“It’s got to be a big advantage,” she said, “having worked with your hands all this time.”
“The yoga classes I’ve been going to with Toby really got methinking,” he said. “I could see the relationship between the body and the brain. Yoga’s great that way.”
“You should try it, Eleanor,” Coco said. “It might help you to be not so stressed out.”
“So now even my babysitter is giving me advice about how to relax,” Eleanor said to Darla when she came over the next day. (There had been a bad scene with Bobby on Christmas Eve. The makeup she’d applied did not conceal the bruise.)
“Coco actually had the nerve to tell me I should be taking better care of myself,” Eleanor told her. “The big eighteen-year-old expert.”
“Of course she’s right,” Darla said. “That’s what’s so annoying. Same as you’re right when you keep telling me to leave Bobby. Sometimes it just feels crummy, hearing the truth.”
Eleanor did know, in fact, that she needed to have something in her life besides taking care of her children and paying the bills. But the idea of hanging out on a mat listening to a CD ofkirtanchanting while performing sun salutations just didn’t have any appeal to her. What she wanted to do, actually, was call up Timmy Pouliot and go for another motorcycle ride.
49.
Zero Gravity
That was the year Eleanor got her first computer, and they announced that a teacher was going up in space.
She’d always resisted technology—held on to her manual typewriter for years before finally buying her IBM Selectric. Back when she had her comic strip her editor at the syndicate was always urging her to upgrade. More significantly, maybe, Al, who’d been obsessed with technology as far back as kindergarten, when her grandparents sent them a Pong game for Christmas, had told her mother she should buy a computer from a new company called Apple. A Macintosh.
Everything was going to be about computers and programming now, Al told her. If you didn’t accept that, you’d be living in the dark ages. Look at theChallenger! That’s where the world was heading. Technology.
“Before you know it, Mom, computers are going to have graphic programs,” Al told Eleanor. Movies, too, maybe, and ways of communicating with people without having to use a phone. On one of her visits to the library she’d found an article about a lab at Stanford run by a man named Terry Winograd—whom she now quoted regularly to her parents. “Pretty soon people will be able to talk to their phone and tell their stereo what music to play,” she told Eleanor. She already knew she was going to study with Dr. Winograd at Stanford someday.
According to Al, computers were going to revolutionize the world. She herself preferred PCs, but for her mother’s purposes, the Apple Macintosh was best.
“Just take my word for it,” she said. “This is something I understand.”
Finally, though it represented a big investment, Eleanor had ordered one of the new Macintosh computers. The box sat in her studio for two months before she had the courage to open it.
“You have no idea how much memory they can store on one tiny chip,” Al told her. “It’s like magic, only it’s real. You’ll see, Mom. This is going to change everything.”
There isn’t a computer in the world that can help Toby,Eleanor thought. But she didn’t say it.
That fall it felt as though everyone was going off in different directions. Eleanor, working her long hours in the studio, was trying to come up with money. Cam was driving back and forth to Boston for physical therapy training and, weeks he was home, spending more and more time off somewhere—Eleanor never even asked anymore—studying his anatomy books in between drives to bring Toby to yoga. With Eleanor working so hard, Phyllis made most of the meals. Al just stayed upstairs in the kids’ room, reading about programming and studying Mandarin. Days went by sometimes now when they didn’t even have meals together anymore. The one thing Eleanor had said they’d always do.
Ursula was focused on theChallengerspace launch. Christa McAuliffe lived half an hour from Akersville, in Concord. She had a husband and two kids, and a job as a high school science teacher, as well as a lifelong ambition to go into space. Except when she put on her astronaut suit, she looked like a regular mother. The happy kind.
They made a bulletin board about theChallengerin Ursula’s classroom. Whenever you found an article in the newspaper about Christa McAuliffe or the other astronauts, you were supposed to cut it out and bring it in to add to the bulletin board. By Thanksgiving, the board had been almost filled up, and they weren’t even going to launch theChallengeruntil January.
By November, the mission to space was all Ursula talked about. She knew the names of every one of the astronauts, but her particular focus was Christa McAuliffe. Christa just seemed so cheerful about everything—like Ursula herself, actually. In every one of the pictures of Christa on the bulletin board, she was smiling.
At Stop & Shop with Eleanor one time, Ursula saw a commemorativeedition ofPeoplemagazine with Christa McAuliffe on the cover. Eleanor didn’t buy things like this normally, but Ursula said she’d rake all the leaves under Old Ashworthy plus empty the dishwasher for a month if her mother would buy the magazine. Eleanor had put it in her cart, though probably less because the deal impressed her than because she had no energy to argue.
Eleanor felt tired all the time now, though the feeling had nothing to do with staying up late or working harder than usual. It was a bone-deep weariness. When she tried to summon an image of something hopeful to look forward to, she came up blank.
For Ursula, nothing exemplified hope better than theChallengerlaunch.
At dinner, when the family gathered around the table, she talked nonstop about Christa. She knew the names of her children and that she had played piano when she was Ursula’s age, and how she believed that everyone should have a dream and never give up on it. Ursula had seen a special on TV that showed Christa McAuliffe at the space center in Texas, practicing what it would be like not to have any gravity around. They showed her floating around a pretend space capsule doing somersaults in the air.
You would think a person’s hair would look really crazy in a situation like that, Ursula pointed out, but Christa’s hair had looked pretty much the same in the no-gravity space capsule model as it did in the other pictures on the bulletin board. Ursula found this difficult to understand, but Eleanor said that was a perm for you. It took more than zero gravity to mess it up.
Ursula wished she could be someplace where there wasn’t any gravity. “When I grow up I’m going to be an astronaut,” she told them at dinner.
“Good luck with that,” her older sister observed, in the new, bitter tone of voice in which she delivered just about every remark. They all knew they were supposed to call her Al now, but they kept forgetting, which was one more source of irritation.
“You have to be wicked good at math,” Al went on. “Plus, they give you a test where you do all these push-ups and jumping jacks. You’d never be able to pass.”
