The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  Julian was about to close the door when he spotted Mr. Burke moving into the porch light.

  Mr. Burke was dressed in his scoutmaster’s uniform and was holding a plastic tumbler. Of course, he was the one who was responsible for the change in Mitch and Howie’s behavior. Just looking at him, Julian knew this was true, and he felt a rush of gratitude.

  Mr. Burke adjusted his stance on the cement slab of the porch, then adjusted it again. “Trick or drink,” he said.

  “What?”

  Leo cleared his throat. “You heard me. I’m doing drinks, not treats.”

  “Dad,” the boy called into the house.

  Leo swallowed what was left in his cup. He batted a moth away from his face.

  When Skip Ferris appeared in the doorway, he was smiling and rubbing his hands together as if he’d been making something. “Mr. Burke,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Trick or drink,” Leo said.

  “Ha ha. What’s the trick?”

  “You’re fired,” Leo said.

  Skip Ferris laughed again, but it sounded forced. “All right. One sec, I think we have a beer.”

  He left them there—Leo clutching his empty cup, Julian holding the tray of candy. Mitch and Howie’s voices bubbled up in the warm night, already several houses away. Listening to them, Leo tried to decipher who Julian was dressed as. A punk was his best guess. A hippie. Julian wondered if Mr. Burke had put on the uniform because he’d forgotten they weren’t going to meet that night. Then another thought came to Julian, a question, and because he was still feeling grateful he asked it as nicely as he could.

  “Is that your costume?”

  “You need a haircut,” Leo said.

  The boy looked distracted, didn’t seem to have heard him. Leo tightened his hold on his fluttering eye, hitched up the drooping side of his mouth, and leaned down so that he could speak in a near whisper. “You look like a goddamn girl.”

  On the Wednesday that I’m supposed to go with Emerald to meet the talent scout, I get home from school and find a box that comes up to my knee sitting out by the curb where we put the trash. Wednesday is not trash day. The box isn’t taped up or even closed, and when I dig through it I see a stack of Tom Clancy paperbacks, our crockpot, and a framed eight-by-ten photograph of my mother and stepfather, dressed up and smiling in front of the Polynesian Hotel at Disney World. Their wedding portrait. As I walk into the house, I hear what sounds like chains being rattled. My mother is in the kitchen rifling through the silverware drawer.

  “This is absurd,” she says when she notices me standing there looking at her. She’s dumping forks and knives and spoons by the handful onto the counter. “Some of it has to go, don’t you think? There must be four different patterns here.” There are six patterns—some plain, some with curlicues, some with plastic handles—but I don’t correct her. And I don’t mention the box out by the curb. She’s home early from work, which is inconvenient because I wanted to have Emerald come in when she got here so she could help me choose an outfit to wear, and my mother doesn’t like Emerald and doesn’t want her in the house anymore. (Emerald flipped her the bird once from the foot of our driveway when my mother told her she needed to wash her car.) I drop my book bag onto the dining room table, go to my room and change into one of my newer blouses and a striped skirt I hope are flattering, check my hair in the bathroom, then head back outside to wait for Emerald on the front porch.

  I’m not sure that meeting a talent scout is the ideal thing for me right now. I’m on-and-off panicky, on-and-off queasy, on-and-off unhappy with who and where I am. But Emerald has been talking about Derek for what seems like weeks. He’s one of the people she’s met since she dropped out of school and got a fake ID, and she thinks he’s going to like me as much as he likes her. She thinks he’s a dream ticket—and who, according to Emerald, deserves a dream ticket more than us?

  Emerald has always been good at making me feel better about myself. According to her—and I’d like to believe it’s true—I am an almost fully realized human being. I’m five feet, ten inches tall, have good cheekbones, and freckleless skin. I have what’s called perfect pitch: I can hear a song on the radio once and sing it back to you without getting any of it wrong; I can even play it on the guitar, so long as I already know how to make the chords. And I have excellent brainpower. I can read a whole paragraph in a magazine and repeat it word for word, no problem. At rapid speed, I can tell you the names of every Miss America winner since 1921, from Margaret Gorman to Kellye Cash. I can list all their talents and all their causes and all their home states, including six each from Ohio and California, five from Pennsylvania, two from Washington, D.C. (which isn’t even a state), and not one from Florida.

