What Burns Away
Page 6
“Here’s an example of a fire that burned for two days, from October eighth through October tenth, 1871, after either Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s cow kicked over a kerosene lantern or, more likely in my scientific opinion, fragments from Biela’s comet ignited a spark that started a barn fire carried on southwestern winds, reducing the city to ash.”
He placed another sketch of an incinerated city onto the overhead. Only the skeletons of the brick buildings remained after the inferno had been extinguished.
“Fire is combustion,” Mr. Barnet told us. He then lit a piece of paper with a Bunsen burner and tossed it the air. It burned to dust before ever touching the floor. “Combustion is the chemical process that makes things burn.”
In the back row, Norwell Jackson cleared his throat and flicked his Zippo lighter, while Mr. Barnet continued his lecture without skipping a beat. “Fire isn’t matter at all. That flame is an oxidation process, not unlike rusting or digestion, but this chemical process differs from those because it releases heat and light. It makes fire intense, it makes the big ones unforgettable, and it makes all of it sexy.”
I had never heard a teacher use the word “sexy” before. The rest of the class seemed unimpressed, but I was rapt.
His next slide featured the space shuttle’s engines, fueled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. He explained how the reaction between the two chemicals—in what appeared to be a very fiery explosion beneath the orbiter—created a propellant that launched the spacecraft into flight.
With a yardstick, Mr. Barnet slapped the screen where the combustion burned red.
“This element, fire, can destroy an entire house in less than an hour, and a vehicle, if ignited from the inside out, in half that time. Propelling a rocket into space takes only T minus 26.6 seconds.”
• • •
That January 1986, the month of my fourteenth birthday and the start of my second semester of ninth grade, had been dubbed “the year of astrophysical encounters” by NASA, which had arranged for the space shuttle to launch in time to ride the tail of Halley’s comet. Their hope was to study the comet with all the technology gathered in the seventy-five years since its prior visit, while hosting a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from a New Hampshire town two hours north of our own.
But all that enchantment vanished as the Challenger split in two that morning of January 28, a Tuesday, after seventy-three seconds in the air. The explosion seemed not just the symbol of a dream turned to ash, but also became the image I would forever associate with the collapse of my parents’ marriage.
Arriving late at school that day, I jumped out of Dean’s truck—racing past the office, dodging the tardy sign-in sheet—and sprinted down the hall to our high school auditorium with my model of the comet in hand. I prayed to Mary, Joseph, and all the saints we learned about in catechism, that I had not missed the countdown and liftoff with our New England heroine on board.
I made it in time and scooted to the edge of my seat as the missile ascended under the combustion of the engines that Mr. Barnet had explained to us. The spacecraft arced through the air, a white tail like the comet’s trailing behind it. But shortly after the launch, unexplained dark smoke billowed out beneath the shuttle as the rocket split in two. Our teachers looked at each other, and the broadcasters went silent.
In an instant, the illusion dissolved, and I knew that burning up with the shuttle and our dreams were all the letters we had written to the crew, including Judith Resnik, the second female astronaut in space, and Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who had visited our classroom and to whom we spent much of our first semester drafting and typing up letters.
January 5, 1986
Claire Spruce
290 Willard Street
East Lyme, CT 06333
NASA c/o Christa McAuliffe
Teacher in Space Project
Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX 77297
Dear Mrs. McAuliffe,
In one week you will take off from Kennedy Space Center at 11:38 a.m. and as soon as you go, you will become a hero. In fact, you already are a hero to me. Even though I am only fourteen, I think about my future a lot. I run track and work on yearbook so that I can be the first person in my family to go to college. I was a Girl Scout in elementary and middle school and learned the basics of camping and survival. I can even make a fire with a flint and two sticks. I have patches on my badge to prove it, but I was never good at selling the cookies.
This year my science class will be participating in the Teacher in Space Project and I am very excited to take classes broadcasted from the shuttle. Do you think there is a chance of seeing Halley’s comet as it rotates the Earth? We have a telescope at our school, but even with a study hall pass no one is ever allowed to use it. I would love to see pictures of it from where you are.
I was hoping you might send me your picture and autograph so that I can include them in my science project called, “The Ultimate Field Trip.” I am making a model of Halley’s comet to go with it. A couple more questions: (A) Do you have any kids? (I think it would be so cool if my mom went up in space to see the comet!) (B) Did you always know you wanted to go into space? (I have known since I was born that I want to study the atmosphere.)
Good Luck!
Claire Spruce
Grade 9
Lyme High School
Watching the shuttle falling from the sky, I imagined my letter falling too, part of the ominous confetti sprinkled over the Atlantic, and sinking into the deep. And in that audience where I sat with my classmates after the explosion, we waited quietly, more quiet than we’d ever been in school, and perhaps in our whole lives.
In the auditorium we scanned the walls decorated with red, white, and blue streamers, but the horns we had blown at liftoff went unsounded in our laps. From my pocket I pulled the letter Christa McAuliffe had returned to me and clasped it to my chest, my rib cage heaving, as I unfolded the creased paper and read it again, certain already that she was dead.
