The Dream Life of Astronauts (14 page)

But I can also see me keeping it.

I'd be a good mother, I think. I wouldn't want to cuddle up with it just because I was feeling sorry for myself. I wouldn't ask it crazy questions and get bent out of shape because I didn't like the answers.

Imagine you're you, and you have this little person growing inside you that you haven't met yet. You don't know what its voice is going to sound like, you don't know what its favorite color is going to be, you don't even know what sex it is. Wouldn't you be curious?

Imagine having a tiny little person that wants your boobs—just
one
of your boobs—more than a pot of gold.

Imagine holding your baby on a sunny day, and pointing at a palm tree and saying, “See that? That's an elephant. Just kidding, baby; that's a palm tree.”

E
merald stops along the curb in front of a squat, orange house with a gravel roof. A Yugo is parked in the driveway; two more Yugos are sitting on the strip of grass alongside it, one of them raised up on blocks. In the front yard is a Big Wheel, and a kiddie pool with a hose sunk into it. I tilt the mirror on the passenger's side and frown at my reflection. “I look awful and I feel like crap,” I say. “I'm getting a zit on my chin.”

“You look pretty,” Emerald says. “You just have to
tell
yourself you look pretty.”

“Okay, I look pretty. But I feel like crap.”

Music is coming from inside the house. On the front porch, Emerald rings the bell, knocks on the door, rings the bell again. She turns to me and curls her lips back. “Do I have food on my teeth?”

I shake my head.

She bugs her eyes out. “Crusties?”

“No crusties.”

She knocks and rings the bell again.

“What do you want?” a voice calls from inside.

“It's Emerald!” Emerald says. “And Dani. Emerald you met at the ABC Lounge that time, and Dani I was telling you about. You said to come by.”

“Wait,” I say, “you met this guy
once
?”

After a few moments, we hear a bolt unlock. Then a chain sliding out of its track. When the door opens, there's a man who's around my stepfather's age, maybe younger. He's barefoot and is wearing shorts and a white T-shirt with high sleeves that show off his muscled-up arms, and he's wiping his hands with a rag. He looks a little like the guy who works at 7-Eleven and a little like the guy who cuts keys at the hardware store, but maybe that's only because he's stocky and has reddish hair, like they do. There's a tattoo on the side of his neck, a kind of little, blue crescent, and there's this unfortunate thing with his eyes: the left one is focused on us and the right one is angled out, as if it's been fixed to his temple with a tiny rubber band. He's staring at us and that Big Wheel at the same time. “You're kidding me,” he says.

“Nope,” Emerald says.

The song is that awful “Love Touch” the radio stations have been playing to death for over a year now. “You're blowing my mind,” the guy says. “I gave you my address?”

“You wrote it on a napkin, remember? You said to come by.”

I'm about to take hold of Emerald's arm and pull us off the porch, because either we're at the wrong house or this guy's got a screw loose. But then his mouth curls into a smile and he points right at Emerald's chest and says, “Had you for a second there, didn't I?”

“Goddamn!” Emerald says in a voice so loud it startles me. “You did! You sure did!”

“Get in here,” he says, backing into the house to make room for us.

Emerald steps inside, and even though I still have the urge to grab her arm and tug her back to the car, I follow.

The shag carpet is the color of avocado meat. Along one of the wood-paneled walls is a pair of bracketed shelves full of ceramics. People and animal figurines, vases and bowls, ashtrays and peace signs—all painted and glazed and shiny. The coffee table is draped with newspapers and has pencil-sized carving tools on it, little sheets of sandpaper, and another ceramic: this one an unpainted, chalk-white turtle. Over the couch is a framed poster of the St. Pauli girl with her bare boobs hanging out of her getup.

“Cool place,” Emerald says.

“That it is,” the guy says, still wiping his hands. “Not the Ritz, but I think a living space should be hands-on, you know? Utilitarian.”

“Totally,” Emerald says.

