The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  Vodge took my hand and leaned into me to share the receiver. “Yes,” he said, his breath mingling with mine, a sweetness there, an internal flowering that was all his own. “We’re ready for anything.”

  “Glad to hear it,” G.C. said, lifting his free hand and dropping it again, as if he were saluting us. “It’s good, it’s all good. But there’s one more thing—”

  “What?” I breathed.

  “I mean for you, Ramsay—”

  G.C. looked as if he were about to deliver the punchline of a joke, but it was no joke, and what he was about to say went a long way toward providing the liftoff I was talking about earlier. “I was just wondering,” he mused, a finger pressed wryly to the corner of his mouth, “when you were going to get down on one knee and ask this girl to marry you. I mean, that’s the way we do it out here in E1—”

  My wedding dress was white, at least. (Or as white as we could make it without the phosphates, chlorine, ammonia, petroleum solvents, alcohol, butyl, glycol ether or nonylphenol ethoxylate you found in standard detergents.) Diane and I cut and hand-sewed it from a pair of bedsheets I’d be doing without from that point on and since we didn’t have any lace to trim it with, we incorporated bright green arrows of broad-leafed savanna grass around the neckline, twists of morning glories at the wrists and a long braided train of them to trail behind me as I came down the staircase and Gyro leaked his way through “Here Comes the Bride” on his clarinet. For shoes, I had to settle for flip-flops, but I put on makeup and did my eyes and put my hair up in a French braid with a crown of blue-flowering salvia stems rising out of it. Blue and white, that was the extent of the color palette, and it was enough, believe me, keep it simple, which was the whole point of E2 to begin with, and if we really didn’t have much by way of flowers for a bouquet (flowers were a luxury when you needed every square millimeter of soil for crops), we did manage to mix and match a few cactus flowers with the salvia and wrap it all up in a bundle of peanut greens, which the goats would enjoy after the ceremony as their own invitation to the feast.

  The groom had come into E2 with a purely practical wardrobe consisting of three pairs of jeans, half a dozen of shorts, six or seven tees and two long-sleeved shirts, with collars, both now so torn and stained as to be all but useless for any formal occasion—and this was a formal occasion, or as formal as Mission Control could make it, given the constraints we were under. Of course, nobody had a tie. Or cuff links. Or, needless to say, a sport coat. Gyro, being Gyro, had imported a more extensive wardrobe, including the leather shoes and baby-blue button-down shirt he’d worn the first evening he came to me with his M&M’s, and he’d offered both the shirt and shoes to Vodge, let bygones be bygones, but of course neither came even close to fitting. Troy came up with a chrome-yellow Hawaiian shirt that featured a pair of outsized pink chameleons flicking their glutinous tongues at equally pink bugs that might have been either beetles or cockroaches, you couldn’t tell which, but that didn’t work either, not when the whole ceremony was going to be telecast nationwide. Finally, Mission Control made an exception in this instance and allowed Vodge to wear his official Terranaut jumpsuit—his uniform—which was fine as long as the cameras didn’t focus on his feet. Like most of us, he’d been going around barefoot to save his cracked and blistered shoes, and the best he could come up with for the occasion was a pair of flips-flops repaired with a shiny gray strip of duct tape.

  June brides, that was what all the magazines held up as the ideal, as if humans were no different from any other Northern Hemisphere species that have to build their nests and rear their young in the season of abundance. Actually, I’d never given much thought to being a bride, beyond that girlhood phase when you play with dolls and watch Disney movies and imagine yourself the princess awakened by a kiss—marriage, family, all that was something that would unfold in some vague unconstructed future. Or not. But now here I was, a bride-to-be myself, and we couldn’t wait till June because of the way we were going to have to present all this to the public—I was no virgin bride, and no one would have expected it of me, but even the thickest reporter could count off nine months on the fingers of two hands and Mission Control felt—insisted—that sooner was better than later. I won’t bother going into detail over the contentious team meetings or the things some of my coworkers said to my face, but as it came about, we decided to skip our Bicycle Day (April 19) feast in order to have enough resources for the wedding, which G.C. decreed would coincide with our May Day celebration. (And, of course, when he’d claimed he wasn’t ruling by fiat it was only a kind of rhetorical flourish, because that was exactly how he ruled, whether Judas and Little Jesus or my six non-engaged crewmembers liked it or not.)

