by Irene Gallo
June finds a job as an office manager, explaining that they need a little more money now. She gets very, very thin and smokes a lot more.
One night, Carol hears her mother crying at night in her bedroom. She wants to jump up and run into her mother’s bedroom and hug her, but something makes her arms and legs very heavy, so heavy that she can’t get out of bed. After school, Carol has to stay at Aunt Edna’s. Instead of doing homework at Edna’s, she watches the Mickey Mouse Club show every afternoon while her cousin Andy sneers that it is a little kid’s show.
* * *
Suddenly, June marries Blake Henry, an economics professor at Caltech. Carol has hardly met him, and they are packing all of the things in their house to store in his attic, all of her childhood things, even her rocket collection, because there is no room in his house for them. Actually, they just don’t look right there. Blake’s ex-wife left a house full of fancy old vases, dark furniture that June now polishes once a week, twin boys who are ten years old and a sixteen-year-old girl who tells Carol that her mother “rode off on the back of a Harley with a Hells Angel and isn’t ever coming back.” Despite their similarity in age—Carol is fifteen—they do not become friends, as their parents had surmised they might.
She never hears Blake talk with June the way that June and Chet had talked. All that kind of talk has been folded neatly, put into boxes, and stored in the attic. Now, it really does seem like June was born to run the vacuum cleaner, make Swedish meatballs, and keep the washing machine chugging day and night. One day she overhears Blake say, “You’re not teaching Carol anything about keeping house.”
“Maybe that’s not what she’ll want to do,” June snaps.
She’s right about that.
“Well, don’t expect me to support her.”
“Don’t worry. You know, we might not even be here, Blake.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry.”
* * *
Something in Carol catches fire and explodes.
It is 1965. Carol shortens her skirts, wears white go-go boots, listens to British rock ’n’ roll, applies heavy black eyeliner and mascara (strictly forbidden by her mother) in the girls’ bathroom at school, and smokes Chesterfields. The teacher in charge of the rocket club tries to prevent her from joining, but Carol’s mother marches into the next meeting and “chews him up one side and down the other,” as she describes it at dinner. The club plans to spend all year designing and building a single rocket for the science fair in the spring, a fairly boring process, as far as Carol is concerned. Three of the rocket-club boys, seniors, whose ringleader is Kent, invite her to build bombs with them just for the hell of it.
It seems like a good idea at the time.
They respect her for what she knows, which begins to reemerge from the other side of the dark twist (though a good deal remains there, she learns eventually). It is exhilarating to walk purposefully, wearing jeans and sneakers, after school and on the weekends, through the huge concrete viaducts that lace the interstate junctions, set off explosions, and race to safety, breathless and laughing. It doesn’t seem that anyone in the passing torrent of automobiles ever notices the explosions.
Kent’s father is a chemist, and Kent forges his father’s name on chemical supply orders. They make the bombs in the garage lab he’s had since he was ten years old. One afternoon, as Carol precisely weighs chemicals, she decides that she will characterize this extracurricular activity as one in which she “uses her time in a creative manner.”
But Blake (she calls her stepfather Blake, because it annoys him) notices that she is withdrawing money from her savings account, which contains presents her relatives have given her over the years, and her baby-sitting earnings, and also discovers, somehow, that she has been using it to buy rather odd things at the hardware store. He finds out that it was she who ruined one of his circular saw blades (she meant to replace it but hadn’t had a chance) in his basement shop, which he never uses anyway, and elicits school scuttlebutt from his rat-children, natural-born snitches. He grounds her for a month. She is incensed. It is her money; why should he have anything to do with it?
After a loud argument in which Carol’s mother emphatically does not stand in solidarity with Blake, she knocks on Carol’s bedroom door and sits next to her on her twin bed.
“What do you suggest?”
“I need to get out of here. I’m going to go crazy.”
“There’s no way out but college.”
“I’m only fifteen.” Dreary, bombless, Blake-throttled years stretch ahead, a dark eternity.
“You might as well start now figuring out how to do it and where to go and what you want to do.”
“I want to go to the moon.”
“Might make a good essay, if it included the steps you need to take to get there.”
“Fiction.”
“Don’t be silly,” June says, her voice harsh. “What would your father think? Figure it out. Have you paid any attention to what’s going on with the Apollo program lately? No, I guess you’ve been a little too busy. Come back with a plan—with several plans, actually—and we’ll see what we can do about getting started. Going to the moon will not just happen to you. You have to make it happen.”
“My guidance counselor told me I should plan to be a secretary, nurse, or teacher.”
“Mine did too. And I fulfilled their expectations.”
“Why?”
“Because that was the country’s expectation, that men should have the best jobs, and besides, that’s the way it always was until the war. After the war, the men were back. There weren’t many jobs for women with my qualifications. That’s my excuse, anyway, but it was just the easiest thing to do. You’ve heard about the feminists, haven’t you?”
“Um, yeah. I guess.”
“I suggest you find out more. And Carol?”
