Summer 1980
In the months after learning she would be joining the astronaut corps, Joan
did three things.
First, she gave notice at Rice.
On her last day, the Physics and Astronomy Department threw her a going- away party. By the punch bowl, Dr. Siskin asked—in a way that struck Joan as remarkably transparent—how she’d managed to pull this off. Joan said, “Luck, I guess,” and then regretted it.
Joan knew that Dr. Siskin, and most men like him, had never taken a good look at her. She was used to it. After all, she was not Barbara. She had never commanded the attention of the entire room with how great she looked in a dress or how well she delivered a comeback. Once, when Joan was a teenager, her mother told her that she and her sister each had their own strengths. She said that Barbara’s were loud and Joan’s were quiet, but both were powerful in their own way. When her mother said this, Joan hugged her.
Joan knew she was easy to overlook. She was average height and a bit stocky. She dressed simply. Her light brown hair was just past her shoulders, but she didn’t wear it feathered like some other women did. Instead, she pulled it back loosely. Sometimes, when Joan saw herself in photographs, she was struck by how beautiful her smile was, her dimples making her face seem friendly and bright. In high school, Adam Hawkins had said so. But she didn’t expect other people to notice.
She also didn’t expect other people to ask what she did in her spare time (she was a classically trained pianist, had run two marathons, was an avid reader and an amateur portraitist, among other things). When people came into her office and saw some of the sketches on her wall, she knew they’d assume she’d bought them somewhere. When someone admired them, she never bothered to tell them she’d drawn them. The praise was never the point.
In any case, no one in a long time had asked her about herself enough to know any of this. And Joan found a familiar peace in going unnoticed.
So it came as a huge shock to the men in the department, many of whom fancied themselves secretly destined for victory, to see that the woman they’d overlooked was lapping them in a race they did not know had started.
Joan looked around the room, put her drink down, and left her own goodbye party early.
The second thing Joan did was tell her family she was going to be an astronaut candidate.
“It’s all because you suggested I apply,” Joan said to Barbara over the
phone.
“I did?”
“Because of the commercial.”
“Oh, right,” Barbara said. “Well, you’re welcome.”
Her mother and father flew out from Pasadena. They all went out to a celebratory dinner, at which Barbara mentioned multiple times that she hoped this didn’t mean Joan was moving to Clear Lake. After all, Frances needed her close by. Joan explained three separate times that it did mean she was moving to Clear Lake. There were apartments right next to the Johnson Space Center. It was only thirty minutes south of her current place, and regardless, she would never in a million years miss a second she could spend with Frances.
And then Joan leaned over to Frances and kissed the part in her hair at the top of her head.
There were things Joan had done with Frances since Frances was a baby— turning her upside down, carrying her on her shoulders, throwing her on the bed—that Frances was too big for now. But Joan would always be able to kiss the top of her head. Even if she had to get on a stool, one day, to do it.
When Joan and Barbara were little, they’d played make-believe for hours.
Joan was always a doctor or a nurse or a teacher. Barbara would pretend to be a singer, a ballet dancer, or a figure skater. But once Barbara could see adolescence approaching, there was no more pretending. She went out in search of things Joan knew nothing about.
Though four years younger, Barbara snuck out to her first party before Joan, had her first kiss before Joan, had her first drink before Joan. What could Joan offer someone so much more worldly than her? How could Barbara look up to someone so far behind?
A few years later, when Joan was pursuing her PhD at Caltech and Barbara
was in her junior year of college at the University of Houston, Barbara called
Joan late one night, sobbing.
She’d gotten pregnant.
“You’re the only one I could call,” Barbara said.
Joan could barely believe what she was hearing. Not that Barbara had found herself here—in fact, Barbara had already gotten pregnant and miscarried once as a teenager. The shock was that Barbara had called Joan.
“What do I do?” Barbara asked.
Joan stayed on the phone with her for three hours, talking it through. She gleaned a lot of surprising information from that conversation. Namely, that there was more than one possible father, that Barbara was unwilling to suffer the indignity of trying to figure out which it was, that she was intent on hiding this as long as possible from their parents, and that she’d stopped going to classes weeks ago.
Joan was trying to find the words for how to respond to the last bit of information when Barbara’s roommate came in and Barbara rushed off the phone.
Then Barbara called again two days later, this time with a clarity of purpose.
She had realized this was a great thing! This pregnancy was the answer to a question Barbara had been asking herself for years. What was she meant to do with her life? This! The reason she had yet to find a passion was because she’d been waiting for this child to give her life a shape.
Joan knew that Barbara did not understand the full weight of the task. But there was little to be done about it now.
“Do you think I’ll be a good mother?” Barbara asked Joan.
Joan had a hard time imagining Barbara as someone’s mother, but the simplest way of looking at it seemed true. “You’ve always been incredible at
anything you’ve put effort into, Barb.”
“Thank you, Joan. That means a lot.”
After that, Barbara kept calling. Barbara needed money for an apartment.
Barbara needed help finding out if she could get her tuition money refunded now that she was officially dropping out. Barbara needed Joan there when she finally told Mom and Dad. Barbara needed Barbara needed Barbara
needed.
When their parents were upset that Barbara was single, pregnant, and dropping out of college, Barbara called on Joan to defend her.
When their mother offered to be with her when the baby was born, Barbara asked for Joan instead.
When Frances was born that May, this gorgeous gangly thing, it was Joan who held her first. It was Joan who handed her over to their mother to hold, Joan who filled out Frances’s birth certificate.
Frances Emerson Goodwin.
Joan spent months sleeping on the sofa in Barbara’s new one-bedroom apartment in Houston. She had to. Frances needed someone to arrange her checkups. Frances needed someone to rock her. Frances needed someone to feed her when Barbara was too tired to wake up. Frances needed Frances needed Frances needed.
It felt weird to Joan—holding a baby. She always felt as if she was going to break her, always worried she wasn’t supporting her head enough. Frances was colicky the first few months; there were times when she would not stop crying, no matter how much Joan held her. Joan sometimes could not hear her own thoughts above the screaming.
And Joan wondered how she’d gotten here. This was not the life she’d seen for herself, caring for a baby.
Joan’s bright, sharp brain—her most beautiful muscle—turned to mush from too little sleep. Sometimes, unsure what else to do, Joan would take Frances out of the apartment, stare up at the night sky, and talk to her about the phases of the moon. Frances often cooed then. It was probably just the cool night air, but Joan also suspected that Frances was starting to focus, perhaps even taking in Joan’s finger, bright against a dark sky. Maybe this was who she could be to Frances. Maybe this was their language.
But that clarity was fleeting. The rest of the time, caring for Frances felt like trudging through mud up to the knees.
Still, as soon as Joan could, she did what Barbara asked and applied to transfer to Rice to be close to Barbara and Frances.
“I do not understand why it has to be you,” her mother said to Joan when Joan was accepted and began to plan her move. “Why it can’t be me? Why can’t I help with my own grandchild?”
Joan did not know how to say to her mother what they all already knew: Barbara had chosen Joan, and Barbara always got what she wanted.
Looking back on it, Joan could see that the universe had unfolded just as she had needed it to. It had given her something she had not even been smart enough to have wanted. Because those tiny moments with Frances—in the courtyard showing her a waxing gibbous moon, blowing bubbles and teaching her shapes, tickling her under her chin and making her laugh—came more and more often, each day. They grew longer, settled in deeper. Until one day, years ago, Joan took Frances to the playground and, as she watched Frances befriend another kid on the slide, realized that she could not envision a good week where she did not at least once get to brush her thumb against Frances’s soft, dewy cheeks. To tickle Frances’s chin—and hear that laugh— was to need it forever.
The night of their dinner, Frances looked up at Joan and smiled. She was six years old. Her light brown, shoulder-length hair was no longer baby fine.
Her bright blue eyes picked up on more of what was going on around her than ever before. She’d stopped wearing Mary Janes and dresses last year.
