by Ian Sales
Which, sadly, she has not been doing as frequently as she had. Keeping up appearances, showing the other wives she is a reliable member of the community, attending the meetings and parties, dropping by others’ houses, having people drop by hers…
She’s rarely alone, even though Walden is not often at home, he’s either at the Cape all week; or when he’s in Houston, he’s at the Manned Spacecraft Center and when he gets home in the evening his head is too full of orbital mechanics, spacecraft systems and the manuals he has been studying to care about Ginny’s day. It’s a level of disengagement an order of magnitude greater than at Edwards, Walden eats his late dinners in silence, and then spreads all his books and manuals across the kitchen table, or relaxes in front of the Zenith colour television, Space Command 600 remote control loosely held in one hand, to watch the football or a current affairs show.
Perhaps this is just as well. Ginny has been finding it increasingly hard to cope with being an astronaut wife. It has been weeks since she last wore slacks, and her favourite plaid shirt sits folded and unworn in a drawer. The Hermes Baby has only come out of its case a half-dozen or so times since her first meeting of the AWC, and then only to write letters—and she still owes replies to many of her friends.
Since moving to Houston, Ginny has not left the city, she has not been to the Manned Spacecraft Center, she has not seen a rocket or anything related to the space program. Walden has brought lots of paperwork home, and she’s sneaked looks through some of it when he’s not about. But surreptitiously checking out Walden’s training materials—she loves the Apollo spacecraft, their lines, their detail, their immense complexity, all those dials and switches, she wants to know all there is to know, much as she would about a spaceship which appeals to her on the cover of a magazine—but it’s only diagrams and dry text and what she really wants is to climb inside a LM or sit inside a CSM, she’d like to stand beside a Saturn V and actually experience its immensity. But she’s reluctant to display too much interest, Walden has professed on more than one occasion that he much prefers his “new” wife, and although she feels like a robot replica of Virginia Grace Eckhardt more and more of the time, in a town of robot wives which were designed, of course, by and for men—and now she thinks about it, that’s not a bad idea for a story—she nonetheless maintains the façade, the pretence: because everything on the home front must be “copacetic” if her husband is to have a chance at the Moon.
Her “space cadette” days are behind her, or so Walden believes—but he remains, as ever, mostly oblivious.
#
…was not the only writer of the first half of the twentieth century explicitly writing about the female experience, and using science fiction to do so.
The place of Virginia Grace Parker, who was published under the gender neutral name V. G. Parker, in the canon of feminist science fiction has been under debate for more than two decades. She was not a prolific writer, producing only eleven stories in as many years. Her stories were interesting for their general atmosphere of isolation, initially filtered through the experiences of a wife or mother. In this, Parker’s fiction followed the form of “housewife heroine” stories, as defined by Betty Friedan in her landmark work, The Feminine Mystique. Classic examples in science fiction include Judith Merril’s “Only A Mother” and Alice Eleanor’s Jones’s “Created He Them”, both of which are very much products of the Cold War and which explicitly document a housewife’s response to a situation resulting from a nuclear war. Parker, curiously, never based stories on this trope, and it is tempting to speculate the fact she was married to a serving US Air Force officer gave her a different perception on nuclear weapons’ capabilities and likelihood of use.
Parker’s stories fall into three rough periods, each corresponding to changes in circumstances linked to her husband’s career. The early ones were written while Parker lived in Germany. They were often told from the point of view of an alien, and displayed a somewhat pessimistic view of humanity. But once Parker’s husband had been stationed back in the USA, the stories turned more optimistic and more domestic, culminating in “The Spaceships Men Don’t See”. This last story is especially interesting, and not simply because its title eerily presages James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story, “The Women Men Don’t See”.
“The Spaceships Men Don’t See” was published in Galaxy in 1968. The story describes a secret military project to develop a spaceship which is invisible to the enemy. The main character of the story is the wife of an engineer who is working on the project. It is not going well, and as the engineer returns home each evening, his wife can tell that the day has once again been a failure. This distancing from the central novum of the story—the technology required to render the ship invisible is neither explained nor provided with pseudo-scientific scaffolding—is common to much “housewife heroine” science fiction.
The story was rejected by a number of magazines before Frederik Pohl took it for Galaxy. However, he asked for several changes before he would purchase it. In the original version, it was only the presence of women which was required to trigger the invisibility field. Pohl thought the story might have more impact if the presence of women and women only were needed for the invisibility to work, and asked Parker to rewrite the final third with that in mind. She did more than he had requested, however. Not only did she change the ending to imply that men would no longer be capable of waging war, in a bold move she also removed all the male characters’ names and referred to them only by their relationship to the female characters. Particularly interesting is the character Betty—possibly named for famous aerobatics pilot Betty Skelton—whom the men treat like one of their own, because she is a test pilot. And Betty in turn treats the wives in the same fashion as the men—except during that one moment of solidarity in the final paragraphs of the story.
