The Body in Space

They were sending her father to space. They were sending him in one month. The matter was not negotiable. The war was going badly. There were no jobs. The government letter said in so many words—though not enough words for Rachel's mother—that the people needed a thing to look forward to, that only space travel could offer the glossy, new–toy pride the country needed at this current, sensitive juncture in our history.


The letter also said they liked her father's story, or what they called his undeniably American past. His own father had been a Russian Jewish immigrant, had made his living as a junker in the Bronx, combing the fetid back alleys for rusted car parts and discarded appliances, his hands going numb on the cold metal in winter.


You are a man who has risen.


Rachel's father had been to the state university, had a house and job in Westchester teaching 5th grade mathematics, a son at Tufts majoring in physics, a rail thin wife with a delicate nose and bright blue chips for eyes. He had Rachel: seventeen, artistic, a soccer player, still a virgin (the government had its sources).


You'll have the honor of being the first teacher in space. Imagine what your father would have said.


The government did not know that Rachel's grandfather had been a cold, mercurial man, given to casual, lasting acts of cruelty. He had died before Rachel was born, but her father had told of how once, when he had crashed his bike going over a jump made of a bent car hood, tearing the skin on his knee almost to the bone, the old man had slapped his face, plucked a needle and thread from his mother's sewing box and ordered him to fix up the wound himself, that would teach him to be reckless. Eventually his mother had taken him to the hospital, where they had undone, then redone his mawkish stitches, had cleansed the infection. Her father still had the scar, the thick, grinning mouth of it running straight across the kneecap, visible when he wore shorts, visible in the evenings of Rachel's girlhood, when he would take her in the backyard in the after–dinner–hour and pass a soccer ball to her across the dampening grass.


Those nights seemed long ago now, part of an intimate language they no longer spoke. She thought of him as an unfunny comedian with too much air time, holding her breath when he spoke to her, her chest burning with an anger she could not name except to say it had to do with his long absences in the evenings, with her mother's eyes in the mornings, bloodshot, rimmed with accusation.


We also view your twenty year marriage as a model of strength and coherency in these uncertain times.


Her mother had quickly placed the government letter in a drawer where they kept the bills and stray paper clips, saying it must be a joke, a prank from a former student who'd less–than–enjoyed her father's "space math" unit.


"Must be," said her father, resuming his red pen and his stack of long division tests.


But later that night he read it to himself and then to Rachel, who sat at the kitchen table with her history book.


You'll join the proud coalition of real Americans entering space: a single, working mother of four from Iowa, a soybean farmer from Nebraska, and our very own Olympic gymnastics champion, Katie Crug—you know, the one who vaulted with the sprained ankle. Inspirations, all. We'll be in touch.


"I wouldn't really want to go, even it was real," said her father, his voice full of longing. "I bet there's no pastrami in space."



Then NASA called two days later, wanting to come for dinner. "You already have my support. Our support. We're all in," her father had told them, his voice rising, while Rachel listened on the stairs. In the kitchen her mother carved a roast chicken. Their dog, an overweight Springer spaniel, panted for scraps.


"My son's in college. It's not a great time for a visit."


"Okay, sure, come meet The Family. Dinner will be fine."


"No, I'm not nervous. She'll love this."


"Space then," said her mother when he hung up the phone, her voice turning in on itself like dead leaves. "Good for you."


They'd met too young, Rachel's mother had told her once. On her second glass of wine her bother became chatty, her pale, freckled hands stuttering over the stem of the glass, her voice breaking now and then.


"We met and married and started with kids right away, without any time for ourselves. It was what people did. I still love him, of course. It's just hard sometimes. Don't marry till you're thirty. It's a rule. Promise me."


"I'm never marrying," Rachel said, and her mother had looked up at her suddenly, as if not recognizing her, as if she thought she'd been talking to somebody else.


