“Cut him off! Cut him off!” Boom shouted.
Cut him off? He wants me to cut off a plane? Using my plane?
“Bank left!” Boom ordered.
Cautiously, I eased the plane to the left.
“Harder! Harder!”
Clenching my teeth, I applied more pressure to the stick. The plane rolled violently sideways into a ninety-degree bank. The wings were completely vertical. I stole a glance out the left window. Eerily, all I saw was a wall of water.
“Tip the nose down!” he commanded.
I followed his order and suddenly we were dropping nose-first toward the ocean. My body felt empty. It was a horrible sensation.
“Oh, what’s happening?” I asked in a rising tone of alarm. “Can you jump in here, please?!”
Boom was unfazed. “No, you’ve got it.”
Instinctively, I pulled up on the nose and straightened out the plane, so that I was driving like a car, with the water beneath us. That was better.
“What are you doing? Don’t look where you’re going!” Boom reprimanded. “Look for the enemy!”
I blinked at him. The enemy?
“Lenny! Remember, lose sight, lose the fight!”
Right. Lenny. I braced my elbow on my headrest and shifted in my seat. I craned my neck, frantically scanning for a plane amid the blueness. Where the hell had he gone? You’d think he’d be easy to spot in an empty sky, but it was not like standing on a flat plain and looking for someone in the distance. He could’ve also been below me or above me.
Suddenly Lenny was upon us. While I had been struggling with the plane, he’d swung in behind and nailed me. White smoke poured out of my tail. The entire dogfight was over in a matter of minutes.
“Good kill,” Boom congratulated Lenny over the radio. Then he turned to me. “You’re doing a great job. Just remember, concentrate on watching the enemy, you can’t hurt the plane.”
“No offense, but I don’t give a crap about the plane. It’s me I’m worried about hurting!”
He chuckled good-naturedly. “As long as the plane is safe, you’re safe.”
We lined up for the second dogfight. This time around I was less nervous as we charged toward each other. We passed, left wing to left wing; then Lenny fanned out to the right and I went left. For a second I was unsure of what to do next.
Boom hollered, “He’s above us! Don’t let him get away. Pull back! Pull back all the way! Pull! Pull!”
Slowly but firmly, I drew the stick toward me until it could go no farther. The earth dropped away as I steered the plane straight up. We were in a high climb, crusading against gravity. All I could see was the white blue sky and Lenny. Something was happening. What was this? I was pinned back in my chair, slumped over to the right, head tilted so far that it was practically resting on Boom’s shoulder. I looked like someone should be wheeling me out during a telethon. The g-forces were so intense that I couldn’t lift my head, not even an inch. I couldn’t move anything.
“Keep pulling!” Boom was saying. I felt the g-forces coaxing the control stick out from under my fingers. If it popped out of my hand, we’d lose our thrust. All I could think of was the demonstration of what happened if you half-ass a backflip.
It was hard to speak, as if gravity was trying to keep the words down. In a feeble voice, I pleaded, “Help . . . me.” That was all I could manage.
To my relief, Boom took over the stick. He steered us behind the bogey, lined it up in the crosshairs, and squeezed the trigger. White smoke streamed forlornly out of Lenny’s tail. Boom hooted with pleasure. As he maneuvered the plane, I could only stare straight ahead. Clouds and ocean and sky twisted and turned in my eye line, as if through a kaleidoscope. Suddenly the pressure on my body ebbed. I could move again. I lifted my head and straightened in my seat and saw that we were flying right side up.
“Wow, that was intense,” I breathed.
Boom gave me a happy nudge. “Congratulations. You won!” he said graciously.
My face was stuck in a huge, goofy smile. I didn’t care that I hadn’t pulled the trigger, I still felt like I’d won. Holy shit, I thought, I’m actually doing this.
There is no such thing as “down” during dogfights, I realized. The sooner you wrapped your head around that, the more success you’d have. Down was whichever way your butt happened to be pointing at any given time. You couldn’t worry about where you were in relation to the ground. You had to keep your focus on the target.
“I got beat by a girl,” Lenny moaned over the radio. I snickered even though Boom made the kill. Let him live in ignorance.
I was fired up as our third and final dogfight began. Fwoom! Lenny was a blur as we raced past each other.
