The number was making me woozy. So I did what I sometimes do when I feel lost in time and space—I began writing down my famous (to me) twelve-step plan:
born
grow up
school
college (Naval Academy)
career (astronomer)
wife (blonde, named Emily, Jennifer or Ann)
kids (2)
house (four bathrooms)
car (mint condition, black 1985 Jaguar XJS/12)
retire (win senior chess tournaments)
death
Heaven (angel) (Forever)
Except now, considering the news from Yellowknife, there’s a parade of question marks after number 12. Like, are angels made of protons? Is Heaven? If so, does this mean they won’t last forever?
And what exactly is Heaven anyway? A thing? A place? I don’t think so. I mean, if I could look at a map of creation, there wouldn’t be a sign saying, “Heaven—This Way.” My opinion? Heaven is a dimension, like time. Like up and down.
I think.
As for angels, what are they made of? Smoke? Vapor? Holograms? No. Angels are spirits, and a spirit—by definition—is non-stuff.
I think.
I hope.
I turned the church program over and stared again at the unbelievable number. And risked the biggest question of all: When all this time, all these numbers go by, when the last iota of stuff in the universe—the last proton—finally winks out, will Forever still be? Does Forever continue on beyond the last zero? My answer (my prayer?): of course it does, because Forever means endless.
So…
If Heaven and angels are non-stuff…
If the stuff-me becomes after death a non-stuff angel-me…
If Heaven and angels exist in a timeless medium we call Forever (“Hey, nobody here but us angels!”)…
Then…guess what?…
There will be no end of me!
Will Tuppence Forever!
If.
Suddenly we were on our feet singing the last hymn. On the drive home I discovered the little yellow pencil was still in my hand.
PD19
English. The only class I share with BT. Mrs. Hartenstine, the teacher, is old-fashioned. She believes in memorizing. She says, “Memorized passages should be a part of every person’s wardrobe, like shirts and shoes.”
Today we recited the poems she assigned us to learn. My poem was “The End of the World” by Archibald MacLeish. Mi-Su did “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson.
When Mrs. Hartenstine said, “Mr. Bontempo,” BT didn’t move. He had his nose in a paperback. His long sandy hair fell like a curtain over his face. Mi-Su, sitting next to him, poked him with her fingertip. He toppled over and onto the floor. Everyone howled, but that wasn’t the funniest thing. Once he was on the floor he kept reading for another ten seconds until he closed the book, looked up half-bewildered and said, “Huh?” More howls.
“Mr. Bontempo, front and center, please,” said Mrs. Hartenstine.
So up he goes—the slowest walker you’ve ever seen—and you could tell he wasn’t prepared. Not that that was a surprise; it would have been a shock if he were prepared. So he stood there, his paperback in his hand, cheap sneakers, hair flopping, giving us a loopy grin, like, OK, here I am, now what?
“We’re waiting, Mr. Bontempo.”
BT turned to the teacher. “Me, too.” Not belligerent, just…BT.
More howls. It’s not always easy to tell if BT is trying to be funny or not. Strangely, Mrs. Hartenstine has always cut him a lot of slack.
“Your poem,” she said. “Time to recite.”
BT pointed a finger in the air. “Ah!” He looked around the room, out the windows, back to the teacher. “And, uh, which poem was that again?”
Mrs. Hartenstine smiled. “‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ Does the name Robert Frost ring a bell?”
She smiled. Kids laughed. I think they were not just laughing at the scene in front of us. They were also laughing at the craziness of the situation, that the teacher actually expected Anthony Bontempo to be prepared.
BT looked out at us, like a character in a movie sometimes looks right at the camera and into the audience. It was comical. Obviously he hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. You poor slob, I was thinking, when are you going to get it? How long do you think you’ll survive in the real world?
“You mean the one that starts, ‘Whose woods are these I think I know…’?”
Stone silence.
Mrs. Hartenstine almost sang, “That’s the one.”
He folded his arms over his chest, holding the paperback with the cover facing out. It was Crime and Punishment. It was thick. Obese. I’ve never known a kid so totally unafraid of thick books. He closed his eyes and he recited Frost’s poem. He said it in a monotone. He didn’t try to make it interesting. He droned it out fast in half a minute and headed back to his seat, eyes and open mouths following him.
