The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

“Mr. Biersdorfer,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether she would remember him from the dinner party. She looked confused.

  “Eric?” she asked after a minute.

  “No, not Eric. Eric’s father. Daddy’s boss.”

  “Oh.” She thought this over. “What is Mom doing with him?”

  “Look, Delia,” I said slowly. “Sometimes a wife doesn’t want to be with her husband anymore, so she finds a new boyfriend. She leaves her husband and her kids if she thinks she’ll be happier with her new boyfriend.”

  “Is Mom a wife?” Delia asked after consideration, squinting a bit as she always did over questions of vocabulary.

  “Yes,” I said. “Mom is Dad’s wife.”

  “Okay,” Delia said. “And Dad is her husband.” I could tell she didn’t understand at all.

  “Look, Delia, never mind. Don’t tell Dad I said anything, okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed contentedly. This was one thing I liked about Delia: she enjoyed having secrets with me, and she kept them well.

  That evening my father got home late but in a good mood.

  “What should we do tonight, girls?” he asked cheerily. “We can do whatever you want.”

  “Can we go out for ice cream?” Delia asked, trembling with excitement.

  “We can get ice cream if that’s what you want. We have to get a real dinner first, though. Let me just change my clothes and make a phone call.”

  But then he was gone for a long time. Delia and I didn’t notice for a while because we were watching TV. At first we hoped he would take his time so we could see the end of The Cosby Show. But then it ended and Family Ties began. When that was over, I crept to the hallway outside their bedroom door, trying to hear something. I only heard his low murmur.

  “Are we still going for ice cream?” Delia whispered when I came back.

  “No,” I whispered. “I don’t think so.”

  We made peanut butter sandwiches and ate them in front of the TV. When it got dark and he still hadn’t gotten off the phone, I picked up the extension in the kitchen. I heard my father’s voice, low and urgent. There was something strangled and bellowing about it—I almost thought he was laughing, and a confused moment went by before I realized that he was crying. I had never heard him cry before. It was a strange sound, mostly breathing, but also voiced, as if he were saying something without words. I must have made a sound, because my mother spoke.

  “Dolores?” she snapped.

  I hung up. My father was still on the phone when we went to bed.

  12.

  MY MOTHER WAS STILL GONE A WEEK LATER, AND WE HAD HEARD nothing from her. The house was empty without her, stale and stagnant. She had always been easily bored by routine, and though I had often wished she would be more predictable, now that my father was taking care of us, I missed her imagination. My father never had sudden inspirations to take us to the toy store or to the beach; he never changed his mind. He cooked the same things over and over, asked us the same questions, watched the same shows, and put us to bed at the same time with the same words: “Okay, girls, time to hit the sack.”

  My mother had always been a presence, even when she wasn’t in the room; she left her clothes draped across chairs, magazines open on the sofa arms, her high-heeled shoes resting on their sides in a pile near the door. With her gone, everything froze into position where it had been the day she left. None of us felt qualified to move anything. Delia took to holding a pink felt slipper of my mother’s in her lap while she watched TV. She shoved her fist into the toe and wore it that way for hours, absentmindedly waving her arm around like an amputee.

  On Saturday Delia and I woke up to find my father vacuuming, having dragged all of the living room furniture out the patio doors into the back yard.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled over the sound of the vacuum, but my father didn’t hear, just waved at me happily, and it was like a bad dream I often had, where I was drowning in full view of one of my smiling parents, who only smiled more broadly and waved when I screamed for help. When he saw I was crying, he crouched over me, pink-faced and out of breath in the newfound silence after he shut off the machine’s roar.

  “What is it?” he kept asking me, and when he got no answer he asked Delia, who didn’t answer. “D, what’s wrong?”

