The Second Kite

Part One · The Plan

Hollis had borrowed the library book three times in succession, and by the third occasion the page with the diagram had gone soft at the corner from being turned so frequently. The kite in the illustration was a plain diamond, two sticks and a sheet of paper, and the caption beneath it announced that a kite constructed correctly requires no tail whatsoever. She read that sentence aloud to her brother Cal, who was eight and lying upside down on the garage floor with his feet against the wall. He replied that a kite without a tail was like a dog without a tail, which was to say, a disappointment. Hollis informed him that this was not how physics operated. He asked what physics was, and she said she would explain it when he was older, which was precisely what people were forever saying to her.

The sticks came from the hardware store on the corner, two slender rods of pale wood that the man behind the counter measured and cut to length while Hollis held the book open at the diagram. One rod was the spine and the other was the spar that crossed it. The instructions were extremely firm that the spar should be bowed, bent backward into a shallow curve by a string tied across its ends. For the sail she had a sheet of the thin plastic that decorators spread over furniture, folded in her coat pocket like a secret document. Cal returned from school with a yard of red ribbon that he had traded for three marbles. Hollis said it was pretty, and he said it was for the kite, and she said they would see about that.

She assembled it on the workbench on Saturday morning while the rain came and went against the garage window. The spine and the spar crossed a third of the way down, lashed together with string and a dab of glue. Then she cut the plastic to the shape of the frame, folded it over the edges, and taped it down with enormous care. The bridle was two lengths of line attached to the spine, meeting at a knot where the flying line would eventually clip on. The book devoted an entire page to exactly where that knot should sit. Cal wanted to help with the tape, so she let him, and then she quietly peeled it up and did it again while he was inside getting a drink.

The bow was the final step and the one she had been dreading since the beginning. The instructions said to tie a string from one end of the spar to the other and tighten it gradually until the stick curved backward like a drawn bow, so that the kite was no longer flat but bent into a shallow V. She tied the string and tightened it. The spar bent, and bent further, and then it broke with a sharp dry crack that made Cal drop his drink. There was no replacement rod, and the hardware store had already closed for the evening. Hollis sat on the stool for a considerable time, and then she removed the string and taped the two halves of the spar together, flat, with no bow whatsoever.

She told herself it would be fine. The hill above the beach was the windiest place for miles, and a strong wind forgave a great deal, and besides, the diagram had been drawn by somebody who had never met her particular kite. Cal arrived at the bench with the red ribbon and held it out without a word. Hollis explained, as kindly as she could manage, that a tail was additional weight, that a tail was what you attached to a kite that could not keep itself steady, and that a kite made properly did not require one. It said so in the book. He returned the ribbon to his pocket without arguing, which was unusual for him, and which she would consider later.

Part Two · Kite Day

Kite day was the first Saturday in March, when the wind came directly off the sea and over the hill above the beach as if the entire coast were taking a deep breath. There were a hundred people on the grass and twice as many kites. There were kites shaped like fish and kites shaped like birds, and one enormous kite like a mattress that two grown men held down between them. The air was full of a sound Hollis had never heard before, the snap and flutter of a thousand yards of fabric, and underneath it the hiss of the grass lying flat. Her father carried the thermos and her mother carried the folding chairs. Hollis carried the kite, and Cal carried nothing at all, with his hands in his pockets.

She let out ten yards of line and lifted the kite over her head, and the wind took it out of her hands as though it had been waiting all week for the opportunity. The kite climbed. It climbed straight and fast, the plastic drumming, the line singing in her fingers, and for ten seconds it was the finest thing she had ever constructed. Then it leaned. It swung to the left in a long lazy arc, hung for a moment, swung back further to the right, and the arcs grew wider every time, until the kite was carving an enormous figure eight across the sky. On the fourth swing it turned its nose directly downward and dived into the grass thirty yards away.

She tried again, and it did exactly the same thing, except faster. The third time, it took a small boy's bird kite down with it, and Hollis had to go and apologize to the boy, who had the hiccups, while his mother patiently untangled the lines. The spar had cracked along the tape. Cal sat down on the grass beside the broken kite and said nothing, with such tremendous effort that she could practically hear it. Hollis wanted to tell him that this was the wind's fault, and that the book had been mistaken, and that the diagram had never met her kite. But she was thirteen, not eight, and she recognized the shape of an excuse when it was in her own mouth.

