Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  Mom did make it. As soon as I saw her in the hospital, I knew I didn’t want her to die. She was my mother, and I loved her. The surgery actually pulled her together—she was always good in an emergency—and for a few months she became once again the mother who could drive a car with one hand and smoke and tell great Women’s Army Corps stories all at the same time. I would have died for her.

  So the day I conceived my plan, I sat down in the chair next to the couch and talked to Mom about this and that, like the old days. She sat there, listening, nodding. I thought about Carol’s friend Stephanie, who couldn’t believe I didn’t tell my mother everything. So I said, “Mom, I’m thinking about graduating from school a year early. But I don’t know. What do you think?” My chest felt cramped with the importance of what I was asking. My whole life, it seemed, would be decided by whether or not I did this.

  My mother looked at me for a very long time. I thought maybe she hadn’t really heard me. I opened my mouth to repeat what I’d said, but before I could, she answered.

  “Why should I care?” she said and closed her eyes.

  In a real way, I deserved that answer. I wasn’t actually asking her advice. I would do what I wanted. I was the one who had said nothing when my sister told me we would be better off with our mother dead, the one who hadn’t asked nearly enough questions about why and how my mother had gotten to be the mess she was. None of us had. As a family, we all deserved that answer from my mother.

  In another way, her answer was truly terrible. From my brief spell in a Methodist Sunday school, I remember a discussion of just which sin it was that the Bible called “the sin that cannot be forgiven.” Maybe this was it. I was just a kid, and no kid deserves to have her mother stop caring. I felt like someone had punched me in the chest. I stood up from the chair across from her, walked down the hall to the bathroom, and threw up.

  I went to night school. I must have gotten my father’s permission to do it, but I don’t remember. My English class was full of girls so pregnant they had to sit sideways because there wasn’t room for their stomachs in the small school desks. Even though these girls were in my high school, or had been, I didn’t know any of them. It made me realize what a little pool—“We’re Advanced”—I had been swimming in. The teacher was a young black woman. The official policy for night school was that we did all our writing in class, no homework. Maybe to forestall cheating, maybe to make sure we did it. The other girls took a lot of time to complete the simplest assignment, some because they weren’t trying, most because they could barely read or write. The teacher and I would sit at the front and talk about books we’d read.

  She was waiting to get called up for officers’ training in the Marines. The war in Vietnam was almost over, so she didn’t think she’d get sent there. She wanted something better than teaching. I liked her more than any teacher I had ever had, maybe because she reminded me of what my mother must have been like in the WACs. After I finished her course, she did get called up. She sent me a postcard from Gamp Pendleton with a picture of her barracks on it.

  I also took night PE, a scary class where the boys were all guys who’d gotten kicked out of day PE for punching the coach or knifing a fellow student. We played volleyball in the middle of the gym. An off-duty cop had been hired to keep score.

  By the end of my junior year, I had exactly enough credits to graduate. My principal was still Mr. Trumbell, the one who looked like Gus Grissom. He had been promoted from the junior high to the high school. When I told him what I was planning, he buzzed his secretary and demanded she bring in my cumulative folder. Then he slammed his finger in his desk drawer while going for a pencil. He was that angry.

  He was afraid he’d lose half the student body if word of what I’d done got around. He’d been a principal long enough to know that no matter how much fun high school appeared to be in the movies or on TV, not too many students would volunteer for an extra year of it. I just sat in front of him with my legs and my fingers crossed. Mr. Trumbell looked long and hard at that manila-clad record of my transgressions and grades. Then he sighed.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like I have much choice. I’ll sign off on this. But I won’t just let you jump willy-nilly into the senior class,” Mr. Trumbell said, his eyebrows dark and drawn. Therefore I would not be allowed to take part in graduation, in the ceremony in which my sister Carol would be finishing with honors. They would send me my diploma in the mail.

  I didn’t give a damn. I was euphoric. I was in a fast car racing toward the future, in a rocket that was blasting off, the earth below me nothing but a deep blue marble. The universe would be my infinite new home. I was sixteen.

  “Be seeing you,” I said. I was out of there.

