Driver's Education (19 page)

The woman squints at my name tag and I do my best John Carlisle impression, though I don't know what that's supposed to be, entirely.

“But sort of funny—in a dark way, at least. Though I don't think anyone here would admit that. You've got a group of people who spend most hours of every day in hospitals proclaiming to be experts on what doctors need in order to be better at their jobs. And then, when Bob Thurston gets too close to a citronella tiki torch and stops breathing, no one's got a clue about what needs to be done. The only thing we can do is hug each other and bite our nails until the paramedics show up.”

She points to her name tag. “I'm Nancy Davenport.” Then, pointing to the camera that hangs from my right shoulder, “Is that thing on?”

I tell her no and I shut it off. I set down my mai tai and I push the piece of ice I'm chewing to the pocket of one cheek, and I tell her, “I'm John Carlisle.”

“Oh.” Nancy pulls at her dress, readjusts the long, fingering petals. “I mean, you know he died two months ago, right?”

I look across the room to Randal, who is shaking hands with a group
of young men. Telling jokes, laughing cartoonishly. Pointing to his name tag and introducing himself.

I say, “That I did not know.”

“Yeah,” Nancy nods. “Selling medical supplies—not for the faint of heart. It was something bizarre. Not citronella-reaction bizarre. But I remember thinking it was weird.” Then, once the band has shifted to ukulele renditions of big-band standards: “I remember now. A staph infection. MRSA. After cutting his finger while slicing oranges for his son's soccer team. He was able to make it to the kid's final game, but he died twelve hours later.”

“That's a rough twist.”

“No kidding.”

“But a fantastic story.”

“Right?”

“I'm Finn McPhee.”

She shakes my outstretched, teriyaki-glazed hand. After some moments she says, a quarter jokingly, “Do you dance, Finn McPhee?”

“No,” I tell her. “I mean, not really.”

“It's fine—they don't either.”

•  •  •

Nancy Davenport favors the same perfume used by my mother's sister and she wears too much of it; that's the first thing I notice when I'm pressed up close to her. I forget what it's called. It starts off smelling holiday spicy: oranges and cloves. But then when it leaves you—when the person walks away—you're hit with sandalwood and cedarwood and, I think, mothballs. My aunt, when I knew her, wore it mostly on her neck and when she hugged me it was stifling, murdering the more submissive scents around it. Nancy Davenport wears it there too, on her neck, and also on her lithe wrists and underneath her arms and in the tiny ravine of flesh between her breasts.

She sways her hips in figure eights, almost off the beat, clinging to it by a precious few milliseconds. Occasionally, she'll pluck up her sagging dress.

On dancing, a note: I meant it when I told her
not really
. The last
time I did it was at a company holiday party a year earlier—and then, even then, it was a rather spastic jump-flail-spin combination that, when asked, I lied and said was Bulgarian. In any event maybe part of me is a bit timid, but I think more so I'm hung up on disappointing Nancy Davenport and her perfume and her eyes, which I'm just noticing are green and hungry and almond shaped.

A song ends and we, and everyone else, become suddenly embarrassed by what we were doing in the moments that preceded the silence. Nancy says, “That shirt you're wearing is particularly offensive.”

I will say, though, that I do get better. Three songs later I'm no longer stepping on her fragile feet and I'm drunk enough from the mai tais to forget that I don't know how to dance, maybe even convincing myself that I'm good. And Nancy! While her vim isn't necessarily interminable, she does put up a good show, shaking and leaping and corkscrewing and hollering.

When the ukulele band twangs through its rendition of “Shout,” she slips off her shoes. She holds them in one hand and tells me she's in desperate need of some air.

•  •  •

I follow her through the convention center's glass front door, out to a long, tightly mowed emerald lawn. Nancy Davenport half reclines on the grass, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed loosely at the ankles. It's humid, so humid, and the night moves around us in long ribbons that smear the light from the yellow streetlamps. Nancy adjusts her birds of paradise.

I ask her, “Where are you from?”

