The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  He jogged to the other side of the yard with the ball. He was dressed in shorts and a plaid shirt, his legs embarrassingly white and bony. In place of a mitt he wore a gardening glove. He tried an overhanded pitch. The ball flew wildly off course as I swung the bat around at empty air. We tried again, and again, my father mumbling about wind speed and arc and trajectories and “getting a feel for the thing.” He called words of encouragement as he jogged back and forth in the grass to retrieve the ball. “You almost hit that one. I think we almost got it.”

  My mother, delighted to see us finally doing the sporty kind of activity that fathers and sons were supposed to do, brought out glasses of Kool-Aid on a tray. Megan joined her, and they yelled advice as they watched. “You have to throw it straight! You’re not doing it right! You’re swinging the bat too soon!” I added my complaints. “How can I hit that? That’s nowhere near where I’m standing. Throw it this way!”

  My father, sweating by now, was getting fed up. “I know! I know! You think I don’t realize that?”

  We all saw it was hopeless. The ball landed on the picnic table and knocked over two glasses of Kool-Aid. Megan laughed out loud. My father shouted at her that it wasn’t as easy as it looked and if she thought she could do better, then she was welcome to try. “She probably could,” our mother muttered. His next pitch dropped the ball into the bayou.

  “Great. Thanks, Dad,” I said. “That’s perfect. You’ve been a big help. I think I’m ready for the big leagues now.”

  “Stuff it. Just stuff it then,” he said, and ripped off the gardening glove and stomped back inside.…

  Where in the morning he shaved at the sink, slicked his hair, and knotted his tie, sighing out through his nose as he got ready for another day of work. He lined up the pens in his shirt pocket, three colors, red, blue, and black. He repacked his brown leather case, finished his coffee, handed off the cup to his wife with a kiss on the cheek, and headed out the door to his bicycle. He wobbled a bit on the drive before catching his balance and turning down the road to school. Our mother watched him go, waving goodbye from the front step. Then she turned and went back inside to wash the dishes, make the beds, do the laundry, and cook our dinner.…

  And then again: he shaved, slicked, knotted, lined up, repacked, and headed out the door. She waved, turned, and went inside to wash the dishes, make the beds, do the laundry, and cook our dinner. He shaved, slicked, knotted, lined up, repacked, and headed out the door. She waved, turned, and went inside. He shaved, slicked, knotted; she waved, turned, went inside. Shave, slick, knot, wave, turn, go inside; shave, slick, knot, wave, turn, go inside …

  Good god. They had no idea adulthood could be so tiresome. Sometimes they wondered how they could stand another day of it. Sometimes they wondered why they even bothered.

  Life chugged on, picking up speed. The weeks and months whipped by faster and faster. Dust gathered on windowsills, sinks clogged, weeds sprouted, furniture sagged, curtains faded. A cabinet door fell off, it was missing a screw or something, and the toilet was backed up and spilling onto the floor. The children needed new clothes, yes, of course they did, but the house needed painting, and the roof needed repairing, and there was a crack running through the front porch step that was getting bigger and bigger every year—and, no, we couldn’t afford a new car, and why would you even ask that?

  Someone should’ve told the newlyweds, back before they boarded that train, that this was what it would be like. Someone should’ve told them that married life would not be filled with years of honeymooned bliss, but with an endless parade of chores and clutter and routine annoyances that over time would begin to make them feel older, slower, less buoyant.

  No doubt a part of them did know this; they were sensible people, after all, and they’d grown up in families themselves, so they understood what domestic life was like. But another part of them, the part that hopped aboard the train that night, clung to the belief that their lives would be different, that theirs would be better than average—because, really, who didn’t believe that?

  A dozen or more years after the start of that ride—years that sped by so fast and then faded so suddenly and absolutely into the past that they might have never happened at all—a dozen years later, and my father dropped into bed at night, exhausted. Soon he was asleep and dreaming, but even in his dreams, he was still hard at work. He was standing, in his dream, at the front of the classroom writing on the chalkboard. He needed to explain some critical piece of information—without this information, the whole lesson would be lost—but it wasn’t coming out the way he wanted it to. He wrote and wrote, but even he couldn’t understand what he was writing. It looked to be a different language, but not any language that he knew—Czechoslovakian, maybe. He looked up and saw that the whole board was filled with his scribbling. He heard his students growing restless at his back. They whispered and growled like waves at a beach. He wrote, erased, wrote, erased, but the baffling words kept reappearing on their own; they wouldn’t go away, and his students were laughing now. They were roaring with laughter. They thought he was hilarious.…

  While in bed beside him, his wife, my mother, turned her head on her pillow and saw him twitching in his sleep. The Moon shone in through a crack in the curtains, casting shadows on the sheets. Her husband’s mouth fell open and he began to snore, a wet, nasal rattle. In the dim light, with his glasses off, he looked completely alien to her—like a stranger who had wandered in off the street and lain down beside her. Was his nose always that big? Was his forehead always that bony? Who was this man who called himself her husband, anyway? A breeze stirred a tree outside the window, and the house creaked around her. In the distance, she heard the whistle of a train at the edge of town, and she felt very far away from herself.

