Life in the Air Ocean

This stunning debut by a talented young writer brings together nine stories, some of them deeply shadowed, moving backward and forward in time to give us two generations of a family: the Mowrys of Carville, Tennessee. Daniel Mowry, a refrigeration engineer, is an expert on cold. His wife, Iris, is a casualty of the fifties: she's smart, but a woman sidetracked into marriage and motherhood. Daniel and Iris love their daughters, Ruth and Monica, in the best way they can. Ruth grows up to fixate on sex and one-night stands with Vietnam War veterans. Monica becomes pregnant by the man she lives with. In "Cave Fish," Daniel Mowry, Korean War veteran, expert in the design of domestic appliances (he tells himself he is making the world safe for women and children), is digging himself a real cellar, a crawl space below the kitchen floor. It's his way out, a place where he can tunnel down when his baby begins to scream. In "Boy Wonder," it is 1937. Daniel is eleven and has a habit he can't beat. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning with the sheet plastered under him and turning cold. Daniel's mother says about it, "It's near every night with him. It's too hard." But Daniel sees a way out. He watches the crows fly swiftly from the yard and envies them. He's going to fly. He's going to be a Boy Wonder.In the title story, Iris is exhausted from the travails of early motherhood, and is driven further over the edge when her husband suggests that they move to South America. Taking us from 1937 to 1982, these stories ex-plore the wilds of childhood and a barren landscape of adulthood, from the tar flats of Tennessee to the lush countryside of Bogota, Colombia, where the Mowrys go to live in the early sixties in an attempt to bring their world into line. But no matter what they do to escape one another, they find themselves back together--a closed-in society of four. Theirs is a precipitous love that both cements the family and rends them apart, a love that the Mowry daughters endure and rebel against, each to reinvent her own.Simply and powerfully told, Life in the Air Ocean startles and moves us.

Sylvia Foley was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and grew up in Bogotá and in Huntington, New York. She received an M.F.A. in fiction in 1996 from Columbia University. The title story of this volume won GQ's 1997 Frederick Exley Fiction Competition. Her fiction has appeared in Story, Zoetrope, and Open City. She lives in Brooklyn.

At the Bloodmobile babies were screaming. Daniel Mowry felt that sinking feeling coming on again. He thought, Like to yowl myself, although his test was over and done with. Dazed, he sat down on a folding chair as the wails of the infants broke over him. He steadied his briefcase against his knee and drank the cup of sugary lemonade the nurse gave him, knowing that within minutes she would make him leave. He told himself his blood was as high octane as the next man's. Then, left hand shaking a little, he peeled back the Band-Aid and examined the stuck pulp of his finger.

He had tried to donate blood and was denied! Here he was at the Carville Red Cross station with the Negro nurse pricking his middle finger, telling him no, and he just didn't get it. His blood had been plenty good enough three, four years ago for the doughfoots over in Korea. He belonged to the U.S. Army then -- he wanted to fly, but his eyes were bad. The army took him anyway, once they saw he was smart enough for the SEDs, the Special Engineering Detachment. He spent the war testing rockets in the heat of the New Mexican desert; he could rattle off the flash points of red fuming nitric acid and gasoline, the degrees Fahrenheit a Nike's aluminum skin could withstand. The time-delay squib, that was his idea: take advantage of deceleration, let things cool a bit before firing up the second stage. After his discharge, what was he meant to do with his life? This was him now -- a design engineer, an expert in home appliances. Not what he'd dreamed. He tried to tell himself he was making the world safer for women and children, but Iris and the baby hardly seemed to need him that way.

He wasn't a coward. Just now, he had watched the needle rowel his flesh, his own blood well and leak out of him. When the nurse touched the slide to his bleeding finger, he closed his eyes and imagined the rest, how blood coated the clamped glass and was flattened to a single-cell layer under the microscope for her edification. His blood was no good. "Your count's too low," the nurse was telling him, and she knew, somehow, not to look at him as she said it. "You get your wife to cook you up a liver steak tonight." But all he knew was his blood was no good, and there wasn't any liver steak, just eggs, because his wife was sick or something. Lately Iris couldn't stand the sight of raw meat. At home his baby might be screaming; maybe Iris would cradle it and coo to it at the kitchen table. He knew he would go down under the house as soon as he could get away. He was digging himself a real cellar, tunneling down from the crawl space below the kitchen floor. Unheard of in Carville, Tennessee; What y'all need a hole in the ground for? people said. Even the guy at the hardware store said it, eyeing him as though Daniel was the one touched in the head.


