The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Yes, hello,” my mother said directly into the phone. “Thank you for waiting. Are you calling for an urgent need or for a checkup?”

  “Checkup,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “All righty,” my mother said. “Would an afternoon work for you? The earliest I have is the twentieth at three.”

  Now I didn’t know what to say. I’d hoped that my mother would recognize my voice, that her formal tone would dissolve and turn to warmth and surprise, or even annoyance that I was bothering her at work. Most frightening of all was that I could disguise myself as an adult to her, that I could disguise myself as some woman not her daughter.

  “Never mind,” I said, and instead of trying to push my voice lower, I spoke as myself. Now surely she would know it was me.

  “Oh!” My mother’s voice sounded a little note of surprise. “All right. Well, do call back if you change your mind.”

  The phone clacked into its receiver at her end; just before the sound cut off, I could hear her voice again, speaking to the same woman or to someone else, just a friendly snip of a syllable, and then she was gone.

  “Who’s getting a checkup?” Delia asked warily.

  “No one, Delia.” I said. “Eat your cereal.”

  That day in physics, Dr. Schuler marched to the front of the classroom and, clearly trying to demonstrate something, held out at arm’s length a sheet of paper in one hand and a dictionary in the other. His head was thrown back oddly; his left shoulder muscles strained against the weight of the dictionary, but he held it out stiffly anyway, for what seemed like a long time.

  “Why will this book fall to the floor faster than this sheet of paper?” he shouted suddenly.

  We were used to his questioning style now, and everyone spoke up at once. “It’s heavier.” “It weighs more.”

  Dr. Schuler let go with both hands, and the book dropped with a bang. Everyone jumped a little in their chairs, then shifted and chuckled, looking at one another, laughing off the embarrassment of having jumped. Long, leisurely seconds went by as the white sheet of paper drifted its way toward the floor, hiccupping to the left and right on its way down.

  “Why did the book fall faster than the paper?” Dr. Schuler asked, his eyebrows arching high.

  “Because it’s heavier,” someone at the back of the room answered, a boy. He spoke vehemently, as if he were answering an annoying child.

  “Because it’s heavier!” Dr. Schuler repeated, making his way down the aisle toward the kid who had spoken. “Refresh my memory as to your name, Mr.…?”

  “Matt,” the voice said proudly. I didn’t want to turn around in my seat to look at the kid speaking; somehow it would have seemed childish to do so.

  “Matt, this book weighs more than a pencil. Do you think the book will fall faster than the pencil as well?”

  “Of course,” Matt said.

  “Well, Mr. Matt,” Dr. Schuler said happily, “you’ll be happy to know that you’re in good company. Many wise men have made the same mistake of observation that you have made today. Aristotle, for example. Aristotle set himself the futile task of explaining why heavier objects fall more quickly toward the Earth. Do you recall the explanation he came up with?”

  “Uh—no,” Matt said.

  “Those who do not read, Matt, have no advantage over those who cannot read,” Dr. Schuler told him gravely. “Think about that.” Dr. Schuler left us a silence in which to ponder this before continuing.

  “Aristotle hypothesized that heavier objects fall faster because all matter wants somehow to return to the Earth. He posited the notion that all matter has some kind of Earth essence in it, so that as an object gets closer to the Earth it starts to get excited to see the Earth, its old friend, and it speeds up, faster and faster, trying to get home.”

  Dr. Schuler stepped away from Matt and moved to the front of the room again.

  “Of course, he was completely wrong. It’s impossible to explain why heavier things fall faster because, in fact, heavier things don’t fall faster.” He paused and turned to look at us, a dramatic look, as if he expected some outcry.

  “Don’t believe me? Good. You shouldn’t. Never believe what anyone tells you. But never believe what you were raised to believe either. What you want, scholars, is empirical evidence. Let’s go outside.”

