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

pay off debtsand taxes. He was gone for five days—he sent a postcard home with a picture of the White House and a message that arrived too blurred with rain or tears for us to read. As luck would have it, someone from Colorado had filed a patent on the same invention two years before.
    When she thinks of her father now, she sees him at the end of the day. That’s his time of day, twilight, or just before. The late afternoon, when the sun is setting, when it feels sad and beautiful, like the last day. When the sadness is too unbearable to think about, and this makes you strangely cheerful.
    Sam Chapman. He was my first real beau. He was a boarder in my parents’ house in California. He was an engineer, a college graduate from back East, with a dimpled, charming, carefree face and sloped, solid shoulders. One night, not long after we first met, he told me his life story on the darkened porch, as the sun set over the empty street, the smell of the desert blowing in on a dry wind. It wasn’t anything special. It was an American life, with a pleasant childhood, a family, an accident, a stint in the war. It was actually fairly dull. But no man had ever opened up to me that way, it was my first taste of intimacy. That night, I felt a ribbon of warmth work its way up the back of my neck, and later I noticed in themirror that my cheeks were flushed fuchsia. I had trouble going to the bathroom: I was too excited to pee.
    Sam escorted me to movies, and to amusement parks, and once we held hands at a Wobbly meeting, where, fired by the fury of the workers of the world, we almost kissed in public, but suddenly the hall was flooded with police. There were people in those days who believed the world could be a better place. Sam was one of them, but like many people who want the world to be better, he didn’t really like change. Instead, he wanted the world to change around him, while he kept his basically old-fashioned views.
    Once I started flying seriously, he let me know what he really thought of women pilots, and so our time together became strained. I attempted to take him up in a plane before I had my license, but when we crashed on the beach I was so unperturbed that he called me a selfish menace.
    As the shy skinny girl he first met grows into a woman, Sam begins to consider the possibility that their future together is not something to be taken for granted, and so he drives into downtown Los Angeles, withdraws his savings from the Western Bank, and purchases a diamond ring, all during the course of his lunch hour. Walking with her on the beach the next day, the light softly tangled in her blowing hair, her face seen veryclose and clearly for a moment like a shell suddenly uncovered by the tide, he feels that he is loving her for the first time, and his heart stops with dread when he hears her voice. It reaches him as if it were spoken from inside him.
    Oh, Sam, she says, I’m so flattered.
    He looks out at the water when she says this. He sees two sailboats moving at opposite ends of the ocean.
    What does that mean, flattered? he says to the water.
    It means that I’m honored you would think of asking me.
    It means no, that’s what it means.
    Years later, when she tells him before she tells anyone else that she is flying across the Atlantic, she recognizes the pained expression, the pinched eyes, the tightened mouth, from that day on the beach. She wants to laugh and pretend that he’s only pouting. Before she leaves, she asks him to tell her mother and sister for her as soon as she’s taken off. She gives him two letters to give to them. In the letters she writes that she knows what she’s doing. She accepts the hazards. She has to go.
    He watches her lips promise to send him a postcard from somewhere. Waving goodbye, he says to himself that that is her style: intimately heartless. He can tell by the way she smiles at him, that she has no idea how unhappy he is.
    •
    The temperature exploded. There is no other way to