NASA
Teacher in Space Project
Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX 77297
Claire Spruce
290 Willard Street
East Lyme, CT 06333
January 19, 1986
Dear Claire:
I am delighted that you took the time to write. When I was fourteen, I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so you are ahead of me there, but I was always very active in Girl Scouts, just as you mentioned you were in elementary school. And, like you, I have been eagerly awaiting Halley’s visit, as it will be the only chance in my lifetime to view the comet orbiting Earth. On our mission we will carry out the first flight of the shuttle-pointed tool for astronomy (SPARTAN-203). It is a Halley’s comet experiment-deployable device that will allow us to observe and photograph the comet. It will be incorporated in several of the lessons from space that I will be teaching in partnership with your school as part of the Teacher in Space Project and the Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP).
As you might imagine, I am excited about going into space on the Shuttle Challenger and I hope that more young women like you are going to be interested in NASA career opportunities later on in life.
To answer your question, I have two children, a boy and a girl. I miss them dearly, as my training at the Johnson Space Center here in Houston keeps me far from home. But, that said, it has been very exciting for me to take advantage of this opportunity and I look forward to my mission in late January.
Enclosed is the photograph you requested, and thanks again for writing. I will be carrying the letters from your class with me as a token for good luck on our mission.
Sincerely,
S. Christa McAuliffe
The sacrifice of the Challenger crew—and for me, the loss of Christa McAuliffe, especially—revealed the profound truth, that we were all changed by watching the orbite
r breaking apart and those seven crew members dying in front of us while their spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean. We were no longer the children we had been, and at fourteen years old, we turned inside ourselves.
The girls sitting in the folding chairs in front of me no longer held hands and grinned at each other in excited anticipation. Each person in that room dived solo into grief. No one ate their pizza slices, and our ice cream melted in the plastic bowls in the back of the auditorium as a teary-eyed Mr. Barnet rolled the AV equipment away.
Ushered into our adulthood, we awaited Principal Jensen’s voice over the loudspeakers to announce what was already clear—Christa McAuliffe, the thirty-seven-year-old mother of two, who bore a likeness to our own mothers, would not be teaching three classes from outer space. Something had gone terribly wrong.
We were let out of school early, and I waited for my mom to pick me up, trying to understand how I could ever let go of that dream, the moment I had waited for all year. I asked myself if there were any guarantees, any promises that our parents or NASA or even President Reagan could keep. And I clearly remember deciding then that if he asked, I would give myself to Dean.
• • •
I don’t remember her doing this any other time, but that afternoon of the Challenger disaster, my mother left her job as an emergency room nurse at Hartford Hospital early to pick up Kara and me from our schools. Out front of my high school, Kara waved apathetically from the front window of Mom’s station wagon, signaling their arrival.
Both my sister’s and my mother’s eyes were red from crying, yet their duplicate beauty was still intact. Kara’s and Mom’s full lips quivered; their mouths were downturned. I got in back and we drove in silence. In the rearview mirror, I watched my mother blink away the tears that streaked her eye makeup and soaked her face. Behind me, grocery bags rustled as we made the sharp turns leading up to our driveway.
Parked in front of our house were my Uncle G’s plumbing van and my dad’s friend Rex’s battered Jeep with its notorious bumper sticker: Draft Beer, Not Boys.
Inside, the guys played cards—their weekly Tuesday afternoon poker match, something my father had organized with his friends who were also out of work, either by choice like my uncle or because they were walking the picket line like Dad and Rex. Sometimes other neighborhood guys joined them, but most often it was just Dad, Rex, and Uncle G who sat around the table, all of them going through various strings of jobs, unemployed on and off for years. The game gave their calendars some consistency and was one they had played since high school, never missing a week, except for a couple of years after their numbers were called for the Vietnam draft.
My father was the only one who served in that war. Uncle G, my mother’s brother—or, as my dad called him, “the Lucky Fuckin’ Mick”—had failed his physical examination due to the Ménière’s disease he blamed every time he got drunk and fell down. “And Rex dodged the whole mess,” Dad explained to us once, “to marry Marian, his first wife, the prettiest of the three, moving with her up to godforsaken Halifax, Canada, to make candles and sell salt cod.” But following my father’s and Rex’s return after those nearly two years away, the three amigos all picked up where they left off and the games resumed at our house.
That January afternoon, in lieu of the poker chips they could not find, the men used my mother’s sea glass as their markers. Mom stored her prized collection in giant mason jars sorted by colors—one filled with just the rare blues, another with greens, a jar for whites, one for the browns, and then the most treasured, filled with pinks and broken pieces of antique pottery.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mom asked my father when she stepped in from the cold and up to the table with bags full of groceries. Her mouth was pinched.
My father scratched his beard with his cards. “What the fuck does it look like we’re doing?”
Rex eyed my mother, thumbing a gold crucifix nestled in the thicket of chest hair that grew up from his V-neck sweater and blowing cigarette smoke from his nose like a dragon.
Next to him, Uncle G wore a plumber’s shirt monogrammed with “Hot Shit” where his name tag should read “Gerald.” He had a thick mustache like Magnum P.I. and a Marlboro hanging from his lip.
