Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  “Duff, do you remember me from . . .” I groped for words to describe the time before my hop. “From before?”

  He glanced at me with an uncertain grin. “From before what?”

  “Before, before. About a year and a half ago. I think I saw you on one of your earlier hops, like, around the time I was thirteen.”

  Duff shook his head. “In 1969, I was still a lowly postdoc, toiling on my thesis and riding herd on my idiotic graduate student. No hops for me, except to the local watering hole. Must be déjà vu.”

  I sat back and considered this. Was he right? Over time, everything that I remembered from before the hop had grown less and less real, the session in the dentist’s office as uncertain as a dimly remembered dream. I discovered I even had memories of events that supposedly happened during the eighteen months I’d lost. Nonno Zin’s funeral. The night I helped Nonna Peppy take Pepé the Seventh to the vet clinic after he ate rat poison. The math exam I missed because I was sick with my period. Had I actually lived through all those things or simply internalized my family’s memories? I wasn’t sure.

  Duff interrupted my reverie, nodding at the windshield. “Look up the road.”

  Walking along the drainage ditch at the side of the concession road was Kendal, shirt off in the heat, head down, swinging his water jug. When Duff pulled over to pick him up, Kendal tried to wave him off. “I’ll walk.”

  Duff reached past me to throw open the passenger side door. “No way, man, it’s twenty miles into town. You’re gonna pass out in this heat.”

  Kendal hesitated for a moment, until I said, “Please get in.”

  He slid in next to me in the front seat and stared out the windshield, his body as stiff as a block of wood. Duff peeled away from the stony verge of the road.

  “Did you get paid?” I asked.

  “What kind of stupid question is that?” said Kendal.

  Those were the last words we exchanged until Duff pulled to the curb on Z Street. Kendal hopped out of the car and slammed the door, disappearing into his house without a backward glance or a see-you-later. He didn’t thank Duff for the ride.

  * * *

  Back at Nonna Peppy’s house, sitting at the vinyl-topped table, she poured me a cup of espresso. “He’s a nice boy, but he ain’t your kind, you know.”

  “But you of all people know about prejudice, Nonna,” I pointed out.

  She shook her head. “Listen: it’s one thing to fit in with regular folks if you’re Italian. Maybe you change your last name. You lose your accent. After a while, people don’t even look at you different from anyone else. But your friend can’t do nothing about the colour of his skin. And Shipman’s Corners ain’t Greenwich Village. You know what I’m saying? They might say, oh, that boy’s as good as anyone else, but just wait ’til he tries to find a job or get a loan at the bank or even a rent a house that ain’t on Z Street. Cara, that’s just the way the world is.”

  She took a sip of espresso; I could see her struggling with what she wanted to say next. Unusual for her: she was usually pretty good at speaking her mind.

  “The farmer said something about you being half-naked. Were you just kissing that boy or what?”

  I felt myself growing warm. “Yes, just kissing. Pretty much.”

  “Pretty much,” said Nonna Peppy, now looking me in the eyes. “Debbie, listen you to me: your sister wasn’t much older than you when she got in trouble. You know what I’m saying?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said.

  “Okay, okay.” She raised her hand. “This can stay between us girls. God forbid Madelena should have another daughter who keeps her up at night. Just be careful.” She pushed a plate of freshly baked biscotti at me. “Mangia. You’re getting so skinny lately, pretty soon you gonna disappear.”

  I nibbled on the biscotti, knowing I would need to find a quiet moment to rid myself of it before the digestive process took over.

  * * *

  I glanced at the kitchen clock: five o’clock. I slipped through the front door, wheeled my bike out of the garage and rode along Fermi Road until I found Sandy sitting on her front stoop, still in her work clothes. She gave a whoop when she saw me.

  “I sweet-talked your wages out of the field hand.” She pulled a few crumpled bills out of her jeans pocket. “You grounded?”

  I shook my head. “Nonna Peppy ran interference. Guess you’ll be picking strawberries without Kendal and me, though.”