Now she wore corduroy pants and T-shirts most of the time. She’d begun using words Joan was surprised she knew, like “horrid” and “pivotal.” She did not have a “great” day but a “splendid” one; when she tasted a new food, it did not taste “bad” but “peculiar.” She’d already skipped a grade in school.
Frances had been born just yesterday; Joan was sure of it. And yet, Frances was going into second grade and Joan was going to be an astronaut.
“Joanie?”
“Yes, Franny?”
“Wait! You’re the only one who calls me Franny!”
“And you’re the only one who calls me Joanie!”
Frances laughed. “When you get a new place to live, can I come visit?”
“She’s not getting a new place,” Barbara said.
That was the third thing Joan did. Days later, she stopped by Barbara’s with a pound cake from the bakery on the corner and explained to her sister one final time that she was, in fact, moving.
“Well, fine,” Barbara said. “But you still need to take Frances on the
weekends. I can’t afford a babysitter.”
“I will see Frances on the weekends, just like I do now.”
“You’re really excited about this astronaut thing, huh?” Barbara said. She pushed the pound cake away, and Joan recognized this as her punishment.
“Yeah, I am. And I’m scared, but in a way I’ve never really been before.
Which I think is good. It’s exciting.”
“You’re really lucky,” Barbara said, her voice lightening. “That you are free to do something like this. No kid or husband or anything holding you back. I always think about where I would go if I could. And I think London or Paris . . . but you’re going to the stars. You’re thinking so much bigger.”
Joan felt a swelling in her throat.
Later that week, Joan packed up her entire apartment. When the moving company arrived, they took all of her stuff and drove off. Less than an hour later, she opened the door to her new place. It smelled like fresh paint.
That night, she went out for a walk in her new neighborhood and ran into Donna Fitzgerald and John Griffin, two of the other mission specialists who were a part of Group 9. She recognized them from the day NASA had gathered them for a photo of the incoming class.
Donna had blue eyes and dark brown hair that was thick and bouncy, so much so that Joan thought she looked like she could be in an ad for shampoo.
And John—with such an easy smile and eyes that crinkled—had the most soothing voice Joan had ever heard. It was low and gravelly and made Joan like him the moment she heard him speak.
“I guess we’re all predictable as shit, huh?” Donna said. “Join the astronaut corps and get a one-bedroom apartment by the campus the week before training starts.”
Joan laughed. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe John got a two-bedroom.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” he said. “It’s a one-bedroom, just like yours. Pretty sure Lydia Danes is in the building, too. I think I saw her.”
“Ah, well,” Joan said. “So much for being original.”
Joan would remember this moment for weeks to come. Because within days, Donna and Griff would come to feel like such close friends that she laughed to think she’d ever called Griff “John.”
The morning of the first all-astronauts meeting, Joan, Donna, and Griff walked over to JSC together, already cracking up at their own inside jokes, overusing their new punch line: “But that’s not going to happen here.”
Griff had said it the first time a few days prior, talking about how he’d been the big man on campus at his New England prep school: valedictorian, class president, and captain of the lacrosse team. When Donna arched her eyebrows, implying that maybe he expected to be just as big a deal at NASA, he quickly added, “But that’s not going to happen here.” And all three of them laughed.
Donna then used the line not even a half hour later, when talking about her previously dramatic and volatile love life.
Then Joan told them about how she’d been considered an astronomy nerd by almost everyone she’d ever known and added, in a sarcastic tone that surprised her in how well she nailed the joke, “But I bet that’s not going to happen here.”
As they made their way onto campus that morning, they spotted Lydia Danes up ahead. She was slight—no taller than five-two, her body wiry—but to Joan there was something terrifyingly invincible about her. Perhaps it was the way she moved with such intense focus. As if enjoying the walk would threaten to waste her time.
The night before, Donna had asked Lydia if she wanted to walk over with them in the morning. Lydia had never given her an answer.
“There’s always one in a group who thinks their shit doesn’t stink,” Donna
said.
“Oh, but Donna . . .” Griff said.
“Don’t!” Joan said.
“That’s not going to happen here,” he said.
Joan shook her head and smiled.
“I’m telling you,” Donna said. “She’s rude.”
Joan watched Lydia walk ahead of them. “You can’t take it personally,”
Griff said.
“She thinks she’s better than everyone else,” Donna said. “As evidenced by the way she keeps clarifying for people that I’m only an ER doctor, but
she is a trauma surgeon.”
As Donna spoke, Joan began taking in the architecture around the campus.
All brutalist, boxlike buildings made of windows and concrete. Somehow dated, and yet timelessly plain.
But as she glanced at the Mission Control building, something buzzed inside her. It had a personality to it, a spark of the ’60s Apollo program flair.
And Joan nearly froze in her tracks.
I’m at NASA.
They got to the conference room one minute early, which Joan considered four minutes late.
The three of them crammed in along the sides of the room, obeying the clear and unspoken hierarchy that the chairs were only for the astronauts, and the candidates would remain standing on the periphery. There was already a tension in the room that Joan could not name. Some of the astronauts were seated with their legs extended, taking up as much floor space as possible, making no attempt to create room for the new candidates. Joan, Donna, and Griff stood wordlessly along the wall. Lydia barely looked at the rest of them.
The last person to dash in, just before Antonio began to speak, was Vanessa Ford.
Her curly hair was pulled back, her posture was tall and straight, her shoulders broad. She took off her sunglasses and tucked them into her shirt pocket, with her eyes narrow, her jaw tight. Then she clasped both hands behind her back and faced forward, her full attention on Antonio, at the front of the room.
And the thought that went through Joan’s head was: That’s an astronaut.
Later that night, Griff and Donna headed out with some of the other astronaut candidates—which Joan now understood was what everyone meant when they said “ASCANs”—for drinks. They invited Joan, but she declined. She’d promised Frances she’d call her to tell her all about her first day, so she headed straight back to her apartment.
“Did you know that there are two pins I might get eventually?” Joan said to Frances over the phone.
“Like my Mickey Mouse pin?” Frances said.
“Yeah, close to that. But these pins are shaped like a star with three rays behind it, coming out of a halo. One is silver and one is gold.”
“And they give you them for being an astronaut?”
“Hopefully, but not yet,” Joan said. She was pulling at the twisted telephone cord in the kitchen, unraveling it as she spoke. Just two weeks ago, the phone had been brand-new. Now it was already tangled from use.
“A year or so from now, if I pass this program, they will make me an astronaut. And they will give me that silver pin, which means I am ready to fly. And then one day when I get chosen for a mission, and go up there and come back, that’s when they’ll give me the gold one. To symbolize that I have flown in space.”
“I can’t believe my aunt is going to space.”
“Maybe one day,” Joan said. “Yeah.”
Joan kept the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she pulled a frozen dinner out of the freezer and popped it into the oven.
“I want to be an astronaut,” Frances said.
What a time Joan lived in. To be able to tell her niece that she could be an astronaut.
“If you work hard at it, then you will,” Joan said. “Now go brush your teeth. Every quadrant. You remember what the dentist said now that your
molars have come in.”
“I know,” Frances said. “I will.”
Once Joan hung up, she looked in the oven at her still-half-frozen dinner and felt a familiar sadness creeping over her. She turned off the oven, put the food in the fridge, and headed out to Frenchie’s for dinner on her own.
She walked straight up to the bar and ordered a Caesar salad and the chicken marsala, then grabbed a book from her bag and began reading. But before she even got to the second paragraph on the page, someone sat down next to her.
Joan knew who it was before she saw her face. She also knew there was a scientific explanation for these moments in which she felt she could sense the future. Information was being received at such a rapid speed that it felt as if the reaction was coming in before the stimulus. But the sensation was eerie, nonetheless. She understood why people got confused sometimes, started
calling things fate.
“Hi,” Vanessa said.
