“That’s so kind,” she said. “Your compassion is an indelible part of you.”
“They’ll die anyway. They’ll starve.”
Late the night before, after she begged him, squatting, I need you to come, stroking his head, this way America might learn what it needs to, leaning her spine against his when he turned again to the corner, the very last time, looping a forefinger around his big toe, I can’t make it there without you, rubbing the lobe of his ear, he had assented.
Ahead of and behind them were people who looked like they had been passengers all their lives, waiting for the time they were told they could eat or sleep. A half hour into the ride the bus swerved to miss the gnarled metal debris of an accident. Fay gasped and put her hands to the ceiling, but Wright only looked down the aisle of thinning purple carpet, his sight on the windshield broad and high.
22.
PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA, 1972
The last letter Claudette and James got from their daughter advised that they keep their television off on a certain evening, and on this point, for perhaps the first time since Fay had been a ballerina in a crown of milk braids, they trusted her. Though she had not mentioned the radio they avoided this, too, even the sight of it. To the question of her son they had agreed, remembering how patient he had been with peas, with the dog who sniffed his fat diaper.
The night in question they ate outside, on the balcony that looked over their animals and their town, anticipating the other’s request for wine or butter before it was spoken. James had given the housekeeper the evening off, thanking her for the meal she left in the oven. It was one of their chickens, a lemon from the tree that straddled the hill beyond their bedroom window, rosemary from the fat row of herbs where the cat slept afternoons.
They set the cast-iron skillet the bird had roasted in right on the table. Claudette sat with her hands on the slight shelf of her belly, her round bun moving a little as she tried to see to each edge of the property, as he carved away the breasts. The knot of hair, the red-blond she had given her daughters, had always been an indicator of her hurt or fear or love, as much as any expression she made, even anything she would say. When she was free it became freer, wobbling as she performed an anecdote or bent a look to some question, and when she was furious it was erect and visible, making sharp turns, the thing that was apparent because she would not show her face. It was high and tight, now, reddening the skin at her hairline, tilted to the landscape while she kept her chin tucked and ate. He never imagined what it felt like, to have that much hair, all the way down her back, to keep it locked up that way. If it hurt he didn’t want to know.
The question of heeding the letter had not been discussed, but on the calendar by the pantry Claudette had circled the date in fine blue ink. There was the air of a wake to the way they ate. Neither sipped any from the crystal glasses of water before them, but once their plates were empty they drank without interruption, draining them like children who have come in from a long time outside. When he belched a little she almost smiled, although a correction passed over her face in half a second. In town that day he had bought her the cookies she liked, madeleines dipped in chocolate.
“None for me,” she said when he appeared with the milk-glass platter on which he had arranged them in a fan, and he understood and felt ashamed. There was nothing to celebrate.
They had been prepared, the two of them, to accept some responsibility. Even the modest farmhouse they lived in now in Northern California, the transition from their life before in the south of the state—the lawns of their Spanish Colonial mansion spotted with imported trees, the parties they had gone to every year, the pink and green tamarisk whose feathery branches seemed suited to the ocean floor, the Whitneys’ Valentine’s gala with the sedated lion cubs rented for the evening—had been a concession to this, to the embarrassment of how far each of their daughters had gone from them. It was understood that, for the rest of their lives, there would be no company coming.
On the table she was folding her linen napkin in some elaborate way, to make it look like a bird or a flower, a talent she had been known for in the decades of dinner parties.
THEY FORGOT IT ALL OUTSIDE. In the night the carcass of the chicken in the skillet took on a coat of dew and the fog bloated the madeleines and upstairs their sleep was dreamless under the lights they left on. When he woke up to piss, he saw she was not even using a pillow, that she had her palms tucked under her thighs and one foot slid under the other. He had always known her to be unkempt in her sleep, Claudette, a leg hinged up at the hip in a crazy angle and a hand high above her, and had teased her about it, calling her the colonialist, saying, Could you stay out of my country over here. Tonight she was like an epiphyte, a thing clinging to its host, almost undetectable in the bed.
