I pulled the chair closer to the desk. “What type of rocket am I assuming?”
“The Jupiter class, unless it’s more efficient to do something else.” He rested a hand on my back. “Just sit here and work. I’ll be right back.”
NINETEEN
BIRTHS IN SPACE HELD POSSIBILITY
Psychologist Believes Man Could Produce Children Fit for New Environment
By GLADWIN HILL
Special to The National Times.
LOS ANGELES, CA, Sept. 19, 1956—The possibility of husband-and-wife scientist teams voyaging through space and begetting children on the way was seriously cited today at a gathering of leading space scientists.
By the time I’d figured out that the lunar mission could be done with five launches using the Jupiter class rockets, or two using the Sirius class that was still in development, Nathaniel had cleaned up my mess, brought me a lemonade, and …
And I’d realized that he had given me equations to do so I would calm down.
It had been a good choice. The line of equations was clearly either wrong, or right. Having that certainty gave me a lifeline back to … sanity, I guess. It had been a really long time since I had broken like that. It hadn’t happened since before I met him. Not to that degree, at any rate. Now I just had small panics. The desire to flee. Sweats. The occasional vomit session before a television appearance.
That train of thought was not going to lead me anywhere useful. I checked the numbers again, and they were beautifully correct. Taking a slow, deep breath, I set down my pencil and looked up.
Nathaniel was sitting in a chair he’d drawn up to the other side of the desk. It wasn’t designed to be a two-person desk, so he was hunched over its edge like a worried gargoyle. He had a report in front of him and was tapping his pencil against it as he read.
“I think I’m okay now.”
He put his pencil down and regarded me. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“There’s not much to say.”
He grunted, nodding, and tapped his pencil against the desk. “May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“If it distresses you, then we’ll change the subject.”
“I said I was okay now.”
Nathaniel held up both hands in surrender. “Okay. Good.” He set them back down on the desk and cleared his throat. “I understand why you haven’t mentioned it, so I’m not upset, just worried. So … can you tell me the due date?”
“The what?” I looked back at the papers. Due date for the launch? That hadn’t been in the paramet—… And then my brain caught up. I laughed outright. “I’m not pregnant.”
“I don’t know if that reassures me or makes me more worried. Are you sure?”
“I had my … my period last week. You remember that.”
“Oh. Right.” He rubbed his forehead. “Maybe you are now? I mean … we’ve been intimate since then.”
And more than once, at that. “That’s not how it works.”
“But you’ve been vomiting more.”
So much for thinking I was being discreet about it. “Ah. I didn’t know you knew. It’s not … I’m not pregnant. That’s not … that’s not what this was.”
He watched me, and I could feel the question taking shape. It took up space and left little room for air. “Can you tell me what ‘this’ was?”
I dragged in a breath. As much as I wanted to, I could not pretend that he was being vague. Dodging the question would only worry him more. “You know … you know how I tell stories about being the youngest in my class? Okay. Well. I try to make them funny stories, because that helps. But the truth is that I was … Mama called this ‘having a spell.’ It didn’t happen that often, and hasn’t happened in years. I was just … I’m sorry. I wish you hadn’t seen it.”
“You understand that I’m just worried about you, right?” He reached out for my hand.
“I do.” Mostly. The science part of my brain could describe what was happening. “The anxiety that I get sometimes—I mean … It hasn’t been this bad since I was eighteen.”
I’d been tutoring one of the boys—by request of my professor—and was subjected to six months of “My grades would be better if you knew anything about teaching.” Being eighteen, I believed the boy. Being eighteen, I’d thought that I couldn’t quit. I’d told Nathaniel stories about the student, but only as jokes. I never told him about going to the bathroom to sob, and then wiping my face and continuing the session.
Until one night when I couldn’t.
All I will say about that is, thank God Hershel was at Stanford too, or I probably would have—he’s a good brother. Never told our parents. Although, in hindsight, he probably should have. It had been exactly the thing that Mama had been afraid of, that I would be too fragile to handle the stresses of going to college when I was fourteen. I got so good at hiding my distress that I don’t think my parents ever knew.
“I am … terrified, every time I have to address an audience. You remember Mama and her ‘What will people think? ’”
He nodded, but was otherwise very still and focused on me.
“I think … Mama was concerned about appearances because she had married up. I didn’t know that. I just knew that I had to be perfect. Always. And, and … I think what just happened is that—well…”
“Clemons represents what people will think.”
Pressing my hands over my mouth, I nodded and tried desperately not to cry again. Crying was weak. It was for children. Or grief. I was my father’s daughter, goddamn it. Nathaniel was already worried enough. He didn’t need me dissolving again.
Nathaniel stood and came around the desk. He knelt next to my chair and wrapped his arms around me. “He doesn’t. Okay? He called me in today because what people think is that you are smart, and brave, and funny, and kind, and they want to be like you. Do you know what President Brannan said?”
I shook my head, my hands still pressed over my mouth.
“According to Clemons, President Brannan said that his daughter asked him why she couldn’t be an astronaut.”
