Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  Mark said he had decided to become a nuclear physicist. It took hard work and years of study but would be worth it. Then he told me that his father had been laid off at the Cape. We both knew that this was the beginning of the end. Soon whole companies would be shutting down. The race for the moon was over. We had won. NASA had plans to rig up unused Apollo spacecraft into Skylab, a sort of temporary space station, but the flights to the moon were over. It was too expensive. Mark’s father had once stayed awake for a solid seventy-two hours, working on the team that brought the crew of the disastrous Apollo 13 mission safely back to the earth. How could he sleep, he’d told Mark, when every minute Lovell and Swigert and Haise had less oxygen to breath? Now Mark’s father had taken what he hoped would be a temporary job as a toll taker on the Bee Line Highway. Looked at in this light, it seemed good that Mark was on his way to becoming independently wealthy as a drug dealer. He would be able to pay his own way through college.

  We got back on the motorcycle. After too short a time, Mark pulled up in front of my house. I got off, my legs unsteady. I took off the helmet and he strapped it on the back of the bike. Mark looked at me. I thought he was going to say something like, If you need me, you know where to find me. But he didn’t say anything, and then he roared away. I stood in the hot sun on my driveway, my hair in my eyes. I tried to run my hand through it, but the hair was so tangled that my fingers got nowhere. Now I was ready to talk to Carol. I brushed the sand off my legs and went inside.

  It was dark and cool, as always, but not quiet this time. My parents were in the kitchen arguing.

  “I don’t want to call Dr. Bach’s service again!” my mother was saying. She sounded like she had been crying. “You don’t know what it’s like. I call and I call. He ignores me.”

  “But this isn’t for you. Didn’t you say it was about Carol?” my father said. I slammed the front door, coughed.

  “Jesse!” I heard Carol calling, but her voice sounded strange, like her head was under the covers. “Jes, please.” I walked down the hall and opened her door. What I saw was so strange that I thought it couldn’t be real. I shook my head. It didn’t go away. Carol was lying on her bed, but her back was impossibly arched, her face twisted. Only the tip of her head and her heels were touching the mattress. Even from across the room, I could smell her sweat and her fear. She was having some kind of convulsion.

  “God,” I said, running to her. I tried to push her down on the bed. How could I have doubted her when she told me how bad she felt?

  “Please,” she hissed between clenched teeth. “Get me out of here.” Get me out of here. Out of this house, this family. I felt ashamed. Even Carol had given up on us.

  I ran to the phone and called an ambulance, using a number from the orange emergency sticker on the receiver. My parents were still arguing like children: “You call.” “No, you call.” I wanted to scream at them. Instead, I just told them what I had done. By the time the ambulance attendants arrived, Mom and Dad were grown-up again. They acted like parents, asked questions. An attendant said the muscle seizures might be an allergic reaction to Compazine, the antinausea drug. A pretty common one. Allergic reaction, I thought, of course. Carol was allergic to everything. “Is she going to die?” I asked. I said this so they would say, Heavens no!

  Instead one of them said, “It’s best not to think about that right now.” They put an oxygen mask on Carol, shot something into her arm. She relaxed a little and turned her head away from my parents. She looked at me. I leaned closer, and she said something I couldn’t quite catch.

  “Mmmm … nnn … mad at you” was what it sounded like. Am mad at you? Am not mad at you? Either way, I was sure she knew everything. She was either blaming me or forgiving me for what I had been doing all afternoon.

  My parents climbed into the back of the ambulance with Carol, serious, adult, my mother clutching her purse. The last things I saw before they closed the backdoors were Carol’s toes. As the ambulance started down the driveway, I realized I had no way to get to the hospital. I ran after it, hoping one of the attendants would see me in the rearview mirror and let me sit between them on the front seat. Instead, the driver hit the siren and was gone. I stopped at the end of the drive, breathing hard.

  Just then a sheriff’s car passed, stopped, backed up, and a deputy got out, hitching his belt. At once I was aware of my matted hair, my sandy clothes, which might or might not smell like pot.

