Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  My mother sighed. Here was another proof that the world would have been a better place if the handsome young president had lived. She wasn’t sentimental about much, but she had an affection for Kennedy, which was shared by my sister, who had hung an autographed color picture of JFK over her bed. My mother had even taken us to see him once at an Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn. Carol had been disappointed because Kennedy’s hair wasn’t as red as it was in her photograph. Later, after we’d stood in a day-long line to see his grave, it was my turn to be disappointed. The eternal flame, which I had imagined as something impossible and mystical, turned out to be a sort of bunsen burner.

  Carol made a face at Satellite City. “At least we’re not moving here,” she said. My father stepped on the gas. The ghost town receded.

  When we got to Cocoa, my father turned onto U.S. 1. He patted my mother on the knee. “Almost there,” he said. My mother lit a cigarette. I realized the house my father had picked out was going to be in Cocoa. I couldn’t believe it. Instead of living across a canal from Mrs. Henry and her aqua swimming pool, we were going to live in a subdivision a half mile from the Rocket Motel. “This way I’m less than two minutes from work,” my father explained. “No bridges.” He looked at Carol. “If we want to go to the beach, we can just drive out there on the weekend.”

  We turned off U.S. 1 into a subdivision of pastel cement block houses a little like the model house on Cocoa Beach, but older, with faded paint and dry, sandy brown yards. “This is Indian Heights,” my father said, though the word heights here in flat, sandy Florida seemed like wishful thinking, like naming an ice-covered island Greenland. We went over a big hump in the pavement that signaled the boundary between Indian Heights and our subdivision, Luna Heights, a newer one, where there were still empty lots and half-finished houses. We passed an aqua house, another that was a glistening tangerine. What color would ours be painted?

  It wasn’t painted any color. It was brick. Red brick with black shutters, just like our house in Maryland, or sort of. After my father pulled into the garage and we got out, I could see that the bricks on the front of the house were only one deep, laid over concrete blocks. The shutters, too, were concrete, cast onto the walls like the sea horses in the Henrys’ neighborhood on Cocoa Beach.

  “Brick,” Carol said. She sounded pleased.

  “The only one in the neighborhood,” my father said. “It’s expensive here. They have to haul it down from Georgia.” He unlocked the front door. Bertha and Gretel came charging out, wiggling and peeing on the driveway in their uncontrollable delight, sniffing at us, at Lucky in the remnants of the carrier. I bent down to pet them, but they ran back in the house, moving much more quickly than dachshunds usually do. We followed them inside and found green wall-to-wall carpeting, identical to what my father had picked out for our house in Maryland.

  “New?” my mother asked.

  “I just had it put in,” my dad said, sounding proud and a little nervous. “That terrazzo is hell on your feet.” We followed him into the living room. My mother set the cat carrier down, opening the flap on the top, and Lucky staggered out. The air-conditioning was on, and the curtains were drawn so tight it was dark. All our furniture was there. The big green sofa and matching armchair, our piano, the cherry dining-room set. They barely fit in the Florida-size rooms. The coffee table was wedged between the couch and the piano bench. The china cabinet was so close to the dining-room table that it was clearly impossible to open the drawers.

  “And I’ve arranged to have bottled water delivered,” my father said, continuing the tour. My mother nodded. We all remembered what the water tasted like.

  “The TV’s in here,” Carol called, from somewhere ahead of me, from what turned out to be the family room. Our big black-and-white console TV was sitting in front of a brick fireplace that took up one whole wall.

  “Does it ever get cold enough here to have a fire?” My mother asked. My father laughed.

  “If we turn the air-conditioning way down.”

  Carol was trying to get something to come in on the TV. Since the movers had taken it away four days before, she’d longed for this moment. She twisted the rabbit ears first this way, then that.

  “I can’t get anything,” she said.

  “That’s because the nearest station is in Orlando,” my father said. “Sixty miles away.” Carol stopped.

  “You mean,” she said, staring at the snow that filled the screen, “you’ve moved us somewhere there isn’t any TV?”

  “We’ll have to get an outside antenna, that’s all,” my father said. “Everyone here has one.”