  Ten minutes later, we stood outside in the parking lot in the blazing heat. Dr. Schuler had told us precisely where to stand before disappearing back inside. We stood sweating, looking at each other, waiting. We knew he would reappear on the roof, but somehow it still surprised us when he did. He looked strange up there, small and fragile, his movements tiny and ineffectual, his voice high and weak. A breeze picked up the front of his hair.

  “Scholars!” he hollered. No one answered. We all squinted up at him.

  “Can you hear me?” he yelled.

  We all nodded. A couple of kids groaned, “Yes…” in annoyed tones.

  “All right, then!” he yelled. “Timekeeper, are you ready?”

  He had chosen the girl with the acne and spiky hair, Tina, to hold the stopwatch; she waved back up at him listlessly.

  “Drumroll, please!”

  Nobody responded, but there was, in fact, an odd feeling of suspense. Everyone was tense, leaning forward slightly, eyes trained on Dr. Schuler.

  “Five!” he yelled. “Four! Three! Two! One! Ignition!” The book and the pencil seemed at first not to be moving at all. Then they were floating down softly, all at the wrong sizes and wrong speeds, falling faster and faster until a soft thunk seemed to precede their actually hitting the pavement.

  “Which hit first?” Dr. Schuler screamed, jumping up and down. “Which hit first?”

  No one had any idea. I’d been so amazed by the falling itself, by the sheer drama of the falling, that I’d forgotten to notice which hit first. It had been difficult to take in both the book and the pencil at once; it was only possible to watch one at a time.

  “Which hit first?” Dr. Schuler screamed again. “Timekeeper!”

  But Tina shook her head and shrugged sheepishly. She had forgotten to click the stopwatch at the right time. Dr. Schuler turned away and disappeared from the roof.

  Back in the classroom, when we still couldn’t tell him whether the book or the pencil had reached the ground first, he stormed around and didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. He refused to give his follow-up talk on gravity. Instead we had to spend the rest of the hour making calculations of how long various objects would take to fall from the roof of our school using the gravitational constant.

  “If we can’t perform a simple experiment,” he fumed, “if we can’t establish some basic facts about gravity through empirical study, then I can’t see how you can ever gain an understanding of the physical universe. I can stand here and tell you about it, but you know and I know that that doesn’t mean anything. You have to see it with your own eyes.”

  For the rest of the hour, Dr. Schuler sulked at his desk. He thought we had disrespected his experiment, but he was wrong; on the contrary, I had been too interested in it to see what he wanted me to see. It was that very first fraction of a second of motion that had startled me; it had seemed that something had gone wrong. For the tiniest instant, I had thought it was Dr. Schuler himself falling, and not the objects. Dr. Schuler in his tie and his glasses, slipping past the raised lip of the roof and falling, falling toward the Earth.

  Tina and Chiarra didn’t seem to notice me at all that day, even though Tina sat next to me again in class. But as I left the classroom and headed toward math, I heard Chiarra’s voice calling out to me.

  “Hey, Miss Physics!” Chiarra called.

  I turned around, fearing an attack. The two of them were leaning against a row of lockers. But their faces were smiling, not mocking. They waved me over.

  “Hey, what’s your name again?” asked Chiarra. “You go to my pool, right?” It was hard to tell whether she was being friendly or just gathering information to taunt me with. Tina
tilted her head to one side, examining me from head to toe.

  “It’s Dolores,” I answered.

  “Dolores,” Chiarra repeated. “What grade are you in?”

  “Ninth,” I said. I had decided not to mention being Gifted and Talented.

  “We’re in tenth.”

  “You’re sophomores?” I asked, impressed.

  “Yeah. My father said I have to take physics with Dr. Schuler. He’s supposed to be this big genius or something. At least that’s what my father says.”

  “Tina’s father works for NASA,” Chiarra explained.

  “Mine too,” I said, pleased that this was no longer a lie.