  “So,” he said. “Somebody here OD’d?” He said the ambulance crew had called in a drug-related incident.

  At first, I was so furious I couldn’t say anything. Then I did. In a torrent. It wasn’t an overdose, I said. My sister would never do anything like that. It was an allergic reaction to a drug our family doctor had prescribed. The deputy nodded patiently, and I realized that he had heard all of this many times before. My mother, full of legally prescribed Valium, could have been unconscious in that ambulance. Or Mark could have OD’d. Or me. It was all the same to him.

  I accepted the deputy’s offer of a ride to the hospital, but I couldn’t shut up. I told him how when we were little, Carol would get so mad at me for reading all the time that she would tear the book from my hands. How I would just pick up another book and then another, until she would fall on me, punching me, pulling my hair. “She wanted me to play with her,” I said. He nodded without taking his eyes from the traffic. “ Took at me,’ she used to say,” I told him. “She wants people to be there when they’re there.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “well.” He shrugged.

  He dropped me off at the emergency entrance. I saw my parents on the far side of the waiting room, standing closer together than I could ever remember seeing them. I was walking toward them when the double doors next to them swung open and a doctor in green surgical scrubs stepped out. My parents turned their backs to me, their faces to him. I strained to hear what he was saying, but he was too far away. But I knew.

  He had to be saying that Carol was dead.

  The doctor’s inaudible words seemed to roll like a wave across the room, washing over my mother and my father. I saw my mother’s hands rise, my father’s head snap back. Tonight my mother will throw her Valium down the garbage disposal, grind even the plastic bottle to bits. From now on, my father will come home every day at five. I will hug my mother and listen to my father. We will take up gardening or decoupage or Chinese cooking, some hobby we all can share. The three of us will eat every meal together. It is not too late. We will be a family for Carol.

  I braced myself, waiting for the wave to hit me. Instead, I heard my father’s irritated voice. “I told you she would be fine,” he said to my mother.

  Carol was not dead.

  I took a deep breath, prepared to feel joy or at least profound relief. Mostly I felt strange. Like I didn’t know these people. Like this wasn’t my family at all.

  19

  After Carol almost died, something happened to me. I disappeared inside my own body. I had the sensation of walking around and looking at my feet and my hands as if they were only remotely connected to anything I would call myself. Like I’d become the spaceship I’d fantasized I was when I’d been in my aluminum back brace. If I started to feel anything too keenly, I would close my eyes and build a capsule inside my head, sheet by heavy sheet. Sliding first the back wall in place, then the front, the sides, the top, cutting off all connections. Feeling the thick metal slice through brain and nerve and the tangled knots of worry. When I slid the bottom sheet in place, the part of me that was really me was deep inside a cold, quiet steel safe. Nothing could get to me at all.

  Carol, even as distanced from the family as she was after what had happened, got worried about me. She went to my father and told him I was very unhappy. When he repeated her words to me, I was surprised. I didn’t feel unhappy. I felt tired. Making a body that had so little to do with me get up every day, walk to the bus stop, and go to high school required concentrated effort. I came home each day and took long naps. Ea
ch night, I barely lasted through dinner, went to bed early. Still the alarm clock rang too soon. All I really wanted was to stay in bed and sleep forever, though it scared me to have this in common with my mother. My father talked to someone. I don’t know who, maybe someone at the college who had trouble with their own kids. They recommended taking me to see a counselor at the local mental health center.

  My father took off from work to take me, and I got to skip school as well. He was very nervous and talked nonstop about stuff in the news, Vietnam and Nixon, as we drove to my appointment at the center in Rockledge, the adjoining town. A fountain was in the courtyard outside the clinic. I remembered how my mother used to run water in the sink to get Carol and me to pee before we went on a long car trip or when we were supposed to fill up some little paper cup in the doctor’s office for tests. I said to him, “Boy, I couldn’t work here. The sound of that water would send me to the bathroom a thousand times a day” We both laughed, though it wasn’t really all that funny.

