The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Dolores Gray,” he shouted. Every head in the room swiveled to stare at me. The blood rushed to my skin so quickly I felt my pulse thudding in my earlobes. My whole body shuddered with embarrassment, trying to shiver myself out of existence. I snatched the OTA from the top of my desk and shoved it into my notebook, as if by removing the evidence I could divert everyone’s attention from me. For the rest of the class period, even as we started on new material, I still felt them all staring.

  As I got up to leave after class, Dr. Schuler gestured me over to him.

  “I hope you don’t mind me making an example of you,” he said in a low voice. Up close, his eyebrows looked even more wild.

  “Young people often become very good at making excuses for themselves,” he said, making a gesture to encompass the room behind me. He affected a lazy, whiny tone: “‘I couldn’t.’ ‘It was too hard.’ ‘It was impossible.’ They start to believe their own excuses, you see. It’s important for the others to know that it is possible to succeed.”

  I felt myself blushing horribly all over again.

  “Tell me, Dolores. Are you interested in a career in science?” Dr. Schuler asked, raising his eyebrows. I wasn’t sure what to say. No one had ever asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up in a way that didn’t seem patronizing, half mocking. Dr. Schuler was studying me seriously, his eyes darting all over my face, the front of my shirt, my fingers on the strap of my backpack.

  “I’m going to be an astronaut,” I said, so quietly that he leaned forward to hear me.

  “The astronaut corps!” he said warmly. “Well. That’s quite an aspiration. The odds are certainly against you, but I admire your confidence. We’ll have to talk about that sometime.”

  Tina and Chiarra drifted close to us, waiting for me to finish.

  “Well, thanks,” I said quickly. “I’ll talk to you about that later,” and hurried out of the room before he could answer.

  “Well, Miss One Oh Two!” Chiarra crowed as soon as we got out into the hall. “‘This is what a young mind is capable of!’”

  “Shut up,” I said, grateful that Chiarra’s tone was warm and affectionate. The other kids who were still filing out stopped to listen to our exchange.

  “You got that extra-credit question?” Tina asked. “What the hell was that?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember,” I said. “Some crap about Sir Isaac Newton.”

  Doug came shuffling dejectedly out to the hallway, and when he heard us discussing the test, he paused to listen, holding an OTA marked 79 under his arm.

  “I can’t believe you got those extra-credit points,” he said. “I didn’t even understand the question.”

  “She’s so smart,” Tina said, gazing at me.

  “I wish you’d tell us your secret before the next OTA,” Doug said. “I really have to do well in this class and so far I’m sucking at it.”

  “Her father is a physicist for NASA,” Chiarra explained. “It’s genetic or something.”

  “Jeez,” Doug said. “How am I supposed to compete with that?” The look he gave me was not spiteful or condescending but friendly, even admiring.

  STS 61-B, Atlantis.

  Launch November 26, 1985, on schedule at 7:29 pm.

  The crew deployed three satellites and conducted two six-hour spacewalks to demonstrate space station construction techniques. They were in space on Thanksgiving and ate a special turkey dinner.

  My father took me to this launch.

  “What do you think of this Teacher in Space?” my father asked Delia and me while we got settled in to wait for the launch. It was unseasonably cold for November, in the forties, so we huddled in the car with the heat on rather than get out and wait on the hood as we often did.

  The next mission would be launching in only three weeks; the mission after that, 51-L, was scheduled for January 22 and would carry Christa McAuliffe, Judith Resnik, and five others.

  “Not a real astronaut,” I said dismissively. The day before, Delia and I had watched a TV special about Christa McAuliffe—Christa standing up at the chalkboard teaching her students with a broad smile, Christa trying out safety equipment in a swimming pool. Christa training for her upcoming mission in the KC-135, the plane that flies up and then plunges down again, simulating the weightlessness the astronauts will experience on Challenger. She stretched her arms out like a bird, kicked her legs up under her, and hovered in the padded cabin, a gleeful smile on her face. This is why they chose her, I thought, because she doesn’t seem to think she’s better than other people.