Something was wrong. I’m no poetry expert, but I knew something was wrong.
I think the teacher knew it, too. She called to him. “Mr. Bontempo?”
He looked up. He was already back into the paperback. “Yeah?” he said.
Mrs. Hartenstine blinked a few times. She seemed about to speak but she didn’t. She merely smiled. “Never mind.” She made a mark in her black book. “Next—Miss Bayshore.”
I grabbed my textbook, flipped to Frost, found “Stopping by Woods.” I read it through. The last line comes twice:
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
But that’s not what BT had said. As Rachel Bayshore went on reciting her poem, it was BT’s words I heard:
“And smiles to go before I weep,
And smiles to go before I weep.”
PD27
I saw it as soon as I entered my room after school. My chess trophy stands on top of my bookcase by the door. And it was backward. The pewter king piece was facing the wall. Somebody had turned it around. Hilarious. I turned it back.
I didn’t yell and scream and run after her. I used to, but it didn’t do any good. I calmly walked down the hall to her room. Ozzie, her stuffed octopus, was on the bed. She was under the bed. The bottoms of her socks were showing. I just walked away, ignoring her. She hates to be ignored.
But during dinner I couldn’t help myself. I glared across the table. “Don’t do it again,” I said. Calm. Cool. Not the least bit nasty.
She was building a snowman with her mashed potatoes. She was shaping it with a screwdriver. (Explanation: When Tabby first tried eating with one of my father’s screwdrivers, my mother put a quick stop to it. But then my father got her her own set of plastic tools, and here’s the deal: she’s allowed to eat with them as long as she never uses them for anything else. So if you open our utensil drawer in the kitchen, you’ll see a yellow plastic screwdriver, a pair of red pliers and a little blue saw along with the forks and spoons. And she’s not allowed to eat with tools if we’re having company. This excludes BT and Aunt Nancy, who are not considered outsiders.) So…she was working her mashed potatoes and pretending she didn’t hear me.
“What did she do now?” said my mother.
“She messed with my trophy.”
“Tabby? Did you?”
She looked up, like she didn’t know what was going on. She’s the world’s worst actress.
“Huh?” she said.
“Did you—” My mother looked at me.
“What exactly did she do?”
“Turned it around.”
Tabby quick clamped her lips shut, but not before she giggle-snorted into her potato snowman.
“See?” I said.
“Did you turn his trophy around?”
“No,” she said. She would say no if I had her on film. Unlike her hero, BT, she lies.
“Confess, pest,” I said.
“Don’t call her that,” said my mother.
Tabby snarled,
stabbing her screwdriver at me. “Yeah. Don’t call me that.”
There was a faint noise at the front door. We all turned to see a scrap of paper slipping onto the threshold. It was Korbet Finn, our next-door neighbor. Korbet is five. He’s in love with Tabby. About once a week he delivers a love note to her this way.
Tabby ran for the note. She always hopes it will be from somebody else, anybody else, but it never is. She glanced at it, crumpled it, threw it to the floor, yanked open the door and yelled toward next door: “In yer dreams, lugnut!”
My father laughed. My mother looked at him. “Where does she get these words?”
“BT reads to her,” I said. “Adult books.”
Tabby slammed the door shut, kicked the note-ball into the dining room and stomped back to the table.
We needed to get back to the subject. “Just don’t go near my trophy,” I said.
Now Tabby was eating string beans with her red pliers. Humming. Tuning me out.
I looked at my father for support.
He took a sip of coffee. “Leave Will’s trophy alone, Tabby,” he said. Reasonable. Gentle. Nonthreatening.
Tabby crushed a string bean with her pliers, then smashed the snowman. “I didn’t do it!”
“Fine,” said my father, calm, soft-spoken, forking into his meat loaf. “Just don’t not-do it again.”
Tabby exploded. “I didn’t do it! I’m innocent!”
I snickered. “Yeah, right.”
