The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Horrible. How could she know already that Eric and I had been together? She began to hop in her seat, a soft little hop as if she had to pee.

  “Oh?” I said, as if bored to death. “Who?”

  “You know who I mean,” she said, still hopping. “Eric Biersdorfer. He likes you.”

  “Oh,” I said nonchalantly, my heart pounding. “Him.”

  Elizabeth hunched in close to me, cupping her hand to her mouth, our shoulders touching.

  “Did he tell you?” she whispered. I couldn’t believe it. Elizabeth Talbot. It was like we were best friends.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, still casual as hell, although a tiny point of heat had started in my chest with this lie.

  “What did he say?” she demanded, wrinkling her nose, eyes huge.

  “Oh, you know,” I sighed. “Just, you know. That he likes me.”

  “Oh my God,” Elizabeth said, throwing herself back against the seat. “Eric Biersdorfer.”

  I knew I should stop there, but I couldn’t. “His father’s got a really important job at NASA, you know.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, bored. I was losing her attention.

  “And…” I paused until she turned to me, still not sure if I would say it or not.

  “You won’t believe this,” I said, lowering my voice, hunching toward her. “He invited me to the ballet last Saturday.”

  Elizabeth’s mouth fell open. “You mean, like a date? Did you go?”

  “My mom made me,” I said, mock traumatized. This was acceptable: her expression filled with sympathy.

  “Did he come to your house? Did he come up to the door?” she asked.

  “He stayed in the car.”

  “Did his mom drop you off there, or did she come in?”

  “She came too.”

  “Did he sit next to you?”

  I rolled my eyes and nodded.

  “Did he try to hold your hand?” She was almost whispering. “Did he try to kiss you goodnight?”

  I looked over my shoulder dramatically before answering. “I don’t want this to get around,” I whispered. “I don’t want it to be any harder for him than it is.” I was surprised to hear myself speaking this way. Elizabeth blinked several times rapidly in anticipation, her lips parted.

  “But let’s just say that he wanted to.”

  Elizabeth went insane with delight. Squealing, she smacked both hands over her mouth and practically flung herself out of her seat.

  When she regained control of herself, she said his name again. “Eric Biersdorfer.”

  Elizabeth asked me questions about Eric all the way to her stop. As the bus pulled over, she said, “Come over to my house. My mom will drive you home before dinner.”

  I knew my mother would be home early that day, so Delia wouldn’t be home alone. As I followed Elizabeth down the aisle and climbed off the bus, everyone watched us, taking note.

  Elizabeth’s house was big, with salmon-colored stucco and a row of palmetto trees lining the yard. The front door was ajar, and as soon as we walked in, Elizabeth’s mother called to her from some faraway room. We stood in the living room, which was all white wicker and chintz. Everything looked so perfectly placed it seemed no one had ever sat. I thought about my own living room, cluttered and grungy.

  “Dolores is here,” Elizabeth yelled back. Mrs. Talbot appeared in the doorway, a tiny energetic woman with kind eyes and a huge smile. She was wearing old clothes smeared with pink paint and a kerchief on her head.

  “Dolores!” she cried. “It’s so nice to meet you! You’re in Elizabeth’s class with Mr. Jaffe, right?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked. This seemed like a rudely brief answer, but I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I kept feeling I’d lost my key, but every time I checked the ribbon around my neck, it was still there.

  “We’re painting Elizabeth’s room,” she said. She held out one arm to show me a thick smudge of paint, bubblegum pink. “You like the color?”

  “It’s nice,” I said. In fact, I thought the color was too girly, but I was impressed that Elizabeth could choose any color she wanted, even such a bright and impractical one. All of the walls in my family’s house were white.

  “You girls must be starving,” Mrs. Talbot announced. She fixed us cheese sandwiches and Cokes, then disappeared to finish painting. Elizabeth and I ate at the kitchen table while Elizabeth demanded more details about the ballet—what I wore, what Eric wore, what kind of car his mom drives. I told her again that his father was high up at NASA, but again that didn’t seem to mean anything to her.

