken, tiny, golden beads of sweat gradually stringing her mouth along her upper lip and over her chin, crossing her forehead just above her eyebrows, puddling in the gullies below her collarbones and rib cage, between her small breasts, and drifting, sliding in a thin, slick sheet of moisture down the smooth insides of her thighs. It was close to noon, and the sun, a flat, white disc, was almost directly overhead, casting practically no shadow.

“Mommy, you’re really getting red,” Laura quietly said. She stood over her mother for a moment, peering down with a serious, almost worried look on her face. She was the older daughter, temperamentally more serious than her sister. They had always called her Laura, had never tried giving her a nickname. The other child, named Eva, was called Bootsie, Bunny, Noosh, and Pickle — depending on the parent’s mood and the expression on the face of the child. Most people found the two girls attractive and likable — as much for the differences in their personalities as for their physical similarities. Four-year-old Eva was in appearance a smaller version of seven-year-old Laura, and both girls looked exactly like their mother.

This morning the three of them wore purple two-piece bathing suits, and while the mother sunbathed, the daughters, with their pails and shovels, played in the hot sand beside her. The grandmother had driven into the village for groceries and mail, and the grandfather was on his regular morning walk, three miles up the beach to the old Coast Guard station and back.

“Look, Mommy, sharks!” Laura cried. Janet propped herself up on her elbows and squinted against the hard glare of sand and mirror-like water. Then she saw them. Porpoises. Their gray backs slashed the water like dark knives.

“They’re not sharks, they’re porpoises, Laura.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“No. They’re supposed to be very bright and actually friendly to humans.”

“Oh,” she said, not believing.

Janet lay down on her back again and closed her eyes. She studied the backs of her eyelids, a yellow-ocher sheet with a slight, almost translucent scratch, like a thin scar, in front of the lid, between her eyeball and the lid. Every time she tried to look at the scar — which seemed to ride across the surface, moving slowly, like a twisted reed floating on still water — it jumped and disappeared off the edge of her circle of vision. A tiny scratch on the retina, she decided. The only way she could actually see it was if she tried not to look at it, but looked past it, as if at something else located in the same general region. Even then, however, she found herself eager to see the line (the scar or scratch or whatever it was), and she searched for it, caught a glimpse of it, and, chasing with her gaze, watched it race ahead of her and out of sight.

Janet realized that the girls were no longer close beside her. She sat up and looked around for them. A small flock of gulls loped over the water, dipping, dropping, lifting, going on. The porpoises still sliced the water a few hundred yards from the beach. As far as she could see in both directions, the beach was deserted. She called, “Laura!” Then called again, louder, and stood up, looking back toward the cottage.

“Listen, Mommy, wake up! You’re really getting a terrible sunburn!” Janet opened her eyes and looked into Laura’s worried face. Eva was sitting a few yards away, humming to herself while she buried her feet in a knee-deep hole she had dug in the sand. “Did you fall asleep?” Laura asked.

“No.” She stood up and brushed the sand off the backs of her slender legs, shoulders, and arms. “C’mon, let’s walk up the beach and meet Grandpa,” she said cheerfully. She reached a hand to Laura, leaned down, and helped Eva pull herself free. The three of them started down the beach toward the Coast Guard station. Offshore, the porpoises cruised alongside, headed in the same direction, and, above them, the gulls.

The third night in the cottage, listening to the radio, a top 40 station from Elizabeth City, Janet drank alone until after midnight. She situated herself on the screened porch, gazed out at the ridge of sand that lay between the cottage and the beach, milky white until almost ten o’clock, when it slowly turned gray, then black, against the deep blue, eastern night sky. She drank Scotch and water, and each new drink contained less water and proportionately more Scotch than the previous, until her face felt like a plaster mask slipping forward and about to fall into her lap.