  20 January 1974

  "What would you give to know the meaning of life?”

  I was sitting in the darkened multitorium in the middle of my World Religion class. I’d escaped high school, but I had only gotten as far as my father’s junior college. Usually we spent both hours of World Religion in the dark, watching a psychedelic swirl of slides flashing from six projectors onto three screens, listening to chants of the world booming from the tall black speakers that flanked them. Our teacher, Dr. Lauden, lived in a Winnebago camper in the school’s parking lot. He had once been a Methodist minister, but now he had bigger ideas.

  “To know the one secret necessary to understand your place in the cosmos. What would you give?” Dr. Lauden prodded us. He was sitting on the edge of the stage, dressed in worn bell-bottoms and a flamingo pink shirt. He swung his feet back and forth over the orchestra pit, staring out at the darkness that held the fifty or so students in the class. Some were taking the class for the third or fourth time, even though they could only get credit for it once. “Would you give your most precious worldly possession?”

  I leaned forward in my seat. What would I give? I wanted to know the answer. I needed to know. I thought about the gold pocket watch hooked inside my macrame purse. I’d bought it for myself as a graduation gift when it became clear my parents had no thought of giving me anything. Marly’s parents had given her a pair of fourteen-carat-gold earrings, Lynn’s, a typewriter and a college dictionary. In my family, graduating was a given, not worthy of any particular celebration. We were just supposed to do it from time to time, like brushing our teeth or washing our hair. I gazed up at Dr. Lauden and imagined laying my precious watch at his feet, or at least on the stage next to him.

  “Why don’t you just tell us, Doc?” a kid to the left of me called out.

  “I could, but then it wouldn’t mean anything. Knowledge is worthless without sacrifice,” Dr. Lauden said. “This weekend I fasted, Saturday to Sunday, nothing but bread and water. Early this morning, I walked to the grocery store and bought an orange. Just the smell of that orange in my hand was heaven. When I tore open the skin …” Dr. Lauden took a deep breath and spread his arms. “Ecstasy!” He smiled at us. “So I am asking. What would you give to know the truth?”

  I had a vision of myself on my knees like some medieval pilgrim creeping over the great arched span of the bridge to Cape Kennedy. I closed my eyes and imagined the scrape, scrape, scrape of my jeans on the concrete. It would be hard, but for once I would have a real purpose.

  “Ah, well,” Dr. Lauden said, interrupting my mental pilgrimage. “I don’t want to be unfair. I’ll tell you. The secret is this.” He paused a long time. No one made a sound. “You were never born. And … you will never die.”

  I could feel the disappointment around me in the dimness. What did that mean? Never born? Never die? Our births were something we took for granted. At seventeen or eighteen, our deaths something too distant to concern us. It was what to do next, after this class, after these two years in junior college, that was the impossible burden.

  Then I remembered that I had met Dr. Lauden years before at a party Carol and I had gone to with my parents when we first moved to Cocoa. He had a house on the beach then, complete with a widow’s walk and a yar
d full of sea oats and sand dunes. He was married, too. Did I remember someone saying it was his wife’s house? Carol and I ran barefoot on the beach with his three blond, sunburned sons and the children of some of the other guests, pretending we were wild mustangs. When it was dark and time to go in, Dr. Lauden called his boys over to introduce them to the other parents. “This is David,” he said, saying the oldest boy’s name but motioning to Charlie, the youngest, who was eight. “He’s six.” He went on, introducing each son in some mangled way, too drunk or stoned or just plain absentminded to remember his own children’s ages and names. Where were his sons now? Did they think he was wise? Was he their guru?

  After a brief reprise of Javanese gamelan music, one of Dr. Lauden’s favorite tapes, the class was over. I gathered up my books and headed for anthropology, which was at the other end of the campus. After the dark of the multitorium, my eyes watered in the afternoon sun. “He’s lost his faith,” someone said to me. I blinked in the general direction of the voice and recognized the outline of a fellow World Religion student, Rafe Rivard, a big guy, well over six feet, with long brown hair. He always seemed to choose the seat directly behind me. Standing next to him, I felt like a toy poodle at the feet of a bull mastiff.