“People tell me coming in here is like climbing into my brain.” He drops the rag onto the coffee table and holds his hand out toward me. “I'm Derek,” he says. “You must be Dani.”

“That's me.” I don't want to shake his hand because it doesn't look too clean, despite all the wiping. But I do.

“You've got a face like an angel,” he says. “Like a Charlie's Angel, if there'd been a fourth one.”

“Thanks.”

“Make yourself at home.”

Emerald sits down on the couch. I move to sit next to her, but Derek touches my shoulder and nods toward a puffy leather recliner. “You should get on that,” he says. “Most comfortable seat in the house.”

I sit down in the recliner.

“It rocks,” he says. “Try it.”

I rock the chair back and forth a little.

“And don't forget about this.” He bends over so close to me that I can smell his breath—gum and, just behind it, beer—and pulls a lever. The chair slides forward and flattens out a little, and the footrest swings up, elevating my legs.

“Who'd like a little libation?” he asks, straightening up.

“Me,” Emerald says. “I'd like a little libation. A gin and tonic would hit the spot right about now.”

I've had beer with Emerald before, and wine coolers, but I've never seen her drink anything as fancy as a gin and tonic.

“The problem with that,” Derek says, “is there isn't any gin. I've got Heineken, vodka, and Sunny D.”

“A screwdriver, then,” Emerald says.

“How about you, angel?”

I feel a little silly, having just walked into a stranger's house and suddenly reclining with my feet up. I'm still queasy, but at least the air conditioner is on and I'm not sweating like I was in the car. “Sunny D,” I say.

His left eye is watching me. “That button on the front of the arm?” he says before heading to the kitchen. “Magic fingers. Just so you know.”

“How long are we going to stay here?” I ask Emerald.

“Relax,” she says. “Go with the flow.”

The radio must be in the kitchen, because I hear him turn the dial from “Love Touch” to Starship's “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now.”

“He doesn't look like a talent scout,” I whisper. “And he doesn't really seem all that brilliant, either.”

“He wants to help us.” Emerald picks up one of the finished ceramics from the end table. “Look—a monkey with a boner.”

A few moments later, Derek comes out of the kitchen holding two plastic Slurpee cups and a bottle of beer. The Slurpee cups look like they've been through a dishwasher about a hundred times. He hands one to Emerald, saying, “For the painted girl,” and hands the other one to me. “For the angel.” Then he straightens up, takes a swig of his beer, and rolls his head around. “The thing is,” he says, “I'm no more brilliant than any other guy who's plugged in to the energy around him.” Apparently, I wasn't whispering softly enough. “There's good juice everywhere, right? You've just got to tap into the vibe.”

I'm pretty sure the juice he's talking about isn't what he just handed me. And the “vibe” is probably something he thinks is spiritual. Or sexual. Not that it makes any difference to me.

“And while you're right, I don't look like a talent scout,” he says, “I
do
have some experience in the field.”

“Told you,” Emerald says.

I ask him if he has a business card, and he says he'll get me one. But then he just sits down across from Emerald on the couch and takes another swig of his beer. Emerald is still holding the monkey with the boner. She wags it toward him, grinning, and he takes it from her and sets it on the coffee table.

“So who've you worked with?” I ask. “Anybody famous?”

“That depends,” Derek says. “You know the girl on the Wynn-Wynn Windows commercials?”

I shake my head.

“I got her that gig. And another girl who was working at Mister Donut when I met her, she just finished starring in an industrial for Lockheed Martin.”

“Industrial what?” I ask.

“Industrials are movies a big company makes for its employees. For training purposes.”

Emerald says, “God, Dani, do you live under a rock?”

“But they don't get shown in theaters?”

“I hear you,” Derek says. “You want exposure
,
right?”

I glance above his head at the topless St. Pauli girl. “I don't want to be boobs to the wind in a beer poster, if that's what you mean. But, yeah, I want people to know who I am. I want them to feel happy when they see me, and when they hear me talk.”