  “I like her,” said Delia distinctly now, in answer to my father’s question. “I wish she was my teacher.”

  “I’m sure she’s a fine teacher,” I said, annoyed. “But she’s not a real astronaut. Some people work all their lives to get to go to space, and she just gets picked. The way they pick Miss America.” Delia listened, her face blank. “She doesn’t even have a degree in science. It’s not fair.”

  “I think she’s nice,” Delia said. “She’ll teach kids about space.”

  “Delia likes her, Dolores doesn’t,” my father summed up. I knew he agreed with me.

  “It’s not that I don’t like her, it’s that she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” I said, exasperated. “She’ll jeopardize the mission.” I could imagine Christa pushing the wrong buttons, asking stupid questions, getting in the astronauts’ way.

  But in the footage I’d seen of her training, I had to admit she did seem just as competent as the real astronauts. She floated in a pool wearing her flight suit and helmet, learning safety procedures, what to do in case of a water landing. She thrashed through the water with the same combination of determination and self-mocking as the others, wearing a huge smile all the while.

  16.

  DR. SCHULER KEPT ADMINISTERING HIS OTAS AS COMPETITIONS with a single winner, and I kept winning. I had gained a special awareness in the eyes of Dr. Schuler; when he asked a difficult question in class and no one else answered it, he saved me for last, a right answer he knew he could count on, and he called on me with a flourish.

  “Ms. Gray!” he shouted, waving his chalk in the air with his impossibly long arm. “Perhaps you can settle this for us!”

  I enjoyed answering in a calm, almost bored voice. I feared the effect this might have on my social standing, but I loved being right. I loved understanding what the others didn’t; I loved seeing Dr. Schuler’s smirk as he turned back to the blackboard to inscribe my words in large block letters. Then he turned to repeat them in a satisfied shout.

  “The coefficient of FRICTION! THANK you, Ms. Gray.”

  Everyone looked at me in those moments, and I know I always blushed. But Tina and Chiarra made clear they didn’t judge me for it; they claimed to find my ability in physics “cute.” It was a decision I kept making, over and over again; I made it every night when I opened my physics book again and studied hard the way I did, learning not just all the terms and formulas but the derivations, the logic behind them.

  It wasn’t just that I wanted to please Dr. Schuler. When I turned a page and saw equations that didn’t mean anything to me yet, impenetrable symbols, my heart gave a little skip with the anticipation of knowing I would soon understand them all. The wall of incomprehensibility would slowly dissolve. It wasn’t anything as benign as intellectual curiosity. It felt more like arrogance, egotism, competitiveness pure and simple. I didn’t just want to understand; I wanted to understand better than anyone else. I knew it must be the same for Eric. Even though it had been many months now since I’d seen him, I felt closest to him when I studied this way, felt almost that he was looking over my shoulder. I missed him most feeling that almost-understanding, that resistance, giving way in a warm rush of knowledge.

  Then came my birthday and Christmas, our first without our mother. I turned thirteen on December 11, and my father bought and wrapped the things I’d written down for him: hair curlers, a Prince tape, a calculator.

  For Christmas, my fath
er tried to prepare all the foods my mother traditionally made, and we tried to enact all the normal activities—decorating the tree, cutting out white paper doilies to simulate snowflakes, watching the ancient animated Rudolph on TV. My father overcooked the turkey and undercooked the potatoes, and for the first time I could remember since my mother had left us, Delia cried for her.

  “It’s okay, D,” my father murmured. “Hey, look at Dolores. She’s not crying. She’s having a nice Christmas.”

  But I felt the bleakness of everything too, the bleakness of our dim empty house, of the semi-apologetic way my father had of doing everything—looking in cookbooks for help cooking even the simplest foods, perching the sparkly star at the top of the Christmas tree at not quite the right angle.

  “It’s okay, Delia,” I said. My father got up to clear the table. Delia, still weeping, struggled to finish her potatoes before he could take her plate away.

