Free I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jane Mendelsohn

for this sort of thing. After all, we’re struggling to survive. But in fact we have all the time in the world, and we haven’t yet discovered how to fill it.
    But they always make up by the end of dinner, over music. Noonan will take out his harmonica and she’ll sing. They sing ballads and ditties and advertising jingles, anything they can remember. Their favorite songs are “Home on the Range,” “Good Ship Lollipop,” and “Streets of Laredo.” She has a wavering, delicate voice, but she can carry a tune, and the harmonica gives her courage and helps her along. The reedy sounds of her thin singing and the mournful jauntiness of Noonan’s harmonica hang in the air long after they have put out the fire. The music keeps him sane when he is awake and the memory of it fends off bad dreams when he sleeps. In dreams the truth might be revealed to them, that they are each alone with their teasing glimmers and phantasms.
    It takes us all evening to make dinner. We drag it out, like the bickering. Actually, it takes all day. From the first light of dawn we are concerning ourselves with dinner, with food, with survival. We check the water collectiontanks. Depending on the precipitation and the dew, we shake off the leaves. By now Noonan’s rigged up a permanent device for extracting fresh water from salt. It works slowly, but we treasure every drop.
    Then we check on the crabs—we’ve built a coop and we’re fattening them up—and the fish colony we’ve created. Sometimes Noonan works on the boat he’s building, and I collect fruit, or work on my lean-to. Sometimes I write in my pilot’s log. We do what we have to to make the days fly.
    He sets out every afternoon to catch fish for dinner, and sometimes she comes along, the two of them chatting about odd subjects as they make their way along the reef flat to the inlet. If she doesn’t come, he has a smoke by himself, and signals to her when he’s ready to start preparing dinner.
    Then she will appear from the depths of the jungle, branches tangled in her wide-brimmed hat woven from dried leaves, carrying kindling for their fire. She has a flair for engineering, and so her arrangements of wood are always complex structures, and the more she misses flying the more elaborate they become. She builds replicas of the Hoover Dam, the Eiffel Tower, and then, when she is at her most despairing, a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge. This last one is too long and delicate to be efficient, and it possesses a sublime weightlessnessthat prevents Noonan from being able to light it. She exasperates him with her lofty creations.
    She feels that he uses too much sea salt in his cooking. She asks him casually, when she sees him measure out a handful, whether he is planning to put all of that in. Sometimes her criticisms are more direct, and usually his responses are bitingly defensive. But she has to admit that he’s an excellent cook. She’s too competitive to come right out and say it. Instead she lets the pressure of his expertise inspire her to create ever more inventive desserts. The last course has become her domain. They don’t have a wide variety of ingredients to choose from, and so she makes just about everything out of coconut.
    How do you want your coconut tonight? she asks.
    Medium rare, he says.
    Hmm, an aristocrat.
    It smells delicious, the coconut frying up over the fire, sweet and sugary, sizzling in its juices.
    When you think of life on a desert island, you get pictures in your mind of cannibals and pirates, of desolation and thirst. But at first it wasn’t at all like that for us. It really wasn’t bad. We dined on fresh fish and sea vegetables under a canopy of stars. I would throw another piece of coconut on the fire and Noonan would take up his harmonica. Anyone else stranded on a desert island would probably have wanted to die, but forhim the nights had never been more beautiful, the wind more gentle, the sea more calm. I missed my Electra, I missed it