“Oh.” Joan put away her book. “Hi. I’m Joan. I’ve seen you around, but I
don’t think we’ve officially met.”
“Vanessa.”
Joan looked at Vanessa and tried not to stare. Vanessa’s eyes were light golden brown, almost amber. Her hair was such a dark shade of brown it was verging on black. And there was so much of it, the curls taking up so much space.
“It is nice to formally meet you,” Vanessa said.
Vanessa seemed more stoic than Donna, less high-strung than Lydia. Joan started to wonder what she must seem like to Vanessa. Bookish.
“No one has really introduced themselves to me,” Vanessa said. “But you all seem to know each other already.”
“Oh,” Joan said. “It’s because we all met about a week and a half ago. We moved into the same apartment complex.”
“The one right next to campus?” Vanessa said, nodding. “Makes sense.”
“Where do you live?”
“A bit further out.”
“Didn’t want to bunk with the rest of the us?”
“No, it’s not that,” Vanessa said. She smiled out of the left side of her mouth and then laughed. “Or maybe it is. I like my privacy. Not sure I’m going to be good at this whole ‘living in a fishbowl’ thing.”
Joan laughed as the bartender brought her salad and put it down in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to him.
Vanessa leaned forward, gestured to the bartender. “Can I have a glass of
cabernet and a steak, medium rare?”
Joan’s salad seemed so boring now.
“I really am sorry none of us have spoken to you,” Joan said. “It wasn’t on purpose, but I regret it.”
Vanessa sat back on the barstool, waved her off. “It’s perfectly all right. I figured it was up to me to say hello. So, hello.”
“Hello,” Joan said. She speared a piece of romaine on her fork. It was
disarming—a little confusing, maybe—to think of Vanessa as in want of company. She was the sort of woman who seemed like she could have any friend she wanted. Didn’t the world revolve around women like her? She was tall and lean, with big eyes. Her hair was so shiny. That way she smiled out of the side of her mouth—certainly that pulled people in.
“Settling in okay?” Joan asked.
Vanessa shrugged as her glass of wine arrived. “I mean, it’s hot as hell out here. But otherwise, it’s going okay.”
Joan nodded. “July is the worst of it. The humidity is brutal. You get used
to it.”
“Do you?”
Joan laughed. “No, I don’t know why I said that. It’s miserable.”
Vanessa chuckled and sipped her wine.
This made no sense at all. Vanessa was the one who had come up to her and said hello. But now, somehow, it was Joan leaning toward her, as Vanessa sat there, cool in every sense of the world.
Detached. Effortless. Aloof.
Joan thought about Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke—and got the sense that it would not end well for her if she challenged Vanessa to eat fifty eggs.
If she challenged Vanessa to anything at all.
“How about you?” Vanessa asked. “How is it for Miss Popular over here?”
Joan laughed so loud that it startled the man a few seats down. She covered her mouth. Vanessa reached over and gently took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away from her mouth. Joan looked at Vanessa’s fingers on her.
“You did him a favor,” Vanessa said. “He was falling asleep in his beer.
But, really, how are you settling in?”
“Well, wildly incorrect assumptions about my social status aside . . .” Joan
said. “It’s going all right.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Joan wasn’t sure why she was still talking—what she was thinking, saying
this out loud? “Though . . .”
“Hm?”
“Did you sense an . . . undercurrent today?” Joan asked, turning toward
Vanessa. “When talking to almost anyone in the astronaut corps?”
“You mean the feeling that any of them would slit your throat for ten bucks?”
Joan laughed, this time at a completely reasonable volume. “Exactly!”
“Yeah, I suspect we have a horse race ahead of us,” Vanessa said.
“Am I supposed to compete with you?” Joan asked. “And Donna and Griff and everyone? It seems like a lot of work, to do all that and still put all my time into training.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Spoken like a real killer.”
Their food arrived at the same time, and as Joan looked at her chicken, she wished she’d ordered Vanessa’s steak.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you and I are going to have a problem,”
Vanessa said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to put us up against each other like they would Donna and Lydia. I mean, I’m an aeronautical engineer.
But . . . you’re the astrophysicist, right?” Vanessa said.
Joan corrected her: “Astronomer.”
“What’s the difference?”
Joan shook her head. “There barely is one.”
“But there is a difference, clearly.”
“An astrophysicist studies the physics of space, whereas my focus is on space itself, the sun in particular. Then again, you can’t study space without studying the physics of space. And time. Or math. Or anthropology and the history of humans’ understanding of the stars. Or mythology and theology, for that matter. It’s all connected.”
Vanessa nodded. “And that’s why you like it.”
“Hm?”
“You’re smiling as you’re talking.”
“I am?”
Vanessa grinned out of the side of her mouth again, and Joan wondered if it was one of those quirks she was born with or if she’d practiced it, knowing how captivating it would be.
“Yes,” Vanessa said. “You are. I love that. I love when people love what they do.”
“I do love what I do. I have been . . . I don’t know . . . obsessed with the stars since I was in elementary school. During the winter, when it got dark out early enough, I would lie in the backyard and look up at the night sky, just aching to touch the stars. I’d sit there with my hand stretched out as far as I could reach, trying to convince myself I could scoop them into my hand. I begged my parents to buy me a Unitron telescope for my twelfth birthday. I had never made a fuss about anything before, never asked for so much as a doll, I don’t think. But I had to have that telescope. I had to see the stars up close. And that was before we landed on the moon, mind you.”
“You’re like the girls who liked the Beatles before they went on Ed Sullivan.”
Joan laughed. “Yes, the moon landing was, for us space nerds, exactly like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan! I liked the moon first.”
“Good for you.”
“But I cannot claim to be cool enough to have liked the Beatles first. I
barely like the Beatles at all.”
“You don’t like the Beatles?”
“I am . . . indifferent to the Beatles.”
Vanessa’s eyes went wide.
“Oh, it’s not that big a deal,” Joan said.
“It’s . . . an illegal opinion to have.”
Joan laughed. “The melodies are good, obviously. It’s good music. But . . . it was a little simplistic, don’t you think? I don’t understand why it worked so
well.”
“Why what worked so well?”
“The pandering. To what little girls think love is like. It was just a bit much. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ‘Blackbird’ is a great song. And ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ But the cheesy stuff just struck me as, well, cheesy.”
Vanessa finished her steak. “You are a curious one, Joan.”
“Am I?”
“Yes, it’s all very interesting.”
Joan wasn’t sure if Vanessa was making fun of her. But her gut said she wasn’t.
“So, obviously, you like the Beatles,” Joan said.
“I liked the Beatles when I was a young girl, hopelessly in love. . . . They explained it better than I could.”
Joan looked away and sipped her water. What was she thinking, going on and on like this? Was it really that intoxicating, being asked about herself?
“So, we aren’t going to have to compete,” Joan said, changing the subject.
“Me and you. You and me, I mean.”
“Well, look, anything’s possible. But they want us for different purposes, if I had to guess. They’ll want you for designing and running experiments in space. They’ll want me to help build the payloads. They aren’t going to be measuring you against me, or vice versa.”
Joan nodded. “I like that theory.”
Vanessa nodded and then looked Joan in the eye. “Did it kind of kill you today?” she asked. “To be so close to it all? It killed me. I want to get up there almost as much as I want to breathe.”
Something about the openness of Vanessa’s face made Joan realize that, sitting on her barstool, her feet didn’t touch the floor.
Joan blinked. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it did kill me a little.”
“I want to fly the fucking thing,” Vanessa said. “Though God knows, since I’ve only flown privately, and not as a military pilot, it’s going to be an uphill battle. But I want to go somewhere so few people have ever gone that you could name them all—and when people do name them, I want them to name me.”
“I understand that,” Joan said. “I understand that completely.”
Vanessa looked at her, her gaze intense. “You do?”
“Absolutely. To do something so few people have ever done? No one will ever be able to take that away from us. If we do it, if we leave the planet, we will carry that with us into every room we enter for the rest of our lives.”