* * *


On Tuesday a man and woman from NASA arrived. They were wearing matching khakis and polo shirts with bright silver moon landing logos on the pockets. They were careful not say Challenger, to talk around the word gently like a crevice or a wound.


"The space program has come a long way since the eighties," they said. "NASA will double, no triple check everything before lift–off. Statistically the trip is safer than a drive down the Taconic. Really."


"There are plenty of other teachers who would love to go to space," said Rachel's mother, setting down her fork and knife. Sober, she was a quietly assertive woman, cheerful but firm, a figure skater smiling through a difficult spin. "You see that this man still has a child in the house."


"Hasn't he always dreamed of going?" the representatives argued, Rachel's father nodding along. "Hasn't he gone to the space camp for teachers in Gulfport?"


"Yes. Yes, that's true," said Rachel's mother, the authority seeping from her voice.


Rachel's father took a long gulp of beer. The representatives asked for seconds of the purposefully cheap meal Rachel's mother had prepared for them: chicken tenders from frozen, Rice–A–Roni and canned green beans.


"It's good to have a real American meal," they said. They took more than their share. They chewed funny, like they were trying to show how much they liked the food.


"This conversation isn't really necessary," Rachel's father said finally. He forked the last soggy green bean on his plate. "We're all excited. I know Eric is excited. You're excited aren't you, Rachel?"


"Of course," Rachel said. The prospect still seemed like a fantastic game to her. She said, "Do we get a lifetime supply of space ice cream?"


As a younger girl this was the most impressive aspect of space travel to her, once she discovered a person couldn't run the marbled rings of Jupiter. She no longer cared for the chalky substance, but she knew her father liked it when she acted like a younger girl. It put him at ease, reminded him of the years when they knew each other better.


"All the space cream you want!" said her father, laughing, standing up, waving his hands across the table as if he could make the ice cream magically appear

"Of course, of course. Chocolate?" said one of the representatives, making a note on a legal pad.


"She's cute. Watch out for that one," the other one said, winking at her father.


Her mother served a sour lemon tart for desert. The NASA officials ate it in gigantic bites and smiled hard, drops of yellow curd sticking to their teeth. They slid a neat pile of paper work across the table to her father and Rachel was asked to leave the room. She slipped out of the house into the foggy April night and settled into the pine smelling cool of the minivan.



When the van was new, when they were children, they had not thought of it as one. Rachel and Eric had liked to play in it. Sometimes they pretended it was a city apartment, like the kind her father used to say he wanted for weekends away with their mother. The front seats were the parlor, the middle seat their bedroom, the back seat a balcony looking out over Manhattan. They imagined New York life to be like a James Bond movie, the height of sophistication and swag. They reclined in the two rows, sipping their juice boxes like faux martinis, picking at their bags of fruit snacks like they were caviar. They talked about going "downtown" and what they would do there, about leaving, "this suburb full of hicks," as her father sometimes called it.


Months later, when her father went to space camp for teachers and began the 5th grade space math unit, the van became Rachel and Eric's space ship. Shaped like an egg, painted a pale, emerald green with the word "Quest" on the side in silver letters, it lent itself better to this fantasy. They would get in the bucket seats, Eric pressing the break and gas pedals, then announcing to Rachel, "Please prepare for lift–off. We are now headed for Mars."


It was understood that as the older sibling, as the male, as the one more skilled at mathematics, he would always be captain.


"Passing through the atmosphere," he would announce, and they would vault themselves between the two seats, bumping elbows in an imagined microgravity, until they got dizzy or Rachel accidentally elbowed Eric in the eye. Then he would say peevishly, glaring at her, "We are now touching down on Mars. Please prepare for landing. All crew members restrain your selves."


Upon landing they would explore the forest behind the house as if it were Mars, collecting chunks of granite and broken beer bottles, which they called "Mars rocks," taking them back into the minivan for inspection. Rachel would write down Eric's observations in a composition book. "Definite signs of water. Some green substance, possibly life."