  The dogs were now at the backdoor, whimpering to go out, the excitement of our arrival still too much for their dachshund bladders. I opened the door and stepped outside, Bertha and Gretel brushing past my legs in their eagerness to find some grass. Our new house was built way back on the lot, maybe so the front yard would look impressive, but the backyard was barely wide enough for a sidewalk. I leaned on the chain-link fence. On the other side was a genuine orange grove. Some of the trees were dead, hung with long gray moss, but not all of them. I saw green oranges, ripe oranges, blossoms, all on the trees at once. Above the trees, the moon hung in the still-light early evening sky like the thinnest of nail parings. Only tonight, it was different. Surveyor 1 was up there sitting in the Ocean of Storms taking pictures.

  I grabbed the top of the fence, about to climb over, but I heard a strange whooshing, rumbling sound and looked up to see a truck coming down the road beside our house, spraying clouds of white smoke. To either side of it, kids were running. My age and younger. They ran through what I knew must be fields of stickers and stinger nettles without a pause, danced in front of the truck in their bare feet on the asphalt still melting-hot from the sun. Their legs were brown, their hair almost white. I couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. I wiggled my toes inside my hot black-and-white saddle oxfords, started to pull one off, but the backdoor opened again. My father put his hand on my shoulder.

  “That’s the truck that fogs for mosquitoes,” he said. “Better come inside.”

  TWO MONTHS AFTER I had first seen it, I saw Satellite City again. My mother had driven to Orlando to take Carol to the allergist. I was just along for the ride. The doctor inked blue lines across Carol’s arms with a ballpoint pen and injected her between the lines with fluid he drew from carefully labeled bottles: Sand. Orange Blossoms. Mildew. Basically, the allergist said, what was in the bottles was Florida. After living in the state mere months, my sister was already allergic to it.

  On the way back, she sat in the front seat next to our mother, looking out the window, trying not to scratch. When we passed Satellite City this time, I saw that it wasn’t completely empty. In the distance was a single house, a Rain-bird sprinkler spinning in its green yard.

  When we got home, my mother pulled into the garage, cut off the AC and the engine, and we went inside. “Jesus,” my mother said, “it was hot out there.”

  “Why don’t you lie down?” Carol said.

  So my mother went to take a nap, something she never used to do before the move to Florida. I had developed a theory, which I expounded to my new best friend, Marly Boggs, who lived across the street. I told her the world was divided into inside people and outside people. Most kids were outside, most parents inside. In this theory, mothers were the worst. Fathers, at least, went to their offices to sit around. Mothers just sat in their houses. But in Washington, my mother had been different.

  With my mother safely down for her nap, I started for the front door. Carol called to me from the family room, and I turned back. Carol was sitting on our Danish modern sofa that my mother had had covered in nubby aqua vinyl so the dogs wouldn’t ruin the upholstery. Unfortunately the vinyl made already uncomfortable furniture into something more like torture devices than casual seating. Lucky was asleep next to her on the matching nubby orange chair. Carol was an exception to my theory. Kid or not, she stayed inside most of the
time, folding clothes or playing cards with Mom. “Jesse,” Carol said, “Mom doesn’t want you going out while she’s asleep.”

  “I didn’t hear her say that,” I said. School would be starting in two weeks. Any time I wasn’t outside playing seemed a waste of time. Carol, after all, was only two years older than me, not old enough to give me orders on her own.

  “Well, she did,” Carol said. “Come in here and play cards with me.” Carol wanted to play cribbage, the game my mother had taught her, which they played together for hours now. The wooden cribbage board my mother had owned since before we were born was out on the dining-room table. I didn’t want to play. I always got confused and pegged backward.

  I opened the family-room curtains and looked out at the orange grove behind our house. The dachshunds were in the backyard eating fallen oranges, a new bad habit they’d developed. Bertha ate the middle out of each one that fell, then let Gretel eat the skin. When they ran out of oranges, they sat and watched the trees, waiting for the wind or time to bring down another. I was hoping to see Marly or David Mize, the boy who lived next door, or any of the kids in the neighborhood. In two months, I’d gotten to know them all, along with their older brothers and their dogs.