There is a strange note of bitterness to Parker’s description of the relationship her protagonist, Suzanne, has with her husband. It is implied they have sex, and that it is not especially frequent in their marriage. Perhaps Parker intended this to be an ironic reflection of the husband’s failure with his secret project. But she also hints his moment of amorousness in the story is either a consequence of Suzanne’s appearance—she has dressed up for the wives’ social—or of the husband spending time in the social club bar with Betty.
“The Spaceships Men Don’t See” proved unpopular with many of the magazine’s readers, and one particularly scathing letter writer declared he was not interested in “womanly gossip and high heels”, and that readers of Galaxy, had they been interested in “women’s affairs” would be reading “a woman’s magazine”. Perhaps embarrassed at this vitriol, the editors did not reply to the letter and even neglected to mention that V. G. Parker was not male, as the correspondent had assumed, but female. However, it was likely Parker’s gender was known to most readers—she made no effort to hide it, unlike James Tiptree, Jr.—although there are no contemporary records of any science fiction fans, authors or editors actually meeting her in person. During the fifties and sixties, women were not common at conventions—and those that did attend were typically married to a fellow attendee, or had a professional relationship with the genre. Given that Parker’s husband was in the military, it’s reasonable to assume attendance at a convention would have been frowned upon, even if her husband had permitted it.
Despite the controversy following the publication of “The Spaceships Men Don’t See”, the story quickly vanished into obscurity. Feminist commentators have criticized it on a number of grounds. The female characters, although foregrounded in the narrative (it is their story, not their husbands’), have almost no agency. Even the story’s resolution is a consequence of their gender, rather than any action any of them have taken. The wives are also characterized by their clothing—in fact, the only colors mentioned, other than grey, refer to the garments worn by the women. It is likely Parker’s use of color was intended to be ironic, rather than pandering to nineteen-sixties conceptio
ns of where women’s interests lay.
Parker’s final period was prompted by her husband’s selection as an astronaut by NASA. He eventually flew to the moon aboard Apollo 15. It is possible the response to “The Spaceships Men Don’t See” precipitated a new direction in Parker’s writing, and she chose to use her proximity to the space program to add a more marked technical sensibility to her science fictions, something not present in works by other women writers of the period—and this was a decade in which 250 women began writing for genre magazines. This level of technical detail reached an almost obsessive degree in her last published work, the novella “Hard Vacuum”, about a group of astronauts marooned at a lunar base. The science fiction written by women at this time, however, was considered to be “soft”, and despite her command of her subject, Parker had great difficulty breaking into the all-male “hard” science fiction club. She sold only three stories, in addition to her novella, and those sank without trace.
Parker stopped writing science fiction after the appearance of “Hard Vacuum”. Two space-related non-fiction works, and a co-writing credit on her husband’s autobiography, appeared during the following decade, before Parker finally faded from sight.
Chapter 5
Max-Q
Ginny looks down at the sheet of paper she has just fed into the typewriter and she thinks about a title for this story she can feel taking shape in her mind. She thinks about the word “invisible” and its synonyms, but then she decides she needs to make invisibility an act, not a property—the ships are not hidden from sight, people simply do not see them.
She types,
THE SPACESHIPS MEN DON’T SEE
Yes, she likes that.
And on the next line,
by Virginia G. Parker
Her name, her byline. The letters which identify this story as something created by herself, even though she herself is a creation, a fictional construct. Virginia Grace Parker, who I named for three actresses of the 1950s—Virginia Leith, Grace Kelly and Suzy Parker—and whose life bears a passing resemblance, in parts, to those women I researched in the writing of this novel—especially Mary Irwin, wife of Apollo 15 astronaut James B Irwin, but also science fiction authors Judith Merril and Alice B Sheldon. However, Ginny Eckhardt née Parker is more than the sum of her inspirations, more than an invented history patchworked from the lives of others; and she leans forward and narrows her gaze as the first sentence of her story comes to her, and she types:
Once a month, the wives of the test pilots and engineers met up gathered at the social club for coffee and conversation.
Walden is away at the Cape, she has not seen him since the weekend; and the small apartment is quiet. Ginny has her imagination, and a network of friends spread across the country, and she uses them to fill the empty hours. And, of course, there is the AWC, members of which are all too prone to drop by or telephone, to chat, to have a drink, coffee or something stronger, to just be company, whether she wants it or not. But somehow she has managed to free up today, although she has an appointment tomorrow at the beauty parlour so she will look her best when Walden flies home from the Cape on Saturday. For now, her thoughts are centred on the world of her heroine with the spaceship research pilot husband, a deliberate echoing of her own situation. She thinks about an invisible Navy destroyer in 1943, about pantyhose hanging from a line across the bathtub and lost earrings and women’s magazines sitting on coffee tables. She considers her role as an astronaut wife and the pressure to conform exerted by NASA and the other wives; and her mind is drawn to the Apollo spacecraft, the command module and lunar module, so exhaustively detailed in the manuals Walden studies so assiduously. She thinks about the fiction she has read in her magazines over the past six months, stories by Linda Marlowe, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffrey, Monica Sterba, Susan Trott, Betsy Curtis, Joan Patricia Basch…
And the words flow from her, this is one of the easiest stories she has ever written, perhaps because it had such a long gestation, perhaps because so much of herself is in it—and the narrative does not require those mental gymnastics she must usually perform if, say, her story were set among the crew of a spaceship on some endless voyage landing on an alien world for the first time. She is writing about the Astronaut Wives Club and the Apollo astronauts, although she knows no one reading this story—should she manage to sell it—will ever see the connection.
