Last Night at the Telegraph Club(49)

“Are you finished yet?”

Lily nearly dropped the knife as her mother’s voice cut through her thoughts.

“Pay attention,” her mother admonished her. “I need to start frying that laap ch’eung. Hurry up with that last one.”

Lily bit back a sigh and returned her focus to the narrow red links of dried sausage. When she was finished, she took the whole cutting board to her mother, who had already begun frying onions in the cast-iron pan. Her mother slid in the laap ch’eung in and gave it a stir.

“Bring me the mushrooms,” her mother said, gesturing to the bowl on the kitchen table.

The telephone rang on the landing. She heard running footsteps as one of her brothers sprinted down the hall to grab it, and then Frankie yelled, “Papa! It’s Aunt Judy!”

Aunt Judy didn’t come up to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, since it was only a couple of days and Uncle Francis’s family was much closer to them in Los Angeles, but she always called long distance. She would talk to her brother—Lily’s father—first, and then the phone would be passed around to all of the children. As Lily waited for her turn, she washed off the cutting board and knife. The rain was still dripping down the kitchen window, and she hoped that it would stop before Friday night. She wondered if she should wear the same skirt and blouse to the Telegraph Club. Would anyone notice if she did? She wished she had a new dress to wear—something as fashionable as the dress that Lana Jackson had worn. Would she be able to pull off a dress like that? She was dimly reflected in the kitchen window, and she scrutinized her figure critically. She didn’t think she had the necessary curves.

“You’re daydreaming again,” her mother said.

“Sorry,” Lily said. She dried off her hands and brought over the glutinous rice, which had to be mixed into the pan of laap ch’eung and mushrooms, and then seasoned with salt and soy sauce. It would be stuffed into the turkey, which was waiting on the kitchen table behind them. Lily’s mother had rubbed salt all over the skin earlier, and now as they approached with the stuffing, Lily thought the bird looked particularly naked, the breast glistening and bare. Her mother dipped her hand into the pan of glutinous rice and inserted fistfuls of it into the turkey cavity, holding the bird in place with her other hand. There was something disturbing about it, and Lily was relieved when her father appeared in the kitchen doorway and said, “Your aunt wants to talk to you.”

Out on the landing, Lily sat down on the bench beside the telephone table and lifted the heavy black receiver to her ear. “Hello? It’s Lily.”

“Hello, Lily,” Aunt Judy said. Her voice sounded a bit fuzzy over the line from Pasadena. “How’s school?”

Lily dutifully reported on what she was learning in Advanced Mathematics, the only class her aunt was truly interested in hearing about. “Oh, I also wanted to tell you,” Lily said, “that a friend of mine gave me an issue of Collier’s with an article in it by Wernher von Braun about going to Mars.” She had never before mentioned Kath to anyone in her family, and a flush of happiness rose inside her.

“I’ve seen it,” Aunt Judy said. “We were passing that issue around at JPL. I’ve seen him too, Dr. von Braun. He was at the lab recently.”

“Really! What was he doing there?”

“I don’t know. And if I did, I couldn’t tell you,” Aunt Judy said teasingly.

“In the article Dr. von Braun said that we won’t be able to go to Mars for a hundred years—not until the mid-2000s. Do you think he’s right? Can’t we go before then?”

“Oh, we’ll go before then,” Aunt Judy said confidently.

“When? How soon?”

“Well, we won’t go in that massive spaceship he envisions. He’s a brilliant scientist, of course, but it’s impractical to start with such a huge endeavor.”

There was an unusually formal tone in Aunt Judy’s voice as she described Dr. von Braun as a brilliant scientist, as if she were reading from a press release. Lily wanted to ask what her aunt truly thought of the former Nazi scientist, but before she had the opportunity, her aunt continued, “We’ll send unmanned rockets first, probably within your lifetime. And there are other things we can do much sooner.”

“Like going to the moon?”

“Yes, but even before that we’ll need to go into orbit. That will happen very soon, I think.”

“How soon?”

Aunt Judy laughed. “Well, I can’t say exactly. But 1957 will be the International Geophysical Year. It will be a great opportunity for research and exploration. Peaceful exploration. You know, there were a few other issues of Collier’s that got into some of that—a moon colony and space stations. I’ll try to find them and send them to you.”

Aunt Judy turned the conversation to Thanksgiving dinner (she was bringing hsin-jen tou-fu* to Uncle Francis’s family), and end-of-semester final exams, and then she asked, “Tell me—this friend who gave you the issue of Collier’s. Who is it? You’ve never had a friend who’s interested in these things, have you?”

Lily beamed to herself, ducking her head down to hide her smile even though she was alone on the landing. “She’s in Advanced Math with me. Her name is Kath. She wants to be a pilot—she’s even been in an airplane before.”