Waiting for the bus to take him back across town, all Daniel could think about was failure. The dark-reddish nurse in the little room, the smell of the alcohol swabs and the cold test tubes full of jelly blood, blood so thick and black it might have come from horses. She told him to eat iron. He thought of chewing metal: pieces of copper wire, drill scraps, the iron filings he kept in a vial in his toolbox. When the baby was older he planned on showing her how precisely iron followed a magnet, the inert bits quivering as if touched to life. He could make them race across a mirror. He had a predilection for velocity. Friction is the real enemy, he used to announce like a Dick Tracy scientist, smiling at his own joke, but his superiors in the desert had not seen it as such.

The sun was going down. He felt faint and unknotted his tie. Iris would be wanting him home soon for supper. As he boarded the bus he felt something flap at his knee. It was an unfurled umbrella, belonging to the guy nudging him from behind. "C'mon, move it." The guy was wearing a tight blue suit with little Memphis Air wings on the lapel -- a pilot, for the love of God. Daniel squeezed his teeth together and gripped the rail. The driver glanced down at him as if he were any shady character, and it was all Daniel could do not to turn around and belt the guy. He took his seat, thinking, Should've given him a good poke in the chest at least, told him, Watch who you're pushing! Only he was no fighter. The flyboy would've decked him, maybe cracked his head open on the bus's metal step, and then where would he be. Hell, he might try not to die out here on the Carville run; if something were to happen, he couldn't count on his blood working right. Besides, Iris was waiting for him. Those eggs were probably already cooked into rubber in the green kitchen. He pictured her leaning over the ironing board with her long blue-black hair falling across the pad, testing spit on the iron, and he knew he had to get there. He had to get there so he could cook the eggs first the way she liked, a little runny, with pepper and cheese, and afterward he'd rest one hand on her neck while he clipped the singed ends of her hair and she murmured to him about what the baby was doing now.

A week ago, he had come home to find Iris holding her hand over the baby's mouth, her eyes fixed on the stove clock. When he asked what was going on, she took her hand away. "I'm timing the baby," Iris said. "See the blue lips? She can hold her breath. Maybe she'll be aquatic." They should put a goldfish pond in the yard, like the one the Achesons had, laid to instructions ordered from a magazine. This was Iris's plan. The kid was all right, of course.

And yesterday the baby had rolled over by itself. All day Iris had watched it try and finally it had done it. After supper they went and got the baby and sat out on the back steps. "See her?" Iris said, laying the baby on its round belly on the driveway, on a layer of raked sand. Together they sat and watched while the kid hunched its shoulders and kicked its legs and finally, by accident it seemed to Daniel, the kid turned its head all the way around to follow a moth in the swimmy light, and flipped over, and he and Iris looked at each other.

He wanted to laugh, but he was held back by how his wife was gazing at him. Iris's eyes were wide open as if to say What's next?, as if anything were possible, as if they were all going to perform fabulously from now on. He could almost believe this. It was something to see her that way. They put the baby on its stomach again and it rolled over, toward Daniel.

"She likes you better than me," Iris said. "I knew it."

Then the dusk came down fast and he had lost sight of the kid on its back in the sand, kicking its feet in silent passage.

The bus hit a pothole and shook on its back axle. He nearly bit his tongue, and made a grab for the seat in front of him. He was thinking of the warmth in his hand when he put it to his wife's neck, and then he remembered his blood was missing something vital, which made it no good to servicemen or anybody else. The Memphis Air flyboy turned around and glared at him.

"Easy, fella," he said, glaring back. He felt like a loser, though, with those defective pints inside him.