“Do you see him?” Boom prompted in that teachery tone that implied he knew the answer but wanted me to figure it out for myself. I twisted around in the cockpit, skimming the sky for the bogey.
“Wait, where is he? . . . Oh, I see him!” He was off on the left below us, turning around so he could get behind me.
I rolled the plane to the side with the nose low and began an inverted dive. The ocean twinkled happily in front of me as I dropped toward it, but it was a nonentity. I was so focused that all fear was gone. Dr. Bob had been right. As long as I concentrated on killing the enemy, I stopped worrying about what my plane was doing. The bogey was the only thing that existed right then. I dropped until I was below Lenny; then I twisted the opposite way and pulled my nose up, climbing back up to his level. Now I was behind the bogey, fixing him in my crosshairs.
“You got it. Fire! Fire!” Boom said. I squeezed the trigger and got off a few rounds, none of which connected.
Suddenly Lenny drifted out of the gunsight. I unsquinted my right eye and look out the window. Now he was above us, over my left shoulder, and about to give chase.
My eyes narrowed. Don’t even try it, bitch.
I did a high sweeping turn and pulled back on the control stick. My plane’s nose tilted upward and we were in a climb. I zoomed over after the bogey, determined to make the kill this time. I was closing in. Almost got it . . . almost . . . There was a loud banging sound and the wings started shaking. Buffeting. I was too steep. The airplane was about to stall. Fuck. Fucking fuck. I quickly shoved the nose forward and we tipped forward suddenly and it felt as though we were on the crest of a roller coaster so I jerked the nose back up. When I got the plane level again, I looked around for Lenny.
“Okay, where did he go?” I asked.
“He’s right behind us.”
“Oh no!” I cried. “How do I get away from him?!”
“You don’t,” Boom said flatly. “He just shot us.”
“Oh.”
“I think it’s about time to head home,” Boom said, taking back the controls.
Already? That was it? But I was just getting the hang of it! I wanted to try another barrel roll. I didn’t even care that I’d lost two of the three dogfights and that Boom had technically won mine for me. I had flown! Not only flown, but fought in air-to-air combat. And I hadn’t freaked out or cried or asked to go home. I’d maintained possession of my stomach contents. I felt myself glowing. I could do anything. Anything. I was a warrior. Boom steered us in the direction of the flight school.
“Do you want to fly again?” he asked.
I nodded enthusiastically.
“Okay, you have the plane.”
I was in the lead. I glanced over my right shoulder and saw Lenny following on my wing. He was less than ten feet away, but I was at full throttle so I couldn’t speed up and put distance between us. Why is he so close? Step off, Lenny! Oh, he’s taking a picture of me. While he’s driving. That can’t be safe. Still, I grinned and gamely gave him the thumbs-up, just so he’d turn his attention back to navigating. He took the photo, gave me a thumbs-up in return, and dropped back a little. When the airp
ort bobbed into view, Boom took back the controls. We had to separate the planes so we could land.
“Say good-bye,” Boom instructed me.
I pressed the radio button and said, “Byyyyeeeeeee—” but the word turned into a squeal when Boom banked sharply to the left.
“A little notice next time?” I asked.
He laughed and continued circling around toward the opposite end of the runway. We were maybe five hundred feet off the ground when the plane began to buck. Boom took a firmer hand with the control stick, wrestling with the beast.
“Thermal turbulence,” Boom explained. “Caused by hot air rising off the earth. It’s always worst in the afternoon when the ground is the hottest.”
The plane was jerking, dipping. We were slaloming toward the landing strip. For the first time that day I was genuinely afraid for my safety. Instinctively I grabbed the bottom of my seat with my hands, but remembering my conversation with Dr. Bob, I immediately let go. An alarm in the cabin buzzed relentlessly: Eh! Eh! Eh!
Boom started flipping switches furiously. Oh shit. Something was wrong. After all that, only to be killed on the return? I cased the woods to our left. If we crashed into the treetops, maybe they’d soften our landing? No, it was going to be one of those fiery affairs, I could tell. Black smoke corkscrewing into the sky. Firefighters in silver suits. Local news helicopters muscling in for the best aerial shot to capture the carnage. Or maybe the force of the crash would eject me, Goose-like, from the plane? Only I would break through the Marchetti’s flimsy canopy. “Are you sure there were two pilots?” the first officer on the scene would ask Slick. “There was only one body.” They’d find me a week later lodged in one of the trees. Dental records would be procured for identification purposes, my face having already been eaten by wildlife.
