The Dream Life of Astronauts (13 page)

“Derek's going to put us on the right track,” she says.

“I hope so.”

“He gets people television and movie deals all the time. Modeling, too. Like I said, he's kind of brilliant.”

I'm wondering how she got such a high opinion of this guy just from talking to him in a bar every now and then. Maybe he bragged about himself the way she bragged about me. I feel my forehead tighten. “You didn't tell him, did you?”

“About what?”

“The thing with me and Brian.”

“What's to tell? Brian's out of the picture, isn't he?”

He is. And part of me wishes he wasn't, but I could never admit that to Emerald. She met him only once, and from those five minutes at Burger King she concluded that he was weasel-faced and spineless (he's not; he just has narrow features and bad posture). She didn't understand why I would want to date him, but that was right at the beginning of the summer when she was spending more and more time with her bar friends. What else did I have to do in the evenings? Sit at home with my mother? Brian and I started going out three or four times a week, went to the roller rink and the movies together, and ended up having a lot of sex in the backseat of his Pinto. “Here I go,” he'd say every time, “oh, god, here I go,” and it was cute, the way he sounded so much like a little boy. I'd give Emerald updates over the phone—only because she asked for them. She thought the sex sounded boring, and she thought it was hilarious that I'd gotten Brian to take me to
Dirty Dancing
four times. (“What a pussy!”) But then the stupid thing happened. The queasiness kicked in, and I started having to pee more than usual. My nipples started hurting just from rubbing against my shirt. And, of course, no period came. When I told Brian, in the parking lot of the movie theater, he took hold of both sides of his head and squeezed like he was trying to crush his own skull. Then he started sobbing. He said he was sorry. And he said he had a life. He kept saying this over and over. “I have a life, you know?” I thought at first he was talking about what we'd done, what was inside me, but he was talking about himself. He asked me to please, please, please get rid of it, and I told him of course I would. But as soon as I said it, I thought, maybe not. I was on the fence, which surprised me as much as finding out I was pregnant after we'd used condoms almost every time. I mean, I could see the advantage of having the whole situation just go away, but I could also see me with a baby. Being motherly with it, all-the-time sweet. Sitting right there in the parking lot, I started thinking up names. Trevor if it was a boy, because I've always liked the name Trevor. Rachel if it was a girl. Or Becca. Brian was taking deep breaths, like somebody who'd almost drowned. He asked me not to tell anyone, and I said I wouldn't. Then, as if the whole thing were a done deal, he thanked me. And kissed me. And thanked me again. He thanked me about a dozen times on the way home, his lower lip trembling and his hair mussed from when he'd squeezed his head. And he thanked me two days later, when he called to tell me he needed “some space.”

Emerald came right over when I told her. She took me to Jetty Park and sat with me and let me cry as much as I wanted. When I was done crying, she told me she hated to admit it, but she agreed with Brian: I should get rid of the baby. Did I want my whole world taken over because I suddenly had to be a mom? Did I want to get fat and stay fat? No I didn't, she said. She bought us root beer floats at Carvel. She drove to the mall and paid for us to have Glamour Shots taken (it wasn't the best time because my face was puffy, but it was still nice of her). Afterwards, sitting by the fountain, she eyeballed the pictures and the little stamp-sized proofs they'd given us. That was when she told me about Derek the talent scout. Derek was going to like these pictures a lot, she said. She couldn't wait for me to meet him. As for Brian, she wanted to cut his dick off, put it in a hot dog bun, and make him choke on it.

We turn off Cullen Avenue onto a side road lined with one-story, cinder block houses. The windows are down because of the broken AC and my hair is blowing all over and sticking to my forehead. “Yeah, Brian's definitely out of the picture,” I say. “But did you tell Derek about the thing with me?” My hand, I realize, is rubbing my still-flat stomach as I ask this; I pull it away and let it rest on the seat.

Emerald snorts. “You're kidding, right? That's about the last thing you'd want a talent scout to know.”

