“Why not?” Delia asked. My mother gave me a quick warning look.
“It’s just a secret,” my mother said. “So keep it under your shirt.”
She spent a few minutes showing us how to unlock the door from the outside, then how to lock it again from the inside. We were not to answer the phone or open the door to anyone. We were not to leave the house or use the stove.
All day I checked and double-checked to make sure I had my key and that it was hidden from sight. The tip scratched my chest, just at the end of my breastbone. I felt the weight of the key around my neck with everything that I did.
As I got off the bus in the afternoon, I became convinced that the key wouldn’t work in the door, or that someone would see us and break into the house. Delia was standing on the corner, swinging her key by its ribbon.
“Put that away,” I hissed. “Everyone can see.” Delia looked at me as if I were crazy. No one was on the street. She slipped her key into the lock and swung the door open.
A few hours later, my mother breezed through the door in her high heels. She set down her purse and kissed us hello.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a lot to the job. You’d be surprised all the things I’m supposed to keep track of, all at the same time. But Dr. Chalmers said I had a great start for my first day.”
By the time my father got home, the three of us were watching TV with our feet on the coffee table. My mother was slumped in a chair, still wearing her work clothes, her eye makeup smudged around her eyes. Delia sang along with a commercial, caught up in its exuberance.
My father looked from my mother to the kitchen to my mother again. My mother had usually started dinner by now, but she made no move. He went into the kitchen, which was still dirty with dishes from the night before, and began opening and closing cupboards. Curious, Delia and I followed him in there. He stood facing the refrigerator with his hands on his hips, thinking.
“Where does your mother keep the macaroni and cheese?” he asked. We both pointed silently at the cupboard. Everything he did—choosing a pot to boil the water in, adding the milk, straining the noodles—was slightly different from what our mother did.
“You’re doing that wrong,” Delia said triumphantly as he dropped a chunk of margarine onto the macaroni. “You’re supposed to cut it into little bits.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, this will work anyway.” We watched as he stirred, trying to get the margarine to melt, for a long time. He added the orange powdered cheese, then spooned it into a bowl for each of us.
“That’s it? Just macaroni and cheese?” Delia asked.
“This is dinner,” my father said. “It’s a perfectly nutritious dinner.”
“But where’s the meat?” I asked. “Where’s the green vegetable?”
He gave me a look.
“I’m just kidding,” I said. “We like macaroni and cheese. Right, Delia?”
“Yeah,” admitted Delia. We carried our bowls out to the living room; my mother accepted hers with a coo of surprise. Then we ate together in front of the TV.
Within a month, my father took over doing the laundry, throwing everything in together on the wrong settings, so all of our clothes became discolored and misshapen. Clutter built up in the living room, piles of newspapers and mail and apple cores and dirty socks and homework papers. I decided to clean: I picked up everything off the living room floor, dragged out the vacuum cleaner, and untangled the cord. Then I noticed Delia in the doorway, watching me, her eyes wide.
“Why are you staring at me?” I yelled over the noise.
“What are you doing?” she yelled back.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m cleaning this disgusting room.” But she kept staring, and soon I felt it too: the exhaustion and hopelessness of this task. Even once I finished this job, the other rooms would still be a wreck, the dishes still dirty, the kitchen floor still sticky underfoot. I turned off the vacuum and left it standing in the middle of the floor, the cord snaking across the carpet. None of us had ever thought about the fact that my mother did these things; none of us knew what to do now that she wasn’t doing them.
Through the rest of October, sometimes I played with Jocelyn and Abby in the courtyard, but more often I sat on the steps near Eric but not close enough to attract attention. We watched the boys in bright colors clump together, separate, regroup. There were groups now, kids who stuck together in the lunchroom and in the courtyard. There was a sort of order to things.