  I tried to calm myself and tell him, but I knew I could never explain. Seeing everything cleared away, seeing the patterns on the carpet where our furniture had always stood, the darkened rings around the flattened circles and squares—it was like seeing somebody naked. His doing this was like him saying that my mother had never been here, that she was never coming back. After a while, my father gave up trying to comfort me and turned the vacuum back on, running it over and over those places where the dirt would never come out.

  On Monday after my father left for work, I pulled out the phone book from where we kept it in a drawer next to the fridge. While Delia looked through the cupboards for a snack, I looked in the phone book under D for Doctors.

  “Who are you calling?” Delia asked.

  “No one,” I answered, flipping through the pages. It had occurred to me that wherever my mother had gone, she probably hadn’t quit her job. She must still be going to work every day. She had instructed us long ago never to call her there except in an emergency; because part of her job was answering the phone, she couldn’t tie up the line talking to us. But that day it had occurred to me that Dr. Chalmers’s office would be listed in the phone book, like any other business.

  And there it was, in tiny type, squeezed between Dr. Chall and Dr. Chamber. The words Family and Pediatric Care just after his name, with a phone number. I memorized it and closed the book. When I went into the living room and sat with Delia in front of cartoons, she didn’t look up or say anything.

  All afternoon, I repeated the number in my head. I’d thought when I first looked up the number that I would call right away, but seeing Dr. Chalmers’s name in print had chilled me, the way it was listed with the names of all those other doctors I didn’t know, a row of stern men in white coats who didn’t have time for the likes of me, a child whining for her mother. And what if, when I called, someone other than my mother answered? What would I say? I could say, I’m looking for Mrs. Gray, but then what if the person said, Why? or, even more intimidating, What is this regarding?

  My father came home and fixed us hot dogs and canned beans for dinner. Delia prattled on about something she had seen on TV; I kept waiting for her to ask about our mother, but she didn’t.

  Later that night, while my father put Delia to bed, I went to the phone and dialed. It was long after dark. The line rang twice, and then a heavy mechanical click sounded in my ear. The light hiss of a tape started up.

  “Hello,” my mother’s voice said, and my heart leaped up even as I understood from the formality of her tone that this was not my mother but a recording my mother had made, probably during those first self-conscious weeks at her job.

  “You have reached the medical offices of Dr. Albert Chalmers,” my mother’s voice said. “Our offices have closed and we can’t be here to take your call, but please leave a message after the tone. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Thank you.”

  The tape was full of tiny pauses, places where my mother gathered her breath, or where she reached the end of a line someone had written out for her, maybe Dr. Chalmers himself. When she reached the word we, I could detect the tiniest thrill in her voice, a sound surely inaudible to anyone who didn’t know her well. Her voice contained all the excitement and promise of the new job, the pleasure she’d taken in speaking in a professional capacity. I hung up without leaving a message.

  The construction site that Mr. Biersdorfer had pointed out by the road, the structure that had been slowly accreting layers of gray, then pink, then stone, was finally finished.

  We saw the mall from afar as we approached it on the night of the grand opening—the lights playing over it, the massive building squatting there
like an alien ship that had just landed by the side of the road. We parked and got out of the car. The night was warm and close, a humid haze forming itself around each of the lights. When we reached the entrance, ten tall glass doors flanked by palm trees, my father pulled one of the handles, a long glass cylinder. We heard a whooshing sound, the air-conditioning blowing like its own weather system. The air inside felt cool and dry and smelled somehow northern, a spicy cleanness, high and sharp. And inside: pink marble, glass, chrome, and light as far as the eye could see, up three levels of stores, all the way up to the skylights, and more palm trees.