  “If they’re so rich,” she said, “why does he dress like such a hick?”

  I was afraid that when the subject of Eric Biersdorfer ran its course, I wouldn’t be able to think of other things to talk about and Elizabeth would grow bored with me. But I needn’t have worried; Elizabeth was capable of supplying conversation on her own, out of whole cloth. By dinnertime, when Elizabeth’s mother reemerged to drive me home, Elizabeth asked me to a sleepover at her house that weekend. The best part of this, I thought, was that now Jocelyn and Abby would have to look up to me.

  Eric never said anything bad about me to anyone. I’m sure of that; he had no one to talk to. But I talked about Eric. At the sleepover in Elizabeth’s basement, I sat up in my sleeping bag, talking, conscious of the girls’ eyes on me, my face flushed with the attention, and I told my new friends made-up stories about him: that his mother was not really his mother, but his stepmother; that he was beaten for minor offenses; that he wet his bed at night. None of them asked how I had come by this information. They just listened, silently, as I told it, and believed me.

  When Eric came back to school, it took him a while to gather how much things had changed. He came over to my desk between language arts and math and asked what had happened the days he’d been gone, whether he’d missed anything. I shrugged without looking in his direction.

  “Dolores,” he said, “s-s-something must have happened.”

  When I wouldn’t meet his eyes, he asked me what was wrong. I didn’t answer, and he kept asking, saying my name again and again. Finally he went back to his own desk.

  In the courtyard, he sat alone on the steps, and he remained there for months, sitting curled up with a book, as he had in the first days of school. Throughout the rest of the semester, I worked myself into a position that I hoped would be unshakable, where I could never again be in any danger of unpopularity. I knew that any compassion for Eric would threaten my fragile position, so I avoided speaking to him or even looking at him, and I tried to believe I was doing it to save Eric as well as myself.

  We still assumed my father would get his job back soon, but week after week passed without word. My mother was so sure our encounter with the Biersdorfers would cause NASA to rehire my father that she talked about it as a certainty. My mother believed that if she only demonstrated her confidence about my father’s rehire, the universe would reward her by arranging for it. Only once, over dinner, was my father moved to point out that his rehiring was not inevitable.

  “It’s just that there are rules determining these things, who gets called back and in what order,” he explained.

  “It’s been months,” my mother pointed out brightly. “Surely you’re at the top of the list.”

  “It’s not necessarily that simple,” my father said.

  My mother made a face at me over his shoulder.

  “Always so pessimistic,” she said. “We’ll see.” Even then, she seemed to know something he didn’t.

  Launch Safety

  3.

  ON MY BIRTHDAY, A FEW WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS BREAK, MY mother took me shopping and bought me two new outfits. Then, at her insistence, we went to the lingerie department.

  “Try these on,” she said, handing me two size-A bras, one white and one pink. “I think you’ve already moved past the training kind.”

  “Why are they padded?” I asked.

  “All the A cups are that way,�
� she said as we moved toward the dressing rooms. “I guess they assume that if you’re an A you must want a little more.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said. My mother stayed outside the dressing room while I closed the door and untangled the bra from the hanger.

  “Do the boys say anything to you?” my mother called through the door.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, struggling to figure out the bra’s clasp.

  “You know. About your—development.”

  “Mom, please,” I begged. I somehow felt that if no one talked about my development it wouldn’t really exist. I slipped off my shirt, shivering in the air-conditioning, and put on the bra.

  “When I was your age, I had nothing. I worried about it all the time.” Reluctantly, I opened the door to show her.

  “We need to adjust it,” she said. “Turn around.” Her fingers were cold on my back as she shortened the shoulder straps. Then she squared my shoulders in front of the mirror.

  “Perfect fit,” she declared.

  “It feels weird,” I said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” she said. I wanted to squirm away, but she was still holding my shoulders.

