The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  —

  My stepfather calls from Wyoming to talk to me every Sunday night at eight o’clock on the dot. Like my mother, he’s taken an interest in me only since they split up, and now he asks all kinds of questions (about school, about my guitar playing, about my plans for the future). But Roger is easier to keep at bay because of the Florida-Wyoming thing, which means we don’t have to see each other not looking at each other when we’d rather not be talking. And while I don’t bother telling him the opposite of whatever is really going on, I can usually avoid any topic just by asking Why? and then going quiet.

  “How are your friends?” he asked me last week. “Are they treating you okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “And what about your grades? You’re keeping those up, I hope.”

  “They’re so-so,” I said.

  “And is your mother doing all right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “She couldn’t be better.”

  He’s not a dummy; he picked up on the sarcasm. “Listen, Dani, I’m very sorry about this whole—situation.”

  “Why?”

  Silence.

  “Because I don’t want you to think it’s any reflection on you. And I don’t want you to feel like you need to side with either one of us.”

  “Why?”

  Silence.

  “Because you’re the innocent party here. Not that anyone’s guilty. Your mother and I just stopped functioning on a—sufficiently cohesive level.”

  I wonder if he used this same sort of language with my mother. Gail, I’ve been meaning to tell you: we’re not functioning on a sufficiently cohesive level. Anyway, one more Why? and I knew I’d be home free. He didn’t want to go into the private details of their marriage with me, and I certainly didn’t want to hear them. But before I could ask Why? again, he changed the subject.

  “You really should think about coming out here for a visit. It’s not all cowboys, you know; it’s a lot of regular folk, too. A lot of teenagers. There’s a community center right down the road from me, and they have a newsletter that lists all kinds of events for young people.” He paused for a moment; I pictured him taking off his glasses, squinting at them, putting them back on. “And Wyoming has a lot of natural wonders. It has Yellowstone and Old Faithful. Some interesting history, too. It’s where the very first J. C. Penney opened. And did you know it was the first state to grant women the right to vote?”

  I don’t care about natural wonders, I can’t vote for another two years, and I wouldn’t step foot in a community center if you paid me. “Okay,” I said. Okay can also shut down the back-and-forth in a heartbeat. It’s basically what everyone wants to hear.

  He asked me to say hi to my mother for him and I told him, not for the first time, that I wasn’t doing that for either of them; they could do that themselves.

  He told me he missed me and loved me, and I told him I missed him and loved him, too. We said goodbye and hung up for another week.

  The thing is, I guess I do love Roger. My real dad died when I was a baby (he had a rare cancer, my mother told me, but she doesn’t like to talk about it). My first concrete memory of my mother is of her pitching a fit—I mean, screaming her head off—in the checkout line of a grocery store because the cashier wouldn’t take her coupons. She was always pitching fits when I was little. Then Roger came along when I was seven, and they got married, and she calmed down some. We moved into a new house, I got a bigger room, and we started buying real trees at Christmas. So I love him for that. But I don’t miss him, not really. Maybe that makes me a cold person, or emotionally wounded, whatever a psychiatrist would call it. I don’t feel wounded, or like I need to choose sides. Roger was never mean to me, never once yelled at me, never even scolded me that I can remember; he was always just there: calm and reserved and focused on some inner thought, like the most patient man in the world waiting for an elevator that would take him to some other floor—and then the elevator arrived, and he got on.

  “So what did Wild Bill Hickok have to report?” my mother said when I came into the kitchen. She had various ways of asking about Roger’s phone calls, but she always asked. She was sitting at the table, going through a week’s worth of mail.

  I opened the refrigerator and stared into it. “I’ve told you, if you want to know, you should call him yourself.”

  “Is he out there riding buffalo all day with his new girlfriend?”

