The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  8.

  JUDITH RESNIK FLOATED AROUND INSIDE THE CREW CABIN wearing a polo shirt and shorts. Tanned and healthy, she executed a somersault, her limbs brown and slightly shiny, reflecting the light. Her dark brown curls floated around her head, reaching out toward the camera. Judith Resnik clowned with the other astronauts; spinning themselves in weightlessness, they all smiled and made faces for the camera. The idea of having a woman on a spaceship was still new and strange, and though the other astronauts made a show of not treating her differently, their eyes were drawn to her; each of her movements became somehow symbolic and exaggerated. She didn’t seem to mind it. She was fearless and far from home, spinning carelessly in her stocking feet.

  The morning my father went back to NASA, the TV showed old footage of Judith Resnik on Discovery. She would be flying on another mission at the end of the year, a mission with a schoolteacher who had been chosen through a much-publicized competition. My father had already registered his opinion of this Teacher in Space idea; he scorned it only marginally less than he had the senator in space. But since he’d found out he was going back to work at NASA, he’d stopped yelling at the TV.

  My mother was busy cooking eggs and bacon, and Delia sat at her place, an expectant look on her face. My father came in smiling, smelling of aftershave. Everything about him was clean, pressed and neat. We all stared at him as he walked across the room and took his seat at the table. He wore a white short-sleeved, button-down shirt, just as he always had before he was laid off. He put a paper napkin over his belly as my mother spooned eggs onto his plate.

  “Should I pack you a lunch?” my mother asked. “Or do you think Lerner and the guys will want to take you out?”

  “Oh, we’ll probably go out,” my father said, sipping his coffee, and from the way they smiled at each other, I could tell that this answer made them both happy.

  “What will you be working on?” she asked. “Do you know?”

  “They’re just starting assembly on 51-J. But the next one is scheduled to launch three weeks later, so they might put me on that one.”

  “Wow, they’re getting closer and closer together, aren’t they?” she asked happily.

  “Yup. Someday soon they’ll be taking off once a week.”

  “Unbelievable,” my mother said. “Isn’t that amazing, D?”

  “That won’t work unless they can start launching from Vandenberg too,” I pointed out, putting a forkful of eggs into my mouth. This was something my father usually enjoyed discussing, the pros and cons of a second launch site, but today they both looked at me with annoyance.

  My father began a detailed description of the upcoming launch schedule—which cargo might fly on which missions using which Orbiters. My mother asked questions and expressed happy surprise at the answers. Delia and I watched as they spoke, fascinated. A week ago my mother wouldn’t have been interested in hearing about the manifest schedule, but now she took in every detail.

  My father kissed Delia and me goodbye. His hand on my chin was cold. Delia and I stood in the doorway and waved as they walked out to the car. He opened the passenger door for her, and before she stepped in, we saw him slip his arm around her waist and kiss her on the mouth. They kissed for a long, strange minute, his hand smoothing down her back over and over. We watched, even though we knew we were letting out the air-conditioning standing in the open doorway like that. Delia’s head tilted to one side, and she squinted at them, confused.

  “They’re just kissing,” I said. Delia looked at me as if I were crazy. I’d been thinking about the way they’d embraced like that when I was little, how I’d hated it, feeling left out. The closed circle of their bodies, no room for me.

  Our parents climbed into the car and pulled away. We watched until they turned the corner and disappeared.

  The house behind us seemed very quiet and empty all of a sudden. I felt left behind in a way I normally didn’t when they were gone.

  “Dolores?” Delia asked.

  “Close the door,” I said. “You’re letting all the air-conditioning out.”

  “How did Daddy get his job back?” She was still looking down the street in the direction where the car had driven away.

  “Delia, shut the door,” I told her again. “What do you mean, how? His boss wrote him a letter and he opened it. You remember that morning when he got the letter and we danced around, don’t you?”

  Delia closed the door slowly, looking unsatisfied.

  “No, I mean—why? Why did he get his job back?”