Tabby picked up a string bean and flung it in my face. “I hate you!” she screamed, and ran from the table, my mother snapping, “Tabby!” me hooting.
“Enough,” said my mother.
My father said, “She’s in rare form tonight.”
After a while my mother said, “Here’s my question. How could two such different children have come from the same parents?”
Sometimes I wonder that myself. I wonder why they had us so far apart. When I first heard that I was going to have a little brother or sister, I wished for a brother. When they told me it would be a sister, I thought, OK, I can deal with that. I pictured myself giving her rides on my shoulders, teaching her to ride a bike.
Never happened.
Aunt Nancy says Tabby is just doing her job. That’s what little sisters do: they pester. She says someday Tabby and I will be best friends. I say don’t hold your breath.
I’m not saying I hate her. I don’t. (Even though I do feel that way sometimes.) It’s just that all we have are differences (age, gender, personality, etc.), nothing in common. Maybe when we’re both adults we will get along. But for now, we lead mostly separate lives. If she didn’t go out of her way to bug me, I’d hardly know she was around.
No one answered my mother’s question. We ate in silence. Somehow the room seemed to be slowly revolving around the crumpled note-ball on the floor. In a dark crevice of a crumple I thought I saw a tiny sparkle.
PD29
Tabby made her daily phone call to Aunt Nancy. “I’m going to a star party!”
I still couldn’t believe it. My parents were going to a play at Hedgerow. They had assumed I’d be playing Monopoly tonight. They assumed whether we played at Mi-Su’s house or mine, I would babysit my sister. “No way,” I said. “We’re going to a star party at French Creek. Mi-Su’s mother’s driving us.”
“Fine,” she said, “Tabby goes with you.”
“No way,” I said.
“Tabby goes with you,” she said.
Tabby gushed to Aunt Nancy, “I’m making a star shirt!”
She did. She got glitter and stars and pasted them all over a T-shirt. She thought it was a party party.
She called Aunt Nancy again. “It’s for big people! There’s gonna be appetizers! And kissing games! I’m gonna have coffee!”
The tires crunched on the gravelly road.
“How do I know where it is?” said Mrs. Kelly. “It’s so dark.”
“Look for the red lights,” said Mi-Su.
“Where’s BT?” said Mrs. Kelly.
“He doesn’t care about stars,” I said.
Up ahead—spots of red.
“Lights out,” said Mi-Su.
The headlights went out.
Only the red spots were visible now. Some moving, some still.
The car pulled onto the grass, stopped. Three of us got out.
“Back at eleven,” said Mrs. Kelly. “Watch Tabby.” The car pulled away.
Tabby blurted, “Where’s the party?”
I pointed to the sky. “Up there.”
Tabby looked. “I don’t see nothin’.”
On the way Mi-Su tried to tell her that a star party is where people bring their telescopes to look at the night sky, but Tabby wasn’t buying it. “Where’s the pizza?” she whined.
“It’s up there,” I said. “Next to the Big Dipper. The constellation Pepperoni Pizza. The Greeks named it.”
Mi-Su smacked my arm. “Stop it.” She lifted Tabby to her shoulders and we headed for the party.
We could now make out shadowy figures behind the red spots, which were actually flashlights capped with red plastic. The Delaware Valley Astronomical Society has its star parties at French Creek because the light pollution is low there. This would be the last one until spring.
We wandered into the dark forest of telescopes. I’m always amazed at the size of the scopes.
Mi-Su and I split up. I told Tabby to go with Mi-Su, but she refused. She followed me. Not because she would rather be with me, but because she knew I didn’t want her to.
Shadows drifted. Dull red circles bobbed and hovered. Whispers, but mostly silence, as if we were afraid to disturb the night. This was a place for stars, not people. A show. No button to click, no ticket to buy. Lean in to an eyepiece. Or just look up. The sky! It’s been there all along! Someone pointed the light at himself: red floating face. Soft skitter of footsteps, excited whispers:
“What? What?”
“Saturn! Rings!”
“Where?”
“Over here! Come on!”
I was pumped. Mi-Su and I both want to be astronomers someday. I went from scope to scope, sampling, asking them what they’ve got.