  “She’ll calm down when we open the presents,” he told me quietly as we did the dishes together. And he was right: while we finished up in the kitchen, Delia opened her first present, a Barbie. She squealed with a rapture I could never remember having felt myself over any toy, over anything. My father must have stood in the girl aisles of the toy store, studying the shiny hot pink boxes of Barbies, laboring to discern the fine differences between the Barbies in order to pick the right one for Delia. He might have brought me with him to help, but he probably bought my presents on the same trip, and imagining what he might have bought me, what pains he might have gone to for me, I teared up.

  “Oh, not you too,” my father said good-naturedly. He shook off the pot he was washing and slung the dish towel over his shoulder to give me a hug.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and it was true. In the living room, Delia had fully recovered and was singing “O Christmas Tree” at the top of her lungs, lifting her Barbie over her head. We opened the rest of our presents, and my father had bought me a portable stereo for my room, just what I wanted.

  STS 61-C, Columbia.

  Launch attempt December 18, 1985, delayed one day to finish closing out Columbia’s payload bay.

  Launch attempt December 19 scrubbed at T minus 14 seconds due to a problem with the right Solid Rocket Booster.

  After an eighteen-day delay so the crew and workers could celebrate Christmas, a launch attempt January 6, 1986, was scrubbed at T minus 34 seconds. 4,000 pounds of liquid oxygen were accidentally drained from the External Tank. Two more delays due to weather and one more due to a problem in the Main Engine.

  Launch January 12, 1986, at 6:55 am.

  Congressman Bill Nelson flew on this mission. His district covers the Kennedy Space Center. My father says it was inappropriate for him to fly and that he will not vote for him again.

  My father took me to the first and second launch attempts.

  STS 61-C went through more attempts than any other mission had. We were all used to delays due to technical problems and weather, sometimes two or three delays stacking up together until visitors went from exasperated to angry and newscasters started to snicker and joke on the nightly news. I had thought I was above this, but 61-C was delayed so many times, for so many different reasons, that I started to feel the desperate frustration myself. When the fourth launch attempt was called off only nine seconds before liftoff because of bad weather at an abort site, my father and I threw our hands up and groaned like the tourists. Bad weather in Africa! We heard people yell at each other in disbelief. Part of the frustration came from the fact that this mission was meant to study Halley’s Comet, and with every passing launch attempt, the window for photographing the comet narrowed. The mission finally launched at the last possible moment to catch the comet, but once in orbit, the camera had battery problems and didn’t work anyway.

  Then it turned colder. Only a few times in my life had I felt true cold outside, a cold that made me huddle and shiver no matter how many sweaters I piled on, one over the other. A cold with a smell, narrow and sharp, so that when the cold would finally leave and the normal Florida smell came back, the air would taste broad and generous in the back of my throat, the smell of warmth and murky water and decaying green plants.

  The mission with the schoolteacher, STS 51-L, was next and had been assigned a new launch date later in January. Everyone started talking about that mission, about Christa McAuliffe. TV crews, which had in recent years stopped showing up for launches, came out again to examine the shuttle and champion the astronauts, all because of the Teacher in Space. The area was swarmed with space tourists again, as it had been in the early days of the shuttle.

  We watched a segment on TV together about the upcoming mission: brief snippets of interviews with the crew members. Judith Resnik, wearing a nice dress and makeup, answered questions about traveling with the Teacher in Space.

  Then we saw Christa—a piece from her appearance on The Tonight Show. She leaned toward Johnny Carson, laughing at something he had said.

  “I had a couple of teachers in school I wouldn’t mind being sent into outer space,” Johnny Carson deadpanned, and Ed McMahon shouted laughter. Christa smiled politely.

  “I wonder how they picked her,” my father said without interest. “Out of all the teachers in America.”

  “She won a contest,” I said. “She’s a social studies teacher. She teaches about the pioneers. Apparently she’s going to keep a diary about being a pioneer in space. That’s her big project: a diary. I bet she’s never flown a plane. She probably can’t even drive a stick shift.”

