Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  “Ya still have to do your chores.”

  Her father's voice startled her. Now she could see him, his form hidden in the moody shadows of the late afternoon. He was sitting in a chair, staring into space.

  “Chores never end on a farm.”

  “But I have homework.”

  “Don't matter. Ya wanna go to school? Fine. Ya still have to do a full day of chores—just like everybody else.”

  “But I won't have time for my homework.”

  “Just like everybody else.”

  The barn door was missing a hinge and Mary had to lift it slightly in order to close it. The cow's name was Irma, and as Mary led her slowly toward the milking post, she was careful not to soil her shoes. They were scruffy and well used, but they were hers. Hand-me-downs from a cousin, who had inherited them from some other cousin, they were perfect. It was Aunt Aida who had personally instructed her parents to get Mary some good walking shoes, and they had agreed. In all the world, Mary owned four personal possessions: two dresses, a corncob doll from Aunt Aida, and now the shoes. Were she to be buried with them, archeologists a thousand years hence would make note of how poor the family must have been.

  Mary heard the sound of the truck's engine starting and turned to see Vernon and Michael climb over the gates and onto the flatbed. As her father circled the truck around the yard once, Vernon whistled loudly, and their three dogs, each of them named Rover, jumped into the moving truck. As the truck drove away, Mary's brothers made ugly faces at her. She turned away, grabbing the metal bucket with one hand, the rickety egg crate with the other.

  “Hi, Irma. Ya got some milk for me tonight?”

  The leather belt was already in the crate. Mary removed it, then wrapped the belt around Irma's hind legs to restrain her. She pulled the belt tight, then set the buckle. Irma huffed a breath of air through her downy, white nostrils, giving a subtle grunt as Mary took her seat on the crate. The wobbly wooden box settled several inches into the soil—a wet, slurry of mud, manure, and muck, all mixed with the downstream offal of the butcher block.

  “Actually, I should say you. Mrs. Bowman—that's my teacher—says I shouldn't say ya because ya is not a word. You should say you, she says. Never say ya—only say you. Only the ignorant use words that don't exist. That's what she says. So let me try that again. You got some milk for me tonight?”

  Mary placed the bucket beneath the cow, then ran her hand tenderly along the soft skin of the udder, gently massaging and kneading the bulging sac. This was a technique her father had taught her. He called it “letting the milk down.”

  “I'm starting to learn the alphabet. The other kids know it already, and some of ’em make fun of me. At least I know English. Most of the other kids, their families are from Denmark and Norway. None of them knew English when they got here, but now they talk pretty good. Mrs. Bowman says they all seem to pick it up real quick. Danish in September, English in December; that's what she calls it. Anyway, the alphabet. Would you like to learn it, too? I'll teach you.”

  Mary placed all five fingers of each hand around the front teats and began to draw Irma's milk into the metal pail. She saw movement off to her left and turned to find her oldest brother Clarence walking toward the farmhouse. The high school was an easy two-mile walk down Highway 2—no river crossings required.

  “First, there's the letter A. It has two sticks that form a point—like the roof of a house—with a little stick that connects them in the middle. A is what's known as a vowel. Got that?”

  Irma had no reply.

  “Then comes the stick with the two half circles. That's a B. Next we have a circle with a piece cut out of it—that's a C. A-B-C. Mrs. Bowman says the alphabet is sometimes called the ABC's. Whatta ya think about that?”

  Irma lowered her head and searched for a fresh stalk of grass, but there was none.

  “Mrs. Bowman taught me how to make all the sounds of the alphabet. Did you know that C is pronounced just like the beginning of the word cow? It's the first letter in the word cat, which means it's probably the first letter in the word cow, too. That's what I think.”

  Irma let out a low moan, turning her head to get a better view of her loquacious milker.

