Pink and Gray

The Cessna has reached 8,000 feet. We’re halfway to our jump altitude and I’m about to be attached by a harness to a man I just met this morning. He’s Rick, my tandem jump instructor. He smiles at me. Easy for him to smile, I think. He gets to wear the parachute. I try to relax, and suddenly all I can think of is the bathtub in my parents’ house. I smile when I realize why.

When I was eleven, my grandmother came to stay with us for a month. She was on a tour of her offsprings’ houses and we were number two on the list. She had spent two months at my Aunt Maggie’s house in Illinois and now we had the benefit of her company at our house in Connecticut. I was not looking forward to her visit.

My grandmother was in her seventies. I knew that she and my grandfather, who had died five years previously, had met while she was a flight attendant and he was a pilot for Pan Am. It was a cliche almost as bad as the nurse and doctor one, but it was a story that held warmth and the hug of nostalgia for my mother’s side of the family. When my uncle was born, my grandmother followed convention and left grandfather to the skies and raised her family with their feet planted firmly on New England soil.

My consternation at my grandmother’s visits had not much to do with her actual presence. It hardly bothered me that she was there. Her hearing was still perfectly intact, so there had to be no loud noises when she was taking her afternoon nap. That was about the extent of what I had to worry about. But what really got to me was the bathtub.

Our bathroom was last redecorated sometime in the fifties. It had black and white floor tiles set in a checkerboard pattern, gray fixtures, and pink painted walls. The gray bathtub was always cool to the touch. Its smooth surface was like stone, built to last, not like the plasticky tubs of newer homes. My parents were not big on interior decoration, and this was the only room in our three-bedroom house where everything matched. The coordinated sink, tub, and toilet, the chrome of the water taps, the gray tile all combined to make one unified look. I loved the togetherness of the bathroom. Its look was so much more satisfying than the eclectic hodge-podge of our living room which held a green sofa, plum armchairs, an oriental rug, and coffee and end tables in varying shades of wood varnish accented by white circles where coasters should have been placed.

During the preparations for my grandmother’s visit, my mother worried about her possibly slipping on the slick floor of the bathtub. My father was dispatched to the local hardware store and returned with the solution. The floor of our bathtub was soon decorated with textured, pink plastic flower decals. Although their color approximately matched that of the walls, I was appalled. My only perfectly coordinated room had suddenly lost its elegance. Best to just put a pink flamingo lawn ornament in the corner and have it done with.

It was summer when my grandmother was with us so I had plenty of free time to ignore her. It wasn’t that I disliked her. I just could not imagine having any fun with this frail woman. I wanted to be outside pretending that the rocky cliffs next to our house hid a portal to another world where the dinner bell was the only sound that could penetrate through from the real world. We didn’t live near any other children my age, and I was incredibly shy, so I spent a lot of my playtime alone. My grandmother spent her time chatting with my mother, visiting art galleries, and looking wistfully at old photographs that my mother had carefully preserved. Sometimes my grandmother tried to draw me into conversation, but I would run away as soon as possible, tired of questions concerning my schoolwork, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and whether I knew how pinchable my cheeks were. My mother would often tell me as she tucked me into bed that I should really get to know my grandmother, ask her about her life, and spend some time with her because she maybe wouldn’t be around much longer. That was the wrong thing for me to hear right before bed. I spent many sleepless nights worrying, not about my grandmother’s impending death, but about what would happen to me if I didn’t wake up. The line in the nighttime prayer "if I die before I wake" had always scared the bejeezus out of me.

And each night as I took my bath with the pink plastic flower decals rubbing uncomfortably against my bare bottom, I would mourn the loss of the smooth gray surface of the bathtub. And I would wonder if we could take them off when my grandmother finally left to visit Uncle Mitch in Massachusetts.

One afternoon, up alone on the cliffs, I was entertaining Tiffany, the fairy queen, when I was startled by an unexpected noise. I turned and was surprised to see my grandmother, puffing slightly from her ascent. "Hi Cynthia sweetie," she said. "Do you mind if I visit for a little bit?" She held up a plastic bag of chocolate chip cookies. "I brought refreshments." I was slightly taken aback by the intrusion, but wishing to be a gracious host, I showed her over to my banquet table. She placed the bag down on the rippled surface of the rock and undid the zipper lock. The banquet area was the only area in my kingdom with a view as its "windows" overlooked the driveway and one end of the rectangular house. My grandmother pretzled her small body down into a sitting position next to the rock, surprisingly me with her flexibility. I sat down across from her.