  My father chuckled, but something dark passed over his face. “That’s not very nice,” he said. “You shouldn’t talk that way.”

  “Delia thinks she looks like Mom,” I told him, watching closely for his reaction. His expression didn’t change.

  “I don’t really see it,” he said finally.

  In physics, Dr. Schuler talked about the upcoming Teacher in Space mission nearly every day. I would have thought he would take an attitude toward it similar to my father’s, but Dr. Schuler had applied to the Teacher in Space program himself and had made it to the semifinals, and as a result he found the mission to be of historic significance. He had written essays explaining why he should be the Teacher in Space and a proposal describing his project: a study on fluid dynamics in microgravity. Probably his project had been too scientifically rigorous, he told us; probably that was why he hadn’t been chosen. Once Christa McAuliffe won with her diary proposal, Dr. Schuler said, he realized that he should have dumbed it down.

  “You’ll be able to tell your grandchildren that you were there when the first civilian astronaut was launched into space,” he said in his documentary voice-over tone.

  “She won’t be the first civilian,” Doug pointed out. Dr. Schuler looked surprised, and a bit annoyed, to hear from Doug. I was surprised too—I had thought I was the only one who knew that.

  “Last year,” Doug said. “A Saudi prince flew on 51-G.”

  “Is that true?” Dr. Schuler asked, screwing up his face to show his skepticism. Doug nodded.

  “Just on the last mission, 61-C, they sent a congressman from Florida,” I mentioned.

  “And a year or so ago, they sent a senator from Utah. He got really space sick,” Doug added.

  “A senator? Why would that be?” Dr. Schuler asked.

  “He’s on the Space Appropriations Committee,” I answered.

  Dr. Schuler clearly felt he was losing control of the discussion.

  “Well, it appears that NASA has previously sent some nonastronauts into space, for what sound like fundraising purposes. But this remains an historic occasion, the first time a civilian will fly for the purpose of instructing young people about spaceflight.”

  But once civilians started flying, I thought, how could we separate fundraising purposes from other purposes? Reagan had started talking about the Teacher in Space idea while he was running for his second term as President—Walter Mondale had pointed out his terrible record on education, an
d this had been Reagan’s response, send a teacher into space. My father was horrified that NASA had gone along with the plan, but even more embarrassing was that everyone else had bought into it too.

  The morning of the scheduled launch date for the Teacher in Space mission, Dr. Schuler dragged the TV on wheels into the classroom. We fell silent while he flipped through the channels, trying to find the local station broadcasting a feed from the Cape. We watched boring live footage for half an hour—the countdown clock running, people milling around in the VIP bleachers, the Launch Vehicle steaming against the launch tower.

  The announcement finally came only a few minutes before the planned liftoff time: the launch had been scrubbed until the next day. Shots of spectators shouting with annoyance, packing up their things, shaking their heads at the Launch Control Building, their fists on their hips. Vice President Bush, the newscaster mentioned, must be annoyed; he’d made the trip all the way from Washington for nothing. The weather had turned in Senegal again. A cancellation due to bad weather, the newscaster intoned in his how’s-that-for-irony voice, while in Florida it was a beautiful day.

  Delay time began. I knew the schedule that had been planned for the mission: had it launched on time, by now the astronauts would be unpacking in weightlessness, preparing for Christa’s first broadcast lesson. Instead, the launch was rescheduled for the next day. But that morning, before we even settled down in physics class, Dr. Schuler told us that the launch had been postponed yet again because the ground crews hadn’t had time to prepare overnight.

  Bad weather was predicted for Sunday, so the launch was postponed yet again, for Monday, January 27. But, as it turned out, they should have launched on the twenty-sixth after all; that turned out to be a beautiful day, cool and clear, not a cloud in the sky. My family watched the news that night while we ate dinner. The newscaster smirked; footage showed people out on the Cape looking up at the sky, shaking their heads, bewildered.