Even in a land-yacht station wagon, we were piled in too tight: in the back seat, my high school boyfriend and his angry sister, with me between them so their skin never touched in the heat; their parents up front; the little brothers ricocheting around in the wayback with all the suitcases. When we were halfway across the endless Midwest, moving fifty-five miles an hour through towering forests of corn and sunflowers, the car’s anemic air-conditioning went out entirely and with it any cheer that could be produced by an I Spy game or a lunchroom carton of chocolate milk from the cooler on the front seat.
When we got to the tidy town on the plains of Colorado, all the aunts and uncles and cousins poured out of the grandmother’s house, a great constellation of kindness come to meet us and welcome the family home. Someone mentioned that the Perseids would be putting on a fine display the following night, and someone else offered to bring blankets to the clan’s usual spot on the prairie, and my boyfriend’s father explained that I, a child of the damp, congealed air of Alabama, had never seen a night full of stars like the one I would see that night in the high, thin air above the plains of Colorado.
Though it was August, we had to put on sweaters when they woke us deep in the night, and though we were all still so tired from two days of driving in the heat, my boyfriend and his sister didn’t quarrel, laughing instead to remember another childhood trip to see another meteor shower, and when we turned off the road onto the grass, the soil of the prairie was not at all flat and smooth but jarred us till our heads bumped the roof of the station wagon. Everything surprised me. I understood that I understood nothing at all.
And, oh, the stars were like the stars in a fairy tale, a profligate pouring of stars that reached across the sky from the edge of the world to the edge of the world to the edge of the world. Even before the first meteor winked at the corner of my eye, I tilted my head back and felt the whole planet spinning, and instantly I dropped to the ground and hunted for something to hold fast to before the prairie tilted and tossed me into the black void that holds this tiny blue world.
In silence the family lay together, quilts set edge to edge. Across the grass I could hear the mother still trying to coax one of the younger boys out of the car, telling him she would hold him tight, but he would not budge. “I’m too little,” he said. “It’s too big, and I’m too little.”