PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA, 1961–1963
Letters from Charlie, unopened, asked what her plans were, when she might be leaving, why she hadn’t responded, whether it was money she needed, whether it was a car. She kept them in a neat stack on her bureau under the childhood ribbons Claudette had saved and repositioned here on the mirror, reminders as she fell asleep about who they believed her to be. The spelling bee where she had cried hidden in the red velvet wings, the tennis tournament she had won in the middle of a heat wave. I have a child, was the first thing she thought when she woke up, whether she could hear him or not, a slow fear that poured her out of bed. She kept waiting for the news to change.
He held blocks in primary colors, mystified by them, possessive. A banana was a gavel, he commanded the room with his judgment. Who she was didn’t matter, she thought, what she had believed or fought against—the life she had chosen in reaction to her parents’ had ultimately folded her right back into theirs. Claudette spoke to her and to Wright in almost the same voice, asked almost the same questions. What would you like to do today? What would you like to eat?
It was welcome to them, how she was diminished. At the dinner table her paralysis presented as excellent manners, no, yes, either is fine with me, thank you. If she wept over the roast beef, or while sitting out the afternoon on the wraparound porch, they presented her with the baby. A year passed like a matinee she pretended not to have mostly slept through, accepting what had changed and working out the events behind it. He took his first steps in the green-gold grass with the view of the town hung in fog behind him.
She watched television with her father, game shows, the news, an activity that rewarded her muteness, her lack of anything to say. Truth or Consequences, flat riddles posed by a jaunty host to faces as indistinguishable as loaves of white bread. Why was the wife concerned that her husband was a light drinker? Because he’d drink until it was light. Her father laughed at them, slippered feet crossed at the ankles, the same delay as the studio audience. There were commercials that mystified her, the joy of them. Why do girls in love always look so beautiful, the television asked. A woman in plastic twirled to unheard music. It’s because they always walk in the rain. Noxzema.
Her allowance each week was twenty dollars. His first words were a sentence, “No please.” On the last day of July they watched the footage of the partial eclipse, men streaming out of tall buildings in San Francisco holding cereal boxes to their faces. In the fall a black boy enrolled for classes at a college in the South and her father changed the channel on the riots, cars turned over on a lawn before the Doric columns of the lyceum. After a silent dinner, meat loaf shot through with a ribbon of orange cheese, she returned to the couch and changed it back. Her son remained in the dining room, sitting high on a booster and refusing to eat. When James heard what Fay was watching he did not enter, although from the frame of the door he made his dismissal clear, a hand waved in diagonal across his face as if at a bad smell. There was a shot of the governor’s car rolling onto campus, white faces warped in joy at its arrival, and it took her a moment to understand he was there in protest of the student, an Air Force veteran, the grandson of a slave. This event her parents did not discuss, life on land with people, but when the country had prepared for its first orbit they behaved as if in anticipation of a celebrity at their dinner table. Claudette baked in advance, shortbread cookies that looked like rockets.
Her parents stood by her door in the morning, tapping together without rhythm, her son in Claudette’s arms pawing at it, too. They had brought her coffee and she blinked, gathering a robe around her gauzy nightgown as she stood in the door frame. The coverage was already on in the living room, and the sound of it unsettled her, as did the benign smiles of her mother and father, people who had seemed incapable of delight for as long as she had been aware. Cronkite’s voice had never comforted her, that low bleat sounding like someone reporting from the bottom of a pit. A freckled man from Ohio, his face calm and clean, rode an elevator up the tower and boarded the capsule shaped like a badminton birdie. He was to ring the planet, hurtle around it waving bravely. On the enormous Atlas rocket, thirty stories tall and pale as milk, he waited as his audience did for the boom. When it came it disfigured the whole image, filled the frame with smoke, and then the camera struggled to keep up, losing it and finding it, losing it and finding it, the point of the rocket darting in and out until it was a nebulous white shape in a sphere of gray. The image was like a disease seen through a microscope, a vivid, frantic mutation, and all of it, the great furnace of the takeoff and the low human babble and the wind’s dilating of the reporter’s talk, sounded to her like an evil distraction . . . Has passed through the area of maximum dynamic pressures, the television said. Fay’s parents clapped politely, stunned, unaware of the look on her face. It was the first day their country encircled the earth, and the first day she hated her country.