A Girl Can Dream

by Betty Cavanna

  There was also the chance—Rette refused to admit it as a hope—that Jeff Chandler might steal a few minutes away from his new job and stroll over for a chat. Rette glanced back toward the converted farmhouse, then looked away again quickly, shading her eyes with one hand as she followed Elise to the door of the Cessna’s cockpit. She heard the click of the door as it shut on Elise’s side, then knew, from the pause in operations, that Elise was doing her ground check. The boy was waiting near the tip of the propeller until he got her signal to swing it through.

  “Contact,” came Elise’s voice faintly.

  “Contact!” the boy called back, grabbing the tip of the propeller.

  The engine caught instantly, the boy kicked away the chocks under the wheels, then jumped back, and then the sound of his “All clear!” rang above the roar of the motor.

  Elise taxied to the runway in the shallow S-turns both girls had learned before their first orientation hop, and Rette still kept her eyes shadowed by her hand as she watched the take-off. It was smooth; there was no doubt about it. Rette wondered how much the instructor had to do with its ease, how much correction Elise needed in her manipulation of the controls.

  This was Elise’s third lesson, Rette’s fourth. On her third trip upstairs Rette had practiced climbing turns, S-turns, and rectangles. She watched Pat and Elise fly the traffic pattern and start for the practice area, visualizing what they would do next.

  When the plane was only a spot in the distance, she jumped up, dusted off the rear of her knee-length shorts, and strolled back toward the porch of the farmhouse, pretending that the grass was too damp to be comfortable, but knowing secretly that she was hoping for a glimpse of Jeff.

  She even had a reason why she might logically want to see him. Tony had mentioned at the breakfast table that he had run into Jeff at the drugstore last night. Rette hadn’t wanted to prod her brother’s generosity by asking whether they’d discussed flying, but she was nevertheless curious to know.

  Two young men, obviously student pilots, were sitting on the porch steps comparing open logbooks. Stephen Irish came to the door briefly, squinted at the sky, and waved to Rette, but Jeff Chandler did not appear.

  Loretta considered going to the lunch bar for a coke, decided it would be too obvious, and wandered back to her original position on the grass after she had gone to the bubbler for a drink of water. She looked at her wrist watch. Forty-five minutes to wait.

  She didn’t really mind. There was a lot to think about these days. Seniors were being measured for caps and gowns, and preparations for Commencement were well under way. Exams would be early for the graduating class, and almost every week now some special assignment was handed to the seniors, tagged with the promise of a Commencement prize.

  Spurred by her recent success, Rette had written several essays, on widely diversified subjects. There was one on Martin Luther—a lengthy and, she thought, very erudite job. There was another brief classroom assignment on homemaking, a dull subject if Rette had ever encountered one. Yet she did her best with the writing, because the winner would receive five dollars from the Avondale Women’s Club, and five dollars would pay for another half hour in the air. The Historical Society had offered a money prize also, for a composition of one thousand words on “Our Town.” Rette thought she’d try for that too, if she could find time—not that she really hoped to win, but just to get experience, because the more she thought about it the more she felt she might want to major in journalism in college. She hugged her knees and began to dream about a thrilling newspaper career, in which she might conceivably fly her own plane.

  “Watching the birds?”

  Jeff’s voice came from directly over her head, and Rette looked up with a start.

  “The big ones,” she told him. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” Jeff sat down beside her on a case of coke he had apparently been hauling when he spied Rette. “You flying today?”

  “As soon as Elise comes down,” Rette told him. Now that Jeff was beside her she couldn’t find a way to ask about his meeting with Tony. She sat in self-conscious silence, staring at the sky.

  A small plane was crabbing along the down-wind leg of the course around the airport, and both Rette and Jeff watched it approach the runway in a power-off glide.

  “That Elise now?” Jeff asked, squinting against the sun.

  Rette glanced at her watch again. “I don’t think so. She’s got half an hour to go.”

  “It’s a Cessna,” Jeff said as the plane came closer, landed, then took off again at once. “It looks like Elise.”