Vanessa’s shoulders relaxed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s . . .” She shook her head and exhaled. “That’s exactly it.” She grew more animated by the second. “Every time Antonio talks about the program, I can feel this ache in my chest. Like I’d die to get that chance. Like nothing on Earth will ever matter to me as much as getting up there. It’s what I was born to do.”
Vanessa was so lit up that Joan forgot for a moment that she was right
there next to her, that Vanessa was not onstage in a play or on a TV show.
“I want to make my niece proud,” Joan said when she remembered herself.
“I want her to know that she can do anything.”
“See, even if I did want to screw you over to get assigned before you, I certainly can’t now. You’re too noble,” Vanessa said.
Joan laughed. “No, please, I insist you take the opportunity if it presents itself.”
Vanessa pretended to consider this. Then she said, “I mean, joking aside, if it does come down to you versus me, or me versus that guy Griff, or whatever —I hope I don’t do it with both elbows out, knocking everyone down. I hope I wait until I fully earn it instead of trying to steal the chance out from under someone. I want it bad, but still, I hope I do it right.”
“You know, my mom used to say something to me when I was a kid,” Joan
said. “That you’re reminding me of.”
“What?”
“I always had the top grade in the class. And I would come home and brag about how I helped this boy who sat next to me who was struggling with times tables. Or I helped this girl with her spelling. Then one day, this boy joins our class and he’s really good at math. Not as good as me, but almost.
And he asks me for help. And I told him I’d think about it. But . . . I didn’t want to. Bobby Simpson. I was so scared that he’d take the top score from me. I told my mom that I wasn’t going to help him, and my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”
Vanessa looked at her. Joan shrugged. “Maybe that’s you. Character when it counts.”
“So I have character?” Vanessa said. “That’s a nice thought. Not sure I’ve been accused of that before.”
Joan smiled. “Well, let’s see what you do, then. Just how honorable you
turn out to be.”
“What did you do?”
“Hm?”
“With Bobby Simpson.”
“Oh, I helped him,” Joan said.
“And did he beat you?”
Joan laughed. “No.” And then: “I am very, very good at math.”
Vanessa threw her head back and cackled, and Joan blushed at the attention it drew. But when Vanessa raised her hand to give her a high five, Joan laughed and returned it.
Two days later, Joan walked into the first class on the space shuttle’s design to see that Donna and Lydia were sitting at the front. Griff was talking to naval pilot Hank Redmond and mission specialist Harrison Moreau. There were more guys she didn’t know well yet, mingling in the center. Vanessa
was seated in the back.
“This seat free?” Joan asked her.
Vanessa barely looked up as she opened her notebook and grabbed her pen. “Wide open. You’re my only friend so far, Goodwin, you know that.”
“Well, as your friend, don’t call me Goodwin.”
Vanessa glanced up at her. “Oh, c’mon.”
Joan sat down. “Goodwin feels like . . .” Joan said, trying to explain it.
“I’m not sure.”
There was a part that Joan was going to have to play at NASA. She understood that. Wearing the navy polos and khaki chinos she and Donna had gone out and bought together to fit in. Going out drinking together most nights. Hanging with the guys. Entertaining the posturing from the military side. Fine. She could sense what was expected of her. She was ready for it.
But for it to extend to what should be the more honest moments . . .
“It feels like I’m pretending to be somebody else. I call people by their first names. I’d be playacting calling you Ford,” she said. “When really, you’re a full person, with a first name.”
Vanessa put down her pen. “Are you always this earnest?”
Joan had not meant to be particularly earnest, but this was what she was
like. “Yes, I believe so.”
Vanessa shook her head and laughed.
“Look, I’ll call you Ford when it’s appropriate,” Joan said. “I’m not
entirely opposed to it. I just . . . you know, if we’re going to be friends, let’s be friends.”
“All right,” Vanessa said with a smile. “Fine, Jo, if that’s what you want, that’s what you got.”
Joan shook her head and rolled her eyes, ready to tell Vanessa that she didn’t go by Jo. That no one had ever called her Jo in her life. But she couldn’t quite make it come off her tongue.
There is a theater above Mission Control that looms over the flight center like a mezzanine hovering over an orchestra. And when Joan first walked in and saw, through the glass, the consoles lined up in rows along the floor and the telemetry up on the screens, she felt a great sense of occasion.
There had been a lot of thrilling firsts lately. The first time on the campus, the first night the entire group of ASCANs went to the Outpost Tavern together, the first time seeing the Saturn IV rocket and the space suits used during the Apollo program.
But walking into Mission Control created a pull she felt deep down in the layers of her skin. It was the same feeling she’d had when she’d first seen the belts of Jupiter through her telescope. The same one as when she’d convinced her parents to take her to Death Valley the summer before her senior year and —with the clearest view of the sky she’d ever yet seen—she’d spotted the Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million light-years away.
Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.
And yet, most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them. When you gaze up at the sky and you see Antares, with its reddish hue, in the middle of the constellation Scorpius, you are looking at the same star the Babylonians cataloged as early as 1100 B.C.E.
To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.
That was the stuff that made her knees buckle.
Standing there in the theater of Mission Control, Joan felt exceptionally aware that she was not just embarking on a grand adventure. She was also joining the succession of those dedicating their life to working to understand
this Earth, and the galaxy around it, for the betterment of all of humanity. She was part of something that had started well before recorded history and continued through the times of Aristotle and Aryabhata and al-Sufi and Shoujing and Copernicus, through Galileo and Kepler and Rømer and Newton, the Herschels and Leavitt and Rubin and Einstein and Hubble and beyond.
She knew her name would never be on that list. She had no desire to add her name to a list like that, in part because the idea that astronomy advances because of any one great mind struck her as simplistic. It was a collective pursuit, groups and cultures building upon and learning from what came before them.
But standing there at Mission Control, looking at the same computers they had used to put astronauts on the moon, Joan knew that even if she had erred here and there on her journey through life, she was on the right path now.
Because she was now contributing, in such a thrillingly direct way, to the larger goal.
To learn what lies out there and, in so doing, perhaps how we got here.
As everyone took their seats, Griff sat down next to her.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
“I overslept. Can you tell?”
The back of his tie hung lower than the front, he’d missed a belt loop, and the roots of his hair were damp with sweat.
“The truth?” Joan asked.
“That bad, huh?” Griff said.
Joan waved him off. “You’re handsome enough,” she said. “They forgive handsome men anything.”
Griff laughed. “I had no idea you were such a charmer,” he said.
Joan laughed, too. “Honestly, neither did I.”
Donna came into the room. Joan waved, but Donna didn’t see her. Joan watched as Donna began to take a seat next to Hank. As Donna sat down, Hank smiled at her. Donna smiled back and then looked around. Then, suddenly, Donna stood up and took a seat three seats away, by herself.
Vanessa ended up taking the seat next to Hank.
Joan turned toward the front and bit her lip. She’d known Donna for only a few weeks but knew her well enough. Joan shook her head. Already!
Being completely immune to romantic rituals herself, Joan could spot them better than almost anyone. It was true, she had never had a real boyfriend.
Had been on only a few dates. She had been kissed, a few times, by Adam Hawkins. And she had not cared for it. She was not offended or grossed out.
But it felt, to her, like people were making a very big deal out of what was, essentially, no different from eating a cracker.
Of course, she did not discuss this with anyone anymore. Because every time she’d come close, it became clear no one would understand.
Not her mother, not her father, not Barbara (certainly not Barbara). Her girlfriends from undergrad kept assuming the issue was that she was shy or afraid. When the reality was much simpler: she was not like them. Why was it so hard for them to imagine that she had more interesting ways to spend her time? They mystified her just as she mystified them.
But there was one giant silver lining of being on the outside of it all. From afar, Joan could spot what everyone else could not see up close. Like how botanists know more about leaves than trees do.
Case in point: it was clear to her that Donna and Hank were sleeping together.
