Page 4 of The Space Between

"Have a good one, Peter," Jeanie says, stepping off the elevator as he holds the door open for her. Thank goodness the men she works with have all been raised with the barest of manners; Jeanie can hardly imagine what would happen to civilized society if the men stopped holding doors for women or being polite. It would certainly make the workplace entirely unbearable, as Jeanie knows instinctively that there will never be such a thing as an office or a company where the women are treated like and paid the same as the men. Men holding doors is hardly compensation for all of that, but at least it's something.

Back on the floor where she works, Jeanie crosses the giant open space, winding her way between cubicles and stopping every so often to lay a manila folder on the desk of a coworker. She's been tasked with overseeing the copying of their latest findings, collating it into a report, and delivering the reports to each of the men on her team. It's not lost on Jeanie that, as the only woman on her engineering team, she's frequently asked to do things like secure meeting rooms, make copies, and disseminate documents that they all need. Rather than letting it frustrate her, she accepts that because she's the youngest person on the team, she's simply paying her dues.

However, during a phone call with her mother just the weekend before, Jeanie had realized that she was, in fact, not the youngest member of her team; that distinction goes to Todd Roman, who turned twenty-seven just two months after Jeanie. That had blown her comforting theory out of the water.

Much to Jeanie's surprise, her own mother has been the person in her life who has most questioned what it means to be a woman, and what sort of limitations her gender puts on her life. The first time they’d had the discussion, over the Christmas holiday when Jeanie went back to Chicago following JFK's assassination, it had come as a shock: after all, what did Melva Macklin, mother of three, housewife for her entire adult life,know about the challenges of being female in an almost entirely male engineering program at Northwestern? What experience did Melva have with earning the respect and attention of her male coworkers? But, much to Jeanie's shock, her mother was well-versed in the topics, and her questions were insightful, thought-provoking, and encouraging. Jeanie had ended the holiday with the realization that other womendidunderstand how hard it was to find your footing in a predominantly male workplace, and that her own feelings were real, and not imagined.

Still, she'd come back to Cape Kennedy after the new year invigorated and ready to tackle her job, only to find that one of the men in her group, Ed Maxwell, had been chosen to join a special project in Seattle without her ever hearing a word about the project or the selection process.

Jeanie has found that so much goes on right under her nose that she simply isn't privy to simply because someone is always asking her to run a little errand or complete a menial task and she misses the information.

"Hiya, Jeanie," Bill Booker says, looking up from his desk as she sets a file down in his wire in-box. "How are you?"

Unlike Peter Abernathy, Bill's eyes hold a spark of real interest. His question isn't meant just to spark a one-sided conversation.

Jeanie pauses, holding the remaining files in front of her as she hugs them to her chest. She's wearing a boxy A-line dress of yellow gingham that hits about an inch above the knee, and her long, brown hair hangs straight down to about the halfway point of her back. Jeanie wears no more than a swipe of mascara and a hint of frosty lipstick, and in her ears are small gold studs. She's gotten progressively more tanned during her time in Florida, and her legs are the same color as her suntan nylons, but she'd still never show up at work with bare legs. That just wouldn't do.

"I'm doing alright, Bill. Thanks for asking. How are you?" Jeanie tilts her head to one side as she waits for Bill's reply. They've become friends, she and Bill Booker, but even though he's a terribly handsome man, Jeanie refuses to let herself imagine the way he looks at the end of the day when he's at home and relaxing. She doesn't let her mind wander to the way Bill unbuttons the cuffs of his sleeves and rolls them, revealing strong, tanned forearms. She doesn't like to imagine the way his profile looks when they're standing around talking about life and space and the moon. And she never (okay,almostnever) goes back to the early morning they'd shared in the office, watching the sun come up together as they drank coffee and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the still-empty office.

Jeaniewantsto think about all those things, but Bill Booker is a married man. In fact, he is a happily married man with three children and a wife whom Jeanie has met. Jo Booker is someone she likes and respects, and therefore Jeanie needs to respect that Jo is his wife, and she--little Jeanie Florence from Chicago--is merely his coworker. Bill Booker is the senior member of their team, and his salt-and-pepper hair, his broad shoulders, and his lopsided grin occasionally creep into Jeanie's subconscious, making her life far more difficult than it needs to be.

