Domestic Affairs (28 page)

My friend Janet is a wise, funny, loving but unsentimental woman—marvelous-looking and beautiful-spirited. She’s an artist, a lover of birds, which is how we came to meet her, a couple of Septembers back, watching for hawks on top of Pitcher Mountain. She was just nineteen when her son was born; he was five or six when she and her husband separated. I’ve heard her speak, full of regret, about not having handled carefully enough that hard time in her children’s lives. I’ve heard her voice regrets over mistakes she felt she made, things she’d do differently if she had another chance. It’s hard to find yourself living under the same roof with a person you’d have nothing to do with (I’ve heard her say) if you hadn’t happened to give birth to him.

Usually my children were around us—all over us—as we talked about this. We’d be in my living room, surrounded by the tangible chaos children the ages of mine make of their parents’ lives. Cars and blocks and Fisher-Price people flung in all directions, Audrey begging for another cookie or the chance to stay up a half hour later, and Charlie, naked, having successfully eluded my attempts to put on his pajamas, dancing his wild dervish dance to the
Big Chill
soundtrack, with a plastic fire chief’s hat on his head and an uncapped magic marker in his fist. They are still children of an age to be picked up and put in another place when they’re heading in the wrong direction. Children to whom one can still hold out the threat of no dessert, and for whom the lyric “You better watch out, better not pout, ’cause Santa Claus is coming to town” still carries a lot of power. My daughter (though of course she can also get very angry at me) will still sometimes say, “You’re the best mommy in the entire universe.” My son wakes in the night with my name on his lips. I try unsuccessfully to imagine my round-faced offspring being teenagers who will someday stop smiling, stop speaking to me. Go up to their rooms and close the door, blasting me out of the house with their music. And worse.

Janet was, I know, a loving mother who did everything she could to save her son, and still he didn’t make it. New Year’s Eve, the week before the crash, I saw Janet and the man who—if she were freer, and not bound up by attempts to make things okay for her children—she might happily have been living with. “Something terrible is going to happen,” she said, powerless to change anything.

If another friend’s seventeen-year-old had been killed in a crash I’d be thinking about the senseless way car accidents have of altering a seemingly cloudless horizon. With Sam’s death there is a different sort of grief—of having seen this coming as clearly as if the vehicles had been toys that were wound up and set on a track and we were all watching in slow motion. Sam’s feeling of emptiness—the inability of everyone who tried to give him excitement or hope or even interest in living—appeared bottomless. He seemed so bent on self-destruction that the shock at his death lay most strongly in the fact that he was a passenger in the car and not its driver.

Parents of older children, nodding in the direction of my small ones, shake their heads and tell me, “Wait until they’re teenagers. They’ll break your heart.” Well, I don’t feel the grip of terror. I have to believe that a person has some control over the way things turn out, and beyond that I have to trust my children. But I don’t feel even close to immune, either, to Janet’s kind of disaster, the chaos that an unhappy teenager can bring on a household. I can’t believe that I control my children’s universe and that I have the power to ensure their survival. And there is no such thing as a safe place to bring up children, no matter what the water tastes like or however much the landscape resembles a scene printed on a calendar. It’s always a perilous journey through the woods. Not only for the child, but for the mother, back at home, who stands watching through the glass.

My fears, since I’ve had children, center mostly on the chance of their being hurt. Sometimes, if Steve is driving in bad weather, I’ll stay up worrying over whether he’s safe. I tend to feel invulnerable myself. The greatest injury that could befall me would be injury suffered by someone I love. I have tormented myself with the picture of me losing my children. But never of my children losing me.

And then the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded.