In the morning they each kept a leash to the other, never drifting from earshot. He was very aware of the radio that was usually on, local and national and weather, the detailed forecast that usually filled the rooms of the house. By the afternoon he was unable to concentrate on the most minor of tasks, some paperwork sent over by the accountant or the crossword puzzle folded back on his knee where he sat on the porch, and he called to her. “Trip into town,” he said. Somehow he had adopted the belief that the news of their daughter, whatever it was, had their address, would reach them at home. The thought of a drive was a comfort. “A matinee,” he said. “We’ll drive by the theater and see.” Implicit in this was that they could not check the listings in the paper.
They floated down the hill with the windows up and his foot never pressing the gas, Claudette in a dress he hadn’t seen in thirty years, navy silk padded at the shoulders. She was a woman whose younger self had been eaten angrily by the older. He no longer knew her by her face or body but by how she used them, a way of crossing her feet when she didn’t approve, tipping her forehead back to consider an alternative.
There was a soap she wanted and she asked if he would stop at the market first, and he waited in the car with his seat belt on, the metal of the buckle right in the line of sun and capturing so much heat he could feel it in his gut. She emerged ten minutes later, through the automatic doors installed that year, her purse open and the soap held like a ticket, and he understood from this and how she crossed the lot, her chin buttoned to her neck, hardly lifting her feet, that she knew. On the drive home, the marquee out the window forgotten, he kept telling himself that at the next stop sign, after the next crest of the hill, he would ask her what their daughter had done.
23.
CAPE KENNEDY, FLORIDA, 1972
As though she is just stepping into the store to grab a pack of smokes, something to unclog the drain, he waits in the car for his mother, vaguely surveyed in the rearview by the college student appointed to keep him—company, or from himself, or from her, whichever, the interpretation turning over as quickly as the Florida radio stations. Few mention the launch. There is Zeppelin, there is Bowie, there is the DJ witticism and the accompanying sound effect, zoom, kapow. All four doors are open.
She had spent most of the bus ride meditating, something he hated her for. Even the drool that gathered in the crook of her unmoving lips he hated, even the dairy-white moons of her fingernails on her upturned hands.
In the front seat Brad licks the crease of a rolling paper, his knees splayed so wide the soles of his Birkenstocks kiss, and pulls apart the sticky bits of green with his thumbnails. He passes this back without asking or looking at him and Wright accepts, taking in too much, the taste and smell like the sap of a fir tree. Gasping and coughing is a barbed pleasure, the idea his body might get rid of anything. Wouldn’t it be good to eliminate an organ, any of them, survive on less, be made of less. There are Buddhist prayer beads hanging from the mirror, there is porn stuffed down the back of the seat, a white cock, a black one, a pink mouth too open.
When it hits any calm or pleasure falls shut, an old window on a pulley finally collapsing, locking him into somewhere too small to live for long.<
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In a cavity under the radio there is a collection of stray coins, filthier than he can bear to look at, coatings of gum and tobacco, shadowed faces of Indians. Kill yourself, he thinks, stop living, a quiet, peaceful thought. Brad is talking about direct democracy, or about Marx’s idea of a human home, or about an ex-girlfriend he wishes would fall ill.
Wright looks for something familiar as he puts off accepting that he cannot stay here in this car. Where else can he go? The cigarette burn on his hand shines a little pink, years old now. His mother? His jeans gape around the knees, a disintegration he exacerbated during a year where all food was cold, all sleep was cut short. He had pulled at these holes in steel-sided stalls, on the sides of roads, during talks from his mother when his jaw was locked and he never said a word.
Brad’s head tips back into some kind of dream, waking or otherwise it’s unclear. Wright drifts from the car, a thing pulled by weather.
