Authors: Alan Lightman
At the break, John wants me to tell his friends about my boyhood rockets. “And don’t leave out the lizard.”
“Yah,” says Frodo. “Don’t leave out the friggin’ lizard.”
Ever since the launch of Sputnik, around my ninth birthday, I was entranced with the idea of building a rocket of my own. I imagined the liftoff, the lovely arc of the craft as it careened through space. All of this appealed to my poetic as well as my scientific proclivities. By thirteen, I started mixing my own rocket fuels. A fuel that burned too fast would explode like a bomb, while a fuel that burned too slow would smolder like a barbecue grill. As I remember, I settled on a particular mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate. The body of the rocket I built out of an aluminum tube. For the ignition system, I used the flashbulb of a Brownie camera, embedded within the fuel chamber. The high heat of the flash would ignite the fuel, and the bulb could be set off by thin wires trailing from the tail of the rocket to a battery and switch in my command bunker, a safe couple of hundred feet away. The launching pad I made out of a Coca-Cola crate filled with concrete and anchoring a V-shaped steel girder, tilted skyward at forty-five degrees.
Somehow I had got it into my head that I needed a passenger. Unmanned spaceflight was just too routine. So I built a capsule, to be housed in the upper fuselage of the rocket, and recruited a lizard to ride in the capsule as my astronaut. I constructed a parachute out of silk handkerchiefs and carefully wrapped it around the capsule. A small gunpowder charge—ignited by a mercury switch, a AAA battery, and a high-resistance wire—would eject the capsule at the highest point of the trajectory. I built the mercury switch out of a sealed glass vial with two wire contacts at one end and a thimbleful of mercury at the other. According to my plan, at the moment the rocket turned horizontal in its flight, the mercury would slide across its tiny container, bridge the two wire contacts and thus complete an electrical circuit, the
gunpowder would ignite, the capsule would get blown out of the nose cone, the parachute would unfold—and the capsule, along with its reptilian passenger, would slowly descend to earth. I had it all figured out.
As the designs and preparations unfolded over a period of a few weeks, mostly in my upstairs bedroom laboratory, my three younger brothers looked on with admiration and awe. The launch of this craft took place one Sunday morning at dawn on the ninth hole of Ridgeway Country Club. My brothers were all in attendance, as well as a number of fifteen-year-old friends from the neighborhood.
The launch went flawlessly. After the countdown, I closed the switch, the Brownie flashbulb went off, the fuel ignited, and the rocket shot from its launching pad. A few seconds later, at apogee, the capsule ejected just as planned and came floating gracefully back to earth. All of us boys hurried over to inspect the capsule and astronaut. I am not sure what we were expecting to find. What we did find was that the lizard seemed to be A-OK, except that its tail had been burned off. Only a blackened stump remained at the base of its spine. Apparently, the lizard’s tail had hung down into the fuel chamber, a detail I had neglected in my various drawings and calculations. To the gathered spectators, this one outcome—the burnt tail—was far more noteworthy than any other aspect of the launch.
Some years later, in college, I discovered that other students were better with their hands than I was, and I retreated to theoretical science. This career I pursued for twenty years, until I reached my personal apogee among theoretical physicists, who famously peak at a young age. Just as I began to descend, I turned to my other passion, creative writing, a veering course that made everyone in the family anxious over my well-being and livelihood. Finally, I had traded certainty for uncertainty, questions with answers for questions without answers.
“I’ll
bet the lizard didn’t feel any pain,” says Frodo.
“How would you know what a lizard feels?” says another member of the band. “Or what a lizard thinks about?”
“Everyone knows that a lizard can grow back a new tail,” says Frodo. “No big deal.”
It is Sunday. I want to drive past the Mount Olive Baptist Church, where Blanche used to sing. The church is a modest one-story building made of beige, gray, and sienna uneven stones, with two belfries on either side of a steeply pitched roof and stained-glass windows on the side walls. As I drive by, I can hear the choir.
Blanche hummed gospels as she ironed my parents’ shirts and blouses. As a young child, I lay in my bed listening to Blanche sing when I was supposed to be napping. Although she sang softly, you could hear her music from anywhere in the house, and it was a comforting sound, a fragrant balm that oozed from room to room and healed everything that was not right in the world.
