Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Celia stood with her hands in her pockets, looking relaxed, like Leemona’s nose wasn’t a half-inch from hers, like none of this mattered. “Bitchette,” she said, in a tone that made it a joke.

  Leemona stepped back. The nurse was trying to help Charlotte into the station wagon, but Charlotte had stopped dead in her tracks. “Leemona?” she called, looking blankly left and right.

  Then Leemona laughed, as if she got the joke at last. “Bitchette,” she repeated, as if trying out a new word. Leemona crooked a finger, beckoning Celia to listen, as if she had some secret Celia alone could share. Curious in spite of herself, Celia leaned toward her. Leemona whispered, “Don’t kid yourself, honey, you’re a nigger, too.” Then Leemona helped Charlotte into the station wagon, and Chipmunk drove off in a cloud of white, choking sand. For a moment, Celia just stood there, her expression unchanged. Suddenly, I was afraid for her. I’d been mad at her for all the things she refused to see, now I wanted to hide them again. I felt ashamed.

  “Celia?” I said.

  Celia turned her head to one side and shook it, like she was clearing lake water from one ear. Then, as if Leemona had left without saying a word, Celia turned on one heel and said, “Let’s go see if our canoe won.”

  We had won: Blue ribbon, Best Decorated Canoe. Marly’s unit, Masquerade, came in second. Apparently, the volcano hadn’t been firmly lashed to their canoe. They might have won if it hadn’t fallen into the water near the end of the parade. When Celia and I got there, the rest of the girls in Aquatics were cheering madly. They had Andy and Happy up on their shoulders and had started a stumbling, triumphal march toward our tents, Andy’s long legs trailing the ground.

  Outpost had been too cool to enter the decorated canoe contest, but they won the canoe races and so were in charge of that night’s bonfire. Rather, my sister Carol was. Though she was allergic to wood smoke along with most everything else, she loved a good fire. She had built up a log cabin fire out of huge pieces of pine. The thing looked almost big enough for Abe Lincoln to have been born in it. At her signal, a flaming wad of kerosene-soaked sanitary napkin shot down a wire from the top of the flagpole, and the log cabin burst into flames. Carol had outdone herself. “Oooh,” we all said, and “aaah,” as awed by this feat as the outside world, glued to their televisions, had been by the Lunar Module’s touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility earlier in the afternoon. While the world waited and waited for word that Armstrong and Aldrin were ready to leave the LM, we campers held hands and sang the usual mix of Beatles hits and Girl Scout camp songs.

  We all poured into the mess hall at about ten-thirty that night, ready first for luau and then the moon walk. Chappie had repeated her Hawaii Aloha feast. There was deviled Spam molded into the shape of roast suckling pigs with candied crab apples in their mouths. Stacks of white bread took the place of poi, and there were big platters of canned pineapple. For dessert, of course, we had the fortune cookies.

  Celia tossed a pineapple ring at me. Everyone settled down and was digging into the Spam, making sandwiches. Usually we ate dinner at six, and so after a whole day of Moon Fest, we were really starving. “It’s starting!” someone up front called, and I looked up to see Mrs. Pratt adjusting the rabbit ears on a very small black-and-white TV, undoubtedly the secret set from the counselors’ rec cabin. First there was snow. Then a shot of something alternately very black and very white, which Walter Cronkite’s voice said was the surface of the moon and one of the legs of the Lunar Module. Armstrong would descend the ladder first, Cronkite said—his voice as familiar after all these years as my own father’s—“in just a few more historic minutes.”

  I moved closer to the TV, abandoning my sandwich. I’d been waiting for this moment all my life. I sat on the concrete floor staring up at the small screen. There was a sudden crackle of static, then Armstrong backed out of the LM. Behind me the room went wild, girls cheering and tossing cookies at each other, even though all Armstrong had done so far was awkwardly climb a few rungs down the ladder, looking a lot like one of those miniature helmeted divers people kept in their aquariums. He was saying something, making some kind of speech, but the noise behind me drowned it out. Then he was down, walking around on the moon like a kid in snow boots. We had done it.

