“We went to SeaWorld? And they had these sea lions there and one of them was named Pinky? And they told him to put his flippers up on the thing and he stood up like this….”
Delia sat up on her knees and put her flippers up on the table. She babbled on, her eyes wide and locked on my mother. For the first time I could remember, we all sat quietly and listened to Delia talk, concentrating on every word she said. She described a show she had seen at SeaWorld in which trained sea lions and sea otters, dressed as pirates, flopped about on a large pirate ship set. She told us about an underwater tank full of dolphins that streaked by the glass, showing the healed scratches and scars on their flanks. She stretched out her little hand to show us how she reached into a shallow tank to stroke a manta ray gliding by. He felt dry, she said, and he circled around the tank a second time to let her touch him again.
Delia talked and talked, mostly watching my mother but turning nervously toward my father and me now and then, to check that we were listening too. She showed no signs of stopping when my mother began to cry, a quiet sniffling at first, but then a single animal sound escaped from her. At first I thought it was a laugh, a helpless squawk at the ridiculousness of this—of Delia’s story, of the spectacle of our sitting here together like strangers, like distant relations with no particular feelings toward one other. But it wasn’t a laugh. She put her hand over her mouth, as if trying to catch the sound. People at nearby tables looked over at us.
“Deborah, don’t,” my father said quietly. She bowed her head forward, shoulders trembling, her hand still pressed to her mouth. Delia had trailed off speaking and now just watched our mother, her lips hanging open. We all waited while my mother sniffed wetly and dried her eyes on a napkin.
“It’s okay,” my mother said to Delia, “it’s okay,” in her exaggerated consoling voice, as if it were Delia who was crying, and wrapped her arm around Delia’s shoulders. Delia climbed back into my mother’s lap, her big feet sticking out into the aisle. Delia promptly began to cry softly into my mother’s shoulder, burying her face in the fabric of the new dress.
“She’s been brave,” my father said, and my mother nodded in agreement. I was outraged that only I could see that she wasn’t brave at all, that she was crying like a baby.
My mother fiddled with something in her purse. It was a ball of pink something, a hand-sized doll wearing a gauzy tutu. Delia’s mouth dropped open and she stopped crying instantly. This was the kind of thing she loved, tacky and girly. She crawled out of my mother’s lap and sat up straight in anticipation of receiving this gift, sniffling. But then my mother seemed to have forgotten what she had brought it for, and played idly with the doll, flipping its skirt up and down obscenely. She was looking at my father.
“Well, the girls have sure missed you,” my father said. I wondered if he had planned this line ahead of time, chosen it for its lighthearted sadness, for the way it might move my mother to feel sorry for us without actually trying to direct her sympathy toward him. I pictured him working the sentence out in his mind last night, after they’d made these plans to meet here, mumbling it to the bathroom mirror while he shaved this morning. The girls have sure missed you, Deborah, his lips barely moving. Gosh, they sure have missed you. And what could she say to that? What could she say but to cry, apologize, explain? But my mother only smiled vaguely at the doll.
“Dr. Chalmers says to say hello,” she said. My father nodded gravely, as though this were relevant. He and my mother’s boss had never actually met, at least as far as I knew. My mother opened her mouth again, and she seemed to forget what she was going to say, just sat with her mouth open, communicating something to us silently.
My father nodded, as if he heard and understood. When the waitress finally came by, he looked up at her happily.
“I think we’re ready to order,” he said.
When we got up to leave, we all paused awkwardly at the entrance, the three of us watching my mother to see what she would do.
“It was so nice to see you all,” she said formally, in the same tone and cadence that I had heard on the phone when I called her at work. Her hand fluttered up to her hair, and for a moment she looked as though she had something more to say. But then she turned, pivoting slowly on her high heels, and walked off in the opposite direction from where our car was parked, and we all watched her go, fascinated. She was going somewhere we didn’t know, without us.
