Learning to Fly

It was the duck feathers that gave me the idea. Emily and Clyde waddled, quacked and splashed in the child’s inflatable pool that dominated our backyard. Their feathers dotted the browning lawn like random snowflakes. Ocean breezes raked the down into little piles alongside chain-link fence and folded aluminum lawn chairs.

We lived in the vast sprawl of plywood painted beige that was Fort Ord, California, where all the streets and houses looked the same but were distinguished by the names and ranks of our fathers, posted on little signs in postage-stamp front yards. “Capt. Roger D. Bailey,” said our sign. I had no idea why that made me proud.

Across the street was Capt. Earl F. Edmondson, father of a ruddy, burly troop of boys and husband to a bosomy Swedish woman who wore plaid flannel shirts and looked as if you could sit on her lap or hug her and she wouldn’t mind. The Edmondsons would throw crab feeds and fish fries on their picnic table, weekends when Capt. Earl and the boys had good catches in Monterey Bay. On foggy summer days, my mother and Mrs. Edmondson yakked over coffee while we kids were sent out to play. Two or three cups were good for two or three hours. Mom did love to talk.

We could play anywhere – what could be safer than an Army base? So we climbed the sandy, ice plant-covered dunes back behind our quarters, tossing hard, pointy pieces of the sticky succulent at each other until our clothes were stained green and one of the Edmondson boys aimed close and hit too hard.

My sister and I, too proud to cry, found a way to distract the boys that was as respectably macho as a lethal ice plant toss. “Let’s play in the bivouac,” we’d say. Then, passing the sign that said “Danger! Keep Out!” we’d scramble up more dunes and see who could pick up the most spent ammo to use in our own fort made of twigs and sea grass.
———–
On this boring Saturday, the Edmondson boys are out fishing. I’ve already jumped 100 times on my pogo stick, and walked around the house six times on my stilts. My sister and best friend Laura is watching cartoons in the closet we use as a TV room, and our aloof older sister Janet is in the living room, reading a book. You do not bother Janet when she is reading a book.

I try to catch Emily, but she will have none of it, orange beak squawking as loudly as if I were wielding a hatchet. She web-foots it into the safety of the pool, indignant. Truth be told, Emily and Clyde aren’t that much fun. It’s cool that we have them and everything. Nobody else has ducks — I think it’s against base rules. My mom hates base rules. And anyway, she says, pets help kids adjust. So every two years when we wind up someplace new my sisters and I look forward to guinea pigs or a rabbit, a parakeet, hamsters or, now that I am eight, ducks.

Slimy green duck poop dots our tiny lawn, and soft white feathers collect in a snowy line like remnants of a Christmas tree ruffle at the base of our house. Put all those feathers together, a girl could make actual wings.
I look up at the carport — a flat, tar-and-gravel roof held up by spindly wooden posts. I’d climbed up there several times, hoisting myself up a drainpipe attached to the house, my foot braced on a window ledge halfway up. From there it’s just two monkey-bar pulls to the top, and I’m on the roof of the carport. It isn’t even as high as the roof of our three-bedroom house. Barely high enough to fit the 1958 Ford sedan. You’d get hurt jumping off of it. I know that. But with wings…?

I go inside to the closet/TV room, and take one of the folded moving boxes from against the wall. Seeing my big sister at the dining room table with her homework, I sneak into her bedroom to steal scissors, paste and a ballpoint pen. I carry these and the moving box outside to the narrow concrete driveway. Laura, who is nine-and-a-half, is still on her stilts but sees me with the pilfered supplies, asks what I am doing and agrees to help with my enterprise. She is the better artist and has a sense for shapes and sizes so, holding the cardboard up to my outstretched arms, she draws wings to perfect scale.

“I want to cut them!” I demand, and as usual she patiently complies. I take the scissors and quickly become frustrated with my inability to cut neatly on the lines.
“It’s all crooked!” I complain.
“Here,” she says, and while she finishes the job I explain that the feathers will cover the crooked parts, anyway.

The two of us collect a few handfuls of duck feathers and begin pasting them to the cutout cardboard. When we run out of both feathers and patience with pasting, I eat a little of the paste instead, enjoying a tangy sweetness that won’t leave my tongue. Then I begin filling in the blank parts of my wings with the pen, drawing shapes I imagine being feather-like, in blue ballpoint ink.
The result is a perfect set of bird limbs, smelling of library paste and duck doo, shaped more like rectangles than wings, decorated sporadically with feathers and ink scrawls.

I scramble up to the roof. Laura manages to get onto her stilts while holding arm-length cardboard, and hands me one wing at a time. Then she hoists herself up as well.
“You wanna go first?” I ask, the only time I have ever uttered those words.
“It was your idea,” Laura offers, also a first.
“Okay, how should I hold them?”
“Hold them at the bottom, I guess…”
I maneuver the wings but am unable to keep them from drooping forward.

“This isn’t going to work,” Laura says now, alarm beginning to register in her voice. Then she begins to giggle. I am offended, and relieved.
“Yes, it will!” I insist, now confident that my sister will save me from my impulses, this not the first time.
I peer over the roof, leaning forward with my wings.
“Don’t!” she shouts. I move back.

“We needed more feathers,” Laura now says, consoling.
“Yeah,” I concede. “If we had more feathers, we could fly.”