Gretel seemed happy to see us, but not overly so. She rolled on her back and wagged her tail, but there was no accompanying spray of little wet drops of pee, the disgusting but true sign of dachshund enthusiasm. She ran out in the backyard with us while her new owners told cute stories about how sometimes they would come home to find the living room wrapped in long streamers of toilet paper or the kitchen dusted with pancake mix, and a powdered Gretel looking very innocent. This confirmed something I’d suspected before. When Bertha and Gretel had lived with us and anything like that happened, Bertha always looked the guiltiest and always got the blame.
After Gretel left, no one scattered Kotex around the living room or ate all the Dixie cups from the trash can in the bathroom. Bertha, it seemed, had not been the idea man. Perhaps it should have been obvious, but Bertha was so much in charge in every other way that my parents never suspected. It figured. Over the years, I had somehow talked Carol, my older, supposedly in-charge sister, into doing very crazy things. Once in Maryland, I’d persuaded her to slide down the laundry chute, even though we were on the third floor. I told her I had already done it, and it was great fun. Luckily, she got stuck almost right away. Even more luckily, I was able to lower a sheet to her so she could climb out. Neither of us told our parents about it.
One thing Gretel did should have given my parents some hint of her secretly adventurous nature. Just after we had moved to Cocoa, my mother found her in the backyard having some kind of seizure and rushed her to the vet. She’d licked a poisonous frog, the vet said. Dogs in Florida did that, but only once. After that they knew better. But not Gretel. Twice more my mother found her stiff on her back, her eyes wide open, as if she were on some kind of dachshund LSD, the trip worth the risk of the seizure. This was one illicit dog pleasure she was never able to convince Bertha to try. I wondered at the time if it meant that I, too, as the human Gretel, would one day think it worth risking life and limb for the sake of some great high.
The day of our visit, we left Gretel standing by the canal, barking at the fish, and we drove home saying it looked like she was happy, that she had a good home. We said we would come back, already knowing we wouldn’t.
A year later, her owners called with sad news. They’d come home from work that day to find Gretel, with a frog in her mouth, drowned in the canal.
12 October 1968
Paul Maltezo was drowning and only I could save him.
Mrs. Henry was our swimming instructor. When Dr. Henry left town, she’d bought a smaller house with a bigger pool in the neighborhood next to ours and reopened her swimming school. Mrs. Henry had picked Paul to play the victim for my junior lifesaving test because she knew he couldn’t say no. His sister, Lynn, was taking the test, too. Paul was fifteen, the ninth-grade class president of Clearlake Junior High School (the Rockets). He was tall and tanned, and he was a god. Lynn and I were both just twelve, only a month into the world of seventh grade and junior high.
Could you rescue a god? I had to try. I dove in and swam straight toward Paul, looking for an easy hold, but he was a panicky drowner. He had already passed senior lifesaving and knew exactly what I would try. He grabbed my hair and tried to pull me under. I jerked my head, leaving some blond hair in his hand, and tried again.
This time he kicked me hard right where I didn’t have breasts to speak of yet. I sank, pretending he’d knocked the wind out of me. Then I dove deep and came up behind him, got him in a good cross-chest lock. I side-stroked the two of us toward the end of the pool. Paul wasn’t done yet. He threw his legs high in the air, and we went under. When we came up, both of us were coughing.
I felt Mrs. Henry’s eyes on me. She raised her stopwatch. I had maybe another minute, and we were only halfway to the shallow end. Paul rocked sideways, trying to break my hold. He was bigger and stronger, and I couldn’t believe he was being so unfair. I dug my nails into his side, as deep and as hard as I could. “Christ!” he said. But he stopped squirming.
We made it to the concrete steps, and I half dragged, half carried him out of the pool. “Time, Jesse,” Mrs. Henry called out. Her stopwatch clicked. “You just made it.” She offered me her hand. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Henry,” I said.
Standing in the grass by the side of the pool, Paul showed off the four red, curved dents my nails had left. Mrs. Henry touched her finger to his scarred brown side, her blond head bent over his. Now that she was divorced, she’d stopped asking everyone to call her Lucille. “My, my,” she said and laughed. I stood with my legs wrapped tight around each other, trying to disappear.