  “Look at you,” she said. “All grown up.”

  “Okay,” I said impatiently. “Can I put my shirt back on?” Something about the feeling of the bra straps and the chill of the air on my skin made me want to cry. I knew my mother meant to compliment me, but I didn’t want to look this way. I would have stopped if I could.

  After the holiday break, things settled into a new order at school. Every day after lunch Eric sat on the steps alone. Elizabeth and Jocelyn and Abby and I sat on a wooden bench in the center where we could keep an eye on all activity in the courtyard. Everyone understood this bench to be ours and left it free for us even when we weren’t there.

  We clustered around Elizabeth, listening to her talk. Her tastes were simple, and she returned to the same themes every day: her accomplishments as a soccer player, TV shows she followed, clothes she had seen in magazines and how long they might take to make their way to central Florida. These topics had at first seemed exotic and mature to me, and though I still found them intimidatingly foreign, they had become boring through repetition. Our talk had become a contest between Jocelyn and Abby and me, all of us jockeying to win Elizabeth’s favor with our knowledge and sophistication, to make her laugh.

  After lunch as we filed out to the courtyard, Elizabeth was acting restless. Jocelyn, Abby, and I knew what was coming.

  “Look at Dierdre and Jason over there in the doorway,” Elizabeth whispered. “Are they, like, boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  “Ew,” I said quickly. “Jason smells like rotten eggs.” It was important to me to establish my distance from this type of boy-girl behavior because I knew all three of them must remember the weeks I had sat that way with Eric. The girls had never mentioned it, but they could be holding on to it for future use.

  “Jocelyn, go tell Dierdre to come up here and talk to us,” Elizabeth ordered, and we watched as Jocelyn marched across the open area of the courtyard. Dierdre raised her head, sensing trouble, as Jocelyn made her way toward the doorway where she and Jason were sitting. We watched Jocelyn speak to her, watched their two heads turn at the same moment to look up toward our wooden bench. Dierdre, talking, shook her head once, and at first I thought she was refusing to come over to us. My heart beat with fear for her, but then she stood up and brushed herself off, and I watched the two of them move slowly across the courtyard. Dierdre stood in front of Elizabeth, waiting to be addressed.

  “Dierdre,” Elizabeth said in a businesslike manner. “Is Jason your boyfriend?”

  “Nnnno,” Dierdre said carefully.

  “Then why are you holding hands with him?”

  “We weren’t holding hands,” Dierdre said, turning red. “We were just sitting over there.” She turned and pointed at the doorway, as if the location had been the only issue. “We were just sitting.” She looked not angry, but frightened.

  “Are you aware that Jason smells like rotten eggs?” I asked.

  Dierdre squinted at me, confused.

  “We just wanted to know if you were going together,” Elizabeth said lightly. “It looked like you were getting pretty serious.”

  “We were just talking,” Dierdre insisted, but now her face had softened as though she might cry. Elizabeth looked Dierdre up and down slowly, chewing her lip as though making a decision. Deirdre waited, apprehensive but patient. She looked like she would wait forever.

  “You can go,” Elizabeth said finally. Dierdre waited briefly for something more, bewildered, then walked away. She headed toward a clump of girls sitting on another bench, in the opposite direction from the doorway she had shared with Jason. I knew she would never speak to him, in the courtyard or anywhere else, ever again.

  As soon as she was gone, we all burst into giggles.

  “Rotten eggs!” Elizabeth squealed, and looked at me with approval. We laughed for a long time, long after we were actually amused, just to make sure Dierdre heard us. Across the courtyard, Eric sat on the steps. He had a book open on his knees, but his pale face was tipped up. He’d watched the whole scene. We made eye contact for a second; once he saw I was looking at him, he went back to his book.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake reading a new space shuttle book I had found in the library; the pictures of the space shuttle were mostly ones I had seen before, but I was fascinated with a section in the back filled with photos and brief biographies of all the astronauts. I loved finding a woman’s face among all the men, reading her place of birth and high school graduation year and where she went to college and graduate school, just like the others’. Imagining her as a college student, a high school student, a Girl Scout, made me feel that I could grow up to be like her.

