Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  I don’t know what my father’s love life was like before Fern or before he met my mother. I’m sure there were other women. He always said he had a knack for getting women the wrong age to think that he was something special. When he was young, he told me, it was the mothers who all loved him. Why don’t you go out with that cute young Eddie? they would ask their daughters. When he was old enough to be their father or even their grandfather, the cheerleaders at the junior college would chip in to buy him a team sweater and go on and on about what a sweetie pie he was. I’d say, judging by his choice of first Fern and then my mother, he may have had a knack for picking out the wrong women even if they were the right age.

  When we were children, my father told us he met my mother at a chicken dinner. She was still in the WACs then, but whether or not this was in a mess hall was never clear to me. She said she noticed him because he was polite to women officers, always returning her salute, and because he had just gotten a crew cut, which she thought looked terrible on him. There was another, darker part to the story, one I didn’t learn until much later. When I was little, I just thought they’d met, seen my sister and myself in each other’s eyes, and married in order to have us.

  So my mother, who loved the army, left it. My father, who was always an odd match for the service, stayed in. He finally retired in 1963, when I was in first grade. The army wanted to send him to Vietnam for a tour of duty, promising to promote him from full colonel to general if he would agree to go once more to war. My father didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to be away from his family for four years. He’d requested California for his last assignment, thinking to retire on the West Coast, where he’d grown up. He thought it violated some unwritten army code that they’d even asked him to go overseas again. Also, he didn’t approve of the war, then still in its infancy, or the way it was going. He wasn’t a George McGovern in uniform, but he’d seen what happened in Korea and had a career officer’s distrust for wars that couldn’t be won. He told the army to send somebody else. He’d started as a cadet at West Point in 1932, so by this time he had his thirty years for full retirement.

  When he retired he received a commendation, and there was a ceremony at the White House. He brought home a picture of himself, in his uniform for the last time, shaking hands with Kennedy, the astronauts’ favorite president, a man who was gung ho about sending troops to Vietnam and test pilots in rockets into cold, deep space.

  7 January 1967

  In Maryland, with the nation’s capital next door, every grade in school had its own special field trip. First grade was the National Zoo, second the Museum of Natural History, third the National Gallery of Art, fourth the Mint, fifth the White House, and in sixth you got to go on an over-night trip to Colonial Williamsburg. In Cocoa, I thought, surely we’d get taken to the Cape. So in January, when my fifth-grade homeroom teacher Miss Davis said she had permission slips to pass out, I was sure that was what they were for. She counted off a stack and called that week’s paper monitor to the front. “Just the girls,” she said.

  It turned out we needed our parents’ permission to see some movie the next day. The boys, announced Miss Davis, would have an extra recess. I caught Marly’s eye. She was still my best friend, though homeroom was the only class I had with her. This was only elementary school, but we moved from room to room and teacher to teacher for classes in English, science, and math. We were all tracked by our scores on standardized achievement tests, and, except for homeroom, were herded into little, supposedly like-minded groups. We weren’t supposed to know what track we were in, but all of my classmates knew we were in the Advanced Track. One of the boys, a real pain who never missed a day of school, had even said as much to one of the substitute teachers. “We don’t have to do that,” he said about some spelling drill. “We’re Advanced.”

  Still, you didn’t have to be Advanced to figure out how the system really worked. Almost all the black and poor kids were in Basic and seemed to spend most of their school day helping the janitor. Marly was a High Regular. On the bus home, I told her I’d hoped the slips were for a trip to the Cape. “Field trip?” she said, surprised by the idea. Marly had been in school in Cocoa since first grade.

  “You’ve never been on a field trip?” I asked.

  “Nope. And I never heard of anybody taking one to the Cape. Everybody goes out there with their dads.” She saw I was disappointed. “They’ve started up a regular tour,” she said. “In buses. Want me to ask my mom if she’ll take us?”

  Of course I did. Marly’s mother was tiny and lively and talked even faster than me. In her case, with a Spanish accent. She even laughed with an accent. I thought she was a lot of fun for someone’s mom. She’d been raised in Cuba, and she knew all kinds of strange things, like how fresh-cut aloe was good for sunburn or that you could eat the loquats that hung in yellow clusters from the trees in the neighborhood. She had come to America right after World War II to marry Marly’s father, who had been her pen pal. Marly had even taken the ferry from Key West to Cuba as a little baby, before Castro. Now Mrs. Boggs sent what she could to her family there, a baby sock in this letter, three aspirin in that one. She said if the postmen in Cuba saw something worth money in a letter, they would take it. “It’s not bad enough they work for Communists,” she said, shaking her head. “They have to steal too.” One of her brothers had swum all the way to Florida and now lived in Miami with other exiled Cubans. Mrs. Boggs was the only Cuban, as far as I knew, who had made it as far north as Cocoa.

  My mother was in the kitchen when I came in from the bus stop. She was stringing green beans and singing to herself. She broke each bean in two with a crisp, authoritative snap. She dropped one, and Bertha, waiting at her feet, snatched it up, too worried about any potential competition from Gretel to realize what it was. Gretel was huddled under the kitchen table. Bertha turned and glared at her, growling, even though she hadn’t moved. Lately, Bertha had begun taking their arguments too seriously, once going for Gretel’s throat in a move that was no game. My mother poked Bertha with a slippered toe. “Knock it off,” she said.

  Then she dumped the beans into a big aluminum pot with a good-size piece of salt pork and poured some bottled water on top of them. Green beans were the only thing she made Kentucky-style, cooking them for hours just the way her mother had. That she was making them meant she was in a good mood. She was about to start a job at my school as a replacement teacher. One of the teachers in the fourth grade, some guy, had quit, and my mother was set to step in as his permanent replacement as soon as her scores came back from Tallahassee proving she’d passed the statewide teacher’s test. Whatever doubts my mother had about teaching, she must have gotten over them.

  I poured myself a big, cold glass of Hawaiian Punch, drained it, then wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my shirt. I handed her the permission slip. “Mrs. Boggs wants to take Marly and me out to tour the Cape,” I said, sneaking two permissions into one.

  “When?” she asked, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “The movie or the trip?”

  “The trip.”

  “Maybe this weekend. The movie’s supposed to be tomorrow.”

  She nodded, signed her name. “The Cape sounds like fun,” she said. “Tell Mrs. Boggs to let me know what the ticket costs, and I’ll pay her back. Or maybe”—she scratched her nose with the back of her hand—“I’ll just send some money with you. I’m sure you’ll want some lunch.”

  THE NEXT DAY after lunch, Miss Davis sent the boys out to the playground. Glancing back over their shoulders, they filed away under the watchful eye of Mr. Lewis, the math teacher. Mrs. Rim, the school nurse, marched us girls in the opposite direction, into the school cafetorium, still warm with the smell of sloppy joes. A film projector was set up, the white screen pulled down to cover the stage, and a couple of mothers I didn’t know sat in chairs flanking it. I found a chair next to Marly, who had gotten there ahead of me.

  “What’s this all about?” I whispered, curious
now.

  “Shhh!” Mrs. Rim said, trying to quiet the general rush and whoosh of girls’ whispering. “Watch carefully.” She nodded at the mothers, “We will answer any questions you have after the movie.”

  I don’t know what I had expected. Maybe I’d been too full of thoughts about the Cape to bother to wonder. The movie was titled The Wonderful Thing That Is Going to Happen to You Once a Month. It opened with a shot of a girl, Cindy, in a puffy white party dress. “Today,” a deep male voice announced, “is Cindy’s birthday.” But something else wonderful was going to happen to her that day. She was going to become a woman. Or, as it turned out, she was going to bleed like a chicken with its head cut off.