  There might have been something in the fridge that I felt like eating, but I couldn’t see it, could only see things I didn’t want to eat, and I had to close the door fast, because lately the sight of the food I don’t want to eat is enough to make my stomach turn. I picked up an apple from a bowl on the counter and checked it for spots. Then I didn’t want just the apple. I wanted the apple with peanut butter, but by the time I got the jar down from the cabinet, I only wanted the peanut butter. So I set the apple back in the bowl, took a spoon from the drawer, and started out of the kitchen.

  “Wait just a minute,” she said before I’d rounded the corner.

  I stopped and looked at her.

  A faint dusting of coffee cake crumbs was on her lips. She looked like an overgrown child, a puffed-up baby-woman about to throw a tantrum because snack time was over. “I swear to god,” she said, “with you, it’s like speaking two different languages. I just asked you if he’s riding buffalo with his new girlfriend. Why didn’t you answer me?”

  I stuck a spoonful of peanut butter into my mouth and turned away again.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said, putting a little more volume in her voice. “Don’t you dare walk away without answering me.”

  I’ve got a bun in the oven, I imagined blurting out. I am one hundred percent, baby-on-board pregnant, and I don’t even have a boyfriend.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked. “You need a reality check, Dani. If you can’t answer this one simple thing for me, if you can be that cruel, then you need a reality check. You think everything’s a game? Life is cruel, little lady—much crueler than anything you can wrap your head around. If you’re not careful, the world will chew you up and spit you out onto the sidewalk.”

  “All right!” I said. I couldn’t resist giving her a hard time when she was acting crazy. It’s like how you can’t resist kicking an empty milk carton someone’s dropped on the cafeteria floor—not because you enjoy kicking things so much, but because the carton and your foot are in the same place. Still, I didn’t need to hear her telling me I might end up as someone’s cud on the sidewalk. “He sounds fine, and he didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend, okay? And people don’t ride buffalos!”

  She folded her napkin and touched it to her mouth. “A direct answer,” she said. “How refreshing. What did I do to deserve that?”

  “Made me feel crummy,” I said, and carried the peanut butter to my room.

  —

  I know there are counselors for this sort of thing. Ours at school is named Mrs. Portofino. She smells like pine needles and has a sweet, Mrs. Claus–sounding voice. She wears earthy colors and has pamphlets on a rack outside her office with titles like Avoid Tomorrow Today and Who Deserves to Know? But I can’t imagine talking to her about what’s going on in my body. It’s probably her job to follow up, not to let something drop after she finds out about it. She might even be legally bound to contact all interested parties, which would be aggravating since I’m really the only party that needs to be interested. Even if she counseled me and then never brought it up again, I can’t imagine having to pass her in the halls for the next two years with that conversation under our belt.

  I also know I’m not the first and am probably about the millionth teenager to be in this predicament, but there’s no comfort in that, not one ounce. This girl Katie Hess transferred to Merritt Island High from Lake Wales near the end of freshman year. Because she was new, she was aching for friends and was always coming up to me and telling me things about herself I didn’t really want to know. Just before summer b
reak, she was sitting next to me at a pep rally and whispered into my ear that she was pregnant by a boy from Cocoa and was scared to death. “Wow,” I said—because I barely knew her and what else was I supposed to say? But three months later, when the new school year started, she wasn’t pregnant. So either she got rid of it, or she lost it without trying. I was tempted to ask and still am, but she’s somehow landed herself a whole new set of friends and avoids me now, so I can only assume she wishes she hadn’t told me to begin with.

  Sometimes I think I don’t have to talk to anyone about it. Talking is just thoughts that overflow out of a person’s head, and thoughts aren’t always rational. I can spend all of homeroom fantasizing about a time machine that will take me back to the moment right before Brian, on that fated night, said, “Oh, god, here I go,” and pulling away.

  For about the length of time it takes me to brush my teeth, I can picture not having this baby at all. I can picture going to the bathroom and having a little speck fall out of me, straight into the toilet (that happens, doesn’t it?), and feeling relieved as I watch it swirl away.

  For as long as it takes me to figure out a new song on the guitar, I can picture me having it, full-term, and then giving it to some nice, loving couple who can’t have children of their own and who would raise it and let me visit it now and then.