"This is a lovely view," she said, sweeping her arm across towards my window. You can see the whole house from here.""Uh huh." I said, my mouth full of cookie crumbs.

"I love being high up above everything. You know, this is not much compared to being on a plane, but I still love it. There’s just something about being over things. You can see what is going on and yet you don’t have to be a part of it exactly." She smiled, and a dreamy look came over her.

"I have my own teeter totter up here, you wanna ride?" I offered. My father had set up a log across the Y of a forked tree trunk which functioned very well as a seesaw, at least when I had someone to sit on the other end. It usually sat empty and I had only managed to drag my mother up to ride it with me a couple times.

"No honey, but thanks. I think I’ll just enjoy the view for a little bit. You don’t mind?" My grandmother scooched her body around so she faced the house. "Look, there’s a cardinal at the bird feeder." She pointed at the red feathered creature on the tube feeder far below. It poked daintily at the seeds. She looked at me and the crumbs on my lips. "Sorry I didn’t bring any milk up. It was an impromptu journey and I couldn’t find the right container."

"That’s OK grandma," I said. Somehow, a little voice inside my head, a vestige of my mother’s many nights of gentle prodding, eked its way out and I heard myself say "Grandma? Were you ever scared you were going to crash when you worked on the airplanes?" I had never flown before and wasn’t looking forward to any future chances to.

She smiled at me and her eyes sparkled as their lids crinkled down towards her cheeks. "Not really honey. I always felt safe up there in the plane. It was just like being in a car to me. You don’t get scared in the car do you?"

"Not usually. I mean, sometimes when it snows and Daddy wants to get somewhere quick, but he’s usually really careful."

"Well, honey, the pilots, like your granddaddy, they are very careful. And there isn’t anything to be scared of. You’re very safe inside the plane." She looked over at me with an odd glance all of a sudden as if she had remembered something. Then she grinned. "Hey, I have a secret. You want to hear it?"

I nodded slowly. "Do I have to keep it a secret?"

"Yes Cynthia you do. It’s something very secret. Not even your mother knows."

"Not even mommy?" I was very surprised and felt a sudden weight of responsibility.

"No, I never told her about it. Somehow, it just never came up. I don’t know. Maybe I should have told her. She would probably get a kick out of it now, even though --"

"What is it grandma?" I was an impatient child."Well, you know how I tell the story of how I met your grandfather when he was a pilot and I was a flight attendant?"

"Yes." I knew that wasn’t a secret.

"Well, that isn’t exactly true." She smiled at the amazed look on my face. "You see, we actually met earlier than that. When I was spending a summer up in Vermont at your Great Aunt Sylvia’s house." My family didn’t speak of Great Aunt Sylvia very much; I had assumed that it was because she had died so long ago and wasn’t a very interesting relative.

"There was a small airfield near her home," my grandmother continued. She was looking off into the trees now, and her mind was somewhere far away. "I went there sometimes to see the planes take off. It was just a few little planes. But there was this young man there. He was very handsome."

I figured the young man must be my grandfather. "How old were you grandma?"

"I was sixteen. He was a little older and so much fun. He loved hanging around at the airfield with the ‘barnstormers’. Oh, he used to tease me all the time; he’d take me up in his plane and go upside down. I loved it." She smiled at the recollection and went on. "One time, they had an air show. You know, where they fly different planes around and people do tricks with them."I nodded.

"Well, Marcus decided a few weeks before the show that he wanted to do something really special -- something that would amaze everyone. And he had seen a show somewhere else where a woman, Ethel Dare, would walk out onto the wing of the airplane while it was flying way up in the air."

"Gosh! Really?" I exclaimed. I couldn’t think of anything more dangerous. I knew that my grandfather’s name was Marcus, so this pilot must have been him.

"Yes, well, he wanted to try this himself, but of course he had to fly the plane, and so he was teasing me that I should try it myself, since I enjoyed being up in the air so much. I had heard of Ethel Dare too. People called her ‘The Flying Witch’. She was very brave but she was actually banned from performing because she had dared to do tricks that another man had died trying to duplicate."

"Gosh! They wanted to keep her safe, huh?" This was certainly becoming interesting. But I suddenly realized I was being naïve.

"No, honey, I don’t think they did it for her safety. They just didn’t like the idea that she had upstaged a man. The air show people wouldn’t hire her after that."

That didn’t make much sense to me, and I said so.
"You live in a different world now, dear. You’re quite lucky."

