Oppenheimer

(To hear audio of author reading this selection aloud, go to https://dimestories.org/uncategorized/san-diego-dimestories-august-spotlights/ )

People asked me daily, hourly, “What did you think of the movie?”

I had no answer, I purposely avoided seeing it until finally some friends and my husband said, “Come on, we will go with you.”

So yes, I’ve seen it now. It is a masterpiece,  and true as far as I know.  But I was a child, a little pixie, fixated on horses. What did I know of hearings and Communists except those cars parked mysteriously in front of our house.  Men with suits, white shirts and black ties. 

All I knew is that my father loved Frank and Jackie. That was enough for me, and Frank rode a horse better than anyone I have ever seen.  Jackie laughed and swore and brought out the best in my mother.

Frank’s frizzled hair, balding, smoke encircled him wherever he paced.

He and my father were a pair.  Irreverent, they loved to brew up trouble, loved to talk, over Jim Beam into the wee hours of the night. 

Dad and Frank got so wrapped up in my brother’s science fair project, that my brother, exasperated, went to bed and let them finish on their own . . . both on precarious ladders, ball bearings and feathers dropped from the ceiling, proving Newton’s Second Law—and tempting the law of gravity, two drunk men on ladders at the height of a fourteen-foot ceiling.

Frank gave me binoculars and a little knife, he let me use his  saddles—used in the years they were hiding, far from Senator McCarthy’s reach, in the high mountains of Southern Colorado near Mount Blanca. 

We rode together, Dad and Frank and me, through the foothills of the Rockies near Boulder, cutting fences and trespassing on rancher’s lands. We got shot at once, but they just laughed, experts at re-wiring the fence cuts so the cattle couldn’t escape. 

Dad and Frank played flute duets, both wept into the finger stops.  They argued politics, Dad practical—it ended the war . . . Frank a dreamer, almost a mystic—it will end ALL  war.

Dad died when I was fifteen. Frank and Jackie stepped in.  Long hours at the Exploratorium, working as an Explainer.  I learned to make holograms with red laser light in the dark.  Sometimes I worked with Jackie in the gift shop, one evening at a fundraiser, we hid  on the floor behind the counter, the two of us drinking scotch out of one bottle.

And I guess it was inevitable that my mother married Frank after Jackie ‘s cancer.

Yes, I met Robert.  Yes, I met Kitty, but they were peripheral to my life with dogs and horses and staying alive after my father’s passing.

So, I’ve seen the movie, I did, but it didn’t touch my memories, my grief, my gratitude, my bewilderment, my yearning to have them all back again—me hiding under our grand piano listening to flute duets.