  “What do you think he told his mother?”

  “Nothing, I hope. It seems like every time he gets mixed up with me, there’s trouble.”

  “You should call him,” said Sandy. “Chances are, he’ll answer the phone; I saw his mom drive by, making deliveries.”

  I made the call from Sandy’s kitchen, where Mrs. Holub hummed along with Dreams of the Everyday Housewife on the radio while mixing a potato salad. It must be handy, having a mom who doesn’t understand English. Kendal answered on the first ring.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” His voice sounded thick.

  “Meet me in Postapocalyptica?” I suggested.

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Kendal. “You almost get me killed, and now you want to tease me to death? No, thanks.”

  My heart sped up. Kendal had never sounded mad at me before.

  “Can I come over to your place?” I asked.

  A pause. “I guess so, but wait until it’s dark.”

  * * *

  Humid air hung over Z Street like a soggy beach towel. I cycled past the wreck of Bum Bum’s house and saw Kendal sitting on the steps of his front stoop. The soundtrack of a television show seeped through the front window. My Four Sons.

  Kendal stood up and walked toward the British Methodist Episcopal Church next door. I followed, pushing my bike. The whitewashed church glowed in the darkness, its high walls looking down at us as sternly as a tall pale judge. I became very aware of my heartbeat, Kendal’s breathing, the night sounds and the rumblings of a skunk or raccoon nosing around in the garbage cans. When we were in the shadows of the alleyway, I got off my bike and put my arms around him. He didn’t embrace me back.

  “I love you,” I said, apprehensively.

  “Really? I’m not so sure about that,” said Kendal. “You decided to wait ’til we were out in a field to come on to me. I try to make things safe and normal so we can be together without getting hassled, and you go out of your way to make sure it gets all fucked up. It’s like you’re radioactive.”

  My heart was pounding. “What happened wasn’t my fault.”

  “We should cool it anyway,” Kendal mumbled.

  I hesitated. This was getting confusing. I said I loved him, and he said he wanted to break up with me? None of this made any sense. “Duff said it’ll get easier.”

  I could feel his body tensing.

  “Duff’s a bullshitter of the first magnitude.”

  “But a lot of what he says sounds like it could be true,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not saying he’s not a smart guy,” said Kendal. “In fact, he seems amazingly inventive. That’s the problem — it’s like he’s writing the script of a movie and trying it out on us as he goes along.”

  “I’d like Duff to be telling the truth,” I said. “The future might be a mess but with all the other problems, no one would care about what the two of us look like.”

  Kendal rested his chin on the top of my head. The smell of him filled my nose. Maple syrup and sweat and deodorant. “Or we could just not care about what anybody thinks and agree to get married as soon as we’re old enough.”

  “Married?” I said.

  Through the open window next door, the familiar rhythm of a laugh track tried to remind everyone of how funny TV was supposed to be. I didn’t know what to say. My mouth had turned to dust. I felt like runnin
g. I didn’t want to settle down like my mom and have children and keep house, the Contessina to Kendal’s Captain Crusher. It was always Crusher having the adventures, the Contessina stroking his fevered brow. True, she got to deck the bad guys once in a while, but I suspected the day was coming when I’d see her with a cocktail apron over her skimpy outfit, serving canapés to Crusher’s buddies from V.E.N.G.E.A.N.C.E. while they smoked cigars and played poker, and occasionally sticking her head into the nursery to check on the baby. No thanks. I was determined not to turn into my mother.

  “We’re way too young to talk about marriage, Kendal,” I said a bit primly.

  “But you like the idea, right?”

  I shrugged. We stared at one another. Something had shifted between us, as if he were standing on the edge of the canal with his hands in his pockets while I waved to him from the deck of a moving saltie.

  Finally, he said, “I’d better walk you back to your house. It’s pretty late.”

  I shook my head. “I can ride alone, Kendal.”