Of course, the space van quickly became shoddy, became theirs, became the thing itself. Mud and grass from soccer cleats caked the floors. The air took on the smell of the fast food dinners her father ate on late night drives home from what he said were work meetings.


One day, while he and Rachel drove to a July soccer game in La Grange, the back window shattered, all at once, completely. Her father said a rock must have flown up from the road. A confetti of glass covered the whole back row for days.


Now Rachel had inherited the van. It felt lonely without her family in it, like driving around a restaurant that had just closed for business. There were tiny pieces of window glass between the back row seats, grinning like a promise of future disaster. Still, it was amazing to have wheels. She drove the van to school and to practices and games. She drove it when the house made her stiff with the anger she could not name. She drove it to pick up Chris Watson, who she liked to fool around with in the back row.


She was not sure if she loved him. There was the textbook tone he took with her sometimes: when he was helping her revise one of history her essays or correcting her grammar midsentence. Sometimes when they had fooled around she felt homesick, like she was traveling far away from everything she knew. She would watch her reflection in the dark windows kissing him, a girl with a too–tight pony tale, comically serious. Where were they going? Where was she? What would her father say?


But she liked the curve of his spine, the narrow vulnerability of his hips, his lacrosse player's body. She abandoned her one girlfriend. She lost ten pounds, eating bowls of sour grapefruit after school. He was the first boy she had ever kissed.


"My father's going to space," Rachel said now. They were parked in the county bike trail lot, their usual spot. It was down a dirt road in the middle of the woods. As they talked the last of the day's runners and bikers sped by, their red faces clenched with effort and pain.


"No kidding," said Chris Watson. "No kidding. That's incredible. Actually I already heard about it in the paper. They published the list of Real Americans. Will you get to go in the ship before it takes off? Can I go too?"


"They're usually pretty strict about who goes on the ship."


"How do you know? You don't sound happy." He pointed to the sickle moon, which looked pasted onto the clear, dark sky. "Look. Your dad will be up there. Do you even know the constellations?" His finger left a smudge on the windshield.


"I know the damn constellations," she said, though all she could remember from grade school was the Big Dipper. Empirical knowledge would not stick in her mind. The quadratic formula, the Pythagorean theorem, the parts of the human cell, all of these she had mastered and then forgotten. Other things, like the song her father sang to her when they road their bikes on this trail, back when she was six and it had just opened, she knew she would remember for ever. The song rang in her now.


Wah–oooooh, werewolves of London.


"I know you know," he said, and took her hand. "I'm sorry. This must be hard for you. My father's too drunk all the time to be in space, but if he were, I'd be nervous." The bike trail had gone dark. The lot was empty. He kissed her hard, all teeth. His body moved over and around hers, and then they were swimming toward the back row. His hands spread across her muscled thighs. The windows filled with darkness.


"I love these soccer girl legs," he whispered, as he always did, not knowing that she was trying to slim them. She wanted to be as light as she could, to be floating over him, a mermaid girl. His fingers worked the buttons of her blouse, one by one, fast, like he was shucking oysters. The car filled with the smells of salt and sweat. His hands up and around her breasts, beneath her waist band, heat spreading into her face, until the homesickness seeped into her gut and she held the damp hands still.



Her father's transformation was fast and severe. It seemed like whole parts of him were being sliced with a chopping knife. Every day after school he went to a NASA training center in Manhattan, where they had him on special machines and eating special foods to build bone mass, muscle mass, and to increase the size of his heart.


"A person ages faster in microgravity," he said one night, sitting on the edge of Rachel's bed while she worked geometry proofs.


It was two weeks until he would leave for space.


"The heart doesn't have to work as hard to move the blood. The muscles and bones don't need to be as strong. In space the body declines. Sort of like being a couch potato. Is that a new sweater?"


He touched her arm, very briefly. She looked at him. The new muscles in his arms bulged at the seams of his work shirt. Lighter, stronger, he flew through the house, appearing beside Rachel when she hadn't heard him coming. It was unnerving.


