Everyone has two first cities—the one they were born in and the one they fell in love with. When I was twelve, I began my search for my second first city. I wanted to surrender to love. Of course, I lacked self-knowledge. I lurked on the edges of my life, taking everything in with heedful ears and eyes—school, my family, church, the empty wooded lots in our neighborhood, the poplar trees with their shimmering platinum leaves. I made snap judgements, imagined alternative lives for myself, listened at keyholes, behind staircases, on the bedroom telephone extension relishing conversations I was not meant to hear. I eavesdropped on the terrible fights between Odessa, our maid, and her lover.
I’d try anything if I could do it alone with no one observing me—turn cartwheels in my pediatrician’s waiting room, smoke cigarettes, purloin tomatoes and fat radishes from farmer Shedder’s field. I chose the outcast’s role. Or was my province thrust upon me?
I was an outsider because of Midwest ennui. Entropy. Stasis. Toledo was dark and yellow and full of delusion, like any place. The land was flat and so, with some exceptions, including me, were its collective lives. Before I could find that second city, I reinvented the one my parents tied me to.
I liked to lie in bed—a favorite place to plan, and eat, and daydream. Ohio place names held great attraction—Lima, Sandusky, Ashtabula, Xenia. And much further away from home foreign names intrigued me—Istanbul, Brisbane, Tangier, Guam, Carthage. I would visit all of them. How did they live there? Was it different from my externally ordered life? Did they have sock drawers? Music lessons? Fractions? Dinner at six sharp?
And then on those spring mornings when I woke early, with something so hopelessly promising. The air of northern Ohio rolling over the corn and tomato fields, flat-out, facing the horizon, lost in the cool thread of the corn.
Was I unchaste, was it high sentiment when I felt anything that passed my waist was pure, whether it was a hand or wind? Nothing in nature is that bad.
I memorized in concentric circles a strange acceptance of horrible events. Each time a poet seduces for information, each time she records the theft of musk, each season when she turns and falls in a determined dance, saying, “No pictures, please.”
It’s no good being soft in turns. It’s no good telling a matriarch, “Look, I will be a wife when I have stopped knowing how to love.” The matriarch has been watching and years ago clutched at the breast of a Valkyrie hovering over life’s battlefield choosing for Valhalla, choosing the poet, a doer, a maker, me.
Was I an immoral versifier? Did I close my eyes and wish I could be like everybody in Ohio? That every time I loved it would be different, that I would not abandon… everything?
I imagined conversations with shrewd people I knew and some I only knew through reading about the lives of writers:
It’s not necessary to know in advance how you are going to say what you desire to communicate, what you have already said a thousand times too quietly for anyone to hear.
Your words will surprise you. But the shape, the whole is there at the outset, only the urgency is vital.
There’s anxiety in the risk of ending the life of the measuring stick and beginning the setting forth. The writer’s uneasy separation must eventually become his style of life.
And there I was… stuck in my ramblings. Reviewing what I had written. Creating something out of nothing, dabbling in verisimilitude. A newspaper book review got it just right—I was completely at odds with my environment, a sort of fake who believed he was somebody but could furnish no evidence to prove it.
* * *
My mother rang a cowbell to call me and my two younger brothers home for dinner. I would be out in the woods behind our house doing nothing or next door joining a pick-up game of baseball, or over at Gus’s house shooting baskets in a game where I had to accumulate exactly 21 points to win. Go over 21 and my score was reduced to 11. Sometimes I would be up in my room reading and my mother wouldn’t know I was home.
Mother went out on our back porch, reached up and rotated the metal tongue inside the cowbell—two long peals, one short. Every house in our neighborhood had a cowbell and they all sounded different—high octaves to low. I wondered if the sound was supposed to annoy cows. Without any prior agreement I was aware of, every household had a unique sequence of peals. I believed the mothers struck a long note for each son and a short note for each daughter. Our closest neighbor had two sons and two daughters. Mrs. Whitaker sounded two long peals and two short.
“Sally, that’s your Mom. It’s your dinner,” we kids would call out in unison, sometimes just as Sally was hitting a foul ball.
“Larry, that’s for you,” we said five minutes later.
All dinners in our neighborhood were eaten between 5:30 and 6:15 when fathers came home from their offices. I had heard, actually overheard, as a result of systematic eavesdropping, that certain sophisticates my parents knew ate much later, around 7:00. But their children were in college. Or they were dead in World War II. I was always starving by 4:30 in the afternoon.