She was alone. Her mother and father had done their drinking before dinner, as was their habit, and had gone to bed by nine-thirty, also their habit. Janet had almost forgotten their routines, and a flood of sour memories swept over her, depressing her, separating her from her own life sufficiently to make her feel self-righteous sitting there on the porch with the bottle of Teacher’s, a pitcher of water, a tub of ice cubes, and a small transistor radio on the floor beside her. She poured and drank one glassful of Scotch and water after another, letting the sweetly sad songs from that summer’s crop swarm over her past and present lives. At one point she told herself that she was very interested in the differences between the way her parents drank and the way she drank — meaning that she was interested in making sure that there were differences.

As the land behind her cooled, the wind blew steadily and strongly, and the sound of the waves crashing in darkness on the packed, wet sand filled all the space that lay behind the sound of the radio. Janet thought in clumsy spirals backwards in time, of her husband, Roger, his years in graduate school, and their town house in Cambridge, where the children were born, and the years before that, when she and Roger were in college, the years she’d endured while in high school in Connecticut, living at home with her parents, and then she was a very young girl visiting her grandparents, here, at Kitty Hawk, where the family had been coming for summers for as long as she could remember and before she was born. And now here she was again, back where she had started, where they had started, too, her parents, and she was placing her own daughters where she had been placed, even to the point of sleeping them in the same room she had used at their age. Her chest and throat filled with a hard knot of longing. And as soon as she was aware of its presence, the knot loosened and unraveled and regathered as anger — anger at her life, as if it were an entity distinct from her, for all the cunning ways it had trapped her and her children.

Momentarily satisfied with this object for her emotion, she flicked off the radio, stood slightly off-balance, rocked on the balls of her feet like a losing prizefighter, and wound her way back into the living room, bumping curtly against the maple arm of the couch, grabbing at the light switches, dumping the house finally into darkness, and made her way down the hall to the stairs and up the stairs to her bedroom, the “guest room” at the end, moving in spite of the darkness with pugnacious confidence, but off-balance, inept.

* * *

Over on the western side of the Outer Banks, the sound side, the water was shallow and most of the time calm. The fourth morning at Kitty Hawk, Janet decided to take the girls to one of the small inlets where they could wade and even swim safely. They were excited by the prospect, though they didn’t quite understand how it could be so different only a few miles away. If here by the cottage there was an ocean with huge, dangerous waves and undertows and tides, how could they get into the car and go to the same salty water a few miles away and have it be like a shallow lake?

Driving fast along the narrow road north of Kitty Hawk — deep sand on both sides, witchgrass, sea oats, and short brush, with high dunes blocking any possible views of the ocean — Janet slowed suddenly and carefully pulled her father’s green Chrysler station wagon over and picked up a hitchhiker. He was slight and not very tall, an inch or two taller than Janet. About twenty-two or — three, with long blond hair, almost white, that hung straight down his back, he moved with an odd, precise care that was slightly effeminate and, to Janet, attractive. As he came up beside the car, he smiled. He had even white teeth, good-humored blue eyes, a narrow nose. He pitched his backpack into the rear of the car, where the girls sat, nodded hello to them, and climbed into the front seat next to Janet.

“How far you goin’?” he asked.

“Out beyond Duck, to the Sound. Four or five miles, I guess. Will that get you where you want?”

“Yeah,” he answered. He slid down in the seat, folded his hands across his flat belly, and closed his eyes, obviously enjoying the smooth luxury of the car, the insulating comfort of the air conditioner, as Janet drove the huge vehicle swiftly along the road, floating over bumps, gliding flatly around curves and bends in the road.

“Connecticut plates,” the young man said suddenly, as if remembering a name he’d forgotten. “Are you from Connecticut?” He was unshaven, but his cheeks weren’t so much bearded as covered with a soft, blond down. He was tanned, wearing jeans, patched and torn, faded and as soft-looking as chamois, and a dark green T-shirt. He was barefoot. Slipping a bit further down in the seat, his weight resting on the middle of his back, he placed his feet onto the dashboard in front of him gingerly, with a grace and care that made it seem natural to Janet.

