The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Your father and my mother are having an affair,” I said. I hadn’t known I would say it until I did. Eric didn’t answer, just watched me steadily with his gray eyes.

  “They have been for about eight months now. My mother moved out in the summer, and I don’t know where she is exactly, but I think she’s been staying someplace where she can be with your father.” As I spoke, I watched Eric for a reaction, but he was perfectly still until he was sure I was finished speaking.

  “I don’t think that can be true,” he said finally.

  “But it is,” I said. “That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve seen them. My mother used to take me with her to go and meet him.”

  “Why would she do that?” he asked. The light evenness of his tone was maddening.

  “For cover. She used to tell my father she was taking me shopping and go meet your father instead.”

  Only then did Eric really react. He cracked a grin, a little warily, the way my father smiled at my mother when he thought she was wrong but didn’t want to say so.

  “Okay, well, let’s look at the facts.” He peeled a pinky finger away from its fist. “You saw them together—once?”

  I hadn’t anticipated that Eric would instigate an Eric-style argument over this. His flat arguing voice was familiar, his irritating arguing face with its expression of calm superiority.

  “It was more than once,” I corrected. “It happened on several distinct occasions.”

  This wasn’t entirely true, actually. I knew I’d seen my mother and Mr. Biersdorfer together once, but the other times, my mother had dropped me off and disappeared for the rest of the afternoon. I’d assumed she was meeting him, but it was true that I hadn’t actually seen Mr. Biersdorfer except that once.

  “Second”—now Eric peeled the ring finger back—“your mother left. Okay. That’s a hard thing. But you can’t assume it has anything to do with my father. It doesn’t make much sense that she would leave to be with him, honestly, because he’s still living in his own house with his wife and his son.”

  “Eric, have you ever heard of a thing called having a mistress? Married men put up their girlfriends in a nice apartment where they can go visit anytime.”

  “But when does he go?” he demanded. “Even before this Challenger thing happened, he was working all the time. If he’s home, he’s locked away in his study. I mean, all the time—nights, weekends, holidays. Do you know, my family has never been on a vacation? And since Challenger, he’s been working even more. In fact, he’s working in his study at home right now. Where would an affair with your mom fit into all this?”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” I asked triumphantly, “that your father might not always be where he says he is? Like tonight. You think he’s working in his study, your mom thinks he’s working in his study.” I leaned forward and lowered my voice for effect. “Maybe he’s with my mother right now.”

  “What, you think he went into his study and then snuck out when no one was looking?”

  “Why not?” I pointed out. “We did.”

  Eric didn’t answer right away. I felt pleased with myself for having presented an argument he couldn’t immediately dismiss. He sat and thought for a minute. Then he took in a breath, let it out heavily, and smacked his palms against his knees, a gesture that reminded me of my father.

  “Let’s find out,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He stood up and pulled a key ring from his pocket, jingling it. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Go where?”

  He was already walking, and I had to hustle in order to catch up with him. “My house,” Eric said. “If you’re right, he won’t be there.”

  We walked to the west entrance of the Space Center, closer than the entrance I had used. Eric led me to the car, parked a bit up the road. It was a newer version of the Oldsmobile I had known in seventh grade. Eric slipped into the driver’s seat and fit the key into the ignition.

  “What?” he said to my exaggerated openmouthed look of shock at his driving. “What’s the big deal?” But Eric couldn’t help showing me his real smile then, quick and devilish, with a lift of the eyebrows. I felt a sudden jealousy for the girls at his school, the girls who got to see this smile every day.

  Eric pulled out onto the road. He made little adjustments with the wheel, slowing steadily before stop signs and accelerating away from them smoothly.

  “You can drive,” I marveled.

  “That’s what I told you,” Eric answered. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled up at Eric’s house, lit up as always with landscaping lights. He took me around to a side door.

  “Okay, you’re going to have to be really quiet,” Eric said. He looked me up and down. “Um, take off your shoes.”

