The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “What exactly does your father do for NASA?” she asked. Her face scrunched with impatience, waiting for me to answer.

  “He works on the Solid Rocket Boosters,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I scanned my brain for any way she could have learned that my father had been laid off. “He assembles the rockets.”

  “Oh, so he’s a technician.”

  “That’s right,” I said warily, knowing I was being tricked into something but not sure yet what.

  “So,” she said with satisfaction, “he’s not an engineer.”

  “What’s the difference?” Abby asked.

  “The technicians are kind of like mechanics,” Elizabeth explained loudly for the benefit of all, happy to have been asked. “They didn’t go to college. The engineers are the experts. The make the decisions and design the space shuttle. The engineers are the bosses of the technicians.” She studied me, waiting for a reaction. I shrugged to hide my panic.

  “My father’s an engineer,” Elizabeth added.

  “Who’s the boss of the astronauts?” Abby asked.

  “The engineers,” Elizabeth said. “The engineers tell them what to do.”

  “My dad’s an astronaut, kind of,” Toby offered from his end of the table.

  “Oh, is he?” Elizabeth asked sweetly. Jocelyn and Abby giggled.

  “He is, kind of,” Toby said. “He works with them, to get them trained and stuff? And he told me once that if any of the astronauts gets sick or something that my dad will probably go instead.”

  “You’re lying,” Elizabeth said curtly. “The astronauts live in Houston, and so do their trainers. They only come to Florida for a few weeks before the launch. Your dad’s probably a janitor or something.”

  “No, he’s not, he drives the crawler transporter,” Toby back-pedaled. The crawler transporter was the massive tank that carried the assembled Launch Vehicle from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpad at one mile per hour; we all fantasized about driving it.

  “He probably cleans up after the astronauts when they live in quarantine before the launch,” Elizabeth finished. “He probably mops the floors.”

  Toby was silent. He would be made to pay, maybe for a long time, for his lie.

  In the courtyard, Elizabeth, Jocelyn, Abby, and I took up our usual position on our bench. While Elizabeth talked, I watched Eric sitting on the steps and thought about what my mother had asked me to do. His body was pulled up into a shrimp shape, the book on his knees inches from his eyes. The wind moved his shock of hair to the left, then right, then left again. I’d told my mother I would ask him and his family to dinner, but I could see no way to stand up from the bench, cross the courtyard in front of everyone, approach Eric, and speak to him.

  Eric looked up and held his head high in the air, as if sensing something. He scanned the courtyard and went back to his book. A few moments later, he looked up again. He could sense me watching him, thinking about him, even though he couldn’t see me. He looked left and right. Then he closed his book, put it under his arm, stood, and walked into the school building. This was my chance.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “So go,” Elizabeth said impatiently.

  The school seemed gloomy and dusty inside as my eyes adjusted to the light. I ran down the hall to our classroom. Mr. Jaffe was in there alone grading papers at his desk, and he looked up as I came in and then left just as suddenly. Where was Eric? I stood for a long time in the hallway, not quite believing that I was going to do what I did next.

  Quickly and without knocking, I walked into the boys’ bathroom. It was a mirror image of the girls’, except for a row of low white urinals lined up on a wall where our bathroom bore only a dull, scratched mirror. I squatted to look for feet in the stalls. There were none.

  I was about to leave when I noticed that all of the stalls’ doors hung open at just the same angle, casting just the same shadow, except for the last one, which was closed. I could imagine him in there, his feet on the seat, hunched up with his book on his knees. I walked to the door and knocked on it once. “Eric,” I said loudly.

  I heard a startled crash from within the stall. “Jesus Christ,” Eric said, his voice shaking. He took a moment to reposition himself. “Dolores?”

  “Yeah,” I said. There was a long pause while Eric waited for me to say why I was in the boys’ bathroom knocking on his stall. I didn’t say anything.

  “What do you want?” Eric finally asked, not unkindly.

  “My mom wants to invite your parents for dinner,” I said. But that wasn’t right; Eric was invited too. “I mean, your family. Your mom is supposed to call my mom to set it up. Okay?” I spoke as quickly as I could, feeling a warm rush of relief as I did: I was about to be finished with this impossible task. Eric was quiet for a moment.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, why?” I was finished delivering my message; now I wanted to leave.

  “Why does she want to have us over?”

  “Oh. I guess…” I tried to remember my mother’s exact words. “She thinks we’re friends, so I guess she thinks…that our families should be friends.”

  There was a long silence in the stall. I’d blushed hard as I said the word friends, and I was glad that Eric couldn’t see me.

  “Why don’t you just tell her?” Eric asked calmly.

  “Tell her what?” I asked, though I knew what he meant.

  “Tell her that we’re not friends. That you don’t speak to me anymore.” His voice was matter-of-fact, free of sarcasm or malice. Hearing his voice, I couldn’t understand why I had stopped speaking to him, why we weren’t friends anymore. What had happened? I had made a choice, but I couldn’t recall why. I remembered a force, powerful and compelling, but now that Elizabeth was my friend she seemed not to represent this force at all, but to be just a bossy twelve-year-old girl.

  “I’m speaking to you right now,” I told Eric. “I’m not communicating telepathically, am I?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Well.” After a long pause, he spoke again with a tone of finality: “I’ll tell my mother.”

  I tiptoed to the door, checked the hallway left and right, and slipped out of the boys’ bathroom as if it were on fire. As I walked back to the classroom, I was proud of myself. I had done what my mother had asked, and it seemed that I would get away with it—no one had seen me speaking to Eric.

  When everyone began pouring back into the classroom, Eric walked in with them, his book under his arm. He put the book in his desk, opened his social studies book, and turned the pages rhythmically, never looking in my direction.

  STS 51-C, Discovery.

  This launch was scheduled to be Challenger, but Discovery was substituted because Challenger had heat tile problems.

  Launch attempt January 23, 1985, canceled due to cold weather. The overnight temperature got down to 18 degrees. (Why can’t the shuttle launch below freezing?)

  Launch January 24, 1985, at 2:50 pm. The Backup Flight System failed at External Tank separation, and the crew had to fly manually. During reentry, the BFS started 8 seconds late, but worked correctly otherwise.

  This was the first mission dedicated to the Department of Defense. The mission goals and payload are secret. Ellison Onizuka became the first Japanese-American to fly in space.

  My father took me to this launch.

  My mother took that entire week off from work to prepare for dinner with the Biersdorfers. On Monday she had all of the carpets steam-cleaned, so when Delia and I got home we were confined to a narrow plastic path that led from the door to our room. She brought us our dinner in there, and we weren’t allowed to come out all evening. When the carpets were dry, we saw the next morning, they were two shades lighter than they had been all our lives, and plusher. They gave under each step we took in a way that reminded us of luxury.

  Tuesday she hung new drapes in the dining room and touched up smudges on the walls with pain
t. When Delia and I came home that afternoon, we found her in the back yard refinishing the dining room table.

  We went to the glass patio door and watched her. She hadn’t noticed us yet and worked unselfconsciously. Her face was surprisingly ugly when she didn’t think anyone was watching her—her forehead tight, she squinted meanly at the table, moving her lips now and then. She wore yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows and a set of pink pajamas. Our father had shrunk them in the wash, and now the sleeves came to just past her elbows, and the bottoms strained over her hips. The top with its lace edging was now streaked with red wood stain in a way that seemed obscene. Her hair escaped from its ponytail in frizzy black drifts that hung in her eyes and swayed with the rhythm of her work. We watched her, watched the way she concentrated, her whole body following the back-and-forth of the brush’s strokes, the stray pieces of hair following.

  “What is she doing?” Delia whispered, though the patio door was closed.