I laughed a little. “Oh, that must have been a fun conversation.”
“And he asked her why she wanted to do that, and she said, ‘I want to go into space with Dr. York and be a lady astronaut like her. ’”
And that was when my attempts to not cry failed. Completely. But these tears were of an entirely different sort, and welcome. Nathaniel was crying with me, because that’s the sort of wonderful man I married.
Anyone looking at us would have thought that we were grieving, but it was the happiest I’d been in months.
* * *
You know you’ve worried your husband when he makes a doctor’s appointment for you. I couldn’t blame him. I was angry about it, but I couldn’t blame him. He drove me to the doctor’s office and sat in the waiting room. He probably would have come in, if I’d let him.
Instead, I was sitting in a gown on a cold table with my feet up in stirrups while a man I didn’t know did unmentionable things to my nether regions. Really, though. Would it be too much to ask that they warm these things?
The doctor pushed back his rolling stool. “You can sit up now, Mrs. York.”
He had a beautiful Scottish accent, which made his appearance a little less forbidding. Lean and intense, he studied me with pale blue eyes under heavy eyebrows. One focuses on such things, rather than the indignities of being a woman.
Clearing his throat, he turned away to a pad of paper. “Well, you’re definitely not pregnant.”
“I know. Thank you, though.”
“Can you tell me a little more about the vomiting?” His nose bent down like a hawk.
“Vomiting?”
“Your husband mentioned it when he made the appointment.”
I was going to kill Nathaniel. Pressing my lips together, I ground my teeth, before forcing a smile. “Oh, it’s nothing, really. You know how husbands get.”
He wheeled around
to face me. “You have every right to be angry at his interference, but I’ll ask that you not use social niceties when I’m inquiring about symptoms. I need to know the frequency and nature of the vomiting to make certain that it isn’t related to another matter.”
“Oh.” I rubbed my forehead. The doctor just wanted to know how things were without Nathaniel’s misdiagnosis, the same way I wanted to see the raw numbers before they ran through a machine. Not that my husband was a machine, though I was aggravated with him as if he were. “It’s not … it’s not an illness. I just get nervous when I have to speak in front of a large group. That’s all. It’s been happening since I was a teenager.”
“Just before speaking?”
“Sometimes … sometimes after.” I twisted the hem of my gown, my head bent.
“What other times?”
“If I … it really doesn’t happen very often.” I hadn’t been preparing to speak this last time. My cheeks burned with shame, remembering. “But there have been times … when I feel … overwhelmed? If I’ve made a number of mistakes or feel like I’m … shirking?”
He grunted, but provided no other commentary. “And did anyone ever treat you for it?”
I shook my head. Hershel had wanted me to go to a doctor, but I was afraid that he would say I wasn’t fit for university. Or tell my parents, which would have amounted to the same thing.
“Do you have shortness of breath at these times? Sweating? Racing heart? Before vomiting, I mean.”
My head came up of its own accord. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
He nodded and pulled a prescription pad toward him. “You have anxiety, which is unsurprising, given the age we live in. The papers are calling it the Meteor Age, but I think the Age of Anxiety is more apt. I’m going to prescribe Miltown and refer you to—”
“I don’t want to take any drugs.”
He lifted his pen from his pad and turned to glare at me. “I beg your pardon.”
“I’m not sick. I just get upset sometimes.” This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted Hershel to take me to a doctor. Next thing you knew, I’d be in a sanatorium filled with women getting shock treatment and hydrotherapy for “nerves.”
“It’s perfectly safe. This is, in fact, the most common prescription I write.”
“But I’m fine.” I did not want to join the brigades of women taking “mother’s little helpers.”
The doctor pointed his pen at me. “If I had told you that your vomiting was caused by influenza, would you also refuse to take any medicine?”
“But that’s different.”
“It most certainly is not.” Rolling his stool closer, he held out the prescription. “My dear lady, your body is not supposed to react to stress in this way. You are, in literal fact, being made ill by forces outside yourself. Now, I want you to take this, and I’ll give you a referral to my colleague, who can discuss some other therapies as well.”
It was easier to take the piece of paper than to argue. So I did, and I thanked him, but I would be damned before I was going to drug myself into oblivion.
* * *
In the waiting room, Nathaniel was sitting in a chair by the window where I’d left him. His right knee bounced up and down, which it only did when he was really nervous. He had a magazine open, but I’m certain that he wasn’t reading it, because his gaze was just staring at the same spot on the page—until I walked over.
He closed the magazine and rose to meet me. “Are you—?”
I glanced around the waiting room, which had people in half the chairs. Mothers with infants, women great with child, and men as nervous as Nathaniel. Clearing my throat, I took his arm. “Not. As I told you.”
He rested one hand on top of mine and his brows were drawn together, as if he were trying to solve an engineering problem. “I’m not sure if I should be reassured or disappointed.”
I tilted my head. “I’m sorry.”