So now, standing there at his desk, Jeanie hugs the files to her body even more tightly, keeping her thoughts in check as she watches Bill's blue eyes dance with amusement.

"I've got nothing to complain about," Bill says. His gaze stays on Jeanie. "But I'm really asking—how are you? Last time we talked, you said there was something going on with your brother, right?"

Jeanie is touched that he remembers, as she'd only mentioned in passing one day during lunch in the cafeteria, that her little brother, seventeen-year-old Patrick, had been struggling lately to make good choices.

"He's alright," Jeanie says. She scratches one arm anxiously, thinking of Patrick and the way he'd been caught drinking with his friends and driving dangerously down some country back roads while hanging out of the car and playing mailbox baseball as his buddies cheered him on. "I'm just worried that he'll mess up his future by doing stupid things right now."

Bill leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. "Ahhh. The issue that young boys everywhere must face: have fun now, but still try to make decisions that won't land you in jail." He chuckles softly, as if remembering his own youth.

"Did you ever do anything dumb like, oh, say, riding around at night with your drunken friend driving a car so you could lean out the window and hit mailboxes with a baseball bat?" Jeanie lowers her chin as she delivers the question with complete disapproval.

Bill roars with laughter and a few of the people in their vicinity turn towards him. "Oh, I shouldn't be laughing at that—not at all. It just took me back for a moment." He shakes his head. "When I was seventeen, right before I enlisted, I thought it would be great fun to climb the water tower in my little town and paint my initials on the side of it. So did my buddies, only we were—as you might imagine—somewhat inebriated. My best friend, Rob, fell off the ladder from about twenty feet in the air. Broke his collarbone and had to sit out during the football season. Probably would have gotten a scholarship to play in college if we hadn't been doing dumb kid stuff."

"That's what I worry about," Jeanie admits. "The dumb kid stuff having long-term ramifications."

Bill watches her with earnest interest. "What about you, Jeanette Florence?" He lifts his chin in her direction; his arms are still folded across his chest. "What kinds of dumb kid stuff did you do at seventeen?"

Jeanie leans against the low cubicle wall that surrounds Bill's desk. Around them, phones ring and the sound of typewriter keys clacking fills the air. A conversation in a nearby cubicle results in polite laughter.

"Me?" Jeanie asks, letting her memory drift back to herself at that age. 1954. Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney had big hits that year. Marilyn Monroe Married Joltin' Joe Dimaggio. Hitchcock's "Rear Window" was showing in theaters. Jeanie and every other girl she knew wore poodle skirts to school, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education landmark case. It's only been a decade since then, but so much has changed, with JFK's assassination and the rising tensions in Vietnam; Jeanie sometimes feels like she closed her eyes in one world and opened them in another.

"Yeah, what were you like when you were your brother's age? I bet you were ditching classes to smoke cigarettes with your girlfriends."

Jeanie can't tell if he's joking, but her face immediately bursts into flames. "Me?" she says in shock. "No. No way. I've never smoked a single cigarette."

Bill slaps his desk. "Not even one?"

"No..." Jeanie shakes her head—she can't imagine herself sharing a smoke with Carol in high school; they weren’t the kind of girls who would have looked cool leaning against a car with a cigarette in hand, eyeing everyone knowingly. “Not even one.”

Bill stands up. He yanks open the top drawer of his desk and pulls out a pack of nearly full cigarettes and a lighter. “Come on.”

“What?” Jeanie is blinking and staring after him. She’s never seen Bill with a cigarette. “You smoke?”

Bill doesn’t break his stride, just puts one hand in the air and waves for her to follow without turning back to look at her.

After taking the stairs instead of the elevator, they’re outside in the hot June sun. Bill leads them to a tall overhang that givessome shade, then slips a single cigarette from the pack and puts it to his lips. Jeanie has been silent this whole time.

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