The parking lot at night is a metallic grid of the hundred ways he might go, the posts of light with their necks bent in a way that feels deferential. He goes toward the sound of people. There is a turnstile he walks through, an attendant waving him past, her face as distinct as a dirty puddle. Smells of cheese that is not all cheese, meat that is not all meat. The bleachers are perforated with empty spaces where he might sit and for a moment he forgets what he’s doing, considers taking a load off, considers a souvenir baseball cap. A mom, a dad, a curfew, a bike. He has wanted places like this all his life, uniform rows of people, checking watches, agreeing that they are mostly the same, waiting on the same entertainment. For a moment he considers warning them, distracting them somehow. The rocket, past grass and stanchions and concrete, is the biggest thing he has ever seen. It’s a question, or the clarity of its answer, that puts a laugh in his mouth. Has there ever been anything about which he had no doubt? The biggest.
He watches them hopping the barriers now, people he has never met but who are instantly familiar, the political buttons on lapels, the density of ungroomed hair, the looseness of sleeves. The signs come up like a time-lapse simulation of spring, bulbs breaking through soil. Blown-up photos heave up and down in alternating waves, a naked child running under a sky on fire, a sweatered figure standing over a body while a girl near him howls. There are call-and-response chants, there are mouths that seem never to have been closed. And, he knows, at the center of it, at the bottom of it, his mother.
They part to reveal her where she sits as he jogs toward the stanchions. He clears them in a T shape with the help of his left hand, the lightness of his body what makes the jump possible, the remnant narrowness of childhood. They have made a U around her, a frame from which she is meant to speak. The signs remain but go still. Coming from nowhere a voice mentions minutes, T minus two. The biggest thing he has ever seen prepares to become the biggest thing he can no longer see.
He is on the ground and moving there, avoiding ankles and knees as much as possible. The high has changed. Before he was only his thoughts, places and arguments, but now he is only his body, ankles and calves.
Her face, his mother’s face, is quiet as the moon. Under his breath he speaks her full name, but there is no sign, in the curve of her bare feet on her thighs, the ragged weft of hair, that she imagines herself to be seen. She could be out in the orchards where she grew up, she could be alone in the dark.
He can smell it, the kerosene, sharp, precise. It gives her hair a unified or solid quality, incorrect and unreal as it curves around her face from the middle part, spreads pat as house paint over her heart and meets the bevel of her ankles. Annabelle had teased her: the only one not to cut her hair. Its color, its length, something people have always felt free to comment on, is it red, is it gold, does it change with the time of year, could you lasso a horse with that, hey princess could you escape the castle on your own.
Between chants a few voices acknowledge him.
“Hey, that’s her kid—would somebody—what’s he. What’s he? What’s she? That smell is—”
The knot of people seems like it’s growing toward him, shoelace tips in duct tape, hairy shins dry and reptilian underneath, and then she opens her eyes. Not fully, just enough to see him, the bottom slice of the world, surface but not sky. A pocket of space tears open around her and he crawls through it.
There’s an industrial strike-anywhere match between her middle and ring fingers, a sprout growing onto her open palm. He removes it without looking, eyes staying with hers. She almost smiles. When she replaces it, he pulls it again. Three times, four. What is it he thought he would say? The countdown of the rocket is at thirty seconds now, twenty-nine. He can feel the hum in his teeth.
She uses a phrase then that nobody else knows. She asks him to go. All their life it has gone this way, no commands, just questions. All their life, the illusion of choice. She uses a name for him nobody else ever will. He retreats backward, swallowing nothing wildly, the points of his knees higher than the crown of his head.
Nothing in his mother’s life has ever happened slowly, and neither does this. She is skin then not, hair then not. The orange is oversaturated, a mean smear of one ugly color. It’s not a consequence, an answer or reaction. It’s a change of the channel, another story entirely in a sliver of a second. Ten, says the voice. Nine. He finds it easy to think, for a slow pour of a minute, This has nothing to do with me. This is something else.
24.
YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, 1972
He woke with a dull awareness of it, the last Apollo launch, and had decided by breakfast he would not watch it, the broadcast they had conceded to make, sure to be pitiful. But the rattle of an afternoon flight left him nostalgic for the program, the beauty of the atmospheric burn, and at eight he turned on his Panasonic, thinking he would keep the sound off, lean back and wait for the rocket’s color and smoke, the red becoming gray, the gray becoming the sky left behind. It was the only launch to take place at night and he could not help but see it as an admission of failure. Steel-blue standing lamps bent over the couch, their switches in reaching distance, but he remained where he lay, as darkened as what played out on-screen. He hit mute during a commercial break for Head & Shoulders, a man gripping a tuft of his hair like a twenty found on the street.
The press seemed unsure of where to find the patriotism of this moment, how to euphemize the fact that Congress had deemed all of it a frivolity. They were sorry, their postures seemed to say, their hands too loose on the microphones, their shoulders pushed forward, for the future they had asked the public to dream about. There would be no lunar colony, no vegetables grown in space, no shuttle that ran between the planets on loop, preparing the moon for its pacifist global future. As he watched their lips move around words chosen carefully, the rouge and shadow of their made-up faces attendant to their stoic presentation, he thought he could read some: Watershed. John-F-Kennedy. The last.
The crowd, he calculated, was a fifteenth what it had been when he had ridden in the van with Jeanie and Rusty. There was no one on the beaches, face painted and all-day drunk, no international cross-section of luminaries and royalty, no cacophony of French and Italian, Mandarin and Portuguese, Japanese and Czech. Slate-gray and spotted with empty spaces, the bleachers were lit like industrial holding pens for cattle. The cameras dithered in their path, zooming in on certain members of the crowd, their haircuts rangy and their clothing ill fitting, before cutting to the astronauts crossing into the elevator.
A time zone behind them, there was no way to tell Dean Kernan good luck as he crossed the detachable arm, no red phone in sight that would ring when something went wrong. You made this choice, he reminded himself, in that room that could have belonged to anyone, a place of few photographs or heirlooms, you locked yourself out of that life.
As the countdown began they rushed the fence that ran the perimeter of the launchpad, a group of lanky figures in denim and paisley and plaid, their hair flowing up and sideways from the force of the rocket, their signs warping in the blast.
They planted their high-top sneakers and fringed moccasin booties and they held the poster boards by the corners. NO MORE BREAD AND CIRCUSES. DEATH TO AMERICAN DISTRACTION. YOUR MURDERED CHILDREN ARE NOT IMPRESSED. Photos pulsed between the text, the bodies of Vietnamese men piled in black silk, the body of a black man shot by the FBI as he slept.
From between them she appeared, protected by the fence of their bodies, her hair giving off light, the midcalf length of it as shocking to him as the saturated sight of her. Vincent bent forward, his front teeth on his pinky’s cuticle. She was the girl he had known—that immaculate dancer’s posture, that accusatory tip of the chin—and she was violently, potently, not. His body made a sound like gargling when he realized what was missing, eyelashes, eyebrows. There was nothing about her face that indicated it might break into surprise or fury, nothing in her eyes that would delight in anything around her. The station he was watching cut away to find the shot that would exclude her, and then he ground his thumb into the remote, two presses, four, until he could see Fay again.
Around her the bearded men and barefaced women held their signs and grimaced as the seconds wound down, nine, eight, and the force of the Saturn became greater. Vincent leaned forward and spread his hands on the glass tabletop. Seven. A child, maybe thirteen, appeared from behind the rooted legs of the protesters, his hands gathered in a fist at his stomach. Six. It appeared he was speaking, confirming some stricture with someone above, five, and then he kneeled where she sat, his face turned away from the cameras, only his shrunken turtleneck and blond-gold hair showing. Four. There was a kind of tug-of-war between them, a theft or an exchange it wasn’t clear, and then he fell back on his hands, his knees raised high, his feet and palms working to get him away in a primeval crab walk that removed all feeling from Vincent’s hands. She went up as the rocket did, as red and angry and determined to disappear.
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