  “You mean Dr. Lauden?” I said. Rafe nodded. Considering Dr. Lauden’s evenhanded praise for the Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, and Martin Luther King, I wondered which faith Rafe was talking about. Then my eyes adjusted to the sunlight and took in the cross Rafe was wearing. It hung from his neck on a worn leather bootlace and looked for all the world like two miniature railroad spikes welded together.

  “These other religions have lessons to teach us, of course,” Rafe said, “but there is no sense in pretending that we can reach God without going through Jesus.” Rafe shifted his books from one large arm to the other. I noticed he was taking anthropology, too. “Christianity is our heritage.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. I was technically, if not enthusiastically, a Christian. For two brief months, Carol had had a crush on Tad Gentry, who attended the First Methodist Church and even MYF, Methodist Youth Fellowship. She’d gotten me to go to church with her so she could sit a few rows behind him and gawk. Having had no instruction in the existence or nonexistence of God whatsoever, Carol had unexpectedly decided to take it all very seriously. One Easter Sunday, Carol and I had been simultaneously baptized and confirmed into the Methodist Church.

  All I really remembered was that the minister, making his way with cupped palms down the row of bent heads, baptized each with a sprinkle of water. Reaching me last, he opened both hands and dumped what seemed like a pint of cold water down the back of my neck. I took my first communion (a cube of white bread, carefully trimmed of crust, and a little thimble of grape juice) with water dripping from my hair and chin and running under the white collar of my baptismal robe. After all that, Carol decided to unconvert, to dislike Tad, and to become a serious atheist.

  “Can I walk with you to class?” Rafe asked.

  “Sure,” I said, fighting an impulse to say no and bolt. It wasn’t so much that Rafe, grim cross and all, scared me, as that I didn’t want to know anyone in my classes. That was the glorious freedom of junior college; no one knew me. After living ten years in Cocoa, everyone in high school knew exactly who I was. I couldn’t escape their conception of me. Now I could be anyone, if I could just figure out who I wanted to be.

  As we walked across the middle of the flat, treeless campus my father had helped design, Rafe revealed that he planned to attend seminary and become a Methodist minister, one who would not lose his faith the way Dr. Lauden had. He told me he planned to become a missionary and serve God all his days. We reached class just as he finished telling about a vision his mother had had of his being one of the chosen of God. This didn’t sound all that odd to me. Time and Newsweek were full of stories about the Jesus people, Freaks for Jesus, ex-hippies who, having tried drugs and meditation and Marx, were returning in droves to Christianity, their parents’ faith, but in a slightly groovier, up-to-date form. Rafe, in his shoulder-length hair and handmade leather sandals, looked the part.

  We climbed the stairs to the second floor of the social sciences building, stopped outside our classroom. “I have a confession to make,” Rafe said, as if what he had told me before was mere chitchat. “When I walked into World Religion, the first thing I saw was you, your blond hair shining in the darkness.” Rafe looked down at me. I noticed his eyes were blue, as pale and pure as bottled water. “I kept sitting behind you, trying to get up my courage, but I thought a girl like you wouldn’t want to talk to me.”

  A girl like me? What kind of girl did he think I was? Rafe sighed deeply, and as if I could read his mind, I saw myself as he saw me: blond, bird-boned, tiny compared to him. He was certain I’d been popular in high school, a cheerleader or even a homecoming queen. I’d always had my pick of boys and would never talk to someone like him. He didn’t know that my only boyfriend had asked for his name bracelet back a week after he’d given it to me. This happened one day at lunch in front of everybody we knew. Rafe didn’t know I’d had to beg a friend to take me to the junior prom. He thought I was cute, sexy even. I saw an all-new me reflected in his eyes.

  “Do you think” Rafe said, twisting his cross on its leather thong, “you might like to go to a movie this weekend? If you aren’t busy?”

  The reading in our anthropology text that week had been about a tribe in the Amazon who communicated through an elaborate sign language. If one Indian met another stronger and superior to himself on a path in the jungle, the first would show he did not wish to fight by beating the outside of his thighs, clearly signaling, our text said, I am already subdued. You do not need to subdue me. When Rafe asked me out, I had a strong impulse to beat the outside of my thighs. “Sure,” I said, “if there’s something good on.”