Dinner in our house was consistently good. My maternal grandmother was a good cook. She taught my mother. My aunt Nell, my mother’s younger sister, didn’t know how to cook at all. My father liked to tell the story of the time my mother took Aunt Nell into our kitchen to show her how to boil water for tea.
“Here, Nell, here’s the stove. All you have to do is turn this switch to high to heat the coil. Then you put the kettle on…”
“Stop. Stop at once, Viviane. You’ve already shown me too much.”
Aunt Nell, seven years younger than my mother, didn’t stay in her hometown. After college she went to New York and became a secretary, then a sought-after beauty and raconteur, a fashion editor and a spinster in that order. When I was eight our family visited Aunt Nell in New York. Soaking in her kitchen sink were a dozen yellow gladioli. I peeked at the note that lay on the counter: “I will never think less of you. Frank”
Aunt Nell was slim. So am I. My mother was average weight. When I was born I weighed nearly nine pounds—more than either of my brothers. And I came out feet first.
I thought Aunt Nell must be rich. Everything in her apartment, everything—the carpet, walls, furniture, towels, toilet paper, were shades of yellow. The extremes in the yellow pallet, I carefully noted, were the sofa—a creamy flaxen color and the foyer walls—a knock-your-eyes-out chrome.
Since my mother was a good cook, coached by my grandmother, my mother, in turn, knew how to teach Odessa new dishes to add to her Southern repertoire. We might start out a meal with whole artichokes stuffed with breadcrumbs and anchovies served with melted butter followed by a main course of Southern fried chicken and spoon bread. Every morning around ten my mother and Odessa pored over recipes to figure out the evening menu. I would eat anything. Lee, my brother three years my junior, didn’t eat anything green. Todd, my youngest brother, a bit of a dreamer like me, ate sparingly except when it came to desserts.
After dinner, in mild weather, we neighborhood kids went back outdoors until it got dark to ride our bikes, throw horseshoes, toss a pocketknife into the ground in a game of mumblety-peg. I had a scout’s pocketknife with two blades. When it was my turn to throw, I tossed my knife from various contorted positions to see if I could make it stick. Twilight was our time for hide and seek. When it was nearly dark, and I hadn’t yet come home, my mother rang the cowbell again. A series of short urgent peels. I had five minutes to get inside the front door.
“Stephanie Teresa Clark…”
“Mother… I’m sorry.”
At catechism class it was pointed out to me none of our family’s first names were saints’ names, but our middle names surely were.
“How many saints were named Teresa?” the teacher, a Dominican nun, asked me.
“I bet there are a lot of Saint Teresas,” I said.
“Why not find out? You remind me of one of them. She was stubborn. Very stubborn.”
Everyone laughed and then we went back to memorizing.
Later, Father Hayes told me he knew of two outstanding Saint Teresas. But Teresa of Ávila was his favorite.
“She was a mystic,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“A research topic for you. Take your time, it’s a complicated subject.”
“Someone who does magic?” I asked.
“Someone who understands mysteries.”
“I think about mysteries all the time. Maybe I’ll be a saint. Was she stubborn?”
“Extremely stubborn. Early in her life she certainly didn’t fulfill her family’s expectations.”
Looking in the Britannica I found four Saint Teresas except one of them, Theresa of Portugal, I wasn’t sure about because she was only beatified, not canonized. It wasn’t easy being a Catholic Democrat in our Protestant Republican neighborhood. None of my close friends were Catholic. They were Presbyterians or Lutherans. Their spiritual lives seemed much more casual than mine. For them, it wasn’t exactly believe what you want to believe, but close, I thought.
Once, my parents had to rush off to see my father’s parents in Indianapolis because his mother took a nasty fall on the ice. I was sent to stay for a week at my friend Debbie’s. On Sunday morning there was some discussion of driving me to the cathedral.
“Oh, I can skip Mass,” I said. “My parents wouldn’t mind.”
“Are you sure, Stephanie? You can come to church with us. I want to do what your mother expects…”
“I’d really like to go with you.”
The Presbyterian church and its service amazed me. No Latin—I understood every word. The sermon was about choice and knowing what’s really important. Reverend Duncan said because of its location on the main railroad line from New York to Chicago, Henry Ford wanted to build a plant in Toledo. Detroit was on a spur line adding to costs. Toledo city fathers made a choice. They voted no to Ford’s overture. Wow, I thought. That was dumb! What were they thinking? I almost felt like I could raise my hand and ask Reverend Duncan a question.
