Because of these delays, it was no surprise when the Challenger mission kept getting pushed back, but because it was such a high-profile launch due to Christa McAuliffe’s presence, the pressure on NASA to get the schoolteacher in space became more and more intense. It was a cold, rainy, and windy January in Cape Canaveral. The launch was scheduled for the twenty-second. But bumped back to the twenty-third and then the twenty-fourth because of the delays with the space shuttle Columbia’s mission.
Mr. Singh left on the twenty-fifth to pick up Ottilie and Gurbaksh. After conversations with Ottilie’s parents, it was decided that Mr. Singh would rent a hotel room at the airport in Columbus so that there could be a unified front from the parents in their lectures about Gurby and Ott’s conduct. Unspoken was the idea that no one liked the idea of crying in the airport in front of all the business travelers.
The Challenger launch on the twenty-fifth was delayed until a night launch because of terrible weather in Senegal (the projected landing site) and then pushed back again because the secondary site in Casablanca wasn’t ready for the landing. The next day the launch was postponed because ground control wasn’t able to get ready so quickly for a morning launch. On the twenty-seventh there was a handle that wouldn’t come off of one of the external doors.
When my mom was scheduled to go see Ottilie, Mr. Singh, and Gurbaksh on the morning of the twenty-eighth, no one really thought they’d actually launch the damn shuttle. We were all becoming attuned to the hope and delays of the space program (just as NASA was becoming re-attuned to the pressures of celebrity). And while everyone was excited for the shuttle launch, teachers were getting fed up wheeling TVs into their classrooms and then having to improv a lesson plan because of the delays. As a nation we were all grinding our teeth at night.
Let this happen already.
CHAPTER 27
The day of the pickup Mom decided she wanted to bring me along for support.
And Dad had to be brought as well. He probably could’ve managed the few hours alone, but he was adamant that he come along. It seemed less about his physical state than a desire to stare Mr. Singh in the eyes and demand his wife back. This was all last minute so we didn’t have time to recognize the inappropriateness of what we were doing.
So even though the kids running away didn’t affect my dad one bit, in his present state he brought a gravity to the proceedings, the living embodiment of suffering the consequences of one’s actions. He was emotional mood lighting.
Dad was out of the bed but still dressed in pajamas since they were the easiest to guide around his casts. His right leg and arm were still in their casts. The leg stuck straight out and his arm folded against his chest. Mom and I had gotten pretty good at the choreography needed to get him in the front seat and the wheelchair folded up. The music this dance was set to was my father’s complaints.
“Maybe a warning next time would be nice.”
“Hey, that is still attached, you know.”
“Well, if it wasn’t broken before it probably is now.”
“I thought my last car ride was damaging.”
“It seems like I’m not the only one who wishes I was dead.”
We got to the hotel and Mom checked us in. The desk guy looked at my dad in his wheelchair and asked if we needed any additional assistance, but the way he said it he was letting us know that he wasn’t going to help at all. And he was bothered by our presence in his fiefdom, the lobby. We were not the stylish, well-lit models in the brochures for the place. It was an airport hotel, everyone was exhausted and haggard. Except for the flight attendants. They were impeccably coiffed and aesthetically perfect for life at thirty-five thousand feet. Everyone else looked like shit.
A couple, a black man and a white woman, got up from the ochre couch and approached us. I pushed Dad to the elevator, trying to get out of their way. I am oversolicitous of black people. I need them all to like me and usually I think this is accomplished by a polite retiring away from them. And then the woman said, “Are you the Nadlers?”
“Yes? That’s us,” my mom said, sounding a little reluctant to identify herself as such.
“We’re Ottilie’s parents. I’m Rick and he’s . . . No.” She shook her head and put a palm to her forehead. “Sorry. I’m Miriam and he’s Rick.”
My parents introduced themselves and me.
“Do you all want to go up to the room?” My mom was at her best managing groups of people. “I think we all need to take a load off.”