  “Oh my God, is your father a physicist?” Chiarra asked. “That must be why you’re so good at physics. I can’t believe you knew the answer to that thing he was asking yesterday about gravity. I didn’t even know what he was talking about, did you, Tina?”

  “Not a chance in hell,” Tina agreed.

  “Did you study beforehand or something?” Chiarra asked.

  I gave her a you’re-crazy look, and that was the right response—they both smiled.

  “My father’s always talking about that stuff,” I said. “I try not to listen, but I guess some of it sinks in accidentally.”

  “Ugh, I know what you mean. NASA talk,” Tina said.

  They both regarded me for a moment, and I waited for their next question, feeling I was being interviewed for a job. But neither of them asked me anything.

  “She’s so cute,” Chiarra said to Tina finally, as if I were no longer there. “Isn’t she cute?”

  They both looked at me, smiling. Somehow, this did not seem inconsistent with their behavior yesterday—they were like a couple of little girls finding an unfamiliar creature, unsure whether to torture it or mother it. Somehow, without even trying, I had made my first high school friends.

  14.

  ALTHOUGH WE HADN’T EXPECTED IT TO, THE NEW MALL CHANGED the way we lived. Soon it was where we spent all of our time. When our father was done with work, he’d pull up and idle in the driveway. Delia and I came running out, locking the house behind us, me with my physics book under my arm. The longer my mother was gone, the more we seemed to want to avoid spending time in the house. We’d drive to the mall in silence, park in the acres of parking lot, and when we all walked through the wide set of doors, that cool air and soft music and recessed lighting worked on us like a drug, calming the jumpy feeling we all had. Sometimes we had dinner in a restaurant on the Concourse Level, but more often we ate in the Food Court, where we didn’t have to agree on anything, the three of us chewing different fried foods at a plastic table, not bothering to take our things off the plastic trays.

  The mall did something to me that I would never recover from. Only the best would be good enough, and the best was to be determined at a national, not a local, level. I begged for the things I saw at the mall, things I hoped would transform me into a better person: tapes of the bands that Tina and Chiarra talked about, glitter nail polish, a princess phone, a portable cassette player, glow-in-the-dark earrings, a set of three lip glosses that smelled like various fruits. I’d start working on my father, still sitting in the Food Court, trying to convince him that I needed these things. In the stores, I begged for things I didn’t even want, just so as not to have to leave the mall empty-handed. I saw kids from school in the stores with their parents, begging for new things too. We’d meet eyes, but not talk. We were all playing catch-up, trying to correct our incorrect lives, to replace all the things we owned that we now realized were wrong.

  One night soon after school started, my father suggested we try a new restaurant at the mall. We noticed right away that he seemed more purposeful than usual; he kept checking his watch as we parked and walked through the main doors. He led us to the entrance of the Italian restaurant on the first floor, the nicest restaurant in the mall. It was dark inside, red tablecloths and red booths lit by low lamps and a flickering candle on each table. My father lingered in the entryway, looking for something, even though the sign said PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF.

  Then I saw why we were here. I spotted her before my father did; she was sitting in a corner booth, smoking. The glass of red wine in front of her was half empty. My mother looked like a stranger, like a woman I’d never seen before, her skin and eyes glossy in the candlelight. I had so rarely seen her when she didn’t know she was being watched—it was like having the chance to see her life without me, her life if she hadn’t been a mother. Her face was beautiful, I realized, and it was dear to me. Her brown eyes constantly searching, looking for someone to look back at her. Somehow, as she looked around, she kept missing me.

  She made another sweep of the bar area to her left, this time bringing her cigarette up to her lips, and it was such a practiced gesture, my heart broke for her. I wondered how many times she had sat in bars and restaurants like this, waiting for Mr. Biersdorfer, looking around with just this expression. It was somehow inviting and confident, while underneath that, just barely visible, an intense hopefulness, desperate and unloved, a look of one just about to give up hope. There was something else in her face too, something maybe only I could see: that undercurrent of growing certainty that she had been stood up, made a fool of. The suspicion that could quickly turn to hurt, then anger.