  “They’re sneakers,” I protested, but I slipped them off while he watched.

  “Okay, you’ll have to follow me and step exactly where I step,” Eric whispered. We climbed up two flights, Eric pausing on each landing to let me catch up with him. I watched the backs of Eric’s sneakers until they faded and disappeared, and then I could see nothing, felt nothing but the smothering airlessness of absolute dark. I reached out in front of me to feel for invisible obstacles.

  “Eric,” I whispered as quietly as I could. I felt him stop walking.

  “Yeah,” he whispered back. He had moved very close to me, our faces almost touching, so we could hear each other.

  “I can’t see.”

  “Yeah, well, the lights are off.”

  “No, I mean…” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. “I can’t see. I can’t see where to go.”

  “Okay, hold out your hand,” he commanded. I did, waving my arm slowly from side to side until I felt our fingers brush together. His skin was warm and surprisingly soft. The fingers gripped my hand delicately. I squeezed back. Holding hands, we walked up the last flight of stairs, and Eric flipped on the hallway light.

  “We still have to be quiet,” Eric whispered. “My mother’s room is right under us.” Our hands were still joined; I wasn’t sure whether Eric had forgotten or if he meant to hold my hand, and if so, what that meant. I looked up at him: his profile was set and unreadable.

  “Okay, it’s right here,” he whispered outside a closed door. He pressed his ear to the door for a long time, his face registering nothing.

  I could imagine Mr. Biersdorfer in there working late, his white shirtsleeves folded up, paging through reports and memos detailing theories and data from the investigation, all stamped CONFIDENTIAL in red. He would be scowling and sweating, dictating brief angry memos into a machine. When he found us here, he would go into a rage. He would call my father, who would be horrified.

  “I don’t think he’s in there,” Eric whispered. I could tell by how slowly he spoke that he wasn’t sure. He dropped my hand suddenly and reached for the doorknob.

  “What are you doing?” I breathed.

  “I just want to be sure,” Eric said.

  “Eric, no,” I whispered, but he was already swinging the door open and stepping into the room. A dim light was on in the office, but after a few seconds of silence, I stepped forward and saw Eric standing in the middle of the room, his hands against his hips. I followed him in.

  A huge desk of dark wood faced the door, covered with books and files. A dim gold lamp sat on the desk, spilling a circle of light onto the papers. All of the walls were lined with dark wood shelving, interrupted here and there by plaques, framed photographs of Mercury and Apollo vehicles and astronauts, and a calendar identical to the one Mr. Biersdorfer had given to our seventh-grade class. The room had a vague smell that seemed to come partly from the wood, but that was also made up of paper, old coffee, and a warm tinge of cologne. The room was in some ways exactly what I would expect, but at the same time its sense of habitation was surprising. The fact of Mr. Biersdorfer’s physical presence in this room, the fact of his breathing here, sitting and moving around here for
so many hours over the years, was palpable in the roughness of the papers’ piles, in the quality of the yellow light on the desk, as if everything were waiting for him to return in just a moment.

  I stepped closer to the wall to see the NASA memorabilia. There were signed photographs of the Mercury seven, Neil Armstrong planting the flag, the shot of the whole Earth, the blue marble from Apollo 17, taken the week I was born.

  “Well,” Eric said, looking around the office in a businesslike way, “this could mean a lot of different things.” He still stood with his hands on his hips. “He might have gone to bed, for one thing. He might be in his office at work. He doesn’t usually go there this late, but it’s possible.”

  Eric stood quietly then, and I could practically hear the activity of his mind, trying to come up with more possibilities.

  “This doesn’t prove anything,” Eric said, but now he was looking at me, searching my face for an answer or some reassurance.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” I had learned this from Dr. Schuler.

  Eric nodded. “Right. I mean, he could be anywhere. My father and your mother. Really. It’s absurd. I suppose you think this started that time your family had us over for dinner?”