She works right through lunch, forgetting the salad she made the day before which is sitting in the refrigerator, neglecting the cooling cup of coffee beside the typewriter, and even forgetting that she is improperly dressed for the task, not wearing her slacks and favourite shirt but a short-sleeved shift dress in pink, orange, gold and green paisley.
It is mid-afternoon by the time she types the words:
The End
—pulls the sheet of paper from the platten and sets it face-down on the pile beside the typewriter. She turns over the manuscript and carefully lines up each page until the corners are square.
Sitting back, she feels an ache lay itself across her shoulders like a yoke. A deep sense of satisfaction fills her, a heartfelt gratitude that the past year has not taken from her the ability to write science fiction. She knows the story will need going over with a sharp eye, but she is happy with this first draft.
Her coffee is too cold to drink, so she slips her shoes onto her stockinged feet, and heads to the kitchen to brew herself a celebratory cup.
And if mention of Ginny’s feet in nylons seems an odd detail to include, there’s a line in The Astronaut Wives Club, “Even when she wore her ‘at home’ slacks and went barefoot, she always put on her makeup”, about Martha Chaffee, wife of Roger, a homecoming queen at Purdue and described by Koppel as “drop-dead gorgeous”. It’s for good reason Koppel repeatedly likens Martha to Twiggy—those bare feet! only hippies go around in bare feet! Martha was plainly a bit of a free spirit, a tad “individual”.
Unlike Martha, Ginny has given up her “at home” clothes, she is trying hard not to be “individual”. Because she and Walden are childless, the other wives feel no compunction to call ahead when dropping by. Ginny has had the lecture once, and she knows Walden’s feelings on the matter; let them see her doing as she’s told, she still has “Virginia G. Parker” and not one of them knows about her.
The following morning, she goes over the story once again, but it needs only minor changes and takes her no more than forty minutes to type out a final draft incorporating them. She writes a quick cover letter to Evelyn at Galaxy, puts it and the typescript into a large envelope and, on her way to the beauty parlour, drops it into a mailbox.
#
That Saturday night, Ginny and Walden are watching television, he has a beer, she’s skimming through an issue of Good Housekeeping but the contents are boring her, when the telephone rings. Ginny puts down her magazine gratefully, goes to answer the phone and it’s Evelyn from Galaxy.
This story, Evelyn says, I like it, I like it a lot, but I think you need to fix the ending.
Ginny is proud of ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’, she thinks it’s the best story she’s ever written, and she doesn’t like hearing that it’s not perfect. But she also knows that Evelyn knows her stuff, she’s an excellent editor and has been doing this for over a decade. Besides, if changes are needed to sell the story, Ginny is happy to make changes.
What do you mean? she asks.
Evelyn elaborates, You tell the story from the wife’s perspective, and you drop plenty of hints she’s the solution, but you don’t actually explain the consequences of what happens. You need a twist, Ginny; readers need to know there’s a reason it’s her story and not his.
“The reason for how the story ends…” Ginny realises not only is Evelyn right about the story but her words describe Ginny’s own life here in Texas equally well. The Apollo flight schedule has been postponed while the Apollo 1 fire is investigated and the Block II command modules brought up to scratch. Though it has been six months, a pall continue
s to hang over Houston, adding a bite of melancholy to the ever-present pollution. Impatience too—the astronauts are not so foolish to rush into anything which may jeopardise their lives, but they’re keen to start flying again. In Ginny’s case, the lack of flights has meant the astronaut wives have been getting on with their own lives: avoiding the press, church work, community theatre, substitute teaching, charitable activities and so on. Ginny has none of these, she has only Walden and her science fiction—and the house being built, arguing with the contractor, only for Walden to apologise to him on his next visit home, angering her at his disloyalty and prompting yet another fight…
So Suzanne, says Ginny, referring to the heroine of her story, you think Suzanne needs to figure out why things happen the way they do?
No, that won’t work, you’ve made it clear she’s no scientist, Evelyn points out. But there’s an obvious consequence to what happens in your story and you need to spell that out. Perhaps you should put Suzanne’s husband closer to the mystery, make him an engineer or something?
But, Ginny thinks, Walden is a pilot, not an engineer; he’s not involved in the design of the Apollo spacecraft, although he does need to understand how their every part functions. While his inability to see so many things which are clear to Ginny provided the inspiration for the story, perhaps she should do as Evelyn suggests and give her protagonist’s husband more of an investment in the success of the invisibility project. Yes, she likes that idea, and as she works through the ramifications of that change, the perfect ending suddenly comes to her, one that turns everything on its head—
I think I have it, she tells Evelyn.
She describes her idea, without going into too much detail as she knows the narrative will shake itself out as she puts the words down on the page, and right now the new direction of ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ is little more than an unmarked path leading to “The End”.