  Hundreds of people I had never seen before walked the corridors, wandered into stores, lined up at the Orange Julius counter. We moved toward the escalators, and as I scanned the heads of strangers in front of us, one seemed familiar. Even from behind, I felt I recognized the angle at which his ears stuck out, the pink where the light shone through. He was wearing a navy blue shirt, a color I associated with Eric Biersdorfer. My heart started to beat faster at the thought of seeing Eric again. He should know about the affair by now, I thought, and even if he didn’t, he would surely be suffering from the same bewildering absence of a parent that Delia and I were. He would be pale, haunted, and confused-looking, unsatisfied with any of the explanations his mother offered about where his father was. If I could pull Eric aside, I could tell him what I knew. My fingertips buzzed. I stared at the back of the boy’s head, willing him to turn my way so I could catch more of his profile. I tried to think of what I might say to him when we spotted each other. Hi, Eric, how are you? It’s good to see you. Eric, I’ve missed you.

  I pushed against the people around me to get closer to him, and when he finally turned toward me, he wasn’t Eric at all. His jaw was too heavy, his eyes too small, his lips too round and pursed.

  “What’s wrong?” my father asked me. “You look upset.”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  My father went to an electronics store while Delia and I stayed in the bookstore. I left Delia in the kids’ section and looked through the magazine rack for articles about the astronauts. In one, I found a portrait of the crew slated to fly on Challenger for the Teacher in Space mission. They wore blue flight suits and held their helmets as if they were about to climb into the shuttle and blast off that very minute. I had seen crew portraits before, but this one had both Judith Resnik and Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who had been chosen to fly in space. All seven of them smiled real smiles, happy smiles. I waited until no one was within earshot, then ripped the page out of the magazine and folded it into my pocket.

  Delia appeared at my elbow.

  “What?” I demanded, afraid that she’d seen me tear the picture, but she just whispered, “Let’s go to the arcade.”

  The video arcade was a darkened room lined with glowing booths, their screens shielded on both sides by the edges of the boxes. Teenage boys leaned into them, their forearms working, their faces glowing blue. The machines sang in bleeps and single-toned melodies, bleeding into a single discordant song. Delia got a wicked look and started to trot through the arcade, around in a circle. The second time through, she picked up speed. I was too old to run with her, but I could see why she did. I knew how the bleeps and songs of the machines would warp and blend together as she ran, the lights flashing past. Neither of us tried to play the games; it seemed we’d lose right away, that the games were above us.

  I saw older kids, teenagers, and they reminded me of the new school year approaching. I spent more and more of my time envisioning high school, the things I would be expected to know. The kids at my new school would possess a sophistication that would make everyone I knew look childish, even Elizabeth Talbot. It was impossible to imagine what this would look like, but I tried anyway: They would use words I didn’t know, talk about music I’d never heard. I could never catch up, never join them where they were. They would see my childishness and it would be too late.

  My father bought me four cassette tapes, six pairs of socks in bright colors, and a silver heart-shaped locket. He bought Delia a white sundress, a pink zip-up jacket, and a gold heart-shaped locket. In the car on the way home, I went over each of my new possessions in my mind, savoring the precise colors of the socks. These things, it seemed to me, would be everything I would ever need to live a normal life as a high school freshman. The others would never know I was a year younger because I would have the right things, look the right way, know all the bands, all the song names. Though I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, I felt that this sense of satisfaction, this fullness, would stay with me forever, that I could never feel deficient in any way again.

  When we got home I pulled all of my old clothes out of the closet and spread them across my bed and the floor. I held each item up and asked myself: Will this be acceptable in high school? For most of my clothes, the answer was no. I made a pile to give to Delia. She seemed surprised when I offered it to her and eyed me warily as she picked up a dress and held it to her shoulders. It was way too big. I piled more and more in front of her. She walked back and forth from my bed to hers, her arms stacked high with ruffles and lace, with pinks, yellows, bright blues and greens.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep; I was too anxious about the first day of school. To calm myself, I read the last entry in my space notebok, written ten days before.

  STS 51-I, Discovery.

  Launch attempt August 24, 1985, called off 5 minutes before liftoff because of bad weather. Launch attempt August 25 called off due to the failure of one of the on-board computers. Launch attempt August 27 delayed 3 minutes because of a combination of bad weather and an unauthorized ship intruding on the area of the ocean where the Solid Rocket Boosters fall. Launch at 6:58 am.

