Summer 1983
They spent the fall, winter, and spring of their second year together, shifting from desire into comfort.
That rush and ache that Joan had once felt at the graze of Vanessa’s hand along her arm had muted. There was less newness between them, almost no mystery.
But Joan knew she felt less buzz because she also felt no fear. There could be no danger between them when they made each other this safe.
This wasn’t romance—Joan was sure of it. It was something much deeper.
Something that, unlike every other thing in the known universe, Joan suspected, could last forever.
That June, Joan and Vanessa were at a bar with Donna, Lydia, Griff, and Hank. It was two nights before STS-7 was supposed to launch—two nights before Sally Ride was to become the first American woman astronaut to fly on the space shuttle.
Tomorrow, Vanessa and Hank would head out to Edwards. Donna and Joan were heading to Cape Canaveral.
But Joan always liked this moment best—this liminal time right before a launch where no one had anything to do just yet. Even if Vanessa was growing unnecessarily heated about what was the best song about space.
“Griff,” she said. “I am glad we agree that it’s Bowie. But it’s ‘Space Oddity.’ ”
Griff shook his head. “I stand by what I said.”
Hank laughed.
“You’re standing by ‘Starman’?” Vanessa said. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I don’t want to rock the boat with y’all, but it’s ‘Rocket Man,’ ” Hank
said.
Both Vanessa and Griff looked at him.
“That’s number two,” Vanessa said.
“She’s right.”
And then they looked back at each other. “ ‘Space Oddity’ is a tragedy!”
Griff said. “It’s heartbreaking. ‘Starman’ is hopeful, it’s embracing the future.”
Vanessa shook her head. “You would be a sucker for that.”
“Okay, let’s not get personal.”
“I like ‘Space Baby,’ by the Tubes,” Donna said. “Or what’s that one by the Kinks?”
“All right, at least Griff is smart enough to know it’s Bowie,” Vanessa said.
Joan put her hand on Donna’s shoulder. “It’s better, when Vanessa is talking about David Bowie, to not get involved. She’s insane.”
“Hey!”
Joan sipped her beer. “You know, one time, when Frances was over, she was watching Sesame Street, and this song came on called ‘I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon.’ Ernie sings it. And it’s all about how he wants to go to the moon, but he doesn’t want to live there because he would miss all his friends.”
“Are you serious?” Griff said. “Is this your honest contribution to the best song about space? Bert and Ernie?”
Bert wasn’t in it, but Joan could tell that wasn’t the point. “I’m just saying . . . I found it moving.”
Vanessa and Griff shared a smile. “She found it moving,” Vanessa said.
“You guys are making jokes like you don’t understand what’s at stake on Saturday,” Lydia said.
Everyone turned to her. “One day it will be you on the shuttle, Lyds,”
Donna said. “Don’t worry.”
“It’s not that,” Lydia said.
“C’mon,” Vanessa said. “That’s always what you’re worried about.”
Lydia shook her head. “Not this time. It’s really not.” She pushed her beer away from her. “Guys, if anything goes wrong on Saturday, anything . . .” she said. “If Sally so much as sneezes at the wrong time, everyone will blame it on the fact that she’s a woman. And then none of us will go up there for a very long time.”
Griff and Hank sat back.
Lydia grew more animated. “Little girls across the country will be made fun of at recess when they want to grab the ball, and teenaged girls who get straight A’s in science will be told to have a backup plan, and no one will dress up as Sally for Halloween. Girls’ understanding of who they can be will be smaller. If this does not go well. Whether we mean to or not, we will have
done that to them.”
Donna put her hand on Lydia’s shoulder.
Lydia was entirely right. There were four men on that shuttle. But every American woman was. Joan and Vanessa and Donna and Lydia—and so many people at NASA—were steadying themselves on the edge of a coin. It could be so easy for it all to go sideways. If it did, the backlash would be swift, and brutal. A wave overtaking all of them, each lost in the riptide.
To Joan’s surprise, Vanessa reached across and took Lydia’s hand for a moment. Then she let go and sat back.
