Page 33 of The Space Between

Jo turns onto her back and stares at the ceiling before she puts one arm across her eyes and shuts them tightly.It actually does serve him right that I’m writing what I feel right now, she thinks to herself as she yawns.It really does.

CHAPTER 15

Jeanie

It’s August,and Chicago is only marginally less unpleasant than Florida. Jeanie has flown up for a long weekend to attend the eighteenth birthday party of her younger siblings, Patrick and Angela. Being in the house she’d grown up in immediately restructures Jeanie’s sense of self, and without warning, she forgets that she’s a grown, capable woman who has been hired to work as an engineer for NASA, and instead finds herself saying “Yes, Mama,” to her mother’s every request, sleeping in the twin bed she’d occupied for most of her life in the same room as her sister, and asking permission to borrow the family car to make a quick trip to the pharmacy for aspirin.

“Just drink some water, sweetheart. You’ll be fine,” her mother says, swatting away the idea of buying aspirin.

“Mom, I’ve got a headache and cramps, and I really need aspirin. Water isn’t going to cut it,” Jeanie says, standing there with a hand out, waiting for the keys. She’s finally reached her limit for obedience and daughterly behavior, and that limit happens to be menstrual cramps.

Melva Macklin blushes at her daughter’s mention of cramps and wipes her hands on the front of the apron she’s wearing as she bakes her twins a birthday cake.

“Okay, Jeanie,” Melva says. She ducks her head as she walks over to the drawer where the car keys are kept. “Here you go. Be careful.”

As Jeanie drives through the lushly treed streets of their neighborhood, she thinks about her mother. Melva Macklin is truly a product of her time. Born in 1914, she’d grown up during the Great Depression and lived through both world wars. In Melva’s framework of understanding, a woman needed a husband, because she was born to have children, to raise them, and to make a good home for her family. Her interests were demure ones: baking, knitting, possibly reading light fiction if—and only if—her other tasks had been completed. Her idea of a good life is Jeanie’s idea of a simple, incomplete life, and the more time that Jeanie spends away from Chicago, the more she realizes that she’s never going to be able to live the life that her mother expects her to live.

At the pharmacy, Jeanie browses the aisles, looking at the lipsticks and the cough syrups, and finally choosing a bottle of aspirin that she takes to the counter. When she realizes that the man in front of her, who is perhaps thirty, is trying to discreetly ask for a box of the prophylactics that are stored behind the counter, she pretends to busy herself with digging through her purse, searching for her wallet.

In addition to giving the man a bit of privacy, she is also trying to mask her own reddening cheeks, because for some reason, the mention of condoms has brought Bill to mind, and this makes Jeanie wildly uncomfortable. Why is it that the brain brings thoughts forward at the most inopportune times? And the things that one should be thinking about least become the things that highjack all thoughts and reason, refusing to let go?

By the time she’s paid for her aspirin and gotten back into the car, Jeanie has wrenched control of her mind again, but not before wondering idly whether Bill and his wife rely on male prophylactics, which of course means that she’s now thought of Bill in the nude, and—oh God—Jeanie places both hands on the steering wheel of her mother’s station wagon and lets her forehead fall against it lightly as she squeezes her eyes shut and tries to forget this entire train of thought.

Jeanie lifts her head from the steering wheel and starts the engine. “Birthday cake,” she chants to herself. “Ice cream and balloons and music and grandparents,” she says, turning the car out of the lot and merging into traffic. “Birthday cake, birthday cake, birthday cake,” she tries again, watching for cars as she crosses through an intersection.

And the afternoonisfilled with everything Jeanie has imagined: her mother frosts the cake with bright orange icing and sticks thirty-six small candles into the spongy dessert—eighteen for Patrick, and eighteen for Angela. Wendell’s parents, who are actual grandparents to the twins and de facto ones for Jeanie, are there, and they ask her with appropriate interest and awe all about her job, her condo in Florida, and what it’s like to work with people who fancy the idea of going to space.

“It’s wonderful,” Jeanie says, holding her plate in one hand and her fork in the other as she takes small bites of the orange frosted cake. Patrick has put on a Beatles album, and Angela is sitting on the floor near a stack of vinyl records, sorting through them as she chooses the next one. “The idea of traveling to the moon is so inspiring.” She looks out the window dreamily as she says this, but realizes quickly that Wendell Macklin’s parents, who had been born in the late 1800s, most likely view the entire prospect of space travel as so fantastic, as such complete science fiction, that they can only smile with amusement at the very notion. After all, these are people who first saw the automobilewhen they were in their thirties, and for whom Lincoln’s assassination and the Titanic’s catastrophic voyage are anythingbutancient history.

“Well, Jeanette,” Mrs. Macklin says, patting her gray hair, which is pulled back in a bun. “Life is a wonder and a mystery. We’re so proud of you.”

“Thank you, Grandma Macklin,” she says, using the moniker that Wendell’s mother had insisted she use the moment her son had married Jeanie’s mother. They’ve always been so good to her, and Jeanie loves them both, just as she loves Wendell. She looks over at her mother and Wendell now, and they’re standing proudly in the center of the room, talking to Wendell’s brother and his wife, who have come to town from Milwaukie for the occasion.

These people are my family, Jeanie thinks.And they’re good people. Maybe none of them understand what I do, and maybe most of them don’t approve of a woman doing the job that I do, or maybe they don’t support a woman who wants to go to space at all, but they’re still my family.

After she helps her mother get the entire house back in order following the party, Jeanie flops down on the couch between her brother and sister.

“What’s going on with you two?” she asks them, folding her hands across her overly-full stomach. In addition to the cake, she’d eaten more than her fair share of spaghetti and garlic bread.

“We’re eighteen,” Patrick says dully. “In case you hadn’t heard.”

“Oh, I heard, smarty-pants,” Jeanie says, reaching over to swat his thigh. “And I’m still your big sister even though you’re a grown up now, so show some respect.”

Angela laughs. “Honestly. He should showeveryonemore respect.”

Jeanie can feel some friction between the twins, but they are and have always been a closed unit, so she glances back and forth between them, unsure what might have caused Angela to deliver this particular directive.

“Let’s go out,” Jeanie says, slapping the couch with both hands and then pushing herself up so that she's standing. “Let’s get a drink.”

“We’re only eighteen, Jean,” Angela says with a sigh. “Remember—they changed the drinking age last year from eighteen to twenty-one.”

Patrick runs a hand through his short hair. “Dumb,” he proclaims. “Everyone drinks anyway.”

“Oh. Right. The drinking age—of course. Let’s go out and get a Coke then. I want to take my brother and sister out on the town.”

Patrick huffs a laugh. “Is getting a Coke considered going ‘out on the town’ in Florida?”

“Get your stuff, Patch,” Jeanie says, using the nickname she’d given her little brother as a baby. “You too, Angelina,” she adds, throwing in Angela’s nickname for good measure.

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