  The strangest thing—beyond my parents, that is, who were flown in on the shortest of notice, along with my brother and Ramsay’s grandmother, and more on that later—was Linda. After everything had been decided and G.C. laid down the law for everybody concerned, both inside and out, Linda came to me at the visitors’ window and tried to talk me out of it, going on and on about the procedure all over again, and when she saw that wasn’t working, she started back in on how the only right thing to do was break closure. For my own good. For my safety and the baby’s safety too, not to mention nutrition, basic nutrition. How was I ever going to get enough calories inside E2 to feed a baby? Even now, probably, the fetus was underdeveloped. Hadn’t I thought of that? Didn’t it worry me? Well, that was all she was thinking about day and night—she couldn’t even sleep, she was so worried.

  She was wearing a sombrero that must have been two sizes too big for her, ridiculous really, like a breadbasket or something, and it shaded her face so I couldn’t really read her expression. All I saw was the flash of her glasses and a void where the rest of her face should have been, a trick of the sun—and that was another thing that got me wondering: what was so earth-shatteringly important that she had to come to me in the morning, at break, instead of at the usual hour when we could both relax? So I said, “You shouldn’t worry so much.”

  “But I do.” There was something strained in her voice, a tearfulness, as if she was the one who was pregnant and had to endure all this tension and hatefulness.

  I reassured her, told her it was all going to work out. “I’m really touched,” I said, on the verge of tears myself. “Really, I am. Sisters, right?”

  “I want you to come out of there,” she said, shifting in her seat so the sun fell full on her face for a moment and I saw the way she was looking at me, all tense and wound up.

  “Come out?” I echoed. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Do it for me.”

  I was going to say, For you, what are you talking about?, but then I began to put two and two together, and who did I see staring back at me but Judy. Judy was behind this. Judy wanted me out, gone, vanished for good, and if the price of that was breaking closure because I wouldn’t submit to the procedure she had in mind, then so be it. But Linda. Linda was my best friend. Why would she—? And then it came to me. “You’re not just saying this because you want in, are you? To take my place?”

  She didn’t answer right away, both of us sitting there clinging to the phones waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finally, and now she shifted again so her face was hidden in shadow, she said, “Yes. Yes, I want in. You fucked up, Dawn. You forfeited your place.”

  “And what, Judy promised you if you talked me into breaking closure you could take my place?”

  “Nobody promised me anything.”

  “But that’s the long and short of it, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head, the sun slashing at her mouth. Her mouth was very small and tight. “She wanted me to talk you into getting rid of it, if you want to know the truth—”

  I’m sorry, but I’d had so much thrown at me over the course of the past six weeks it just felt like I was getting slapped in the face over and over again, and I had no patience for this. “Well, I’m not getting rid of it,” I said, making my voice as n
asty as I could. “And I’m not coming out either.” I pushed myself up off the stool, furious now. “You can tell Judy from me to go screw herself. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You can go screw yourself too. And I don’t care. I really don’t.”

  As soon as things had been finalized, I called my mother from the phone in the command center, which Mission Control had linked up to an outside line. “Hi, Mom,” I said, already tearing up at the sound of her voice.

  She didn’t say “hi” back, didn’t say my name. “What’s the occasion?” she asked, sounding bitter. “You mean they actually let you talk to your own mother?”

  I’d planned on easing into things, to just chat a minute before getting to the business at hand, but that wasn’t to be. “Mom,” I blurted, “I just wanted you to know—I’m getting married.”

  To say she was surprised would be an understatement (mortuary silence punctuated by the background chatter of talk radio and the intermittent barking of our family dog, Pearly, a silence that went on so long I had to ask if she was still there).

  “I’m here. I’m just floored, I guess. Who’s the lucky man?”