Eh! Eh! Eh! Boom was still fumbling, not telling me what was going on.
Matt had been so cute earlier taking pictures of me—the last photos!—before we’d taken off. After I was gone, there would be newspaper stories about me and the project, the sad irony of it all. It would scare the shit out of readers. Inadvertently, I would uninspire thousands. They’d take to their couches, eschewing bravery for television sitcoms and cop shows. I’d be the anti–Eleanor Roosevelt.
The noise stopped and Boom settled back in his chair. I exhaled with relief. In retrospect, the whole thing had lasted less than ten seconds.
“That was the automatic landing gear alarm,” he explained. “If you go below a specific altitude and you’ve forgotten to lower the wheels, it lets you know.” I could hear the wheels whirring into position. He chuckled. “Sometimes the plane is smarter than we are.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that before we took off.”
The wheels eeeaaaaked onto the runway. As we were taxiing, Boom ripped back the canopy and, without realizing it, bonked me mightily on the head.
“Doesn’t that feel good!” he exclaimed into the breeze.
As we rolled to a halt and climbed out of the cockpit I spotted Matt waiting off to the side on the runway. When he saw that I was grinning and not in need of sedation, he pulled out a video camera and peppered me with questions.
“Would you do it again?” he asked.
“I would, actually!” It was slightly embarrassing to admit. I’d spent weeks worrying and whining about this one hour. The scariest thing I’d done in my life so far turned out not to be all that scary—fun even. It made me wonder what else I was missing out on. Also, what other things in my life was I unnecessarily wasting time and energy worrying about?
“Was it scary?” Matt asked as I climbed down the wing.
“Nah,” I said, then qualified: “Well, maybe a little during the landing . . .”
Matt took pictures of Boom and me, then of the two of us standing with Lenny and Slick in front of my plane.
“Can I get a few more shots of you two in front of the tail end?” Matt asked Boom. “Would you mind?”
“Take as much time as you want. We get all sorts of crazy requests,” Boom said. “We’ve had women strip down to bikinis and pose lying on top of the plane. Someone else had us take a picture while she did a handstand on the wing.”
Later, after we’d said our good-byes, I opened the car door to find a paper plate on my seat with half of a funnel cake on it. “I went to the car show next door,” Matt said sheepishly. “Saved you some!” As he negotiated our way back onto the Long Island Expressway, I paused while licking the sugar off my fingers.
“Hey wait, I never got my call sign!”
“What?”
“Boom told me I’d get my fighter pilot nickname at the end of the day. He must have forgotten.”
“So call him and ask.”
I winced. I never liked calling strangers—a ridiculous admission for a former reporter, I know. Even as a kid, it had taken years before I could comfortably order a pizza. It got much better as I got older; then e-mail and texting arrived like manna from heaven for the telephone challenged. In the last few years, especially, as my life shifted even more toward writing and the Internet, I’d regressed to being the child who wished I could ask a parent to call on my behalf.
I picked up the phone to call Boom several times over the next week. In the end, I chickened out. I went to the Air Combat USA website, e-mailed the webmaster and got Boom’s e-mail address from her. After a few throat-clearing lines of “hey, remember me?,” I finally asked the question: “So what’s my call sign?”
A few days later I received a reply. “Despite your initial quavers, ya done good,” Boom wrote. “Aggressive to the point where I had to throw a leash on you to keep from overextending. Hence, from henceforth, in fighter pilot circles, you shall be known as Fearless. Hope you do fly with me again, because afterward the cry will be, ‘Fearless, you’re buying the beer!’ ”
For a few moments, I just stared at the e-mail, smiling. I’d felt like a bit of a coward for e-mailing instead of calling, but now I was grateful that I could keep this conversation forever. Still, I wanted to atone for my sin. I picked up the phone, and when the person on the other line picked up, I said, “Mom? You won’t believe the e-mail I just got . . .”
