The Dream Life of Astronauts (4 page)

Robbie draped his head back and let out a low whistle.

My mother laid her hand on top of mine and squeezed it—as if the two of us had suffered more than anyone else.

I was waiting for the show to come back on, but my father lowered the footrest of his recliner, got up, and turned off the set.

And even that wasn't the end of it, for the next morning, the programming was interrupted again so that we could all watch the president say goodbye to his staff and then walk out to his helicopter with his wife. She climbed the steps ahead of him, and just before he ducked inside he turned and waved, smiling, and then threw his arms open wide and made the victory sign with both hands.

Robbie and I were sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, playing domino-monkey-sticks. “Little guy,” he said, “you just witnessed history.”

My mother was still asleep. My father was standing at the front window, gazing out at the street. He'd taken the day off and was dressed in his weekend outfit—canvas deck shoes, khakis, a polo shirt—and he was holding a coffee mug. “Whose car is that?” he asked without turning around.

“You mean the Mustang?” Robbie said. “That's mine. I bought it a week ago. You're just now noticing it?”

My father said nothing for several moments. Then, still with his back to us, he said, “You know, things haven't been so good since you've been here.”

Robbie had a plastic monkey in each hand. He looked at me and chuckled. “You can't exactly blame Watergate on me, can you?”

“I don't mean that,” my father said. His voice was calm, level. “You move in, you eat our food, you sit on your ass like it's some goddamn resort. Like everything's a big joke. And all this time, you've got the money to buy a car?” He turned around. “You could have offered to help out a little.”

Robbie opened his mouth, but hesitated. “I can,” he said finally.

“You could have bought some goddamn groceries,” my father said.

“I can do that,” Robbie said. “I've got a little left over. I've just been trying to get on my feet.”

“I think you should leave.”

H
e stuck around for another two days. He didn't argue with my father's decision—my mother did that for him, but even she fizzled out after a few fights. She moped instead, and started drinking at lunch.

I asked each of my parents, in private, why Robbie had to go, why he couldn't just stay and pay for his own food. The sad truth of it, my father told me, was that people will take advantage of you, if you let them. People will railroad you, take the best part of you and twist it to fit their own needs. The only person who has your best interests at heart is you, he said, and the sooner I learned that, the better. My mother's answer was more succinct: “Your father's an ass.”

I helped Robbie stuff his things back into his duffel bag and asked him where he was going to go.

“Not sure,” he said. “Key West, maybe. I hear it's closer to Cuba than mainland Florida.”

I didn't know anything about Cuba other than that it was a whole different country and sounded impossibly far away. Still, the antsiness crept back into my stomach until I figured out what it was I wanted to ask next. “Can I come?”

He grinned, and a shine surfaced on his eyes. “I guess not,” he said, as if my coming along was an option and he was choosing not to take it.

For a long time—a year, maybe—I stayed mad at him for that. Then one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me that of course he couldn't have taken me with him. That would have been kidnapping. It would have enraged my father and upset my mother; it might even have been on the news—a manhunt involving the police, private detectives, witnesses who'd spotted us, and a team of FBI agents laying siege to the southernmost port in the country, just as my uncle and I were about to board a boat bound for Cuba. I had to stay; he had to go. Three years later, he sent a postcard from Prague, addressed to the family (“
Pozdravy!—
Robbie” was all it said). By then, my mother was gone, too: back to Ohio, where she got a job in a department store and called every couple of weeks—sometimes drunk, sometimes not—to talk to me, not to my father, and where she eventually married a fat man who had twin sons from another marriage, and where I had to start going for a month in the summers and hated every minute of it, and where she hugged and kissed me over and over again every time she had to put me on the plane back to Florida. I was in college when the fat man dropped dead. I didn't fly to Ohio for the funeral, even though both she and my father offered to buy my ticket, and I don't think she ever forgave me for that. But she came to my wedding, and she gave an impromptu speech at the rehearsal dinner that was kind-spirited, meandering, and, ultimately, incomprehensible. My father, at the far end of the table, had been about to speak, but he kept his eyes on his plate as she prattled on, and I saw him slip his notes back into the pocket of his suit coat. I wished, of all things, that Robbie could have been there. But Robbie and my mother had had a long-distance falling-out sometime during her second marriage, and she didn't want me trying to track him down. Anyway, it would have made him sad to see what she had become, which wasn't so different from what she'd always been. As for my father, he'd stopped drinking years ago. He'd switched over from real estate to life insurance. He hated Carter, voted for Reagan, voted for the first Bush but not the second one. He never remarried. We spoke once a week on the phone—about politics, the weather, his arthritis—until just after his seventy-third birthday, when he went to sleep one night, and that was it. I had to call my mother, of course. She surprised me by weeping.

C
lark Evans finished his talk on his NASA experience with a description of the g-forces created in a Darmotech centrifuge. He held one of his large hands open in front of him, as if displaying a work of wonder, and then moved the hand in a circle that increased in speed as he described the sensation. Frankie, staring from the front row, felt nearly hypnotized.