  She remembered that dreamy teenager in the drugstore, leaning on the counter and staring out the window at night, waiting for her future to walk in the door. Whatever happened to that girl? she wondered. So young, so expectant, so full of hope? She puzzled over the mysteries of time, memory, and space. She imagined that girl, her younger self, still waiting there in the drugstore, as though the store itself and she in it were suspended in some timeless, heavenly blue place where bright flowers bloomed in endless green fields in an eternal spring.…

  Her husband snored. She shivered. Her feet were cold. She pressed her bare, bony knees together under the sheets and stifled a sob. What was wrong with her? She should’ve been happy. She was happy, she told herself. It had just been a long day, that was all. She had everything she needed. Her husband didn’t beat her, her children weren’t hoodlums. Nobody was starving and they had their health, thank god. They were tremendously fortunate, she knew that. And yet … and yet in those long, lonely hours between one and three in the morning, when everyone was asleep and the house creaked around her, she couldn’t help but feel that she was already half dead, so slight and inconsequential her life had become. She was a ghost, trapped inside a tiny, rickety home, stuck in a world she never foresaw.

  She sat up and, careful not to wake her husband, slipped out of bed and into the living room. She hugged her gown around her as she looked out the back window at the night. Across the bayou, the trees had been cleared for a new house. Above, a wash of stars and—good lord, but it was bright tonight—the Moon.

  A Gulf breeze blew, rustling the trees. She rubbed her arms and hugged her gown tighter around herself. She felt a familiar burning sensation in her gut, one she realized she must’ve had for quite some time now. It seemed to come and go, flaring up especially at night. What was it? Hunger? Heartburn? Loneliness? Regret? She’d go get a glass of water and lie back down. She was just tired, that was all. What was she doing anyway, wandering around the house like this in the middle of the night?

  She could not have known then, my young mother, that you couldn’t just ignore an ache like that and expect it to go away. Such a burn, unattended, could grow and spread, laying waste to entire villages—trees, homes, cars, and
families up in flames.

  Nor could she have anticipated a future when, a few years later, she would surprise even herself by leaving her husband on account of another man—a man who, to be honest, she barely knew, but whom she loved with such a blind, needy love that she was ready to throw over everything she had for him.

  She couldn’t have known these things, not then, but as she stared out the window that night, in some dim, prescient corner of her mind, she could almost already see her husband standing abandoned in their yard in his raincoat, surveying the sky with a telescope, wondering what the hell had happened to their marriage; while their son, a teenage boy who looked just like him, stared sleepy eyed and puzzled from his bedroom window upstairs, wondering how such certainties could collapse so suddenly; while arching over them all, a comet, grand and mysterious, disappeared behind the Sun.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ON Christmas Eve, Comet Kohoutek dipped behind the Sun, disappearing completely from view. In the lens of the telescope now there was nothing but black space between the stars. The celebrated Comet Cruise on the Queen Elizabeth, I read, had been a bust; the skies were cloudy, the water choppy, and no one could see anything; Dr. Kohoutek became seasick and stayed in his cabin, refusing to attend any of the events. A few newspaper editorials were already starting to call the comet a hoax, going so far as to raise questions about its discoverer’s motivations and nationality. Meanwhile, astronomers at institutes and observatories everywhere struggled to explain why the comet had so far failed to dazzle.

  Some attributed the lack of visual magnitude to its chemical composition, speculating that Kohoutek was a relatively clean comet with not enough dust particles in its coma to properly reflect sunlight. Others said that maybe Kohoutek wasn’t a virgin comet after all, and that it must have exhausted most of its volatile gases in a previous passage, perhaps millions of years ago. Still others blamed the media for over-hyping the comet and building up public expectations to far beyond what anyone in the scientific community had actually promised.

  Whatever the explanations, many astronomers began backpedaling on their earlier predictions for a postperihelion apparition. Reminding us that comets were notoriously capricious, they advised a wait-and-see attitude now. Nobody, not even the comet’s namesake, could safely say how big or bright this one would eventually appear once it rounded the Sun and began its second pass through the planets.

  The curtains were closed, the living room dim when I went downstairs on Christmas morning. The only light was a murky flickering from the TV. My father sat on the sofa in his pajamas, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His hair stood on end, his face was unshaven. Scattered on the sofa around him, on the floor, and on the dining room table, were all his magazine articles and newspaper clippings about Kohoutek.

  “What’re you watching?”

  He answered as though from very far away. “Huh?”

  “What’s on TV?”

  He pointed. “It’s the, ah, Skylab. They’re having Christmas now.”

  On the screen was a fuzzy video feed of astronauts in orange jumpsuits floating around inside a spaceship cabin. They were decorating a spindly silver tree made from empty space-food tubes. One of the astronauts pointed to three socks taped to the side of a metal cabinet, each marked with a set of initials, and gave a thumbs-up sign. I watched for a minute over my father’s shoulder before backing away into the kitchen.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “What?”

  “Hungry? Do you want something to eat?”

  “Okay,” he mumbled.

  In the cupboards we had only a couple of cans of vegetables, cooking oil, and some Cream of Wheat. In the refrigerator, some carrots, wilted celery, and butter.

