“Can I call my mom?” I asked, not wanting to explain again that Mr. Boggs was not my dad, though I thought it was pretty obvious from the family snapshots that I wasn’t a curly, brown-haired junior Boggs.
“Sure,” he said, scooting Mr. Boggs’s phone across the desk toward me. “Push this button, then dial nine and the number. Come get me,” he nodded at his desk near the far wall, “if you have any trouble.”
I tried the house, but there was no answer. My mother might have taken Carol to the library, or they could have gone grocery shopping, or they could just be out shifting the Rain Birds around the yard. It was hard to say. I tried the junior college. Usually there wasn’t anyone at the switchboard on Saturdays, but I didn’t have any better ideas. I let it ring a long time, playing with Mr. Boggs’s slide rule while I did. I had no idea how to use it, though my father had one in a box of old stuff in the hall closet, and sometimes I’d played with that one, too. I wondered what grade you were in when you finally found out what they were for. Someone finally answered, a man. Usually the girl at the switchboard said the name of the college, but whoever this was just said, “Hello? Who is this?”
I said my name, asked if he had seen my dad around.
“Just a minute,” the voice said.
After a long time, my dad came on. I told him what had happened, and he said, “I was in a meeting, but we’re taking a late lunch break right now. I’ll come and get you, but you’ll have to give me a better idea of where you are. Does the building have a number?” I called over the man who’d given me the Coke. He and my dad chatted for a while. When he hung up, he looked at me and laughed.
“I took a course from your dad when I was a cadet at the academy,” he said. “If all the teachers had been as kind as he was, I might have made it out of there.” I’d forgotten my dad had ever been an instructor at West Point. All his life before I was born seemed kind of vague to me. “You look like him except for that,” he said, touching my still rather small nose with his index finger. I blushed. People said all the time that Carol, whose nose was already starting to grow, looked like my dad, but no one had ever said it to me.
I drank my Coke while I waited for my dad. My stomach kept growling. I’d hardly had any breakfast, and no lunch, and now it was after two. By the time my father arrived, it was nearly three. When he walked in the room, I was struck by how much he still looked like a colonel, broad shoulders held straight, hair cut short. He gave the impression of being in uniform even though he was wearing weekend clothes, a short-sleeved white shirt and no tie. I waved and rushed over, and he put his arm around me. He shook hands with the man who’d been his student. “Come back sometime when we’re not so busy, Colonel,” the man said. “I’d be happy to show you and your family around.”
When we got outside and into my father’s Plymouth, he smiled at me and said, “Hungry?”
I said, “Starving.”
He turned out of the parking lot headed east, toward the beach, and I started to say something—-he was famous for having a bad sense of direction—but it turned out he knew where he was going. We left Cape Kennedy and drove down Highway A1A into the town of Cape Canaveral, which hadn’t, I guess, felt like changing its centuries-old Spanish name because of a dead president, no matter how beloved. He pulled up in front of a restaurant called the Moon Hut, whose facade was a full moon with a door cut in it, and whose sign was another full moon with a bamboo hut perched on the rim, as if the people who ate there were natives living on the moon.
I followed my dad in, trailing a little. The place was full of men who looked like him, that is, like military or exmilitary. I saw a half dozen hands with heavy, gold West Point class rings like the one my father always wore. The waitress brought us big, stiff menus. All the sandwiches were named after astronauts or rockets. Some were obviously jokes. A Gus Grissom was a French dip, a reference to the Mercury flight where he’d opened the door of his capsule too early and it had sunk in the Atlantic, almost taking him down with it.
I didn’t really like roast beef, which we had all the time. My mother bought it cheap at the commissary on Patrick Air Force Base down toward Satellite Beach where she shopped once a month. When I remembered how Gus Grissom had waved at me, one hand lifted in the air in what was very nearly a salute, I ordered the sandwich anyway. My father had a Cosmonaut, a reuben on dark rye. While we waited for our food, I told him I was worried about Marly.
