She cupped her hands under one side of her face and fell
asleep.
I tried to keep fully awake but soon images came with an
invitation to rest in this half dream-state. My mother caressed me in the
half-dream, she pulled me into her and protected me. I surrendered,
partaking of her love and then in the mental movements that were darkness
and fragment I was making love to myself, seeing and touching myself from
the dreamer's place of seeing, my body had doubled and contained the shift,
the ending of which drew out an orgasm like blood.
By seven p.m. New York time, the plane landed for its hour
of refueling inside the gusty night of a mountain range, but its passenger
cabin and its fill of sleeping travelers were quiet as a bevy of bones. The
lights in the cabin were off, and all I could see outside my window was the
gleam of Swiss airline fuel tanks and scaffolds.
My mother's eyes did not open and the plane ascended into
the black air again.
I watched the swelling morning clouds over the continent, a
dawn was coming carrying a light storm, heaving winds.We would be in Israel
soon, I told myself, and there would be time for escape and remedy.
A few hours later, the airplane was jolted by turbulence in
the air.
My mother sat up, startled. "Oh . . . what? What?" she said,
blinking. She kicked at her red-tanned purse that had toppled out of the
seat's pocket with the magazines and tissues she had tucked inside it.
"Nothing, Mom," I said, "you're all right. It's nothing at
all."
She stared at me. And then she fell back into her sleep.
I sat, wide awake for a while longer, watching the airplane's
escape hatch where other warning signs were pasted in white-and-black
letters, instructions on how to bolt out in time and land on an inflatable float boat in the ocean, in case of sudden descent, or
irreversible mechanical failure.
I stared out the plane window and into the great black hole
in the galaxy where my father had fallen. The possibility of escape through
death lived inside me as some odd and exciting adventure.
I listened to my mother's heavy breathing blend with the
noise of the airplane's motor under my feet and I promised to the spaces
unknown into which we were traveling, from one world to another, soon I
would make a new life.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
First time novelist Vaddey Ratner captured my heart and senses in this novel based on her childhood in Cambodia. Her story transcends any news story...
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From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
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Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
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Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
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