Blanche did the ironing on two days of the week: shirts, blouses, and underwear on one day; tablecloths, sheets, and cotton napkins on the other. A huge pile of laundry waited in a couple of baskets at her feet. One by one, she would bend over and lift up each item, straighten it, pat it, and stretch it out on her ironing board as if she were about to perform an operation. Then she would dip her hand into a bowl of water and sprinkle the fabric with a quick flick of her fingers. When the hot iron met the damp fabric, it hissed and sent up a little puff of steam. Blanche had a routine. With a shirt, she would first press the front, moving the iron in a little semicircle around each button. Then the
buttonhole side, then the collar, then the sleeves in short strokes, careful not to form any double creases, and finally the back in long strokes. Her technique, slow and rhythmic, was hypnotizing to watch. Pat. Sprinkle. Back and forth. Up. Down. Turn. Pat. Sprinkle. Up. Down. Up. Down. After each shirt was done, she put it on a hanger, buttoned the top two buttons, and hung it from the doorknob of the silver closet. Fifteen years later, when I began to iron my own shirts, I was astonished to realize that I had unconsciously memorized Blanche’s technique and rhythm, in the same way that my fingers learned the notes of a Chopin sonata. Pat. Sprinkle. Back and forth. Up. Down. And I could picture Blanche standing at the ironing board, her face moist with sweat, a fan chopping the heat, an ashtray on the table holding her smoldering cigarette. Every minute or so, she would put the iron down and take a long drag.
It was at her ironing board that Blanche held forth on her views of the universe. Never would she delve into such discussions when my mother was near, but if Blanche and I were alone in the laundry, she talked easily. “Some people’s rich and some people’s poor, but it don’t matter to God ’cause He can see into a person’s heart,” she said, sounding like one of Faulkner’s characters. She would pull out her Bible and point to a passage. Blanche could hardly read, but she had a well-worn Bible, and she knew what it said, and where. “God made the world so Jesus could save it. People always raisin’ cain and makin’ trouble, but if they jes put theirselves in the hand a Jesus … People is jes people, that’s all they is, jes people.
“The Lord brought me here on loan, and He’s fixin’ to take me back. Alan, I’m countin’ on you makin’ sure I’m buried right.” She began saying such things when she was still in her thirties and I was in my early teens. The way she was talking, Blanche could drop dead any minute. I began worrying about
where I was going to find the funds and the know-how to “bury her right.”
Blanche herself always owed money. Credit bureaus were constantly calling our house at all hours to speak to her. Whenever the telephone rang, Blanche got an anxious look on her face and bustled out of the room. She seemed to know when it was a credit bureau. “Tell them I’s not here,” she’d whisper. Mother would roll her eyes at Blanche. “If you didn’t waste so much money on those dumb cigarettes,” Mother said, “you wouldn’t have to borrow so much.” Eventually, Mother would pick up the telephone and make up some small lie about Blanche’s whereabouts, shaking her head in disapproval the whole time.
Blanche once came to my mother with a different kind of financial conundrum. She had a check she couldn’t cash. It was customary for the women in Mother’s circle to “lend” their maids to each other when a special evening’s entertainment required extra help. On such an occasion, one of my mother’s friends had paid Blanche by check. Needless to say, Blanche didn’t have a bank account. For weeks, she carried the check around in her purse. Finally, she mustered the courage to walk into a First Tennessee Bank. After waiting in a line of white people, she arrived at the teller’s counter. The teller, a middle-aged white woman, looked at Blanche, frowned, and asked to see her ID. Blanche produced her driver’s license. The teller studied the document with skepticism and called for the manager. At this point, people standing in line started mumbling impatiently. Out comes the manager, a white man in a suit. He looks Blanche up and down. Then, in a voice everyone can hear, he asks the name of her employer and her salary. Blanche crept away with her check. Now, with her eyes cast down on the floor, she asked Mother if she would be willing to accompany her to the bank. “Don’t look so mopey, Blanche Lee,” said Mother. “I’ll go with
you. But next time you work for Mrs. Tannenbaum, make sure you ask for cash.”