  “Next comes D—a stick with a half circle. Then E—a sideways table with three legs. E is also a vowel. After E comes F—which is like E but with the bottom leg missing. G—which I found out is the first letter in God—is like a C, but different. The letter H is like A, but the legs are straight instead of pointy. I is just a line—that's easy to remember. J is kinda like a fishhook.”

  Mary paused in her lesson, easing her grip slightly on the teats.

  “That was wrong. I meant to say, J is kind of like a fishhook. Kind of. Turns out kinda isn't even a word at all. Who woulda thunk?”

  Mary looked around to make sure no one was approaching or watching, then removed a small slip of paper from a pocket in her dress.

  “Hold on. I can't remember the rest.” She unfolded the paper, revealing a series of crudely scrawled notes. “Ah yes—K. K is kind of hard to describe. Then L—like an I but with a foot. After L comes M, which happens to be the first letter of my name. N is like a sideways Z. We'll get to Z in a moment. O is just a circle, and P is like B but without the bottom half-circle thing. Q comes next. Mrs. Bowman describes Q as an O that's been stabbed. That's funny. R is like K, but rounded at the top.”

  Mary folded the paper and returned it to her dress.

  “I think I know the rest.”

  There was a sound—a footstep. Mary turned around to see Clarence right behind her.

  “Gimme some milk.”

  “No, Clarence. There won't be enough.”

  “Gimme some milk, Mary!”

  “Dad says no!”

  Mary screamed at him as Clarence reached in and grabbed the bucket. She tried to take it back, but he held it away at arm's length, pushing Mary down with his free hand.

  “Give it back!”

  He offered the bucket, then pulled it quickly away again, laughing as she vainly struggled to reach it.

  “I'll tell dad!”

  “Go ahead.”

  Clarence lifted the bucket and drank. Mary helplessly watched as he guzzled all of her work away. He finished, then wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve.

  “You tell him, and I'll hurt you.” Clarence tossed the bucket in the mud, then turned and walked toward the tall, dried-out wheat stalks. “Keep your mouth shut, little schoolgirl.”

  Mary picked the empty bucket out of the sludge. Now she would have to clean it all over again. The well spout was nearby and she pumped water into the pail, using a cotton cloth to dry and sanitize its interior.

  “Only good milk is clean milk.”

  Mary returned to Irma and the egg crate.

  “Sorry. We have to start over. Anyway, S is easy to remember because it looks like a snake, and it's the letter that snake begins with. T is like an I with a flat hat. U is like a bowl. V is like an upside down A but with no stick in the middle. W is like two V's stuck together. X is shaped like those two boards at the front gate that cross each other. Y is like a person standing up with their arms raised, and Z is like a sideways N. You got all that?”

  Irma let out a long and forlorn moo, as if to affirm she had understood the lesson well.

  “So that's the alphabet. The alphabet is very important; it's what words are made of. You use letters to make words, and words to make sentences, and sentences to make paragraphs. That's what books are—a whole lotta words, sentences, and paragraphs. Whatta ya think…”

  Mary stopped to correct herself.

  “Whatta you think about that, huh?”

  Before Irma could respond, a clap of thunder rolled over the prairie and found its way to where she was sitting. Mary stood up and gazed past the grasslands toward the North Dakota horizon. A fresh Canadian storm was brewing slow and sure, its angry charcoal cloud layers leapfrogging one another, battling for position and marching steadily sout
hward. They would arrive soon enough.

  “Gonna have more rain, girl. Lots of it.”

  Mary sat back down and picked up the pace of her work, concerned about being caught milking in the rain. Not that she cared for herself, so much. When it rained, drops of water would wash over Irma's back, pick up the dust and dirt from her skin, and slop like grime into the bucket, contaminating the milk.

  “Only good milk is clean milk,” she said, briefly turning her head to check on the clouds one last time. “Only good milk is clean milk.”

  Irma agreed, and said as much.

