The Time It Takes to Fall Read online

  Delia pulled out her crayons and flipped through her pad of construction paper, looking for a clean page.

  “Why is Daddy home?” Delia finally asked, selecting a crayon and scribbling.

  “He’s laid off. He can’t go to work for a while, so he has to get a different job,” I explained.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why can’t he go to work?”

  “The point is…” I said in my best adult voice, “the point is he’ll go back there soon.” Hearing myself say this, I immediately felt better. It sounded true. “It’s not like he got fired. It’ll be like nothing happened at all.”

  “Okay,” Delia agreed. She seemed comforted and started drawing in earnest, but after a minute she pointed out softly, “Mom cried, though.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She didn’t understand at first. She overreacted. It’s just for six weeks.”

  Delia scribbled. I waited for her to ask what overreacted meant, but she didn’t. I’d been explaining things to Delia since she’d been born, and I always told her the truth. Since her life coincided almost perfectly with the years the space shuttle had been flying, I’d been explaining the shuttle to her all along. Those are the rockets and that’s the tank. The astronauts sit in the nose part, there. Those are the three Main Engines. One of them could fail, but not two.

  After a while, Delia stuck her head out in the hallway and yelled, “Can we come out now?”

  “Yes!” my mother yelled back.

  When we came out to the living room, my father was watching the news. Delia curled up next to him on the couch. I found my mother doing the dishes. She had dried her eyes.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It’s not something you have to worry about, okay? It’s just for a little while. Your father’s very smart. He could do lots of things. Besides, it’s just for six weeks.” She fell quiet as she scrubbed at a pan. A few minutes later, she said quietly, “This happened before.”

  “When?”

  “Before you were born. Whenever NASA runs into hard times, they lay off people like your father first. It was hard, but in the end they needed him to come back, so everything worked out okay.”

  “How long did it take?” I asked.

  She looked up toward the ceiling, as if calculating. She blew her fuzzy black bangs off her forehead, then looked down at the pan again. She seemed to have forgotten the question. “Don’t you worry, okay? We’ll figure everything out.”

  My father found another job, repairing machinery at an appliance factory. His first day of work, my mother saw him off as always, made his coffee in the same mug, so Delia and I were falsely comforted.

  “Good luck,” my mother said quietly as she kissed him goodbye.

  “Ready?” he asked me.

  “Ready,” I answered. We said goodbye to Delia, who was waiting for her ride to preschool.

  All the way to school, my father talked about the math I would be learning this year. It was one of his favorite topics.

  “Soon you’ll be getting into real algebra. Multiple variables, the quadratic equation. The concepts you’ll learn this year are the foundation for calculus. Everything you learn in the future will build on this.” I couldn’t help but feel a little proud. All of the women astronauts were either doctors or physicists.

  We pulled up in front of the Palmetto Park Middle School, a large, rambling, low-slung building framed by mature and symmetrical palm trees. Three weeks earlier, I had started seventh grade.

  “Do you need lunch money?” my father asked. He heaved himself up in his seat to reach the wallet in his back pocket, making the seat squeak and crunch. More than kisses or other signs of affection, that motion embodied his everyday, responsible love for us. He handed me a dollar, then kissed me on the cheek.

  I walked up the steps and through the big set of doors, where kids were milling around talking and yelling, some of them wandering into the building as if by accident. Inside, I breathed the smell of industrial cleaners mixed with dust, paper, cooked food, and the bodies of hundreds of adolescents.

  I knew only about half of the kids in my class. The kids who had gone to the district’s other elementary school seemed alarmingly more mature. They wore more stylish clothes and spoke to each other more harshly. They also had a leader, Elizabeth Talbot, who wore designer jeans and T-shirts with the names of bands I had never heard of. From the first day I’d laid eyes on Elizabeth, I simultaneously hoped she wouldn’t notice me and hoped she would choose me as her best friend. So far, she hadn’t noticed me. Today she sat between Toby and Nathan, writing something on their notebooks that made them all laugh in low, scornful tones.

  I took a seat near my friends from Palmetto Park Elementary, Jocelyn and Abby. Jocelyn had always been pretty, and this year her fluffy blond hair was growing out from an attempt to fashion it into wings. Abby was not as beautiful as Jocelyn, but looked more put-together than the rest of us. She wore her black hair in a glossy cap, and her blue pants matched perfectly the blue stripe in the rainbow on her shirt. Both of them watched Elizabeth Talbot’s every move.

  At recess on the first day of school, when Elizabeth Talbot went from person to person, pointing at each of us and demanding, “What’s your dad do?” Abby had said, “Accountant,” Jocelyn had introduced herself and added, “Firing room,” and I had answered, “Dolores Gray. My father works on the Solid Rocket Boosters.” It went without saying that everyone’s father worked for NASA.