She explained that she was from Cambridge, that the car was her father’s, her parents were the ones who lived in Connecticut. Manchester, outside Hartford. And she was just down here for a while, she and her daughters, visiting them at their cottage. Though she herself hadn’t been down here in years, not since her childhood. Because of summer camps and school and all…

“Yeah, right,” he said, peering casually around, taking in the girls in the back, who grinned soundlessly at him, and the Styrofoam floats in the far back of the car, beach towels, a change of clothes for each of them, a bag with sandwiches and cookies in it, a small cooler with ice and a six-pack of Coke inside. “You going swimming in the Sound?” he asked.

“Yes, for the kids, y’know?” She started to explain, about the waves, the undertow, the tides, how these presented no problem over on the Sound and children their ages could actually swim and enjoy themselves, not just sit there digging in the sand, which was about all they could do over on the sea side — when she realized that she was talking too much, too rapidly, about things that didn’t matter. She asked him, “What about you? Are you staying down here for the summer? Or what?”

“I’m just kind of passing through. I may stay on for the summer, though,” he added softly. His accent identified him as a Northerner, but that was about all.

“Are you living here? In Kitty Hawk, I mean?”

“I made like this camp out on the dunes a ways, beyond where the road ends. It’s a fine place, so long as they don’t come along and move me out. Nobody’s supposed to be camping out there.”

“Do you have a tent?” she asked, curious.

“They’d spot that as soon as I pitched it. I just sort of leaned some old boards and stuff together, pieces of wood I found along the beach and in the dunes. Last night, when it rained, I bet I stayed as dry as you did. It’s the best place I’ve had all year. Up north, even in summer, there’s no way you can be comfortable drifting around like this. But down here, it’s easy, at least till winter comes. I work a couple of days every couple of weeks pumping gas at the Gulf station in Manteo, for groceries and stuff. That’s where I’m comin’ from now. I got my two weeks’ groceries an’ stuff in my pack. I just spend the rest of my time, you know, out on the dunes, sitting around in my shack, playing a little music, smoking some good dope, fishing on the beach. Stuff like that.”

“Oh,” she said.

The road ahead was narrower and, on both sides, dunes, and beach beyond dunes, and no vegetation except for brown grasses scattered sparsely across the sands, and as they rounded a curve, the road ended altogether. There was a paved cul-de-sac at the end where, without much trouble, one could turn a car around, and Janet steered the big Chrysler into this area and parked it. She shut off the motor, opened the door, and stepped out quickly.

The young man got out and walked around to the back, where he flopped the tailgate down, pulling his pack out first, then the kids’ floats, the lunch bag and cooler, and the towels and clothes. The girls scrambled past him, leaped down from the tailgate, and ran for the water. They were already in their bathing suits and didn’t break stride as they hit the quietly lapping water and raced in, quickly finding themselves twenty or thirty feet from shore and the water not yet up to their knees. Janet had come around to the back of the car, but by the time she got there the man was already closing the tailgate, lifting it slowly. Smiling, she came and stood beside him, to help lift the heavy tailgate, brushing his bare arm with her hand, then moving tightly toward him, touching his thigh with the front of hers. They lifted the slab of metal together, slamming it shut, and moved at once away from the car and from each other. She peered easily into his face, and he answered with a slight smile.

“Want to come up and see my shack?” He stood about eight feet away from her, one hand resting on his pack.

“Where is it?” She tossed her head and slung a wisp of hair away from her eyes. She leaned over and picked up the two coffin-shaped floats, hating the touch of the things against her hands, their odd weightlessness.

He waved a hand toward the seaside. “A couple hundred yards over that way. Just walk over those dunes there, and when you get to the beach, go along for maybe a hundred yards and cut in toward the dunes again, and then you’ll see my shack. It’ll look like a pile of driftwood or something to you at first, but when you get closer, you’ll see it’s a pretty cool place to live,” he said, showing his excellent teeth again. “I got some good smoke, too, if you care for that.”