  A half hour later, Mary had a brimming bucket. As she toted it toward the creamer, her father and brothers returned in the truck, its cargo bed loaded with hundreds of pounds of lignite. With the temperature dropping seemingly every day, they would be burning lignite by the ton. Mary watched the men shovel the fuel into the storage bin. Lignite had always fascinated her. How, she wondered, could a rock that was pulled from the ground actually burn? It was a puzzle, and she made a mental note to ask Mrs. Bowman about it.

  Mary arrived at the creamer and raised the lip of the bucket to its rim. Tilting the bucket slowly, the raw milk poured into the machine. In a few moments, the bucket was empty.

  After unbuckling Irma's hind legs, Mary led the cow back toward the barn for her late-afternoon feeding. As she walked, she quietly repeated the alphabet over and over and over.

  “I do not have OCD, OCD, OCD.”

  —WIDELY ATTRIBUTED TO EMILIE AUTUMN

  I stare at my laptop, eyes drooping, breath slowing. According to the tiny digital clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the monitor, it is 1:32 a.m. I am exhausted. My wife and I have recently become foster parents and Ventura County has just placed a two-year-old boy with us. His name is Dalton, and he works overtime to find ways to keep us busy. As a result, most of my writing projects now have to be accomplished in the late evening, after everyone is in bed and things have quieted down.

  The previous weekend I spent several hours interviewing Bill Webber, one of my mother's former coworkers. Bill had sat at the desk directly next to my mother's for several years, and now I'm sitting on a trove of great information. Finally, here is someone who knows where all the bodies are buried—far more so than even my father, who had worked in a different department than my mother. During our interview, Bill shared numerous anecdotes and historical details with me and, better still, shared my passion for getting my mother's story told.

  Still, there is a gaping hole that cannot seem to be filled no matter whom I talk to.

  For years before our mother's death, and long thereafter, my three siblings and I had often discussed what physical or mental ailment had afflicted our mother. Everyone knew about it, but no one talked about it. As I have mentioned, Mary Sherman Morgan never discussed anything personal to anyone, anytime, anywhere. And anything of a medical nature was at the top of the list of subjects over which she would rather die than discuss with her children. Yet it had always been obvious to us that something was wrong.

  Two months before my brother Stephen was born, Mary decided to retire early from the aerospace business. It was December 1955. In a subsequent employment application two decades later she would write that her reason for leaving her prior employer was “to raise a family.”1 I wasn't even three yet, too young to remember much of anything. But over the next few years there were events and situations that began to accumulate in my memory. I remember our mother enjoyed playing four-handed bridge with herself—laying out four hands and strategizing how each hand would be played if it were hers (like a solo chess master playing both white and black). I remember walking home from school one day (yes, there was a time in this country when it was considered normal for very young children to walk to and from school by themselves) and arriving to a different atmosphere in the house. My mother was at the dining table with what had become her four props—a newspaper, a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a deck of cards. She would read the paper, take a sip of coffee, take a drag on the cigarette, then repeat that action until the cigarette was gone and the coffee cup was empty. At some point she would remove the cards from their pack and begin shuffling them. And she would shuffle them, and shuffle them, and keep on shuffling them. Over and over and over. Eventually she would stop shuffling and play solitaire or solo four-handed bridge—but not until she had shuffled the deck a hundred times more than necessary. The detail I should stress here is that all this incessant shuffling was accompanied by anger—grinding teeth and furious mumbling. I was about six years old; I knew no other mothers to compare her to, so I thought it was normal behavior.

  “George—who does Mom remind you of?”

  It was my sister Monica, calling from Stayton, Oregon—the town she had hitchhiked to as a teenager thirty years before. She had gone there to discover herself. Instead, she discovered rain. Monica knew I was starting work on the play. I had told her to call me if she had any ideas or could remember any pertinent details I could use.

  “Think,” she said. “Who does mom remind you of?”

  “What are you talking about?” Our mother had been dead for six months—she didn't remind me of anyone except herself.

  “Have you seen that show on TV?” Monica asked.

  “What show?”