  “What do you mean, why? Because he’s smart and he’s a good worker.”

  “No, I mean—” Delia huffed with frustration. She couldn’t articulate her question, whatever it was.

  “Let’s go to the pool,” I whispered, and that cheered her up.

  Delia and I had been walking to a pool in our neighborhood, even though we were under strict instructions never to leave the house. It was a long walk, but we cheered up once we drew close and heard those bright splashes and the plasticky sound of the diving board reverberating.

  We passed through the locker room where the women and girls changed. As always, Delia stared at the teenage girls turning their narrow backs to the room, showing the indentations at their kidneys, like places where someone had pushed two thumbs in. The moms struggled into their suits, their heavy, stretched breasts pointing toward the floor.

  At the poolside, Delia and I claimed two chairs, laid out our towels, and watched the teenagers. They rubbed themselves with tanning lotion, already seemingly dying of boredom. They were unspeakably cool. I remembered looking up to Elizabeth in this way, and before that Jocelyn and Abby, believing them to have important knowledge I lacked, that I would never be able to understand. But now, compared to these girls, it seemed obvious that Elizabeth didn’t know much at all. She was still just a child like me, and knew only how to mimic the knowledge these kids had.

  One girl I especially admired had a purple suit and chin-length curly hair. I watched her spread lotion carefully over her legs and arms, then spray a bottle of lemon juice onto her hair. I wanted to try bleaching my hair with lemon juice too, but I feared that my mother would notice and ask too many questions.

  A boy in orange board shorts and bleached blond hair spread out his towel near the girl with the purple bathing suit. He was often here, always wearing those same board shorts, and always commanded a lot of attention.

  “Ladies!” he shouted, loud enough to get the attention of everyone on our side of the pool. “It’s time for tan line inspections.” They all giggled while he moved up the row of girls one by one, demanding that each one move a strap or lift an edge of her suit. He checked off their names on an imaginary clipboard, muttering notes to himself: “Coming along nicely,” or “Needs more baby oil.” For one pale girl, he pretended to scribble and murmured, “No discernible color whatsoever.”

  “Oh, come on, Josh,” she said with a laugh. “It’s not my fault. I’m out here every day. I’ve just got no melanin in my skin.”

  “Claims she has no magnatonin in her skin,” the boy in the orange shorts added solemnly to his notes. “Clearly a ploy to escape punishment.”

  They all laughed. He pretended to throw her into the pool, but instead cannonballed in himself. I watched him as he hovered there in the air, his knees drawn up and his ankles crossed in front of him. He was impossibly comfortable with himself, I thought—the opposite of me. He never had to worry about doing the wrong thing, because whatever he did, by definition, was exactly right.

  I watched him swim across the width of the pool toward the edge where Delia and I lay, the wavering bright orange of his trunks visible underwater. When he hauled himself out of the pool, he cracked a smile, and at the same time he happened to look right at me. The surprise of the eye contact flooded me with adrenaline so fast I nearly shuddered. He kept his eyes on me, his blond bangs soaked brown and dripping into his face.

  He jutted his chin in greeting or confrontation.
I became aware that I was smiling; I had been laughing at his clowning along with the others. He kept watching me, wearing an expression I couldn’t identify—amusement, maybe, not quite contempt. He turned on his heel and did a chicken walk back in the other direction, to the teenagers’ area.

  “Dolores?” Delia asked. “Who is he?” She was looking up at me.

  “Shut up,” I said distractedly. My heart was beating quickly and I felt hot. I was probably blushing.

  I was careful not to look in the teenagers’ direction for the rest of the afternoon. Whatever had happened, I didn’t want to ruin it. I reran the moment over and over in my mind. Whatever the meaning of his look, it had been a look. He had seen me. I tried to imagine what he had seen: a girl laid out on a towel, wearing a blue bathing suit, her nose and shoulders sunburned, her hair wet and tangled. It occurred to me that the way I saw myself might not be the way I actually looked at all.