  Rette felt vaguely irritated by Jeff’s apparent absorption in another girl. “It can’t be Elise,” she told him sharply. “She’s taking only her third lesson. I’m going up for my fourth, and I haven’t practiced take-offs and landings yet.”

  “That would be pretty early in the game,” Jeff admitted, but his eyes still followed the silver airplane as it flew the traffic pattern and came down rather bumpily on the runway again.

  “By cracky, I think that is Elise!” he said.

  “It can’t be!” Rette sounded really annoyed now, and Jeff turned and looked at her curiously.

  “There’s a chance,” he said quietly, “that Elise may be the kind of natural pilot who learns extra quickly. She could be doing landings and take-offs this early. People have.”

  Rette’s laugh was thin, and her voice, usually so husky, sounded almost high-pitched. “Not Elise.”

  Jeff’s straight, dark eyebrows almost met over his deep-set gray eyes. “What have you got against Elise, Rette?” he asked. “She’s always been decent enough to you.”

  Rette couldn’t meet Jeff’s level gaze. She picked at a blade of grass, feeling frustrated and misunderstood. All the beauty of the morning faded, and the sun felt hot and stinging as it beat down on her head. All right. She had been petty and jealous; she had been catty and mean. But she didn’t intend to admit it, not to Jeff Chandler. Just when she’d got the one big thing that had ever come her way, the flying prize, Elise had to come along and share the glamour. It wasn’t fair.

  Rette fought for composure. “I haven’t got anything against Elise,” she said with lifted eyebrows. “It’s just that it’s perfectly silly—” She bit her lip and stopped.

  “It’s just that it’s perfectly silly to imagine that she could be a better student pilot than you?” Jeff asked. “Rette, grow up! You can’t always be best!”

  Rette jumped to her feet, astonished that Jeff should dare to scold her as though she were a naughty child. “I’m not going to sit here and have you insult me,” she said.

  Jeff’s expression was puzzled. “I’m not insulting you, Rette.” He added gently, “I’m just telling you the truth.”

  To be chided by her mother was one thing, but to be taken to task by a member of her own generation, and a boy at that, was both mortifying and infuriating. Rette stamped her foot from the sheer necessity for physical release.

  “You wait,” she said angrily. “You’ll see!” Then, leaving Jeff without a backward glance, she stalked off, head high, toward the office.

  Jeff hoisted the case of coke to his shoulder and followed her, pausing now and then to watch the Cessna, which was again coming in over the runway for a practice landing. This time, however, the trainer didn’t take off again, but taxied back to position on the line. Just as Rette reached the farmhouse porch the doors in the cockpit opened. Jeff, who had overtaken her with his longer stride, tapped her lightly on the shoulder.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  Rette looked back, scarcely believing her own eyes. It was Elise and Pat Creatore who jumped down from the airplane’s metal steps and came toward her across the grass.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The fact that Elise Wynn was beating her at what she privately considered her own game was one of the bitterest pills Rette had ever been forced to swallow.

  All her life she had secretly admitted Elise’s superiority in many thi
ngs—in popularity, in poise, in appearance, even in brains—but in winning the flying prize Rette felt for once that she had achieved something so special and individual that its fruits would be hers alone.

  And without apparent effort Elise was sharing the glory. In fact she seemed to be taking the lion’s share.

  Not that she reached out for it and grabbed, as Rette in her shoes undoubtedly would have done. Elise seemed unaware that Rette considered her a rival in a sport in which there could be no real rivalry. Indeed, she was friendlier than ever before, as though their mutual interest in the air had given Rette and herself a basis for intimacy.

  Rette dissembled, smothering an inclination to be sullen and taciturn. When she met her in the school corridors or out at the airport, she greeted Elise with a smile and never for one moment indicated that she was jealous of her superior skill.