  According to Emerald, I could change that.

  My mother, on the other hand, likes to temper her encouragement with cynicism. She doesn’t mind dishing out a compliment, but she usually shatters it with what she calls a “medicine bomb.” I’m beautiful, she’ll admit; I’ve got all of her looks, and then some. But looks aren’t everything, she says, and my attitude needs some serious adjustment. “Just remember, when you’re staring into that mirror you’re so fond of,” she once told me, “for every beauty, there’s a beast.”

  To which I said thank you, thank you very much, and could I quote her on that some day?

  I’m sweating up a storm by the time I see Emerald’s pale yellow Chevette coming down the street toward our house. She taps the horn as she drives up onto the strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk, and for a second I’m worried she’s going to smash right into the box with the paperbacks and the crockpot and the wedding portrait. Then I realize: what difference would it make? And there’s something sad about that, but I don’t have the space in my head to make room for it.

  “All aboard, bitches!” Emerald says, leaning toward the window on the passenger’s side.

  I open the door and climb into the car without looking back at the house.

  —

  Three months ago, my stepfather made the big announcement at dinner that he was ready for some major changes in his life. Specifically, he was ready to quit his job and relocate. My mother, who likes to read magazines while she eats, asked him without looking up what in the world he was talking about.

  “Wyoming,” Roger said.

  “The state?”

  “I’ve been mentioning this to you for a while now. Leaving my practice? Buying a buffalo farm? I’m ready to pursue that.”

  “Please,” she said. “Dream on, buddy boy.”

  “I haven’t come to this decision lightly. Not lightly at all. But I’ll be flying out next week to look at a ranch that’s gone into foreclosure.”

  “So you can do what?” my mother asked, turning another page. “Uproot us all? Pull your daughter out of school at the beginning of her junior year? That doesn’t sound very considerate.”

  “Gail,” Roger said. Then he did what he always does when he needs a moment to collect a thought: he took off his glasses, squinted at them as if they might have belonged to someone else, and put them back on. “I don’t expect you to come with me.”

  “And we wouldn’t,” my mother said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard such a half-baked idea.”

  “Dani can come, if she wants,” Roger said. “I know she needs to finish out the school year, but she’s welcome to visit, once I get settled.”

  And right about the time I was thinking that if they divorced, they wouldn’t be able to sit in a room together and talk about me as if I wasn’t there, it seemed to dawn on my mother that he was leaving. She looked up from her magazine, at least.

  —

  Here’s what she’s gotten good at, since he left:

  Deciding she can no longer bear certain household objects—like the wedding portrait, the rattan coatrack, and the marble sculpture of a pelican he gave her a few Christmases ago—and hauling them out to the curb.

  Collecting paint chips from the hardware sto
re and taping them up on the walls of every room in the house, including mine. (When I told her I didn’t want my room painted anything called “Fruit Punch,” she told me there was nothing wrong with a little color in our lives, now that we were free of my stepfather’s obsession with taupe.)

  Putting away desserts in the evenings. She’s always been good at that, but she’s gotten better over the past year. She can put away a pound of cookies and a half-gallon of sherbet when she gets revved up. And if there’s nothing she feels like watching on TV, she sits down with the phone and starts dialing. “Everything’s just rotten,” she tells my one aunt in Wilmington or my other aunt in Carson City—whichever sister will take her call. “My life stinks, and why should I have expected it to be any different? Stupid me for marrying a Gemini, right?”

