An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [93]
Then she rallied and began defensively, “But you know, he was never cross with me.”
“Never once?” someone ventured from the depths of the back seat.
“Well, once. Yes, once.” Her voice lightened.
They were driving, she said, on a high mountain road. I saw the back of her round head swivel; she was looking up and away, remembering. The two of them were driving along a dreadful road, she said, a perfectly horrible road, in Tennessee maybe. Her voice grew shrill.
“There was a sheer drop just outside my window, and I thought we were going over. We were going over, I tell you.” She was furious at the thought. “And he got very cross with me.”
She had never seen him so angry. “He said I could either hush, or get out and walk. Can you imagine!”
She was awed. So was I. We were both awed, that he had dared. It cheered everyone right up.
The bird-watching was fine in the nearby Fort Lauderdale city park. Right in the middle of town, the park was mostly wild forest, with a few clearings and roads. Oma and Mary drove me to the park early every morning, and picked me up at noon. There I saw some of the few smooth-billed anis in the United States. They were black parrot-beaked birds; they hung around the park’s dump. The binoculars I wore banged against my skinny rib cage. I filled a notebook with sketches, information, and records. I saw myrtle warblers in the clearings. I saw a coot and a purple gallinule side by side, just as Peterson had painted them in the field guide; they swam in a lagoon under sea grape trees. They seemed, as common birds seem to the delirious beginner, miraculous and rare. (The tizzy that birds excite in the beginner are a property of the beginner, not of the birds; so those who love the tizzy itself must ever keep beginning things.)
Often I was startled to see, through binoculars and flattened by their lenses, glimpsed through the dark subtropical leaves, the white hull of some pleasure cruiser setting out on a Lauderdale canal. Who would go cruising beside houses and lawns, when he could be watching smooth-billed anis? I alone was sane, I thought, in a world of crazy people. Standing in the park’s smelly dump, I shrugged.
Afternoons I wandered the blinding beach, swam, and read about tide pools in Maine; I was reading The Edge of the Sea. On the beach I found skeletons of velella, or by-the-wind-sailors. From the high apartment windows I looked at the lifeguards around the pool below, and wondered how I might meet them. By day, Oma and Mary shopped. Evenings we went out to dinner. Amy was as desperately bored as I was, but I wouldn’t let her follow me; I addressed her in French. Everyone knew this was our last Florida trip.
It was on this visit that Oma asked me, when we were alone, what exactly it was that homosexuals did. She was miffed that she’d been unable to command this information before now. She said she’d wondered for many years without knowing who she could ask.
Amy and I boarded our plane back to Pittsburgh. It would be softball season at school, and a new baseball season for the Pirates, whose hopes were resting on a left-handed reliever, Elroy Face, and on the sober starter, Vernon Law—the Deacon—and on the big bat of our right fielder, Roberto Clemente, whom everyone in town adored.
Flying back, looking out over the Blue Ridge, I remembered a game I had seen at Forbes Field the year before: Clemente had thrown from right field to the plate, as apparently easily as a wheel spins. The ball seemed not to arc at all; the throw caught the runner from third. You could watch, this man at inning’s end lope from right field to the dugout, and you’d weep—at the way his joints moved, and the ease and power in his spine.
I was ready for all that, but it was only late March, and snowing in Pittsburgh when we got off the plane, and dark. At least we were tan.
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I FELT IT COMING; now I was sixteen, and it