Eric made no special effort to keep quiet, or to keep out of people’s way. He was tiny and pale. Paleness itself was unusual enough in Florida, but Eric was very pale, a translucent pale, blue pale, veins showing through his skin. He said things: in class, and in the courtyard, he talked, and not quietly. He used words that I knew but would never have used with other kids: inevitable, mitigating, askance.
Eric’s eyes were watery and icy gray. He had the oversized, serrated teeth of a kid just growing in his adult set. And that awful haircut: his hair seemed almost designed to accentuate his ears, and how can I describe those ears? They were both huge and elegantly shaped, more intricately whorled than most ears. They did not seem, as some large ears do, to be made of some type of molded rubber. Eric’s ears seemed to be made of skin—delicate white skin with thin scarlet blood vessels running through. I was only eleven, but I knew it was strange for me to find Eric’s large ears so lovely. I knew large ears were supposed to be laughable, but Eric’s ears, like everything else about him, seemed untouchable.
Eric Biersdorfer and I had a nice balance: we were both good at social studies and science; he did better in language arts, and I did better at math. I had always liked doing schoolwork; I took pleasure in the dogged satisfaction of scratching through a math problem step by step and getting to an answer at the end that was right, not negotiable or disputable. The first thing we did after we came in from lunch was check our homework from the night before, reading down the column of numbers while Mr. Jaffe gave out the correct answers in his slow, serious voice. Every checkmark I ticked down the margin—correct, correct, correct—seemed to affirm my idea of myself as good at math, smart in that way that not many others were smart.
One afternoon, I went inside before everyone else to find Mr. Jaffe stapling a brightly colored calendar to the corkboard. When he turned and saw me watching him, he gestured at it dramatically. “This is an o-fficial calendar from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” he announced.
“Oh,” I said. I approached it to look more closely. “Where’d we get it?”
Mr. Jaffe flipped the calendar over. On the back was a color portrait of a big jowly man with silver hair and pink cheeks. The man was dressed in a suit and standing in front of an American flag and a model of the space shuttle, smiling in a fatherly and false manner. Under a round seal was an extravagant and illegible signature. Under the signature, the man’s name was printed in all capital letters. It said: RANDOLPH R. (“BOB”) BIERSDORFER, DIRECTOR OF LAUNCH SAFETY.
I flipped the calendar over to the front again and studied the photo for that month: Columbia lifting off from the 39-A launchpad. Black-bellied, attached to its red External Tank and its white rockets, the shuttle pointed its black nose up against the blue sky, showing us its American flag tattoo. White and pink steam billowed under it. In the background you could see the Vehicle Assembly Building, where my father had worked all my life until September.
When Eric came back in with the rest of the kids, he saw the calendar, met my eyes, and looked away. None of the other kids seemed to notice it. But Eric seemed irritated with me, as if this new and troublesome fact—his father’s being the boss of everyone else’s father—were somehow my fault.
“Why are you acting so weird?” I asked him finally, when no one else was around. Involuntarily, I looked at the calendar at the back of the room over his shoulder.
“It’s just better when people don’t know,” he said. “I jus
t wish my dad would stop giving out the stupid calendars, that’s all.”
I touched my key where it rested under my shirt. If I were in his place, I thought, I would let everyone know in some accidental way that I was better than they’d thought I was. Eric probably lived in a bigger, nicer house than anyone. Those clothes he wore, which looked so nondescript on him, were probably expensive brands, and knowing that made them look a little better to me. But Eric would never tell anyone about his father. Eric wanted to be left alone at school, and it seemed that it hadn’t helped him, at his other school, to be so different and also to be the son of a rich, powerful man, the boss of the other fathers.
STS 51-A, Discovery.
Launch attempt November 7, 1984, canceled due to wind shear. (What is wind shear?)
Launch November 8, 7:15 am.
Anna Fisher was on board. She is the third of the women to fly and the first mother in space. She used the Remote Manipulator Arm to grab two broken satellites and put them into the payload bay.
My father took me to this launch.