  President Kennedy and Marly’s dad and everybody who worked at the Cape and in Houston, and every family who paid taxes—together we had done it. Nothing from now on would be the same. They would probably start the calendar over. This would be the last day of 1969 P.M. (Pre-Moonwalk). Tomorrow would be the first day of the year 1 A.M. (After Moonwalk). What will it be like for the babies being born around the world tonight? They would probably grow up taking vacations on the moon. They’d have a hard time realizing what all the fuss had been about.

  “It doesn’t look real.” Andy slid onto the floor next to me. She was watching Aldrin, out of the lander now, kicking up moon dust. “I mean, how do we know this isn’t just happening out in the desert in Arizona or somewhere?”

  I stared at her. No wonder her father drove a chip truck. No wonder the psychic grandmothers of Casa Dega bought snack food from him and cookies from his daughter. She was tuned to the wrong channel.

  Happy switched on a record player, and Celia started leading a conga line. No one was watching the TV anymore but me and Andy, and Andy was making those snorting noises like she did when she listened, disbelieving, to me talk late into the night.

  It was all too much. I stood up. “I gotta pee,” I said, but I headed not to the bathroom but out into the night. I wanted to see the moon. To see if somehow, in some way I couldn’t quite define, it looked different. Earlier, a big silver slice of the moon had been hanging low in the sky. Now, there was no moon at all. It must have set. Someday soon, I was sure, whole cities would be on the moon, jeweled necklaces lighting up the dry, dusty craters and seas. Now the moon was hiding, ashamed somehow of the two men making tracks on its surface. Men and footprints too tiny to be seen from where I stood, even if the moon had been full and bright.

  I wondered what Leemona was thinking, and Charlotte. Were they at home watching the moon walk on their own TVs? Did it seem possible to them that their children might someday live on the moon? Or did they look up at night and see only white?

  “Jes—” It was Carol. She had been down at the site of the bonfire, making sure the ashes were all safely buried. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me, all right.” I said. I must have sounded as blue as I felt because she stopped next to me. She smelled strongly of smoke.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. She put her arm around my shoulder. “Thanks,” I said. She nodded.

  We stood there for a long time, two sisters looking up at a black sky.

  16 October 1970

  One Saturday, Carol and her best friend, Stephanie, marched into the mall bookstore and bought a paperback copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. They let everyone they knew sign up for a turn with the book. Everybody but me.

  All I knew was that suddenly everyone was laughing at things I didn’t find funny, telling jokes I didn’t get. Then on Friday, Carol came up to me in the lunchroom during fourth period begging for my help. Carol had been supposed to pass the book to Pete Orsini but had left it in her desk in Madame Muller’s classroom. Madame Muller was our French teacher, a woman who steadfastly refused to admit that there were French names for parts of the body. Stephanie, Carol said, would kill her when she found out she’d lost the book, not to mention Pete. Since I had French III next period, it was up to me, her only sister, to save her.

  “You can do it,” she said.

  I stood with my arms crossed. “Why should I?” I said, upset she’d left me out of the only illicit thing she’d ever done in her life.

  Carol sighed. “I’ll let you read the book.”

  I nodded. “Deal.”

  “It’s under the third seat from the door,” she said, leaving me with a firm squeeze of my
shoulder.

  It wasn’t easy to get away with sitting at a different desk in a class that had only four bored inmates. But I did it, making a show of finding gum stuck to my usual seat and moving to the one where Carol said she’d sat. Then I waited until the lights were off and Madame Muller was showing French Impressionist slides.

  In the dim light, I slumped down in the desk, groping among the old gum and papers for the book. “Camille Pisarro’s Place du Théâtre Français, painted in 1898,” Madame Muller read from the booklet that came with the slides. “Notice the panorama of blurred dark figures against a light background.” The slide projector clicked. A fuzzy scene of a street full of people and wagons appeared. My fingers found the book, closed around it. I slipped it out of the desk and into my lap. Madame Muller went on, reading the description of the next painting before she changed slides, “Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, painted in 1863. Notice the combination of a modern setting with traditional sixteenth-century Italian themes.” Carol and Stephanie had ripped off the real jacket and recovered the book with yellow-and-orange flowered contact paper, and Magic Markered Betty Crocker’s Hot Dishes on the spine, another joke I didn’t get. “Contemporary viewers,” Madame Muller said, “found the portrayal of a nude woman and two clothed men shocking.” Click, FLASH. The screen was blank, and the flood of light made me sit up, afraid of getting caught.