Joan tried to hold back a sly smile. Not being interested in romance herself didn’t make it any less intriguing. Donna and Hank. Huh. She wouldn’t have predicted that one.
Lydia ducked in at the last moment and snagged the seat behind Joan. She
leaned in toward Joan’s ear.
“Did I miss anything?”
Joan shook her head. “You’re fine.”
“I heard today is about Apollo 1,” Lydia said.
Joan and Griff both turned to look at her.
“Really?” Griff said.
“Yeah,” Lydia answered.
“Oh, gosh. I’m not sure I . . .” Joan said.
“You’re not sure what? That you can handle it?” Lydia said. “Because if not, then you should probably leave the program.”
Joan and Griff turned to the front of the room, and as they did, Griff raised his eyebrows at her. But Joan didn’t engage. Lydia was entirely right.
The instructor, a man with a crew cut who, Joan learned, was Jack Katowski, walked to the front of the room.
“It’s important that you understand what’s at stake here,” he said. “For those of you coming from the military, this will be less of a surprise. But for you civilians, this may be the first time in which you have embarked on an endeavor with this magnitude of risk. Going into space is not for the faint of heart. Great men have died in the pursuit of space exploration. If you are not prepared to face the sacrifices that may be required in order to serve this country in this unprecedented undertaking, it is best that you realize that now.”
Joan could hear people shifting in their seats, leaning forward.
“We have lost nine men here at NASA over the last twenty years. All but one during training or testing. Here today, I’d like to talk to you about the weight of what you are signing up for. And I’d like to start by making sure you all understand the significance of the Apollo 1 fire.”
Joan looked at Griff and took a deep breath. She felt Lydia’s hand, ever so briefly, on her shoulder. And then it was gone. When Joan turned to acknowledge her, Lydia frowned and gestured for her to pay attention.
“As you are all aware, Apollo 1 was supposed to be the first crewed mission of the Apollo program, originally designated as AS-204. But in January 1967, a fire erupted in the cabin during a launch rehearsal. All three astronauts—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—were locked inside. None of them survived. At NASA, we honor the people we have lost by referring to them as being ‘on an eternal mission.’ But please do not let the euphemism soften what happened here—and what you all risk, by being a part of this program.”
He pressed a button. Within seconds, Joan realized he was playing the recorded audio from inside the cabin of Apollo 1.
“Flames!”
“We’ve got a fire in the cockpit. It—”
Every muscle in Joan’s body tensed as she heard a man screaming. And then another and another.
Joan could feel the tension in the room as they listened to the men’s
increasingly desperate voices. Joan could hear their movements as they scrambled to get out. She could see it, could feel it. What it must have felt like to be trapped there, knowing they were going to die.
Joan could not get Frances out of her mind. How would Barbara explain it to her if something like that happened to Joan? How might Frances be forever changed by a tragedy like that?
Joan was not afraid to die. She had always felt that she was prepared for the nothingness that awaited her. She was happy, in some ways, to know that her body would decompose. That she would give back to the Earth all she
had taken from it.
But Frances.
She might be fine with dying, but she was not fine with leaving Frances.
The transmission ended after only seventeen seconds. Everyone in the room knew what that meant. Joan’s entire body felt heavy, her legs concrete, her head a magnet pulled to her chest. She could not look at Griff. But when she managed to raise her head, briefly, she saw that he could not look at anyone, either.
“Most of our days here at NASA are good ones. We achieve things once believed to be impossible. But there have been some days that we never see coming. Days that stick with us forever. That may cost some of us our lives.
If you cannot accept that this risk lies ahead in all we do here,” Jack said, “now is your chance to make a different choice. To choose a different life for yourself. A safer one.”
The theater was quiet. There was no shuffling of feet. No one fiddled with papers. For a moment, Joan felt a strong sense that this entire undertaking was a mistake. Perhaps humans should not do this. The shuttle was nothing more than a pair of wax wings.
When Joan finally exhaled and looked up, Griff was pinching the bridge of his nose, and Hank was staring straight forward. Donna’s chest visibly rose and fell. Vanessa was so lost in thought, Joan could not even catch her eye.
Then Joan turned to look at Lydia. The color was gone from her face. The two of them looked each other in the eye. Could they do this? Could they really stay here in this room knowing what it might one day mean?
Not a single person left.
Days later, every member of Group 9 stood on the tarmac at Ellington Field in front of a fleet of Northrop T-38 Talons—white jet trainers with glass cockpits barely big enough for two people. The T-38s were supersonic, meaning they could fly faster than the speed of sound. And they could go ten thousand feet higher than a commercial airplane.
As the ASCANs stood in front of the jets, Joan began to understand just how large the disparity was between the military astronauts and the mission specialists. She had not noticed the difference in the classroom, where it favored her. But here, in a flight suit on the airfield, with the wind drying out her eyes, the gap between them felt vast, its edges sharp.
“As you know, if you are not a military pilot,” the instructor said, “you will be a backseater for the entire time you fly here at NASA.”
Joan had already known she’d be relegated to the backseat and was grateful for it. But when she looked over at the rest of her colleagues, she could see that Vanessa’s jaw was clenched.
Soon the group was divided, and the military guys made their way to the other side of the tarmac.
Joan could not think of a single pilot she had gotten to know. Some of them, like Hank, seemed nice enough. But a lot of them kept making the kinds of cracks that irritated her.
At first it was things like “I’ve never been so up close and personal with so many women,” at the gym on campus. And then it was a comment one of them made about the women’s “sturdiness” during one of the facility tours.
There were innuendos about skirts, cracks about penis envy.
Just yesterday, Lydia had been bemoaning the fact that they’d have to meet on the tarmac so early in the day, instead of easing in with classroom instruction first. Joan had disagreed and said that she was “glad to get the hard part done first.”
At which point, one of the pilots, Jimmy Hayman, said, “I’ve got a hard part you can do first.”
Joan stared right at him, unsure how to respond. But then Lydia laughed.
And in the moment, Joan wanted to slap her.
Didn’t Lydia understand that if one of them made it seem like it was okay, the rest of them would be sidelined as humorless? Didn’t Lydia get that this
was how the men kept them separate and underestimated? With these small jokes that made them look petty if they got upset? Couldn’t Lydia see how it worked?
“Hayman,” Griff had said as he walked into the room, “cut that out.”
Jimmy shut up then. Joan knew she was supposed to be grateful, though she resented the need for it at all.
“Thank you,” she whispered to Griff when she sat down.
He shook his head. “Don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum,” he said.
“It does a disservice to us both.”
Obviously, the mission specialists weren’t immune to bad taste, but they weren’t as overt about it. And so Joan preferred it when she was grouped with Vanessa, Donna, and Griff. Even Lydia, Harrison, and the others were all right.
The instructor refocused on them as the pilots left.
“As mission specialists, you will be required to gain significant flying experience here at NASA, fifteen hours of flight time a month, for the length of your time in the corps. You will not take off and land the jet yourselves,” he said. “But you will learn a lot from that backseat—including how to navigate and, occasionally, how to handle the aircraft while in the air.
“As you know, flying is not without its myriad risks. Today we will start slow. You will watch the pilots from the ground as they take off, barrel-roll, and land,” he said. “Think of it as a flight show, knowing that in the future, you’ll ride shotgun.”
Joan looked to Vanessa, whose face showed nothing. But Joan already knew what she was thinking.
The flight instructor had to raise his voice over the sound of the engines starting.
“Before you are allowed in the planes,” he shouted, “you will have to learn how to survive being thrown out of one. First thing tomorrow you will be leaving for water survival training.”
In the swampy August heat, Joan, Griff, Donna, Vanessa, Lydia, Harrison, and the other two mission specialists, Ted Geiger and Marty Dixon, had departed for Homestead Air Force Base, in Florida, for three days to learn
how to bail out over the ocean.