  After one talk with a woman counselor—she made me draw a picture of my family with crayons—I got assigned to group therapy. If I could come in on Mondays and Wednesdays, she said, I could join an ongoing group, one especially for teens in crisis. At the Cape, thousands of dads were being laid off. Houses were being repossessed, families coming apart. I wasn’t surprised that other kids besides me were in trouble.

  The first time that I went, the group leader, a thin, tall man with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, talked to me before the others came. He stood me in front of a full-length mirror. I’d let my own hair grow by then. My mother always liked it short, but now it was a regular blond bush, standing out from my head in a frizzy tangle. The counselor gathered it in his hands, holding it tight at the back of my neck. He asked me to look at myself. “Do you like your hair?” he asked, looking into my eyes reflected in the mirror.

  “Sure,” I said. I actually did like my hair. Even in my detached state, I considered it my best feature.

  “Your forehead?” I nodded. He went on. “Your nose? Your mouth?”

  I kept saying, yeah, sure, I liked all of them just fine. My body, that had so little to do with me, was just standing there in the mirror, looking back at me.

  “Your breasts?” he asked. “Your vulva? Your vagina?”

  I looked at him and thought, What the hell does he want? “Fine,” I said to him, “I like my vagina just fine.”

  When he asked me how I liked my feet—my toes-out duck feet—my detachment finally broke down. I felt a rush of sympathy, sympathy I had refused to feel for myself. Poor feet. They’d had a hard life and deserved better.

  The other kids started filing in. I was relieved to see I didn’t know any of them, but I could tell from their clothes that these were cooler kids than me. Their jeans were more ragged, their bell-bottoms more extreme. One girl had a rose with a dagger through it tattooed above her skinny elbow. We sat on the floor in a circle and took turns talking. Most had been busted for drugs or shoplifting or running away from home. The group was a lesson in how to really mess up. One kid told how easy it was to hot-wire a car. Another about skipping school to do hash oil and break into his neighbors’ houses. Their stories only made me feel more distant, even weirder. I’d been a saint compared to them. Me, I’d only smoked pot that one time with Mark Lish to get even with my sister. I’d never even thought of doing most of this stuff. It was embarrassing. I didn’t talk at all that first meeting. Then, I started to lie.

  One week, I said I’d stolen money from my mother’s purse and also Valium from her medicine cabinet, which I’d sold in the girl’s bathroom at my high school. Everybody nodded. I could tell they were starting to like me. I wasn’t a stuck-up bitch after all. I’d just been a little shy. At the break, one kid tried to buy some Valium off me. When I said I didn’t have any just then, she offered to sell me speed. The next week, I said I was in love with one of my teachers, that he’d kissed me. The counselor seemed to approve of that.

  I started lying other places, too. I had a job at the public library, working a few hours after school repairing torn books, and there I practiced telling the older women working in the backroom the most outrageous things I could think of. I said my aunt was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. I brought in Carol’s autographed picture of JFK as proof. I said next year I wouldn’t be living in Cocoa, that I was going to Israel to live on a kibbutz with Golda Meir. I said this because, though I wasn’t Jewish, I’d been the Israeli delegate at my high school’s mock United Nations.

  I told these lies as I worked, cutting huge sheets of cardboard into smaller pieces for the other women to stick inside broken bindings. One day I was so wrapped up in some complete fiction that I cut three fingernails off my left hand with the giant blade of the board shear. Another quarter inch and I would have lost the tops of half my fingers.

  Then one week at group therapy, when everybody was just sitting there, at a loss for anything left in their short lives to confess, I told the group my mother had tried to kill herself. As soon as I said it, everyone sat up. I was surprised to find I was crying. I don’t remember how I said she’d tried to do it, but while I talked I remember feeling sick, as if I were breaking some horrible taboo. I was afraid of bringing bad luck on my mother, that just telling such a lie might make it true. I thought I had finally gone unforgivably too far. Looking back now, I think I felt sick because it was true. She was killing herself. It was just taking years instead of minutes, like watching a terrible train wreck in slow motion.

