Read Online The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville - Free Book Online Page A

to the waitress and to her husband, and they smile at her, her husband turning slowly to his paper, the waitress no doubt thinking she’s a tourist, giddy from the climate. She leans back in her chair, rubs her hands over her bare arms, and thinks no, I live here now, this is my home, cold weather will not touch me, nor the cold seasons of the heart. She drinks her coffee, watches a tree full of wild parakeets outside the window, the silver watch on her husband’s left arm, his cheekbones tensing and relaxing as he reads. Last night they had gone outside, around midnight, and gone swimmingin the warm water of the Gulf. They had gone far enough away from shore that it felt as though there were only water and sky, both the same shade of blue-black, and holding onto one another, treading water and looking up at the stars, both of them had the same sensation, as though they were swimming through space, like a dream of falling and there’s no end to it, but a safe, euphoric falling, like flying. She reaches over now and touches his hand, asks him if it hadn’t been wonderful, swimming in the Gulf at night, and he puts the paper down, apologizes for not paying enough attention to her. He says he’ll be sorry when his job starts next week, that he might get too tired for a while to do anything like swimming at night, and she says she can’t imagine that it could really be like any job he’s been used to, not here. He laughs, and they begin to eat. My eggs taste like lemon, she says, sweet lemon. (Days before she had, automatically, tried to remember what she needed to be worrying about, a holdover from the way she used to feel, and she had found that there was nothing, nothing she was worried about. She’d even begun to forget old worries—the dreariness of Illinois, problems as a child—and could remember only the good times, the comfortable times, as though she had taken thread and made a stitch in every pleasant memory she had and drawn them together with the dark places hidden in folds, gone. And she herself is expanding, infinitely, a balloon that is not brittle, that will not break.)
    As usual, he finishes eating before she does and sits drinking coffee and pointing out articles in the paper. There are new color photographs in here of Venus, he says. He shows them to her. The joy rises and settles inher chest like something tangible. She feels that she could run, climb mountains, and still it wouldn’t be released. How amazing that those colors have been there all along, she says, and no one to see them. Yes, he says, amazing. He says that he might get a telescope, that he might make astronomy a hobby. He had never talked about hobbies in the North, had been so involved in his work there. She touches his hand again, knows she can’t begin to explain how wonderful his saying that makes her feel. She turns to watch a dolphin, eats a piece of toast, and listens while he calmly talks about theories of the edge of space, the birth and eventual death of the sun, colliding galaxies, in between sips of coffee. Many scientists now think, he says, that the universe is expanding and will some day fall back into a cosmic egg and then explode again into a new one, will pulsate, which makes time stretch infinitely and allows cataclysmic things to happen, as they do biologically, which we can understand, but only so long in the future that it doesn’t concern us and helps us feel less responsible. Some theories, he says, are more reassuring than others. She nods, smiles, thinks that sounds as logical as Superman and the planet Krypton and other science fiction, wonders if she plants a poinsettia now if it will bloom this Christmas, wonders when their grapefruit tree will bear fruit that she can pick in the mornings with a wicker cesta. She can find the Big Dipper and the North Star, and she saw them last night and she’s seen them in Illinois, and the Indians saw them, and the Greeks saw