  Along Z Street and through downtown Shipman’s Corners, every pedal stroke was a relief, taking me away from Kendal’s anger, directed at me for reasons I didn’t understand and at the world for reasons I stupidly imagined I did. At not quite fifteen, I actually thought I knew how a young black man growing up in an intolerant small town might feel in the face of raw hatred.

  When I reached Cresswell’s Collectibles, I braked and stood with my hands cupped on either side of my eyes, peering inside. I could just make out the shelves behind the cash. Whatever Duff had stashed there had helped him hop through time. Why not use it? The Contessina wouldn’t shy away from time travel. Given the chance to travel forward in time, she might even willingly abandon her rough-edged lover, Crusher.

  I tried the handle of Cressie’s front door, but it was locked tight.

  Back on my bike, I rode through the muggy streets. Even the lampposts seemed to be sagging in the heat.

  I wheeled up the driveway of my house, the familiar closing theme of My Four Sons floating through the TV room window. Someone was humming along. I looked up. In the moonlight, I could see Dad sitting at the edge of the roof, something he did from time to time because it was as close as he could get to a mountaintop. His legs dangled over the eavestrough. He didn’t realize I was there until I said, “Hi.”

  The shadow of his head tipped down at me. “You’re home late. Hanging out with Sandy?”

  “Yup,” I said. At least it was a half-truth — I’d eaten dinner at the Holubs’.

  Something hit the ground between my feet: a pair of weathered leather work gloves.

  “Come on up,” he said.

  The gloves were about ten sizes too big, but they’d do the trick. I stepped into Mom’s flowerbed — careful not to crush any of her beloved petunias — and gripped the white latticework clamped to the bricks.

  When I got close enough, Dad extended a hand over the eavestrough and hauled me the rest of the way up.

  “Come on, you monkey. Oop-a-la!”

  I crawled onto the sloped roof. Lit by streetlights, the world below looked as well-ordered as a Monopoly board: rectangles of house lots marked by fences, a grid of streets and drainage ditches that seemed to have been ploughed with a sharp stick wielded by a giant.

  Beside me, Dad lay flat on the shingles, hands behind his head, gazing up at the sky. Ever since I’d hopped into 1971, he seemed to be getting younger by the day. Every morning he’d head off to the winery in his denim clothes, driving his bright yellow truck, whistling show tunes. Every evening, he came home with a new Sparkling Sparrow vintage for us to taste.

  “Are you happy, Dad? I mean, with your business and stuff.”

  “Yes. Very happy,” he said.

  I paused for a moment, trying to decide how to push into delicate territory. “Did you know that Mr. Holub is trying to borrow enough money to open a restaurant?”

  He turned to look at me. “What kind?”

  “Ukrainian fast food. Like McDonald’s, with perogies.”

  Dad snorted and looked back to the stars. “Igor’s always been a dreamer. Good ideas. Bad follow-through.”

  “The anti-radiation suits in the cellar — did he make them for us?”

  Dad turned his head to look at me again. “No, I had a craftsman do that. Igor sold the rights to the suit a long time ago, not that he made much off them. Problem is, no one really knows if they’ll work. But I figured, what the hell? Cheaper than digging a bomb shelter.”

  “I guess he didn’t get much capital out of the idea for the suits, huh?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So — how did you get the capital to buy Sparkling Sparrow?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Just curious,” I shrugged. “I mean, it is the family business, right?”

  “Fair enough,” said Dad. “ShipCo is my partner. They own half the winery, but I get a nice management fee.”

  “How come ShipCo wants to own a winery?”

  “To keep people happy,” said Dad. “See, we use a hybrid grape that has a calming effect.”

  Even to almost-fifteen-year-old me, this sounded suspicious.

  “You’re drugging people, Dad?”

  He lifted his hands in an expression of surrender. “Now, don’t get all het up. ShipCo’s doing it as a public service. I was angry for a long time about what they were doing in the Z-Lands, but the fact is, we can’t do anything to change the world. Folks might as well be calm and happy instead of worrying themselves sick about World War Three.”

  “Maybe if they worried about it enough, they’d force the government to change things,” I suggested.