  The sunshield on one of the three satellites got caught on the Remote Manipulator Arm camera and the satellite had to be deployed one day early. Another satellite failed to function after it reached geosynchronous orbit. Two astronauts, William Fisher and James van Hoften, performed spacewalks totaling 11 hours and 27 minutes including time spent fixing the satellite deployed on mission 51-D.

  My father took me to this launch.

  I set down the notebook and closed my eyes. I tried to picture my mother: I saw her in the yellow dress she had bought for work, with a white belt and white shoes. She smiled broadly and opened her arms. She was proud of me, excited for me to start high school. She would have advice for me about what to wear, how to act. She would tell me stories about her high school days. And did she not know, I wondered, that tomorrow was the first day of school? Or was she so busy with her new life wherever she was that she had forgotten something so important?

  In my mind, I wandered through Eric’s house, floating above the floor, drifting through the living room with its vaulted ceiling. I made myself remember each tile around the fireplace, the precise square shapes of the ultramodern furniture, the black leather chairs facing each other in little clusters, as if the chairs themselves were chatting. The huge vague modern paintings on the wall, just slashes of fuzzy color across the canvases. I passed through the doorway and across the hall to the dining room, where everything matched in shades of burgundy and cream. I measured the precise width of the gold edge of the plates, the exact weight of the silver forks. Behind the chair where Mrs. Biersdorfer had sat, there lurked a tall china cabinet, and though I hadn’t looked into it carefully that evening while Eric and I ate our dinners, I catalogued its contents now. Gold-rimmed dishes, rows and rows of them, large plates and smaller plates and dessert dishes. Silver bowls and decanters, a large silver platter, engraved, resting upright. Tiny delicate teacups, each one with a matching saucer, tiny silver spoons laid across each edge. The glass door of the cabinet, clean, free of fingerprints. Cleaned every day by Livvie.

  And the wide beige uniform and kind brown eyes of Livvie, the way she had looked away from me as I stared. I decided to imagine her as a loving mother for Eric: I gave her a soft warm lap for him to climb onto, a secret stash of cookies for
her to slip into him when Mrs. Biersdorfer wasn’t looking. I liked to imagine that it was Livvie who encouraged Eric’s love for reading. I imagined after-school snacks at the kitchen table while she asked him to describe what he had read, correcting his pronunciation of the hard words. Eric must have had someone to encourage him, I reasoned, and it comforted me to imagine it was her.

  I thought of him. I thought of him growing up in that house with those people, both of them dry as matches, humorless, quick to anger. I thought about Mr. Biersdorfer, and how a boy like Eric was in so many ways a mystery to him: a boy with no aggression, a boy with no desire for power. A boy who takes no values for granted, not the value of spaceflight nor of patriotism, a boy who must think through every blessed thing for himself.

  I got out of bed and tiptoed to the kitchen. I didn’t want to turn on a light, so I felt the buttons on the phone, counting the squares with my fingers to push the numbers I had memorized.

  “Hello, you have reached the medical offices of Dr. Albert Chalmers. Our offices have closed—”

  This time, her pauses sounded a little distant, as if she were unhappy about something. It was the same recording I had heard before, of course, but it was unmistakable, this halting sadness, and it was hard not to hear this as a sign that things were going badly with Biersdorfer, that she might change her mind and come back to us.

  13.

  THE MORNING OF THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, I WOKE UP TO FIND Delia watching an interview with Christa McAuliffe on TV. I studied Christa McAuliffe, trying to memorize her: dumpling face, kind eyes, frizzy hair. She smiled at Bryant Gumbel and told him how excited she was to be going to space. He asked whether the idea of the space shuttle frightened her.

  “Maybe just a little?” he prodded.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe when I’m strapped in and those rockets are going off underneath me, I will be. But spaceflight today really seems safe.”