The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [7]
For the first time in years, he wasn’t required to drop off his passport at the scheduling office.
He found his Honda Civic, its silvery gray like an emblem of age, and drove home as if on autopilot. He always found that the wheel-clutching demands of driving a mere automobile were minor trifles. On the four-lanes he could zip around lumbering trucks and keep the accelerator even, but on streets, with their stop signs and intermittent shopping strips, he grew inattentive.
“I hope you don’t fly that plane the way you’re driving this car,” Loretta had said once. Most of the time she pretended his driving was like Apollo at the reins of his chariot.
As he passed the garbage mountain near Rahway, glittering with green glass, he remembered Loretta saying it sparkled like the aquamarine of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s garbage, he pointed out. His career had liberated him from the kind of work done by most men. He couldn’t imagine himself driving a bulldozer, sculpting refuse. He ascended, bursting through the cloud layers, rising, rising, scooting through the atmosphere, leveling off at thirty-six thousand feet. The jets, the bumping through clouds, the speed—it was like sex, with much more at stake. Sometimes he imagined he could just keep rising until he reached the moon. He thought now about the time, just before Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong was practicing on the flying-bedstead lunar trainer, a framework contraption that hovered. The thing went kerflooie, spun out of control, and Armstrong hit the eject button at the last possible millisecond. Matter-of-factly, he parachuted to the ground, shucked the chute, and was back at his desk in thirty minutes. He didn’t even mention the incident to his office mate. Just another day on the job.
ALTHOUGH BASED AT JFK, Marshall lived in New Jersey. From the air, the landscape made sense to him, but on the ground the suburbs were a meaningless hodgepodge of deadpan houses and noxious shopping centers. Loretta had flourished in the suburbs. She knew the neighborhood of the school and the streets where she took Albert and Mary to harp and flute lessons when they were growing up. Yet she remained devoted to Cincinnati, her hometown, and she had gone there often, with the children, even after her parents were dead. His own parents died long ago, and he had lost touch with all other kin in Cincinnati and down in the Kentucky mountains.
The Stones’ house was a two-story, green-clapboard colonial hedged with boxwood. The interior was feminine throughout, except for his wood-paneled study, with its somber barometer and photographs of DC-3s and the beloved old Connie—the Constellation, the most satisfying airplane he had ever flown. He had always been like a special guest in this house, someone who dropped in every week or so. Loretta played her part as hostess. Home life had an air of pretense, as if staged. When he was away, did she strike the set?
Whenever he thought about his role in the family when the kids were young, he teetered off balance. What a fraud he was! What did he know about parenting? He was the dad who took the children to get the Christmas tree, the dad who carved the turkey, the dad who drove the station wagon on summer vacations. On holidays when he had to be away, Loretta simply shifted the date. The turkey waited. Santa too.
Loretta greeted him sunnily each time he returned. The transition was disorienting. In an airplane, he was perpetually alert, energized, a cat watching a mouse hole. On the ground, his real self floated away. Home was a maze of costumes and allowances and bicycle tires. He stayed in his den for hours on end, absorbed in the ancient Mayans or Viking explorers or Georges Simenon mysteries—in French. He read anything he could get his hands on. He jogged around the high-school track.
Yet he had held fast to the contract. This home life in New Jersey was what all the sacrifices were for—the training, the war, the job. His nuclear unit ensconced in this fine colonial two-story was his raison d’être. He had no complaint. As a 747 captain, he was