The wheat-haired librarian who was moderating the event asked if anyone had a question for their guest. Frankie raised his hand. There were five people in the audience, scattered over a flock of twenty folding chairs. The librarian and Clark Evans sat on slightly nicer chairs at the front of the library's map room. She looked right past Frankie and pointed a wavering finger at an old man wearing a sun visor.

“Did you find being on the moon made you want to throw up?”

“Well, as I was saying—” Clark Evans began.

“The reason I ask is because Conrad, or maybe Bean—one of those guys from Apollo 12 or 14—said in an interview that the low gravity made him nauseous, and I was wondering what would happen if an astronaut threw up in his suit.”

“I imagine that would be quite a mess,” Evans replied.

“But it didn't happen to you?”

“Not to me, no. As I was saying a while back, I was lined up for three different missions, but they didn't come through. NASA politics and whatnot. But I can tell you from knowing a whole lot of guys who went up there that walking around on the moon is like nothing on this planet, that's for sure.” He seemed to smile right at Frankie as he said this.

“Any other questions?” the librarian asked.

Evans's jaw looked smooth, but bore a five o'clock shadow. Only one of his cheeks had a dimple, which may just have been from the way he was holding his face. Frankie raised his hand, but the old man spoke up again:

“So you're saying there's no system in place for when an astronaut vomits?”

“Not that I'm aware of,” Evans said, and the old man glanced at the other audience members, seemingly appalled.

The librarian cleared her throat and said in a trembling but authoritative voice, “Let's have another question.”

She pointed to a woman who didn't ask anything but said, “God made the Earth for people to live on, not leave.”

“How about this young man,” Clark Evans said, nodding toward Frankie. “You've got a question, don't you, buddy?”

His face, Frankie thought, was a little like Buck Rogers's. He had Han Solo's shaggy brown hair. Remington Steele's alluring gaze. It was the face Frankie saw every week on the back of the local TV guide in the ad Evans took out for his real estate business. Frankie straightened up in his chair and asked, “Can you comment on Gordon Cooper's UFO sighting and the photos he took during his Mercury orbit?”

“That's a great question,” Evans said. “And, you know, I actually have an interesting story about that event—but it's a little long to tell right now.” He turned to the librarian. “We're about out of time, aren't we?”

When she confirmed this, Evans stood and pulled his wallet out of his blazer, and from it he removed a small stack of business cards. He stepped forward and passed them out to each of the five members of the audience, encouraging them to call if they were ever buying or selling a home in the area. There was a small clatter of applause.

Frankie was unlocking his bicycle from the rack in front of the library when he heard a voice say, “I hope you didn't think I was dodging your question, buddy.” He looked up and saw Evans standing several feet away, holding his car keys. The man had on a pair of aviator sunglasses and he was smiling. He had very white teeth.

“That's okay,” Frankie said.

“I'd love to tell you that story sometime. These public talks are a circus. It's refreshing to run into someone who has a genuine interest in the space program.”

The “circus” had only involved an audience of five, but Frankie was grateful for the chance to talk to the astronaut one-on-one. “I think there was a cover-up and maybe Cooper was in on it—only because he was scared. I think maybe he was afraid NASA would get mad if he talked too much about what he saw.”

Evans held out his hand. “I'm Clark,” he said.

Frankie's skinny arm snapped like a rubber hose in the man's grip.

“You live on the island?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good for you. No need to
sir
me, by the way. Do you want to be an astronaut?”

“Not for the government.”

“Well, there aren't too many independent companies out there, though if there were, I'm sure they'd be better run than NASA.”

“Do you think we're descended from aliens?”

“I haven't given it much thought. How old are you, buddy?”

“Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

“How about that. Well, listen, you still have the card I gave you?”

Frankie nodded and pulled it out of the back pocket of his jeans.

“That number on the front is my office,” Evans said, taking the card from Frankie's hand. He turned it over, clicked a ballpoint pen, and began to write. “But this is my home number. Why don't you give me a call sometime, and maybe we can get together and talk—about space.” He handed the card back to Frankie. “Ever been inside the Vehicle Assembly Building?”

“Not inside it, no.”

“We could tour the facility. Would you like that?”

Beneath his Admiral Ackbar T-shirt, Frankie's heart was pounding. “Sure,” he said.

“Give me a call and we'll see what we can work out.”

“Thanks, Mr. Evans.”

“Not ‘Mr. Evans.' It's Clark.” The man pulled his sunglasses down and gazed at Frankie for a moment. Then, spinning his key ring around his index finger, he walked across the parking lot to a midnight-blue Trans Am. He glanced back once before getting in, pulled out of the parking lot, and was gone.

Still standing next to his bike, Frankie looked down at the business card. He read the handwritten phone number, then turned the card over. The motto of the business, bolded and italicized, read,
I'll travel the galaxy to meet your needs!