“But then again, it’s also the first time jelly beans are going to space, so
pray for the jelly beans,” Lydia said.
Joan choked on her water.
“I told you I’m funny,” Lydia said.
Two days later, STS-7 launched without a hitch. And six days later, Joan pushed her way into the theater at Mission Control to watch the shuttle land, safely, at Edwards.
When Joan got home to Vanessa that night, neither of them said it, but Joan knew both of them felt it.
Sally had done it. Any of them could be assigned now. Their moment was coming.
In August, NASA was hosting the Bicentennial Balloon Meet. Joan had called and asked Barbara if she could take Frances to see some of the balloon
launches.
“Sure. Can I come, too?” Barbara said.
“You want to come with us? It’s just a picnic at JSC.”
“Yeah, I want to see what you do. Where you work.”
“Oh,” Joan said. “Yes, I would love that.”
When Joan got off the phone, she turned to Vanessa. “Barbara wants to come.”
“Well, that’s nice, right? She’s trying. I feel like she’s been nicer to you lately.”
Joan considered it. “Yeah, she seems happier, I think.”
Joan had met Daniel. She’d joined Barbara, Frances, and him out for dinner one weekend. When Joan had shown up in the parking lot of the restaurant, he’d taken off his ten-gallon hat and put it to his chest as he shook her hand and smiled. Joan noticed that he was about ten years older than Barbara, hair graying at the temples. He seemed perfectly nice, albeit arrogant in exactly the way Barbara would confuse for confidence.
“Well, she’s getting laid consistently, so that’s probably it,” Vanessa said.
Joan shook her head. “Would you stop?”
“Still such a prude,” Vanessa said as she kissed Joan’s neck and dragged her into the bedroom.
Joan did not know what to expect that evening, but then, when she met Barbara and Frances at the main parking lot at JSC, she immediately spotted the giant diamond ring on Barbara’s finger. She decided not to say anything.
“Hey, babe,” Joan said to Frances.
Frances was nine now and had taken on an air of maturity that Joan both celebrated and mourned. There was no sitting on Joan’s lap anymore, no smushing their noses together, no carrying Frances across a crowded parking lot. Those things had been replaced by talking about pop music, and wanting to see a lot of the same movies, and less being asked of Joan in the taking
care of her.
When Frances had been younger, Joan would sometimes carry her such long distances that it hurt her back. Back then, Frances would hang on so tight that sometimes she would press on Joan’s windpipe or kick her in the ribs. Now Frances would barely hold her hand.
Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted.
Joan tried to remind herself that when Frances had been younger, she had held Frances’s little hand every single chance she got. When Frances had been a baby, she had smelled her hair sometimes for whole minutes at a time.
She had been present for all of it. Didn’t that mean that she would not grieve its loss, since she had voraciously and self-indulgently taken all of it that was
offered?
No. It did not.
She still ached for every version of Frances.
But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.
She missed every Frances she had known. But oh, this Frances. This lanky, gangly, whip-smart Frances, with her ears pierced and a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt on, this Frances was a gift Joan would one day miss, too.
“This is how they used to launch astronauts into space,” Joan said as she pointed to the Mercury-Redstone on display. “This was the rocket that launched the very first American in space. And this one”—she pointed to the Saturn V—“launched the first astronaut to the moon.”
“Neil Armstrong,” Frances said.
“That’s right.”
“Are you going to the moon?”
Barbara cut in: “Joan is doing something even more important.”
Joan looked at her.
“One day, she is going to go into low-Earth orbit and put up a satellite or a telescope—or something else that is going to help everyone learn about our
universe better.”
Joan was taken aback. She had not told Barbara any of that.
“We’re very proud of Auntie Joan,” Barbara said.
“Of course we are!” Frances said.
For a moment, Joan couldn’t speak.
“We should get going,” she finally said. And then: “Thank you both. That means a lot.”
The grass was packed, but Joan found them a spot a ways back, far from the action, so they could relax and talk. There had been heavy rain for weeks, but tonight was clear and dry.