She looked down at the clothes lying in the sand, the paper bag and ice chest, the beach towels, then back at the bony youth in front of her.

“Well, no. I don’t think so. I have my daughters here. They haven’t had a chance to swim, really, not since we got here, and I promised them this would be it. A whole day of it. But thanks,” she said.

He answered, “Sure,” lifted his pack onto his back and jabbed his arms through the straps and started across the pale sand, through slowly waving lines of sea oats, leaving deep, drooping tracks behind him.

She stood at the back of the car for a few moments, watching him depart, then turned and dragged the Styrofoam floats down to the edge of the water.

“You coming in, too, Mamma?” Eva asked her.

“Yeah, Pickle. I’m coming in, too.”

“What were you talking about, you and that man?” Laura wondered, looking anxious. She stood knee-deep in the tepid water, about twenty feet from shore.

“Nothing much, really. He wanted me to come and see the way he lives. I guess he’s proud of the way he lives. Some people are proud of the way they live. I guess he’s one.”

“Are you?” Laura asked.

“No,” Janet said. Then she went back to the car for the rest of their gear.

When she woke the next morning, the first thing she knew was that it was raining — a soft, windless, warm rain, falling in a golden half-light — and she couldn’t decide if it had just begun or was about to end.

Dressing quickly, she shoved a brush through her hair and walked out to the hall, heard her daughters talking behind the door of their bedroom, saw that the door to her parents’ room was still closed, and, judging it to be early, probably not seven yet, walked downstairs to the living room. Immediately, upon entering the room, she felt the dampness of it. In the mornings here, the living room and kitchen seemed strangely inappropriate to her — wet, chilled, smelling of last night’s supper — which made her eager to get a pot of coffee made, bacon frying, the new day begun.

As she moved about the small kitchen, from the Formica-topped counter to the stove to the refrigerator, she gradually realized that the rain had stopped, and the golden haze had been replaced by a low, overcast sky that cast a field of gloomy, pearl-colored light. She stopped work and looked out the window toward the ocean. A gull, as it swept up from the beach, ascending at the ridge between the cottage and the water, seemed to burst from the ground. Its belly was stained with yellow streaks the color of egg yolk, and she realized that the seagulls — scavengers, carrion eaters, filthy, foul-smelling creatures — were beautiful only when seen from a distance. Suddenly, the force of the day, the utter redundancy of it, the closure it represented and sustained, hit her. She was unwilling to believe that her life was going to be this way every day, unwilling to believe it and yet also unable to deny it any longer: a lifetime of waking to damp, smelly couches and chairs, to rooms filled with cold furniture, to preparing food again, for herself, for her children, of waking to sudden gray skies and stinking birds searching for garbage, and on through the day more meals, more messes to make and clean up afterwards, until nightfall, when, with pills or alcohol, she would put her body to sleep for eight or ten hours, to begin it all over again the next morning. It wasn’t that she believed there was nothing more than this. Rather, she understood that — no matter what else there was — she would never get away from this. Anything she might successfully add to her life could only enter it as background to this repeated series of acts, tasks, perceptions, services. She was thirty years old, not old, and it was too late to begin anything truly fresh and new. A new man, a new place to live, a new way of life, a profession, even — the newness would be a mockery, a sad, lame reaction to the failure of the old. There had been the promise, when she left Roger, of sloughing off her old life the way a snake sloughs off an old skin, revealing a new, lucid, sharply defined skin beneath it. But the analogy hadn’t held.

And she was trapping her own children. The terms of her life had become the terms of theirs, and thus they, too, would spend the rest of their lives in relentless, unchanging reaction to patterns she could not stop establishing for them. None of them, not she, not her daughters, was going to get free. Once again, she’d been fooled, but this time, she knew, it was for the last time. She felt a dry bitterness working down her throat. Walking to the bottom of the stairs, she quietly called her daughters down for breakfast.