We all crammed into the elevator. I pushed our floor and exhaled loudly as if to say our journeys were difficult but soon they would be at an end. I exhaled in order to put everyone at ease, I think. Though as soon as I did it, it seemed like I hadn’t exhaled in weeks. I was exhaling breath I didn’t remember inhaling. I wondered where all that extra breath had been hiding.
“You’re the boy who taught my daughter to huff gas,” Ottilie’s dad said, leaning over and into me.
“That wasn’t me,” I said, bouncing off of him a little.
“Who was it? Because Gurbaksh says he didn’t do it either.”
I fell in love with Ottilie’s dad then and there, even though he looked like he was ready to punch me, punch the elevator, punch the world to get his daughter back in arm’s reach. But he called Gary by his real name. There was a grace there, a kindness.
“My dad’s girlfriend showed us how to do it. But nobody else actually did it. I swear, sir.”
“Where’s she? I want to talk to her.”
“She’s dead,” my dad whined and started to cry.
The elevator dinged and the door opened.
CHAPTER 28
“We all become martyrs to our indecision,” Ottilie’s mom, Miriam, said. “A lazy manic mole-visioned set of people with infrequent fits of brilliance and rarely enough stamina to see a plan through.”
We were all sitting on the edges of the two queen beds watching the preparations for liftoff. Everybody that is except for my father, who sat in his chair in the narrow alley between the two beds. We rented two rooms that have this door between them. We were all in one room because when we had both TVs on the sound was unsettling. All echo and lag.
“I don’t think they’re gonna launch today,” Miriam said to the room. “Morons were using a hacksaw on a billion-dollar rocket just yesterday. It’s too cold in Florida. We ants will have to wait for another day to build our staircase to God.”
She had been narrating the launch from the moment we turned the TV on. She and her husband seemed to switch places as soon as the door to our hotel rooms closed. She became voluble and he retreated into himself.
She wasn’t wrong. The launch from the day before was scrubbed because of a hatch handle that wouldn’t come off the door. A bolt got stripped or something. The guys on the launchpad attacked the handle with a hacksaw. They finally got it off with a drill but not before they pushed the launch to today. It’s 30 degrees in Cape Canaveral, which means that if they launch it’ll be the coldest launch in NASA history.
“They want to get twenty trips this year. Twenty trips,” Miriam said. “It’s the end of January so they’re already behind. All of our money just sitting there on the launchpad.” She exhaled dramatically. “All that money for another launch that won’t go and meanwhile, meanwhile, we don’t have money to keep the mental hospitals open. Which is like telling all of the Vietnam vets who came back all messed up from that shameful debacle of an illegal war to go screw.”
“Honey, please,” Rick said.
“Don’t ‘Honey, please’ me. Those are your comrades in arms, Rick. Your brothers. You’re going to forget them?” Another dramatic exhale. “I should be the one saying, ‘Honey, please.’ ”
“The shuttle has nothing to do with Vietnam.” Rick got up and started opening drawers. “Is there coffee?”
“I saw some downstairs,” I said.
Rick put his shoes back on. “All right, I’m going to make a move here. Anybody else want any?”
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“They could be here at any moment, Rick. Don’t go.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.” The door slammed hard and made all of us jump. Rick came back immediately. “That wasn’t me,” he said. “Damn door is weird. Sorry.”
He eased the door closed when he left this time.
“This has been so hard for him,” Miriam said, turning an inch away from the TV to speak to our reflections in the mirror. “It’s his little girl. He’s a very protective father, you know. He takes her back-to-school shopping every year. I haven’t bought my daughter clothes since she started kindergarten. I mean other than training bras and her other intimates. I have never figured it out but he gets so squeamish about Ottilie’s developing body. Do you know when she first got her period, he didn’t speak to either of us for a week?” She sucked her teeth. “He was exposed to Agent Orange, saw his buddy’s head explode in a rice paddy, but tampons, panty liners, maxi-pads—those he can’t deal with.”