Joan put a blanket out on the lawn. She rolled up a sweatshirt and used it as a pillow for Frances. Barbara sat down with her legs to the side and covered herself with the skirt of her dress. They watched the sun begin to set.
“Two hundred years ago, in France, the first man flew. He went up in a hot air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers. It was made out of paper, but it was pretty similar to the ones they have on the ground over there.”
“Wow,” Frances said.
Joan told neither of them that some of the balloon teams had asked members of the astronaut corps to accompany them in the air, and that Vanessa had eagerly raised her hand. So only Joan knew that Vanessa was just off in the distance, preparing to go up.
“And here is something else,” Joan said to them. “This is commemorating
twenty-five years of spaceflight, too.”
“Like what you do?”
“Like what I’m trying to do. But there are a lot of us astronauts, and we all want to go. There’s only so many spots at a time.”
“You will get picked one day,” Barbara said. “I bet it’s soon.”
Joan had long known that if you’re unhappy, it’s hard to watch other people be happy. So it stood to reason that the opposite was true, too. That if you were happy, you wanted others to be happy alongside you. This was the only reason Joan could think of for why Barbara suddenly seemed so immensely proud of her.
If that was the case, then maybe Barbara had been right. She had needed to set up her future with Daniel in order to take care of the people around her. In
order to be her best self for Frances.
“Thanks,” Joan said. “I hope so.”
Barbara inhaled sharply. And then she held out her hand for Joan to see.
“I’m surprised you haven’t congratulated me yet,” she said.
Joan looked at the ring and pretended to see it for the first time. “Oh, my
God, Barb, it’s gorgeous.”
“Thanks—it’s five carats.”
Joan did not know much about diamond rings, except for what she knew about diamonds themselves. Which was that scientists had long thought it was possible that there were diamond-like minerals on other planets. In fact, in 1967, a substance named lonsdaleite was discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona—a fragment of an asteroid that had struck Earth—and it is theoretically harder and purer than any diamond ever known.
Which meant that the rock used in Western civilizations to express romantic love and steadfastness was not the strongest material in the universe, but merely the strongest thing humans had ever found on Earth. The hardest, strongest thing humans knew of at the time.
Language is what allows us to communicate. But it also limits what we can say, perhaps even how we feel. After all, how can we recognize a sentiment within ourselves that we have no word for? And perhaps, Joan thought, science is the same. Even the way we tell one another we want to live alongside them is limited by what we understand is possible in the world.
What more could we say if we knew more about the universe?
“I’m happy for you,” Joan said. “I know this is what you wanted.”
“He’s a really good man,” Barbara said.
Joan nodded. “I believe that. And I’m thrilled to hear it.”
“What are you talking about?” Frances asked.
“I’m getting married, honey,” Barbara said to her. “Daniel and I are getting
married.”
“Oh.”
Joan squeezed Frances’s hand, trying not to let it show on her face that she was stunned that Barbara had not told Frances all of this before, at home, just the two of them.
“He’ll be your stepdad. We are all going to be a family. And we’ll move in
with him. Into his big house with the pool—remember when I brought you
over there?”
“I’ll have a pool?” Frances asked.
“You’ll have everything you ever wanted,” Barbara said, rubbing Frances’s cheek with her thumb.
The balloons started to lift, one by one. “Look!” Barbara said. “There they go!”
There was a red-and-yellow one, one with blue and green stripes, and a few were rainbow-colored. They all started to lift.
Vanessa had said she would be in the American Express balloon, but Joan couldn’t quite make out which one that was. And so, as they all began to take off, Joan felt thrilled by each one lifting, all of them potentially holding Vanessa. If she was not exactly sure where Vanessa was, then Vanessa was everywhere.
“You know, Frances, it took us one hundred and twenty years to go from a man in a hot-air balloon to the invention of the airplane,” Joan said. “But then only fifty-eight years to go from the first airplane to the first man in space.”
Barbara looked at her.