  Delia ran to get her bathing suit as soon as our parents left the next day. Instead of pulling out my old, stretched-out suit, probably still damp from the previous day, I walked down the hall to my parents’ room and started pulling open my mother’s dresser drawers. At the bottom of one, I found her black two-piece. I pulled off my pajamas and slipped it on. People always remarked on how tiny my mother was, and I’d known I was catching up to her, but I was still shocked when the suit fit perfectly.

  I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of their bedroom door, looking at myself, and I was both curious and slightly horrified by what I saw: my head, my same old round boring head with the same stringy brown hair and the same sunburned face, perched atop a body that filled out this bathing suit. I examined myself from every angle and came to the astonishing conclusion that I looked good in it.

  My mother had been commenting on my breasts for a while now; just the day before, she had complained that I had outgrown the size-A bras she had bought me just months before. I hadn’t wanted to tell her; I didn’t want to hear her teasing, but I also had a nonsensical hope that wearing a too-tight bra would keep them from developing any further. Now this bikini showed everything I had been trying to hide. I adjusted the straps, trying to get used to the way the top fit. If I was going to walk past the teenagers’ area wearing this suit, I had to look confident in it. I bent over and shook the cups to create cleavage, as I had seen my mother do.

  “I’m telling,” Delia said from the doorway. She’d been watching, for how long I didn’t know.

  “What?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m just trying it on.”

  “That’s Mom’s,” Delia said. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Then you shouldn’t either,” I said. “Get out.” I put on my shorts and T-shirt over the bikini. We left the house, checking and rechecking to make sure we had our keys, and we trudged to the pool together, squinting in the morning sun.

  At the pool, Delia looked at the bikini thoughtfully as I pulled off my clothes, but she didn’t say anything more about it. The teenagers were all there, lined up like a jury, surveying the moms and the kids in the pool with bored absorption, as if performing some elaborate equations based on what they saw. I laid myself out in tanning position while Delia joined some younger kids in the shallow end. Soon they were all splashing around together playing Marco Polo. I closed my eyes against the sun, which burnt red through my eyelids.

  My father returned home from work that evening carrying a huge fruit basket wrapped in red cellophane.

  “What’s that, Daddy?” Delia asked.

  “It’s a fruit basket,” our mother said, her voice pleased and expansive. “Who sent it?”

  My father put the basket on the dining room table and went into the kitchen. I looked at the card. It read: Welcome back and best wishes! R. Biersdorfer. In my mind, Eric rolled his eyes. My mother took the card from me and tucked it back in the basket.

  “What’s it say?” Delia asked, but no one answered her, and she didn’t ask again. “Can I have a fruit?” she asked my mother.

  “Maybe after dinner,” my mother said. That night, it sat at the center of the table as we ate. No one had much to say, and our eyes kept falling on it.

  “Did you see Mr. Biersdorfer today?” my mother asked.

  “No,” my father said, sounding mildly surprised. “We work in different buildings.”

  “I know—I just thought you might have run over there, to thank him.”

  “I’ll send a note to thank him for the fruit,” my father said.

  “For the fruit,” my mother repeated scornfully. “I think you have a lot more to thank him for than the fruit.”

  My father was quiet for a minute. He looked at me, then at Delia, showing each of us a little reassuring smile.

  “I don’t think I necessarily have anything more than that to thank him for,” he said carefully to my mother.

  “Fine,” she said to her plate. “If you know something I don’t know.”

  “What would I know that you don’t?” my father asked. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Never mind, Frank,” my mother said. She got up and started clearing dishes even though the rest of us were still eating.

  “There’s no secret,” my father said. He had to raise his voice to be heard because my mother was running water in the kitchen.

  Delia and I stared at him. The look on his face was different from any I’d seen on him before. He wasn’t irritated, tired, sick, impatient, or excited. My father looked hurt, I recognized suddenly. He didn’t understand why she was angry. I felt a strange fear: he didn’t see why she was angry, and I did.