Chapter Seven
My life can be so arranged that I can live on whatever I have. If I cannot live as I have lived in the past, I shall live differently, and living differently does not mean living with less attention to the things that make life gracious and pleasant or with less enjoyment of things of the mind.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Fall continued apace. So did my Year of Fear with a random assortment of daunting tasks. I took a pole-dancing class. Jessica had refused to go with me (“I’m sorry, Noelle, but I have my limits”), but I left with considerably more respect for the hardworking ladies of the exotic dancing industry. Despite a lifelong fear of needles, I submitted to acupuncture, a horrifying one-hour event where I watched a man painfully insert needles into the tops of my feet and the tender webs of skin between my toes. I went back to trapeze school and spent two months training for a recital, where I performed—in costume—before hundreds of people.
I didn’t wear makeup for two weeks. If this doesn’t sound scary, you’re not from Texas. In Texas, if you leave the house “without your face on,” you might as well actually leave the house without your face on. People will react with the same level of revulsion. As a freelancer, I had days where the only person I saw was the guy who worked at the deli on the corner. Yet I found myself applying makeup to go order a sandwich. After more than fifteen years of wearing makeup every day, I realized, I’d come to think of my made-up face as my real face. Without makeup, I felt vulnerable, less than. So I decided to stop wearing it until I made peace with my face. My mom, who slept in her makeup for the first two years of my parents’ marriage and to this day was always fully fragranced, was appalled. When she found out I went to a party barefaced, she
said, “I wouldn’t check the mail without makeup on, let alone go to a social gathering. That’s just not—well, it’s not done.” It took two weeks, but I knew I was finally comfortable with myself when I spotted a former crush from college in a subway station and instead of ducking my head or flinching, I marched right up to him and, with rosacea and acne on full display, said, “Hey! Long time, no see!”
Now four months into the project, I decided that, to understand Eleanor, I was going to have to see her house. And to truly see Eleanor’s house, I also had to see Franklin’s house.
“Franklin’s house?” Matt sounded confused as we climbed into bed. I was sleeping over at his apartment that night because, bless him, even though he’d driven in from Albany just a few hours before, the next day he’d be sacrificing his entire Saturday to accompany me upstate to visit the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York. “You mean they didn’t live together?”
“They did for the first twenty years of their marriage. I’ll explain on the drive up tomorrow.”
Matt set his reading glasses on the bedside table and had just turned off the light to go to sleep when I suddenly threw back the covers and leaped out of bed. “Oh no, I haven’t done my scary thing for today! I’ve been so focused on tomorrow that I forgot all about it.” I pulled off my nightshirt—a black T-shirt Jessica had given me that said I SLEEP AROUND—and wriggled out of my panties.
Matt squinted at me through bleary eyes. “What are you doing? It’s one in the morning!”
“I’m going to run down the hallway! Be right back.” Running down the hallway naked had become my go-to if I got to the end of the day and nothing scary had come up. I’d yet to run into a neighbor, but it never failed to be scary. Before Matt could respond, I threw open his front door and tore out of his apartment.
The ride was two and a half hours, about as much time as I needed to explain to Matt the complicated living arrangements of this couple. Franklin’s father was twenty-six years older than Franklin’s mother, Sara. James Roosevelt was a widower with a grown son Sara’s age. By the time Franklin came along in 1884, James was fifty-four and not much interested in parenting. He even had Franklin call him “Mr. James.” But Sara tended to her son like a prizewinning orchid. She raised him at Springwood, the family estate on the banks of the Hudson River in Hyde Park. The house staff addressed the boy as “Master Franklin,” and his smallest accomplishments were met with glowing praise. And while this kind of acclaim can produce disastrous results (children who overestimate their talents, enter the real world, and wilt at the first hint of rejection or criticism), it worked out brilliantly, not just for Franklin but for America as well. It takes a considerable amount of presumptuousness to believe you can lead a country out of a Great Depression. James Roosevelt died when Franklin was eighteen, causing Sara to cling even more possessively to her only child. She was cold toward Eleanor when the two announced their engagement, as she would have been toward any rival for her son’s affections. When Eleanor moved in with them at Springwood, it was the stuff of bad sitcoms.
My Year with Eleanor Page 11
