Jill Morgenstern stared at the catchment pond full of dark brown runoff from the streets, a pond that the neighborhood kids called Peat’s Moss. She was observing a family of mallard ducks paddling serenely on its surface. Peat’s Moss filled up during the rainy season, and it also grew dense with aquatic grasses and reeds that somehow thrived in the ethyl gasoline and spent motor oil-contaminated waters. Jill sat on a concrete platform at the edge of the depression that surrounded the catchment pond, beside a sagging chain-link fence full of holes that boys used to gain access to the steep clay walls of the depression. They would burrow into the clay, hollowing out shallow cave “forts.” Jill had been told that the year before one of the “forts” had collapsed and buried a kid named Keith, who was dead by the time emergency rescuers got to him.
Jill was twelve-and-a-half, and had been on a swim team that practiced at the community pool across the street from the pond for almost five years. She wore a blue baseball cap and had a bright sunburned nose. Her tawny skin and wet, curly hair smelled like chlorine and cocoa butter. She was waiting for her mom to pick her up after practice. Her mom was always running late. Jill popped a wintergreen lifesaver in her mouth from a shiny roll that one of the coaches had given her as a reward for an outstanding effort in the pool that afternoon. She had eaten a sardine and tomato sandwich for lunch, and was hoping the lifesaver would hide her sardine breath if any of the boys on the swim team stopped to talk with her.
The ducks were having a good time in the water. Eating, floating and quacking. She was always meaning to bring them bread crusts, but it would slip her mind by the time she got home from swimming and into her nightly routine. Back at the house there was dinner and homework and writing in her diary and TV and bed. No time to think of ducks or bread crusts. She would be half-asleep when she left the house in the morning for swimming practice, school, and more practice. She figured she spent as much time in the water as the ducks. Could have saved the crusts from her sardine sandwich, but she was always ravenous by lunchtime.
None of the boys from swimming came by and spoke to her as she sat watching the ducks and waiting for her mom, but one of her schoolmates, Sisa Dizon, crossed the street and said hi. Sisa only swam once a day. She was with the afterschool team, and wasn’t all that serious about swimming. She was a Science Kid, a kid who made explosives with her chemistry set and had shelves of starfish and frogs and pig fetuses in jars of formaldehyde for dissection; who owned a microscope and telescope and spinthariscope and had made a homemade Geiger counter that would absolutely freak-out in the presence of anybody’s radium dial watch. Sisa was the only female Science Kid in their school, and her gender, in 1966, meant that most of the teachers refused to acknowledge her aptitude for research and analysis and empirical reasoning and explosions. It was always some random boy, not Sisa, who was allowed to take the class hamster home for the holidays, and who got to wash out the test tubes after science class and pass out the slide rules during math, even though Sisa had been using a slide rule since she was six and had raised the class hamster from the time it was born until her mother made her get rid of it.
“Hey Jill.”
“Hey Sisa.”
“Waitin’ for your mom?”
“Yeah. You?”
“My brother. Man, I’m so hungry I’m gonna scarf when I get home.”
“Me too. Which of your brothers is picking you up?”
“Ray.”
“Oh man, he’s cute.”
“Couldn’t say. He’s my brother.”
Jill was tall and thin and awkward out of the water, and her tangled hair and oversized baseball cap and large, thick glasses made her look like a stereotypical Science Kid herself. None of the boys on the swim team ever talked to her.
Her mom showed up before Sisa’s brother did.
“Jill, ask your mom if you can come over. Ray’ll drive you home in a little while.”
“Mom, can I go over to Sisa’s?” Jill asked.
“For how long?”
“For jus’ like an hour. Please?”
“Okay, but if you’re not home in an hour I’m coming to get you.”
“Okay. Her brother’ll be here in just a second.”
Jill hadn’t been to Sisa’s in a while. Her house was in a new development just south of the one where Jill lived in far east El Paso. The place had shag carpeting in all the rooms and Danish Modern furniture and a huge color TV. Sisa’s room was like a museum. Every surface was stacked with bottled animal specimens and paw print casts and textbooks and fossils. She had a closet full of chemicals and lab equipment. Most of the kids Jill knew had posters of the Beatles or Elvis or Herman’s Hermits on their bedroom walls. Sisa had pictures of John Glenn and Miss Baker, the first monkey in space (who survived the trip). She was one of those kids who actually believed that astronauts would one day walk on the moon.
Sisa’s mom and dad weren’t home, and her brother was outside working on his ’62 Tempest. Sisa made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for herself and Jill, along with a bowl of popcorn and two large glasses of orange juice. They ate in front of the TV, watching an episode of Bewitched. Jill thought of saving her crusts for the ducks, but was too embarrassed to put them in her satchel in front of Sisa. When they were done eating, Sisa dumped their dishes in the sink and asked Jill if she wanted to do a volcano.
“Sure. But I gotta get home pretty soon.”
Sisa fetched a can filled with homemade “volcano powder” out of her closet. Potassium permanganate, sulfur and iron filings. She took Jill outside and poured a small mound of powder on the flat edge of a brick barbeque pit. It was almost dark. She lit a sparkler on the stove and carefully carried it outside, using it to ignite the mixture. It took forever to catch, but when it did the pile emitted bright orange and yellow flames and a shower of golden sparks, ending with a lot of white smoke. It lasted for only a moment. The two girls danced around it, their faces illuminated by the fitful blaze. After the flames died down the “volcano powder” residue that was left on the bricks glowed livid red.
Sisa went back to her room to fetch an oily chemical enclosed in a glass capsule that would bubble when it was heated up, and eventually explode. By the time she found it and brought it out the powder was no longer red. Figuring it was still hot, she laid the glass capsule filled with amber liquid on top of the ashes of the dead “volcano.” The capsule stayed inert. The oily liquid inside didn’t boil or explode.
Sisa started telling Jill about excitonics, a new field of science that was going to have a ton of applications with regard to the space program. Jill wasn’t really listening. She was wondering to herself what the hell Samantha saw in Darrin. She couldn’t figure out why Samantha didn’t just dump him and conjure up a perfect husband instead.
“I’m gonna get us some Cokes out of the ’fridge,” Sisa said.
While Sisa was getting the Cokes Jill began idly burying the capsule that still sat on the spot of the former “volcano,” pushing the hot powder on top of it with a stick. Even with her thick glasses, Jill’s eyes were terrible. She leaned over to study her work. Sisa returned just as the capsule burst. Jill’s face was only a couple of feet from the blast, but the “explosion” turned out to be more like a pop. Jill was startled by it, and jumped backward, nearly losing her footing. Tiny fragments of lightbulb-thin glass flew in every direction. Sisa dropped the Cokes and ran to Jill. She looked at her face, holding it steady with her hands. Jill had a couple of tiny cuts on her chin that stopped bleeding almost immediately, and she sneezed violently for a few seconds. Sisa wet a paper towel and carefully wiped Jill’s face, removing the tiny fragments of glass and any chemical residue that was left.
“You okay?”
Jill shrugged her shoulders. “Guess it works.” She was actually quite pleased she had caused an explosion. It felt like a Science Kid initiation. “That was neat.”
Sisa went to get the Cokes she had dropped on the grassy lawn.
“Sure you’re okay?” she asked again. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
Sisa put down the Cokes and the bottle opener on the edge of the barbeque pit and wrapped her arms around Jill. The phone was ringing inside the house. It was probably Jill’s mom.
“Girl, don’t scare me like that. What’d I do if something happened to you? Hey, all I’ve got to say is: thank God you were wearin’ those big glasses of yours.”
She opened a Coke with the bottle opener. Foam sprayed out like an eruption.