He nodded. “She probably just forgot to eat her breakfast,” he said, unimpressed by a little bloodless fainting. I wasn’t convinced. Marly had odd tastes in food—she liked to drink orange juice while eating dill pickles—but I was the one who usually skipped breakfast; she always ate a bowl of Captain Crunch and at least a couple of strawberry Pop Tarts. Besides, it seemed an odd thing for my father to say since he often skipped breakfast, unlike my mom who needed a soft-boiled egg and toast every morning to keep her two cups of coffee company.
Just as the waitress brought our plates, I realized I had to pee and got up to find the bathroom. On the way back, I heard one of the men at a nearby table say, “Look at that. I wouldn’t let my son wear his hair that long.” I looked around. I was the only kid in the place. He was talking about me. In my shorts and button-down shirt, he thought I was a boy. I suddenly felt like I was in costume, like I wasn’t myself at all. I sat down across from my father, wondering what it would be like to be his son instead of his daughter. Would we spend more time together?
Then my father started talking. He had been at a board meeting all morning because there was big trouble at the college. Money was missing, a lot of money, and Dr. Henry seemed to have something to do with this. Though whether my father and the board thought he’d stolen the money or just made foolish and unauthorized expenditures was unclear. Now, he had left town. Maybe for his father’s funeral, but nobody was quite certain. The newspaper was onto the story now, and the board had to act. They didn’t feel they could put off a decision until Dr. Henry reappeared. I thought about Mrs. Henry, Lucille, alone in her turquoise house on Cocoa Beach except for Max, their beagle. Did she know where her husband had gone or what he’d done?
“They’re going to fire him,” my father said. “I don’t see any way around it. I’d hoped they could wait, but now …” He ate one of his french fries, bite by meditative bite. “I think they’re going to ask me to be acting president.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Do you think I should say yes?” My father looked up at me, waiting quite seriously for my answer, and I realized I didn’t feel at all like his son. I felt like my mother or maybe his secretary or some other grown-up woman.
I thought about it. “I think you’ll do a great job, Dad,” I said. He smiled.
“The chairman asked me what I’d say if the board voted to appoint me. I told him, like Truman, I would serve if asked.” My father wiped his mouth, looked around the Moon Hut, which even at this odd hour was very busy. “This place really does a business,” he said. “Maybe if we stay around here, I’ll get a partner and start a place like this. There’s hardly anywhere to eat. A place with steaks, drinks, good desserts. A lot of bachelors work at the Cape who must eat out every night.”
I looked around. It was hard for me to tell if the men around us were single or married, though I noticed the waitresses seemed to know most of them. As I watched, one waitress stopped to put an arm around a man, to laugh at a quick joke before setting down a cup of coffee. “You want to own a restaurant?” I asked. It was my mother who had run mess halls in the army, and I couldn’t imagine my father ordering menus or training fry cooks.
“Well,” he said, shaking his head. “Just an idea. You know my father was a businessman, and I guess I’ve always wanted to prove I could be one too.”
I looked at him, waiting for him to remember that his father had lost everything in the Depression, had spent his last years before he died of stomach cancer writing letters to his congressman protesting fluoridation of the water. “It’s okay, Dad,” I re
ached over and patted his hand, feeling less like his wife now than his mother. “You run a college.”
My father took me home. After a quick word with my mother, he headed back to the office for the board meeting that would decide Dr. Henry’s fate. The lights were off at the Boggses’ house, both cars still missing. After dinner, which I ate in spite of having eaten my whole Gus Grissom, I went to my room and tried to remember what I’d seen at the Cape well enough to write it in my diary. I’d been trying to keep one off and on since Christmas, but I found my life so boring, I usually wrote nothing in it but lies. I tried to stick to the truth this time, though I ended up shaking hands with all three astronauts. Just waving as they drove past seemed insufficiently dramatic.