  “How, exactly, do you think they’d do that? Nothing will change, sweetheart. Until one or the other superpower pushes the button, we’re deadlocked.”

  “And ’til then, we should all just chill out,” I said.

  “Something like that,” murmured Dad. “All that activism of Dave Kendal’s back in the ’60s, and those people in the Z-Lands a couple of years back complaining about the radiation levels and getting themselves roughed up by Security — what was the point? It’s not like any of them are going to be around long enough to feel the effects. The Bomb will put an end to them long before any mutations do. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  I lay back on my elbows against the slope of the roof. Dad’s logic made sense, if you believed we were destined for nuclear Armageddon. Live, drink, work for ShipCo and be happy, for tomorrow we’ll be bombed to shit.

  I watched as the moon was eaten away by Earth’s shadow, turning from a flat white plate into a round sphere the rusty colour of old blood. I could have reached up and grabbed it, bouncing it off the wall of the sky like a red rubber ball.

  “The moon looks strange tonight,” I said.

  “It’s eclipsing,” said Dad. “The old folks used to call that a Blood Moon.”

  As I watched the moon turn deep red, it occurred to me that I was not in the wrong place, but the wrong time. If Duff’s secret weapon could take him into the past, I might even be able to turn the clock back to the Z-Lands, to the very moment, perhaps, when Kendal’s life was turned upside down, and mine along with his. Or back, back, back to when Kendal’s activist father was eaten alive by a machine at ShipCo. We could also avoid the humiliation of the farm that very day. All mistakes could be corrected or prevented. Then Kendal and I could hop into an alternate continuum, untouched by bad karma, unembittered by hate and prejudice and dumb decisions. All I had to do was get Duff to show me how to use that secret weapon hidden in the Florsheim shoebox behind the cash at Cressie’s.

  ten

  Shark Bite

  Sandy stood in front of me holding a pair of silver tweezers. “This is going to hurt,” she warned.

  The pain brought immediate tears to m
y eyes. “Ow. What are you doing?”

  “I’m plucking your brows thin, thin, thin. Like Mia Farrow.”

  “Mia Farrow is a blonde, for Christ’s sake. And she was married to Frank Sinatra. Yuck.”

  “Check it out.”

  I opened my eyes. My eyebrows were gone. I looked like a different girl. One who was in a constant state of surprise.

  “I didn’t mean to pull them all out, but it’s probably just as well. They were wrong for the shape of your face,” said Sandy, pointing out the makeup chart from Glamour taped to her mirror. “I’ll draw them back in the way they’re supposed to look.”

  She picked up an eyebrow pencil, dark brown and sharply pointed, and pressed into the skin over my eyes — it hurt almost as much as having my eyebrows yanked out. In the mirror, my new brows hovered on my forehead like quotation marks. As if my eyes were trying to tell something.

  “Now for the false eyelashes.”

  I watched Sandy apply a thin line of glue to the spidery lashes. “Where’d you get all this makeup from?”

  “My dad made me buy it,” she said. “When we went to the bank, he wanted me to make myself look older. Damn it all, now I got glue all over my fingers.”

  The feathery weight of the false eyelashes felt like a tarantula walking on my eyeball. I focused my one functioning eye on Sandy as she gripped the false eyelashes in a spring-loaded metal curler that looked like an implement of torture.

  Despite the weight I’d already purged away, I felt like a cow when I was around slender Sandy. She did her best to boost my ego. As she sponged Cover Girl foundation in deep bisque all over my face, she said, “You have such great skin, Debbie. When I put this stuff on, it just makes my zits look bigger.”

  The Cover Girl turned my face into a blank canvas. I was now featureless, except for my sketched-in brows and large dark eyes staring back in the mirror. I had been erased. I could be anybody now.

  Sandy went at me with eye shadow, liquid liner, blush and setting powder, then coated my lips with a tube of Cherries in the Snow, although she sighed and said that bright red lips were totally square for anyone but old ladies. My lips should either be bubble-gum pink or white as death.