After our mother had left us again, I remembered all the things I had wanted to ask her. Where she had gone, why she had left us, when she planned to come back. Whether she blamed me, whether she ever saw Eric. While she was with us, we had been confused; our thoughts had been jammed in our heads like radios in a thunderstorm. The physical fact of her, the cigarette smell on her hair and the lipstick crumbs at the edges of her mouth, the crackling energy of her, had distracted us. She fidgeted and smiled and cocked her head while she talked to us, and we couldn’t take our eyes off her. When asked direct questions, she looked off into a corner and the slightest expressions might cross her face—the eyebrows gently lifted into the tiniest indication of surprise. The lips turned up into the barest smirk. We could see, now that she didn’t live with us anymore, that we didn’t know a thing about her.
My father drove us home, and it seemed he thought everything was still the same. He gave the same grunt as he plopped himself into the driver’s seat of the car. He tapped his ring against the steering wheel, never thinking of his wife’s ring, never wondering whether she still wore hers or not. He hummed quietly, a formless song. He asked if we needed anything from the store. We didn’t. When he pulled the car into the driveway, he let out a quiet comment he’d clearly been saving up for some time.
“That was nice,” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” Delia agreed.
“What was nice?” I demanded. I knew what he meant, of course, but I wanted to hear him talk about it.
“Seeing your mother,” he answered.
“Yeah,” Delia said again. I resisted the urge to tell her to shut up.
“I hope we can do it again soon,” he said after a long pause. “Would you like that?” The tone of his voice was happy, nostalgic, hopeful. I realized with a horrible heavy feeling that he had misinterpreted the whole dinner; he thought something had been accomplished, some contact made. Only I knew that he had accomplished nothing, that she wasn’t coming back.
“Yeah!” shouted Delia from her corner of the backseat, where she had been busy stripping her new doll. I felt my father turn to look at me. I tried to think of the most hateful and disgusting thing I could say. I felt someone needed to tell the truth about what was happening. My father nodded a quick encouraging nod at me. His face was full of hope.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “That would be nice.”
STS 51-J, Atlantis.
Launch attempt October 3, 1985, delayed 22 minutes and thirty seconds due to a false instrument reading. Launch at 11:15 am.
This was the first launch of the last Orbiter to be built, Atlantis. This mission was the second one dedicated to the Department of Defense, so the mission objectives were top secret.
After landing, Atlantis was found to have lost a heat tile, which had caused some damage to underlying structures.
My father took me to this launch.
I’d been in high school for a month, and I found everything but physics boring and pointless. I spent the time in my other classes, the classes that weren’t physics, thinking about physics. The Emancipation Proclamation; the independent clause and the subordinate clause; the passé composé: nothing compared to the hard reality of physics, the pleasurable frustration of its difficulty. I didn’t listen when other teachers talked; instead I thought about Dr. Schuler, Dr. Schuler who would explain it all to me, Dr. Schuler who would recognize my talent and send me to Space Camp in Houston, where Judith Resnik would notice me, pick me out of the crowd.
Tina and Chiarra invited me out to the parking lot with them during lunch; this
is what the cool kids did, they had explained. When we got outside, the heat was crippling. Kids, mostly juniors and seniors, were sitting on the hoods of cars, eating fast-food lunches or sandwiches from brown bags.
Tina and Chiarra had pointed out cute boys to me, boys they deemed worthy of the label, and under their influence I had started to watch boys more closely myself. I had learned to pick out the common elements among the boys Tina and Chiarra liked—a strong jawline, a heavy brow, full lips, white teeth. Broad shoulders were important, as was height. Of course, they sometimes labeled “cute” boys who lacked all of these qualities if they behaved the right way—funny, mocking, slightly hostile. It seemed that Tina and Chiarra liked confidence, arrogance, aggression. These were boys who, if someone were to embarrass themselves by tripping, would call attention to it rather than pretend it hadn’t happened.
