7.
The day I fell in love with Lindy Simpson was January 28, 1986.
This was also the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, and seven courageous astronauts died. I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade.
Along with nearly every other school in America, the Perkins School had structured its entire science curriculum around this mission. We focused on stars and galaxies and made crude Styrofoam mobiles of the Milky Way that we hung with fishing line from the ceilings of our classrooms. In preparation for the Challenger’s liftoff, to be broadcast live on CNN, similar grades had been lumped together, fourth through sixth, seventh and eighth, et cetera, and ushered into rooms with televisions. This was exotic to us then, watching cable at school, and the TVs stood on carts that had been pushed in front of the blackboards. They had plastic knobs and buttons beneath the screens. To make additional space in the classrooms, our wooden desks had been stacked and moved out into the hallways and we were seated in long rows along the carpeted floor, organized by homeroom.
As a class project, the sixth grade, Lindy’s grade, had written a letter to Christa McAuliffe. She was the elementary school teacher chosen from more than twenty thousand applicants to accompany the astronauts into space, and she was a national hero. Their letter to her was simple, written in pencil on lined paper, and it thanked her for her bravery. In the weeks before takeoff, Mrs. McAuliffe had returned to the sixth-grade class an American flag and signed publicity photo of the entire crew, both of which were now hanging on a large bulletin board lined in red, white, and blue crepe paper. Our teachers gathered in front of it and chatted energetically. The whole place had the buzz of a holiday.
We drank fruit punch and ate cookies shaped like stars. We wore flag pins and sang the national anthem. We felt good, all of us did, and I had no way of knowing that the image of Mrs. Knight, my homeroom teacher, singing along in front of that flag would never leave me. She was a young woman with a bob haircut, although all teachers looked immensely old to me then, and she was a brunette. This was her first year teaching at the Perkins School, at any school, and it would be her last.
I remember that it was cold and dry that morning, oddly enough, as even January offers no promise of winter in Louisiana. I’ve spent Christmases in Tshirts, Thanksgivings in shorts and sneakers. On this day, however, we all wore pants and long-sleeved button-downs, and two rows across from me, sitting Indian-style on the carpet, Lindy Simpson wore a navy blue sweatshirt over her jumper.
I paid her no mind. I wanted to see the rocket.
When it came time for the countdown, our teachers turned up the volume on the television and asked us to pay attention. We stared like tourists at the shuttle in its launch position, filmed at long distance by a handheld camera. I remember the Kennedy Space Center looking completely deserted but for the craft: a white shuttle perched atop three cylindrical rocket boosters, the middle one some fifteen stories high and blood red. This was a good time in America. We were dreamers, teachers and students alike, all aboard that mission by patriotic proxy.
So, as the countdown began, we joined along. Our chorus swelled at T minus eight as smoke released from beneath the rocket in purposeful plumes. We then bellowed out the final “one” and watched the Challenger take off, heavy and miraculous, breaking away from the launch pad and burning everything beneath it. Our teachers applauded. The announcer said “Liftoff! We have liftoff!” and told us we were witnessing history.
We believed him, and watched the shuttle rise atop a column of fire.
Seventy-three seconds later, it ended.
Due to a massive amount of wind shear, along with the failure of the right rocket booster’s O-rings, a flare breached the external fuel tank of the Challenger and destroyed the integrity of the ship. From the ground, all systems looked normal. We could hear the joyous cheers of people standing behind the camera, the excitement in the announcer’s polished voice. We had no clue. Even Mission Control was unaware of the problem until the very end, as was evidenced by the last transmission made by NASA to the crew. It came ten seconds before the explosion and said, “Roger, Challenger, go at throttle up,” which means Everything’s okay, you guys. Give it all you’ve got.
After a federal investigation into the event, and public disclosure of every detail, we learned that there was a bit more to this story. The disaster was not a complete surprise to everyone. It turned out that an additional transmission had been made, one second before the explosion, from the crew of the Challenger back to the ground, when Pilot Michael J. Smith, while either reading something on the gauges or feeling something in his heart, said, “Uh-oh.”
Often, in times of tragedy, there is a delay period, a moment of collective disbelief.
Not this time.
I immediately heard shouts from the halls.
Our teachers reacted first, clutching their chests and screaming as the shuttle burst into flames, and so chaos had us before the first piece of debris splashed into the Atlantic. Mrs. Knight scrambled to turn off the television and Mrs. McElroy, a parental volunteer, tripped over a boy curled up on the floor and fell against the snack table. When the punch bowl broke and spilled red juice all over the carpet, we hit maximum hysteria. I heard people running up and down the hallways. I heard the worried voices of eighth graders in the adjacent classroom. I heard the squealing of pigtailed girls. I didn’t know what to do.
So, I sat on the carpet and watched this. I tried not to get stepped on.
Across from me, Lindy Simpson sat on the carpet as well.
When a space cleared between us, I saw that her sweatshirt was covered in vomit.