A little after eight, I heard Mrs. Boggs’s Buick bump into their driveway. Bertha and Gretel heard, too, and scrambled barking for the front door. I ran outside. Mrs. Boggs got out, followed by Marly. “I’m going to go get your brother,” Mrs. Boggs said, heading across her perfectly kept green lawn toward the Mizes’. “It’s past his bedtime.”
Marly walked down the driveway toward me very slowly. “So?” I said. She stopped in front of me and shrugged.
“I fainted.”
“Just fainted?”
“The heat and …” she said, looking down at her sneakers, “I started my period.”
“You fainted because of that?” I found this unsettling news.
“Apparently it’s not all that uncommon,” she said.
I looked at her. She had her hands on her hips, and her skinny arms stuck out at the usual sharp angles. Her hair was a curly, uncombed mess. She didn’t look any different. She hadn’t suddenly grown breasts or anything. “So how do you feel now?”
“Okay,” she said, tugging at her jeans. “But wearing this pad is like walking around with a couch between your legs.”
“What would happen,” I asked, struck by an awful thought, “if you were an astronaut and you got your period in space?”
“I don’t know,” Marly said, shaking her head. “I mean they take care of all that other stuff, pee and all. Some astronauts even throw up. Why should this be any different?” She looked unusually subdued, as if she didn’t quite believe it. We both looked up at the moon, hanging big and orange just above the river. In spite of its size, it looked farther away than ever. At least for us. It hadn’t been a woman dummy astronaut backing down that ladder from the Lunar Excursion Module to the moon.
Just then the front door of my house flew open, and Carol came running out. “There’s been a fire,” she called to us. She had her transistor radio in her hand. She’d taken to walking around the house with it pressed to her ear listening to WRKT, Rocket Radio, the local Top 40 station.
“Where?” I said. I was hoping she would say at school, because I suddenly remembered I hadn’t brought home my science book. We had homework.
“The Cape,” she said. “Apollo 1.” She turned up the radio. The announcer could barely speak, he was so upset. A spark had ignited the pure oxygen in the capsule. The tests had not been going well, tempers were short, when the technicians in the blockhouse heard one of the astronauts say, “We have a fire in the spacecraft.” The heart rates for all three of the crew shot off the scale. Unofficial reports said all three astronauts were dead. They cut to some worker at the Cape, who could have been one of the men in Mr. Boggs’s office or Mr. Boggs or anybody’s dad. He had obviously been crying. “I ran to help with the hatch, but we couldn’t get it open. All I could see was smoke. One of the crew said, ‘Get us out of here. We’re burning up.’ Then the intercom went dead.”
“Turn it off,” I said, and Carol did. Marly and Carol and I stood there on the driveway, not saying anything, trying not to look up at the moon, so bright and orange it, too, looked like it was burning. I felt like maybe we should all be crying. But we weren’t.
9 April 1967
I was on the highest platform of the tree house. Then I was on the ground, trying to breathe while people asked, Can you hear me, Jesse? Do you want a glass of water? Silly, worried questions. Then someone asked me why I fell, and I heard myself saying something about a branch that pulled out of the tree. As I said it, it seemed true. I could see a rotten branch like the arm of a Barbie doll popped from its socket, a round, useless stub. All I could really remember was the moment when my heart turned over, when I knew I had lost my balance.
At this point, my mother arrived. She had been moving the Rain Birds in our yard and was wearing old shorts and tennis shoes. I tried to sit up, but someone wouldn’t let me. Then the ambulance arrived. All I could think about was how stupid this was, how embarrassing. On my report card, the school counselor had written that for a fifth grader I tested remarkably low on the manual dexterity index. I’d been working hard ever since to live down a reputation as a klutz. This was part of why I went so high in the tree house. I couldn’t believe my bravery had turned out so badly.
“Forty feet,” Mrs. Boggs was saying over me. “She must have fallen forty feet.”
“Three stories,” someone else said. “Isn’t that more like thirty feet?”