A woman with white hair and a green coat was flying a train of twelve small kites from a single line, each one a different color, and they hung above the hill in a steady curve like a row of paper lanterns. She had observed the entire performance. She came over, examined the broken spar, and did not offer to repair it, but asked Hollis a question instead. What is holding its head up, she said. Hollis did not understand the question. The woman indicated the sky, the bird kites and the fish kites and the mattress, and told her to look, really look, at every kite that was sitting still, and to describe what they had in common.

So Hollis looked. The fish kite had a long tail of ribbons, and so did the dragon beside it, and so did the plain diamonds that the smallest children were flying. The bird kites had no tails, but they were bent, bowed backward along the wings into a shallow V that she recognized immediately from the diagram. The mattress had no tail and no bow, and it did nothing except hang there, but it was the size of a car and three men were required to hold it. Everything that sat still in the sky had either a tail or a bow. The kites that had neither were the ones wandering, and diving, and carving figure eights, and taking down small boys' birds.

The woman said it was the same principle as a weather vane. The wide end always finishes up behind, because the wind pushes hardest on the largest surface, and so the narrow end points into the wind whether it wants to or not. A kite tail performed exactly the same job, dragging on the air behind the kite and keeping the nose pointed in the direction the nose belonged. A bow managed it differently, by catching the wind on both sides at once, so a bowed kite could manage without a tail, but a flat kite could not. Hollis thought about the broken spar and the string she had removed, and about a yard of red ribbon traded for three marbles, and then she turned to her brother. Cal, she said, I need to borrow your tail.

Part Three · The Tail

He had it out of his pocket before she had finished the sentence. He did not say that he had told her so, although he was entitled to, and she noticed that as well. She repaired the spar with the tape and a pencil borrowed from her father's pocket, splinted along the crack, and then she tied the ribbon to the bottom of the spine and released the kite. It climbed, swung once, and settled, and for a moment she believed they had managed it, until the slow wandering began again, gentler now, but unmistakably there. The woman in the green coat said that one yard was not sufficient. A tail wants to be five or six times as long as the kite, she said, and longer in a strong wind.

They had no more ribbon, but they had the offcuts of plastic in Hollis's bag, and the scissors, and the remainder of the morning. She cut the plastic into strips as wide as her hand, and Cal tied them end to end with the knot she demonstrated, and they measured the tail against the kite until it was six times the length of the spine and then a little more. It looked ridiculous. It lay on the grass like a red and white serpent with a kite for a head. Their father came over with the thermos, considered it, and had the sense to say nothing beyond offering them each a cup.

This time Cal held the reel. Hollis walked the kite out thirty yards, lifted it, and released it, and the wind accepted it the way it had before, straight up and fast, with the long tail unrolling off the grass behind it like a ribbon pulled from a drawer. It climbed, and leaned to the left, and the tail swung after it like a rudder, and the kite returned to the center and remained there. It did not wander. It sat in the sky as if it had been nailed in position, steady, humming, with the tail describing a slow lazy S in the air beneath it, and Cal let out line hand over hand until the reel was nearly empty.

The woman in the green coat raised one hand to them from across the hill and returned to her lanterns. Hollis sat down on the grass beside her brother and watched the thing they had constructed together, and she thought about the book, and about the sentence she had read aloud in the garage, and decided that it had not been wrong, precisely. It had merely been describing a different kite. The one on the page had a bow. Hers had a brother. Cal announced that his arms were getting tired and asked whether she wanted a turn, and she said no, and meant it, and they remained there until the light turned golden and the mattress finally came down.

The library book went back on Monday, on time, which was a first. Hollis constructed a second kite the following week, with a new spar, and this time she bowed it slowly, over an hour, after soaking the wood in the bath so that it bent instead of breaking. The second kite requires no tail, and flies perfectly well without one. But when they take it up the hill on windy Saturdays, which is most Saturdays, there is always a yard of red ribbon tied to the bottom of the spine, trailing a little in the wind, performing no particular job at all. Cal holds the reel. Hollis has stopped explaining physics to him, because he keeps turning out to understand it already.