Lindy looked over at me and pressed her lips together, not out of any form of embarrassment, I don’t believe, but rather as if she were merely glad to see someone she knew. She did not smile, necessarily, and she did not cry. Instead she had a look on her face that still haunts me. It was as if Lindy had unplugged herself completely from the event.
This was a look of hers I would see later in life.
Mrs. Knight eventually noticed her, too, and rushed over. In one expert move, she pulled the soiled sweatshirt over Lindy’s head and balled it up so that no one would see. Then Lindy, coming to, began to cry. Mrs. Knight helped her off the floor and ushered her out of the room, stroking her hair. As they passed in front of me, I heard Mrs. Knight say, “I know, honey. I know.”
I’m not sure why this ignited my heart. I suppose it was the fact that I, myself, was not crying, that I hadn’t even had time to react. Or perhaps it was the sight of Lindy’s bright pink vomit that did it, strangely enough, so full of candy and sweet punch. Was she so sensitive that this was always inside of her? When I saw her running carefree through our neighborhood, or eating a sno-cone on the curb of Piney Creek Road, was it possible she was this tender and vulnerable? How deeply did she feel what she saw? How intensely can one experience life? Were all girls like this? The idea broke over me. These were separate creatures altogether, I realized, these girls. If not, then how could Lindy have felt so immediately the panic in the classroom, the concern over the death of our heroes? How could it make her sick before I even got off the floor?
So say what you will about men, our massive failures on Earth, but some understanding flickered inside me at that moment, something hardwired came alive. I was just a boy, not even a man, and yet I suddenly felt it my warrant to defend this particular girl from there on out, against any vague threat that might arise. In the days that followed this event, I got into arguments with other kids my age, boys who said they, too, had seen Lindy throw up, and tried to gain an audience to laugh at her expense. I threw fits. I denied it vehemently. I raged against an unchangeable history, something that would later become a habit of mine.
In a curious turn of events, many years after this, I ran into Mrs. Knight at a local restaurant. I was in college then, and she still looked young and lovely. She now worked as an assistant at a contracting firm, she told me, and had given up teaching completely. But she remembered me well, she said, from the day the Challenger exploded. She introduced me to her husband and explained to him the nightmare it was, having charge of all those shell-shocked children, and how she still revisits the day in her head. Then she told me a story I didn’t remember.
After Mrs. Knight had taken Lindy to the restroom and rinsed out her sweatshirt in the sink, she led her back into the hall. Apparently, I was standing there waiting for them, she said, and had taken off my long-sleeved shirt to give it to Lindy. Embarrassed and upset, Lindy ran off in the crowd without acknowledging me. Mrs. Knight said that she still remembers the lump in her throat at that moment, how ill-prepared she was for pandemonium, and what I told her as Lindy ran away.
“Do you remember what you said?” she asked me.
I didn’t.
“You came up and took my hand,” she said. “You told me, ‘I guess it’s true what they say, Mrs. Knight. When it rains, it pours.’”
I smiled at this small memory, as did she.
“I never forgot that,” she said. “You seemed so mature. I don’t know. You were like an old wise man in a little kid’s body. It stuck with me. I always wondered how you’d grown up.”
“Well,” I said. “Here I am.”
“And the Simpson girl,” she said. “I felt so sorry for her, too. Are you still in touch with her?”
“No,” I told her. “Not anymore.”
So on the day I fell for Lindy, school was canceled by noon.
There was a line of traffic in the carpool lane, and even our parents were distraught about the shuttle, thankful to have been let out of work to come get us. Randy and I rode the short distance home in my mother’s car, and he kept making crashing noises with his mouth. My mother begged him to stop. We saw Lindy walking home alone on the sidewalk with her sweatshirt in her hand. She looked cold and sad, and my mother pulled to the side of the road. I hopped out of the car and let Lindy sit in the front. She didn’t say a word to me. I was crushed.
Later that night, my mother called me into the living room to watch Ronald Reagan on TV. “Honey,” she said. “It’s the president.”
I remember it clearly.
Reagan sat in the Oval Office, his face placid and genuine. He wore a dark blue suit and fiddled with a paper clip in his hand. The credenza behind him, barely visible, was covered in family photos. And instead of delivering the State of the Union Address, which he was scheduled to do, President Reagan mourned our nation’s tragedy and mentioned each of the fallen astronauts by name. My mother broke out in quiet tears as he spoke of them, something she did with regularity in these years. She then put her arm around me and pulled me close to her on the couch. We sat in the darkness and listened.
The president said, “And I now want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff.”
My mother looked down at me. She ran her fingers through my hair.
“I know it’s hard to understand,” he told us, “but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted,” he reminded us. “It belongs to the brave.”
I looked up at my mother. She was already broken, I realize now, and had yet to even face the greatest tragedies of her life. She dabbed a soft handkerchief at my eyes and held my head in her hands.
“Were you listening, honey?” she asked me. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”
This was my first day in love. I didn’t understand anything.
I put my head on her shoulder.
She covered my eyes with her hand.