“What?”
June lowers her voice. “I understand why Blake’s wife rode off on the back of a Harley.”
At first, they just giggle and snort, but laughter finally explodes from them. They laugh so hard they cry. They subside into weak giggles, but when they look at each other, the laughter builds again. Finally, they fall back on the bed, breathless.
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t think so,” says June soberly. “But I could easily change my mind. I’ve certainly thought about it, but I know everything will be fine. If I didn’t, I never would have married him. It was just too sudden, and I’m sorry. You should have been involved in the decision. I didn’t think about it. I just went kind of nuts after your father died.”
* * *
Blake is even less happy when Carol’s extracurricular activities expand to include feminist marches and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He is hard to please.
Gradually, the Eames chairs, the modernistic dining room table, and Carol’s rockets emerge from storage. Dark, fusty landscape paintings come down off the wall. As the house is repainted in bright colors, June convinces Blake to “invest” in modern art that reminds Carol of the one-eyed aliens that might live on Mars. A cleaning lady comes once a week. June starts writing Chemistry for Children in a spare bedroom she claims as an office. Sometimes, Blake hums around the house.
Carol still hates him.
* * *
Carol hears Blake say to June, “By the way, did you hear about that Kent kid?”
“What about him?”
“Blew up his garage. Ran away. The police are looking into it. Aren’t you glad I got Carol out of that before she got in trouble?”
It’s all over school. Kent is hiding out in Crescent City, with a friend who graduated a few years back. He’s not hiding from the police. He’s hiding from his father.
If Carol had been there, he wouldn’t have blown up his garage.
* * *
Carol takes college-track classes, despite the opposition of her guidance counselor. At first, trig and calculus seem hopeless, a
n impenetrable foreign language. Her mind is like a rusted machine with frozen bolts. She can’t make head or tails of anything; nothing seems related to what she’d done when she was, supposedly, a brilliant little kid.
* * *
One afternoon while sitting on the school bus ignoring the chaos, it comes to her: this is just one way of looking at time and space, a way she learned when standing in a different place, with a different view—the view from the house where her rockets hung from the ceiling. It is like learning to take new roads to get to the same place. You see new scenery along the way. She closes her eyes and sees how it all fits together, how to speak these languages. Pictures pace through her mind. It feels so good, like waking after a long sleep.
She smells cigarette smoke, and sees her father’s face, close and dear. He says, “Carol, I have something to tell you…”
Someone shakes her shoulder. Angry at being yanked from her father, from what he was going to say, she squinches her eyes firmly shut.
“Hey. Kid. You okay?”
It’s the bus driver.
“Your stop’s about two miles away. I wish I could drive you back, but I got to get home to my own kids.”
The bus is empty. “It’s okay. I can walk.”
It is, in fact, a grand day to walk. How, she wonders, did she hover above the things she used to know and put them together again? She worries that she might lose it all, just as easily. It’s part of the dark twist, along with so many of her memories. Sometimes she can’t even remember what her dad looked like.
She starts to run, to run home, to write down, draw, nail down what she has seen, what she knows, how to think, the new roads that stretch to a new distance.
To the stars.
* * *
In the summer of 1967, Haight-Ashbury casts its spell across the entire country. In Carol’s neighborhood, kids crowd into any car that can be cadged from unwary parents to make the trip from LA to San Francisco. The Haight’s seductive alternate world beckons, through blacklight posters (in friend’s bedrooms, not her own), psychedelic music (which she listens to through tiny headphones), and pot (which she smokes with friends), but Carol never fully surrenders to its sensuous siren call. She does choose a young man with whom to have sex, just because it seems so important to everyone and she is curious, but the relationship only lasts a few weeks. He keeps showing up on the front porch, undeterred by Blake, and sits moping in his car in front of the house several nights in a row, but finally gets the picture.
Carol instead surrenders to the clean power of science and math—possibly because she knows a lot more about both than most people her age. They attract her in ways she cannot really communicate, except that she wants to go further and further into them, there will never be an end to them, they are dependable and real, and they will take her where she wants to go. She finds her father’s thesis in the attic and reads it end to end, working out equations she doesn’t understand. One day June says, “I’m worried about you. You’re so much like your father.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
Her mother looks as if she’s going to say yes, and maybe, even, say why, but then smiles a bit sadly and says, “Of course not, honey. I guess I just miss him,” gives Carol a surprising hug, and goes off to settle an argument between the twins.
Things seem a lot better now with Blake and June. She hears them having actual conversations. They enjoy watching TV in the evening. They go for little trips up the coast.
Carol hates him.
* * *
There aren’t many engineering schools that accept women. It is not difficult or expensive to apply to all of them.
* * *
Carol holds her head high, a dimple in her cheek. She isn’t smiling. The dimple manifests from the effort of suppressing explosive laughter. Miniskirted, carrying a stack of chemistry books, she strides past slamming lockers and tight circles of gossiping girls who glance sidelong at her as she sweeps past them in the hall. She just got the news from her stunned guidance counselor that she received a perfect SAT score in chemistry—one of two in the country—and a near-perfect score in math. She must have made some stupid mistake, which irritates her. From now on, she will be more careful when taking tests.