  I knew my father had spotted her when he said quietly, “Oh!” a surprised grunt, as if he hadn’t been expecting to see her here, though of course they must have planned this. His face relaxed into a look of happiness—not exactly a smile. He almost seemed to glow, catching sight of her, admiring her across the room. Only when I saw this look did I understand, for the first time, that he had no idea what was going on with Mr. Biersdorfer, that he thought she might come back.

  Then Delia spotted her. She gave a cry of happiness, ran down the aisle between tables, and flung herself into my mother’s arms. People on either side looked at them and smiled nervously. My mother didn’t seem self-conscious—she giggled and hugged Delia hard.

  “We didn’t see you here,” my father announced; then he looked embarrassed as he realized this made no sense. He slid into the booth opposite my mother. I sat next to him; Delia was still in my mother’s lap.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had changed, though of course she was also exactly the same. She was wearing a dress I had never seen before, a maroon wraparound with a pattern of tan squares. She had straightened her hair recently, and the chemicals had been too strong, as often happened to her; the ends were fried, as though they had drifted too close to a flame. Her face was shiny with makeup, her cheeks pinked and her eyes outlined with pencil. She looked as nervous as she’d been the night the Biersdorfers came to dinner so long ago. I thought about how everything was backward now: Mr. Biersdorfer saw my everyday mother, her real face, while we saw her made-up face and tense smile. Her nervousness was a smell, her perfume and the faint sweet burnt smell of her hair relaxer tinged with the cigarettes she’d had on the way over. I knew she had worked so hard to make everything perfect and matching, but her tan high-heeled shoes didn’t quite match the pattern on the dress; neither did the tan purse with the broken strap. I’d thought somehow that Mr. Biersdorfer would have changed her, that she would now have nice things, the expensive sheen that Mrs. Biersdorfer had. It made me angry at him, at Mr. Biersdorfer, not only for taking her away from us, but for failing to make her better, as surely she had hoped he would.

  “You’re looking well, Deborah,” my father said. We all looked at him.

  “Thank you,” my mother murmured, then cleared her throat. Nobody said anything for a while.

  “Delia was just telling us about her field trip to SeaWorld,” my father said. This was true; she’d talked about it in the car, and we had both more or less ignored her.

  “She was telling us about the sea lions,” he added, hoping to prompt her. But Delia said nothing; she was looking up openmouthed at our mother sitting next to her, warm and fragrant, larger than life.
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  “Ohh, that sounds like fun,” my mother enthused, holding the f a long time between her teeth. I’d forgotten that about her: the way she pronounced words more crisply when she was wearing lipstick.

  “Tell me what the sea lions did, baby.” She folded her hands on the table in front of her, a friendly but unfamiliar smile, like an aunt or a babysitter, a childless friend of the family.

  “Umm…” Delia trailed off. Delia, who was always looking for an audience, was suddenly struck with stage fright. She looked up at our mother, her eyes wide and wary. While we waited for her to answer, my mother changed the interlocking of her fingers, then changed it back again. She wore her diamond engagement ring, but I wasn’t sure whether she was wearing her wedding ring stacked under it. I squinted at her finger, leaned forward a bit to get a better look. My mother noticed me and tried to catch my eye.

  “And what about you, Dolores?” she asked, still formal, still with that distant-sounding warmth. “What have you been up to?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to this, and I sat struggling for a minute. But she didn’t seem to notice; she wasn’t waiting for an answer anyway. She had already turned back to my father.

  “And how have you been, Frank?” she asked him. “How’s it going? Have the girls been good for you?”

  “Oh, just fine,” my father said. “They’ve been great for me.” My father turned his jovial smile on me, looking for affirmation. I glared back at him.

  “Umm, we went to SeaWorld?” Delia piped up, raising her little face to my mother.