The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville

teenager; my brother and our oldest cousin were twelve. At dinner they performed for me and for each other. When it was my turn to perform, I gave them secrets: names of rock groups, clothing stores, high school teachers that would serve as passwords, keys to the exciting life they supposed I led. I grew used to being the sage, used to the openness of them, the transparency of children. Then I left for college, came back for brief visits, graduated, began to work in another state, and—returning for visits at Christmas and Thanksgiving—found that I was becoming obsolete, that the secrets no longer resided in me. I was no longer needed. I am ashamed to admit that I was hurt by this, found it difficult to speak with them. It was difficult for me to change. I suppose that I am selfish or too easily intimidated. Perhaps I am shy. Theywere different people, aware of themselves, able to think about their actions secretly at the same time that they performed them—a definition, I suppose, of adulthood. It seems so much more alienating when you watch it grow, when there is suddenly something that needs to be broken down between people who were, at one time, close. I suppose that parents feel this, I’m not sure. I know that it is profoundly sad. With strangers it is more easily broken down. There is no false assumption that you know each other, that it is not necessary to begin at the beginning.
    And worse, there is the feeling, unthinkable, that we are the seeds scattered by a single tree, in the hopes that one will take. William and Henry James are a rarity. There is only one Joyce, one Shakespeare, one Pasteur, one Michelangelo. Raised as we were, similarly, we cannot occupy the same space. As teenagers, all of our ambitions ran deep. Only mine are becoming tempered by the demands of practical things. I am slowly beginning to realize that teaching is not something that I make my living at temporarily until I become a famous actress, a playwright. It is what I do, what I am. My cousins do not want to hear this, that it might happen to them. I had been sent out to test the waters, and am no longer trustworthy. Perhaps I am exaggerating. Perhaps I am feeling, right now, the price of my restlessness.
    Early this year their father died, my uncle, my aunt’s husband, my mother’s brother, my grandmother’s son. It is important that he is understood in this way, how he was connected to all of us, because he had been the central bond. He had had a heart condition for years. Still, his death was unexpected. He was in his middleforties, slender, handsome like one of the singers my mother loved, Perry Como—a slimmer Frank Sinatra. He had given up salt and Cokes and this was supposed to have protected him. My aunt found him slumped over a stove that he was moving into his appliance store.
    At one time he had wanted to be a pharmacist. Every man I knew who was his age, my father’s age, had wanted to be a doctor or a pharmacist. But they had all gone into business. My own father, who started his studies in pre-medicine, spends his life writing reports on the viscosity of nail polish, the solidity of brushes. The only ones who remembered these ambitions, who spoke of them often as if they were still alive, as if they formed part of the characters of the sons, were the grandmothers.
    I thought of pharmacy when my mother called to tell me of my uncle’s death and I thought of my cousins as they had been when we were small children. This one’s an actress, my mother would say, this one a doctor. This one’s a poet, this one a composer, this one a politician, my Aunt Mary would counter. I asked how everyone was taking it and my mother told me that my aunt and my grandmother had both collapsed, but that they were doing better now. There are so many “I’s” in this that it will be difficult to believe that the real action is going on elsewhere, where I am not. I can imagine the slumping,