“Don’t get your panties in a tangle,” he told my mother, his sister. “We couldn’t find where you hid the poker chips so we compromised.” He smiled then and flicked his ashes into an empty beer can.
Without a word, Mom leaned over the table. Sweeping her arm across the surface, she collected the cards, her colored sea glass, and all the dollar bills on the kitchen table into a paper bag holding the week’s produce. She looked at my father as she did it. Even in her fury, my mother was beautiful, her Irish skin rouged, her pursed lips seeming the caricature of a kiss.
“Guess that’s fold,” Rex announced, leaning back in his chair.
Uncle G ran the back of his hand across his forehead. His palms were dirty with the work he’d been doing on our water heater in exchange for a place to crash while he was in between girlfriends. “Kat, you need a drink,” he told my mother.
In one pull, Mom guzzled the beer that was sitting in front of my father. “I’m taking a walk. Don’t wait on me.”
Next to me on the living room couch, Kara colored while I watched my parents. I thought about the note my mother had left for my father that morning, the one I had read after snatching it off Dad’s dresser. It remained wadded up in the pocket of my parka, and because I’d taken it, my father spent much of his morning walking the picket line with Rex, oblivious to Mom’s impending split.
“You’re dismissed,” Dad shouted at my mother and pointed to the door. “Take your walk. Weather might cool you off.”
I was anticipating my own dismissal after homework was done so I could meet Dean at the creek. While my uncle helped himself to another beer, I opened the World Book Encyclopedia to the letter C. Under a photograph of an old cave wall with a comet sketched across it, I read the Mongolian legend that dubbed comets “the daughters of the devil, warning of destruction, fire, storm, and frost whenever they approached the Earth.”
When I looked up from the book in my lap, my mother was pulling on her green winter boots and tying her scarf. Then she slammed the door behind her.
I wondered if perhaps Christa McAuliffe had suffered from Halley’s arrival as the legend predicted. And as my mother disappeared, my panic rose. I feared she too might be placed in some unknown jeopardy out there in the cold with the falling dark, so I grabbed my coat and hat and followed behind her.
“Dad—” I called.
“Just go,” he yelled back.
• • •
For a year, my mother had been walking to Sea Glass Beach alone when she was angry or quiet or sad. But I could remember a time when she’d walk off with my father, hand in hand. And just a year prior, on the Fourth of July, the four of us had walked beyond the creek and over the seawall together. Everyone was disappointed because thunderstorms rained out the fireworks, but to assuage our disappointment, Dad brought two kites on the trip to surprise us. One was a dragon with a long yellow tail, and the other was a neon butterfly.
Kara and I had moseyed down the beach, but Dad ran with a kite in one hand, gripping my mom’s palm in the other. They raced like kids down the sand, as Dad’s dragon and Mom’s butterfly took flight.
Dad hollered to Kara and me to catch up. “Girls, come on! Let’s get them higher!”
Kara had an orange Popsicle stain around her mouth and bent over breathless, her hands on her knees, when we finally reached my father.
Mom held both kites while Dad pulled additional spools of twine from his shorts’ pocket. My mother smiled at me, the wind whipping her long, dark hair in her eyes, as the mansions beyond the seawall hovered like disapproving chaperones.
Dad added to the lines and showed us how to let the twine out slowly
. “Give barely an inch at a time, or you’ll crash and burn.”
“You’re a damn fool,” Mom told my father as he added a third spool. She shook her head, but she laughed loud.
When the thunder cracked, Mom looked at my father, then at us. “Maybe that’s enough.”
“We’re grounded,” Dad said. He kicked up a shoe. “Rubber-soled sneakers.”
My mother was barefoot.
Lightning struck and the sky darkened to almost purple.
Mom turned toward home, her kite trailing behind her, and hollered into the wind, “Peter? Girls? You coming?”
Kara did cartwheels on the wet sand. Pink shoelaces hung from her ponytails. Her scatter of freckles, the beauty of her high cheekbones, and the heart shape of her face made her my mother’s twin.
“Kat, you’re no fun anymore,” my father shouted back. “You used to be fearless.”
Mom stood still a moment. She examined my father. There was a pause. A change washed over her face. Then she let go of her twine completely and we all watched her kite nosedive into the ocean.
• • •
But as I tailed my mother after she took down Dad’s poker game, she was anything but still. Her anger fueled her speed, and she kept a good forty paces beyond me, shrinking toward the horizon. With her ponytail wagging behind her, she could easily be mistaken for a girl my age.
At the creek, our first marker, I wondered if my mother would run and leap the width of the water. Unsure of the tides and fearing that she might find herself immersed, her down coat billowing as it filled with a current that could easily take her under, I ran to catch up.
But the tide was dead low and my mother marched right across the creek, soaking her green boots. On the sand she broke into a run that lasted until she reached the breakwater, and then she scaled the five-foot rise of the rock wall and dropped over the side.
She was out of my sight for several minutes, the jetty separating us from each other. When I finally crested the climb, I stood atop the granite ledge a moment, wanting my mother to look back, to call my name and wait for me to join her. But she kept jogging ahead, her tied hair swinging behind her like a pendulum.