  What I don’t mention to her is that she used to say she needed the sweets because of how emotionally absent my stepfather was. Now that he’s completely absent, she’s gnawing through them from the minute she walks in the door after work till around the time she falls asleep—usually on the sectional sofa with a blanket pulled up to her neck. Her eyes dart like frogs just under the surface of a pond when she’s sleeping. Her lips smack together and her nose sounds like an exhaust pipe. If I’ve been out, I try to come in quietly so she’ll stay under, but she usually wakes up and wants to hear all about my day, or—worse—she wants to cuddle. “Come here, sugar,” she sometimes says. “For godsake, just come here and hug me and let’s weather this thing out together.” This thing always has to do with her and never has to do with me.

  Here’s what I’ve gotten good at:

  Whatever’s going on, I pretty much tell her the opposite. I started doing this not long after my stepfather left, after she said it was high time she and I became friends. (All I could think was that she’d never seemed to care much before, so why all the sudden enthusiasm?) And, besides, she would have a meltdown if she knew what was really going on with me. Her life already stinks; the last thing she needs is more bad news. So how am I doing in school? I’m getting straight A’s in everything, including Advanced Calculus, thank you very much. Have I given any thought to college? I have, and it’s going to be law school for me, Ivy League all the way. Am I still seeing Brian Watley, the most respectful and handsome young man she’s ever met? Yes, Brian and I are in love, but we’re both saving ourselves for marriage one day because that will make it so much more special. And what about Emerald, that bad penny who needs to clean up her act before she gets into trouble with the law? I don’t see much of Emerald these days, couldn’t tell you where she is or what she’s up to.

  “I know you better than you think I do, little lady,” my mother sometimes says.

  I wonder.

  —

  “The thing about Derek is that he’s pretty much brilliant,” Emerald tells me as we sit in her car on Cullen Avenue, waiting for a funeral procession to pass. “He knows all about people, what makes them tick. He says the key to life is figuring out what you want and what kind of person you are. Some people shoot heroin, and some refuse to take an aspirin. Some eat raw steak, and some chew on tree bark. Some people cuss up a storm, and other people wouldn’t say a bad word if they were looking the Grim Reaper in the face. They could be driving over a bridge and have the steering wheel come off in their hands, and it wouldn’t even occur to them to say, ‘Dammit.’ And there are some people—like your mother, for instance—who let every stupid thing happen to them just because there it is, and there they are. And then there are people who see their lives about to be potentially fucked beyond belief and realize they can do something to change it. That’s Derek, through and through. He says it’s not astrophysics; it’s common fucking sense.”

  That sounds reasonable, I guess. I want to be someone who doesn’t live on Merritt Island, someone who lives in New York or Los Angeles; I want to be someone millions of people love and admire for her beauty and her kindness and her talent; I want to be Miss Brevard County, and then Miss Florida, and then Miss America. But I don’t know how to make any of that happen.

  “Jesus, how many friends did this fucker have?” Emerald says, glaring at the line of funeral cars. She turns to me. “So are you one of those people who lets every stupid thing happen to them?”

  “Maybe,” I say. Her air conditioner’s been broken for over a year. I feel like I could throw up from the heat.

  “You’re not. You just have to know you’re not. You just have to say it out loud.”

  “I’m not one of those people,” I say.

  “Right on,” she says. “To thine own self, cut the crap.”

  Emerald’s name isn’t really Emerald. It’s Rowina, but she hates Rowina and has been saying since seventh grade that she’ll punch in the throat anyone who calls her that. Before she dropped out, she even had some of her teachers calling her Emerald—which would be an amazing accomplishment if there weren’t already two girls at school who’d gotten their math teacher to call them Peaches and Tinky. Emerald’s hair was wispy and brown as a Hershey Bar all through school; now it’s full-bodied and blond. Recently, she’s started wearing lipstick and rouge and eye shadow. If somebody asks her where she works, she’ll say she’s an actress, like that’s a place, when, in fact, she clears tables at Lobster Heaven in Cape Canaveral. All this is in keeping with her philosophy about not bullshitting thine own self because she’s made every decision to change who she is on a calculated basis.

  The funeral procession is just barely past the intersection when she takes her foot off the brake and guns the engine. She lays into the horn as the Chevette fishtails around the last car, and it feels like we’re being dragged instead of just moving fast.