  That afternoon, no one was outside, not even a dog, no excuse for me to run out the backdoor. Just orange trees drowning in long, gray Spanish moss. “Oh, gross,” Carol said, pointing. I looked up and saw that the telephone wires just outside the window were knit together by sticky spider webs. In the middle of each web was a big, furry, black-and-yellow spider. I counted to ten to prove that spiders didn’t bother me, then shut the curtains.

  “They looked like hairy bananas,” Carol said. She was playing with the bowl of wax fruit in the middle of the coffee table, shifting the red apple from hand to hand. We used to pretend the apple and the bunch of grapes were married, the colored marbles from our Chinese checkers set their many children. Carol swished the purple grapes along the table like a Southern belle in a long skirt. “Mom didn’t have to come to Florida, you know,” she said.

  “What do you mean, not come?” I said. This was obviously stupid. “I mean, what were we supposed to do? Live without a mom?”

  Carol shrugged.

  This was too much. I heard my mother in her bedroom, coughing. She was still awake. “I’m going outside, Mom,” I called down the hall. “Okay?”

  “All right, Jesse,” she said. She sounded tired, dreamy.

  I was halfway out the door when Carol called after me. “Mom says to keep your shoes on.” I kept going. “And she means it.”

  Marly was on top of the sand hill, a big white dune that stood between Luna Heights and the causeway to Cape Kennedy. So far, the sand hill had been too steep and shifting for anyone to build a house on. Marly waved when she saw me struggling up the steep side, the hot sand -filling my Keds, weighing me down. She was tall and very skinny, with short brown curly hair that was sprinkled white with sand right then. Just when I reached her, she yelled, “Freefall, Captain,” jumped in the air, and slid feet first down the dune. I kicked off my shoes and jumped, too, sliding to a stop next to her in an avalanche of white sand. I lay on my back, my feet buried. The sand was cool underneath and damp, and I dug my hands into it like they were crabs. I could hear Marly beside me, digging, too.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “a gravity wave,” and began to roll like a log down the hill, faster and faster, sand flying from my hands and my hair.

  This was Space, the game we’d been playing all week. We rolled off the sand hill and into the Hecks’ backyard, dodging meteors that fell like so much hail. Two weeks before, standing in the street in front of my house, I had gotten to see my first manned launch, Gemini 10, and I was sure we’d all be vacationing on Mars by the time I was in high school. In the Mizes’ backyard, where solar wind was so fierce you had to spin in circles, David came out and spun with us. We spun across my backyard, into the orange grove, then across the River Road and down the steep bank, overgrown with elephant ears, to the Indian River. We lay facedown on the old dock that stood leaning in the shadow of the causeway bridge and trailed our hands in the brown water. I told Marly about Satellite City.

  “Wouldn’t it be neat to live there?” she said. “You’d have miles of streets all to yourself to ride your bike on.”

  I thought about that one house surrounded by all those empty streets and empty lots, enough backyards to run for miles without a single bad dog or fence. But alone? Without anyone in the neighborhood to play with? I shook my head. It would be worse than being an only child.

  5

  I raced home that night in front of the truck that fogged for mosquitoes. I had put my sneakers back on, and my feet felt hot. A great white cloud of mosquito spray followed me across our yard, but I beat it to the door and ran inside.

  My father was in the kitchen, and when he saw me he asked, “Do you know where your mother keeps the scissors?” I couldn’t help staring at him. Of course I knew. How could he not know? It was like not knowing where the bathroom was. Don’t you live here? I wanted to ask. Then I realized that he didn’t really, not like we did. In his office he probably knew which drawer the scissors were in, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just asked his secretary, Mrs. Cowen, like he was asking me.

  “Did you hear me, Jesse?” He sounded more hurt than angry, like there was a game going on and I’d left him out.

  “They’re in here, Dad,” Carol said, pulling out the drawer closest to the phone. Lately, she hated for anyone to get upset. “What do you want to cut?” That was the question my mother always asked. The pair with the black handles were for paper and her chrome sewing scissors weren’t, though we used them for that every chance we got because they were sharper.