  Long after I’d assumed everyone was asleep, I heard the door to my and Delia’s room slowly creak open. I shoved the book under my pillow and pretended to be asleep as my mother crept into the room. She sat on the edge of my bed in her pink robe, picking at her chapped bottom lip. Each tiny tug vibrated the bed frame. She sat for a long time. I didn’t open my eyes and tried to keep my breathing even and regular. Finally she spoke.

  “Dolores,” she whispered gently. I opened my eyes, faked disorientation, and gave a stretch.

  “Hey, D,” she said. “You awake? I want to ask you something.” I studied her face in the gray light: she hadn’t been crying, but her face was tight, pinched with anxiety. “What was the name of your little friend? The Biersdorfer boy?”

  A heartbeat of dread went by. My father had been laid off for four months now. I had gone to the ballet and thought about nothing but myself; I had done nothing to get my father his job back. My mother studied me, her eyes intent, as if what I said next would be crucial, could break her heart.

  “Eric?” I whispered.

  “Eric,” she repeated emphatically, in a voice that meant she had been trying to remember all day. “When was the last time you played at Eric’s house?”

  “I’ve only been to Eric’s house that once,” I said. “After the ballet.” Wouldn’t she have known if I’d been there again? “I only go to Elizabeth’s or Jocelyn’s or Abby’s.”

  Her forehead wrinkled.

  “That ballet was the only time,” I said. “Just that once.”

  “Well, whenever you went,” she said, suddenly exasperated. “When was that?”

  “That was a long time ago. That was in the fall,” I said. “I haven’t really seen him much since then.”

  I started to get an uncomfortable windy feeling in my chest, a feeling that I would come to have often, later, as a teenager: the feeling of having been caught doing something thoughtless, selfish, destructive—having quite literally forgotten the existence of other people—my mother or Delia, this friend or that—in the elation of doing something I wanted to do, being who I wanted to be, someone slightly cooler than my normal self.

  “A
ren’t you still in the same class with Eric?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “But we’re not really friends anymore.” My heart pounded twice, three times, four, as I waited for her response. But I was surprised to find that, at this moment, it was more important to me to maintain my distance from Eric than to please my mother, more important to be who I was with Elizabeth than with her.

  “Well, I want you to do something at school tomorrow,” she said. “I want you to talk to Eric, and I want you to tell him that our family wants to have his family over for dinner. We should get to know each other, if you and he are going to be friends.”

  She patted me on the arm and kissed my forehead.

  “Okay?” she asked. Her face had suddenly become so open and hopeful, I couldn’t bear it.

  “Okay,” I agreed. She smiled and kissed me again before creeping out of the room, leaving the door cracked the way Delia liked it.

  Mr. Jaffe taught us vocabulary words during language arts, and instead of listening I worried about when I would talk to Eric. I decided that the best time would be during math. We sometimes worked on problems in groups, creating enough chaos to cover a conversation. But when math came, we did an activity where we each worked quietly at our desks.

  At lunch, Elizabeth supervised us so closely there was no hope of getting away.

  “Does your father work for NASA?” Elizabeth asked me that day, apropos of nothing. My heart stopped. She scrutinized me closely, waiting for me to answer.

  “Yes,” I lied. I fiddled with my key on its ribbon around my neck.

  “Is your father an astronaut?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, my face getting warm.

  “I know he’s not,” she announced. “I was just testing you, to see if you would lie.”

  Hearing the word astronaut escape her lips, seeing the snarling way she said it, filled me with fear. If Elizabeth ever saw the growing pile of space shuttle books in my room, saw into my fantasies in which I cast myself in the role of Judith Resnik, that would be the end of me. I would become the next victim of her blood sport.