  Now I found it difficult to imagine my father going to work in a factory, so I pictured him at NASA instead. Once, before the fourth test launch of Columbia, he’d taken Delia and me into the Vehicle Assembly Building and showed us the tools he worked with, the elevator that took him up to different levels so he could work on different parts of the rockets. He introduced us to his boss, who peered at us through his thick glasses as if we might suddenly pounce and bite him. Mostly, my memory of NASA was of the candy machine down the hallway, the feel of the quarters clinking into it, and the candies that Delia and I chose, brightly colored sour disks. The crunch of sugar between my teeth, the smarting saliva feeling, and Delia’s tongue afterward—blue, and green, and pink.

  Four launches took off successfully in 1983, then three more already the year I was eleven, 1984. My father had said his layoff would last for six weeks to two months; maybe he would be back in time to work on the flight scheduled for November 7, and no one would ever have to know.

  After lunch, we straggled out to the courtyard, where everyone stood around listlessly, looking each other in the eye and then looking away, as adults do. Jocelyn, Abby, and I sat on a low wall. As we talked, I looked around and counted under my breath: twenty-five kids. Of the thirteen I knew, ten had parents who worked for NASA. As far as I knew, none of them had been laid off. Then again, how would I know?

  Across the courtyard, Elizabeth Talbot stood talking with some boys, her arms crossed over her chest. Her father had designed some part of the oxygen system in the space shuttle’s crew cabin. One of the boys threw a ball to her, and she caught it nonchalantly, without looking, and tossed it back.

  A few days later, Mr. Jaffe frisbeed fat newsprint booklets onto our desks. A loud moan broke out: standardized tests. We took them at least once a year. This one would take all afternoon. We opened our test booklets to a reading section and began when Mr. Jaffe said, “Now.” Secretly, I liked these tests. I liked filling in the newsprint bubbles completely with a sharpened pencil. I liked the tense hush and the rustling sound of pages turning, the occasional scrubbing of erasers. Half an hour into the hour-long section, I finished the last question and closed my test booklet. I looked around the room at the other kids, still working. Abby scratched her way through a long division problem. Nathan hunched over his desk, clutching a shock of sand-colored hair at his forehead. Next to him, Toby sat with his eyes squinted shut, slowly filling his cheeks with air until they ballooned, then slowly leaking it out.

>   On a scrap of paper, I drew a picture of an astronaut in a space suit. A few seconds later, Eric Biersdorfer closed his text booklet and laid his head on his arms. I stared at him in disbelief: no one had ever finished as quickly as I did.

  Eric had gone to a private elementary school, so no one knew him. So far, he had sat by himself without trying to talk to anyone. He was tiny, the smallest boy in our class. I watched him to see what he would do next, and it seemed that he really was done; he pulled a Choose Your Own Adventure book from his pocket and held it open under his desk so that Mr. Jaffe wouldn’t see. Then he raised his head suddenly and met my eyes. He looked at the closed test booklet on my desk and then smiled at me. The surprise of it traveled all the way to my feet. We sat, not looking at each other, but staring into mutual space with our ears on our elbows, until the other kids finished and Mr. Jaffe called time.

  My father couldn’t take me to the next launch because he had to be at work at the appliance factory before dawn. He’d been working there for only three weeks, but already this felt dangerously long; I worried that NASA would forget him and hire somebody else when his work needed to be done again.

  I went outside while the sun was still coming up, casting a strange blue light onto the houses and trees in my neighborhood. I wasn’t sure which direction to look for Challenger, and I started to think I’d missed it, when I caught sight of it over our garage, a tiny bright light scoring a white vertical streak onto the sky. I counted two minutes and then I thought I could see the Solid Rocket Boosters fall, but I couldn’t be sure. My father had assembled one of those boosters before he was laid off.

  Later, I wrote up the launch in my space notebook.

  STS 41-G, Challenger.

  Launch October 5, 1984, at 7:03 am, no delays.

  This is the largest crew of astronauts ever to fly (seven). Two of them are women (Sally Ride and Kathryn Sullivan), and this is the first time two women have flown in space together. Also the first time a Canadian citizen (Marc Garneau) has flown in space.

  Sally Ride lifted a satellite out of the payload bay using the Remote Manipulator Arm. Kathryn Sullivan became the first woman to do a spacewalk during a 3-hour EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity). She and David Leestma simulated the refueling of a satellite in the payload bay. “I love it,” Sullivan said as she floated through the airlock.

  My father didn’t take me to this launch.

  I didn’t write in my space notebook about my daydream of this mission, my fantasy of what it must have been like to live on a spacecraft. What it must have been like for Kathryn Sullivan to spend three hours pulling on the layers of the EVA suit, the thin under layer laced with tubes of water to cool her, the tough pressurized outer layer, the gloves and helmet. What did she think about, getting suited up, knowing that she would be the first woman to venture out of a spaceship on a tether, to float alone in the blackness of space?

  On the afternoon bus, the only open seat was next to Eric Biersdorfer. As I sat down, keeping as much space as possible between my body and his, Eric didn’t look up or say anything. His head rested against the window, and he held a book open against the back of the seat in front of him.

  After a few minutes, Eric suddenly set his book on his knee and looked out the window.

  “I don’t read books written for children,” he said. “They’re too boring.”