* * *

“Look, it’s going to be a lousy day all day, so instead of waiting around here hoping the sun will come out, is it okay if I take your car and spend the day with the kids, just driving around and taking in the sights?” She lit a cigarette, flicked the match onto the floor, saw it lying there, a thin tail of smoke ascending from one end, and quickly plucked it back. And wondered what the hell made her do that. She held the burnt match carefully between her thumb and forefinger, while her father tried to answer her first question.

It was difficult for him, mainly because he wanted her to know, on the one hand, that he was eager for her to use his car, that, in fact, he was eager to be able to help her in any way possible (going for his wallet as the thought struck him), but also, he wanted her to know that he and her mother would be forced to endure her and the children’s day-long absence as a painful event — wanted her to know this, but didn’t want that knowledge to coerce her into changing her mind and staying at the cottage or leaving the children here while she took the car and went sight-seeing alone. After all, he reasoned with himself, they were her children, and right now they must seem extra-precious to her, for, without Roger, she must need to turn to them for even more love and companionship than ever before. He imagined how it would have been for Anne, his wife, if they had gotten divorced that time, years back, when Janet was not much older than Laura was now.

Yes, but what would this day be like for him and for Anne, with Janet and the children gone? A gray blanket of dread fell across his shoulders as he realized that five minutes after the car pulled away, he and his wife would sit down, each of them holding a book, and wait impatiently for the sound of the car returning. After lunch, they would take a stroll up the beach, walking back quickly so as not to miss them, if Janet and the children decided to return to the cottage early, and, because, of course, they would not have come back early, he and Anne would spend the rest of the afternoon in their chairs on the porch, holding their books, he a murder mystery, she a study of open classrooms in ghetto schools. Well, they could drink early, and maybe Anne could think of something special to fix for dinner, blue shell crabs, and could start to work on that early, and he could rake the beach again, digging a pit for the trash he found, burying it, raking over the top of the pit carefully, removing even the marks left by the teeth of the rake.

“Sure you can take the car, that’s a fine idea! Give us a chance to take care of some things around here that need taking care of anyhow. How’re you fixed for cash? Need a few dollars?” he asked without looking at her, drawing out his billfold, removing three twenties, folding them with his second finger and thumb and shoving them at her in such a way that for her to unfold and count it would be to appear slightly ungrateful. She could only accept.

Which she did, saying thanks and going directly into the living room, switching off the television as she told her daughters to hurry up and get dressed, they were going out for a ride, to see some exciting things, the Wright Brothers Memorial, for one thing, and maybe a shipwreck, and some fishing boats and a lighthouse, and who knows what else. She looked down at her hand, found that she was still holding the burnt match. She threw it into an ashtray on the end table next to the couch.

She drove fast, through the village of Kitty Hawk — several rows of cottages on stilts, a few grocery stores and filling stations, a restaurant, a bookstore, and the Fish Pier — and south along Highway 158 a few miles, to Kill Devil Hills. The overcast sky was breaking into shreds of dirty gray clouds, exposing a deep blue sky. Though the day was warm, the sun was still behind clouds. The hard light diminished colors and softened the edges of things, making it seem even cooler than it was. Janet switched the air conditioner off and lowered the windows opposite and beside her, and warm, humid air rushed into the car. In the back, the girls had taken up their usual posts, peering out the rear window, finding it more satisfying to see where they had been than to seek vainly for where they were going.

On her right, in the southwest, Kill Devil Hill appeared, a grassy lump prominent against the flattened landscape of the Outer Banks, and at the top of the hill, a stone pylon that, from this distance of a mile, resembled a castle tower.

“We’re almost there,” she called to the girls. “Look!” She pointed at the hill and the tower.

“Where?” Laura asked. “Where are we going?”