But now that I was looking at the boys, I noticed the other kind too. The kind who didn’t compete, didn’t shout or laugh loudly or hit each other. They were nearly invisible—you had to train yourself to see them, like ghosts. They walked around by themselves, books tucked tightly under their arms, not making any impression on the world around them, just trying to get to the next class, get through the day. I was most fascinated by these boys who didn’t seem to have a shred of aggression in them, like Eric. Unlike Tina and Chiarra’s “cute” ones, they met my eyes if I looked at them, always with a tinge of shock at finding themselves locking eyes with me. Always a feeling of electric current with these boys, of actual human contact. I didn’t understand why Tina and Chiarra chose the ones they did: the boys who were so closed, so hard, the ones who took trouble to make sure you knew that there was nothing special about you, that they barely noticed you at all.
Chiarra found a new boy to talk to this time, a pimply dark-haired boy sitting crossed-legged on the roof of a beat-up old Volvo with a bumper held on by duct tape. Tina and I watched from a respectful distance while she sailed a few comments his way; he answered her, and after a couple more exchanges, he held out a hand and helped her up onto the roof of the car.
“It’s amazing,” Tina said, dejected. “That guy is a senior. He even has a girlfriend. Chiarra has this weird power with guys. She always gets whatever she wants.” I thought of my mother smiling up at Mr. Biersdorfer at the dinner party, everyone’s eyes on her. It occurred to me that my mother might have preferred a daughter like Chiarra, a daughter open to the world, daring and confident like herself.
“You could do it too,” I said. “You just have to talk to one of them.” Then, to comfort her, I added, “You know, you’re much cuter than she is.”
“What difference does it make? They always like her.”
Across the parking lot, I spotted an older boy, broad-shouldered, who looked familiar. It took me a minute to recognize him without his orange board shorts—Josh, the boy from the pool. He was holding a can of Coke in one hand and trying to pick up a blond girl by her waist with the other.
Chiarra returned a few minutes later, flushed with success. “I have a date Saturday,” she announced. “How’d you do?”
Tina and I shook our heads. “Not much to pick from out here,” Tina said.
“Oh, come on,” Chiarra protested, twisting to look back at the parking lot as we headed inside. “Use your imagination. What about you, Dolores? Anything?”
“Maybe next time,” I said.
I still felt young compared to Tina and Chiarra, but it occurred to me that if I told Elizabeth and Jocelyn and Abby about the parking lot, that we came out here to meet boys, they would be intimidated. If I offered them a chance to join us, they would back away, saying, No, thanks, we’re too young. They would go back to their playground gossiping.
I was distantly afraid that Dr. Schuler would come to associate me with Tina and Chiarra and their lack of interest in physics. But he seemed not to notice the social groupings in his class; he seemed to make a point of ignoring such things. I decided to respect him for that.
“On Monday,” Dr. Schuler had announced at the end of class that day, “you will come in to find the room hushed with concentration. None of the usual hustle and bustle will take place. You will simply proceed quietly to your places, where you will find a freshly-printed Opportunity to Achieve waiting for you.”
“You mean a test?” some kid called from the back.
“No, I do not mean a test. I mean an Opportunity to Achieve. An opportunity to show me—and yourself—what you have learned about physics so far this term, and how you are developing as a problem-solver.”
No one had anything to say to that.
“When you come into the room,” he continued, “you will take out one pencil”—here he brandished his own yellow pencil—“and nothing else. You will take your OTA silently and thoughtfully. If you finish before the bell rings, which is highly unlikely, you will set down your pencil and think intelligent thoughts about physics until such time as the bell should ring, looking neither to your left nor to your right.”
As we shuffled out, everyone around me complained about the OTA.
“‘Look neither to your left nor your right,’” Doug said, trying to mimic Dr. Schuler’s tone. “It’s like living under a Nazi regime.”
I laughed with the others, but I was secretly thrilled by Dr. Schuler’s speech. I was impressed by the idea of a test being so important that it needed a special name and special instructions.