  But Jeff knew, and Rette therefore avoided him. He came to the house one night to see Tony, and Loretta dodged upstairs, feigning an appointment to play pinochle with Gramp. Actually she hung around the upstairs hall, trying to hear snatches of their conversation as it drifted up the stair well. She hoped they would make an appointment to fly, and was delighted when she heard Tony tell Jeff he knew of a Cub trainer he could borrow. Yet a sense of shame kept her from joining them. She felt she had lost the right to any regard Jeff had ever held for her. She felt that she didn’t even merit Tony’s brotherly interest any more.

  Jealousy, most futile of emotions, bred in Loretta a new sense of inferiority, just when she was beginning to feel quite a person; just when she was beginning, also, to acquire a certain social place in the school scheme of things. She retreated into her shell, hard as a diamond-back terrapin’s, and spent most of her spare time brooding over Stick and Rudder, trying to get from the pages of the book the key to Elise’s success.

  “You’re not doing badly,” Pat told her, when Rette complained to her instructor that she felt inadept and clumsy. “Your reactions to the airplane are perfectly normal. You’re just a little rough with the controls, that’s all. Take it easy. Don’t be too impetuous. You’re not running a race.”

  Rette was practicing stalls, climbing and gliding turns, and landings now. She liked to land the plane, enjoyed calculating to a nicety the glide with which they approached the runway, and was proud that after a couple of trials she rarely bumped off the ground after settling. Pat’s “Good landing!” was frequent enough to be music in her ears.

  Daffodils were fading in the gardens of Avondale, and the dogwood was in full bloom by the time Rette went up to three thousand feet to do her spins.

  “Tell me if you begin to feel a little green,” Pat warned. “Getting airsick is no fun.”

  “I think I’ll be all right,” Rette told her, but she didn’t feel as confident as she sounded.

  There were two parachute packs in the plane in place of the usual back cushions. “Slip your arms into this harness,” Pat said to Loretta. “It’s just a formality, really. A spin is rather a simple maneuver.”

  “Oh, yeh?” Rette said inelegantly to herself. Aloud she asked, “Has Elise done her spins yet?”

  “Just yesterday.”

  “Funny. I saw her at school today and she never mentioned it.” Rette looked inquiringly at Pat, but the instructor, busy with the clips on her own harness, didn’t seem to hear.

  Two small boys in corduroy pants, who had obviously come out to the airport to see the sights, drifted over and watched Rette struggling with her own parachute straps.

  “Gee, girls!” one of them said. “D’you spose they’re stunt flyers?”

  “Betcha,” his friend replied.

  Their admiring glances made Rette feel like a veteran pilot as she climbed into the plane beside Pat. But a second later the boy who was standing by to prop took the wind out of her sails.

  “Naw,” he told the kid over his shoulder. “Pat Creatore’s just taking up a student for her spins.”

  “We’ll climb a little above three thousand,” Pat told Rette as they taxied over to the runway. “You need plenty of altitude, because even in doing a two-turn spin you’ll lose five hundred feet—maybe more.”

  Rette’s stomach felt tight as the instructor explained the maneuver. “It’s hard to put these planes into a spin, and they recover by themselves after two turns. They’re made that way, for safety’s sake. But you’ve got to know how to recover in case you go into a spin accidentally, through misuse of your controls.”

  “I see,” Rette said, trying to sound calm.

  As they flew at cruising speed toward the practice area, Pat explained that a spin is always preceded by a stall. “The instant you feel the stall, press your right rudder sharply forward, pull the stick back all the way, and hold it there. The plane will fall off toward the right wing and, with the nose pointing straight down toward the earth, we’ll start to rotate to the right.”

  Rotate seemed a mild word for what Rette knew would happen. She gulped and nodded, trying to listen carefully as Pat explained the method of recovery. “This is one time you should move the controls sharply. You ought to be good at this.”

  Rette grinned rather ruefully, knowing that a tendency to slap the plane around was her chief weakness. “I’ll bet,” she said.

  Under Pat’s direction she climbed to the required altitude. Elise got through it, Rette was thinking, so I can. She tried not to seem nervous but the palms of her hands were wet and so were her armpits. She kept watching the altimeter anxiously: 2800, 3000, 3100.