  “Ramsay. Ramsay Roothoorp. You know, my crewmate. Inside?” And I began talking in a rush, filling her in on all the details (except the most salient one, that I was pregnant and this was a shotgun wedding, with G.C. standing in for the outraged paterfamilias). I was telling her how we’d been in love for a long time without knowing it, or expressing it, that is, both of us tentative and not really connecting as anything more than colleagues until things had begun to heat up around Christmastime, when she cut me off.

  “Roothoorp? What kind of name is that?”

  I told her it was Dutch, mainly Dutch. “I think,” I said. “Actually, I never really bothered to ask. I mean, I’m assuming.”

  “He is American, though, right?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I said. “Born and raised. And as far as I know, nobody in his family has a tail. Or retractable claws.”

  Just for the record, I should say that I had what could be described as a normal childhood and that I love my mother, even if she doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, at least where I’m concerned. A lot of parents are like that, I suppose—they don’t expect their children to be funny because being funny lies outside the bounds of the prescribed parent/child relationship, which is built on a platform of mutual support and the dispensing of hard information. Anyway, my attempt at a joke—at deflecting her—fell flat. All she said was, “Which one is he again? Not the tall one?”

  She still wasn’t clear on it all even after SEE flew her, my father and brother into Tucson and the three of them came to the glass to see me the morning of the wedding, which was planned for seven that evening, both to coincide with the magic hour of dusk and accommodate the scheduling of TV broadcasts across the time zones. It was ten-forty-five, break time, and heating up outside. I’d done the morning’s milking, slopped the pig and fed the chickens and ducks, though I’d been excused from ag work because I’d had to do my hair, put on makeup and sit for half a dozen interviews, including one for an Anchorage radio station during which a pair of typically juvenile morning DJs kept asking me if we were planning on going to Vegas for our honeymoon and I kept saying “Not this year,” and they kept crowing, “But how can anybody tie the knot without roulette and Wayne Newton?” as a kind of idiotic refrain that got very tired, very quickly.

  My mother would have been in her mid-fifties then, old by my standards (and of course, she’d always seemed old to me, even when I was a child and she wasn’t much older than I was now on this sun-burnished morning of my wedding day). The thing was, and maybe it was because I hadn’t seen her in so long, I was struck by how young she looked, so young I barely recognized her. There she was, standing between my beanpole of a brother and my beanpole-with-a-belly father, in heels, a knee-length skirt and silk blouse (white, as if she were the one getting married), wearing a pair of pearl earrings and a matching necklace I’d never seen before. She’d let her hair grow long and she’d had it lightened so she was nearly as blond as Stevie. “Mom, you look great,” I exclaimed, because she came up to the phone first, while my father and brother pantomimed their greetings and congratulations and a scrum of photographers, seeing action at the window, came rushing across the courtyard snapping pictures.

  “Thanks, honey,” my mother breathed into the phone. “I’d like to say the same about you, but truth be told, you’re way too skinny. Aren’t they feeding you in there?”

  She was smiling when she said this—it was meant as a joke, but I was as unprepared for her attempts at humor as she was for mine. I said, “It’s just like the salad bar at Sizzler, all you can eat all the time.”

  “No, I mean it,” she said, the smile fading. “You really think you can hold on for another, what, ten months, isn’t it? Because I have to tell you, and this isn’t just a mother speaking, you’re practically skin and bones—maybe you don’t notice it because it might seem gradual, but to me it’s really affecting you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  My mother had turned to my father and I could faintly hear her asking, “Isn’t she too skinny, Todd?” and I watched my father grimace and nod and give me an I-told-you-so look. Then my mother was pinning the phone to one shoulder so she could free both hands to rummage through her purse until she came up with what she was looking for: a little square of white tissue paper. Which she carefully unwrapped to reveal a ring. A diamond ring. “This was your nana’s,” she said, pressing it to the glass.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was simple and elegant—a one-carat brilliant-cut diamond in a plain gold Tiffany setting, a ring my grandmother had worn till she died, and that my mother, thinking of me, must have set aside and kept in the back of her jewelry box through all the years I was growing up—and though I’d trained myself to reject material things, especially in here where the only currency was utility, in that moment I think I would have died to get hold of that ring, to have it for Ramsay to slip on my finger as we were pronounced man and wife in front of the whole world and all the cameras it contained. As if to remind me of that world, a camera flashed suddenly, and then another, and I saw my father turn and say something to one of the paparazzi crowding in to make public what was private and existed between me and my mother and the memory of my grandmother, a woman I’d hardly known, who’d died when I was a child but was present here today in the empty circle of her ring.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Really beautiful. But you know I can’t—”