The trick with launch attempts was to pace yourself, not to get too excited all at once, because just as likely as not the attempt would be scrubbed. My father and I packed food and crept outside in the middle of the night, then parked and waited for hours. The tourists and first-timers never understood the waiting. They wore themselves out with anticipation, clapping and hollering at the vehicle squatting on the launchpad; then they shouted with rage when the weather turned, or an instrument read outside the acceptable range, and the calm voice of the public affairs officer came on the speakers to announce that the launch attempt had been called off.
While we packed our things to leave after the launch was scrubbed, I looked up at my father and thought of asking him about his NASA job, when he might go back. But he just gave me his quick nod and smile, and I decided not to.
When we arrived home, my mother was standing in her bathrobe, the phone to her ear, her voice high and formal. My father got to work unpacking the groceries we’d bought on the way home. But Delia and I watched her, trying to figure out who could elicit such a charming phone manner.
She hung up the phone and looked at me.
“That was Mrs. Biersdorfer,” she said.
My father pulled himself out of the refrigerator.
“Did you know that your daughter is friends with Bob Biersdorfer’s son?” she asked him.
“Bob Biersdorfer’s son,” Delia said conversationally, hugging a box of sugar cereal she’d pulled out of a grocery bag.
My mother turned to me. “Why didn’t you tell us you were friends with Bob Biersdorfer’s son?”
It had never occurred to me to tell them; school and home were two separate universes. My father stood with his hands on his hips, looking from her to me.
“She’s invited to the ballet in Orlando next Saturday,” my mother told him. “Their family has season tickets and Bob can’t make it.” She used his name heavily, not quite sarcastically. “The son said he wants to invite her. She’ll have dinner over there afterward. At the Biersdorfers’.” All three of them looked at me.
My mother gave me a big smile.
“You may have gotten your daddy his job back,” she whispered, excited.
“Deborah,” my father murmured quietly.
“What? She’ll have dinner over there. You’ll go to pick her up, he’ll invite you in for a beer…”
My father stooped into the refrigerator again, sniffed a moldy cantaloupe, and handed it to Delia to toss into the garbage.
“This is an opportunity,” my mother added, and the way she pronounced the word, it sounded longer than when other people said it, broad and long-ranging, with hills and valleys, secret spaces. “Right, Dolores?”
“Right,” I answered quickly, not sure what I was agreeing to.
“You have to learn to use your connections,” she said, this time speaking to my father. He rummaged loudly through a grocery bag.
“Okay,” my father said when my mother didn’t look away. “All right okay all right.”
2.
I TOOK A BATH WHILE MY MOTHER WENT THROUGH MY CLOSET, trying to find something I hadn’t outgrown that I could wear to the ballet. I washed my hair and wondered why I had such a feeling of dread. Eric Biersdorfer had invited me to the ballet: fine. Eric’s father was the man who could get my father his NASA job back: fine.
Then I saw what it was: the faces of Jocelyn and Abby, the two of them huddling so their shoulders touched as they always did, leaning together; they could see me where I sat in the tub. They laughed as Eric and I took our seats together in the theater, all dressed up. Jocelyn and Abby would tell Elizabeth Talbot, and what then?
Once I was washed and dressed in a pink sundress that was too tight in the armpits, my mother stood me in front of the full-length mirror in their bedroom and brushed out my hair. Delia lingered behind us. My mother had promised Delia she would do her hair too, even though she wasn’t going anywhere.
“I want you to be very polite,” my mother said, yanking my head back a little with each brushstroke. She was fixing my hair in a bun on top of my head, a style I thought too little-girlish.
“Maybe a ponytail instead,” I said casually. My mother didn’t seem to hear me.
“I want you to say please and thank you, and don’t stare at people, and answer when someone speaks to you. Will you do that?” she asked me. I tried to nod, but couldn’t—she held all of my hair tightly in one hand.
“Yeah,” I said.
She glanced into the mirror to meet my eye. “It’s important,” she said.
“Important,” Delia repeated.