M
y stepfather calls from Wyoming to talk to me every Sunday night at eight o'clock on the dot. Like my mother, he's taken an interest in me only since they split up, and now he asks all kinds of questions (about school, about my guitar playing, about my plans for the future). But Roger is easier to keep at bay because of the Florida-Wyoming thing, which means we don't have to see each other not looking at each other when we'd rather not be talking. And while I don't bother telling him the opposite of whatever is really going on, I can usually avoid any topic just by asking
Why?
and then going quiet.

“How are your friends?” he asked me last week. “Are they treating you okay?”

“Sure.”

“And what about your grades? You're keeping those up, I hope.”

“They're so-so,” I said.

“And is your mother doing all right?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “She couldn't be better.”

He's not a dummy; he picked up on the sarcasm. “Listen, Dani, I'm very sorry about this whole—situation.”

“Why?”

Silence.

“Because I don't want you to think it's any reflection on you. And I don't want you to feel like you need to side with either one of us.”

“Why?”

Silence.

“Because you're the innocent party here. Not that anyone's guilty. Your mother and I just stopped functioning on a—sufficiently cohesive level.”

I wonder if he used this same sort of language with my mother.
Gail, I've been meaning to tell you: we're not functioning on a sufficiently cohesive level.
Anyway, one more
Why?
and I knew I'd be home free. He didn't want to go into the private details of their marriage with me, and I certainly didn't want to hear them. But before I could ask
Why?
again, he changed the subject.

“You really should think about coming out here for a visit. It's not all cowboys, you know; it's a lot of regular folk, too. A lot of teenagers. There's a community center right down the road from me, and they have a newsletter that lists all kinds of events for young people.” He paused for a moment; I pictured him taking off his glasses, squinting at them, putting them back on. “And Wyoming has a lot of natural wonders. It has Yellowstone and Old Faithful. Some interesting history, too. It's where the very first J. C. Penney opened. And did you know it was the first state to grant women the right to vote?”

I don't care about natural wonders, I can't vote for another two years, and I wouldn't step foot in a community center if you paid me. “Okay,” I said.
Okay
can also shut down the back-and-forth in a heartbeat. It's basically what everyone wants to hear.

He asked me to say hi to my mother for him and I told him, not for the first time, that I wasn't doing that for either of them; they could do that themselves.

He told me he missed me and loved me, and I told him I missed him and loved him, too. We said goodbye and hung up for another week.

The thing is, I guess I do love Roger. My real dad died when I was a baby (he had a rare cancer, my mother told me, but she doesn't like to talk about it). My first concrete memory of my mother is of her pitching a fit—I mean, screaming her head off—in the checkout line of a grocery store because the cashier wouldn't take her coupons. She was always pitching fits when I was little. Then Roger came along when I was seven, and they got married, and she calmed down some. We moved into a new house, I got a bigger room, and we started buying real trees at Christmas. So I love him for that. But I don't miss him, not really. Maybe that makes me a cold person, or emotionally wounded, whatever a psychiatrist would call it. I don't
feel
wounded, or like I need to choose sides. Roger was never mean to me, never once yelled at me, never even scolded me that I can remember; he was always just there: calm and reserved and focused on some inner thought, like the most patient man in the world waiting for an elevator that would take him to some other floor—and then the elevator arrived, and he got on.

“So what did Wild Bill Hickok have to report?” my mother said when I came into the kitchen. She had various ways of asking about Roger's phone calls, but she always asked. She was sitting at the table, going through a week's worth of mail.

I opened the refrigerator and stared into it. “I've told you, if you want to know, you should call him yourself.”

“Is he out there riding buffalo all day with his new girlfriend?”

There might have been something in the fridge that I felt like eating, but I couldn't see it, could only see things I didn't want to eat, and I had to close the door fast, because lately the sight of the food I don't want to eat is enough to make my stomach turn. I picked up an apple from a bowl on the counter and checked it for spots. Then I didn't want just the apple. I wanted the apple with peanut butter, but by the time I got the jar down from the cabinet, I only wanted the peanut butter. So I set the apple back in the bowl, took a spoon from the drawer, and started out of the kitchen.

