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launched, outward bound into space. In school, our teachers were still using the launch of Sputnik as a goad to spur us on to paying more attention to our lessons and growing up to become smart people who could beat the Soviets at their own game. I don’t think I was particularly impressed by this argument—nothing anyone ever said in school energized me very much—but I was interested in the idea that you could listen to Sputnik’s successors, Soviet and American, on the radio. I had the idea that I might actually hear them speak.
    In hindsight, I could guess, now, that there was yet another reason we went to Rockaway that night: my mother was often in a lot of pain and welcomed any excuse she could find to get me out of the house so I wouldn’t have to see how sick she was. And as usual, Avi was my babysitter. He didn’t seem to mind and I was excited by the idea of going on an unplanned trip, into the night. Why not? I was a kid. Any change in the daily routine was interesting.
    In any event, once Avi and I got to Rockaway, I was struck by how different the community was in the winter: the streets were deserted, the rows of bungalows and boarding houses mostly shuttered for the season. And the cold seemed more biting because the sand swept around my feet by eddies of wind felt as sharp as the scrape of a whisk broom.
    Avi parked in front of the building, which also looked very different to me; its wedding-cake cheeriness had vanished, as if I had only imagined how welcoming the Sunlite Apartments seemed in the summer. Now, most of the windows were dark and the building itself had a squat, grim appearance. I thought it looked a little frightening.
    In the basement, Avi pretty quickly got the fuse fixed and the lights back. Then he led me up the stairs to the top floor, to the one small room he occupied during our summer getaway. The only apartment he had the key to, it faced the backyard and had no balcony, but there was a fire escape right outside. Once we were inside, he opened the window, lifted me onto the rusty metal flooring of the fire escape and climbed out after me, carrying the radio equipment in an old milk crate. The cold, clear air out by the ocean, he explained, was a good place for radio reception, and like thousands of other shortwave radio operators around the globe, we were going to tune into the new Sputnik’s telemetry broadcast frequency, which had been published in all the amateur radio enthusiasts’ magazines.
    As much as I understood of what he was saying, there was something else about this particular Sputnik that was on my mind that night—my uncle also told me that it had a dog aboard and I was wondering if it was scared.
    Out on the fire escape, Avi told me to sit down, to be careful and not to move around too much so I wouldn’t accidentally slip between the railings and fall the five stories down to the yard. I was so bundled up in corduroy pants, a sweater, a jacket, a knit hat and mittens that I could barely move anyway, so I did exactly as I was instructed.
    I remember that the sky looked really close to me that night and it was easy to identify the animals and hunters and dipping cups made out of stars. I kept imagining that I could see one of the stars moving slowly across the sky, guessing that it might be Sputnik 10, but Avi told me it was unlikely that we would actually be able to pick out the dim, reflected luminescence of the satellite.
    After a while, Avi got his radio receiver assembled and attached the pyramid antenna, affixing it in what seemed to me like an upside-down fashion, with the narrow end fitting into the radio and the wide mouth open to the sky. He twisted the antenna this way and that as he listened to what sounded to me like nothing more than static coming out of the receiver’s speaker. And then, all of a sudden, Avi said, very softly, “Listen, Laurie. There it is.”
    I really had expected to hear a faint, tinny voice—syllables spoken, perhaps, with