  Madame went on. “Edgar Degas’s Ballet Rehearsal (Adagio), painted in 1874. Notice his use of arrested motion,” she said, and click, some leaping ballerinas appeared, very like ones I remembered from my third-grade tour of the National Gallery of Art. I pretended to be interested in the blurry, bluish montage of tutus and toe shoes. “Edgar Degas’s The Morning Bath," she announced, and click, there was another bright, empty blank. Stephen, the only boy in the class, raised his hand. Stephen was president of the French Club (a true losers’ organization) and the only student with any enthusiasm left for French after three years of Madame Muller. The rest of us sincerely wished we had taken Spanish.

  “Pardon, Madame,” Stephen said, rolling his r. “There isn’t any picture on the screen.”

  “Of course not, Stephen,” murmured Madame Muller, pronouncing his name with a soft ph in the middle, which suited Stephen, so soft and plump, too well. “I would never show nudes in mixed company”.

  So she went on, showing or not showing us the Impressionist masters. When a blank screen gave me enough light to read, I flipped open the book. Breasts are erotic …

  Then a landscape came on, and I lost my place in the gloom. Click, FLASH. More light. The size of the penis does not…

  Three dim landscapes in a row, and I fumbled. We were moving on, she announced, to the Postimpressionists. “Paul Cezanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire,” Madame Muller droned, “notice the …” Click, FLASH. We got back to more censored nakedness. By the light of Madame Muller’s invisible nudes, I caught my first knee-weakening glimpses of the words penis, vagina, and orgasm. My tiny nipples sat up in the padded bomb shelters of my bra and begged.

  I went straight home from the bus and locked myself in the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet and opened the book to the title page. Yes, I had been afraid to ask. It was true. I remembered hearing two ninth graders whispering in the second-floor girls’ lavatory:

  “So she lay down in the middle of the bed,” the first one had breathed out, mascara-clumped eyes wide.

  “Unh-huh, unh-huh,” the second murmured through Pony Pink lips.

  “And she says to the guy, ‘Do you know what I want?’”

  “Unh-huh.” The second girl chewed on her rattail comb.

  “And he says, ‘No.’ So she spreads her legs even wider and says, ‘Now do you know what I want?’ and …”

  “Unh-huh.”

  “So he says, ‘Yeah, you want the whole damn bed.’” The black rattail comb clattered to the floor as the two girls collapsed, clinging convulsively to the sinks, but I hadn’t gotten it. Not really.

  I speed-read the first chapter of the book. A man has a penis. Okay. I’d seen Paul’s in the flesh, and my second favorite book up to this point hadn’t been Fifty Centuries of Art for nothing. I’d seen my share of naked marble men. A woman, the book said, had a vagina. I knew that, too, though more vaguely. I had it confused with a womb and maybe also with my bladder. Were there really separate envelopes inside me for sex, babies, and pee? It seemed so. A woman was also supposed to have a clitoris. Cly-toris, cleet-oris, clito-rees? It was as bad as the names in The Lord of the Rings, my first favorite book. I sincerely wished Dr. Reuben had followed J.R.R. Tolkien’s lead and included a few good maps with the points of interest done in red.

  Exploration was called for, so I got into the bath. I’d spent fourteen years soaping up what my mother called my fixtures, and I felt sure I knew the territory pretty well, but … there it was. However you pronounced it, I did indeed have a clitoris. Round, shy, it peaked and wavered like the soft foot of a winkle at low tide. Hello, in there, hello.

  AFTER READING Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, I understood why I blushed and my nipples stood up around boys that I liked and why I had dreamed about floating in space with Paul. I had lived fourteen years without a clue. I was sure I was the last human being on the planet to find out about sex. I may have been smart, but I was retarded. Dr. Reuben, who wrote about six-year-old girls masturbating with their teddy bears, certainly would have thought so.