The shuttle sat on the launchpad in the early morning sun, its mighty rockets seeming to shiver with kinetic energy. They also now looked for all the world like a pair of unwrapped tampons. My insides curdled and I got a half-erection thinking about Ottilie’s intimates and her periods. I resettled myself on the bed and tried to think about anything but Ottilie’s underwear or about things being inserted into her body.
Miriam was still talking. “I would think he would be excited every time she got her period. Like hooray, she’s not pregnant! We got her through another month!” She raised her arms above her head, making her clunky necklace and array of bangles make Boggle noises. “But no. He won’t buy those things for either of us. He’s delicate in strange ways. That’s what I get for marrying a southerner. You know he wears all of his t-shirts inside out because the tags irritate him? I’ve told him just cut the ding-dong tags off. But he gives me this look like I’ve blasphemed the lord almighty of retail, by suggesting he take a scissor to his clothes.”
There was a moment of silence in which the fact that neither my mom, dad, or me said anything made the silence have a heavier density. The silence sagged in the room. At any moment the shuttle would launch, at any moment Mr. Singh would be knocking at our door ferrying the kids home. Miriam popped the silence herself. “I mean, Rick doesn’t need to buy me those things anymore. Not since I had my hysterectomy.” She turned to face my mother. “Do you still have yours?”
“My what?” Mom asked, blanching.
“Do you still have your uterus?”
My dad started coughing. It wasn’t that bad but I jumped up and went into the bathroom to get him a cup of water. I was hoping all of the motion of a minor coughing spell would be enough to reset the conversation.
“Hmm,” my dad said when I handed him the water. My dad’s mood was so down I’d need to do some major spelunking to relate to him.
The door opened and Rick came back balancing two coffees in Styrofoam cups. “I brought an extra,” he said. “I know nobody asked for it but there are some people who want coffee when it’s not there and there are people who want coffee when it is there.” The door slammed shut causing Rick to spill one of the coffees on himself. “Motherfucker,” he shouted.
“Ahhhh!” Miriam jumped up and ran into the other room. She reappeared a moment later with towels and she smothered her husband in them.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Rick said, holding the remaining cup over his head trying to balance it while his wife patted him down. “Stop.”
“Take off your sweater. I need to blot it or the stain will set.” She pulled away and wadded up the towel but she saw him hesitate and she made a dumbshow of holding it up as a shield. “Don’t be shy. They know about your inside-out T-shirt thing.” Her movements were getting more manic by the moment. Her gestures broader, her jokes playing to some unseen audience, the Boggle noise of her jewelry more specifically emphatic.
“Stop it, dammit!” Rick tore off his sweater and shoved it into his wife’s chest. “Let me be. We agreed to better behavior.” He stabbed his forefinger millimeters from her face. “This is not what that looks like.”
And there was an expression that flashed across her face—it looked like a ship without its barnacles, vulnerable and new and real. Not even the most sublime camcorder could have intuited it. I saw in that moment her as a girl, her as a baby, her standing outside a library alone in the rain, her so much older on a beach stabbing something curious and dying in the sand with a slender strip of driftwood. Can any of us experience another’s existence without going mad? How glibly are the decisions made that change everything? These ruts of behavior that after decades we shrug at and call character. These masks we wear, letting our faces atrophy. None of this changes the temperature of the universe one bit. We are alone in the cold, cold void.
She recovered and pretended to cower, shooting us looks and doing a shaky cringe thing that I recognized as the universal pose of women in Halloween photos when the boyfriend in the Swamp Thing/Frankenstein/Bigfoot/King Kong costume has his arms outstretched in attack.
How often do we stage our nightmares? Who would’ve thought the real hell was this: you and your parents waiting for your mom’s boyfriend and her boyfriend’s kid and her boyfriend’s kid’s girlfriend who really should be your girlfriend but she’s not because your friend stole her from you even though you saw her first but there’s also the mom’s boyfriend’s kid’s girlfriend’s parents who are melting down right in front of you. It’s a long tired train of possessives to cram into a Days Inn double room. Of which let’s be honest—why the shit am I here at all? Isn’t there someone minding the store of my mental health? There’s negligence and there’s whatever I live in now.