I spent a day with Christa McAuliffe once. It was early last fall, just a month after she had been chosen America’s First Teacher in Space. Because we live in New Hampshire, just about twenty miles from the McAuliffes, and because, like her, I know a few things about what it is to have a family, with young children, that you love more than anything, and a job you love too (and a husband named Steve, even), I had been following her story with particular interest. Most of all, I watched her, I guess, because like her I live an ordinary life, filled with trips to the post office and frantic searches for lost shoes, and like her, I sometimes dream of adventure. Only my adventures, unlike hers, happen mostly in my own familiar home, with my two feet planted firmly on the ground.

So I called her up (that was still possible then, although the line was often busy). It was Christa herself who answered. She was taking off for Houston to begin astronaut training in a couple of weeks, and already her schedule was so busy that she had managed to spend a total of one hour at the pool with her children that summer, sitting at the edge of the water counting heads. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “This year I don’t even have a tan.”

Well, she was meeting one reporter at eight and another one at eight forty-five. Someone else at nine-thirty. That’s how it went, all day long, with breaks in between for her son Scott’s Little League practice and picking up her daughter Caroline at day camp. But there was a hour at seven
A.M.
, and she said I could come then.

She met me at the door with her hair still wet, in stocking feet, and I followed her through the rooms of her house as she talked, and as she looked for Scott’s sleeping bag (he was going to a friend’s house), took the chicken out of the freezer to defrost, and started the wash. There were lots of phone calls too: NASA one minute. The cleaners, to say her husband’s shirts were ready the next.

There were piles of letters and newspaper clippings all over the house at that point; also helium balloons and flowers and signs saying things like “Reach for the Stars” and “Out of This World.” I guess some people might’ve said the place was a mess, but you could tell something else too: This woman was organized. In her pocket she had a two-page list of things to do, and there was another one taped to the dashboard of her car. She had NASA’s phone number attached to her refrigerator with alphabet magnets, right next to her kids’ drawings. In the middle of a sentence, she’d suddenly reach for her pencil and jot something down. “Black high-top sneakers for Scott.” “Get more checks.” She was no less concerned with the cake for Scott’s approaching birthday party than she was with her appearance on the
Tonight Show.
If the phone rang when she was in the middle of a sentence, she’d come back five minutes later and finish it. That’s a skill many mothers possess, but I have never met one who had it down the way she did.

I liked her. She was brisk, confident; she paid attention to things (remembered the ages of my children, asked me a question about the town where we live, knew the names of students she’d taught ten years ago). I remember thinking, too, how different we were. There didn’t seem to be a shred of ambivalence or hesitation in her, about changing in such a major way the life she and her family had been living until now (a life that everybody liked just fine), leaving the teaching job she loved and the family to which she was unmistakably devoted, for six months’ training in Houston—and then leaving the planet altogether, to blast into orbit.

She met her husband when they were both fifteen; they had been together twenty years, and though he had been, for most of that time, the kind of husband who doesn’t know where you keep the cleanser, he was also totally behind her when she said she wanted to go into space. They both seemed clear on that—surprised, almost, that there would be any question. What kind of love would it be, in which one partner would keep the person he loved from pursuing her dreams?

Well, our one hour was up swiftly, and there was a new batch of reporters knocking at the door, taking pictures of her cat, her car, her son’s bike. I left.

But I wanted to talk to her some more. It was that business of leaving the family that puzzled me. I have met women who work twelve hours a day and see their children mostly for breakfast and a bedtime story; I have known ambitious, driving women who want to be rich, want to be famous, want to have their picture on the cover of
Time
magazine, would just as soon see as little of their husbands as possible. She wasn’t one of those. I have even known a couple of husbands and fathers who are really the backbone of their family anyway: the ones whose name the children are most likely to call in the night. The ones who know who’s due for a booster shot and which grocer has the freshest chicken, and remember, when someone gets a loose tooth, to have a surprise ready for the tooth fairy. But this was a family that ran on Christa’s extraordinary energy and organization and attention to detail. How could she leave her husband and children? How would they ever manage without her?