  Now I saw the world with new eyes. I saw vibrators for sale in the drugstore and knew that in spite of the picture on the box, they weren’t entirely for massaging feet. When the kids at school told dirty jokes, I got the punch lines. More than that, I saw clearly that everything was a potential dirty joke. Even things that didn’t breathe were all about sex. Anything longer than it was tall (bananas, tampons, the Washington Monument) were really just penises. Carol saw it, too. “Will you look at the size of that rocket?” she said one day, holding up Time with a Saturn V on the cover. Penis, I knew she was thinking. Really BIG penis.

  “No wonder astronauts are men,” I said. Carol laughed so hard she choked.

  It was more than that. It was as if the whole world had only been pretending certain things were important—science, art, politics, religion—when actually everyone was only interested in one thing, something not on that list. Sex. All the books I’d been reading without really understanding (War and Peace, The Sun Also Rises, the James Bond novels I’d snuck from my dad) were really all about sex. Everyone was having sex. Everyone except me.

  17 December 1972

  Carol and I are on the roof waiting for the moon rocket to blast off. This is not a dream or a science fiction story. We are staying up to see Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, and the only one to leave earth at night. It is pitch-black.

  It is supposed to go up at ten, then around eleven, but the countdown keeps getting stopped, the launch time delayed. At first, mothers as well as kids are on top of the other houses in our neighborhood. Most of the fathers are at the Cape, trying to get the rocket up. By the third time the radio announces the countdown has stopped, the mothers are gone, sure the mission is scrubbed.

  Up on the roof, the countdown resumes. I think about our mother asleep right under my butt. Although it’s past midnight, my father is still at the office, working late as usual on some interminable report. I close my eyes and imagine my parents’ dark cherry-wood bed, my mother completely, unnaturally still. When we were little, she used to yell in her sleep, No no no! By this night, she is not only on Valium, she is mixing it with bourbon, and so doesn’t do that or much else anymore.

  At twelve-thirty, Carol says she is giving up. This is not a slumber party, but still she hates staying up late. I beg her to stay, afraid I will have to go, too. I’m sixteen, not a little kid anymore, but still she thinks she is my mother. At least, she thinks somebody should be.

  She opens her mouth to say something: Yes, I will stay. No, I won’t. But I realize I can s
ee her mouth, and I wonder where the light is coming from, and in the same instant I know. The rocket is blasting off, rising over the river like the sun, that bright. I look at the orange trees and see colors, green leaves, waxy white blossoms, yellow fruit sooty with mildew. Above the flame, the sky turns a perfect, ordinary blue. Birds begin to sing. Somewhere, a dog barks.

  Then the sound hits us, a roar so loud it makes my bones itch, louder than any rock concert I have yet been allowed to go to. Carol and I are on our feet, hugging each other on the gently sloped roof. She is shouting, and I am shouting, though we can’t hear our own voices. The red-and-gold trail burns through the sky, and we track it with our eyes. Our bodies lean forward, longing to follow. But we can’t. We are not old enough or strong enough or desperate enough to break free. Gravity will not let us go. Not yet.

  In the fading light as the rocket passes downrange, we see who is on the next roof: David Mize and the Hecht boys, one my age, one older than Carol. Over them is a cloud of smoke. They are smiling and waving a bottle at us. They are obviously stoned. All over Brevard County people are either stoned or selling or sorting or smuggling pot. Our senior class president has just been arrested for dealing, though he had to go to Orlando to get busted. No one ever seems to get arrested in Cocoa. At that moment, Brevard County is the drug-smuggling capital of Florida, maybe the drug capital of the United States. But I have never smoked pot or even a cigarette. Partly that is Carol’s doing. Or maybe it is all her doing.

  “Oh, it’s just Jesse Lee,” I hear one of them say my name, mocking me for not being with them. I have already gone through my first two years of high school without being allowed in the rest room, Dealer Central. But they don’t mock Carol. She does not drink, smoke, take drugs, or chew gum, and they respect the fierceness of her convictions. All those things are bad for your voice, and she is serious about her voice. Carol starts to lift her hand, wave back. Then, as the roar fades, she doesn’t. The light dies.