“I know,” I answered, and looked right at my mother’s reflection. I gave her a big smile to show how I would act. “Thank you, Mrs. Biersdorfer!” I piped in a little-girl voice.
My mother laughed. “You’ve nearly outgrown that,” she said, looking at my dress.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s tight.”
My mother finished pinning my hair into place and sprayed it with her hairspray.
“We should get you some training bras next time we go shopping,” she said.
“Training bras,” I repeated with disgust. “I’m only eleven.”
“I know, but you’re starting to get a little something here.” She reached out to touch, with her forefinger and thumb, one of the swollen bumps of breasts just starting to form on my chest.
“Mom,” I protested, and knocked her hand away.
She gave a bemused smile. I felt a horror that she had not only created these breasts by calling them to my attention, but had also made them laughable.
“I don’t need a bra yet,” I said petulantly.
“Sensitive,” she chided. “Whatever you say, baby.”
She stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, surveying her work. I looked just the way she wanted me to, young and sweet, excited to see the ballerinas and emulating them a bit with my high bun and strappy dress.
“How does your sister look?” my mother asked Delia.
“Pretty,” she answered perfunctorily.
“I’m so proud of you, baby,” my mother whispered in my ear. She was proud, I could tell, but she was also nervous for me; they went hand in hand.
Mrs. Biersdorfer pulled up at our curb in a large shiny car and stepped out gracefully, keeping her knees together. From the doorway of our house, my mother and I watched her pick her way politely up our weed-strewn walk. Bigger than my mother, louder than my mother, Mrs. Biersdorfer wore her makeup aggressively, like a mask: the rouge and mascara were what you saw, not the face underneath. Her colorless hair was curled and poufed large. Her blue suit was stiff like a uniform.
“Hello there,” she said, wiggling her beige nails at me, before turning to my mother for the obligatory pleasantries. While she and my mother chatted, I found Eric in the backseat of the Oldsmobile and slid in next to him. He grinned when he saw me, turned red, and clunked his head against
the window. He was dressed in a gray seersucker suit with a white dress shirt and a red bow tie. His hair was wet and looked as though someone had recently been attempting to comb it into submission. But Eric’s hair wanted to be vertical. He wore penny loafers with his suit, with athletic socks that bunched out at his ankles.
I still felt the dread I’d felt in the bathtub, but once I saw Eric, I was glad he had asked me to the ballet. He was taking a great risk by doing this, even if he didn’t realize it. And now that we were here in the car, it didn’t seem to be as much of a danger; in fact, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for us to go to the ballet together.
Mrs. Biersdorfer got into the car and pulled away from the curb without looking back at us. Eric looked out his window. I looked out my own. The neighborhood and its green leaves and street signs fell away to reveal the freeways, wide and fast, and the shiny structures of Orlando.
The main character of the ballet was danced by a woman who kept changing tutus. She was dark and had an angry look. The way her hair was pulled down at the sides emphasized her nose, which was long and had a bump in it. She took in a breath, raised her arms, and slowly toed the floor like a horse, flexing every muscle in her leg. I was conscious of Eric breathing beside me. I heard every rustle he made, every rustle I made, like we were communicating in code. I watched the main ballerina’s partner: he wore as much makeup as she did, and the white of his outfit, draped over his shoulder and exposing one nipple, picked up purple and green from the lights. He stepped backward out of the circle of light in three steps, his feet turned out—toe-heel, toe-heel, toe-heel, then stopped, his back foot perfectly pointed against the floor, a look of perfect longing for her on his face, and he watched her dance all over the stage.
The house lights came on. We blinked, got up, and made our way out to the lobby.
“Would you like anything?” Mrs. Biersdorfer asked me. I shook my head mutely, then remembered my mother and the chirpy way I’d practiced saying “Thank you, Mrs. Biersdorfer!” Already I’d let her down. I should have asked Mrs. Biersdorfer for something so I could thank her for it charmingly.
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 3