To my surprise, Paul brushed the dripping hair out of his eyes and smiled at me, not Mrs. Henry. “Scarred for life,” he said.
After Lynn passed her test, too, we walked back to the Maltezos’ still in our suits, ready to celebrate. Paul had stayed behind to help Mrs. Henry put away the floats, but I hoped he might come soon. We stood in the garage dripping, reluctant to go in the house where our clothes were because the air-conditioning would freeze us. “Jeez,” Lynn said, looking at my chest, “I think my dad’s home. What if he sees you like that?”
I looked down. My nipples stood at attention, showing clearly through the fabric of my bathing suit. I crossed my arms tight across my chest, felt my face turn red. Lynn rolled her eyes, disgusted both with my breasts and with my embarrassment. She went over to a box in the corner of the garage. “Mom keeps some old clothes here for yard work,” she said. “Take this.” She handed me a madras plaid shirt. Inside the button-down collar was a name tag: PAUL MALTEZO. The shirt was soft and dry and warm, pure cotton too worn to hold a wrinkle.
“Thanks,” I said and meant it.
The back door opened. “Are you girls coming in or not?” It was Mrs. Maltezo. She worked part-time as a nurse for my pediatrician, Dr. Blue, so I knew her better than some moms. “I put out some Tab and Bugles,” she said, enticing us. We went in. The Maltezos had lived in Cocoa longer than anyone else I knew. Lynn had been born there. Even Mrs. Maltezo had been born in Florida—in Tampa, to a family that had made cigars. Their kitchen counter, now topped with a bowl of Bugles and two large, sweating tumblers of diet soda, was made out of a slab of marble. Marble upon which, Mrs. Maltezo said, girls working for her father used to roll the finest cigars to be had on the planet.
Just as we finished our snack, Mr. Maltezo came in. He had a half-bushel basket of oranges in his arms. “George Pickering sent them home with me,” he said. He’d spent the morning in Kissimmee. Mr. Maltezo ran an insurance office in downtown Cocoa and traveled a lot on business and to things like University of Florida football games making contacts. He set the oranges on the marble counter and took the highball Mrs. Maltezo offered him. He smiled down at Lynn and me perched on our stools at the counter, our bare legs crossed.
“Don’t you girls look nice,” he said.
At school the next week, Lynn and I were in the back row in PE waving our arms and pretending to do jumping jacks, when she told me Paul wanted his shirt back.
“Why?” I said. I’d been wearing it around the house. I liked it. “It’s just a rag.”
“Yeah, but he’s pissed. It was Dad’s when he was in high school and so it means something to him.”
I nodded. “Okay, tomorrow.”
The next day I pretended to forget, but on Friday I had to give it back. That same day Paul was on an Orlando TV station’s evening news and in the local paper the next morning. He and two friends from his science class were going into space. That is, they were going to lock themselves in the Maltezos’ Airstream travel trailer and not leave it for as long as the upcoming Apollo 7 mission lasted. Apollo 7 was the first moon mission since Apollo 1 burned up on the pad. They had the principal’s permission to miss school.
“Yeah,” Lynn said when I asked her about it, “can you believe it? He’ll miss almost two weeks of school. Too bad girls can’t be astronauts.” I nodded. A year ago, it had seemed impossibly unfair that women couldn’t
be astronauts, real astronauts. Now I was only bummed that it meant I couldn’t blast off in the Maltezos’ Airstream and spend ten days nearly alone in space with Paul.
She said she might not be getting out of any classes, but that her mother had promised she could have a slumber party on Friday, a week after the launch. She could invite up to ten girls, one for every day Apollo 7 was supposed to be in space. Paul and his friends would still be orbiting in the Maltezos’ yard. I thought about Paul asleep inside his aluminum-skinned capsule just yards from where we would be making popcorn and pizza in the Maltezos’ kitchen. If I couldn’t be inside with him, at least I could be close. Please God, I thought as Lynn told me, let me be one of the chosen.