“Here,” she tells me. “Right here.”

“As in, Columbus?”

She props herself up on one elbow. “As in, about two hundred yards up North High Street.”

“I see.” I pull at the blades of grass. “And how long have you lived there?”

“About two years.”

“And before that?”

“Before that, Victorian Village, which is about six blocks west. And before that, OSU, but the south campus, which is about a mile down the road.”

She falls flat against the lawn and her blond hair spills out around her head. Her dress inches higher, exposing white thighs that seem to stay thin, the same width, as they reach higher, higher, higher.

I ask, “How long, exactly, have you lived here?”

“For as long as I can possibly remember, and probably then some,” Nancy says. “I think I was likely living in Columbus before I was even born in Columbus.”

Two people, a salesman and saleswoman from the luau, stumble out of the convention center, down the concrete path to the sidewalk that runs in front of it.

“It seems like a nice place to live,” I say, and I pull my knees to my chest.

“Nowhere is a nice place to live if you've been there forever.”

She folds her hands behind her head, which make the birds of paradise flatten themselves even more.

“When you move around I imagine it's easy to catalog your life, you know?” Nancy continues. “ ‘When I was five, I lived in this house, in this town. When I was fifteen, we moved to Detroit.' That sort of thing. But when you stay in one place you don't have that—that sort of reference. You can't figure out if you're getting older or younger. The place changes, Columbus changes, sure. But you get used to the change—the change becomes predictable. You say, ‘Oh, they're finally doing something with that empty lot.' Then, three months later, there'll be a new glass building—something with steel beams—and you'll find yourself asking if there was ever an empty lot in the first place. The city builds up around you, and you stay exactly the same.”

Nancy stretches her arms. She pushes her palms upward, slicing through the gelatin air. “Anyway.”

After the better part of a minute I say to her, “So, get out. Leave.”

She fixes her hands behind her head again, her hair clumping between her fingers. “You don't think I've tried? That's why I took this
job. I figured I'd get to travel, right? Visit different hospitals in different cities. I even thought, Hey, maybe Cyanta would give me some great region. The West Coast, even. I'd get to see California.”

“But—”

“But I got Columbus.” Absently, she runs a finger along the edge of her name tag, which is pinned, at an angle, between her breasts. “There are worse places to be, I know. It's actually a lovely city. There are a million ways to distract yourself. But I suppose the problem with the distractions here is the problem with distractions everywhere: after a while they become so monotonous that you find yourself actually going back to boredom to distract you from the boringness of the distractions.

“I went through this phase where I took up new hobbies. About one every two months.” Nancy removes something from her eye—an errant insect, some piece of the night. “I rock climbed at this indoor gym. I grew miniature bonsai trees on my windowsill.”

“And . . . ”

“They'd hold my interest in the beginning, they'd be something new. I gave them all up, though. I guess I could never shake knowing what they actually were.” And then, very suddenly, as if she's just remembering me: “Where are you from?”

“New York City.”

“That,” she says, “must be nice.”

“It's all right,” I tell her. “It smells a little too much like people and nuts.”

She half nods, strangely. “And you're not John Carlisle.”

“No, because he's—”

“Dead. So then why are you here?”

I say, “I'm a circus performer.”

She pinches the bare skin on the back of my arm and I jolt the camera. “Knock it off.”

I rub the reddening skin. “For real. I swing from trapezes. I'm a trapeze artist. You wouldn't believe how dangerous it is—swinging from the tops of poles and flying into midair. But then, I guess it's not for everyone.”

“Tell me something true.”

“Who says that's not?”

“I do.” She leans back into the grass again, dissolving into the green, closing her eyes.