In their first test, they’d been strapped to a parachute and then tied to the back of a speedboat. One by one, each of them had been dragged through the ocean while attempting to keep their head above water for as long as possible. They’d had mixed results. Vanessa and Lydia kept calm. Marty almost drowned and had to take a rest on the boat. Donna and Griff ended up somewhere in the middle. And Joan took so much water into her stomach and lungs that she was burping for hours afterward. Her head was thrashed so hard by the chop of the waves that she still had a headache the next morning.
But still, she had done it.
The next day, in the open water, she had successfully swum beneath her floating parachute, come up for air on the other side, and inflated her life vest. It had taken her a few tries—and one full moment in which she thought she might be drowning—but again, she succeeded.
But today was the biggest test. One she was not sure she could pass.
They would start on the deck of a large boat, connected to both a parachute and a harness that were attached to a speedboat. When the speedboat accelerated, they would run off the edge of the first boat and let the wind catch their parasail, the speedboat pulling them high over the ocean.
When they were hundreds of feet in the air, they would disconnect their harness from the tether to the speedboat. This would send them crashing into the water, where they’d have to get themselves to the surface, inflate a life raft, and then crawl into it.
If, until this point, Joan had been able to convince herself that being an astronaut was a cerebral affair, she was cured of it now as she sat on a boat just off Biscayne Bay with a harness on, preparing to crash-land in the ocean.
She wiped the sweat off her forehead. She kept imagining the moment when she was supposed to disconnect from the boat.
Griff was guzzling water like his life depended on it. Donna was chattering away, as if talking nonstop would dispel her terror. Vanessa was silent, watching the wake behind the boat.
“There are sharks in the water,” Griff said to Joan under his breath. “Just because we didn’t see them the past two days doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Right?”
“Here, mostly hammerheads and tiger sharks,” Marty said. “I’d be
surprised if we saw a great white, but it’s certainly possible. Maybe some bull sharks.”
“So then just say yes,” Lydia said. “Nobody needs a list.”
Donna had told Joan that Marty and Lydia had slept together that first Friday they’d all gone out to the Outpost. This had made perfect sense to Joan. Both of them were more in love with the sound of their own voices than listening to anyone else. She pictured them carrying on two conversations at once, talking only to themselves, and having the most wonderful time.
But today, Marty said something about Atlantic water currents and Joan saw Lydia roll her eyes. So, unless Joan was mistaken, it seemed probable that Lydia had ended it.
People say opposites attract, but Joan had found this to almost never be true. People just couldn’t see the ways they were drawn to exactly who they feared—or hoped—they might be.
Lydia and Marty were now quarreling, Griff and Ted looked seasick, and Joan could not stand to listen to Donna talk anymore.
She turned to Vanessa. With her hair pulled back, it was easier to see that Vanessa’s cheeks were a little rosy, her skin smooth without any makeup.
Joan had always worn a little mascara, a little powder. She’d been beaten into it by Barbara’s taunts as a teenager. Plain Joan.
“You’re not afraid,” Joan said to Vanessa. She’d meant it as a question, but it came out as an observation.
“I am,” Vanessa said. “Specifically of the part where we have to get out
from under the parachute.”
“But you seem so calm.”
Vanessa nodded. “Yeah, I suppose I am.”
“Braver than me,” Joan said.
“No, not braver than you.”
Their boat slowed as it met up with the speedboat.
“I’m . . .” Joan blew all the air from her lungs. “I’m terrified,” she said. “It doesn’t even make any sense. I passed the other two tests well enough. But today, I . . .” She would swear her hands were shaking except that she could see they were completely still.
“Do you know the difference between bravery and courage?” Vanessa
said.
Joan considered the question. “I don’t think so.”
“My dad taught me when I was little. Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong
enough to do it anyway.”
“Oh,” Joan said.
“Neither of us are particularly brave right now,” Vanessa said. “But both of us are going to be courageous.”
Joan again imagined herself disconnecting from the boat.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Griff went first.
Joan watched every second. The sun blinded her as he got higher, but she could not look away. He detached from the speedboat and drifted on his parachute down to the open water. And then he was gone under the surface.
She kept watching, holding her breath, waiting for him to pop up.
A second went by. Then another. And then there he was.
Joan inhaled.
She watched as he inflated his raft. It took him a few attempts before he could get himself onto it, but on the fourth try, he managed it. A second later, he put his fist up in the air.
“If he can do it, you can do it,” Vanessa said.
Joan nodded, unsure.
When it was Joan’s turn, she took a deep breath.
“Don’t think about it,” Vanessa said. “Just go do it. And then you can tell
your niece how courageous you were.”
“Frances,” Joan said.
“Yeah, you can tell Frances.”
Joan got into position. They connected her harness to the speedboat. Her heart started to race. She stood on the edge of the deck, waiting for the go- ahead. She pictured telling Frances she had parachuted into the ocean from behind a speedboat. She laughed to think of it.
Okay, she thought, here we go.
When she got the thumbs-up, she took off, running as fast as she could.
She felt the catch of the air as the speedboat accelerated. For a moment, she fought against the fear in her body. But then she gave in to it. She let herself feel the horror, and then it passed through her.
In fact, for a few slow seconds, Joan could feel nothing but the ocean air on her face. The smell of the brine of the sea overtook her nose and filled her lungs.
When she looked down, she could see the expanse of the dark blue ocean, how quiet it was, how steady, cut by the strong wake behind the boat.
When they gave her the signal, she put her hand on the latch of her harness
and closed her eyes.
She disconnected.
Her parachute slowed her down, softened her descent enough that it felt like being cradled more than falling. And the view of the ocean drawing nearer felt a little mesmerizing. By the time her whole body landed in the water, she’d forgotten to panic.
Suddenly she was underwater, her ears clogged, her vision cloudy, her body dragged down by the weight of everything she was tied to. Her parachute darkened the ocean above her. She managed to get herself free from it and then twisted and turned, looking for the light of the sky. Soon she found it, just to her left, the sunshine diffused across the surface. She swam for it.
When she broke out into the air, she gasped and choked on the water. But when the breath rushed into her lungs, she wondered if anything had ever felt so good as breathing.
She inflated the raft and then managed to throw one leg over the side of it.
She dragged herself onto the raft swiftly, her back soon resting against the bottom, feeling the current of the ocean. She coughed up the salt water in her nose and her throat. She pushed her hair out of her face.
And then she looked up at the clouds, raised her hand in a thumbs-up, and smiled.
My God, she thought, what else can I do?
When the T-38 assignments came in, Joan was grateful to find out she’d be flying with Hank.
He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a Texas accent. He’d come out of Top Gun, the naval flight school in San Diego, so he and Joan shared some of the same Southern California references. Breakfast burritos, fruit trees, how cold the Pacific was. Joan also liked his sunglasses. He wore dark-tinted aviators that made him look like a movie star.
“Come on, girl,” he said to her as they got in the jet. “Let’s go fly a plane.”
“All right, boy, let’s go,” she said.
He laughed as they got in. That was another thing she liked about him: he laughed at women’s jokes.
Joan fit tight into the backseat, the weight of her helmet and harness already bearing down on her before he’d shot them into the sky. She could swear they were perpendicular to the Earth. She tried not to focus on how sick she felt in her belly as they reached higher and higher. She did her best to ignore the force of the air in her ears. She closed her eyes, trying to ward off the intensity of the headache. It reminded her of riding the Round Up as a kid when the carnival came to town, fighting the centrifugal acceleration flattening her body.
It reached a fever pitch, and she was not sure she could withstand the pressure.
But then they leveled out above the clouds and Joan gasped. The beauty of the pale pink puffs—soft blankets against the sky—startled her into focus.
The steady hum of the wind drowned out almost everything except the sound of her own voice inside her mind. Which was such a gift. She had always been her greatest friend, her greatest guide.
Up here, all she could hear was that voice. The kindest version of her. Look at the clouds, take a breath, do you see how pale the blue of the sky can be?