  My mother’s features sharpened. “Can’t what? Connect with your own family on the most important day of your life? This was your nana’s ring.”

  “I know, I know. But we can’t break closure, you know that as well as I do.”

  “Don’t give me that, because that’s just crazy. What about Mission One—they did it, over and over, sending medicine in, food, what, oxygen even. And you’re telling me these people can’t send a ring through that thingamajig right there?” She pointed to the sleeve to the left of the window through which Mission One had passed medical samples back and forth. “Or what, they open the outer door there and I just toss it in in a little box and back right out without taking even a single breath of your precious air and then you open your side for like three seconds? Tell me you can’t do that—”

  Another flash. Another look from my father—and now my brother was getting into the act, making shooing motions as people kept crowding in with their cameras. I smiled, waved, always on display and never more than now, then turned back to my mother. “I can’t do it, Mom.”

  The fact was, Gyro had fashioned a pair of rings from a steel spring he’d dug out of his spare parts drawer, and they would have to make do till reentry, just as my baby would. Which didn’t make it any easier.

  My mother didn’t respond. She just stood there, pressing the hollow of the ring to the glass and staring into me as she’d done so many times
when I was a child, trying to unnerve me. After a moment, she said, “What’s the hurry? I mean, why couldn’t you wait the ten months and have a real ceremony, one your parents could attend?” Without waiting for an answer, she raised her purse to eye level, unsnapped the clasp and carefully tucked the ring back inside, then moved back a step to raise her head and take in the monumentality of the structure rearing over us in all its harsh geometric beauty.

  “All this is great,” she said, waving a hand at the spaceframe and the visitors’ window and everything that lay behind it. She’d already divined the answer to her question, I was pretty sure of that. I watched her eyes gather in the knowledge and hold it close. “I just want to know if it’s worth it.” She took another step back, glared round her—two more flashes, three—then leaned back in. “I mean, doing this to your own mother—and your father, of all people. Your father too.”

  At six-forty-five that evening, Richard led me down the stairs of the Habitat, through the orchard, past the animal pens and up to the visitors’ window, where Ramsay was already stationed, his grandmother standing at the glass just beside him. Inside, we had Gyro, as I said, aspirating his way through Mendelssohn’s wedding march, while outside Mission Control had arranged for the Tucson Symphony Orchestra to entertain the crowd, which was overwhelmingly composed of reporters and cameramen, with a spattering of the sort of celebrities G.C. could hustle up on short notice, as well as the Mission Three crew and support staff, including the secretaries, techies and anybody who worked in any capacity on campus and could stand upright on two legs.

  I suppose all brides are nervous, and not just because of the irrevocable leap they’re making but because of all the pomp and circumstance and the very real worries of tripping over your train, dropping the bouquet or screwing up in any number of ways, minor and major both. I was no exception. In fact, and I’m sure you can appreciate this, I was under the kind of spotlight few brides have ever had to endure, if you except people like Pamela Anderson or Princess Diana. What I was dealing with, aside from the press, my disgruntled parents, G.C., a jealous and resentful Judy and an equally jealous and resentful Linda, not to mention the small detail of my being four-plus months pregnant, was the fact that I’d instantaneously become the face of Mission Two while everyone else, even Ramsay, faded into the background. That was the quid pro quo—you can have your baby, but you’re going to have to dance to a new tune, a faster one, a tarantella of whirling cameras and talking heads. That was the deal. That was the bargain. And I’d agreed, because what choice did I have?