  “She’s painting the table,” I said. “So it’ll look nice for Friday.”

  “When is Friday?” Delia asked.

  “Today is Tuesday,” I said. “Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday.” Delia lifted her eyebrows slightly in a look of hopelessness, never taking her eyes off our mother.

  “Three more days,” she said.

  Wednesday our mother scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom with toxic-smelling powders and sprays. Delia and I found her standing on a chair in the kitchen, sweeping the ceiling with a broom. Dust rained down onto the counters and appliances and floor, everything she had just cleaned.

  “Shit,” she swore softly. “I should have done this part first.”

  “Can I help you clean, Mom?” I asked.

  “No, thanks, baby,” she grunted, taking a swipe at the ceiling fixture. “You and D go and do your homework.”

  When she was finished, the kitchen didn’t exactly gleam—the linoleum and the chipped white appliances were too old to shine. But the kitchen had an orderly feeling to it that I’d never experienced before. She had thrown away the collection of empty containers that clustered on top of the refrigerator and had taken down all of the drawings and notices from the corkboard. It was nearly empty now, with only a cluster of pushpins in the corner and the index card entitled EMERGENCY NUMBERS. The corkboard made me oddly proud of my mother—it implied an ability to organize, a spartan sense of order.

  Thursday she cleared away everything in the house that was old, tacky, or otherwise unsightly. This phase of the project was the most transformative. When I got home from school that day, I felt as if I were walking into a sitcom set for a show about our family. Elizabeth’s house had this sense of reality, and Jocelyn’s, and Abby’s on the days the maid had been there. Eric’s house had had it. I was surprised to find that this quality didn’t come from the nicer things—bookcases, new furniture, plants—that those families had, as I had always assumed. The feeling came from a lack of clutter, from simplicity. Gone was the pile of bills and mail from the side table. Gone was the pile of shoes in front of the door. The laundry that never quite seemed to get folded from the uncomfortable wingback chair was gone, and so were the old magazines piled near the couch, their covers warped or torn off. Homework and discarded sweaters and dirty plates and a stapler that I remembered being on the coffee table for months, gone. The comfortable mess of our living room, all of the marks of my family’s past, our chaotic life together, all gone.

  I’d always avoided having Elizabeth over, always making sure our plans were for her house or Jocelyn’s or Abby’s instead. But now I wanted Elizabeth to see this house, for her to think that we lived this way all the time.

  When my father came home, we watched him approach our mother where she stood in the kitchen, stirring the margarine into a bowl of macaroni and cheese. He kissed her on the back of the neck. “This place looks great,” he murmured into her hair. “You’re a miracle worker.”

  She smiled up at him. They felt it too: this housecleaning was not just a temporary effort but a permanent change. I was filled with pride for her. We heard our mother humming as she finished putting together the macaroni and cheese, and she served it not in front of the television, where we usually ate, but around the table, from matching dishes. She poured Delia and me matching glasses of milk in actual glasses, not plastic cups. Delia watched her glass coming toward her with an enraptured look, as if the milk were something she had seen advertised but didn’t quite believe she deserved.

  When Delia and I went to our room, we found just inside the door ten or twelve grocery bags, all full to the top. It took me a moment to recognize the bags’ contents as the junk that had been in the living room.

  “Dolores,” Delia cried softly. She took a step back, frightened. We looked at the bags without touching them. At the top of one rested a shoe; at the top of another, my math book. A coffee cup lined with mold, an ashtray half full of gray powder, a paperback book, bent and marked with a footprint. Delia looked like she might burst into tears. I felt it too. We had thought our new clean house had transformed us, but the junk still existed. There was only so much our mother could do.

  Friday, our mother spent the morning at the beauty parlor and then began to cook. When Delia and I got home in the afternoon, we found her in the kitchen chopping onions. We oohed and made her do a slow turn for us. Her hair had been straightened and then waved into large, smooth curls. Her bangs lay organized and sprayed into place across her forehead. A light frost of pale blue glittered on her eyelids, and heavy black lines outlined her lashes. Her skin was an even, matte pink color. When she stopped turning, arms outspread, she held her artificial smile carefully, trying not to let her lipstick touch her teeth.

