Uncle Richard laughs. “You need to stop watching so much TV, little girl. Ain’t no VCR in this house. But if you really want one, you could ask your daddy. And he could ask Lester to do him a solid. He’s gonna need some cold hard cash for a hot VCR, but if he loves you and wants to keep you here with him . . . ”
“Keep me here with him?” I ask, looking at him sideways.
He walks up the stairs without answering me.
I can’t watch the Star Trek: The Motion Picture—Special Longer Version videotape that’s in the makeup case, so I sink into the couch and tolerate the news, which Momma doesn’t let me watch back home. After a few minutes of an anchorwoman named Sue Simmons (who looks very much like Momma) reporting on all the very bad, terrible, and awful things happening to the good people of No Joke City, Granddaddy’s job’s logo comes up in a little square next to Sue Simmons’s head.
“NASA!” I whisper-yell. I move closer to the TV—almost kissing the screen, as Momma would say—and listen very carefully to Sue Simmons talk about Granddaddy’s job.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announces some of its mission specialists for both the 1985 and 1986 space shuttle crews. The flights are mission 51-D scheduled for launch in February 1985 and 61-D, forecasted for January 1986.
Images of the space center pop up on the screen and I step back to get a good look at Granddaddy whenever he shows up. But that news is not coming out of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The astronauts and rocket-ship people on the screen are all from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The other space center, as Granddaddy would say, while rolling his eyes.
Mission 51-D is to be the twenty-first space shuttle operation on the ninth flight of the orbiter Challenger. While mission 61-D will be the fourth Spacelab flight and will focus on experiments in the field for its seven days in space. It will be the ninth flight of the orbiter Columbia.
I inhale deep and shake my head. “But, Mrs. Sue Simmons,” I say to the TV screen, “the Uhura has already made it way past Mars and Jupiter and Pluto and out of the whole galaxy. I know it’s a top secret space mission and all, but you got these people thinking that the moon is as far as we got.”
Sue Simmons can’t hear me, so I start to fidget with the wire hanger above the TV so that it can get a good signal from my imagination location. The images on the screen wave, morph, and fizzle like soda pop. And soon, a wide shot of the great and wonderful expanse of outer space shows up on the screen.
CHAPTER
8
I use a Jedi mind trick to sneak past the Funkazoids standing guard and make my way into the empty kitchen where our lunch plates are still on the table. Momma won’t be able to see how I didn’t clean up after myself, and Daddy doesn’t seem to care.
I grab the telephone and dial home while whispering every single number like it’s a countdown . . . 2 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . The operator quickly comes on because Daddy can’t make long-distance calls. So I ask for a collect call to Mr. Jeremiah Granville Norfleet. When the operator says, “Hold please,” after I repeat several times that this call is from E-Grace Starfleet, lieutenant on the Mothership Uhura, I pull the receiver all the way into an empty nook between the refrigerator and the sink.
But Momma picks up the phone, and before the operator asks if she will accept a collect call from E-Grace Starfleet in New York City, I gasp, rush to the phone on the wall while almost tripping on the cord, and quickly hang up the receiver.
I need to speak with Granddaddy! I have to tell him about the Sonic Boom I saw hanging over Harlem. I have to know what I gotta do to rescue Captain Fleet. I have to ask about the space missions and why they go from 51-D to 61-D without missions 52 to 60 and A to Z in between.
But instead I just go back to the television set and watch Sue Simmons, who’s still talking about no-good, terrible, and awful things. I hope that there’ll be news coming out of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Maybe then I’ll be able to see Granddaddy, and if I press my forehead against the screen, we’ll mind meld and he’ll be able to read my thoughts.
After Al Roker’s forecast of a heat wave headed to No Joke City (which, of course, is really the Sonic Boom!), I switch to channel 7 for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Now, it’s about the no-good, terrible, and awful things happening in the galaxy.
By sunset, I leave the TV on while the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes begins, and climb the stairs to the third floor of Daddy’s brownstone and the special bedroom that he’s been saving for me all these years. It’s not fancy like my bedroom back home in Huntsville with its canopy bed and white furniture.
Daddy keeps the tall windows wide-open. “Don’t you lean too far out, you hear?” he says.
I nod even though he can’t see me standing against the wall way on the other side of the room. “Why don’t you close those windows, Daddy?”
“Aww, you afraid of heights, Broomstick? It’ll be hot as hell if I don’t let in some cool breeze.”
But it’s not just a cool breeze. What’s coming through the windows is not the sound of whispering leaves on oak trees, singing cicadas, the squeak-squeak of Granddaddy’s rocking chair on the porch, or Momma’s soft humming. It’s the sound of old roaring cars, wailing sirens, crashing glass bottles, and cursing—way too much cursing—that’s easing up through the windows and crawling into my ears like the Ceti eels in Wrath of Khan.
Daddy takes one look at me and how I’m still pressed against the wall like a scaredy-cat, pulls down the windows, and says, “All right, Broomstick. I know you’re not used to all this noise. And you probably don’t mind all this heat, anyway.”
I don’t tell him that I’m not used to this heat. Granddaddy’s house has a General Electric air conditioner in every room, especially mine. Maybe when I leave here, I’ll have the Huntsville post office deliver to Daddy one of our air conditioners. And one of our JVC VCRs, too. That way, he could record his Saturday afternoon Kung Fu and Bruce Lee movies and watch them whenever he wants.
I think of all my videocassettes back in my room in Huntsville. I’ve got shows like Battlestar Galactica and The Powers of Matthew Star I taped off TV and then there’s all the videocassettes Granddaddy ordered from the Columbia House catalog. It was hard to decide which ones to bring. But they won’t do me any good now.
When I’m undressed and all cleaned up for the night, Daddy sits on the edge of my bed—a bed he’s had ever since I last came to visit him. He had tried to convince Momma to let me stay and got the bed and dresser and small desk to prove to her that he could take care of me.
“Broomstick,” he says, looking at the closed windows and not at me. “You tell me if everything’s been all right at home down in Huntsville.”