My mom lit another cigarette with that pretty gold lighter, art deco and worn smooth. It fit in her hand so well and she enjoyed how good it felt, like, I saw her note it and smile. I’d never seen my mother as beautiful before, as a being capable of pleasure before.
My father broke his silence to wave at the air and cough.
Miriam came back to the bed with Rick’s sweater in her hands. She stood up a second later and said to my mom, “Excuse me, I’m just going to scootch around you. Crack a window. I hear the smoke is bad for the heater units.” She knelt down and really pushed at it. “Hey, you’re a strong young man. I have a job for you. Have I a job for you? I do!”
I looked at my mom to beg for a way out. She looked away. And took another drag.
“Scootch on down here and use those big muscles to open these windows.”
I crawled down once she’d gotten up and after straining for a couple of minutes, I noticed that the windows were painted shut. I announced the fact which made Miriam beg her husband to go out and get some ice when he grumbled, “I’m just so worried about this man here, his color is just not right. I want to have some ice cubes he can hold in his mouth.”
My dad was playing his silence game. And Miriam took his silence as an acknowledgement of her plan. I think my dad liked being referred to in the third person. He must’ve felt like it was the culmination of maturity to have people trying to guess at his needs. The wheelchair became his throne and his subjects must try their best to assuage what must be his terrible anger at the tragedy that befell him. This devotion from others was what he always wanted. Let the world service his body. He’d never felt so strongly about that flesh carapace; he wanted the freedom of his mind. He was done with translation minutiae. Now he seemed to want to commit sati, to be a male Dido throwing himself on the pyre of his lover’s affects. But not because of the sorrow of losing my mom and then the waitress but rather because of a grave feeling of injustice, the feeling that this pain had been unjustly inflicted on him.
I really hadn’t noticed before how selfish my dad was. Mom’s infidelity was about him. The waitress’s death was about him. His soul was a narrow hallway lined with portraits of himself.
The door slammed and we all jumped again. Rick was back with the little plastic tub full of ice
.
“These ice cubes are enormous,” she squawked. “How’s the man supposed to hold one of those in his mouth?”
Rick kicked off his shoes and laid himself back on the bed. “There wasn’t a selection of sizes, Miriam.”
“I’m just worried about the man getting hypothermia.” She disappeared into the bathroom and came back with a hand towel. She palmed ice cubes into the towel then wrapped the whole thing into a kind of bindle. Then she started swinging, slamming it down on the table. Bang bang bang.
“Miriam!”
“What?” She paused, already a little out of breath. “How else am I going to get them small enough for him?”
I was standing next to my mother when she leaned into me and whispered, “That woman is toxic.”
For a woman who almost never cursed, this was the most damning thing I’d ever heard her say.
“Mom,” I said. “What am I doing here?”
My mom didn’t get a chance to answer because there was a knock at the door. It opened and Mr. Singh, Gurbaksh, and Ottilie threaded their way into the hotel room.
The three of them were exhausted and sullen. Ottilie looked wan and thin and Gurbaksh just looked so different, his face more open, his jaw more prominent, his eyes bigger and sadder. Around one of his eyes was the black and blue corona of a bruise. He looked like I’d never seen him before. Defeated.
“Gurbaksh,” my mom shrieked, maneuvering through the narrow aisle between the TV and the bed to hug him. “Where’s your turban? What happened to your hair, baby? And your poor eye?” The door slammed and we all jumped.
Mr. Singh shook his head at my mom sternly. The subject was meant to be tabled. This was what was making him look so different. Where his turban usually sat instead was a badly buzzed scalp. I wanted very badly to touch the thin skein of stubble that covered his head now but knew that this was not going to be possible. Gurbaksh saw my dad in his chair and looked immediately to my mom for an explanation. And that’s when he saw me and the questioning in his eyes ratcheted up to astonishment. And annoyance.
How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Page 17