  We were shown a black-and-white outline of a woman’s body. Ovaries and babies were mentioned. The outline disappeared too quickly for me to match it to my own skinny torso. The important thing, the man’s voice said, was that Cindy could still have a wonderful time on her birthday even though she was menstruating, provided she didn’t go horseback riding, do gymnastics, or swim in terribly cold water. Cindy’s mother held up a kind of fat paper pillow, called a sanitary napkin, and showed her how to strap it between her legs with a contraption that looked more complicated than the garters my mother wore to hold up her stockings. I suddenly remembered how my mother used to keep a box of those big white pads in the linen closet outside the bathroom in D.C. How I had once borrowed one to make a bed for one of my trolls only to find it missing the next day and the box mysteriously gone as well. Now I knew why. The movie ended with Cindy, still in her spotless white dress at her birthday party, dancing with her terribly handsome dear old Dad.

  Years later, when I told this story to a friend who’d grown up in a tough neighborhood in Philadelphia, she said, “That’s nothing.” At her school, they had followed a film like the one we’d seen with one on the dangers of syphilis, showing an apartment building where one by one the lights in the windows went out while a voice intoned, “This one went mad. This one died. This one lost her baby.” So it could have been worse. Still, when the projector cut off, I was in shock.

  Everyone sat blinking as the fluorescent lights blinked on, but no one else looked quite as stunned as I was. I was going to bleed like that once a month? I had had no idea. I couldn’t believe my mother had any idea what the movie was about. If she’d known, she would have given me some warning. Would she be angry at me when she found out? Angry at the school?

  Girls began to ask questions. What happened if you started your period and you didn’t have a sanitary napkin?

  You could fold some toilet tissue into your panties, one of the mothers volunteered. Or, if you were in school, go to see the school nurse. Mrs. Rim, looking particularly official in her white uniform, nodded. “You should really always carry your supplies with you,” she said. You never knew when your period might start, and it was best to be prepared. You might even want to carry an extra pair of panties or a change of clothes. Carry where? I thought, picturing each of us moving through the halls with a change of wardrobe in a suitcase. None of the girls in fifth grade even carried purses.

  I began to wonder if there wasn’t some way out of this. I’d spent the year lying to get out of homework, doing as little as possible in school. Since moving to Florida, all I wanted was to be outside. Was it possible to not have periods? So far, only a few of us had to wear bras, and there certainly was no sign I was ever going to have breasts. Carol was in sixth grade, and she didn’t need a bra yet either. As far as I knew, she wasn’t walking around the house bleeding. But then, maybe she was. Maybe she hadn’t told me. Almost everyone seemed to have secrets.

  “Those pads are so big,” someone said. “Couldn’t we just wear Tampons?” I listened carefully, unsure exactly what a Tampon was. Not until after we were married, one of the mothers said. And that was that.

  Afterward, the girls huddled together in science class, whispering. We were working in small groups, and Mrs. Sack never made any effort to mix girls with boys. We were doing experiments that involved dropping marbles into glass tubes full of some kind of thick liquid. The marbles floated slowly to the bottom like the pearls in those Prell shampoo commercials. We were supposed to be learning by deduction about viscosity, but today we weren’t paying much attention.

  Tammy Lightfoot said her mother always called having a period falling off the roof. Marsha Miller said that last year when her older sister was up on the stage at the junior high waiting her turn to give a campaign speech for class secretary, the girl running against her was standing at the microphone as her pink stretch pants turned first a little red, then bright red with blood, while the girl talked on and on about her plans for a better and more active student council. Every person in the school had seen it. Needless to say, Marsha’s sister won.

  “Well,” said Lisa Nesbitt, a girl who sometimes wore lipstick and who I didn’t much like, “that film was too late for me. I’ve already started.”

  “Was it …” I began. Awful was the word I was headed for.

  “Jesse Lee!” I turned. Mrs. Sack was right behind us, her hands on her hips. She glanced down at our empty experiment sheets, then wrinkled her nose as if she could smell us. What she smelled wasn’t pretty. “You know what’s wrong with you, girls?” she asked loud enough for everyone in the class to hear. “You have constipation of the mind”—Mrs. Sack looked right at me—“and diarrhea of the mouth.” I felt like she had hit me. Behind, I could hear some of the boys laugh, then a couple of girls, too, ones in a different group. Traitors. And Mrs. Sack was, too.