I discovered some things about my environs that really interested me. First and foremost were the behemoth cargo ships that roamed Lake Erie. My paternal grandparents had a summer cottage on the southwestern edge of the lake. Technically the cottage was located in Michigan, a few miles from the Ohio border. Having to cross into another state heightened my enjoyment of our summer visits. A foreign land, I thought, the air and customs are different.
Thirty feet from the cottage’s large front porch was a stairway of four concrete steps that linked the sloping lawn (full of tough crabgrass) to a small sandy beach. I’d sit on the steps and imagine the lives of the sailors aboard the enormous, far-off ships. Their fog horns made mournful, exciting sounds that carried long distances over the water. Where were the ships going? Did two ships ever bump into each other? They seemed to be in a hurry. What did the sailors eat? Would I want to marry a sailor? Gus told me the ships transported salt. Salt! A ship full of salt! I didn’t believe Gus (five years older than me) although he had been right about the non-existence of Santa Claus.
Long before it was legal, I learned to drive a car just by doing it on my own. When my parents were out of the house for an extended period, like on a trip without us kids, I got behind the wheel of my mother’s Willys Jeep station wagon. Odessa was terrified. Unable to convince me not to proceed, she gave up and became complicit. She sat in the backseat because she said it was safer. I drove at night. Once, on our dimly lit suburban street, I almost collided with another car. A classmate, also underage and high on freedom, was driving. He got out of his car to talk to me.
“Don’t tell,” he said.
“My lips are sealed,” I said back. I wondered, was our Jeep station wagon made in Toledo? Maybe it was made in Detroit. Anyway, Toledo and Detroit wished each other bad luck.
Toledo’s airport had only a few commercially scheduled flights a day. It was also home to several privately-owned corporate planes, mostly DC-3’s, that reliable workhorse, a pilot’s favorite. I had conquered driving without adult instruction. It was time to learn to fly. My parents had no idea I managed to take surreptitious trips to the airport. Parked in a hanger, I got to sit in the left seat, the captain’s seat, studied the DC-3’s instrument panel while fending off handsome pilots who found me pretty. They took me up. Let me practice.
Before going to sleep I rehearsed taking off:
Check for traffic
Set flaps
Add power
Hand on throttle
Airspeed is alive
Raise the tail
90 MPH, Rotate
Positive rate of climb
Gear up
Climb power
Climb at 110 MPH
Flaps up
My mother and I were returning on a private plane from a trip to New York where I took a test to assess my attitudes and knowledge. My parents were concerned about me. It turned out I was good at foresight and tweezer dexterity. The plane belonged to NPK Spark Plugs. The president of the company and his wife, good friends of my parents, and other guests were also on board.
We took off from a general aviation airport in New Jersey. Teterboro Airport to Toledo is 450 nautical miles, a three-hour flight on a DC-3. Midway through the flight I visited the cockpit. I’m sure my mother thought her curious daughter was just observing, maybe even making a nuisance of herself.
The pilot, Jim, and the first officer, Steve, were my secret instructors. I had led them to believe I had my parent’s permission for flying lessons. The sky was clear. Jim let me briefly take the left seat on the aircraft. Why is the captain’s seat the left seat? So a captain can operate the throttles with the right hand. I moved to the right seat, the first officer’s seat. Air Traffic Control advised an eight-knot wind right down the runway. Nothing to worry about. Steve went to the lavatory. As he passed my mother in the aisle she said, “Please tell Stephanie to come back to her seat.”
“At the moment, she’s flying the plane…” he said.
It wasn’t true. I found out later that’s all my mother heard before she fainted. This wasn’t the first time alarming news caused my mother to faint. She read too many Victorian novels. Deplaning she didn’t speak to me. When she took a prolonged look at me inside the airport, she said nothing. I was ready for: “How do you know how to fly?” My deviousness overwhelmed her. So did the illegalities. She drove us home in silence.
It is good to live in an unrewarding city. It leaves your mind clear for other things. Eventually I felt the ground shift. Perhaps embracing engines was my long way round to making peace with the world. I gave up on the idea of propeller-driven joy rides.
My mother never spoke of that afternoon to me—ever. Not even on her death bed when she revealed to me painful truths about her marriage to my father, spilling out poison she had bottled up for years. The subject of how and where I learned about flying never came up.