After fielding offers from Caltech and Georgia Tech, she decides to attend MIT on a full scholarship.
It’s about as far away from California as she can get.
* * *
The first day at MIT, Carol’s chemistry lab-bench mate asks her out. Eddie’s blond hair skims his shirt collar, and he has cute blue eyes.
They go to a bar on Harvard Square. It’s only eight, but the place is loud and lively. They drink overflowing mugs of beer at a tiny, deeply marred table, and order another round. Carol has a good head for beer, liquor, pot—just about anything, really. Sometimes she thinks it’s kind of a shame; she has to spend so much more to get a decent buzz.
It starts out okay. They talk about their families. They both like Hendrix, but he’s never heard of Pink Floyd or the Velvet Underground. He asks if she always wears jeans, and she says that’s what everybody in California wears. He glances around and she notices that most of the other women in the bar wear preppy-looking skirts and blouses. If she were to wear a skirt, it would be a colorful hippie skirt. She doesn’t mention that she often dances topless at Grateful Dead concerts. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one would talk about on a first date.
She discovers that Eddie would have been a cheap date, if she had been paying.
“So, your dad was a rocket scientist?”
“This is the third time you’ve asked.”
“Well, it just explains everything.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you’re here.”
She slides from her stool and slips her pack onto her shoulder.
“Where are you going? What’s wrong?”
“I doubt you’ll ever figure it out.”
Burning with anger—she decided not to go to Caltech just because of this issue, because her father had gone there—she pushes her way through the crowded bar and emerges onto the sidewalk.
Most of the people she sees are men. She’s set to go for a nice, long walk to burn off her anger—maybe down to the harbor, maybe to California—when she notices a small, tasteful sign: Harvard Book Shop.
She ducks inside.
Soon, she’s reeling. She couldn’t possibly afford all the books she wants, not by a long shot, not even with her scholarship. Physics, chemistry, rocketry, IBM computer programming … a cornucopia.
Then she runs across the women’s studies section. Hmmm. She leaves with an issue of Off Our Backs. She’s seen it around, but never picked it up. She’d been planning to leave all the asshole boys in California behind.
She should have known they were everywhere.
It’s even worse than it seems at first. By the time she leaves for Christmas, two of her professors have asked her “out,” broadly implying that her decision might have something to do with her grades. She feels very lucky that all of her classes cover material not open to interpretation. Answers are right or wrong. She does as much public work at the blackboard as possible, always volunteers to answer questions, and is never caught flat-footed when chosen. In fact, some of her answers seem to awe her classmates, and soon no one asks her out, saving her the trouble of saying no.
She’d learned in high school that no one likes a smart girl. Everyone is smart at MIT, but no smarter than her. They should be her natural peers. Why does being a girl always mean that you have to be tougher than anyone else?
Well, fuck it. When she leaves at Christmas, she’s decided not to go back.
Her mother talks her out of it. She soldiers through her first year, and gets a summer job in a National Science Foundation lab in Bethesda, Maryland.
She gets a call from her mother in early July.
“You’ve got to come home for it, honey.”
She knows what Jun
e means.
They have to watch the moon landing together.
* * *
She flies in on the nineteenth. Her mother meets her on the tarmac, and they hug. Carol is surprised at how much older June looks. Her clothes are kind of … dowdy, and they hang on her. She even looks a little bit shorter. But once June starts talking, all that goes away.
Carol says, “Mom, I’m so glad to see you!”
“Oh, honey, so am I. So am I.” They walk through the parking lot. Everything seems brighter and bigger in California, after the humidity and congestion of Bethesda. “I have a plan. But you can decide. We have an invitation to watch the landing at the Jet Propulsion Lab.”
“Really? That is so cool!”
“Oh, it is. They really want us there, all of your dad’s old friends. We’d have a great day. But here’s my alternative.”
They choose plan B and drive north on the Coast Highway as the sun falls slowly toward the ocean. They pick up vodka, olives, and gin along the way. They also buy three fancy martini glasses and some groceries. June gets a carton of cigarettes. Carol stopped smoking, mostly, the day she graduated high school.
The trip is deeply soothing. Carol realizes that her body memorized the curves of the highway along the base of the hills that plunge into the ocean, perhaps when she was an infant. She rides into the history of her own body, her own mind, curving, wending, leaning, growing younger with each bend of the Coast Highway. The Pacific Ocean is silver behind June, who drives as if hypnotized, smoking one cigarette after another, a faint smile on her face. The lowering sun pours through the open window, a gold and salty tone, turning her mother’s face to a map of dissonant lines that Carol has never heard before. She watches June grow older by the second in the intensifying light, and this new, strange music is difficult to bear.
“Mother!” says Carol, and June turns wide blue eyes toward her.