At the depot stop Daniel climbed down, and the bus pulled away emitting jet puffs of exhaust. The depot road was littered with bits of glass, sand fallen from the builders' trucks, coils of wire, bent nails. Lengths of rebar lay rusting by the roadside. All that junk lying around suited Daniel fine. He took off his shoes and slung them, laces knotted, over his shoulder. Under the waxy streetlight his feet looked bread white and soft. It wasn't tetanus that worried him (there were shots for that); it was his nerve possibly failing. He set out, putting his feet down without looking, thinking if a nail stuck him, then so be it; he'd get the iron he needed. And if one didn't, he'd try being more of a man from now on.

He hoisted his briefcase higher, as if he were wading. He had refrigerant data and his drawings for an antislugging device with him. If the thing worked, it would keep liquid refrigerant from gumming up the compressor -- using centrifugal force, same as a blood separator, which pleased him now as he thought of it. He pushed on, marching himself toward his wife and the half-dug-out cellar, and the child that flopped against his chest when he picked her up.

He passed the tupelos with their half-eaten leaves, the station man's house. Then he was on the tar flats, a stretch of undeveloped land that the builders used for a shortcut. The path crackled under his feet. On a burnt-smelling road like this he had crossed the Tularosa Desert basin in New Mexico a few years back on his way to join the army, driving Lumpy Doyle's car with its big, springy seats and the gray paint peeling off the dash. The army kept him stateside at White Sands Proving Ground, where he wouldn't get hurt. On a weekend leave in Alamogordo he'd had a blind whore, his first whore ever; he could still see her lashless eyes. She had the longest back he had seen on a woman and no hair anywhere on her body. She was oiled, and shiny that way, and the ceiling fan was going over both their heads. The fan needed new bearings, and the sound of the flat blades revolving, the displaced air coming at the back of his neck, unnerved him. He remembered now, the feeling in him that told him if he stood, if he was even to raise his head from the girl who was pulling him down to her, wanting him to hurry, if he rose up he would be decapitated. She would get all his money! He touched his pockets and she pulled harder at his belt, the black wig listing on her scalp as his pants came off. Then the voice outside the door, telling him he was taking too long and it would be extra, and the girl pushed her hands underneath his shirt, laughing. Her eyes slipped back and forth like cave fish. "Private," she called him. She made him turn over on the mattress and slowly she pushed something, later he hoped it was only her finger, up his butt, and it was then that he'd felt himself get hard. He had wanted to, he had nearly plunged his fist into her. Instead he had grabbed his uniform, turning away so her eyes couldn't float over his face. She told him she could see shadows. He skinned out of there. He itched afterward in the places she'd touched.

He washed his hands at a truck stop before going back to base. He came in at 00:20; technically, he was AWOL for those last twenty minutes out on the black desert road. The sergeant made him scrub the mess floor with a toothbrush half the night, him and a leggy half-wit boy from Arkansas, which was okay because Lumpy Doyle had worked it out about the car, and he knew Doyle would be good for another ride out of there, when the time came. Doyle was.

He wished he knew where Doyle was now. The last call came July a year ago from a bar in Vegas. Woke Iris, three months along then; it wasn't good. Doyle said he'd bet and lost, racing that ruination of a vehicle of his. Doyle had been losing bets since craps in high school. He sounded very fine.

The whore was still there in Daniel's mind, the coolness of her hands, making the skin on his butt prickle. He walked faster, staying on the tar path that was practically a bed of nails, and he was ready, hoping, even, for a 4D galvanized to stick him, but somehow he crossed the flats unharmed. Ten minutes later he stood on his own driveway, the shoes still on his shoulder. He picked up his feet to look. Nothing, and moonlight flashing all around him.

All right, he thought. He stood at the kitchen door watching his wife through the screen. She was sitting with her back to him at the green laminate table. Smoke eddied slowly in a humid cloud above her head, so he knew she'd been in there a long time. Beyond his wife was the short, dark neck of the hallway. He listened for the baby crying in its room at the back of the house, but he heard nothing.

A fear grew in him, specific. He threw open the door.

---

Excerpted from Life in the Air Ocean by Sylvia Foley
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.