  After two months, I quit going to group. On the positive side, I came to the decision I didn’t want to follow my group-mates into a life of boosting cars or eight-track tapes. On the negative, I just didn’t want to talk about how I felt anymore. Whatever was happening to me was something I more than deserved. It was only fair that all my years of lying had led to my loss of self.

  What I wanted, instead, was out. Out of school, out of the house, out of everything that had made up my life until then. One day, standing outside the school cafeteria, dreading going back to English class to diagram more sentences, I saw a way. Because I’d heard my father talk about it, I knew that the courts had struck down the requirement that girls in Florida public schools take a year of home ec and the boys, a year of shop. The number of hours required to graduate from high school was actually pretty low. Most kids took lots of electives, band or typing or, like my sister, chorus. The bottom line was three years of English, two years of math, two of science, two of PE, and a semester of something called Americanism Versus Communism, designed to convince us how lousy it would be to live in the Soviet Union. This was an entire term of filmstrips where they did things like show a giant shoe store in America as a deep voice said, “In America, we have a choice of shoes, but in Russia”—bring up the heavy Volga Boatmen music, fade-in a shot of one ugly pair of granny boots—“choice is not allowed.”

  Kids who flunked or who wanted to take even more electives during the day signed up for night school. An eight-week course at night carried a year’s credit. Nasty requirements could be quickly gotten out of the way. I had no hobbies, so I’d already taken most of what I needed to graduate. I was only short one credit in English and one in PE, which I’d been putting off because I hated it so much. If I went to night school, I could graduate a year early.

  As soon as I had the idea, I started to have doubts. I’d miss my senior year, prom and all, which everyone said was important, not that high school had been my favorite thing so far in life. I was a big fan of an old show on TV called The Prisoner about an ex-spy locked up on an island resort that was actually a prison. On that show, whenever anybody said good-bye to anyone else on the island, they’d always say, “Be seeing you,” a remark that I found wonderfully ironic. Of course, they would be seeing one another because there was no escape from the island, though the imprisoned spy tried every week. It was the way I thought of school, the way I thought of my whole life. In the last episode, the prisoner did esca
pe, blowing the island apart behind him.

  When I got home from school that day, my mother was awake and sitting on the couch. By then, she was really in bad shape. On those nights when she came to dinner, she often choked on her food. Tea or bread would run from her mouth and nose right onto her plate. When Carol or I asked my father about her, he just repeated her doctor’s line about how she would be much worse without the medication. How? I should have asked. How could she possibly have been worse?

  Now, of course, after Betty Ford and the experiences of a thousand other women, I can see it was the Valium that was killing her. Instead of helping, the Valium only made her more and more depressed. Her doctor gave it to her, gave her more and more, because that was what doctors were told to do for women who took to their beds but didn’t sleep, who were unhappy without knowing why. On top of everything else, the summer before, she’d had a mastectomy. This was in the days when women routinely went in to have a lump checked and woke up with half their chests missing. I’d been away at the time. My father had sent me to visit my half-sister Bobbie, a trip that was probably another of Carol’s ideas to cheer me up. No one told me about the surgery until I got back. Carol, who was driving by then, picked me up at the airport.

  “She came through the surgery okay,” she said, “but it was cancer.” She shook her head, very adult and in charge. Then later, as we drove across the swampy basin of the St. John’s River, she said, “You know, at the hospital Dad and I got talking.” She looked at me sideways, driving fast. “We both agreed it might be best for everybody if Mom just didn’t make it.” I stared at her. What she said was horrible, and we both knew it. But by this time Carol wanted out as badly as I did, as we all did. We’d turned into some kind of emotional Donner party. Wishing our mother dead was just one more little thing we were willing to do in the name of our survival.