  But I can also see me keeping it.

  I’d be a good mother, I think. I wouldn’t want to cuddle up with it just because I was feeling sorry for myself. I wouldn’t ask it crazy questions and get bent out of shape because I didn’t like the answers.

  Imagine you’re you, and you have this little person growing inside you that you haven’t met yet. You don’t know what its voice is going to sound like, you don’t know what its favorite color is going to be, you don’t even know what sex it is. Wouldn’t you be curious?

  Imagine having a tiny little person that wants your boobs—just one of your boobs—more than a pot of gold.

  Imagine holding your baby on a sunny day, and pointing at a palm tree and saying, “See that? That’s an elephant. Just kidding, baby; that’s a palm tree.”

  —

  Emerald stops along the curb in front of a squat, orange house with a gravel roof. A Yugo is parked in the driveway; two more Yugos are sitting on the strip of grass alongside it, one of them raised up on blocks. In the front yard is a Big Wheel, and a kiddie pool with a hose sunk into it. I tilt the mirror on the passenger’s side and frown at my reflection. “I look awful and I feel like crap,” I say. “I’m getting a zit on my chin.”

  “You look pretty,” Emerald says. “You just have to tell yourself you look pretty.”

  “Okay, I look pretty. But I feel like crap.”

  Music is coming from inside the house. On the front porch, Emerald rings the bell, knocks on the door, rings the bell again. She turns to me and curls her lips back. “Do I have food on my teeth?”

  I shake my head.

  She bugs her eyes out. “Crusties?”

  “No crusties.”

  She knocks and rings the bell again.

  “What do you want?” a voice calls from inside.

  “It’s Emerald!” Emerald says. “And Dani. Emerald you met at the ABC Lounge that time, and Dani I was telling you about. You said to come by.”

  “Wait,” I say, “you met this guy once?”

  After a few moments, we hear a bolt unlock. Then a chain sliding out of its track. When the door opens, there’s a man who’s around my stepfather’s age, maybe younger. He’s barefoot and is wearing shorts and a white T-shirt with high sleeves that show off his muscled-up arms, and he’s wiping his hands with a rag. He looks a little like the guy who works at 7-Eleven and a little like the guy who cuts keys at the hardware store, but maybe that’s only because he’s stocky and has reddish hair, like they do. There’s a tattoo on the side of his neck, a kind of little, blue crescent, and there’s this unfortunate thing with his eyes: the left one is focused on us and the right one is angled out, as if it’s been fixed to his temple with a tiny rubber band. He’s staring at us and that Big Wheel at the same time. “You’re kidding me,” he says.

  “Nope,” Emerald says.

  The song is that awful “Love Touch” the radio stations have been playing to death for over a year now. “You’re blowing my mind,” the guy says. “I gave you my address?”

  “You wrote it on a napkin, remember? You said to come by.”

  I’m about to take hold of Emerald’s arm and pull us off the porch, because either we’re at the wrong house or this guy’s got a screw loose. But then his mouth curls into a smile and he points right at Emerald’s chest and says, “Had you for a second there, didn’t I?”

  “Goddamn!” Emerald says in a voice so loud it startles me. “You did! You sure did!”

  “Get in here,” he says, backing into the house to make room for us.

  Emerald steps inside, and even though I still have the urge to grab her arm and tug her back to the car, I follow.

  The shag carpet is the color of avocado meat. Along one of the wood-paneled walls is a pair of bracketed shelves full of ceramics. People and animal figurines, vases and bowls, ashtrays and peace signs—all painted and glazed and shiny. The coffee table is draped with newspapers and has pencil-sized carving tools on it, little sheets of sandpaper, and another ceramic: this one an unpainted, chalk-white turtle. Over the couch is a framed poster of the St. Pauli girl with her bare boobs hanging out of her getup.

  “Cool place,” Emerald says.