  He told me about the books he’d been reading, and I noticed that he had a slight stutter when he got excited. It occurred to me to try to find out whether his father worked for NASA, but I didn’t. I just listened to the talk as it spilled out of him, fascinated that such a person could exist where I did.

  Delia and I woke early on school days, when the sounds of talking, running water, and our mother’s radio station burbled through the door. We shuffled out to find our mother sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, with the newspaper spread out, chewing on Delia’s green crayon. Delia ran over and sat on her lap, crinkling some of the papers.

  “Hi, girls,” my mother said without looking up.

  “What are you doing?” Delia asked, excited. She liked projects.

  “Your mom’s going to get a job and make some money,” she said. She looked up at us, her brown eyes hopeful and energetic.

  “What do you think about that?” she asked us, looking from me to Delia and back again. It was a real question.

  “Good idea!” Delia said.

  “Who’s going to take care of us?” I asked.

  “You girls are big enough to let yourselves in when you get home and fix your own snacks. We’ll get a key made for each of you. You’ll wear it on a ribbon around your neck so you don’t lose it.”

  “What kind of job?” I asked. “Where would you work?”

  “Maybe SeaWorld!” Delia cried.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told her. “She’s not going to work at SeaWorld. That’s not the kind of job she wants.”

  “Thank you for the suggestion, Delia,” my mother said warmly. “But I’ve decided to be a secretary. I’d like to work in a nice office and answer phones for an important businessman. What do you think?”

  I thought of the women I’d seen on television, dressed in dark suits and lipstick, clicking through offices in high heels, whispering important messages into the ears of silver-haired men. The offices were always dark wood, and it always seemed to be cold outside; I assumed that these offices only existed in the north. But my mother seemed so inspired by this idea, I wouldn’t have dreamed of discouraging her.

  “That sounds perfect,” I said.

  We didn’t hear about the job idea again for a few days, until the morning I came out of my room to find my mother in the kitchen dressed up in a white blouse and a frilly pink skirt I had never seen before. Her hair, usually a fuzzy black cloud, had been smoothed into a tiny bun on the back of her head. The blush on her cheeks made her look eager or embarrassed. She wore high-heeled sandals with pantyhose; I could see the seams across her toes.

  “You look nice, Mom,” I said.

  “Thank you, baby,” she said. “Do you think I’ll get hired?”

  “Of course,” I said. “What’s the job?”

  “It’s working for a doctor’s office, checking in patients and filing records. I talked to the doctor himself yesterday. He said mostly he just wants a friendly person at the front desk when people come in. I told him, ‘That’s me!’” Her voice quickly rose into a nervous laugh, as though she were talking to the doctor all over again.

  “How do I look?” she asked. “Would you hire me?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “I’d pay you a million dollars.”

  When I left, she was crouching over to apply her mascara in the hallway mirror, stretching her mouth into a long distorted shape like a fish.

  At recess, Eric and I sat on the steps and watched Elizabeth Talbot kick around a soccer ball. She controlled it with her feet the way the boys did, curling her cleat inward to steady it, then drawing back to kick it precisely with the side of her foot. The six weeks my father was supposed to be laid off were almost up. I expected him to get a call any day. Elizabeth jogged over to where a group of boys were talking; we watched her retie her ponytail as she discussed a Dolphins game with them. Somehow, she didn’t have to try at being better than everyone else.

  “I wish I could play soccer like her,” I said to Eric. This wasn’t exactly what I meant, but I wanted to broach the subject of Elizabeth. I wondered what Eric thought of her.

  “You could if you wanted to,” he pointed out.

  “Not like her,” I said.

  Eric shrugged. “I don’t see why not,” he said finally.

  My mother got the job. That night, she told my father all the details—the questions the doctor had asked her, the responsibilities that would be hers. She still had her work clothes on and, wearing them, she held herself more upright, speaking in complete sentences.

  “Look at you,” he said, holding her at arm’s length. “All dressed up.”
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br />   “I’ll have to dress like this all the time now,” she pointed out. “I’ll need some more good work outfits.”

  “This is full-time?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Full-time.”

  They stood holding each other’s arms, forming a closed circle. It always made me a little anxious when they did this, that they would forget me entirely. It was one of my earliest memories, seeing my parents kiss on the lips when my father got home, briefly but with force; I saw their lips change shape in profile pressed against one another, and it had seemed a strange and slightly violent thing to do. When they hugged in the middle of the room, I stood next to them with a hand on each of their legs, waiting for them to remember me.

  The first day of my mother’s job, she woke early to shower and do her hair. When Delia and I wandered out to the kitchen, my mother was already dressed with her makeup on.

  “Well, good morning,” she said. “I have a surprise for you.”

  She slowly clicked open her change purse and pulled out two keys, then placed them carefully in our palms as though they were valuable. I turned mine over in my hand, examining it. It was silver, brighter and shinier than my parents’ keys. Its teeth were sharp, brand-new.

  My mother found some ribbon and strung the keys on them, then tied the ribbons around our necks like medals.

  “Remember to keep these under your shirts,” she said. “You don’t want to advertise to strangers that you’ll be home alone.”