Rosa waited with itchy impatience for the appointed day. The trip to Los Angeles International was novelty enough. From the waiting room at the gate she was able to study in gratifying detail the silvery bodies of Vanguards, Convairs, 707s. They were cumbersome on the ground; out of their element, like beached whales. The distant runways turned them into sleek sky-things through the redeeming magic of speed and altitude. Watching, Rosa trembled with excitement.
The boarding call startled her. After an eternity of waiting, it seemed almost—too soon.
Their plane was a new Douglas DC-8 Super 61, a stretched version of the standard DC-8. Rosa had picked out, had insisted upon, a window seat, and she watched with honed attention as the luggage was loaded from a cart, thumping into an invisible space under the passenger compartment; listened with keen ears to the final latching of the door, revving of engines, rumble of wheels as the taxiing began.
She was able to see the runway before the plane turned for takeoff. The runway was long and empty, a strange road for this massive machine. The stewardess demonstrated oxygen masks and advised passengers that their seat cushions could be used for flotation. Rosa watched and listened with a sense of unreality. Flotation? She was interested in flying, not floating.
Then the engines whined to a higher pitch. The sound invaded every part of the plane: the bulkhead, the window, her seat, herself. A brake was released and the aircraft began to roll.
To accelerate. She had not been prepared for this brutal burst of speed. From below, every takeoff had seemed graceful. Elegant. From inside, it was patently an act of force. The wings, which had seemed so solid, bounced and wobbled against the air. The fuselage rattled as if its rivets were about to pop.
And Rosa began to entertain her first doubt.
Was this practical? Would all this machinery really work? Could this fragile bus possibly sustain itself a mile from the surface of the earth?
She believed in flight. She was not sure she believed in the invulnerability of engine parts manufactured by sweaty men in a Pratt Whitney factory.
But then the wheels lifted from the runway… and she was flying.
The DC-8 rose with the prompt efficiency of an elevator. The ground simply dropped away at an angle that seemed to Rosa precipitously steep… She couldn’t help imagining the DC-8 as if on a hill, stalling and rolling backward.
Her hands began to sweat. She wiped them on her skirt.
There was a knot of excitement in her stomach. I’m flying, she told herself. This is the real thing; I am true-to-God FLYING. She gazed at Los Angeles below her, its gridwork vanishing into a gray diffusion of smog. The aircraft tilted and seemed to rotate around the point of the wing as it banked over the Pacific. Rosa’s parents read magazines. Incredible, she thought. Her mother read Redbook. Her father read Time. As if they were in some dentist’s waiting room! Not a metal cylinder high above the ocean!
The airplane circled as it rose until it was high and heading east.
A stewardess offered soft drinks. Rosa said, “No, thank you.” The knot of excitement in her stomach had become… something else.
She felt flushed and hot and unwell. Her eyes crept to the window and back again. If she didn’t look at the window, she wouldn’t see the ground. Wouldn’t be reminded of their astonishing height. Of the distance the plane would fall, if it fell.
But I’m FLYING!
But she wasn’t. She was just sitting here, strapped in. Helpless! In a metal box, suspended above the San Gabriel Mountains by the clumsy rotation of a few greasy turbofans.
It might be flying… but it felt more like risking her life.
The aircraft lurched in a pocket of air, and Rosa gasped and tightened her grip on the armrest.
Her mother glanced over. “Are you all right, dear? You look pale.”
“I think—” She swallowed hard. She couldn’t decide what was worse: the fear, the humiliation, or the disappointment. A dreadful lump had formed in her throat. “How long is the flight?”
“Five hours. More or less.”
Five hours? Could these engines really operate for five hours? Full of volatile jet fuel? Revolving at God-knows-what velocity? Bearings hot as griddles? Metal fatigue tearing at the fuselage?
She glimpsed mountains down below. Clouds. And an impossible volume of empty air.
“Rosa?” Her mother again. “Dear, what’s the matter?”
“God’s sake,” she heard her father say. “Give her the goddamn paper bag. That’s what it’s there for.”
She traded in her return ticket and rode a bus back to California.
The trip was long, uncomfortable, and depressing. Every inch of highway under the wheels was a confession of failure. She spoke to no one. She focused her eyes on the horizon, the uneasy intersection of Earth and sky.
Home, she registered at UCLA. Midway through the fall semester she met a B. A. student named Vincent Connor who drove all thoughts of flight and recrimination from her mind. Vince was a farmboy, gauche and handsome. He came from Wyoming, his daddy was a sheep rancher there, but to Rosa’s glazed and grateful eye he was something out of the Broadway musical Oklahoma!: a sweet, big-boned blond man in a checkerboard cotton shirt. At any moment, Rosa thought, he might break into song.
She married him in the spring and became Rosa Perry Connor. Five of his cousins, brave about airplanes, flew in from Wyoming with his widowed father. The church was full. Her twin nieces, four years old, her brother’s girls, carried Rosa’s train. After the reception Vince began their honeymoon drive to San Francisco; they spent a night at a motel on Highway One where the sea fog came winding through the pines. They made love for the first time as man and wife, which seemed to inject a new vigor into the act. Rosa called him Cowboy, and he grinned.
After that—
Years later, she would wonder at how fast the time had passed. Vince took a series of jobs, one of them with her father’s electronics firm in Orange County. Briefly, Rosa was thrust into the garden-party and country-club circle she had despised as a girl. She wasn’t good at it. Vince was worse. He didn’t know how to dress. At parties, he told coarse jokes or refused to say anything at all. “He has ‘Wyoming’ stamped on his forehead,” a friend told Rosa, “and it’s fucking indelible.” Vince had dreams of opening his own business, but he couldn’t manage to save any money. He began to drink too much. So did Rosa. Her garden parties became haphazard affairs, at which she was liable to sit cross-legged on the patio steps indulging her old Fokker fantasy. Watch out, girls, it’s the Red Baroness. Airsick bags provided for your comfort on the seatback.
When his father died, Vincent drove her across the desert to Wyoming, which Rosa regarded as a hostile alien planet. To her horror, Vince had decided to take over the family ranch.
“You’ll get used to it,” he told her, not much interested in her objections. “It’s not so bad here.”
But it was. It was a huge, lonely land full of bellicose men and submissive women. Rosa did nothing but cook meals, keep house, and watch TV. Vince wasn’t keen on children, he said, and neither was Rosa—she thought about a pregnancy just to relieve the boredom, but never seriously enough to skip her pills. And yet, Rosa thought, for all the tedium, my God, how the years flew! Crackling cold winters, muddy springs, summers so dry her small garden plots inevitably failed before autumn. Seasons and seasons of network television. She drove into Cheyenne with Vince sometimes, but good lord, Cheyenne? The last refuge of the bolo tie?
Her life became eventless, as smooth as the eastern horizon, and worse… somehow, her life passed. It eroded. She grew old. Yes, old. She was forty in Wyoming, and how had that happened? Then forty-five. Then, oh, Christ, fifty. Fifty years old on a sheep ranch in Wyoming!