  “Monk. It's a TV show about an obsessive-compulsive detective. Have you seen it?”

  In fact I had come across a few episodes. Not much of a TV watcher, nothing had clicked. What was she getting at?

  “What are you getting at?”

  “We've wondered for years what mom's problem was.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I want you to imagine,” she said. “Imagine the character of Monk without the funny—a Monk who's been taken over by the dark side of the Force.”

  I imagined it, and a light went on in my head.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A dramatic Monk instead of a funny Monk. Could be.” I thanked her, and we hung up.

  Was that her problem? Or perhaps I should say, was that her “condition”? Had Mary Morgan been obsessive-compulsive? I opened up a few websites and began studying the subject—a subject I knew nothing about. It didn't take long to figure out that this very possibly was the source of her many odd behaviors over the years—behaviors that at times were downright scary. As I read and studied, one other characteristic of the disorder also became obvious: there was absolutely nothing funny about it.

  But here was the strangest thing of all: during my interview with my father, Bill Webber, and other former coworkers, I had asked about her odd repetitive behaviors. I wanted to know what it was like to work with someone like that. I wanted to know how it had affected her work, or her working relationship with her fellow engineers.

  Their reply: “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

  Which was very strange. From my earliest youthful recollections, a day never went by that I did not witness her symptoms, if that's what they were. How could someone who worked next to her for years have missed them? I went back and re-interviewed my father on the subject; he still maintained the same reaction. This was a man who had been married to the woman for fifty-three years.

  “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

  The house is cemetery quiet—the perfect environment to get some writing done. Have to get started. I need to get words on the page. I look at the digital clock in the lower right-hand corner of the monitor.

  1:39 a.m.

  All our lives we, the four Morgan kids, have been told the same your-mother-retired-to-raise-a-family story. But there are other things we have been told about her that have turned out not to be true. Does the retirement story fall into the category of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? I'm beginning to wonder. I'm beginning to wonder if she was forced to retire from her top secret aerospace career because her OCD-like behaviors were becoming more pronounced and less self-controllable. People were fired all the time at North American Aviation for far less than that.

&nb
sp; On this late evening as I struggle to get words on the page, I am fifty-two years old. Even now, many years later, I can still hear my mother grinding her teeth, mumbling to herself, and shuffling those cards.

  I have no idea what you're talking about.

  One day, completely out of the blue, I get an e-mail from someone claiming to be a friend of Irving Kanarek. I had been searching for Kanarek for years, but no one knew his whereabouts. In the ’60s and ’70s Irving Kanarek would become famous for being Charles Manson's defense attorney. But long before that career took off, Kanarek was a chemical engineer at North American Aviation and worked as my mother's immediate supervisor. Based on his birth year, I had come to the conclusion that he must have passed away. But the lady who has e-mailed me says Irving heard about my play at Caltech and he wants to talk to me. Her phone number is in the e-mail, so I call her.

  “Irving Kanarek is still alive!?” I ask, incredulous.

  “Yes,” she says. “He just turned ninety, but he's alive and living in a motel in Costa Mesa.”

  Costa Mesa is a city in Orange County about forty miles south of Los Angeles. Since Irving was one of my mother's supervisors at North American, it's urgent I talk to him right away. The lady gives me his e-mail address and I fire him off a few sentences: Mr. Kanarek, you don't know me, but you worked with my mother, Mary Sherman Morgan, at North American Aviation. I am writing a book about her life. If it wouldn't be too much trouble I would like to sit down with you for a couple of hours and ask you some questions.

  The next day he e-mails me his phone number and tells me to call him. I take a few hours preparing what I am going to say to the man who has become one of the most famous defense attorneys in history. I need the reception to be as clear as possible, so I eschew the cell phone and use a land line at my office. I want to keep a record of the conversation, so I hold the receiver in my left hand and hover a pen over a pad of paper with my right. My finger dials his number, and the line on the other end begins to ring. This was the conversation: