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  Space a memoir

  Jesse Lee Kercheval

  TERRACE BOOKS

  A TRADE IMPRINT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street

  London WC2E 8LU, England

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kercheval, Jesse Lee.

  Space : a memoir / Jesse Lee Kercheval.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-299-30024-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-30023-4 (e-book)

  1. Kercheval, Jesse Lee—Childhood and youth.

  2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  3. Florida—Social life and customs.

  4. Outer space—Exploration.

  5. Families—Florida. I. Title.

  PS3561.E558Z47 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  [B]

  2013043835

  Prologue Madison, Wisconsin, 1993

  1 May 1966

  2

  3

  4 June 1966

  5

  6

  7 January 1967

  8

  9 April 1967

  10

  11

  12 October 1968

  13

  14 July 1969

  15

  16 October 1970

  17 December 1972

  18

  19

  20 January 1974

  21

  Epilogue

  The author is grateful to the following persons and organizations for their support: the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Ragdale, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Special thanks to Gail Hochman, Shannon Ravenel, and my researcher, Dan Hughes Fuller.

  Portions of this book in somewhat different form have appeared in these publications: American Short Fiction, Calliope, the Colorado Review; the Missouri Review, and the Southern Humanities Review.

  My sister, me, and our mother, 1957

  For Carol

  Space

  Prologue Madison, Wisconsin, 1993

  I open my front door and bend down to pick up the package the postman left. I’m bruised and sore from a car accident the week before, and so have to lift the box from the porch with my uninjured but awkward left hand. The box is full of family photographs I asked my sister Carol to send.

  The night of the accident, I’d been driving home from a late meeting at the university where I teach, thinking perfectly ordinary, slightly harried thoughts, like, Do I have enough detergent left to run a load of wash and if I don’t what will my daughter and husband and I wear tomorrow? The light was green at the last intersection before my house. I started across, was just shifting into third, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw headlights. I’ve never been good at math, but my brain made this calculation with frightened speed: The headlights belonged to a car moving too fast to stop.

  I’d been a passenger in a minor car accident a few years before and had ended up thoroughly black and blue. That was going to be nothing compared to this. A speeding car was about to slam into my driver’s-side door. I remember thinking, I’m dead. Then, Thank God, my daughter’s not in the car. And then, I’ll never write the memoir I was planning. After that, I relaxed. It was out of my hands.

  The car hit mine, and I went spinning across six lanes onto the other side of the highway. Luckily, my mental geometry had been off by a few feet. The other car had crushed the rear, unoccupied half of my car. I wasn’t even bleeding. I had whiplash, a red stripe like a burn from the seat belt, and a cracked tooth where I’d hit my head on the side window. But I was miraculously, perfectly alive. Later, I would have to have a series of operations to try and fix my right hand, which had clutched the steering wheel in a brave but foolish attempt to save me.

  I watched stunned as five teenage boys piled out of the other car. They were unharmed as well. Amazing. They, too, had been wearing their seat belts. The driver came over. He looked about twelve to me, with downy cheeks and soft puppy eyes. He was so sorry. He’d bent down to change the radio and hadn’t seen the light turn red. He hadn’t meant to be going so fast. It was his mom’s car, he said. She was going to kill him. I managed to shake my head, the mother in me sure he was wrong. No matter what, she wouldn’t prefer her son dead.

  So life started up again. Except now I had no car. My family still had no clean clothes. But I would have time, with luck, to finish what I’d started.

  Pictures seemed like a good place to begin, but I didn’t have any. My sister, Carol, had kept them. The rationale behind this was that I moved around too much to haul family photos with everything else. And I have moved around too much. As I pick up the package of pictures that Carol has sent and feel how little it weighs, I realize how ridiculous this excuse is. The package is lighter than a book, and I’ve hefted boxes and boxes of books, apartment to house, town to city, state to state, for years.

  The truth is that Carol kept the family pictures for the same reason—if you could call it by a name like reason—that she was the one in charge of keeping the family together all those years growing up. She thinks this has changed now that our parents are dead, that it is important that it change. In the matter of the pictures, at least, she is still the one in charge.

  At first I just flip through the snapshots in my sister’s shoe box to see what she has sent, what might be useful. I was afraid to be too specific about why I wanted the pictures. I wasn’t sure how she would feel about my writing about our family. So she has sent an assortment, a grab bag of our life. The first one I pick up is a fuzzy, bluish color picture of me as a week-old baby. My head and hands show above a white blur of swaddling. I am lying in the middle of an equally white bed, and my mother’s hands are just in the picture, resting on the mattress below my feet. I’ve seen the picture before, of course. I’ve even heard the story behind it. It was originally a slide and is in color (not black-and-white like all my later baby pictures) because one of the nurses at the hospital took the picture with her camera.

  Looking closely, I can just see the gray metal railing at the edge of the bed. I was born in a hospital in France where my father was stationed as some sort of American liaison officer with NATO. I think I remember being told it wasn’t an army hospital, but this looks like an army bed. My mother’s hands, I would recognize anywhere. When I think of her, I think of her hands. In this picture they look large, competent, older than her age, which at the time was forty-one. Looking at them this time, they look subtly different to me. Now that I’ve seen my own hands next to a newborn baby daughter, I can imagine my
mother felt less certain, less competent, than her hands look.

  Sunlight falls in a slant across the bed, but is it early morning or late afternoon? My mother is wearing a watch, but it has turned on her wrist so I can’t see the time. Right now that watch is somewhere in the bottom of my jewelry box, though it has a different band and the winding stem is missing. My mother wasn’t a woman who wore much jewelry, and most of it is in this picture. On her left hand, she wears her engagement, a miniature version of my father’s West Point class ring, and the matching wedding band. Carol has the engagement ring now, but on my left hand, the one that is holding the photograph, I wear the wedding ring. I had to have it cut down. My hands are smaller than my mother’s.

  I know I was delivered by cesarean section, as was my own daughter—lifted out of me; rescued from me, I sometimes joke—and that my mother and I were kept in the hospital for two long weeks. Still, where is my father? Why was the nurse the only one with a camera?

  Now that I have a daughter, I respond to the baby in the picture more than I did before. If the infant me were here in the room, I would instantly pick her up. But the baby does not look like me. When I look at pictures of my daughter, I know her. When I first saw her in the operating room, it was as if I had already known her a long time. I thought, Ah, there you are. As if she had left the room for a moment, then stepped back in.

  Did my mother feel that way when she saw me?

  After a while, I put that picture down and pick up one of Carol and me. Then another. Always my sister’s face is next to mine, the older sister bending over me. The photographs don’t lie. She was always there, in the bath, the double bed, the backseat of the car. In these photos, taken with Brownies and Instamatics, our parents are only shadows, stretching dark along the foreground, or fuzzy index fingers wandering into the frame.

  My sister’s small face I’d know anywhere. I imagine my grown sister walking into the room right now, my smoothing her skin tight with my hands and finding that girl, the Carol in these pictures, hiding there. For myself, blond girl number two in these photographs, I still feel no recognition. I call the girl by my name, Jesse. But I have no sense that, yes, this is me.

  I pick up a curling color print, KODAK KODAK KODAK printed in gray across the yellowing back, and flatten it with both hands. In it, Carol and the girl who must be me are standing in our backyard in Cocoa, Florida. Behind us, I can see the dark, glossy leaves of the orange grove next door. We both wear plaid shorts, white cotton shirts. Carol stands half a head taller. I am probably ten, Carol a wiser and older twelve.

  In this picture, Carol and I seem to be holding shoe boxes like the one in which my sister shipped these family memories to me, but actually they are elaborate cardboard viewers we have made following instructions printed in the newspaper. We are armed and ready to observe our first total eclipse. The sun is about to be blotted out by NASA’s number one target, that object of all our desires, the moon. My sister and I are rooting for the moon, ready to see the home team win.

  Before I had my daughter, before the accident, I used to think I had forgotten my childhood, had left it behind the way America built great rockets to reach the moon and then, losing interest, left the tons of metal to corrode in a swamp under a hot Florida sun.

  I was wrong. The Florida of my past, where it is a humid, sunny ninety-five degrees, is always with me. At night, it makes me sweat just dreaming about it. May 1966

  1 May 1966

  We were supposed to stay at the Holiday Inn. But when my father asked the guy filling our gas tank at the Esso station off U.S. 1 where that might be, he just shrugged. There isn’t one, he said. Not in Cocoa.

  “This is Cocoa?” Carol said. I was nine, Carol eleven. Besides the service station, all we could see were four concrete lanes divided by a weedy median strip. I don’t know what I’d expected—gantries with rocket ships lining the highways, astronauts in space suits riding motorized sidewalks? There weren’t any sidewalks, moving or any other kind. The air conditioner in our Plymouth had frozen up, icicles dangled from the vents, but the rest of the car was unbelievably hot.

  “Well,” the attendant said, “there’s more stuff down that way.” He pointed south, the direction most of the traffic was headed.

  We had driven three days from Oxon Hill, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., to get to Cocoa. My father had a job offer to be the business manager of the local junior college. He’d been teaching math, trying to put together a civilian life after thirty years in the army, and he was ready to move up. Still, on the trip down, he’d nodded in agreement whenever my mother said, Remember, we’re just checking it out. She did not say so, but we all knew she hated the idea of leaving her job at the Treasury Department, where she was known for her ability to trace lost, forged, and stolen Social Security checks.

  The president of the junior college was supposed to have gotten us rooms in the Holiday Inn. “Dr. Henry said he did, Mary,” my father said to my mother. “I’m not making it up.” It was nearly six. Too late, my father said, to call Dr. Henry. He was tense because we were lost and because he was driving. When my father drove, he gripped the wheel with both hands, like driving was hard work and needed constant attention. My mother drove with one hand resting lightly near the top of the steering wheel, a cigarette in the other. I liked to watch her. When she ran errands with Carol and me in the car, she sometimes told stories about being a WAC during the war, driving two-and-a-half-ton army transports on the busy Seattle docks.

  A mile or so from the Esso station, my father pulled into the parking lot of a low, pale green building made of concrete blocks, not much more than a row of doors facing the highway: the Rocket Motel. At the edge of the parking lot, a rocket outlined in blue neon flickered in the sunlight over a hand-lettered sign: TV HOT WATER. The Rocket was not like any place we had ever stayed before. My parents were big fans of Holiday Inn, where the rooms looked just alike no matter where you were.

  “Ask to look at the rooms first, Ed,” my mother said as my father climbed out of the car, headed for the office. Carol and I scrambled out of the backseat. My mother had us dressed in matching plaid shorts and white blouses with Peter Pan collars. We were blond and had identical pixie haircuts. Once a day, at least, people asked if we were twins, something Carol hated but I didn’t mind, since it meant I looked older than I really was.

  The thing I hated was when someone mentioned my feet, which point out to either side like a duck’s. If someone was a mom and being kind, she might ask if I took ballet. Kids, though, tended to stare and laugh. Carol’s feet were perfect, her toes pointing straight ahead. She stood, rubbing the backs of her legs, which were red and lined from the car seat.

  “Look,” I said, pointing at the vacant lot beside the motel, “a palm tree.” Carol looked. The palm was not waving gracefully like the coconut palms on Gilligan’s Island. It was too short and stubby for that, its trunk armored with broken fronds. Still, it was a genuine outdoor palm tree, and I was excited. Carol shrugged. She wasn’t.

  “Come on,” Carol said, pulling me toward the motel office. The tiny lobby was crowded with potted plants, like the ones our mother had back home but with thick, lushly tropical green leaves. Even living inside, they seemed to know they were in Florida. Philodendron covered the ceiling above the woman behind the counter. She was old and had grayish pink hair. My father was asking for two rooms. “There’s only one left,” she said. She spoke slowly, stretching out her vowels. “And I’m supposed to be holding it for this salesman. A regular customer.”

  My father shrugged, giving up. He was heading for the door when my mother came through it. Her hair was limp from the Florida humidity, and the gray in it was showing. If we’d been home in D.C., she would have been at the hair-dresser. My mother was already fifty. She and my father hadn’t married until she was nearly forty. When Carol and I were little and asked her how old she was, she told us thirty-six. It wasn’t until we met her youngest brother, the baby of her family,
and he said he was thirty-six that we found out she had lied to us. She laughed then and rolled her eyes, although I don’t think she really thought it was funny.

  “Please,” my mother said to the woman with the gray-pink hair. She was sure now she wanted the room. “The girls are so tired.” She waved a red fingernail at us. “It’s been such a long day.” My father had stopped just inside the door and was cleaning his glasses with his handkerchief.

  “Your grandkids?” the woman asked.

  My mother straightened. “My daughters.” The woman looked from my mother to us and back again.

  “Well,” she said. “Joe’ll kill me if he gets here and I’ve given away his room, but...” She paused. “I guess if he was coming, he’d be here by now.” She handed my mother a white card to fill out. She printed Col. and Mrs. in front of our last name, though my father never used his rank anymore. The woman surrendered a key with a large green plastic tag.

  I hung back when Carol and my father followed my mother out. I stood there kicking at the linoleum with one sneakered toe. I knew NASA was in the middle of the Gemini program, which was all about learning to do this and that—docking, walking in space. Things most kids I knew in D.C. found about as fascinating as watching the toddler down the block learn to tie his shoes. But after Gemini would be Apollo, and that meant the moon. I got up the nerve to speak. “Is there a space shot tonight?” I asked. The woman behind the counter smiled, shook her head.

  “I don’t think so, honey.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “It’s not an airport,” she said, losing patience with me, maybe with all Yankee tourists collectively. “Rockets don’t go blasting off every hour.”

  OUR ROOM WAS tiny, nearly filled from light green wall to light green wall by two double beds. My mother pushed the button marked HIGH on the window air conditioner, and it came on with a whoosh and a groan. She stretched out on one of the beds. Above her on the wall was a faded color mural of three hoop-skirted Southern belles. One was sitting on a throne made of bright waxy oranges. The other two stood poised, as if ready for a game of musical chairs. I stood on the bed to get a closer look. In one corner it said Citrus Queen and Her Court at World Famous Cypress Gardens. I wondered if Cypress Gardens was in Cocoa and if we would get to go see it.