So I called a couple of weeks later (it was just three days before she left for Houston), and asked if I could see her again. She had no more time to sit and talk; I knew that. I just wondered whether I could spend the day with her, riding around town, while she did the errands on her list for the next day. She said okay.

Here’s what we did that day: Drove to the local TV station, where Christa taped a show with a couple of ministers and a priest about the religious implications of space travel. Stopped by the grocer’s to pick up peanut butter for her daughter’s babysitter. Picked up Caroline at kindergarten and took her over to the sitter’s. (I took the wheel of her car, for those three blocks, so Christa could walk over there with Caroline, alone. I recognized the impulse of a busy mother to make use of every scrap of time she can find to be with her kids.)

After leaving Caroline, Christa gave another television interview and posed for pictures for a couple of magazines. She stopped by the cable TV company to let them know that her husband Steve wanted to get the Sports Network. She picked her son up at school, listened to him tell about his day.

After that, she was supposed to pick up Caroline and take both kids over to a friend’s house for the rest of the afternoon. But it was easy to see Scott wanted to stay with her, so he came along: to the doctor’s office to get Caroline’s immunization records for kindergarten and the grocery store to order meat for a family party Christa was giving that weekend. She told me the recipe for the casserole she was making, an Armenian dish that would serve fifty. Then we stopped for an ice cream cone. She had peppermint. Scott said in a small, proud voice that maybe they’d name the flavor after her now.

After that, I went home, to my own family, my own collection of lists and phone numbers and refrigerator magnets and errands. It had been my daughter’s first day of school too, and of course I wanted to hear all about that. Also, as it turned out, this was the day my sons had their tomato fight on our porch, so all in all it was a busy day.

Christa called me once, from Houston, to fill me in on how things were going. She loved it down there. I called Steve, her husband, and he told how, when he got the children home every night, they’d say, “Let’s see what Mr. Microwave has for us tonight.” Christa had left him with lists of neighbors to call on, phone numbers of babysitters and doctors and take-out food places. Already, he said, he had a whole new understanding of what it was she’d been doing all these years. “Wait till she gets home, though,” he joked. “I plan to slip back to my old bad habits just as far as she’ll let me.”

Well, she won’t be coming home, and I have been trying to make sense of it, or at least find something comforting to tell myself and my children when the television replays for us, for the tenth time, the one hundredth time, those terrible haunting images of that rocket lifting off, blasting higher, going to full throttle, and then exploding in midair four miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving no trace of the seven crew members, including, of course, this woman NASA had placed on board specifically so that the American people would finally have someone up there we could identify with, who could make us feel (as she did) “that could be me up there.”

Other images haunt me too: Steve McAuliffe, reading her Teacher in Space application and saying, “Where is this woman? I want to marry her.” Scott McAuliffe, getting off the plane in Florida with his fourth-grade class, posing before the launch, holding his mother’s official NASA portrait, with a look that strikes me now as proud and wistful at the same time. Caroline’s room, back in Concord, filled with jelly bracelets and nail-polish bottles, just like Audrey’s. Christa and the other members of the crew, taking that last, euphoric walk toward the van that would bring them to the
Challenger.
I move closer to the television set every time they run that film, to study their faces. As if maybe, if I look hard enough, I’ll find some clue to the tragedy that awaited them.

Shall I, tonight, tell my children the story of Icarus, flying too close to the sun? Is the final lesson Christa McAuliffe ended up teaching that mothers are better off staying home after all? I ask myself again, “How could she have left her family?” And how will they live without her?

What I choose to remind myself, as I put on our table the dinner that neither my husband nor my daughter nor I feel much like eating, and later, as Steve and I lie side by side in the dark and I hold him tight, is that the only home worth having is the kind that makes you strong enough to venture forth. That nothing is worth much that comes without risk. (Giving someone your heart. Having a child. They all leave us open to danger, and loss.) And still, it’s for all of us to press on, not shrink back. Who can forget that final command from Mission Control moments before the sky exploded? Full throttle.