“Moon. Great view of Sea of Tranquility.”
“Mars.”
“Jupiter. Four moons.”
Reminded me of a summer fair: “Hey, right here, get yer moon! Yer stars! Three planets fer a dollah!”
Tabby tagging along, her finger hooked in my back belt loop, pestering every time I bent to an eyepiece: “Let me see!” If I didn’t let her, she’d get loud. Sometimes I had to lift her, hold her while she squinted and whined, “I don’t see nothin’!”
I’m not much interested in moons—ours, Jupiter’s, whoever’s. Going to Mars doesn’t excite me. In fact, I’m pretty lukewarm about the whole solar system. For me, the farther away, the better. Stars. Galaxies. Quasars. That’s what makes me tingle.
One monster scope had a line. I asked the man-shadow at the end, “What?”
“Mars,” he said. “You can see the polar cap.”
I moved on.
Tabby yanked my belt loop. “I want to see Mars!”
I swung around, whipping her off her feet with her finger caught in the loop. She wailed, “Owww!”
“Don’t be an infant,” I snapped.
She roared: “I’m not an infant!”
The stars flinched. Shadows stopped. Gasps. Shushes.
I shook her. Her knobby shoulders were like golf balls. “Keep your voice down! Whisper!”
She whispered, “Ow. You hurt my finger.”
To look at me, she had to tilt her head back as if she were looking at the sky. Sometimes I forget how tall I am to her. I saw moon gleam in both eyes. “You screamed like a baby. You want to be with grown-ups, act like one.”
I continued my telescope hopping. I viewed a couple of nice star clusters. Most of all I wanted to see a galaxy, and finally it happened. There was a line of five people at a large scope. The lady at t
he end didn’t even wait for me to ask. “Spiral galaxy!” she gushed.
The line went slowly. Tabby paraded up and down. “Want to see my star shirt?” She held back her arms and puffed out her chest. The paste-on paper stars glimmered in the moonlight. The gazers cooed and patted her on the head and asked dumb questions.
At last I reached the eyepiece. I couldn’t see the target at first. Bright images swam by like fish. Then things steadied, and there it was. I could see the oval shape, the spiraling arms. It was the thrill of seeing it for real, the difference between seeing a fox in a zoo or a fox walking across a snow-covered field. But it was even more than that. It was the distance. The galaxy I was looking at, if it was anything like the Milky Way, contained at least a hundred billion (100,000,000,000) stars. “How far?” I said to the scope owner. “About two thousand.” He meant two thousand light-years. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. In the time it takes me to say “per second,” light zips around the world more than seven times. So figure out how far light travels in a year (which has almost six trillion seconds), then multiply that by 2,000 for the distance to this spiral galaxy. How can something that big be so far away that it looks smaller than my little fingernail?
Pretty soon I knew all the scopes that were viewing galaxies, and so I just galaxy hopped. I was in heaven. I bumped into Mi-Su. “Ships passing in the night,” she said. I said to Tabby, “Why don’t you go with Mi-Su now?” “No,” she said, only to bug me. I knew what I was going to say next time: “Stay with me. Don’t go with Mi-Su.” And she would go.
But we never got to next time. Somewhere along the line I realized I was no longer feeling the finger tug in my belt loop. I turned. She was gone. She’s off with Mi-Su, I told myself and went on scoping.
But I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t enjoy myself. What if she wasn’t with Mi-Su? What if she was doing something stupid and getting herself hurt or whatever? I was the one who would get blamed. I was staring through an eyepiece at the Beehive Cluster, but all I could see was my sister wandering off among the dark shadows of strangers just to tick me off. I snapped back from the scope and stomped off. I stopped. I looked over the dark field, the starry horizon, the silent, moving shadows, the jutting shapes of the scopes, the dull red floating spots. I didn’t know where to begin. I looked at my backlit watch: 10:30. Mrs. Kelly would be there soon, and I was missing wonders because I had to round up a stupid sister. I knew that one good call would do it. Just stand right there and rear back and bellow her name. But I couldn’t. It would be like screaming in church.