  “Derek’s going to put us on the right track,” she says.

  “I hope so.”

  “He gets people television and movie deals all the time. Modeling, too. Like I said, he’s kind of brilliant.”

  I’m wondering how she got such a high opinion of this guy just from talking to him in a bar every now and then. Maybe he bragged about himself the way she bragged about me. I feel my forehead tighten. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “About what?”

  “The thing with me and Brian.”

  “What’s to tell? Brian’s out of the picture, isn’t he?”

  He is. And part of me wishes he wasn’t, but I could never admit that to Emerald. She met him only once, and from those five minutes at Burger King she concluded that he was weasel-faced and spineless (he’s not; he just has narrow features and bad posture). She didn’t understand why I would want to date him, but that was right at the beginning of the summer when she was spending more and more time with her bar friends. What else did I have to do in the evenings? Sit at home with my mother? Brian and I started going out three or four times a week, went to the roller rink and the movies together, and ended up having a lot of sex in the backseat of his Pinto. “Here I go,” he’d say every time, “oh, god, here I go,” and it was cute, the way he sounded so much like a little boy. I’d give Emerald updates over the phone—only because she asked for them. She thought the sex sounded boring, and she thought it was hilarious that I’d gotten Brian to take me to Dirty Dancing four times. (“What a pussy!”) But then the stupid thing happened. The queasiness kicked in, and I started having to pee more than usual. My nipples started hurting just from rubbing against my shirt. And, of course, no period came. When I told Brian, in the parking lot of the movie theater, he took hold of both sides of his head and squeezed like he was trying to crush his own skull. Then he started sobbing. He said he was sorry. And he said he had a life. He kept saying this over and over. “I have a life, you know?” I thought at first he was talking about what we’d done, what was inside me, but he was talking about himself. He asked me to please, please, please get rid of it, and I told him of course I would. But as soon as I said it, I thought, maybe not. I was on the fence, which surprised me as much as finding out I was pregnant after we’d used condoms almost
every time. I mean, I could see the advantage of having the whole situation just go away, but I could also see me with a baby. Being motherly with it, all-the-time sweet. Sitting right there in the parking lot, I started thinking up names. Trevor if it was a boy, because I’ve always liked the name Trevor. Rachel if it was a girl. Or Becca. Brian was taking deep breaths, like somebody who’d almost drowned. He asked me not to tell anyone, and I said I wouldn’t. Then, as if the whole thing were a done deal, he thanked me. And kissed me. And thanked me again. He thanked me about a dozen times on the way home, his lower lip trembling and his hair mussed from when he’d squeezed his head. And he thanked me two days later, when he called to tell me he needed “some space.”

  Emerald came right over when I told her. She took me to Jetty Park and sat with me and let me cry as much as I wanted. When I was done crying, she told me she hated to admit it, but she agreed with Brian: I should get rid of the baby. Did I want my whole world taken over because I suddenly had to be a mom? Did I want to get fat and stay fat? No I didn’t, she said. She bought us root beer floats at Carvel. She drove to the mall and paid for us to have Glamour Shots taken (it wasn’t the best time because my face was puffy, but it was still nice of her). Afterwards, sitting by the fountain, she eyeballed the pictures and the little stamp-sized proofs they’d given us. That was when she told me about Derek the talent scout. Derek was going to like these pictures a lot, she said. She couldn’t wait for me to meet him. As for Brian, she wanted to cut his dick off, put it in a hot dog bun, and make him choke on it.

  We turn off Cullen Avenue onto a side road lined with one-story, cinder block houses. The windows are down because of the broken AC and my hair is blowing all over and sticking to my forehead. “Yeah, Brian’s definitely out of the picture,” I say. “But did you tell Derek about the thing with me?” My hand, I realize, is rubbing my still-flat stomach as I ask this; I pull it away and let it rest on the seat.

  Emerald snorts. “You’re kidding, right? That’s about the last thing you’d want a talent scout to know.”