  Rafe picked me up in his car, a green ’68 Plymouth Fury that was jacked up in the back like a drag racer and had valves that rattled like old bones whenever Rafe stepped on the gas. He’d bought the car, he told me, with the money he made working the night shift at a plant outside town that made electronic circuits for B-l bombers. The company had just moved the plant to Cocoa from California to take advantage of all the laid-off Cape workers. Cheap labor, Rafe explained.

  We went to see Towering Inferno at the big new mall on Merritt Island, spending two and a half hours trying to guess which stars would burn to death, which would survive. Since there was hardly a building tall enough to need an elevator in Brevard County, the threat of death in a hundred-story high-rise was hard to take seriously, but the idea of dying by fire reminded me of Gus Grissom and Apollo 1. When we left the theater, I felt shaky, like I’d been watching a real disaster in Cinemascope.

  Rafe’s engine rattled its way back over the humped causeway. He had to be at his job by midnight, he said. We got back to Luna Heights at eleven, and Rafe circled the block. My house looked dark, but since the family room was in the back, those lights didn’t show from the street. I couldn’t tell if my father was home watching TV or still at the office. My mother, I was sure, was in bed.

  Carol was away at college, living in a red brick dorm in Tallahassee. She’d done volunteer work during her senior year in high school with retarded kids at the training center in town, helping them découpage pictures from magazines onto empty lard cans to sell as decorative trash cans. She had fallen in love with them. They deserved help, she’d said at dinner one night, because they always tried their best. I thought she was implying that she couldn’t say the same about us, her family. All she could talk about was going to Florida State University, six hours away in north Florida, to get her degree in special education. In the fall, she’d gone.

  Now she was interning at Sunland, a residential center for profoundly retarded adults. Her phone conversations were full of talk of catheters and feeding tubes and the value of playing music on the wards. Her voice burned with dedication. She’d had to go a long way to find a grou
p more helpless than our family to care for, but she had done it. I hoped they realized how lucky they were to have her.

  Rafe circled the block again. I realized he was waiting for instructions. “You can park on the street,” I said. “We don’t have to go in.” He pulled the car up to the curb in front of the Boggses’ house, and we sat in the dark listening to the mosquitoes hum, the frogs singing in the orange trees. Marly Boggs had joined the air force, was off somewhere learning to repair radar. Her father still had his job at the Cape but fully expected to be laid off any day.

  I kept looking across the street at my house. I wasn’t nervous that Mom or Dad would wonder where I could be. It was just that the house looked so dead from the street, like a big family tomb. This was the view Mrs. Boggs and our other neighbors had had of us for years: dead house, dying family.

  Rafe coughed. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. I didn’t want to tell him about my family, about anything. I wanted to stay Rafe’s mystery girl as long as possible. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

  Rafe took my hand. He told me he could feel I had troubles. Who didn’t? But if I let Jesus into my life, if I just closed my eyes and said, Help me, Lord, then He would take control of my life and find the path that was truly right for me. Jesus would take my heart in his hands and never let go.

  I closed my eyes, got as far as help. “Please,” I said to God or somebody. I was lost. I did want to be found. I felt something wet on my cheek. I was crying.

  Rafe kissed me, his lips soft on my wet cheek. I kissed him back. His mouth was wide; even his teeth were oversized. His hand was so large it covered half my chest. Under his palm, I could feel my heart pounding. We kissed until my lips were raw, until my teeth hurt, until the car windows were completely fogged and dripping. Sometime later, I heard the jangling of the tags on Bertha’s collar. My father was walking her around the block. Bertha was our only pet now. Lucky had died the year before, his kidneys finally giving out. My mother had become hysterical at the news, crying uncontrollably, as if this small cat death were the one thing she couldn’t bear. I froze as the jangling tags came closer. My father didn’t know what Rafe’s car looked like, but in our neighborhood, with its wide drives and two-car garages, no one parked on the street. Surely, he would be curious, take a look.