Kissing my forehead, he released my hand to pull the clinic room door open for me. Cool air rushed in from outside and carried with it the hubbub of downtown Kansas City. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am.” I didn’t tell him about the doctor’s actual diagnosis, because that was just going to lead to arguments, and this was close enough to the truth. I leaned against him, feeling the wool of his coat beneath my cheek. “I’m sorry I worried you.”
“I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation.”
I laughed. “You? The man who dreams in rocket engines? Please.”
“Not long, but you know—careful.” Nathaniel steered me clear of a woman running down the sidewalk, clutching a shopping bag. He scowled after her before continuing. “We’re going out to California for your nephew’s bar mitzvah, so why not make it into a proper vacation? We could stop by JPL while we’re out there.”
As if stopping at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was a vacation. “I see how you are…” Another woman ran past, carrying a bag of flour. “Your idea of vacation involves looking at rockets.”
“Just trying to be efficient.”
“Mm-hm … ‘Efficiency’ is not usually a word I link to vacation.” The street got emptier as we walked, and yet the noise of Kansas City seemed to become louder and angrier.
“Ha! You’re the one who calculates our fuel consumption even when we’re driv—what in the…”
I’d already tightened my grip on Nathaniel’s arm before we rounded the corner for our streetcar stop. A gang of reporters filled the street. A runaway rocket ignited in my chest and I twitched back. Cameras, microphones, and … none of them were pointing toward us.
A police line stretched across the sidewalk, and on the other side of it, a crowd surged. The gang of reporters stood just this side of the line, holding their cameras over their heads. Occasionally, the police line would part and let a civilian through.
Every time, the reporters mobbed around them.
I tugged on Nathaniel’s arm. “Let’s go back.”
“Hang on. I want to see—” He glanced down at me and stopped with his mouth open. I don’t know what he saw, but he nodded. “Yeah. Sorry. Right.”
Goddamn it. I wasn’t that fragile. I relaxed my grip on his arm and nodded toward the police line. “Do you want to find out what’s going on?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Let them do their job. We can read about it in the paper tomorrow.”
TWENTY
U.S. CAPITAL ROCKED BY FOOD RIOTS
By GLADWIN HILL
Special to The National Times.
KANSAS CITY, KS, Sept. 22, 1956—The area around the capitol was cordoned off after rioters, headed by housewives, attacked butcher shops and grocery stores today protesting high prices. They broke into stores and tossed goods onto the streets. At least fifty persons were injured and twenty-five arrested as the result.
One of the luxuries of our apartment building was that it had laundry facilities in the basement. That was fortunate, as I’m not entirely certain that Nathaniel would have let me go out to a laundromat alone after the food riots we’d seen the day before. Not that there would be laundry riots anytime soon, but still. My husband was a worrier sometimes.
Even so, schlepping the laundry bag up four flights of stairs left me huffing by the time I got back to our floor. It was tempting to drop the bag and just drag it down the hall, but I kept it hugged against my body, then propped it on my knee between myself and the wall as I unlocked our door.
Pushing it open with my shoulder, I grabbed the bag and carried it into our studio. Nathaniel was sitting on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table, talking on the phone.
“Uh-huh. Oh, hang on. She just came in.” He set the phone down on the table and jumped up. “Let me get that for you.”
I relinquished the bag with a sigh. “Who’s that?”
“Hershel.” He carried the bag over to the dresser and set it down.
“Anything wrong?” It wasn’t our usual day for a phone call.
He shook his head, busy with t
he knot on the laundry bag. “Just wanted to talk to you, I guess.”
I sat down on the sofa and picked up the phone. “Well, hello. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
My brother laughed in my ear. “I need a favor.”
“I’m not doing your math homework.”
“It’s more dire than that.” His voice took on the overly serious tones of a radio star. “It’s the most dire thing a man could face and hope to survive.”
“Dancing?”
He laughed out loud at that, and I could picture his eyes crinkling until they almost closed. “Worse. Doris’s entire family is coming for Tommy’s bar mitzvah.”
I whistled, which isn’t ladylike, but he’d taught me to do it when we were kids, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. “That is rough. And what’s the favor?”
“Will you come early? To the bar mitzvah. I need…” His voice faltered a little, which made me sit up on the couch. “Ah, hell, Elma. I was planning on joking about it, but I realized that I was going to be … There aren’t any other Wexlers. It’s just you and me and the kids.”
You’d think that at some point the grief would stop. I put my hand over my mouth and leaned forward, as if I could somehow fold over the pain and keep it from escaping into the world again. There might be cousins out there somewhere, but between the Holocaust and the Meteor … it was just the two of us.
I had to swallow hard before I could speak. “Yeah—I mean, I have to check the launch schedule, but yeah. I can come out early.”
“Thanks.” His voice was a little ragged. “Plus, California has actual food. Nathaniel said you got caught in those riots yesterday?”
I let Hershel change the subject, and shot my husband a look. He was engaged in trying to figure out how to fold my panties, and it seemed to be taking more effort than a differential equation. “That’s a wild exaggeration. We had to go to a different streetcar stop, that’s all.”
“He made it sound like you were right in the middle of it.”
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