Fall 1984
Joan and Vanessa were at the Outpost with Donna, who was going to have the baby any moment.
“How are you feeling about liftoff?” Donna asked Joan.
Joan downed half her beer. It was wild to think there was a time when she did not look forward to the taste of an ice-cold beer.
“Are you scared?” Donna said.
“Me?” Joan asked.
“Yeah. It’s only six weeks away. I know all the men say they aren’t scared to go up there, but I think they are lying. And I think you’ll tell me the truth.”
Over the past few weeks, Joan had become intensely aware of the fact that she was getting into a spacecraft attached to a massive fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters that were alarmingly delicate. If anything went wrong, she
might never touch land again.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’m scared.”
“Being scared is . . . the rational response,” Vanessa said.
“I’m scared,” Donna said. “I don’t even have my assignment yet. But I’m
scared.”
“I’m scared, too,” Vanessa said.
Vanessa’s mission had been scheduled for two days after Christmas. And as it got closer, her training had picked up rapidly. She and Joan were used to going weeks without seeing each other. Now sometimes they couldn’t even talk on the phone.
Joan found it hard to remember how to be that alone. Without Frances.
Without Vanessa. She’d taken up running again. It had not been helping much.
“But I also feel ready,” Vanessa added. “I guess I feel like I’m ready to face whatever it is. I’m ready to pay whatever price is asked of me. I’m scared, but I’m ready.”
“Courage,” Joan said. “You have courage.”
She looked at Joan and smiled. “I guess I do.”
Joan held her gaze for a moment too long, smiled a little too earnestly.
Donna stared at them. When they snapped out of it—when Joan finally saw Donna’s face—she could see that Donna was holding back a smile.
Donna had a brightness in her eyes that Joan interpreted immediately.
Donna knew.
Donna knew and she had, perhaps, long known.
And she didn’t care.
Donna sipped her club soda and bitters as she glanced at the two of them.
Suddenly Joan felt as if her heart were so swollen it might burst open.
Donna knew! Donna would love Joan anyway, would love Joan still,
maybe had even loved Joan because.
Joan was safe with her. Joan was okay.
God, Joan’s entire life she’d been asking that question, hadn’t she? Was she okay? She had been looking around every room she was in to survey the people around her, compare herself to the way she saw them, trying to gauge where she didn’t fit, trying to find where she could. Trying to see if she was
okay.
And she was.
She was.
Joan wanted to say something—anything—but there was no air in her throat.
“You should be more scared of what’s happening to you and Hank,”
Vanessa said, raising her eyebrows. “That gorgeous miserable bomb that’s going to blow up your life when it arrives, any minute.”
Donna laughed. “I’m not scared of that. I’m scared of what NASA and everybody else in the world is going to try to tell me I can’t do once I’m a mother. ‘How can you leave your child at home while you’re in space,’ even though fathers have been doing it for, let’s see, over two decades. ‘Should mothers even be in space?’ ‘Who takes care of your child when you’re at work?’ That I’m scared about. But I’m not scared of being a mother.”
“Why not?” Joan asked her.
“Because it feels good to love someone,” Donna said. “It feels better than anything on this Earth. And I bet better than anything up there.”
Donna gave birth to Thea four days later, after only eight hours of labor.
Hank called everyone that night. By the time he called Vanessa, it was two A.M. Vanessa answered it bleary-eyed as Joan sat up next to her.
“Aw, congrats, Hank. Tell Donna we’re proud,” Vanessa said. “That I’m proud, I mean.”
Joan knew she probably had a message on her answering machine.
That weekend, they drove over to Hank and Donna’s with an oversized teddy bear and a frozen lasagna.
When they pulled into the driveway, Jimmy was leaving the house.
“Oh, nice,” Jimmy said when he saw Vanessa get out of the car with the lasagna. Joan was trying to get the teddy bear out of the back. “It’s good how you women do that, the ‘taking care of each other’ thing.”
“You could have just as easily brought food,” Vanessa said, and Jimmy laughed.
Vanessa was holding the lasagna, and Joan waved her off, encouraging her to go ahead inside without her.
After Vanessa walked away, Jimmy stopped at his car door and turned to Joan.
“It’s early,” Jimmy said, “in the morning, don’t you think?”
It was nine A.M. on a Sunday.
“What do you mean?” Joan asked.
“No, nothing,” Jimmy said. “Just that you two are always together. Early in the morning. Late at night.”
Joan looked at him. “Oh, no,” Joan said, her voice as condescending as she could muster. “Little Jimmy Hayman has never had a friend.”
Jimmy squinted at her, got in his car, and left.