At home I sat down to study, arranging myself on my bed with my physics book and notepad and pens around me. But once I was flipping through the chapters and looking at the notes I had taken in class, I didn’t quite know what to do with them all. Much of the information I felt I knew already, in some commonsense way. And the things I didn’t know—for example, the fact that the metal rod that set the standard for the meter was kept in Sèvres, France—seemed unimportant to the study of physics, irrelevant details, the type of maddeningly pointless information that English and history teachers wanted us to know. Dr. Schuler didn’t seem like the type of teacher who would test us on facts like that, details that didn’t have any bearing on our understanding of the actual subject. At the same time, he did seem like the type of teacher who would make his tests ridiculously hard. He would enjoy including questions that would make kids like Doug and Matt groan—Dr. Schuler would get a satisfied look on his face and rock back and forth on his heels while those boys complained. I flipped through the book looking for the formulas I would need to memorize.
I looked up to find Delia standing in the doorway, watching me. I wondered whether I had been talking to myself, what I had been doing with my face.
“He’s talking to her,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?” I shot back at normal volume.
“Mom,” Delia said.
Together we crept out to the hallway, where I picked up the phone.
At first I heard just the seashell static of an open phone line, an oceany silence. I was about to say something, just to hear the reverberation of my voice, when I heard the papery sound of someone exhaling into the receiver. I held my breath.
Two seconds went by, then three, then four. Then my father’s voice: “Deborah,” he said. Then, after another long pause: “Deborah…”
Delia looked up at me, smiling. So she did this too, this telephone listening. When I replaced the receiver carefully, they still hadn’t said anything more.
“Maybe Mom’s coming back,” Delia whispered. Her mouth was hanging open with anticipation.
“Don’t count on it,” I said.
Long after I’d gone to sleep that night, I woke to a warm weight on my bed.
“Go back to sleep, Delia,” I mumbled. The weight shifted and remained. But then I recognized the smell of my mother, her perfume and the faint tinge of cigarettes and something else under that, something like new bread. She was biting her nails.
“Mom?” I whispered. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here, duckie,” she said. “Right h
ere with you.”
What I had meant to ask was, Where were you? Where have you been? But somehow it would seem rude to ask directly. My mother didn’t seem to think her presence required any explanation.
“I want to ask you something,” she said, kicking at some of my clothes strewn on the floor. I felt a sudden fear.
“What has your father said?” she asked. As she spoke, she snagged one of my T-shirts with her toe. She lifted it to her hand, sniffed it, and dropped it again.
“About what?” I whispered back.
“About me,” she answered, irritated, as if I were being obstinate.
“Nothing,” I insisted quickly. It was true: as much as Delia and I were dying to hear him speak of her, as much as we hoped he would slip up and admit that she had left us, he never said a word, never showed a sign. “Nothing.” Just too late, I realized my mistake. This was the wrong answer.
“Really. Nothing. I wouldn’t have thought—after fourteen years of marriage…” She trailed off, gave a shrug, an elaborate gesture of hurt and shucking off that hurt, both at once.
“No, I mean, he talks about you,” I stumbled. “He talks about you all the time. I just meant he won’t say anything bad about you to anyone. He says wherever you’ve gone, that’s your business.” I was guessing now, flailing at what she might want to hear.
“Wherever I’ve gone,” she sneered. “Why is he saying that? Does he want people to think he doesn’t know where I am?”
It had never occurred to me that he might know where to find her. If he did, why wouldn’t he have told us? Why wouldn’t he have convinced her to come back?
“What else does he say?” she whispered.
“He wants you to come back,” I said.
“Does he?” she asked shyly.
“Yes,” I said, so relieved to have hit on a right answer. “We all want you to come back. We talk about it all the time.” It was an idea she would find appealing, the three of us invoking her name every morning and every night, remembering her, missing her more and more. It occurred to me that this was all she was waiting for. If we could prove to her that we missed her, that we loved her, then she would come back. But for now it wasn’t enough, and soon after I spoke, she slipped out again.
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 17