“Wait just a minute,” she said before I'd rounded the corner.

I stopped and looked at her.

A faint dusting of coffee cake crumbs was on her lips. She looked like an overgrown child, a puffed-up baby-woman about to throw a tantrum because snack time was over. “I swear to god,” she said, “with you, it's like speaking two different languages. I just asked you if he's riding buffalo with his new girlfriend. Why didn't you answer me?”

I stuck a spoonful of peanut butter into my mouth and turned away again.

“Don't you dare,” she said, putting a little more volume in her voice. “Don't you dare walk away without answering me.”

I've got a bun in the oven,
I imagined blurting out.
I am one hundred percent, baby-on-board pregnant, and I don't even have a boyfriend.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked. “You need a reality check, Dani. If you can't answer this one simple thing for me, if you can be that cruel, then you need a reality check. You think everything's a game? Life is cruel, little lady—much crueler than anything you can wrap your head around. If you're not careful, the world will chew you up and spit you out onto the sidewalk.”

“All right!” I said. I couldn't resist giving her a hard time when she was acting crazy. It's like how you can't resist kicking an empty milk carton someone's dropped on the cafeteria floor—not because you enjoy kicking things so much, but because the carton and your foot are in the same place. Still, I didn't need to hear her telling me I might end up as someone's cud on the sidewalk. “He sounds fine, and he didn't mention anything about a girlfriend, okay? And
people don't ride buffalos
!”

She folded her napkin and touched it to her mouth. “A direct answer,” she said. “How refreshing. What did I do to deserve that?”

“Made me feel crummy,” I said, and carried the peanut butter to my room.

I
know there are counselors for this sort of thing. Ours at school is named Mrs. Portofino. She smells like pine needles and has a sweet, Mrs. Claus–sounding voice. She wears earthy colors and has pamphlets on a rack outside her office with titles like
Avoid Tomorrow Today
and
Who Deserves to Know?
But I can't imagine talking to her about what's going on in my body. It's probably her job to follow up, not to let something drop after she finds out about it. She might even be legally bound to contact all interested parties, which would be aggravating since I'm really the only party that needs to be interested. Even if she counseled me and then never brought it up again, I can't imagine having to pass her in the halls for the next two years with
that
conversation under our belt.

I also know I'm not the first and am probably about the millionth teenager to be in this predicament, but there's no comfort in that, not one ounce. This girl Katie Hess transferred to Merritt Island High from Lake Wales near the end of freshman year. Because she was new, she was aching for friends and was always coming up to me and telling me things about herself I didn't really want to know. Just before summer break, she was sitting next to me at a pep rally and whispered into my ear that she was pregnant by a boy from Cocoa and was scared to death. “Wow,” I said—because I barely knew her and what else was I supposed to say? But three months later, when the new school year started, she wasn't pregnant. So either she got rid of it, or she lost it without trying. I was tempted to ask and still am, but she's somehow landed herself a whole new set of friends and avoids me now, so I can only assume she wishes she hadn't told me to begin with.

Sometimes I think I don't have to talk to anyone about it. Talking is just thoughts that overflow out of a person's head, and thoughts aren't always rational. I can spend all of homeroom fantasizing about a time machine that will take me back to the moment right before Brian, on that fated night, said, “Oh, god, here I go,” and pulling away.

For about the length of time it takes me to brush my teeth, I can picture not having this baby at all. I can picture going to the bathroom and having a little speck fall out of me, straight into the toilet (that happens, doesn't it?), and feeling relieved as I watch it swirl away.

For as long as it takes me to figure out a new song on the guitar, I can picture me having it, full-term, and then giving it to some nice, loving couple who can't have children of their own and who would raise it and let me visit it now and then.