  “He was flirting with her an awful lot that night,” I pointed out.

  “But it would be so stupid. This would be the worst time for something like this to happen. Even if he was doing something like this before the disaster—which I’m not saying he was—but now he’s under so much scrutiny. It would be insane.”

  I reached out and took Eric’s elbow. At first he stood more rigidly, almost about to pull away. But still I wasn’t surprised when Eric crumpled against me, his back rounding as he stooped over to slip his arms around my neck. His head hung on my shoulder awkwardly; I could tell he didn’t know what to do, but he didn’t let go.

  “We should get out of here,” I whispered after a long time. I still felt nervous that his father could return at any minute and unravel everything. But Eric was ready to kiss me then, and he wanted to do it there, in his father’s study. What I felt then was so different from what I had experienced with Josh any of the times he had kissed me, especially that afternoon in his room, that afternoon which had so quickly shrunk in my mind to the image of Josh sweating over me, laboring at something private, something only he could know. Eric’s kiss was trembling, unpracticed, but it was entirely for me, and we stood kissing for a long time in that room with the dark wood smell and the faces of old-style astronauts smiling all around us, just outside that yellow circle of light.

  27.

  I KNEW I LOVED ERIC BIERSDORFER THEN, SO IT WAS A STRANGE feeling to climb off the bus on Monday morning and see Tina and Chiarra lounging in the grass, sleepy and smiling, sneaking a smoke before homeroom, and to think they knew nothing of Eric and would only want to hear about Josh.

  “Hey, what happened to you on Friday?” Chiarra called. “We went to the mall, but you guys weren’t there. Did you sneak off somewhere?”

  “You’ll never guess,” I began, and they fell silent as I told them about Josh picking me up and turning left instead of right. By the time I got to the two of us climbing into Josh’s bed, Tina and Chiarra were clutching each other for support.

  “Oh my God, you let him?” Tina demanded. I felt as though I were lying to them, because really I had barely thought of Josh since Friday; I had been thinking only of Eric. I felt as though Josh were something I had accomplished, like work—he was a permanent shield I had constructed for myself. But Eric was what I had wanted to find all along.

  As I spoke, we saw Josh approaching us from across the parking lot. He sidled up to me, and I felt aware of Tina and Chiarra’s attention, the way they scrutinized the two of us—they were just as curious as I was to see how people are supposed to act together after they’ve had sex.

  “Ready for some new Challenger jokes?” Josh asked.

  “Oh God, no,” Tina moaned, but then we all listened expectantly.

  “How do they know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?”

  “How?”

  I studied Josh’s expression—lighthearted, amused, only slightly mean. For the first time, I realized the Challenger explosion hadn’t really affected him, not the way it had affected Eric or me.

  “They found her head and shoulders on the beach,” Josh said, then opened his mouth wide and squinted in a parody of helpless laughter.

  “Josh, that is disgusting,” Tina moaned, covering her face with her hands. “Did they really find her head and shoulders on the beach?” she asked a moment later, her voice rising in panic. Josh burst out laughing for real.

  “Ugh, I don’t want to hear any more,” Tina said. She and Chiarra gathered their things.

  “We’ll leave you two lovers alone,” Chiarra said.

  As soon as they were gone, Josh pulled me to him and slipped an arm around my shoulders.

  “I’ve missed you,” he whispered, his breath hot on my neck. I resisted the urge to flinch away. Josh didn’t seem to notice; he was nuzzling my cheek.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he added. “I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.” He didn’t seem to expect answers to any of these statements. He played with my hair, traced the outline of my jaw, a child excitedly exploring a new toy.

  I marveled at his transformation, at the way sex can make the hardest, most sarcastic character into a pile of unabashed mushy clichés. Did he mean any of these things he was saying? It hardly mattered. He would say anything in the world to ensure I would come over to his house again this afternoon. Or maybe he meant every word of it, maybe he had been thinking of me, missing me, dreaming of me. I tried to imagine what this would be like, tried to conjure his image of me: a silent brown-haired thing, a tiny package, skinny arms and legs, pink unpracticed lips. I tried to see myself as he had seen me, pulling my shirt over my head and smiling mischievously. I couldn’t imagine it.