She looked at him, a man preparing to enter a country she would never enter. She wanted to ask him if he was scared, if he thought about dying. What were his regrets? She wanted to ask him about the woman, the meetings, the other part of his life she knew must exist. She imagined his ship catching fire, then fading, a beautiful, hot coal thrown into the dark. She could make him not go, she knew. But he seemed so happy now, standing up and snapping his fingers. "It's not new," she told him.


He stood in her doorway, the hallway a dark tunnel behind him. "You know, I'll be able to contact you there. This is WDAD, coming to you from space."


When she was a young girl, and he tucked her into bed, he had pretended he was speaking to her from his own radio station. "This is WDAD saying good night," he would say, his voice screwed up to sound like a sportscaster's.


She smiled at him, said, "cool. That'd be great." He looked at her for a moment, then he was gone. A moment later she heard his voice somewhere else in the house, calling the dog for her last walk of the day.



In the remaining two weeks, Rachel's mother seemed to warm to the idea of her father in space. Glad to see him at last taking good care of himself, she cast off her sullenness and dedicated the house's décor to space travel. A build–a–bear was decorated in an astronaut suit and placed in the front foyer. Posters of the moon hung in the living room like great cratery eyes. In the basement, where her father read the NASA recommended books about space travel, she stuck glow in the dark stars to the walls, like the kind Rachel and Eric had had as a children, Eric's in all the constellations, Rachel's in shapes she chose: a pie, her name, a bicycle like the one she rode.


You don't even know the constellations.


The refrigerator was covered with pictures the children of Hawthorne had drawn for her father, wishing him luck, expressing their bubbly admiration. His cartoon image smiled ecstatically, floating among stars, standing on the moon beside a giant American flag, waving a giant space hand at the earth, a flawed, blue–green marble behind him.



At the Coalition of Real Americans picnic, one week before the launch, Rachel, Eric and her mother made small talk with the other real Americans. They were gathered on the White House Lawn. A table was spread with lukewarm, Thanksgiving–type food. Lakes of cooling butter lay in piles of mashed potatoes. There was an oily looking green bean casserole, a giant, half–carved turkey. The grass of the lawn glowed an eerie, neon green, as if the government had dyed it for the occasion.


"I'm so excited," said the mother of four, a tired looking woman with frizzy hair in an ill–fitting suit. Her hyperactive four–year–old twins kept putting their hands in all the food, and soon she had to turn away to reprimand them.


The farmer wore overalls and dirtied boots. "They said to look rustic," he said, shaking his head. "I didn't know everyone else would dress normal." Then he criticized the flavor of the vegetables. "Unnatural fertilizers, that's what that tastes like." Then he was off to have his picture taken holding a shovel someone had brought for him.


Then there was the gymnast, who was only a year older than Rachel. In a baby doll dress she cranked first one leg, then the other, back behind her back, each foot touching her head, as if she was trying to break herself in two.


"Agility training," she laughed, when she caught Rachel and Eric staring. From somewhere a camera flashed, and then a cadre of reporters enveloped her short, pale body.


"I bet she doesn't menstruate. All muscle, no tits," Eric whispered to Rachel.


"That's none of your business," Rachel said, scanning the small gathering for her father. He stood next to the turkey carcass, talking to someone on his phone. He looked angry.


"Damn parents won't let me do my job," he said when Rachel approached, swiftly tucking the phone into his pocket. "I'm sorry sweetheart. Where's your mother?"


They found her mother talking to the gymnast. The reporters had moved on the mother of four, whose six–year–old girl was in her ballet tutu, and was demonstrating her glisandes.


"Such a darling," they were saying.


"It's just amazing. You're such a lovely creature," Rachel's mother said to the gymnast. " I could never move like that. You know men really go for that kind of thing." She glanced at Rachel's father. "Men really like a woman who's flexible. Just make sure you keep it up. They don't like it if you go slack."