The ambulance attendants strapped me to a board, lifted me up, but the wheeled gurney got stuck in the sand, and they had to carry me to the ambulance. My mother got in with me. Someone had run to the house and gotten her purse for her, but I knew she wished she’d had time to change her clothes. I wished Carol were there, but she was still at school, at chorus practice. I wondered who would go to pick her up when she called and Mom wasn’t home.
The attendant put an oxygen mask on me, and because it was made to fit an adult, it covered not just my mouth and nose, but most of my face. So I couldn’t see much, but I knew we were headed out of the neighborhood when I felt the bump in the pavement as we crossed from Luna Heights to Indian Heights, from our subdivision to the next. Even with the oxygen mask over my face, I could barely breathe. My mother sat on a bench by the window, holding on as the ambulance turned onto U.S. 1 and picked up speed. The ambulance attendant held my hand. “Take a deep breath,” he said. “Let it out.”
“It’s better,” I said, “if I breathe kind of shallow.”
I had been up in the tree house so high and alone because when I went after school to get David Mize, whose tree it was, his mother was yelling at him. David was a year older than me, a sixth grader, and it seemed he was supposed to take a big test in American history. He didn’t. Instead, he’d asked the teacher’s permission to go to the bathroom. Then he didn’t come back. I imagined him sitting in one of the stalls, bored, scared, waiting for school to be over. It reminded me too much of my own life at school.
Just that week, I’d spent half an hour searching for a blue notebook I told Mr. Martin, my math teacher, had my homework in it. I told him I had lost it. But I didn’t even have a blue notebook, and Mr. Martin knew it. Even my homeroom teacher, Miss Davis, whose history class I had to interrupt to search through my desk, knew it. I wanted to look like Miss Davis one day, wear matching mono-grammed gold earrings and sweaters, so her knowing I was a liar hurt. I kept on pretending to be looking, digging through the mess in my desk, sweating and feeling sick at my stomach.
So I couldn’t stand it when I heard David was in trouble, too, couldn’t stand hearing his mother say how disappointed she was in him, using exactly the same puzzled, hurt tone my parents had taken to using. “Were you trying to get attention? Is that it?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. I believed him. If he felt like I did, all he wanted was to be invisible, to disappear.
I went into the Mizes’ backyard and climbed up to the tree house, which was really just sheets of plywood nailed here and there in the tree, and waited for David to come out. The tree was a live oak, huge, covered in mistletoe and Spanish moss. It loomed like a skyscraper over the orange trees in the neighborhood yards. Eventually David came out and stood at the base of the tree. Just seeing him made me uncomfortable again. Why did he skip the test? Why didn’t I do my ma
th homework? There didn’t seem to be any good answer. “Hey,” I called out to him, starting up to the highest platform where David went all the time, but where I had never been. “Watch me.”
THEY ROLLED ME into the hospital in Cocoa and then back out again because there wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon there. “We’ll have to go out to Cape Canaveral,” the ambulance driver said to my mother.
I felt us fly up and then down the high bridges Carol was so afraid of. “God,” my mother kept saying. “Christ.” She was not praying but looking out the front window, watching the cars that the ambulance had to dodge. The driver hit the siren time and again, but no one moved.
“Half the time, with their windows up and the AC on, they can’t hear it,” the attendant said. “And the other half...”
“Where are the police?” my mother asked. “They should all get tickets.” One thing my mother believed in was the law. She had already lectured me twice about not answering chain letters, and once, after I put my initials on some quarters with purple nail polish, about defacing government currency.
Cape Canaveral Hospital was in the middle of the Banana River, on a part of the causeway pumped up from the river bottom. The attendant and the driver had me out in a minute. Acoustic ceiling tiles flew by above as they wheeled me into the emergency room. My father was there. A neighbor had called. He had driven from the junior college and somehow had beaten us. “Thank God,” my mother said. “At the first hospital, they took one look at me dressed like this and wouldn’t believe we had insurance.”
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