  “She just wants you to be grateful,” I told him quietly.

  “I am,” my father insisted, his voice high-pitched with bewilderment. “Of course I’m grateful. Lerner didn’t have to call me back first, but he did.”

  “Not to Lerner,” I said. “To her.”

  He looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where my mother was still moving around.

  “To her?” he repeated. I’d hoped he had some idea what I was talking about, that this prodding would stir him to an understanding. But his expression was completely innocent, completely blank.

  “I’ve always been grateful to your mother,” he said, still careful to keep his voice down.

  “Okay, Daddy,” I said. “Never mind.”

  I couldn’t help staring at him now, at the way his glasses shifted slightly on his face as he chewed the rest of his dinner. He thought he had been proven right all the times he said he should just wait patiently to be called back to work. I had been in the habit of thinking of my father as some kind of large appliance with no weaknesses or vulnerabilities, but just in that moment, I had realized that he was alive, capable of suffering, the way I had occasionally, when I was little, had the sudden certainty that a stuffed animal was sentient.

  The fruit basket stayed where it was, untouched, for the next few days. We ate our meals around it, arranging our plates and bowls so as not to touch it. By the end of the week, it had begun to smell, and my father took it out to the trash.

  9.

  THAT SUMMER, I FELT ONE ERA OF MY CHILDHOOD END AND A NEW ONE begin. The era before, when my father didn’t work at NASA, was over and quickly came to seem like something I had made up. In this new era, we were proud of my father again, my parents bought us things, and the house was cleaner and more organized, its surfaces more solid, more reliable. Delia and I came home and kicked off our shoes, let our bags drop to the floor, flung ourselves onto the couch.

  I asked for new things and got them. We all acted as though we were rich now: my mother bought a dining room table, new curtains, and had the couch reupholstered. She bought herself dresses, shoes, a new purse; she had her hair straightened at a salon. Delia and I each got new sheets for our beds, new clothes. We ate out three nights in a row; my mother had taken to coming home and declaring, “I’m just too tired to cook!” It gave us a giddy feeling to hear this, a lifting feeling of freedom a
nd indulgence to hop into the car and ride through the humid evening, the sun setting pink and orange, knowing that we’d be able to order whatever we wanted—large Cokes, big entrées, not just from the kids’ menu.

  “Are you too tired to cook?” Delia took to asking excitedly as my mother got home. She learned to ask for dessert, and she loved to watch our parents put up a brief but pleasant struggle before acquiescing and ordering sundaes, cakes, puddings, in exchange for the promise that she’d let them have a bite.

  This new era brought with it a privileged sensation, a feeling that I would be taken care of. I could do the things Elizabeth and Jocelyn and Abby did at home, that kids on TV shows did—complain and roll my eyes and take my parents’ generosity for granted.

  I watched my parents, studied their faces and their movements as they went about their daily routines. My mother had never mentioned our walk, the secret she had told me. I watched them when they were together, scrutinizing them for signs of strain, my mother still in her work blouse and lipstick, telling a story about a filing problem at work, my father grunting amiably.

  I tested my father once as we drove to the grocery store.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird?” I asked him. “Months and months went by and they didn’t need you, and now suddenly they need you?”

  “The work flow is very complicated,” he said in a voice that let me know he was about to explain this complication in its entirety, a voice like the beginning of a long paragraph.

  “But still,” I interrupted him. “Don’t you think it’s weird that right when you met Mr. Biersdorfer you got your job back?”

  “Well, it wasn’t right when I met him,” my father pointed out. “There was quite a lapse in between. But even if it was, I don’t think you should deduce too much from that. Correlation is not causation.”

  I gave him a look.

  “D, I understand that from your perspective it seems like you and Eric brought us together and then this happened. You and he might even have planned on that, talked about how this would happen, right? And I really appreciate your thoughtfulness. But the fact is, this would have happened even if you never met Eric, and they never came over, and we never went to that launch that day.”