  “We need more food,” I called to my father.

  “What?”

  “We need more food!”

  I boiled water for the Cream of Wheat, but there was barely enough for both of us; two servings’ worth made only a thin gruel. I carried a bowl to my father and cleared a place on the table for myself. We slurped our breakfast. On the TV was a commercial for Norelco electric shavers, with an animated Santa riding a silver rotary razor over hills of snow, ho-ho-ho-ing and waving his arms. Our Christmas tree had been restored to its base in the corner of the room, but neither I nor my father bothered plugging the lights in; even the thought of blinking Christmas tree lights here, now, in this house, seemed too sad to bear.

  This was yet another one of those things that school failed to prepare you for: how to deal with the unpredictable behavior of real people in the real world. My father had always been the model of responsibility. He was never sick. He never missed a day of work and was never late for class. The only time I normally ever saw him in pajamas was before bed or on Sunday mornings, when he liked to linger with the newspaper and coffee in his armchair. So to see him like this, as he had been for the past several days, was frightening.

  Midmorning, my sister let herself in the front door. She carried a grocery bag of food and an empty suitcase.

  “Brr. It’s freezing in here,” she said, coming around the corner into the room.

  It was her first visit since our parents’ fight the week before. There was an awkward moment when she met eyes with our father. He looked like he might say something, but then he closed his mouth, stood up from the sofa, slipped past her into the bedroom, and shut the door behind him.

  “I guess he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “I guess not. You’re in the enemy camp now.”

  She set the grocery bag down on the table and began unpacking it. “It’s not much, but it should tide you over until the stores open again. Got bread, eggs, milk … I need to pick up some more of my clothes and things, too, while I’m here.”

  She stopped to take in the rooms—the paper and clutter, the dishes piled in the sink, the stray pieces of clothing. “Jesus, it looks like a train wreck in here.” She asked quietly, “How’s he holding up?”

  “He’s holding up fine!” our father answered from inside the bedroom.

  I shook my head: Not fine. My sister mimed smoking a cigarette and pointed to the backyard. I took some bread, grabbed my father’s blanket from the couch, and, still wearing my pajamas and slippers, followed her outside.

  The day was crisp and sunny. We settled on top of the old picnic table at the rear of the yard, resting our feet on the bench. The table wobbled precariously under our weight. The light off the water was so bright that it made us squint.

  “Did you do something to your hair?” I asked.

  “I got it cut,” she said, holding up the ends of it. “And I brushed it.”

  “It looks good.”

  “A compliment! How unusual.” She pulled her Kools out of her coat pocket. “You want one?” she asked, offering me the pack.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Strictly a dope man.”

  “Ha.”

  As she lit up her cigarette, I ate a piece of bread and watched the Martellos’ house across the water. Yellow leaves littered the yard and boardwalk. The curtains were closed, the patio furniture rolled out of sight. I knew they were gone for the holiday, but I couldn’t help watching the house anyway, half hoping to see an arm, a head of black hair flashing behind a window.

  Megan said, “Mom said to be sure to tell you hello and that she misses you and she wishes you would talk to her.”

  “I did talk to her. She telephoned.”

  “She said you were angry and wouldn’t say anything.”

  That was more or less true. My mother had telephoned, more than once, in fact. But what was there for me to say to her? That I understood what she was doing? That I didn’t have any problem with her running out like she did?

  “You might try calling her back, you know,” Megan said.

  I shrugged and didn’t say anything, and Megan let it drop.

  “So how’s he doing?” she asked. “The same?”

  “The same.”

 
I told her how our father still wasn’t leaving the house; how he spent his days rereading all his notes and papers on the comet, or watching the Skylab on TV, or just lying in bed like a sick man. “I don’t think he’d bother to eat if I didn’t bring food to him. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never seen him this way before.”

  “Paps and Grams invited you all for Christmas dinner. You should try to get him to go.”

  “I don’t think he will.”

  “No. No, probably not,” my sister agreed. “Not with Mom there.”

  In the distance we could hear neighborhood kids shouting and playing outside with their new Christmas toys. I felt suddenly older than I’d been a week ago. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders.

  “What’s going on with you guys?” I asked.

  Megan said that she was still sleeping on the couch, our mother still in her old bedroom. It was awkward staying with our grandparents, my sister admitted, because our mother hadn’t told them the whole story yet, only that she and our father had had a fight, and so they didn’t realize how serious the situation was. Grams and Paps treated her like she was just some hotheaded teenage girl who’d run away from home for the weekend; they seemed to think that if she’d only go back and apologize, everything would be all right. That didn’t make it any easier on our mother, naturally. Megan wanted to get her out of the house later this week, maybe drive up to New Orleans for the after-Christmas sales and help her shop for new clothes.…

  As my sister rambled on about living arrangements, the Martellos’ house didn’t just disappear. It squatted there unmoving on the other side of the water, a reminder of what had led us to where we were now. I hated to even think about it myself, but I needed to know. When Megan stopped talking, I finally asked her.

  “Has Mom told you anything about Frank? Do you know what’s going on between them?”

  She sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “Just tell me.”