As children, my brothers and I could feel the house expand and contract with the body language between Blanche and Mother. They dueled and fenced, they danced around each other, they loved and hated each other. I think they completed each other. Those two females were the tsunami waves of my childhood. Despite the insults constantly heaped on Blanche, both intentional and unintentional, she never complained. Blanche once asked me, “Why does Mizz Lightman treat me the way she does?”
I felt terrible. But what could I say? Mizz Lightman was my mother. And Blanche didn’t expect a reply. It wasn’t really a question. It was a statement, an addendum to the universe as she saw it. She hesitated for a moment, looking off somewhere, then went back to her ironing.
Sometime in the 1980s, long after I’d moved away from Memphis, I was back for a brief visit and drove out to Blanche’s house in Midtown. In all the years that Blanche had worked for our family, I’d never seen where she lived. Her house was wedged into a row of tiny ramshackle houses, each with a little screened porch and a rotting white picket fence. Parked in front was Blanche’s ancient Oldsmobile, given to her by my parents after they’d put a hundred thousand miles on the car themselves. When I arrived, Blanche was sitting on her front porch wearing bedroom slippers, fanning herself and listening to WDIA. I kept waiting for Blanche to invite me into her house. Over the years, I had often imagined the inside of her house. Did she have secondhand furniture, like her disintegrating car? Did she have photographs on her tables of me and my brothers? Or pictures of Jesus on the wall? But Blanche never invited me in. We talked on her porch for an hour, glad to see each other, and I left.
CRUST: 1½ cups flour and ½ teaspoon salt sifted together. Add 4 tablespoons chilled shortening and 4 tablespoons chilled butter and churn together with fingers until mixture becomes coarse crumbs. Add 1 beaten egg and 2 tablespoons ice water. Stir with a fork until dough holds together. Cover and refrigerate. Roll out dough in a 12-inch circle on a floured sheet of wax paper. Place circle of dough in a 9-inch pan and crimp edges. Makes 1 pie shell.
FILLING: Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together 4 tablespoons melted butter, 2 eggs, 1 cup dark corn syrup, 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon brandy. Pour into pie shell. Put 1 cup shelled pecan halves on top. Bake 45–50 minutes and allow to cool.
Near the end of the film
Babette’s Feast
, members of an ascetic Christian sect in a chilly town in Denmark are invited to a sumptuous meal prepared by a French refugee. After discussing the matter among themselves, they agree to attend the feast out of courtesy but to show no pleasure while eating. As dish after dish of turtle soup, quail, cheeses and fine wines and creamy desserts is placed on the candle-lit table, the villagers struggle in vain to deny the raptures of their palates as they devour the meal.
After all these years since my mother’s passing, I have come to believe that there was some part of her that rejected the pleasures of life. With food, with entertainment, and with romance, she never gave herself permission to fall headlong into the dark and wondrous cave of sensual delight. When she ate, she ate at such high velocity that there was no time to taste. When she laughed, the laugh came from her throat instead of from deep in her stomach. Even in her dancing, so graceful to me as a child, she sometimes struck at her body as if it were a dog that had to be trained, she leaped with a compulsiveness that went with her insomnia and her incessant to-do lists and the fidgeting of her legs. She was a taut string. Certainly she didn’t consider pleasure to be sinful or immoral. Her ambivalent relation to pleasure was something else, some kind of hesitancy in herself, a denial of her self.
I continue to be haunted by the letter she wrote to my father
in the months before they married, correctly foreseeing the raw edges of their union and the missing flesh of her life
: I criticize you all the time for not being social minded, but in reality you are a better person than I will ever be. I care too much what people think. Maybe that is why I will never be completely satisfied or happy
. These remarkable words were penned in dark blue ink on light blue stationery. Her handwriting has a lilt, a roundedness and slight forward slant, and the
g
s and
y
s have long flourishing tails. There are no words scratched out. How could my mother know at age twenty-two that she would never be completely satisfied or happy? Had she already decided that she would not let herself taste? Or that nothing in life would live up to her expectations? Or did she see something unworthy and desolate in herself, a barren and cold village on the edge of the sea?