Some Things About Flying Read Online Free PDF Page A

parachutes if they’re lucky, into the freezing air and down, expelled for misbehaviour.
    â€œI keep wondering how a nice English professor got to be so vulgar.” He uses the word “vulgar” as if it’s one of those chocolates that splash cherries and cream into the mouth; as if it’s delicious. “Was it something you read?”
    â€œAbsolutely. That, and a few other pleasures.” It is true, stories are not insignificant in a life, wherever they come from. Television also, Lila expects, although more, say, for her students than for herself. But what goes in comes out somehow; nothing is wasted or entirely lost, either to the keen observer or to the porous personality.
    This has little to do with vulgarity, but Tom, for instance, might be unnerved to know how alert she is to shifts of his limbs and to his alterations of tone. The alertness he does discern has sometimes annoyed him. She supposes it can make him feel exposed, or burdened. She supposes she might feel that way also, faced with acute attentiveness.
    But a smart child, and Lila was a smart child, keeps an eye, which is not a trick that gets unlearned, although it doesn’t necessarily get much sharper, either. She can sniff tension and identify camouflaged joy or distress, but that does not particularly help to track causes or ways to repair.
    â€œI learned practically everything I know from stories,” she tells him. “Reading them or watching them.” He will assume she is referring only to fiction, but she is not.
    A child has no way of knowing the origins of adult tensions, but a wise child knows they’re there, and when they’re dangerous. Not, for Lila, physically dangerous, not like that kind of terrible story, but with a kind of thick-aired, mysteriously grown-up resentment that could make it hard to breathe around the house.
    Whatever did this, a single, dramatic, huge event or a series of smaller, unforgivable, unforgettable sins, is beyond Lila, even now. But something between her mother and her father threw a silence like a sheet of glass between them.
    It couldn’t have been money; her father was in charge of a bank branch’s loans and mortgages and certainly earned enough for comfort. Not a woman, women, either: he was too perpetually, when not at work, around the house. A man? Surely not. Not her mother, a woman dedicated to doing good, if not exactly to goodness itself.
    Something sexual, then, between the two of them? Something profoundly passionate, at any rate, and secret.
    Could Lila have asked? After she became an adult and could have inquired as an adult, would they have answered her?
    If they had little to say to each other, they also had little to say about each other. In their different ways, they were ferocious, clasping their shared passionate secret tight to themselves.
    Lila and her brother Don endured painful dinners during which their father seldom spoke, and their mother chattered about her days, and Don’s and Lila’s days, her voice so falsely, brightly high that Lila’s teeth could ache by the end of a meal.
    At night her parents went separately to her room to tuck her in, and then to Don’s. Her father leaned down to kiss her forehead; her mother tugged the covers up and gave them a brisk, efficient pat. Then what did they do with the rest of their evenings, with no children between them? Supposing despair, Lila still cannot bear to imagine.
    She felt pulled between them like a rope. She felt she and Don held them together like a rope. The children of divorce, she thinks now, too often lack appreciation for their circumstances.
    Beginning school, she stared uncomprehendingly at Dick and Jane and their beaming, encouraging parents. From the bookshelf at home, A Child’s Garden of Verses didn’t echo with any vagaries of love she could recognize. Could her parents ever have resembled the Romeo and Juliet of her children’s version of