The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville

behind you and falling in front of you, and when it’s your turn to fall you’re not afraid becausemore spokes are rising and the rest of the wheel keeps revolving.
    The granddaughter walks over from the line, gives Alma an extra roll, then sits at the other end of the table, afraid to be like her. Can’t be helped. And maybe she doesn’t remember as much about being young as she thinks she does. Earlier, at the bazaar, she called the eleven-year-old grandson
Schnikelfritz
and kissed him as he stood talking baseball with a friend. He blushed and said, Oh Grandma, and now he comes and sits near her, red at the neck. Like the granddaughter, he spends much time deciding what he will be, though not in as much turmoil, knows everyone will expect him to be something. He talks of space shuttles, atomic power, thinks she knows nothing but memories of tin pails of beer carried to her father in the summer, ice carts pulled by horses. Alma thinks, no, too much emphasis on style, not substance. Widows eating the noon meal after church on Sunday. One had been a doctor, one a secretary, one a housewife. One had been crazy. All talk about the ocean, a pain in the joints, the color yellow, the taste of coffee. It comes down to that. There is that connection between friends. Alma watches her family ladling kraut from the huge kettles to their plates. All of the grandchildren standing unaware of the things that have come from her, a gift. A certain twist of a certain chemical causes the reddish hair, they know that. But there are things that they don’t know.
    She takes one of the sweet rolls from the pleated and waxed container. The amber liquid sugar settles in a pool at the bottom. Some sticks to her fingers. A grandson has a bead on the tip of his nose, the Reverendstands by the banquet table and smiles, a bit of caramel on his tooth. She smiles back. Clean German Protestant, enormous thighs, she’s heard he sweeps the snow off the driveway of the manse every twenty minutes as it falls, and never has to shovel. She had a crush on him once, before the fat covered him like mounds of potatoes. Of course she never told him and never told John, decided not to feel guilty about it as long as it didn’t hurt anyone. They were her thoughts and she had a right to them. It made her happy for a whole summer when she was twenty-four and John was thirty and working too hard. She would come into the cool dark church in the afternoons to cut out pictures from picture books for the bulletin board in the cradle room, hoping she might catch a sight of him pacing at the end of a high-ceilinged hall, working on his sermon. She wore a cotton print dress and sat on the cool green linoleum by a crib, very aware of herself. She often laughed at this, knowing that he wasn’t aware at all, and glad of it. She would see him in one of the dark halls, first a blur of dark suit and light brown hair, then her eyes would become used to the dark and she could see the serious features of his face in the same way, she thought, that the babies in the cradle room would see the picture of Mary she was cutting out for them, first as a blur of blue that was part of the brown corkboard, then as something separate and finally at the end of two years, as something resembling a real person.
    That was many years ago but she still thought of him with gratitude, could sometimes see the young man in the old. He helped her in the years after John died, told her to look for a sign, and she began to sit long hours inthe sanctuary washed by the light from outside died deep blood colors as it filtered through the stained glass windows. A ray of royal blue that had once been white warmed her hand as she sat in her pew all that spring after John’s death. The sign was this: things change form with ease, with abandon. There was much comfort in that.
    Another granddaughter comes to the table, brings Alma a square of dark red Jello, half a pear trapped in the