Joan finally pulled the teddy bear out of the backseat and tried to lower her heart rate. She planned on telling Vanessa later. But Donna looked so happy, and Hank and Vanessa seemed to be having such a great time talking about their upcoming mission, and Thea felt so good in Joan’s arms. It reminded her of when Frances was so light that Joan kept worrying she would drop her.
The day was such a good one that Joan just put it out of her mind. There was so much to do. She could not be worried about Jimmy Hayman.
The rest of October passed by so fast she felt dizzy. It was wild to Joan how long you could wait for something—how much you could ache for it to hurry up and happen—and then how it could come too quickly.
The simulations the crew had tackled over the past months had gone well.
Joan felt as prepared as she could imagine herself being. But in early November, she also felt like each moment was carrying more and more weight, the closer she got to the day.
The night before Joan went into quarantine, Joan was waiting for Vanessa to come over when the phone rang.
When Joan realized it was Barbara, she assumed her sister was checking in one last time before Joan’s mission. But no. Barbara had called to talk about Thanksgiving.
“Barb, I have other things to focus on right now other than what I’m bringing to Thanksgiving.”
“Joan, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. We aren’t hosting Thanksgiving this year. Mom and Dad aren’t coming. We’re not doing it.”
“What?”
“Daniel is taking me to Gstaad.”
Joan blinked. “I’m confused.”
“I don’t have to host Thanksgiving for the whole family, you know. That’s not my responsibility.”
“I know, but why are you bringing Frances to Gstaad for the few days she has off for Thanksgiving? You can’t drag a kid that far across the world and back in four days.”
“Don’t be absurd. She’s staying at school.”
Joan gripped the receiver. “What do you mean, she’s staying at school?”
“She has asked to not come home,” Barbara said.
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Well, I don’t care what you believe. I asked if she wanted to abide by my rules or stay there and she said stay there. So we booked a trip to Gstaad instead.”
“You can’t leave her alone for the holiday. Even if she said to.”
“Okay, first of all, it’s Thanksgiving, not Christmas. No one likes
Thanksgiving. We do it because that’s what people do. And she’s not alone.
There’s a whole program there where kids have Thanksgiving together. Lots of her friends will be with her. That’s why she wants to stay.”
“I don’t buy that. Something must have happened for her to make that choice. What was it?”
“I mean, ask her. We went for a parents’ weekend and it was horrible, Joan.”
Frances had told Joan that Barbara and Daniel had left early, but Joan hadn’t been able to get much more out of her than that. “I don’t care if it was
horrible!”
“She kicked me in the shin!”
“But why did she do that? She wouldn’t do that for no reason.”
“I don’t know, but I’m really getting tired of you always taking her side.
She kicked me. And she told Daniel she wished I’d never married him. I really don’t understand it, because she’s getting glowing reviews at the school. Her grades are good. She finishes her work early most of the time.
Her teachers say she has a lot of friends. Everyone loves her. Apparently, she won an essay contest that included the entire middle school. She actually
won!”
“Well, that’s great.”
“So I don’t get it. And I’m not going to waste more time trying to. She’s perfectly well behaved when she’s there. So let her stay there.”
“Of course she is well behaved there—she isn’t mad at them.”
“Well, why on Earth would she be mad at Daniel? He hasn’t done anything to her.”
“But she can’t see that. All she can see is that he showed up and you suddenly stopped paying attention to her.”
“I swear, sometimes you act just like a child,” Barbara said.
“Hey.”
“No, I mean it. It’s like you can identify with a child’s point of view because there’s still something very childlike about you.”
“That’s completely out of line.”
“I’m really not trying to be mean. But think about it. You’ve still never even gone on a date outside of high school, have you? Have you even had a
real kiss? Do you know how adult life goes? Of course you don’t understand what I have with Daniel. Because you’ve never had it.
“And you could certainly never understand how to actually raise Frances. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just that I’ve felt judged by you for such a long time. Such a long time. And I’m finally seeing the situation as it really is. Which is that you judge me because you don’t understand what it is like to be in an adult relationship. You don’t understand what it means to love. You may never understand that. You’re probably just not built for it. And that’s not your fault. I just have to stop letting you get into my head.”
“Barbara, that is completely . . .”
“What? You may not like it, but nothing I said is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Which part?”
Joan wanted to tell her that she knew exactly what it meant to love someone. That she’d had kisses and dates and a whole life that Barbara knew nothing about. But that—also!—her opinion would still matter even if she hadn’t. Even if Joan had never fallen in love, she would still matter. She wasn’t a child just because her life looked different from Barbara’s. She wanted to tell her that there were many, many people in this world who had full, rich lives the likes of which Barbara could not fathom because of her tiny little brain.