“I’m reading a book about the Wright brothers,” Joan said. It was the closest she could come to saying to Barbara, I love a pilot.
“Well, then imagine what we will do in the next fifty-eight years,” Barbara said, smiling. She started French-braiding Frances’s hair as they watched the sky.
Joan looked up. Vanessa was in the air somewhere. And if Joan was looking up, trying to find Vanessa, it stood to reason that Vanessa was
looking down, trying to find her.
“Wow,” Barbara said.
“I want to fly,” Frances said. “Someday.”
“Then someday you will,” Joan said.
“Who knows,” Barbara told her. “Maybe one day Daniel will buy you a plane.”
“I can’t wait until you get assigned to a mission, and I can tell everyone at school that my aunt is going to space,” Frances said.
As the hot-air balloons floated above their heads and the sun had set and
the stars dared to come out, Joan grabbed Frances’s hand. It was not as tiny as it had once been, but it was still so small compared to hers. Frances was still so young. Joan could not wait to meet the adult she would be, but also wished she could pause here, in this moment, forever.
Joan kissed the top of Frances’s hand. “I’m glad you’re both here,” she said.
And then she bent her head back and looked up at the sky with the wonder of someone who’d never seen it before.
It was a balmy September night, at six o’clock in the evening on a Monday.
Vanessa and Joan were at Joan’s apartment, about to head out to Frenchie’s for dinner with Donna, Lydia, and Griff. But then Joan’s phone
rang.
Joan picked it up in the kitchen.
And there he was. That voice that ruled over the astronauts as if they were mere gods and he was Zeus.
“Can you come see me tomorrow morning?” Antonio said. “First thing?”
“Of course,” Joan said. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Just please come see me when you get in.”
Joan hung up and then looked at Vanessa, who was leaning against the
refrigerator, watching her.
“Antonio?” Vanessa asked.
“He wants me to see him first thing in the morning. He won’t say why.”
Vanessa cocked her head. “How did he seem?”
“Very casual, like it was nothing at all. Like he always summons me to his office.”
“Maybe you’re getting a flight assignment.”
“Before Lydia or Griff? C’mon.”
Vanessa shrugged. “It’s not impossible.”
“It’s not likely.”
Vanessa didn’t respond. Instead, she grabbed a bottle of wine off Joan’s counter and began to open it. “Let’s stay in tonight and drink this bottle and listen to records and make out,” she said.
Joan had become a flake since falling in love. “Yes,” she said, “Let’s.”
The next morning, Joan was outside Antonio’s door at seven forty-seven, despite knowing he usually didn’t get to the office until after eight.
She waited patiently by his door until she saw him coming down the hallway, holding a briefcase.
“Come on in,” he said, opening his office door.
He had a corner office in Building 1, the large windows giving him a view of the campus. And Joan saw a future, in a flash, of who she might be when she was no longer an astronaut. Might she be Antonio one day? She did not want to go back to academia. She wanted to be here at NASA for as long as they’d have her. But that would require her getting this part right first, the astronaut part.
She sat down as she waited for him to get settled.
Antonio put down his briefcase, hung his suit jacket over the back of his chair. When he sat, he situated the notebooks on his desk and then looked at
her.
“Joan Goodwin, always a pleasure.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Tell me, how would you feel about going up into space?”
“What?”
Antonio started smiling and leaned back. “How would you feel,” he said again, this time slowly, “about going up into space?”
“I would feel . . . great about that,” Joan said. “I would love that, sir.”
“I thought you might.”
He took a long pause, and Joan felt herself leaning forward. A smile spread across his face and crinkled his eyes.
“We are assigning you to STS-LR7. Your commander will be John Donahue, who I know you’ve spent some time with during training.”
“Yes, sir, he was one of the survival-training instructors.”
“This will be his second mission, so you’ll be in good hands. And your pilot will be Greg Menkin. The mission specialists will be you, Mark Simons, and Harrison Moreau. You’ll be flying on Discovery, slated for launch November of ’84, which gives you more than a year to train.”
“I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Say that you accept.”