She invited me that afternoon on the bus and also asked Carol, which made it almost certain I could go. She asked Marly Boggs, too, whom she knew had been my best friend before her. Now that we were in junior high, Marly and I were never in a class together. I told myself I was busy with swimming and hardly saw her anymore. The truth was, coming off the bus on the first day at junior high school, we’d been so scared we’d held hands. Now, after one month in the big social swim of Clearlake Junior High, I found it mortifying to remember I’d been seen holding hands with a girl.
That next week all the talk in Cocoa was of Apollo 7. After what had happened to Apollo 1, the deaths of the three astronauts, everyone was nervous. Sure, the capsule had been completely redesigned. No more pure oxygen. New emergency procedures. Nothing unexpected could or would happen. But no one had foreseen the first tragedy either. Everyone thought the astronauts—Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham—were brave. No one envied their wives. This sense of bravery in the face of danger rubbed off on Paul and his friends. People had always thought he was special. Now in the rush between classes, they stepped off the sidewalk onto the grass to let him go by. Even the bad boys, the ones who spent all their time lounging in the hallways waiting to be paddled by the assistant principal, moved aside.
The papers, too, were full of Apollo features. The impending launch knocked the war in Vietnam and even the upcoming presidential election onto the back pages. I was beginning to think I was against the war, but my mother had always been a big Johnson fan, crying, “Oh, God. Oh, no!” the night he announced he wasn’t going to run again.
One night, when both my father and Carol were out, my mother and I ate dinner on TV trays and watched Walter Cronkite together. My mother was on pills now, Valium, something that her doctor prescribed. She had gone to him worried she was getting Parkinson’s disease like her mother, but he’d found no sign of that, no sign of anything you could put a name to.
I thought the pills made her worse, not better. She often spent the whole day in bed, getting up only to fix us something that passed for dinner, drifting around the kitchen opening cans, setting the table, not saying a word. When I’d told my father what I thought, he’d just said, “Dr. Bach says she’d be much worse without medication.”
This night, my mother was unusually chatty. Like LBJ, she had her doubts about Humphrey. Johnson, she said, reminded her of her father, a good tyrant, a strong man. LBJ had had to be. He’d started out life a poor schoolteacher just like she had. Look what he made of his life. Humphrey, on the other hand, was weak. Look at the way he let Johnson walk all over him. Humphrey was intelligent, no doubt about that, but in ways that didn’t do him or anybody else much good. Like so many smart people, she’d added. Though she didn’t say so, I knew she was talking about my father. Maybe about me, too.
In spite of my mother’s misgivings, or because of them, I decided I was for Humphrey all the way, a radical decision at our junior high. Our school was getting ready to hold a mock election on the same day as the real thing, and George Wallace was going to win by a landslide. I had gotten my father to drive me to the Humphrey headquarters, a tiny storefront downtown by the library, where I paid fifty cents for an HHH button the size of a small dinner plate. I wore it on my purse. Twice during class change, someone took a look at my Humphrey button and tried to push me down the stairs. Lynn Maltezo and Marly Boggs were both staunchly for Nixon.
On Friday, the day of the launch, Paul and the other mock astronauts were home, loading their silver capsule, running a last check of supplies with Mrs. Maltezo. They had a chemical toilet; instructions from Mr. Donner, their science teacher, for a set of authentic space experiments; and a deck of cards in case they got bored. They had several cases of baby food, the closest they could come to what the astronauts ate. All the windows were covered with aluminum foil with tiny holes poked in it so the sunlight shining through would look like stars in the black night of space. All morning at school, I wished I were there, outside Paul’s Airstream rocket. If I couldn’t be an astronaut, I would be the perfect flight controller, handmaiden to the gods. Instead I had PE, then science, where we had been stuck on the reproduction of liverworts for some time. Then the principal came on the intercom and said we could all file out onto the driver’s ed range to watch the launch.
At eleven A.M. Schirra and the others headed across the blue Florida sky trailing white smoke. The blast rattled the windows in the twenty portable classrooms, portable bathroom, and portable lunchroom it took to house and service all us extra space kids. No doubt it rattled the windows of the Airstream where Paul and his friends sat, strapped into lawn chairs rigged for the purpose. “We have liftoff,” the controllers at the Cape said. “Blastoff,” Mrs. Maltezo said into her walkie-talkie to Paul, waving to the boys though they couldn’t see her. Bon voyage.