  She was beautiful. I looked at Delia, who was gaping at our mother. I knew she felt the same way I did: that this new mother was glamorous, more exciting than the mother we were used to, yet we didn’t know this mother or how she might treat us.

  A number of cookbooks lay open on the counters, and all afternoon, while Delia and I watched TV, we could hear her swearing softly as she flipped through them. She hadn’t cooked much since starting her job, and I couldn’t remember seeing her cook from books at all, trying to do everything perfectly and neatly. I snuck into the kitchen to see what she was doing. She was still chopping onions, but they were getting away from her, sliding under her knife so that they were cut at strange angles, strange geometrical shapes, and all crazy sizes. She picked through the piles with her lacquered nails, scooping out the ones that didn’t look right to her and throwing them away. I could tell she didn’t want to be watched, and I slipped out before she noticed me. The next time I checked on her, she was washing out measuring spoons while a sauce crackled angrily in the bottom of its saucepan.

  “Dammit,” she said. “D, could you turn that off for me?”

  I turned off the burner. A black crust was beginning to form around its edge.

  “Dammit,” she said again, more distinctly this time. “That’ll probably taste like ashes. I guess I have to start it over.”

  “What are you making, Mom?” I asked.

  She sighed. “A number of things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s not like when we just have a regular family meal together and we’re having hamburgers and that’s all we have. It’s more like when you eat at a fancy restaurant. First there’s the cocktails, then the appetizer course, then the main course, and each one is a different food. It’s complicated.”

  “What’s the main course?” I asked, although I could tell this conversation was peeling away the feeling of elegance and exactitude that she had been cultivating all week, the feeling that she needed to keep about her like a borrowed shawl if she was to bring this off.

  “The main course is meat,” she said. “Now let me get this mess organized, okay?”

  I left the kitchen as she scraped the sauce into the garbage.

  I was in charge of dressing myself and Delia in the last hours befo
re the Biersdorfers arrived. I brushed Delia’s hair into two ponytails and tied red ribbons around them. We put on the dresses my mother had laid out for us: Delia wore a red dress with a white lace collar, her only fancy dress, and I wore a white dress my mother had bought me for my birthday. I understood how my mother wanted us to look: neat and girly, matching. We both brushed our teeth and washed our faces. Delia drooled a glob of toothpaste onto her red sleeve, and I scrubbed at it with a washcloth. She stood passively, watching her eyes in the mirror as I jerked and jostled her.

  “What is this?” Delia asked.

  “What is what?”

  “Tonight. What are we doing?”

  I knew it had affected her, seeing our house change.

  “It’s a dinner party,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, but what is that?”

  “It’s—you know—a party. We’ll eat dinner together. The grown-ups will drink wine.” I didn’t really know either.

  “But why is it a party?” Delia demanded. Every party she had ever been to had been a children’s party, with balloons and cake.

  “It’s not, really,” I admitted. She seemed disappointed. I kept rubbing at the toothpaste as we talked, and the stain became paler, then invisible. I scrubbed until long after I couldn’t see it anymore.

  We heard the front door opening and my mother’s high company voice welcoming the Biersdorfers. We cracked our door and stood there for a minute, listening. Our mother’s voice warbled, outlining a shape of gaiety. My father’s low voice rumbled under it in a polite cadence, probably offering to take their coats. My mother’s heels clipped to the end of the hallway leading to our room.

  “Girls!” she called, her voice sounding almost frantic. “Our company is here!”

  Delia’s eyes widened a bit in fear at the sound of our mother’s voice. I stood in the doorway and held Delia’s hand, breathing quickly.

  “She’s calling us,” Delia said, and pulled gently toward the door.