But when she played it out in her mind, it was so clear how such a conversation would go that there was no need to see it through.
“Forget it, it’s not worth it,” Joan said.
Barbara had done so many things society said were “wrong.” And Joan had stood by her, cared for her, taken her side. How many nights had Joan wiped away Barbara’s tears while she was pregnant? How many times had she made Barbara feel better after someone made a disapproving remark about the absence of a father?
The rules of society came for everyone eventually: the too big, too small, too wild, too quiet, too strong, not strong enough. When Barbara had been kicked out of the main group, she’d never stopped to question the injustice of it all, she’d just been so desperate to get back in.
There would be people who loved Joan for exactly who she was. Donna, Griff. Maybe her parents, hopefully Frances. But Barbara would never be one
of them.
The world was full of Barbaras. That was the whole problem.
Joan hung up without saying goodbye. She called Frances’s hallway phone three times but kept getting a busy signal.
Later, Barbara would make a remark about how she could never forgive Joan for hanging up on her.
But Joan would never be able to forgive Barbara for not loving Joan as Joan had loved her. For not knowing how to love Frances as Joan loved her.
The next morning, Joan found it difficult to drag herself out of bed. It was so comfortable, Vanessa’s body so warm as it clung to her.
“I have to go,” Joan said.
She had to go to the airfield and get into a T-38 to Cape Canaveral. She would not—could not—see Vanessa or anyone other than her crew for over a week.
It would be her and the guys in the crew quarters until the morning of liftoff.
As Joan lay in bed, her legs sinking into the welcoming mattress, her pillow so soft, she kept trying to understand how she’d gotten here.
Hadn’t she been an associate astrophysics professor, teaching freshmen about Copernicus, just yesterday? She would go home each night and heat up her dinner. Frances was six and slept over every weekend.
But as Joan had taken each small step forward, the world had kept spinning on its axis. Days had formed into weeks and months and years, which people marked with watches and calendars, all based on the only thing they had to tell what time it was: the stars.
As the Earth orbits the sun, it shifts toward the sun’s warm embrace. Then summer turns to fall, fall to winter. Soon it loops back around, and winter thaws to spring, spring to summer. Through it all, babies are born from stardust and grow taller. They begin to walk and talk and learn the days of the week, the months, the seasons. Then they look up at the sky, to see where they came from.
And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they
love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy.
Day in and day out, the Earth keeps spinning and revolving and sailing through the Milky Way. That is why time never stands still.
And that is why, small as they were, Joan’s choices had added up to something magnificent. In the changing of seasons these past four years, Joan had found it all.
Something she loved, someone she loved, the parts of her she had hidden within herself.
“Goodbye, my love,” Joan said as she kissed Vanessa’s temple.
“Come home soon,” Vanessa said.
It felt so good to Joan, to hurt to leave her.
“T minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”
Joan was in her flight suit, her helmet on. She was strapped to her seat in the mid-deck, lying on her back. The four guys on the crew, including Harrison, were sitting in the flight deck. She did not have a view out any window during ascent. All she could see were the lockers in front of her.
“Six . . . five . . . main engine start . . .”
The shuttle ignited, her bones vibrating as the ship came to life and began to quake. And it was a great relief to her—to shake like that.
She’d barely been able to sleep the night before—adrenaline running through every limb of her body. But the morning had been so slow, so methodical. She could not rush or indulge her excitement. Each item had to be checked off one by one, cross-referenced with Launch/Mission Control.
The difference between the outside of her—so controlled—and what ran inside her—such thrill—was jarring and hard to reconcile.
Until, now, finally, the outside was matching the inside. Joan felt an intense sense of equilibrium for the first time in days.
“. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero . . . and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery.”
The ignition of the rockets hit her like a bang, her body hurling into the air.
Joan tried to think of how to explain the feeling to Frances. It was like being dragged through a hurricane, all the blood in her brain rushing to the back of her skull.
Discovery dropped its solid rocket boosters. And as the ship ascended higher and higher, going over seventeen thousand miles an hour to fight against gravity, Joan felt an intense lift in her belly. Then there were two loud blows, which she knew to be the dropping of the huge external fuel tank, now emptied of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Then they hit main engine cutoff, and everything went quiet and still.
The cacophony, the quaking of the ship, the pressure—gone. Replaced with an eerie sense of calm.
Joan’s body started to catch the air and she felt suddenly, excruciatingly alive—somersaults overtaking her chest and lower body. She detached from her seat.
“And we are in orbit,” she heard Commander Donahue say.
Joan’s stomach was in her feet, her head in her chest. She took off one of her gloves and let it go, remembering just in time to grab the tether attached to it as it began to float away. She removed her helmet and took a deep breath.