"So did you do it too, Grandma? Did you?" I bounced excitedly on my rocky perch, picturing my grandmother as the star of the air show.

"Well, I was a real risk-taker in those days, and Marcus egged me on, so I said I would. He was surprised when I agreed to try it, actually, he tried to talk me out of it, but the excitement had already gotten into him too. So we practiced and got ready for the show."

I was speechless at this discovery and looked at my frail grandmother with my brown eyes opened wide. She hardly knew I was there; she was staring out into space, her mind back in the 1920s.

"We were careful about it, I started out with guide ropes and he was very careful about when he could keep the plane steady for me to go out onto the wing. It was one of those surplus war planes you could get for cheap." She pushed a gray strand of hair out of her face and wrinkled her nose a little bit. "Of course, I didn’t tell Aunt Sylvia what I was up to."

"Did she find out and stop you?" I asked, waiting for the reason why the event had become such a big secret.

"Well, she didn’t know until she saw me up there at the air show! Practically gave her a heart attack. Oh goodness, the look on her face when we landed and she came running over to the plane. I thought she was going to kill both of us!" She laughed softly at the memory.

"So, that’s why this is a big secret." I had figured it all out. "Aunt Sylvia forbid you to see Grandpa anymore because of this and you had to become a flight attendant and pretend to meet him later when he was a pilot?"

My grandmother’s face darkened and her voice became much quieter. "No. She really liked Marcus and I kept seeing him. But, something else happened a little bit later that summer. Something not so good."

"What grandma?" I was concerned, sensing that we were now heading into sensitive territory.

She looked right at me, as if seeing me for the first time. "Honey, I’m sorry, it’s not something I can really explain to you right now. Maybe when you are older."

"Oh come on, I’m old enough. I’m almost twelve!" I was worried that I would never hear the reason for the secret that had eluded even my mother, the family historian.

"Cynthia, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you about this. I just got carried away, thinking about being high up and flying and being young again. Cynthia," she got up and came over to my side of the table and put her arms around me. "Trust me, some things you just don’t need to hear until you are grown up." "But grandma, you can’t just tell me about the wing walking and all that and leave me wondering why you couldn’t tell anyone about how you really met granddad and --" I stopped because somehow my inner voice was telling me I should stop.

She realized I would not be satisfied without some sort of explanation. "Cynthia, your grandfather and I made some mistakes that summer. We loved each other very much. But we were young and careless. And Aunt Sylvia never forgave your grandfather for what happened then. We were so young, I was especially young, such a child who wanted to try everything." She went back into her reverie. "I was never supposed to see him again; Aunt Sylvia wouldn’t let me even speak of him to anyone. He went off to fly airplanes in New York and I went back to Massachusetts. But I really loved him and knew I wanted to spend my life with him. So when Aunt Sylvia died, I went off to New York to become a flight attendant. We got married very soon afterwards. And that’s that." She snapped out of her trance. "Isn’t that the dinner bell? We’d better get inside. Your mother was horrified that I was going to feed you cookies so close to dinner, so I hope you still have an appetite. Come on."

I looked up at her wistfully. "You never walked on planes again?"

"No no no, in fact they outlawed it some years later. Come on, we have to go in for dinner."

I realized that a certain moment was over and I would probably never hear exactly what had happened. But part of me knew that it wasn’t something I should pursue. So I let it go and concentrated instead on the wondrous and secret image of my grandmother as a young woman balancing precariously on an airplane wing.

A few days later, my grandmother headed off to her hometown in Massachusetts to visit Uncle Mitch, who lived in the house he and his sisters had grown up in. I looked down at the bathtub the night she left and started to pick the pink decals off the gray surface with my fingernails. But I was a chronic nailbiter so didn’t get very far and let them be. I think they’re still there.

It is the tenth anniversary of my grandmother’s death and I’m on a plane, 15,000 feet above the earth. Rick asks if I’m ready and I nod. We move to the open door. I don’t want to look down at the ground, but I do. I see patches of green and brown and the Pacific coastline in the distance. He attaches the harness. All of a sudden, the floor is gone and we’re outside the plane. The ground is so far away that it doesn’t appear to be getting any closer. I’m not scared. I feel detached from the moment. I think about what my grandmother said about being above everything, how you can see it all but not be a part of it. I want to be a part of it. I think about the little girl on the cliff rocks, timid and shy, hiding in her own world. I think of how far she’s come. And as I look down and suddenly, almost violently, feel the exhilaration of being in free fall, I laugh in wonder at how much farther she now can go.