We all have stories where something happens to us that we cannot explain. This one came out in my collection The American Storybag. Almost immediately I received some emails and other direct responses from kids who asked, "Is this story true?"I would say to them: "All stories are true. This one happened as I said it did. But, then again, I was seven and my cousin was five."
My cousin Kyle
said to me, “Do you remember the little room on the third floor of Grandad’s
lodge overlooking the lake?”
“I remember it--not much bigger than a closet. There
were two pieces of furniture -- a marble table and an old rotten, horsehair
chair.”
Kyle said, “When
we were five we’d go into that secret room when no one was looking.”
“It was at
night," I said.
"Our
parents thought we were fast asleep."
Kyle laughed, a little hysterically, I thought, but, yeah, it was kind
of funny the idea that we were together in the shadow room with the big gloomy
chair.
“Mmm,” Kyle
purred, “the big chair was our secret sharer.
Remember?”
“It's coming
to me -- something weird about that," I admitted. "Did the chair have -- powers?”
It was coming
back in more detail. The
narrow steep stairs winding up to the third floor. The creaky door to the secret room. The knotty-pine closeness of the walls. The absence of breathable air. The dust.
The secretness. The horsehair smell.
The moon on a thousand year old, threadbare
oriental carpet.
There was the
old chair, so vast and solid, a kind of personage that beckoned children to sit
on it. Yes, it had powers, all right.
We crept up to
the chair and inched our way up onto the sprung horsehair cushion. The chair smelled ratty and rotten. The room so airless and close, as if whatever
lived within the walls needed every bit of oxygen that was available, and none
left for a couple of errant and disobedient kids.
Suddenly it
was clear to me why the chair was so special.
It transported
us to places we didn’t want to go.
Settled into
its cavernous bulk, the chair somehow blasted off like a rocket, flew us out of
the Lodge and skimmed us across the lake.
Not only that,
it skimmed us under the lake. Then it
soared us into the clouds, and above the clouds, took us into outer space, sent
us into the Milky Way where we tailed the tails of comets.
And then,
always and forever buried in my memory, the old chair turned around and brought
us home.
We'd blink --
and there we'd be in that stuffy, small, airtight room that smelled of one
hundred years of dust.
I remember
that, one night, Kyle met me in the darkened hall in front of the secret room,
and she whispered, “Tonight we’re going to do something different.”
“What will it
be?”
“Come, I’ll
show you.” Kyle was both mysterious and mischievous
and I often forgot she was my cousin, more like some magical, dreamed-up friend
from a storybook.
Soon we were
seated, elbow to elbow, in the chair.
I remember how
the chair was woven of twigs, millions of strands of twigs and it was, in
reality, a once upon a time tree that was now a square, squat painted tree that
looked like a chair and had horsehair cushions, bottom and back.
So we sat
together, Kyle and I, and the chair rocked out of the secret room and into the open
night of sundry stars.
All was well
until Kyle screamed at me -- “Let go of the chair!”
I wouldn’t -- but
she did.
And then my
cousin Kyle went spiraling off into space.
She was tumbling
and rolling, while I held onto the arms of the chair until, at last, it upended
me and then I was floating around in the
heavens with Kyle. We were flying, I
guess. Not like Peter and Wendy or the
Lost Boys because there was no sense of self, there was only space, emptiness,
void, air, wind, volume of nothingness, white noise of moonlight, and us moving
through it, invisibly and immaterially.
We were, and
we sort of weren’t.
We were not
flying so much as we were flight itself.
We were like the thought of flight. Miraculously detached, unloosed from the world.
And always, at
the end of the ride, the old trustworthy chair scooped us up and brought back
to the airless attic, secret room.
“We must not
tell anyone about this,” Kyle warned.
She was younger than I but so much wiser. I wanted to tell the whole world about our discovery. But I agreed
not to tell. But – and I swear this is
true – when we got out of that room,
we each forgot
about the chair. We forgot about flying. We forgot about the thought of flight. We even forgot about ourselves.
Some months
later, Grandad lost all of his money and the lodge was sold for petty cash.
The old chair went
with the Lodge.
We did not
think about the strangeness of this. The
place where we grew up -- gone. Not
lived in by us anymore, inhabited by someone else.
Thus did we
grow up, and forget what it meant to be transported by magic.
Sixty years
passed.
Kyle and I got
older, and then, just plain old, as I'm afraid we are now. But we still laughed a lot and from doing
this, we had laugh lines and lots of wrinkles.
Well, as it
happened, one day a few months ago, we were sitting on the dock by the lake
below the hilltop where the Lodge had been – it burned to the ground in the
1970s -- and a big wind came up out of nowhere.
Kyle’s beach chair,
and mine, didn’t move because we sat hard upon them, waiting for the wind to go away.
It did,
finally, but then, when we weren't expecting it, the wind returned and knocked
Kyle and me into the lake.
Kyle laughed. “Can you still hold your
breath like you used to?”
“Sure," I
said.
Kyle dived down.
I dived down. The lake was as clear as the air above it.
We swam in circles. Lots of seaweed, beer cans, stones,
bluegills, sunnies, bass, pickerel.
"Let's find the chair!" Kyle said.
After swimming for a while, I felt chilled. “Kyle, I’m getting cold.”
“Pssh,” she
said. “Find the chair!”
I swam around
some more, staring into the wondrous clarity of the lake.
Then Kyle cried out,
“There it is!”
The old
horsehair chair. Kyle and I were flying
above the ancient, rotten horsehair chair. We
touched the twiggy green-painted, woven arms and then the sprung matting of the
cushion . . . and . . . it happened all over again.
We were both
seated upon the chair underwater.
Then we flew, raced
in and out of spiral coves and caves.
The chair took us to the swamp, scattering turtles and herons, and there
was that instantly familiar release that knows no bounds, that unlimited
non-human form. . . flying, we flew. . . out of body, we abandoned our bones
and entered that unknown, unknowable zone of pure flight, of the thought of
flight, and then of nothing, nothing at all.
When, at last,
we dragged the aluminum dock chair onto the dock, I was shivering and shaking,
and I started jabbering about flying but Kyle said, “Let’s not tell anyone
about this.” And I haven't -- until now.