Suddenly Hank’s voice crackled in her helmet: “Tell me that’s not the heavens.”
“You are never going to believe this, but I was thirty thousand feet into the air!” Joan said that evening, holding Frances’s hand as the two of them and
Barbara walked into Joan’s apartment. “And on Monday, we’re going to fly
upside down.”
“Upside down?”
“Upside down! And by the way, I almost puked just going right side up!
So who knows what’s going to happen.”
“Oh my gosh, you can’t puke, Joanie!”
“I am obviously going to try not to!” Joan said, “But I might not be able to control it. I might just go, ‘Oh no,’ and then blaaach.” Joan mimicked puking right over Frances’s head. Frances laughed so loudly that Barbara asked her to please use a normal tone of voice and then looked at Joan with reproach.
As they settled in, Barbara told Joan how great the apartment looked and Frances immediately gravitated toward all of the portraits Joan had been working on when she couldn’t sleep at night. There were a few of Frances with her big eyes and long eyelashes, one of Barbara, one of their father.
“You have to do Grandma,” Frances said.
“I know, I really do,” Joan said. “For some reason, I find it hard to draw Grandma.”
Barbara looked at the portrait of herself, which was sitting on the nightstand. Joan saw a small smile on her face, even though Barbara tried to hide it. This was Joan’s favorite part. To be able to show someone what they should love about themselves.
Barbara put the picture down, gently. “It’s because you look like Mom.”
“What?” Joan said.
“You look like Mom. I look like Dad. And you can’t draw Mom because
you don’t like to draw yourself.”
“I could draw myself.”
“Oh,” Barbara said. “Well, you don’t ever draw yourself, so I just figured you didn’t want to.”
Joan considered this. “I just . . . don’t find myself all that interesting, I suppose.”
“Joanie, I think your face is very interesting,” Frances said. “I like how you have tiny light freckles all over it and you have three gray hairs on the side of your head.”
Joan laughed. “Thank you, my love.” And then: “I ordered pizza for
dinner.” Barbara offered a tense smile, but Joan knew she wouldn’t complain.
Joan always paid, ordered too much, and sent Barbara home with the
leftovers.
“Did you get pepperoni?” Frances asked.
“Yeah, and with extra anchovies because I know how much you love them.”
“Noooooo!” Frances said, and Joan grabbed her and tickled her ribs.
Barbara set the plates for dinner.
After dinner, Barbara sent Frances to get ready for bed. She was spending the night at Joan’s, and the two of them were going shopping for back-to- school clothes the next day. It was their annual tradition. As Joan walked Barbara out, she handed her the leftover pizza. Then Barbara pulled Joan into the hallway.
“You seem happier,” Barbara said. “Lighter.”
“I do?” Joan felt a little jolt go through her.
“Yeah,” Barbara said. “It’s nice.”
“Well, I guess . . .” Joan thought of that feeling up in the jet. The pale pink of the clouds. “I guess I am a little lighter.”
“You’ve met someone,” Barbara said.
“What? No!”
“I thought for sure that’s what all this was. That glee in your voice.”
“Barbara,” Joan said. “No.”
Barbara sighed. “I swear, Joan, every time I think I understand you, I’m more wrong than the time before.”
“I’m not that hard to understand, Barb. I love my new job. It’s . . . the coolest thing I’ve ever, ever, ever done.”
Barbara looked at her, and Joan could feel the distance between them growing. She’d been just an arm’s length away a second ago, but she was gone now.
“If only I could find something I love half as much as you love talking about stars.”
Joan said good night to Barbara and went back inside her apartment with a smile still on her face. She could hear the condescension in her sister’s voice,
but she could not be angry.
Joan so loved the beauty in this world: showing people the stars, spotting the fuzzy glimmer of the Orion Nebula with just her eyes, the rare moments when auroras are visible even in the southern states because of intense geomagnetic storms, trying one more time to really nail Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, rereading The Awakening, listening to Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, drawing for so long, so late into the night that her palm cramped, running so far that she forgot to think, taking Frances for ice cream and watching how long she deliberated over which flavor to choose, the smell of Frances’s hair . . .
That was the stuff that made life worth living. And she worried Barbara didn’t see that.
“All right, babe,” Joan said once Frances was done with her shower. “Are
we watching TV or reading a book?”
“Reading a book!” Frances said.
Joan began taking the throw pillows off the sofa. “Okay, if you’re sure . . .” It was the easiest trick with Frances: if you let her choose, she’d choose the responsible option. But if you told Frances she couldn’t do something, you’d get a battle for the ages. Joan had tried to explain this to Barbara, but Barbara didn’t want to hear it.
Joan extended the sofa bed, and Frances got settled in, grabbing her book.
“Joanie,” Frances said. “I love your new apartment. I wish I lived here.”
“Aw, babe, you can stay here anytime you want. It’s your place, too.
Always.”
Joan kissed her on the forehead and turned out the lights in the living room. She went into her bedroom.
And then, instead of grabbing her own book, she grabbed her sketchpad and a pencil. For the next hour, she tried to draw her own face.
It was late August and Joan was standing by herself in Steve and Helene’s backyard, watching Steve turn off the smoker while his daughters ran around the yard trying to catch fireflies. On the table next to her were the very few leftovers from the spread of brisket, macaroni salad, coleslaw, baked beans, and biscuits. People had not yet cut into the buttermilk pies or the Texas sheet cake. Joan was trying to remember the last time she’d eaten dinner alone. It had been far too long.
In their training, they had been split into two teams. The Red Team, led by a military pilot ASCAN named Duke Patterson, consisted of Donna, Harrison, Vanessa, Marty, and some of the pilots Joan still did not know well yet.
Joan’s team, the Blue Team, was captained by Hank and included her, Griff, Lydia, Ted, and their own group of pilots, including Jimmy Hayman, whom Joan disliked more every time she spoke to him.
The Red Team would have instruction in the classroom in the morning and then head out in the T-38s in the afternoon. Joan’s team would do the opposite.
Their days were packed. Between the lessons on engineering, oceanography, geography, anatomy, and other topics, Joan was absorbing so much information alongside her fellow ASCANs that it only made sense to study after hours with them, too. She and Griff had spent so many nights in his apartment, going over country borders and emergency medical procedures, that they now knew each other’s takeout orders without having to ask. Every other evening there was some get-together, either at the Outpost or Frenchie’s. Joan couldn’t remember, even in college, being out so late, so often, with so many people.
The only thing she was actually enjoying right now at this party was the nearly empty beer bottle in her hand. She’d never tried a beer until Donna and Griff insisted. She’d been surprised to find that Coors Light was delicious.
Joan took a last sip and looked around. Most people seemed occupied.
Maybe she could sneak out without anyone noticing.
But a moment later, Vanessa strolled up to her and handed her another beer. “You look like you’re counting down the minutes until you can leave.”
Joan laughed. “I think I’ve had my share of socializing for now,” she said as they stood on the edge of Steve and Helene’s pool. “Present company excluded from my complaining, of course.”
Hank walked into the backyard, hours late to the BBQ. Everyone cheered, even Joan. They’d gone up in the T-38s four more times together since that first ride. Each time, Hank had let her take more control of the jet than the time before.
She found Donna’s mooning over him to be a bit much. But she had to admit, he was one of the good ones. She thought of him the way she thought young children must think of Willy Wonka. Here was the door to all the magic and danger.
“I mean, Griff and Donna are great. Hank, I like. You’re great. But some of these other guys, I could do without. No offense, but I could be at home right now with a good book.”
Vanessa laughed and sipped her beer. “You’re awfully grumpy.”
“I am not grumpy.”
“It’s a good thing.”
“How is it a good thing? To be grumpy?”
“It gives you some much-needed dirt on your clothes.”
“What?”
“Otherwise, you’re a little too perfect,” Vanessa said. “Smart, well- rounded, always five minutes early, nice to everyone. A little edge to you is good.”