She tried to swim to the window, to look out across the expanse of space to spot the terminator line, dividing dark from light across the Earth’s surface.
But she was seeing double, her vision looping, as if replaying a bad videotape. Her stomach felt both full and hollow. Her throat constricted. She could feel bile coming up through her chest.
Within the first hour of being in space, as the majority of the crew got to work, Joan vomited three times.
This continued through revolution after revolution around the Earth. She puked through each of the many sunrises and sunsets, what she usually used to measure days now coming in ninety-minute revolutions. The only thing that made her feel better for the first twenty-four hours was that Harrison was
puking, too.
He puked for one day.
She puked for three.
Sometimes, during those days, as she made her way into the Spacelab module and conducted her experiments, she was fighting against a haze of confusion. Joan could not always focus her eyes, could not count her fingers.
In fact, at one point, she lost the ability to recognize where her arms were or how to control them. She, twice, could not swim out of Spacelab until she summoned all of her strength—as if lifting a car on Earth—to pull herself through the hatch. On the third day, she developed a headache so painful she could not keep her eyes open.
What are we doing? Joan thought. Believing we have any right to be up here?
“Look at the smallest thing you can, and don’t move,” Harrison told her as they hung in their sleeping bags.
Joan moaned. She was determined to finish her experiments. But it was making her feel even sicker to think about them.
“Don’t look out the window—it’s not like being carsick,” Harrison said.
“I know,” Joan said. “I’m trying to just keep my eyes closed.”
“No,” Harrison said. “Do what I did and look at your fingernail. For as long as you can stand to.”
She stared at her fingernail for six and a half hours.
“You hanging in there, Goodwin?” Donna said through the earpiece at some point on day four. What a joy it was, to hear Donna speaking to her as CAPCOM. Joan knew that it could not have been easy to get everyone on board with her coming back to work so quickly. But Donna, clearly, had pushed it through. How delightfully unsurprising. Joan was not sure that she herself would have that in her. But it thrilled her to know that Donna did.
That Donna would make the world give her all the things she wanted all at once. “Feeling any better?”
She wanted to tell Donna everything. She wanted to say, I don’t think humans are meant to be up here. And I’m worried I’ve spent my entire life hoping for something it turns out I can’t stand. And I don’t know who I might be anymore if I don’t want to do this ever again.
But there would be time for that later. Instead, she said, “I’ll survive.”
On the fifth day, not long before the end of the mission, Joan felt well enough to look out the window.
As she stared ahead, at the big, bright, deep blue of the oceans of Earth, she took a full breath for the first time in days.
There it was.
Earth.
Daytime over the Pacific Ocean.
She looked at the western coast of the United States—all green and fading brown, cloud patterns across it in the starkest white. She could spot Baja California, but she could not tell where the border between the United States and Mexico was for certain. She could not see countries, with firm lines and borders. She saw only landmasses, undivided.
It was so funny to her, in that moment, to think that only American-trained space explorers were called “astronauts.” That if you were trained in the Soviet Union you were a “cosmonaut.” How utterly silly to make that distinction, when Russia kissed North America the way it did.
She thought back to Sputnik 1.
She’d been seven years old, looking up at the night sky with her father, when she had seen the satellite overhead in her binoculars. It rocked something in her, that humans had sent something up into the sky. That week, on the news, she kept hearing that “the Russians” put a satellite in space and that America must catch up.
But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent.
Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all.
Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there.
Humans had gone to the moon.
And sure, they were all Americans in that shuttle at that very moment. But for the space shuttle program to be an American victory felt so small compared to the victory that it could be, should be.
Look what we humans had done.
We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly.
It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt.
Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.
“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her.
Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.”
“With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said.
Joan nodded.
“Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now. Human life is . . . meaningless.”
Joan looked at him.
How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions?
When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it.
Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing
keeping everyone she loved alive.
Intelligent life was her meaning.
People were her meaning.
Frances and Vanessa.
Harrison swam away, but Joan stayed at the window and tried to spot Dallas. She thought of Frances, and what time it was there, and whether she was with her friends or playing field hockey. She thought of Vanessa, in Houston, at JSC, doing her own flight preparations.
Were they happy? Had they had a bad day? Did they need her?
Nothing happening across Texas mattered to the universe. Joan had always known that. But, oh, how it mattered to her. It made the whole Earth look bright and vital and urgent to her. It made that thin line of the atmosphere the most beautiful thing Joan had ever seen.
But as beautiful as it was, she wanted to feel it, and smell it, and taste it.
She wanted to touch it in her hands.
Joan wanted to go home.