“Where are you?” my mother asked him, but he wouldn’t say. She woke up crying and called the operator, demanding to know which area code my father had been calling from.
One Friday, I was getting ready to drive up for a visit when Carol called. My mother had been rushed to the hospital. She had pneumonia. When I got there, Carol was waiting just outside the swinging double doors of the emergency room. She looked pale and grim. “They had Mom in one of those inflatable shock suits,” Carol said. “All she kept saying was, ‘Get me out of here.’”
I wondered if Carol remembered saying the same words to me in Cocoa, just before her ambulance ride. This time when the double doors swung open, the doctor came out shaking his head. Get me out of here, my mother had asked, and God or someone answered. She was dead. Like my father, she was barely sixty-five.
WHILE THEY WERE alive, I am sure I was a disappointment to my parents. I married at seventeen and was divorced by twenty. It took me ten years to get my BA. I worked an endless round of minimum wage jobs, delivering phone books, selling shrubberies at a nursery, ringing a bell for the Salvation Army one Christmas when they had run short of bums and believers. I was smart, my mother would have said, but in ways that didn’t do me or anybody else much good. After my parents died, all that changed.
I left Florida, went to graduate school, and got a job as a professor. I published two books, a story collection and a novel. As a fiction writer, it amazed me to discover that I could get paid to lie. I remarried and had a daughter. I suppose I finally did what I had dreamed of doing when I left high school. I went far enough and fast enough to become a new and better person. In every way that counts, I have a good and happy life. Often, though, I dream about my parents. Not anything scary or portentous, I just walk into a room and my father and my mother are there, in a house in Wisconsin they didn’t live to see. One night I dreamed my father gave me twenty dollars to take my daughter to see the rerelease of 101 Dalmatians, a movie he’d taken Carol and me to see. “Get some popcorn,” he said. “And keep the change.”
IN 1983 CAROL and I went back to Cocoa because she wanted to attend our tenth high school reunion. As only a quasi-member of the Class of ’73, I was less keen. I hadn’t set foot in Brevard County in eight years. But Carol insisted. “If you’re my sister, you’ll go,” she said on the phone. How could I say no?
At the reunion, I was surprised by how many of the kids we’d grown up with were working at the Cape. After the end of the Apollo program, the Cape, the town, and the county seemed to be closing up shop. Now Mark Lish’s little brother, Dana, had the very same job his father had before being laid off.
While we were there, Stephanie (former co-owner of a very well read copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask) offered to take us onto the Kennedy Space Center to see the space shuttle Challenger take off. Stephanie was another second-generation Cape worker and so had passes. This was Challenger’s second launch, three years before its disastrous end.
The launch was scheduled for 7:33 in the morning, so we had to get up before dawn to make it to the Space Center. This was the shuttle with Sally Ride on it. Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut. Sally Ride, whose father had been a teacher at a junior college like my father’s. Sally Ride, who, unlike me, had taken science seriously, something that was now about to pay off.
The causeway was crowded with bumper-to-bumper traffic, but we got a good parking spot just opposite Pad 39-A, the old Apollo pad now cut down to fit the shuttle. The boosters on the space shuttles don’t make flames like the Saturn Vs did, so we had to be close to get a good view. We sat on the hood of Stephanie’s Honda and listened to the countdown on the car radio. Cars and RVs were parked on either side of the causeway for miles. Thousands of people stood in the cool early morning, waiting for the launch, for a second sun to rise. The numbers ticked down: T minus five, four, three. The crowd counted along. “Two, one.”
White smoke poured out from the pad, the boosters spat flame. The shuttle seemed to hover for a moment before it began to rise, slowly at first, then suddenly racing upward, clearing the tower, heading straight up into the open sky. Above our heads, Challenger banked and turned like the plane it was and headed downrange.
“Ride, Sally, ride,” people all around us were chanting. I was yelling, whistling. Carol’s voice was hoarse from her allergies, come to visit like ghosts of the past, but she was waving her arms and screaming, too. “Ride, ride.”
There will always be disasters, the big black boot waiting to come down on somebody, somewhere, someday. In three years, this same shuttle would explode on takeoff, killing all on board. Cape workers would be laid off again. But that day, for that launch, everything was perfect.
It’s important to remember that things can be. I close my eyes and see it: the sun shining the way it can only in the Sunshine State, my sister next to me, both of us shouting with joy because, at long last, an American woman is on her way to space.
Space Page 23