“There. See that hill and the tower on top? Actually, it’s not a tower. It’s only a stone memorial to the Wright Brothers,” she explained, knowing then why she had never come here before and simultaneously wondering why the hell she was coming here now.

“The Wright Brothers?” Laura said. “Are they the airplane men?”

“The men who invented the airplane.”

“Oh.”

“Mamma, look!” Eva chimed in. “A castle! Are we going to the castle? Can we go to the castle?”

“Yes.”

“How many brothers were there?”

“Two. Wilbur and Orville.”

“Only two?”

“Yes.”

“Will there be a king and queen at the castle?”

“No … yes. Sure.”

“Laura, there’s going to be a king and queen at the castle!”

“Stupid! That’s not a castle.”

“Let her call it a castle, Laura. It looks like one.”

Off the highway, they drove along the narrow, winding approach to the memorial, passing the field and the low, flat-roofed, glass-walled structure that housed the various exhibits and the scale model of the aircraft, past the two wooden structures at the northern end of the field where, she remembered reading once years ago, the brothers had stored their device and had worked and slept while preparing it for flight. Janet was surprised to find herself oddly attracted to the place, to the hill, round and symmetrical, like an Indian mound, and, atop it, the pylon that, even up close, looked the way as a child she had pictured the Tower of London.

Janet parked the Chrysler in the small parking lot on the west side of the hill. The three of them got out and walked quickly along the paved pathway that methodically switchbacked to the top. In seconds, the girls had run on ahead, and Janet was alone. The sky was almost clear now, a bright, luminous blue, and the sun shone on her face as she climbed. She was sweating and enjoying it, feeling the muscles of her back and legs working hard for the first time in weeks. The sense of entrapment she had felt a few hours ago she could recall now only with deliberate effort. She still perceived it as the primary fact of her life, but merely as if it were a statistic. Ahead of her, Laura and Eva darted about the base of the tower, scurrying around the thing as if looking for an entrance. In a few moments, she arrived at the crest, breathing hard, sweating, and the girls ran to meet her.

“It’s a castle all right!” Eva cried happily. “But we can’t get in, the door’s locked!” She pulled Janet by the hand to a padlocked, steel door. “The king and the queen had to go to work, I guess. They aren’t home.”

“I guess not, Pickle,” Janet said. They walked slowly around to the other side, where they sat on the ground and peered down the slope that the two bicycle mechanics had used for launching their strange machine. Then, as if a wonder were unfolding before her eyes, filling her with awe, Janet saw a large, clear image of the two men from the Midwest and their clumsy wire, wood, and cloth aircraft and the sustained passion, the obsession with making it work, and their love for it and for each other. It was like discovering a room in her own house that she’d never suspected existed, opening a door that she’d never opened, looking in and seeing an entirely new room, unused, unknown, altering thoroughly and from then on her view of the entire house.

The image was of her own making, but that didn’t lessen the impact. She saw the brothers as having released into their lives tremendous energy, saw it proceed directly, as if from a battery, from their shared obsession and their mad, exclusive love for each other — a positive and negative post, the one necessitated by the presence of the other. They had not permitted themselves, she decided, to live as she feared she was condemned to live: curled up inside a self that did not really exist.

For her, the image was perceived by her body as much as by her mind, and she felt lightened by it, as if she could fly, like a deliberately wonderful bird, leaping from the lip at the top of the little hill, soaring from the height of land first up and then out, in a long, powerful glide across the slope and then over the field that aproned it, drifting easily, gracefully, slowly to the ground, coming to rest at the far end of the field, where the two workshops were located, where, she decided, she would pitch herself into the task of making a machine that could fly, making it out of wires and shreds of cloth and odd remainders of wood and rough pieces of other machinery — the junk of her life so far. Her daughters careened uphill past her, mocking and singing at each other, asserting their differences to each other, and she knew, from the way her face felt, that she would be tireless.

Standing, she turned and waved for the girls to follow, and the three of them descended the hill, holding hands, and talking brilliantly.