On Saturday afternoon, half the neighborhood gathered in the Maltezos’ yard. Mrs. Maltezo had set up refreshments on the picnic table. There were squares of the special Astronauts’ Fruitcake she had baked for the boys to take into orbit. The recipe, clipped from the paper, was beside the plate: This fruitcake identical to the ones the astronauts eat in Space, it read, has energy power a plenty for us earthlings who live in this globe’s field of gravity. I took a square and bit into it. It tasted just like the fruitcake my mother’s brother in Texas sent us every year. Which is to say, it tasted awful. I spit out my first bite into my hand, then dropped the whole piece discreetly onto the lawn under the picnic table where I hoped some neighborhood dog would find it. About seven pieces were already there. So far, no dogs had been interested.
As I helped myself to a cupcake with a tiny American flag on a toothpick in it, Mrs. Maltezo came over and poured me a glass of Tang, drink of the astronauts. She asked me if I had heard the news.
“What news?” I asked
“The president called.”
“Our president?” I almost dropped my orange drink.
Mrs. Maltezo nodded. “LBJ.” She looked pleased, but I couldn’t help thinking that my mother would have been more than pleased. She would have been speechless, awestruck, to speak to Johnson. If only I’d been the kind of kid who merited a call from the president.
Mrs. Maltezo went on. “First thing this morning. Woke us up. He saw the piece about the boys on Walter Cronkite and wanted to talk to Paul.” And so he had, though only briefly. Paul, standing on principle, had refused to leave the Airstream to come to the phone. So Mr. Maltezo had to hold the walkie-talkie up to the receiver. The president was both pleased and proud. “A new generation is readying itself for space,” President Johnson had told Mr. Maltezo, who had two Nixon signs stuck in his yard.
That night, the TV news was all about Wally Schirra, three-time space veteran, who had just come down with the first head cold in space. By Monday the excitement had died down at school. Paul wasn’t there, and out of sight was out of mind. Instead, everyone was talking about the new order from the principal that all homeroom teachers measure girls’ skirts to make sure they ended no more than ten inches above their knees. Any shorter, he announced, was a violation of the school’s dress code. My homeroom teacher, who taught shop, didn’t bother, but I could see girls across the hall lined up on their knees while Madame Muller, our French teacher, me
asured their bare legs with a yardstick. One of the teachers ripped the hems out of all but one of her girls’ skirts, then sent them to the nurse’s office to be sent home to change. The only girl who didn’t flunk the ten-inch test belonged to a Pentecostal sect that wore ankle-length skirts and giant beehive hairdos on their heads. God had told them never to cut their hair.
I saw Carol at my locker after homeroom. She said, “Let them try that on me. Dad will call a lawyer.”
“Yeah,” I said, though I was less sure. Although I didn’t have a ruler on me, I was pretty sure the hem of my dress, an orange-and-yellow flowered A-line, was at least twelve inches above my kneecaps.
The next day, the school paper ran an actual copy of the school dress code on the front page. Who knows where the kids who worked on the paper found it or how they managed to get to the mimeograph machine in the middle of the night to run off the extra edition or how they managed without Paul, who was editor of the paper. The official code (written in 1959) called for boys to wear white shirts with ties and girls to wear either shirtwaists in solid colors or white blouses and blue skirts. Socks and black shoes were required for both. On Fridays, everyone was to wear spirit beanies. The article turned the dress code into a joke. Even the principal had to admit it. Eventually a revised dress code would be issued that even allowed blue jeans. Flip-flops were banned as a health and safety hazard, but people wore them anyway. This whole revolution took place while Paul Maltezo, class president, was in orbit and unavailable.
By Thursday, when I stopped by the Maltezos’ house in my bathing suit to get Lynn for swimming lessons, the yard was empty except for the Airstream. Only the picnic table served as a reminder of Saturday’s excitement. Lynn was slumped in a lawn chair, picking nail polish off her toenails and talking to Paul on the walkie-talkie.
“No,” she was saying, “I don’t see why I should run down the battery on my transistor radio just so you boys can hear music. If you’re bored, go walk in space.”
Space Page 12