“I do, I absolutely do,” Joan said.
“Good. You’ll be assigned to Spacelab on the shuttle. You have become absolutely crucial to the inner workings of the pallet. We have a series of experiments that will be conducted by all of you, but we are planning on
moving forward with the solar investigations, which we believe you are best suited to execute. But more than that, we feel you will be a great asset to the crew in terms of expertise and demeanor. We need a calm, steady hand on any crew, someone who understands that we all succeed or fail together. And we believe for STS-LR7, you are the best fit. That’s why we’ve selected
you.”
“I am honored, truly.”
“The assignments on STS-LR7 will be announced shortly. As I know you are aware, the entire astronaut corps is eager to be assigned a mission. I ask that you keep your assignment between us and your crew until I have time to formally announce. And when it is announced, that you help me to keep morale high for those not assigned yet.”
“Of course, sir. I would consider that my highest priority until training.”
“I know, Goodwin. That contributed to my decision. You are exactly who NASA needs on the mission. And we are lucky to have you in our service.”
He stood up and put out his hand. Joan stood up and shook it. “Thank you,
sir. I will make you proud.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.”
When Joan left his office, she had trouble composing her face. Finding it impossible to steady her hands, she walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind herself. She was overcome. And it came bursting out of her.
She sobbed.
Crying in the office felt so good. Holding it in felt so terrible.
As Joan inhaled and blew the air out of her lungs, she let the tears fall down her face.
She’d done it. She’d been assigned a mission. The first mission of her group. She was going to space.
When she was all cried out, she left the stall and washed her hands at the sink. She looked at herself in the mirror.
Her eyes were puffy, her cheeks splotchy. Her hair was falling out of its ponytail. Her mascara had run.
This probably wasn’t what an astronaut looked like to most people. But she was one, and she was going up into space. So the definition was going to have to change.
She waited until some of the redness went away, caught her breath, and then left the bathroom. As she was walking back to her desk, she saw Vanessa coming down the hallway.
Vanessa was trying, covertly, to read her face. She raised her eyebrows inquisitively.
As they passed, Joan said, “November ’84.”
Vanessa beamed.
And then the two of them walked on in different directions, not skipping a beat.
That night, Joan went to Vanessa’s house and knocked on the door.
Vanessa opened it and they both walked inside. But just as Joan shut the door behind them, she took Vanessa by the wrist and pulled her close.
“You’re sure you’re okay with me going up there first?” Joan asked. “It would be okay if you were struggling with it.”
Vanessa shook her head. “Every day I don’t have an assignment, I’m on pins and needles waiting to hear,” she said. She pushed her body into Joan’s and took Joan’s face in her hands. “But that has nothing to do with you.”
She kissed her and then looked her in the eye.
“I fell for the coolest astronaut at NASA,” Vanessa said. “What did you think I thought would happen?”
The announcement about the flight crews was made the following Monday at the all-astronauts meeting.
Donna put her hands on Joan’s shoulders and squeezed them. Vanessa clapped softly while smiling at her. Lydia’s jaw tensed. She would not look at Joan. She just kept nodding, intensely, rapidly, in a way that was almost pathological.
Later, in the hallway, Joan chased Lydia down.
“Are you okay?”
Lydia turned to her. “I’m fine, Joan.”
“I know you wanted it to be you.”
“I’m fine, Joan. Congratulations.”
But three days later, at nine o’clock at night, when Joan was alone in her bedroom, there was a knock on her door.
Vanessa had gone to Alabama, where she was working in the dunk tank.
Joan had been sketching, trying to draw Vanessa’s face. In all of their time together, Joan had not once captured it right. Every so often, Vanessa would ask Joan if she could see whatever Joan had come up with. Joan had yet to show her a single attempt.
This evening was no different. It wasn’t right. It was the hair—it was always the hair. How could you capture something like that with a pencil?
The way it was always in motion? You couldn’t.
Before Joan could put the pad down, the person knocked again. She tucked her things in her nightstand and walked to the front door and answered it.