  I could feel my face was red. If the tubes full of viscous goo hadn’t been glued down, I would have hit Mrs. Sack over the head with one. She had no right to make fun of the girls in the class that way, hold us up for ridicule in front of all the boys. Yet part of me, some part of me that didn’t seem to like myself much these days, agreed with Mrs. Sack and the girls who were so traitorously laughing. We were too busy talking, too busy with our bodies, to keep up with science. No wonder women weren’t the ones on their way to the moon. Mrs. Sack turned away, satisfied with what she’d done.

  “Oh, go sit on a stick, you old whore,” Lisa Nesbitt said under her breath, pronouncing the last word like war. Suddenly I liked Lisa a lot better.

  When I got home from school, my mother was in the living room, using the couch to fold some laundry. The dogs were at her feet, and Lucky was asleep on the piano bench, shedding cat fur on the mahogany. I told my mother the movie had been about menstruation. “Yes,” she said. She had known. “There’s already a box of Tampons under the sink in your bathroom. So we’re all ready.”

  “They said we couldn’t use Tampons until after we get married,” I said, unsure exactly why this should matter. My mother laughed.

  “Well, Carol certainly uses them,” she said. “You can ask her about it.” Carol had started and hadn’t said a word to me about it. My mother was carefully folding towels in thirds to fit under the bathroom sinks. “You girls are lucky. When I was your age we sewed pads out of old dishrags. After I’d used one, I had to sneak down to the cellar with a bucket of water to wash it out, so my father and my brothers wouldn’t see.” I’d read a ton of historical fiction. Sometimes women had babies in such novels, even died doing it, but no one had ever mentioned a word about menstruation. So books were yet another source I couldn’t trust. Apparently not everything made it into history. My mother looked up, a washcloth in one hand. “When I joined the WACs, I took my old pads with me, but the army issued each of us a great big box of sanitary napkins. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” She shook her head, then handed me the stack of towels that went in my bathroom. “Here, put these away.”

  I put the towels under the sink. I found the small blue box with TAMPAX written on the side in flowing, soft pink letters, and took it out. Each tampon was individually wrapped in paper to keep it sterile, just like the drinking glasses at a Holiday Inn, so I couldn’t tell much about it except it was rocket-shaped. Inside
the box, folded over and over until it was a tiny square, was an instruction sheet. I laboriously unfolded it, revealing a vague outline of the lower half of a woman with her legs spread inserting the Tampon into some hidden cavity in her body. Was that the same place pee came from? Carol came in and saw what I was looking at. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not that bad, except for the cramps. You’ll get used to it. I promise.”

  Later, when I was outside playing in the orange grove, I asked Marly what she thought about the whole thing. “My mom said she started her first period when she was out in the sugar fields cutting cane. No one had told her it was going to happen. She thought she’d cut herself somehow and was dying.”

  We climbed up through the Spanish moss, which was full of chiggers, to the very top of one of the tangerine trees. We perched, eating the fruit that grew there, which was always the biggest and sweetest. We were playing Explorer. Sometimes we explored other planets. Sometimes it was more like Tarzan or Daniel Boone, shows we’d seen often enough on TV. My name was Dostoevsky Tolstoy and Marly was Faulkner Hemingway, names we’d chosen off the spines of the Great Books set in Marly’s living room. We chose the names because they sounded both adventurous and terribly important. There was something about Marly or even Jesse that wouldn’t do.

  We did not want to be boys. Marly had two brothers, and so had no illusions. The older one was a projectionist at the local theater and had a bedroom full of movie posters and soundtrack albums. The younger one lived in a room full of caged rodents and tortured us by sticking a mirror under Marly’s bedroom door to see what we were doing. So she knew more than she wanted about boys. But we didn’t really want to be girls either, not if that meant sitting in our bedrooms in lace socks like Lori Barns, the Barbie Queen of our neighborhood, spending the precious time after school painting our toenails or some other form of doing nothing. Like other primitive people, we thought of ourselves simply as the Humans. We read books and assumed the boys in them were not really boys, but adventurous and brave young humans much like us. “Oh,” said Marly, spitting out a seed, “my mom said if you still want to go to tour the Cape, she’ll take us first thing tomorrow.”