  “So, um—are you doing okay?” Josh asked, and now there was an edge of nervousness in his voice. I wasn’t sure at first what he meant. Why wouldn’t I be okay? But then I understood—he meant the sex. He was trying to ask delicately whether I had been damaged.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “It still hurts pretty bad.” Just at that moment, I had decided to be cruel. The first bell rang, a five-minute warning to get to class.

  “Still?” he said, blanching. “I’m sorry. Do you think—”

  “Plus,” I added, “I think I may be pregnant.”

  Josh’s eyes bugged. “You mean you’re late?” Even as he spoke, I could see his brow furrowing, counting the days as the illogic of this claim set in.

  “But it’s too early,” he said. “I mean, you wouldn’t know something like that for at least a couple of weeks, right?”

  “Oh, I know. I’m just kidding,” I said quickly. I gave a little giggle. “Joke.” Josh’s face went from white to red.

  “Joke,” he echoed. “Okay, just a note for future reference?” His sarcasm was back in full force. “That? Is not a good joke.”

  He bared his teeth and tried to give a laugh, a low heh-heh, to show that he could laugh at himself.

  “But it sounds like you know a lot about it,” I pointed out. “Sounds like you know what you’re talking about.”

  “Whatever,” Josh said vaguely, looking up at the main doors, where the other kids were hurrying in. “Health class.” But I was surprised by how deeply I felt the pain of this possibility, that Josh had experienced previous pregnancy scares, the idea of Josh having done this before, many times, with lots of other girls. Maybe he chose a freshman girl every fall; maybe he made a hobby of it. Maybe everyone knew but me.

  “I have to go to physics,” I said.

  “But can you come over again after school?” his voice was high, almost squeaking. “Meet you in the parking lot?”

  “I have to take care of my sister,” I said.

&
nbsp; “I’ll get you home before she gets there,” he offered.

  His expression was beseeching, and it was somehow embarrassing to see it, even obscene, his eyes shining and his mouth open, completely unself-conscious. He was exposed, much more than when I’d seen him without his clothes. I had no intention of ever going to Josh’s house again, to his puppy-smelling bed. But I said, “Okay.”

  Josh smiled broadly, relieved, and that smile reminded me again of the Josh I’d once admired from afar, the Josh of such effortless cuteness, such easy grace. As he kissed me, I felt surprised that he couldn’t see the change in me, the mark of Eric. I could feel Eric as a cloud hovering around me, Eric as a part of my body, another organ. He could see everything I did, hear everything I said and thought, and I felt I could commune with him this way, glance at him sideways under my eyelids and share an invisible look, even when he was miles away.

  After my last class, I slipped onto the bus early. I knew that Josh was waiting for me, that he had pulled his car up to the curb where everyone could see him, lounging on the hood. I had never before considered the effort that must have gone into Josh’s performances, but now I could see that he had worked hard to impress me. Josh waited on his Datsun, first with anticipation, then with impatience, then with annoyance. He watched everyone else he knew stream out the doors. He greeted them, yelled friendly things to them, turned down their offers of other places to go. He told them he was waiting for me. I know he must have waited a long time, until after everyone had driven away and the yellow buses had rumbled off in a long parade of diesel fumes. Only then would he have given up and turned the key.

  28.

  ERIC AND I MET IN HIS BACK YARD THE NEXT NIGHT. WE WERE awkward together, but we found things to talk about. School, classes, good teachers and bad teachers. I wanted to ask Eric about the girls at his school, whether he had made friends with any of them, or even a girlfriend. But I decided not to; it was none of my business, and besides, I wouldn’t have wanted him to ask me similar questions.