  “A tag off a shirt,” he said. Carol thought about it, then handed him the sewing scissors.

  After dinner, I lay on the family-room floor in front of the big black-and-white console TV while Carol twisted the rabbit ears this way and that. All she got was snow, a moving white fog as thick as the one the mosquito truck left behind. My dad had ordered a giant silver aerial from Sears like the ones all our neighbors had up on their roofs, but so far it was still in a box in the garage. He was looking for someone to put it up. He’d graduated from West Point with a degree in engineering, but apparently this wasn’t the sort of thing they had taught him to do.

  Carol was trying to get I Dream of Jeannie for me. It was about an astronaunt and was set in Cocoa Beach. It was my favorite. Even Carol liked the idea of living near a place important enough to have its own TV show.

  “There, I think I’ve got it,” she said, keeping one hand on the rabbit ears and holding the other out, so her body would act as an extra aerial. She was right. Jeannie the Genie followed by several ghosts of herself went out in her belly dancer’s costume to get Tony the astronaut’s morning paper. “The neighbor is going to see her,” Carol said. She was right again. He did.

  “She’s gonna get Tony in trouble,” I said, getting into the plot, which was pretty much the same every week.

  “Hey, look at that.” Carol pointed with her free hand at the TV screen. “I never noticed that before.” Above and beyond Jeannie’s ponytailed head, at the end of this suburban street in Cocoa Beach, I saw what she saw: mountains.

  “That’s not Florida,” she said. “There aren’t any mountains in Florida.” She was angry. She let go of the rabbit ears, and Jeannie disappeared. “Mountains.” She shook her head. “How stupid do they think we are?”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, the moon woke me up. It was full, and the light coming through the window was so bright I could see the purple flowers on the bedspread, the purple-and-white plastic flower arrangement on Carol’s dresser. I was sleeping in Carol’s room, in one of her twin beds. Recently I’d started being afraid to sleep alone in my own room because I thought all creatures, everything living except me, could move effortlessly through time and space. Who knew what might end up under my bed? I sat up, pushing the cove
rs away. Carol’s bed was empty, the bedroom door open. I waited for the sound of the toilet flushing in the bathroom, but the house was quiet. I got out of bed.

  I called softly to her, “Carol?” I could see her standing motionless halfway down the hall.

  She turned, her finger to her lips. “Shhh” There was a faint blue light flickering under the family-room door. The TV. Our parents were still up.

  I heard my mother’s voice. “So basically, without saying as much, they said it was hopeless, that if something in civil service opens up, it will be filled from Washington. So … I’ve signed up to take the teacher’s test.”

  “Good idea, Mary,” my father said, sounding a little distracted, like he was the one trying to watch TV. “That way at least you’ll be able to substitute-teach.”

  Carol looked at me, shook her head. “But she hates to teach,” she whispered. I knew my mother had taught before. She told stories sometimes about teaching in a one-room school in Kentucky, but that was twenty years before she met Dad. She’d taught again for a year when Carol was in first grade and I was in kindergarten, before she got her job with the Treasury, but I’d never heard her say she’d hated it. It didn’t sound as if she’d ever told my father she did, but she’d told Carol, told her a secret, like they were friends or something. The air-conditioning cut on with a whoosh. The cold air gave me goose bumps.

  I grabbed Carol’s hand. “Come on,” I said, pulling her toward the front door. I was trying to be quiet, afraid Bertha or Gretel, who were probably in the family room with our parents, would start barking.

  “What?” Carol said. She yanked her hand away. “Where?”

  I opened the front door. “Outside.”

  “In your PJs?” Carol stared, unbelieving. “Mom wouldn’t …”

  “Going, going, gone.” I started down the front steps with Carol following. The white light of the moon was everywhere. Mom had left the Rain Birds on and they swung in wide arcs, watering more drive than grass. Now it was Carol who grabbed my hand. I tried to pull her with me, but she dug her heels in. I ran in a circle, orbiting her, trying to make her dizzy. She was the planet, me her satellite. Around and around and …