“Can I come in?” Lydia said.
“Uh, sure,” Joan said, opening the door wider.
Lydia looked at Joan’s apartment. Joan could now see it through her eyes: a little messy, a little lived in, a little quaint.
Lydia stood by the couch. “Can I sit?”
“Of course—do you want water or something?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Lydia sat down. “You need a new couch,” Lydia said. “The springs are soft.”
“I like it just fine,” Joan said, as she sat in the chair opposite Lydia.
“What’s on your mind?”
Lydia said nothing for a moment. There was an awkwardness to Lydia that some people found off-putting. But it did not unnerve Joan at all. Joan found it easier to be around Lydia one-on-one, when she did not have to contend with Donna’s or Vanessa’s discomfort around her.
Lydia put her elbows to her knees, looked down at the floor. When she looked back up at Joan, her eyes were soft, just a hint of glassiness to them.
Joan could hardly return her gaze.
“Why wasn’t it me?” Lydia said.
Joan blew the air out of her lungs. “I don’t know.”
“It should have been me,” Lydia said, her voice breaking slightly.
“No, Lydia, that’s not true.”
“I understand you deserve it,” Lydia said. “I’m not saying you don’t.”
“Good,” Joan said.
“But I work harder than you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Well, I’m smarter than you.”
“No, you aren’t.”
Lydia considered this, looked down at the floor again.
“Why are you here, asking me this?” Joan said. “Instead of going to Harrison’s door and asking him why he got assigned before you?”
Lydia nodded and continued to stare at the floor. And then looked up at her. “I’m . . .” She hung her head again. And then quickly worked up her nerve again. “I’m not confronting you. I’m . . .” She looked Joan in the eye.
“I’m asking your advice.”
Joan’s entire body softened. “Oh.”
“I want to go up there—” Lydia said.
“And you will,” Joan said.
“Stop—please let me finish.”
Joan backed off.
“I want to go up there first and, sure, that is part of why I’m upset. But, Joan, even more than that, I . . . I want to be good at this. Not just because I want the gold pin. I want to be good at it in the sense that I want to be helpful. I want to use what skills I have to be of service to this team. I want to be what NASA needs. I really want that.”
Joan nodded.
“They need you for Spacelab, and I get that. But also, if they wanted me, they would have just assigned Marty to Spacelab and given me Harrison’s spot. I have the most hours on the RMS of anyone from our group, so it doesn’t actually make sense to give it to Harrison first. There must be another reason. Something I didn’t get exactly right yet. Or there is something else I need to learn,” Lydia said. “So that I can be a great astronaut, someone
Antonio knows he can trust.”
“I can’t speak for Antonio,” Joan said. “But I do think you’re already learning it.”
Lydia looked up at Joan, her eyes a little brighter. “Learning what?”
“That it’s not about you,” Joan said. “Choices like this are dictated by what is best for the mission, not the individual. And if you’re asking my advice, I think that’s where you sometimes go wrong. You’re not smarter or harder working than anyone here. Yes, you’re brilliant and driven, but you’re surrounded by people who are just as brilliant and just as driven. You’re not better than anyone on this crew. You cannot be. And you cannot want to be.
If you are, you won’t be prepared to do the hard stuff, if you’re too worried about whether you’re winning some imaginary race. It’s about the collective, not the individual.”
Lydia closed her eyes and nodded. She did not speak for quite some time.
“You’re saying be less American, be more Soviet.”
Joan laughed. “I absolutely did not say that!”
“Yeah,” Lydia said, laughing. “You did. I’m going to tell everyone you said I needed to be more Soviet in my mentality, and you’re gonna get kicked off LR7 for being unfit to serve and I’m gonna get your spot. I finally figured it out.”
Joan was still laughing when Lydia stood up. “This is so much easier than I thought! I don’t have to learn anything!”
Joan stood up too and then, without thinking, walked over to Lydia and
hugged her.
“What is happening?”
“I’m hugging you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Lydia didn’t pull away. She relaxed into it. “I hate this.”