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Lamp and Ball
Episode 3 of 3 of New Earth Tonight by Rebecca Sorensen · free to read
My daughter was forty miles away, and on Friday fifty-one eighth graders expected her to call from the Moon.
She asked me, on the phone that night, to let her do it anyway.
“Twenty minutes, Mom. I know every answer. I was there six months. I can do the backdrop and count the lag, and nobody has to know.”
“You’d be counting for twenty minutes in front of children.”
“I’ve been counting for eight weeks in front of you.”
I lay awake. I did the arithmetic instead, the way I always had. Eight weeks of motel rooms at sixty-one dollars a night came to $3,416. Eight weeks of Sundays, and I had never once asked how she was sleeping. I had asked her to turn toward the window.
Wednesday morning I called her back.
“Don’t call Friday,” I said. “Come.”
“I can’t stand up in front of Fran.”
“You don’t have to stand up. I will. I’m the one who told everybody. I can untell them.”
“What would you even say?”
“The truth, with a lamp and a ball. Tell me what I’m allowed to say.”
She was quiet, with no relay and no lag, just my daughter deciding.
“Say my heart,” she said. “Don’t say the motel.”
“Will you be there?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Friday at 1:15 the gym smelled like floor wax and popcorn from the concession closet. Fran had the big screen down and my laptop cabled to the projector. STATION RELAY waited at 20:00, gray on gray.
Fifty-one eighth graders filled the bleachers. Their shoebox station sat on a folding table, painted silver, about the size of a coffee table.
I unplugged the laptop.
“Marge,” Fran said. “What are you doing?”
“Teaching,” I said.
I set the lamp on the table and took off the shade. I picked a girl from the front row, gave her the foam ball on its pencil, and stood her in the light.
“Your head is the Earth, the ball is the Moon, and the lamp is the Sun. Face the lamp. Now hold the ball up behind you, above your head, so your shadow misses it.”
She did. The ball lit up, full and white.
“Now. When the Moon is full like that, what does it see when it looks back at you?”
She thought about it, squinting into the bulb. Her face was lit, and it was pointed at the lamp, away from the ball.
“The back of my head,” she said. “The dark side.”
“That’s right. Phases are complementary. Full Moon for us, new Earth for the Moon.”
I held up Sunday’s printout. Bright ocean, comma of cloud, lit edge to edge.
“Last Sunday the Moon was full. I took this picture that night, from my daughter’s call. Somebody tell me what’s wrong with it.”
A boy in the third row said it. “The Earth should be dark.”
“It should. My daughter came home from the station in August. The doctor up there found something with her heart. Down here it’s a pill. Up there it’s a ride home. She’s fine.”
The bleachers went very quiet.
“She didn’t tell me, because I had told the whole town, and I never once asked if she was all right. I asked her to turn toward a window. I taught you all that a picture can lie. I should have looked sooner.”
Fran had drifted back to the gym doorway with her arms folded. She said it from there, Fran with her C minus and her forty-one praying women.
“Light doesn’t lie, Mrs. Haines. It’s just slow. You got there.”
Behind her, in the hall, by the corkboard, stood Carla.
She was thinner than on the screen. She had her hands in her jacket pockets, the way she did at ten.
Fifty-one heads turned. I did not wave her in. I had made enough choices for her.
She walked in by herself and stood next to the lamp.
A boy raised his hand. “Can you really see the Earth all the time from up there?”
“All the time,” Carla said. “It doesn’t move. It just changes.”
A girl in the top row went next. “Do you miss it?”
“Every day,” Carla said. “I miss the quiet. I miss watching the Earth change its face.” She looked at me. “I missed this more.”
Then the hands went up everywhere, and Fran came down the bleacher steps to keep order, and nobody kept order at all.
She took questions for twenty minutes. Nobody paid fourteen dollars for any of them, and nobody waited 2.6 seconds.
Sunday at seven, the laptop stayed shut against the sugar canister. Carla sat across from me with her shoes off and her pill bottle by the salt.
“Hungry?” I said.
She answered before I finished asking.