whether I played sports (You should, everyone should, even if they weren’t good at it, because it taught you about life), my eyeliner (Young people were so much more free these days, and wasn’t that a good thing? He, for one, supported my wearing eyeliner if I chose to).
Bunny did not react to any of this as though it were unusual and looked placidly out her window at the lighted facades of glamorous homes flashing by, though she did reach her hand out again and lace her fingers through mine. While this gesture was unquestionably overly intimate, my little sister had also been a hand-holder, and so I squeezed Bunny’s hand in little pulses as I had Gabby’s, and she squeezed mine back, though otherwise we did not address each other but spoke only to her father as he quizzed us about our teenage lives.
The Chinese restaurant, casual and merrily chintzy in a way I found deeply reassuring, was almost empty, and we took the largest corner wraparound booth, even though we were only a party of three. I did not know what to order and felt anxious about pronouncing things correctly, but Ray Lampert was the kind of man who loved to order without consulting others, and he gave the waitress a long list of dishes, ordered a Tom Collins for himself and two Shirley Temples for Bunny and me. I had never had a Shirley Temple before, though as a child I had coveted them, and, while it was so syrupy it made my teeth itch, to possess one now caused my stomach to continually rise within my torso like a helium balloon bumping along the ceiling.
“I’ve been reading,” Mr. Lampert said, “about the founding of the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA, and you know, back then rockets were considered sci-fi, and basically they were just these three guys, amateurs, who were obsessed with rockets. They spent two years just trying to launch a rocket, you know, but they had to invent rocket fuel basically, in order to make a rocket. And they wound up working with this expert at Caltech, who said, you know what, you guys are going about this in the right way, I’ll help you and you can use some of my grad students. They used to call themselves the ‘Suicide Squad’ because the open joke was that they were probably going to blow themselves up. But they did it, they successfully launched a rocket, about the size of a soda can, and that was that, and they got absorbed by the Department of Defense. But none of the generals would take seriously anything with the word ‘rocket’ in it, because it sounded too sci-fi, so they became the Jet Propulsion Lab, because that way they could get funded. Then after the Second World War, the government said: Do you want to be a defense company or do you want to join this new thing we’re starting, called NASA? And they opted for NASA.”
“Wow,” Bunny said, though she was clearly bored and not really listening.
“Can you imagine that?” Ray Lampert said, and ordered another drink from the waitress before continuing, “Just three guys obsessed with rockets, no background in aerospace, and they wind up part of NASA? Just monkeys shooting shit at the moon. Wild, you know?”
“Wow, you’re like a little museum in person form!” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, though I did find it genuinely interesting.
“Oh, not really,” Ray said, waving away what I’d said as though it were a compliment. “I never went to college, you know that? But no one, I mean, aside from the founders, but I’m saying in contemporary times, I’ve had a really unparalleled influence on the town. I mean, I really can’t think of another single individual who has more directly influenced the development of the town in the last twenty years. I got the new high school built, I got the building code changed so now we finally have some development. Did you know I’m behind that new Italian place that opened up on Main? I convinced the chef to move there, I said, ‘Screw L.A., I’ve got rich people who don’t want to drive to get decent pasta, live the good life, put your kids in decent schools,’ you know what I mean? Were you born in North Shore?”
Even as he asked me this question, he was loading his plate with fried rice and cashew chicken and some