Her mother's acquiescence lasted until exactly one night before her father was to go to space. The family was gathered for a parting dinner. They ate filet mignon, garlic mashed potatoes and buttered rolls, all her father's favorite. When all the dirty plates were cleared her mother stood in the kitchen, hand on hip, telling him not to go. "I feel like this is a death row meal," she said.


Rachel and Eric sat on the stairs listening.


"Oh come off it Kit," her father said. "If it was you, you'd go. You're jealous. You're stuck in your own little world and you can't see anyone else's. Its how you've always been, with me, with the kids."


"I wouldn't go with a daughter still to raise. You could have failed one of the fitness exams on purpose. Invented a vision problem. You had a choice here. You're already there. You're already gone. You know what? Fuck you. Go to space right now. Leave. You heard me."


Yes, leave, Rachel thought, hating herself for thinking it. We're all tired of the in–between, of all this waiting.


Her mother cursed again. There was the slamming of a door, the sound of her father's car engine turning, the screech of tires on wet pavement. Outside, it was raining.


"This is why I never come home," said Eric, sulking up to his room and shutting the door. There was some exam that he'd been studying for since he got home. She wouldn't understand it, he had told her. She heard the flick of his lamp go on, the heavy thud of a textbook thrown open on the table.



She snuck out of the house into the minivan and then she and Chris Watson sat in the bucket seats, light leaching from the sky, waiting for the bike trail to empty.


"You nervous tonight?" Chris Watson asked.


On the bike trail a man her father's age ran by. He wore no shirt and his large belly trembled with each stride. A woman in bright green spandex and roller blades quickly overtook him, her arms swinging by her side, her motions fluid and aggressive.


"Why should I be? It's just like a trip down the Taconic."


While Chris Watson talked to her about the size of the universe, about the physics of the trip, Rachel remembered when the bike trail had first opened. The pavement had been so smooth it was like riding your bike on water. Whole families traveled to it on Saturdays, packing lunches to eat on the bridge that crossed the Hudson, babies strapped onto bike seats, dogs well leashed. It seemed her family had ridden as a pack then, speaking to each other on their bikes, warning each other of bumps or patches of wet leaves. Or maybe that was just what Rachel wanted to believe of them. Maybe they had always been tacitly racing each other, maybe they had always left one another behind, maybe they had always been looking for some kind of advantage.


"Let me know what you need," said Chris Watson. "I love you."


He was not a bad person. She could be comfortable here. What was the worst that could happen? A lie small as a splinter, shiny as the key to a mysterious castle, slipped from her mouth. "I love you, too."


She pulled him closer and they swam out of their bucket seats and through the darkening van. She had lost more weight, moved so easily in his hands she felt that air had become water, that she had scales, fins, gills. The sky clouded. It began to rain, great sheets of water pouring down the windows so that the trees around them blurred. When another car pulled into the lot they saw only vague headlights like falling stars, like dying suns, and they continued their swimming. She watched their reflections in the windows for a moment, like two fish flailing on dry ground, then closed her eyes.


And even if she had gazed through those rainy windows, through the night's thick fog, the black Honda Accord on the far side of the lot would have looked anonymous. Like the van, it had no distinguishing external features, no bumper stickers or dents or window ornaments. Rachel's father had taken meticulous care of it. She would not have seen her father's tense face in the driver's side window. She would not have seen the face of the woman in the passenger seat, her long, dark hair or her chapped lips. She could not have heard the woman say that yes, this was it, this was the last time, she was sorry, there was a house of people who loved her too much. She could not have sensed her father's large, healthy heart filling with sadness and regret, through all that rain. They would have looked only like two other teenagers, two dark heads coming together, two bodies swimming backwards inside another family's space ship, the doors and windows sealed against the elements, praying for safety, going somewhere else.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c

August, 2010

Fiction