Joan turned to look at her. “I have plenty of edge to me.”
“I know. You’re grumpy and a little antisocial,” Vanessa said, sipping her beer again. “So am I. It’s nice to see.”
Joan frowned.
“It’s a compliment. You’re like Marlon Brando,” Vanessa said as she leaned in and shoved her shoulder into Joan’s.
Joan tried to maintain her frown, but it wasn’t working. “How am I anything like Marlon Brando?”
Vanessa put her beer down on a folding table covered with a vinyl tablecloth.
“Okay, so . . .” Vanessa said. “Before Streetcar, Marlon Brando was gorgeous, sure. But almost too beautiful. Maybe a little . . . boringly beautiful? But then, during the run of the play, he’s goofing around, boxing some guys backstage. He gets decked in the face, right across the nose.
Pow!”
Vanessa mimicked somebody getting knocked out. Joan was trying to stay irritated, but it was a helium balloon and she was losing her grip on the string.
“Breaks his nose. He’s rushed to the hospital. The doctor does a shit job resetting it. It’s totally crooked. And the producer, I don’t remember her name, but it’s this woman and she goes to the hospital and she says, ‘Oh, no, Marlon, they’ve ruined your face.’ But he doesn’t care. He never gets it fixed.
And he goes on to be a major star, bigger than anyone ever thought he’d be.
And years later, she takes it back. It didn’t ruin his face, it enhanced his face.
Somehow, with that crooked nose, he was more handsome. He had been too perfect before. Now he had a flaw. Now he was somebody you could touch.
He looked like the most handsome real man that ever lived, instead of some
beautiful doll.”
“It made him interesting,” Joan said.
Vanessa snapped her fingers. “Exactly—it made him interesting.”
“So my not liking this party is my crooked nose?”
“When somebody’s too smooth, there’s nothing to grab on to. Now that you’ve got a little edge to you, I can hang on.”
“You didn’t like me before?”
“I have always liked you, Jo,” Vanessa said, picking up her beer. “You know that. I just like you more now.”
Joan nodded. “Well, thank you for comparing me to Brando, I guess. No one’s ever done that before.”
“You also look a little like Ingrid Bergman—not that you asked,” she said.
Joan tried to picture Ingrid Bergman.
“From Casablanca,” Vanessa said.
“Oh,” Joan said. And then: “Oh, wow, that’s . . . that’s very nice. I’m not sure I see it, but thank you.” Joan just kept talking now, couldn’t stop herself.
“First time I really met you, I thought you seemed like Cool Hand Luke. Not that you’re a man. Just . . . the attitude, maybe. Sorry, this is coming out
wrong.”
Vanessa put her hand on Joan’s arm as if to stop her. “Joan,” she said.
Joan looked at her.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Joan laughed. “It is?”
“Yes, it is. Thank you.”
“Oh, well, you’re welcome.”
“I love Paul Newman. Who wouldn’t want to be Paul Newman?”
Joan shrugged and laughed. “I mean, yeah, when you put it that way. Who wouldn’t?”
Why had she been annoyed? She couldn’t remember.
Duke’s wife, Kris, opened the sliding glass doors to the living room and Steve’s dog, a blue heeler named Apollo, came running out and pawing at
Vanessa’s leg.
“Oops!” Kris said. “Sorry!”
“No,” Vanessa said, crouching down to pet him. “You’re all right, aren’t ya, buddy?”
Apollo rolled onto his back, and Vanessa scratched his belly.
“Apollo, you make me wish I could have a dog,” she said.
“Why can’t you?” Joan asked.
Vanessa looked up at her. “One day soon, I’m hoping to strap myself to a rocket and bounce out of the atmosphere. I’m not going to be able to take care of a dog.”
“Oh,” Joan said. “Okay. But couldn’t you just get a dog sitter when you go on a mission?”
“I’m not going to put a dog through that. I’ll just come over here and pet Apollo,” Vanessa said and then rubbed his back and gave him a good pat.
“Vanessa!” Steve called from the side yard. “We need you! Antonio’s Dodge is stalled.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Come on, boy,” she said. And then she smiled at Joan. “Bye, Jo.”
Joan laughed as they walked away. She could leave now. But instead, she sat on the rough concrete, pulled her long skirt up to her knees, and put her
feet in the pool. It was so warm, it felt like stepping into a bath.
She watched as Lydia floated by her with her eyes closed, hogging the only pool float. Lydia had refused to share with anyone enough times that no one asked anymore.
Griff swam up to Joan. “I have obtained very important, very confidential insider information,” he said as he pushed his hair back off his face. “And if you play your cards right, I will read you in.”
Joan looked at him. She’d long ago noticed he was objectively handsome.
But she could see now that he’d probably had to grow into his features. And she wondered if that had made him an ugly duckling. She loved ugly ducklings.
“Lay it on me,” Joan said. Maybe she had a bit of a buzz. She must have.
“Do you know Duke’s real name?”
“I did suspect it wasn’t Duke.”
“It’s Chris,” Griff said. The pool lights had kicked on a few moments ago, just as the sun was setting. Griff’s smile was lit from below.
“Oh, wow,” Joan said.
“Yeah, so they are Chris and Kris,” Griff said, pulling closer to the pool’s edge, hovering close to her.
“So he let her be Kris,” Joan said. “And he took on a nickname. That is . . . that is very touching.” She looked up at Duke and Kris, standing by the sliding glass doors with Steve’s wife, Helene.
It was obvious how well Duke and Kris fit together. Duke was quiet and strong. Kris was small and spirited, with big hair. Duke told the stories and Kris hit the punch lines.
“No, she knew what she was doing,” Duke was saying, with a smile.
“Oh, I absolutely did!” Kris added.
Helene laughed.
Joan was always curious what it was like on the inside of a marriage. What happened when it was just the two of them at home, Duke and Kris? Did she have to ask him for permission to buy new clothes? Did he sometimes tell her he didn’t like what she made for dinner? Joan tried to ward off the sadness that always came when she pictured a marriage—any marriage.
Her parents’ marriage seemed fine to her. Good, even. They still loved
each other. Her mother, basically a vegetarian, made her father’s favorite meatloaf most weekends with a joy that Joan had scrutinized for years but found completely sincere. Still, when she thought about it, a gloom dared to take over. You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own?
Joan knew that society was changing and some men were changing with it.
Some of them now understood that a woman’s career, her life, her passions were just as important as their own. But still, all Joan could think was that it was now just two people cutting off parts of themselves to make themselves fit together. A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.
“Goodwin, do you read me?” Griff said.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said, I’m going to head out in a minute. Do you want a ride?”
Joan had come with Donna, but any second now Donna was going to ditch
her for Hank.
“Sure,” she said, standing up.
Griff dried off and they said their goodbyes, including to Antonio and his wife, Jeanie.
When they got to the driveway, Vanessa had her head underneath the car’s engine, next to Steve. Ted and Harrison were watching. Apollo was now at Steve’s feet.
“How’s it going on the Dodge?” Griff said.
The path to get by the car was narrow, and there was a hose on the ground.
Joan saw where to step, but Griff put his hand on the small of her back to guide her. When Joan turned to look at him, he smiled sweetly at her.
She had been here before—not often, but enough to recognize it for what it was. The glances that lasted just a bit too long, the softer tone of voice directed only at her. It almost never ended easily. There was always a thrash or two, when she tried to kill it.
Joan moved forward quickly, away from his touch.
“Looks like Steve’s got it,” Harrison said. “I certainly couldn’t figure it out.”
“Actually, Vanessa spotted it,” Steve said. “It was the vacuum pull-off on the choke.”
Vanessa stood up slowly and wiped her hands on a rag. “A team effort.”
Steve laughed, and then Vanessa saw Joan there, with Griff. “Off to read
your book?”
“Caught red-handed.”
“Well, good night, Brando.”
Joan shook her head, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good night, Newman.”