Jesse Lee Kercheval - Space: A Memoir

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Space a memoir

Jesse Lee Kercheval

TERRACE BOOKS

A TRADE IMPRINT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Terrace Books
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright 2014 by Jesse Lee Kercheval

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kercheval, Jesse Lee.

Space : a memoir / Jesse Lee Kercheval.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-299-30024-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-299-30023-4 (e-book)

1. Kercheval, Jesse LeeChildhood and youth.

2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography.

3. FloridaSocial life and customs.

4. Outer spaceExploration.

5. FamiliesFlorida. I. Title.

PS3561.E558Z47 2014

813.54dc23

[B]

2013043835

T he author is grateful to the following persons and organizations for their support: the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Ragdale, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Special thanks to Gail Hochman, Shannon Ravenel, and my researcher, Dan Hughes Fuller.

Portions of this book in somewhat different form have appeared in these publications: American Short Fiction, Calliope, the Colorado Review; the Missouri Review, and the Southern Humanities Review.

My sister, me, and our mother, 1957

For Carol

I open my front door and bend down to pick up the package the postman left. Im bruised and sore from a car accident the week before, and so have to lift the box from the porch with my uninjured but awkward left hand. The box is full of family photographs I asked my sister Carol to send.

The night of the accident, Id been driving home from a late meeting at the university where I teach, thinking perfectly ordinary, slightly harried thoughts, like, Do I have enough detergent left to run a load of wash and if I dont what will my daughter and husband and I wear tomorrow? The light was green at the last intersection before my house. I started across, was just shifting into third, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw headlights. Ive never been good at math, but my brain made this calculation with frightened speed: The headlights belonged to a car moving too fast to stop.

Id been a passenger in a minor car accident a few years before and had ended up thoroughly black and blue. That was going to be nothing compared to this. A speeding car was about to slam into my drivers-side door. I remember thinking, Im dead. Then, Thank God, my daughters not in the car. And then, Ill never write the memoir I was planning. After that, I relaxed. It was out of my hands.

The car hit mine, and I went spinning across six lanes onto the other side of the highway. Luckily, my mental geometry had been off by a few feet. The other car had crushed the rear, unoccupied half of my car. I wasnt even bleeding. I had whiplash, a red stripe like a burn from the seat belt, and a cracked tooth where Id hit my head on the side window. But I was miraculously, perfectly alive. Later, I would have to have a series of operations to try and fix my right hand, which had clutched the steering wheel in a brave but foolish attempt to save me.

I watched stunned as five teenage boys piled out of the other car. They were unharmed as well. Amazing. They, too, had been wearing their seat belts. The driver came over. He looked about twelve to me, with downy cheeks and soft puppy eyes. He was so sorry. Hed bent down to change the radio and hadnt seen the light turn red. He hadnt meant to be going so fast. It was his moms car, he said. She was going to kill him. I managed to shake my head, the mother in me sure he was wrong. No matter what, she wouldnt prefer her son dead.

So life started up again. Except now I had no car. My family still had no clean clothes. But I would have time, with luck, to finish what Id started.

Pictures seemed like a good place to begin, but I didnt have any. My sister, Carol, had kept them. The rationale behind this was that I moved around too much to haul family photos with everything else. And I have moved around too much. As I pick up the package of pictures that Carol has sent and feel how little it weighs, I realize how ridiculous this excuse is. The package is lighter than a book, and Ive hefted boxes and boxes of books, apartment to house, town to city, state to state, for years.

The truth is that Carol kept the family pictures for the same reasonif you could call it by a name like reasonthat she was the one in charge of keeping the family together all those years growing up. She thinks this has changed now that our parents are dead, that it is important that it change. In the matter of the pictures, at least, she is still the one in charge.

At first I just flip through the snapshots in my sisters shoe box to see what she has sent, what might be useful. I was afraid to be too specific about why I wanted the pictures. I wasnt sure how she would feel about my writing about our family. So she has sent an assortment, a grab bag of our life. The first one I pick up is a fuzzy, bluish color picture of me as a week-old baby. My head and hands show above a white blur of swaddling. I am lying in the middle of an equally white bed, and my mothers hands are just in the picture, resting on the mattress below my feet. Ive seen the picture before, of course. Ive even heard the story behind it. It was originally a slide and is in color (not black-and-white like all my later baby pictures) because one of the nurses at the hospital took the picture with her camera.

Looking closely, I can just see the gray metal railing at the edge of the bed. I was born in a hospital in France where my father was stationed as some sort of American liaison officer with NATO. I think I remember being told it wasnt an army hospital, but this looks like an army bed. My mothers hands, I would recognize anywhere. When I think of her, I think of her hands. In this picture they look large, competent, older than her age, which at the time was forty-one. Looking at them this time, they look subtly different to me. Now that Ive seen my own hands next to a newborn baby daughter, I can imagine my mother felt less certain, less competent, than her hands look.