  “All right,” Pat said as casually as though she were discussing winding a ball from a hank of knitting yarn. “Let me have the controls now. You follow me through.”

  She chose a fix point, made sure there were no other airplanes below, then began to climb into a stall.

  Rette watched the stick coming back toward her under Pat’s practiced hand. Back, back, back—

  “Here’s the stall!” Pat called.

  Down went the nose of the plane. Pat kicked the right rudder sharply. Around went the plane, falling through space, nose down, like a conical top!

  Rette conquered a tendency to clutch at the wheel before her. Wind roared past the struts, and the earth below whirled like a motion picture gone wild. Upside down. Right side up. Sideways! Rette felt her neck jerked around like a flower in a storm.

  Suddenly the left rudder moved under Rette’s foot, and she could see the stick follow it forward. Pat neutralized the controls after the spin broke, and the airplane went into its recovery dive.

  Back on the stick. Easy. “There!” The plane leveled off and Pat glanced at her pupil.

  “See?”

  “Whee!” as Rette’s head cleared, she glanced at the altimeter. They were flying at a little over two thousand feet. She heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed.

  “See what?” “See how simple it is to bring a plane out of a spin?”

  “Simple!” Rette snorted.

  Pat grinned at her. “Feel all right?”

  “I’ll live,” Rette said without much conviction, then added prayerfully, “I-hope-I-hope.” Then she grinned back at Pat. “What I’m wondering is how I’ll ever have enough presence of mind to pull out of a spin by myself.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Pat assured her. “Your reactions are plenty fast.” She checked the sky below, then started to climb again. “I’ll tell you a modern nursery rhyme:

  ‘In a spin

  If you’re in doubt

  Just nose her down

  And she’ll come out.’”

  Rette laughed. “Where did you learn that?”

  Pat shrugged. “Haven’t the foggiest notion.” She glanced at the altimeter needle. “I’ll do one more. Then you can try a couple. O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” Rette agreed. During the next spin she made a determined effort to follow through on the controls during recovery. If she had to do this trick herself, she decided, she’d better get wise.

  Again she was dizzy, again her stomach s
eemed to be wrapping itself around her backbone, but on the next climb upward she realized with some astonishment that she hadn’t been frightened, exactly. The merry-go-round feeling in her middle disturbed her, but that was simply a physical reaction to the crazy tilting of the earth. Actually she had complete confidence in Pat and in the plane.

  “Ready to try a right spin yourself?” Pat asked after a minute or two of level flight.

  Rette nodded. She was reviewing in her mind each step of the maneuver, trying to make sure that when the time came she would be ready with the proper moves.

  “All right. Check for traffic below. Then line up with that railroad track.”

  Rette felt as though she were about to go off a high diving board for the first time, but she did as she was bidden, then nudged the plane up into a stall and kicked the rudder. Fortunately now that she was operating the controls herself, her body was not tense. She possessed the fine quality of relaxation when in action, that quality which makes great athletes. As the plane went into its spin she counted out loud.

  “One! Two!” Her recovery dive was steep, her pull-up a little too sharp, but there was no indecision in her reactions. Her parted lips and shining eyes told Pat how much she was enjoying the excitement of it.

  “Good girl!” the instructor called.

  “I ought to try it once more,” Rette said of her own accord, ignoring her still rebellious stomach.

  Pat nodded. “Try a left one this time,” she said, “and watch your stick pressure more carefully.”

  Rette nodded, and as the plane again winged over into its spin she noticed that her head was clearer than before, that the feeling of dizziness was gradually vanishing. She executed the maneuver with more precision, and Pat seemed very pleased.

  “Feeling a little less whirly?” she asked.

  “Much less.”

  “Fine.” Pat wanted to show Rette some accidental spins, so that she would know what can happen when a plane is flown carelessly or pushed beyond its capacity. They climbed back to three thousand feet and worked for fifteen minutes more before it was time to call it a day.