I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jane Mendelsohn Page B
Authors: Jane Mendelsohn
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was stung by the six-foot tentacle of a jellyfish. We hobbled our way back to the fire, which was by then a pile of ashes and shark’s teeth, and we dragged ourselves inside the shack, where I fell asleep for thirteen hours. Noonan told me he stayed awake, he had a hard time not waking me, but instead he watched the breath flow in and out of my nostrils, with a concentration that he had not devoted to anything since he had tried to watch a flower grow when he was a child. When I woke up he was able to tell me all about my dreams.
Three days later, after a supper of the last of the shark fin soup, they went for a midnight swim in the lagoon, where they were both struck at the same moment with the realization that they had never been so happy. Implicit but unspoken in their epiphany was the understanding that they had never been happy before at all. Each of them had known pleasure, and triumph, and satisfaction, but they had never really tasted happiness. They said nothing of this to each other, not only becauseit wasn’t necessary to say out loud, but also because to say it would have made them both inconsolably sad. Instead they performed tricks for each other in the water, and Amelia pretended to be a bareback rider like the women she had seen in circuses as a child. She stood high on a rock with her body three quarters exposed and she held out her arms in a soaring gesture as if she were floating in the air. She had flowers in her hair and the water dripped from her neck over her breasts and down her stomach. She looked like a statue come to life: part woman, part fountain, part tree.
That, along with so many other images of her captured in the course of their long association, will suddenly appear to him at the whim of fate, and disappear just as quickly when he sees her real face, lined and tan and intent on something. But the images, they live a life of their own in his mind, and he measures the passage of time less in terms of his own experience than in the changing expression of her form.
When she is old, gray-haired, he will love her for all of the seasons she contains.
One day, while she was napping, he went to catch fish in his favorite spot, a wild inlet where the coral reef teemed with tropical life, and he sat down to meditate before he worked. All at once, in the bright blue mirror ofthe sky, he caught a glimpse of an airplane barely visible on the horizon. It grew clearer. It developed before him as if it were a picture of a plane, coming to life in a chemical solution. It moved with a speed that he had not witnessed in so many months that it seemed supernatural, and it appeared to be heading directly toward the island. He watched it with a calm detachment at first, because he assumed it was a hallucination.
Holding his breath, he observed the machine at his leisure. He saw it grow large as if seen through time-lapse photography, and he saw it glide stealthily over the island, in wide circles, like a shark. From his solitary position he watched the plane as if he were watching an episode from his past or his future fly by, and he lingered, for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, escaping history. Then he caught six yellow fish for dinner and smoked a little on his pipe to pass the time until he saw the plane sweep around in one last arc and disappear into the slowly fading blue. It passed close enough above him so that he thought he could make out black pontoons for landing on the water.
It isn’t until two hours later, over dinner, that he tells her about the plane.
You know what, she says, I was right. You’ve been smoking too much of that stuff.
•
She is heading to check the water collection tanks, making her way through jungle still redolent of last night’s rain, when she looks up through the canopy of leaves. She has to repress a trembling unlike anything she has ever experienced when she sees the image of her dreams and her nightmares crawling across the space of sky delineated by a
Three days later, after a supper of the last of the shark fin soup, they went for a midnight swim in the lagoon, where they were both struck at the same moment with the realization that they had never been so happy. Implicit but unspoken in their epiphany was the understanding that they had never been happy before at all. Each of them had known pleasure, and triumph, and satisfaction, but they had never really tasted happiness. They said nothing of this to each other, not only becauseit wasn’t necessary to say out loud, but also because to say it would have made them both inconsolably sad. Instead they performed tricks for each other in the water, and Amelia pretended to be a bareback rider like the women she had seen in circuses as a child. She stood high on a rock with her body three quarters exposed and she held out her arms in a soaring gesture as if she were floating in the air. She had flowers in her hair and the water dripped from her neck over her breasts and down her stomach. She looked like a statue come to life: part woman, part fountain, part tree.
That, along with so many other images of her captured in the course of their long association, will suddenly appear to him at the whim of fate, and disappear just as quickly when he sees her real face, lined and tan and intent on something. But the images, they live a life of their own in his mind, and he measures the passage of time less in terms of his own experience than in the changing expression of her form.
When she is old, gray-haired, he will love her for all of the seasons she contains.
One day, while she was napping, he went to catch fish in his favorite spot, a wild inlet where the coral reef teemed with tropical life, and he sat down to meditate before he worked. All at once, in the bright blue mirror ofthe sky, he caught a glimpse of an airplane barely visible on the horizon. It grew clearer. It developed before him as if it were a picture of a plane, coming to life in a chemical solution. It moved with a speed that he had not witnessed in so many months that it seemed supernatural, and it appeared to be heading directly toward the island. He watched it with a calm detachment at first, because he assumed it was a hallucination.
Holding his breath, he observed the machine at his leisure. He saw it grow large as if seen through time-lapse photography, and he saw it glide stealthily over the island, in wide circles, like a shark. From his solitary position he watched the plane as if he were watching an episode from his past or his future fly by, and he lingered, for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, escaping history. Then he caught six yellow fish for dinner and smoked a little on his pipe to pass the time until he saw the plane sweep around in one last arc and disappear into the slowly fading blue. It passed close enough above him so that he thought he could make out black pontoons for landing on the water.
It isn’t until two hours later, over dinner, that he tells her about the plane.
You know what, she says, I was right. You’ve been smoking too much of that stuff.
•
She is heading to check the water collection tanks, making her way through jungle still redolent of last night’s rain, when she looks up through the canopy of leaves. She has to repress a trembling unlike anything she has ever experienced when she sees the image of her dreams and her nightmares crawling across the space of sky delineated by a
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