“She wants to be Miss America,” Emerald says. “Miss Florida first, but Miss America after that. I'm the one that wants to be in the movies. I want to be on TV, too.”

Derek doesn't look at her. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “You want to be a role model,” he says to me.

I don't know what I was imagining a talent scout would look like. Maybe the guy from
The Idolmaker,
but that's not Derek. He's got this slight smile set into his mouth now, and it's not a sarcastic smile. It's an interested smile, an impressed smile—like Reuben Kincaid when he listened to the band play at the end of every episode of
The Partridge Family.

“Dani and I both want to be role models,” Emerald says, reaching into her purse. “We want to be stars, but Dani's got no confidence. She thinks she's ugly—”

“No I don't!” I say.

“—and I tell her she's crazy. We're pretty, and we've got more talent in our pinkies than most famous people do in their whole bodies. Look at these proofs from our Glamour Shots.”

Derek raises a hand toward Emerald and says, “Shh-shh-shh.” He keeps his eye on me. “What talents do you have, Dani?”

“I can play guitar.”

“She's really good, too,” Emerald says.

“What else?”

“She can sing.”

“I mean, I can carry a tune.”

Emerald tells him I sound just like Cyndi Lauper and that she sounds like Sheena Easton.

Derek shushes her again. “What else?” he asks me.

“I have a good memory.”

“For?”

“What I read, and just about anything I hear. Words and music.”

“She's like a computer. One time, somebody asked her if she could recite all fifty states in reverse alphabetical order—”

“Emerald,”
Derek says. He frowns, squints his eyes shut, and grinds his thumb and forefinger into his eyelids. When he opens his eyes again, they're lined up just fine. It's like the rubber band came detached and let that right eye swing true. I don't even know if he knows it's happened. “Could you tone it down a little?”

Emerald looks confused. “Tone what down?”

“The jackrabbit routine.” He turns back to me. “Any other talents?”

I'm all out of talents, but he looks more interested than ever now that his eyes are lined up. “I've got strong feet,” I say. “I can stand on point—you know, like in ballet.”

“So you can dance?”

“Sure.”

“Want to show me?”

There isn't even any music on now. The radio is playing a commercial. I make myself laugh a little and say, “Not really.”

“Well, I'm a good judge of people,” Derek says. “And I think you're something special, Dani. You've got what I call high-octane promise.”

“Thanks.”

“Don't thank me. Just trust me. You see this?” He angles his head and shows me the tattoo on the side of his neck. “It's a comet.”

“I can dance,” Emerald says softly, and then takes a swallow from her cup.

Derek sits back and picks at the label on his beer bottle with his fingernail. “It's a comet, girls, because I can recognize rising stars when I see them.”

Okay, a comet is about as opposite as you can get from a rising star, since comets are always falling, so that's pretty dumb. And I'm well aware that nothing going on in this room is going to lead to the Miss Florida contest, or even the Miss Brevard County contest. But look at me: I've got the best seat in the house and the air conditioner's aimed right at it. I'm a little nauseous, but I've got magic fingers if I want them. And Derek's paying a lot more attention to me than he is to Emerald—who didn't need to be called a jackrabbit, true, but who also didn't need to ask me if I lived under a rock. The fact is, I feel as close to being okay as I have in weeks. I almost feel special. How's that for a reality check, Mom?

A
s opposed to, say, falling asleep last Friday night with my Walkman on continuous play—Blondie's
The Hunter
—so that it keeps switching from one side of the tape to the other, all night long, until the batteries die. And in the morning waking up because my mother's leaning over me, holding one half of my headphones away from my ear, and saying, “How a person can get any rest with music pounding into their brain all night long is beyond me.”

“What are you doing in my room?” I asked.

“Getting rid of dead weight.”

I sat up, yawned, and glared at her. She was holding the pole of the floor lamp from the den in one hand and had the decoupaged
God Bless Our Home
sign from the kitchen tucked under her arm. “What can we get rid of in here? And don't say nothing because I'll bet you haven't touched half this stuff in years.”