  “That it is,” the guy says, still wiping his hands. “Not the Ritz, but I think a living space should be hands-on, you know? Utilitarian.”

  “Totally,” Emerald says.

  “People tell me coming in here is like climbing into my brain.” He drops the rag onto the coffee table and holds his hand out toward me. “I’m Derek,” he says. “You must be Dani.”

  “That’s me.” I don’t want to shake his hand because it doesn’t look too clean, despite all the wiping. But I do.

  “You’ve got a face like an angel,” he says. “Like a Charlie’s Angel, if there’d been a fourth one.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Make yourself at home.”

  Emerald sits down on the couch. I move to sit next to her, but Derek touches my shoulder and nods toward a puffy leather recliner. “You should get on that,” he says. “Most comfortable seat in the house.”

  I sit down in the recliner.

  “It rocks,” he says. “Try it.”

  I rock the chair back and forth a little.

  “And don’t forget about this.” He bends over so close to me that I can smell his breath—gum and, just behind it, beer—and pulls a lever. The chair slides forward and flattens out a little, and the footrest swings up, elevating my legs.

  “Who’d like a little libation?” he asks, straightening up.

  “Me,” Emerald says. “I’d like a little libation. A gin and tonic would hit the spot right about now.”

  I’ve had beer with Emerald before, and wine coolers, but I’ve never seen her drink anything as fancy as a gin and tonic.

  “The problem with that,” Derek says, “is there isn’t any gin. I’ve got Heineken, vodka, and Sunny D.”

  “A screwdriver, then,” Emerald says.

  “How about you, angel?”

  I feel a little silly, having just walked into a stranger’s house and suddenly reclining with my feet up. I’m still queasy, but at least the air conditioner is on and I’m not sweating like I was in the car. “Sunny D,” I say.

  His left eye is watching me. “That button on the front of the arm?” he says before heading to the kitchen. “Magic fingers. Just so you know.”

  “How long are we going to stay here?” I ask Emerald.

  “Relax,” she says. “Go with the flow.”

  The radio must be in the kitchen, because I hear him turn the dial from “Love Touch” to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

&nbs
p; “He doesn’t look like a talent scout,” I whisper. “And he doesn’t really seem all that brilliant, either.”

  “He wants to help us.” Emerald picks up one of the finished ceramics from the end table. “Look—a monkey with a boner.”

  A few moments later, Derek comes out of the kitchen holding two plastic Slurpee cups and a bottle of beer. The Slurpee cups look like they’ve been through a dishwasher about a hundred times. He hands one to Emerald, saying, “For the painted girl,” and hands the other one to me. “For the angel.” Then he straightens up, takes a swig of his beer, and rolls his head around. “The thing is,” he says, “I’m no more brilliant than any other guy who’s plugged in to the energy around him.” Apparently, I wasn’t whispering softly enough. “There’s good juice everywhere, right? You’ve just got to tap into the vibe.”

  I’m pretty sure the juice he’s talking about isn’t what he just handed me. And the “vibe” is probably something he thinks is spiritual. Or sexual. Not that it makes any difference to me.

  “And while you’re right, I don’t look like a talent scout,” he says, “I do have some experience in the field.”

  “Told you,” Emerald says.

  I ask him if he has a business card, and he says he’ll get me one. But then he just sits down across from Emerald on the couch and takes another swig of his beer. Emerald is still holding the monkey with the boner. She wags it toward him, grinning, and he takes it from her and sets it on the coffee table.

  “So who’ve you worked with?” I ask. “Anybody famous?”

  “That depends,” Derek says. “You know the girl on the Wynn-Wynn Windows commercials?”

  I shake my head.

  “I got her that gig. And another girl who was working at Mister Donut when I met her, she just finished starring in an industrial for Lockheed Martin.”

  “Industrial what?” I ask.

  “Industrials are movies a big company makes for its employees. For training purposes.”

  Emerald says, “God, Dani, do you live under a rock?”

  “But they don’t get shown in theaters?”