H
e had begun to think of his house as a network of pods where they all lived separately. His sister Karen's pod was off-limits and silent when she wasn't there, off-limits and noisy with heavy metal music when she was. His brother Joe's pod was a dark hovel Frankie rarely glimpsed; it smelled of sneakers, and the only sound that ever came out of it was the faint but frequent squeaking of bedsprings. Frankie's pod was lined entirely with tinfoil and had a cockpit at one end, fashioned out of his desk, a mounted pair of handlebars, and three dead television sets. And at the opposite end of the house was his mother's pod, where she sometimes spent whole days off from work with the door closed.

They'd taken to foraging for their dinners, crossing paths in the kitchen like competing scavengers. Joe, his chin speckled with a fresh outcrop of zits, was leaning against the counter, eating pickles from a jar, when Frankie walked in. “Do we have any Triscuits?”

“No idea,” Joe said.

Frankie found a box of Triscuits behind the cereal and took it down from the cabinet. Before he could eat any, Karen walked in wearing her steak house uniform and grabbed the box out of his hand.

“Evening, losers.”

“What, are you supposed to look like a winner in that outfit?” Joe asked.

“Bite it.” Karen ate a cracker as she peered into the refrigerator.

“I met an astronaut today,” Frankie told them. He was used to his family's not understanding him and normally he kept the events of his day to himself, but meeting Clark felt too big, too exciting to contain.

“On this planet?” Karen asked.

“At the library. He gave a talk on NASA.”

“So he's been to the moon?”

“No. He never really went on a mission—NASA politics and whatnot. He gave me his phone number, though. He wants to take me on a tour of the Space Center.”

“Lucky you.” Karen finished what was left of the crackers, took the pickle jar from Joe's hand, ate the last pickle, then took a swallow of the juice.

“That's disgusting,” Joe told her.

She wiped her mouth with her hand and gave him back the jar. “So when are you and the fake astronaut going on your date?”

“He's not a fake. And it wouldn't be a
date,
” Frankie said.

“Why else would an old guy want to hang out with you? He'll probably try to butt-fuck you in a Mercury capsule.”

After Karen left for work and Joe had retreated to the back of the house, Frankie sat down on the couch and looked at Clark's picture in the quarter-page ad on the back of the TV guide. The picture was a head shot no bigger than a postage stamp. Clark was displaying the same smile he'd given Frankie that afternoon, and his slogan was printed below his face. Frankie was staring at the picture when his mother's door opened and she stepped into the living room. “Where is everyone?”

“Karen's at work. Joe's in his pod,” Frankie said.

“In his what?”

He held up the TV guide. “I met this man today. He used to be an astronaut and he wants to take me on a tour of NASA.”

“Is he sane?”

“He seems like it.”

She walked into the kitchen. “Well, make sure he gives you a hard hat if he takes you anywhere with scaffolding.” He heard her clacking dishes around. When she reappeared, she was holding a bowl of cereal. “And if you get into his car, don't let him drive unsafely.” She carried the bowl back to her room.

In his own pod, liquid purple from the black lights reflecting off the tinfoil, Frankie sat at his desk and extracted Clark Evans's head from the TV guide with an X-Acto knife. He used his glue stick to anchor the head to a blank sheet of drawing paper, then sketched a body beneath it: naked, hands on hips, dick pointing up to the sky.

A
t school the following Monday, he met Melissa in the commons during lunch. She was eating an egg salad sandwich and had a cookie and a lemonade next to her on the concrete bench. “Don't even look at me,” she told him. “I'm Godzilla.”

“No you're not,” Frankie said, sitting down next to her and unwrapping his own sandwich. “You look skinny.”

“I'm a monster of grotesque proportions. How's life?”

“I met an astronaut this weekend at the public library. He wants to show me the Space Center.”

“Haven't you seen it already? I thought your dad used to work there.”

“My dad worked in a supply room. Clark said he wants to show me behind-the-scenes stuff. My sister says he's a phony and is just trying to get into my pants.”

Melissa stared down at her half-eaten sandwich as if she didn't have the energy to lift it. Then she lifted it and took a bite. “He probably is. It's probably going to turn into some steamy affair. He's not gross, is he?”

“No. He's really handsome.”

On his way past the bench, Curt Alberg stopped short and looked at Frankie. “Are you talking about me?”

Frankie shook his head no.

“Definitely not,” Melissa said.

“Faggot,” Curt said, and walked on.

Frankie turned back to Melissa. “Do you really think he might be interested in me—like that?”

“Lust rules the world,” she said. “It doesn't rule
my
world, but it rules everyone else's. And you're an okay-looking guy, though you're kind of an oddball. You're not going to show him your bedroom, are you?”

“Why?”

“He'll feel like he's at work.”

“He's not an astronaut anymore; he sells real estate.”

“And he's handsome?”

“Really handsome.”

Melissa sipped from her lemonade and let out a long sigh. “I guess I really am going to be the last living virgin on Merritt Island.”