“Something true,” I repeat. “Okay. All right.” And this is what I tell her:

•  •  •

The
Spirit of Columbus
was a 1953 model Cessna 180 with an apple-red nose and broad white wings. On March 19, 1964, an Ohio girl named Geraldine Mock took off in the
Spirit
from the Port Columbus Airport. Twenty-nine days, twenty-two stopovers, and 23,103 miles later, she became the first woman ever to complete a solo flight around the world. She flew east, across the Atlantic to Morocco, dipping over the Arabian Peninsula to India—Calcutta—finally bulldozing the Pacific's blue until she reached America, until she reached home. It wasn't an easy trip: Mock flew through blinding sandstorms as she crossed the Sahara. The plane was slammed with lightning and severe weather, both freezing and scalding. Still, she persevered, skating into the record books, stamping her inky thumbprint on history.

All of this is true and totally verifiable. What's truer, though: if it hadn't been for my granddad, she wouldn't have been the one to do it. There was someone else—another woman—who was poised and ready before her.

She was a pilot and her name was Charlotte Sparrow—honest to God, that was her name. When my granddad first saw her, she was thirty-two years old. They met almost accidentally at the end of February in 1964, the first time he sailed into Columbus, about a year after he engineered his house of records in Pittsburgh. The sky the evening he arrived was elastic—stretching between red and violet and blue and black—and Lucy was all in. She'd been choking on fumes evaporating in her belly over the past ten miles. He'd been driving her on 161, past New Albany, and then south down 270 when she finally gave up ten miles northeast of the city, outside a box-shaped hangar a stone's throw from the airport.

The relationship between my granddad and Lucy wasn't always an easy ride. Mostly he found her quirks at least amusing, maybe endearing:
the way she got ornery on certain dirt roads; the way she griped and bitched on hills that were too steep. There were times, though, when she wasn't just a handful, but a bona fide pain in the ass. She'd come unglued on a back road in Minnesota, a hundred miles from anything, in the middle of the decade's worst snowstorm. Every time they crossed Death Valley, her windows would jam. He'd watch the pavement evaporate in underwater waves from behind the melting glass.
Damn it, Luce!
he'd cry.
Of all times!

But that's just the way it goes, he'd always tell me. Half of loving someone is being okay with hating her—at least some of the time.

It wasn't sleeting and it wasn't snowing, but they—both my granddad and Lucy—had fallen victim to this particular disposition when she called it quits near that hollow white hangar.

“This is the way it's going to be, is it?” he said once she'd stopped, once gravel no longer crunched beneath her tires. They'd been driving for more than seventy-two hours. “You're something else, Luce. A real piece of work.” And her headlights blinked off. He stepped out onto the road and into the chilled Ohio night. To the southwest, Columbus's abridged skyline shot up like a set of blunted fingers. He'd never dream of hitting Lucy—neither the wife nor the car—but if there was ever a moment when he wanted to club a tire with his heel, to put a dent in her hood, by God, he said, that was it.

And so to stop himself from doing something he might regret, he busied his hands. He shoved them into his pockets. Went about digging out a bent pack of Lucky Strikes from the sports coat he was wearing. He had a cigarette pinched between his lips and was poised to light it when he heard a woman say, “What's the problem?”

She'd emerged from the hangar without my granddad seeing her, and she wiped her hands with a grease-spotted cloth, cleaning each finger like she was turning a screw. He said she wore a brown bomber jacket with the sleeves pushed up above her elbows; blue jeans with stains cupping the knees. Blond hair clipped at the shoulders. But it was her skin, he said, that got him. The moon that night was the brightest Ohio and the world had seen in sixty years; it had orbited so close to the earth that
when you gazed up at it, you'd swear it was a hole that had been punched out of the sky. Cities turned streetlamps off and cars drove with no headlights—there was just no need for them.

He told me how she was the only thing that was brighter. He told me how she glowed. How she threw out shadows at night. My granddad tipped his hat to her. Chivalry had already started in on its long death by 1964, but my granddad, he was still a man who tipped his hat.

“It's this car,” he called out to her. “She's fed up with me.”

When Charlotte Sparrow walked toward him, my granddad had to reach for his sunglasses. She popped Lucy's hood and my granddad combed the hair that snuck out from underneath his hat with three wet fingers.