The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  “I hear you,” Derek says. “You want exposure, right?”

  I glance above his head at the topless St. Pauli girl. “I don’t want to be boobs to the wind in a beer poster, if that’s what you mean. But, yeah, I want people to know who I am. I want them to feel happy when they see me, and when they hear me talk.”

  “She wants to be Miss America,” Emerald says. “Miss Florida first, but Miss America after that. I’m the one that wants to be in the movies. I want to be on TV, too.”

  Derek doesn’t look at her. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “You want to be a role model,” he says to me.

  I don’t know what I was imagining a talent scout would look like. Maybe the guy from The Idolmaker, but that’s not Derek. He’s got this slight smile set into his mouth now, and it’s not a sarcastic smile. It’s an interested smile, an impressed smile—like Reuben Kincaid when he listened to the band play at the end of every episode of The Partridge Family.

  “Dani and I both want to be role models,” Emerald says, reaching into her purse. “We want to be stars, but Dani’s got no confidence. She thinks she’s ugly—”

  “No I don’t!” I say.

  “—and I tell her she’s crazy. We’re pretty, and we’ve got more talent in our pinkies than most famous people do in their whole bodies. Look at these proofs from our Glamour Shots.”

  Derek raises a hand toward Emerald and says, “Shh-shh-shh.” He keeps his eye on me. “What talents do you have, Dani?”

  “I can play guitar.”

  “She’s really good, too,” Emerald says.

  “What else?”

  “She can sing.”

  “I mean, I can carry a tune.”

  Emerald tells him I sound just like Cyndi Lauper and that she sounds like Sheena Easton.

  Derek shushes her again. “What else?” he asks me.

  “I have a good memory.”

  “For?”

  “What I read, and just about anything I hear. Words and music.”

  “She’s like a computer. One time, somebody asked her if she could recite all fifty states in reverse alphabetical order—”

  “Emerald,” Derek says. He frowns, squints his eyes shut, and grinds his thumb and forefinger into his eyelids. When he opens his eyes again, they’re lined up just fine. It’s like the rubber band came detached and let that right eye swing true. I don’t even know if he knows it’s happened. “Could you tone it down a little?”

  Emerald looks confused. “Tone what down?”

  “The jackrabbit routine.” He turns back to me. “Any other talents?”

  I’m all out of talents, but he looks more interested than ever now that his eyes are lined up. “I’ve got strong feet,” I say. “I can stand on point—you know, like in ballet.”

  “So you can dance?”

  “Sure.”

  “Want to show me?”

  There isn’t even any music on now. The radio is playing a commercial. I make myself laugh a little and say, “Not really.”

  “Well, I’m a good judge of people,” Derek says. “And I think you’re something special, Dani. You’ve got what I call high-octane promise.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just trust me. You see this?” He angles his head and shows me the tattoo on the side of his neck. “It’s a comet.”

  “I can dance,” Emerald says softly, and then takes a swallow from her cup.

  Derek sits back and picks at the label on his beer bottle with his fingernail. “It’s a comet, girls, because I can recognize rising stars when I see them.”

  Okay, a comet is about as opposite as you can get from a rising star, since comets are always falling, so that’s pretty dumb. And I’m well aware that nothing going on in this room is going to lead to the Miss Florida contest, or even the Miss Brevard County contest. But look at me: I’ve got the best seat in the house and the air conditioner’s aimed right at it. I’m a little nauseous, but I’ve got magic fingers if I want them. And Derek’s paying a lot more attention to me than he is to Emerald—who didn’t need to be called a jackrabbit, true, but who also didn’t need to ask me if I lived under a rock. The fact is, I feel as close to being okay as I have in weeks. I almost feel special. How’s that for a reality check, Mom?

  —

  As opposed to, say, falling asleep last Friday night with my Walkman on continuous play—Blondie’s The Hunter—so that it keeps switching from one side of the tape to the other, all night long, until the batteries die. And in the morning waking up because my mother’s leaning over me, holding one half of my headphones away from my ear, and saying, “How a person can get any rest with music pounding into their brain all night long is beyond me.”

  “What are you doing in my room?” I asked.

  “Getting rid of dead weight.”

  I sat up, yawned, and glared at her. She was holding the pole of the floor lamp from the den in one hand and had the decoupaged God Bless Our Home sign from the kitchen tucked under her arm. “What can we get rid of in here? And don’t say nothing because I’ll bet you haven’t touched half this stuff in years.”

  “It’s my stuff,” I said. “I don’t want to get rid of anything.”

  “Baloney.” She crossed the room and opened my closet. “I wish I was the FBI. I’d dust every single thing in this house for fingerprints. Anything without fresh prints—out it goes. Anything with just Roger’s prints—out it goes.”

  “You can’t keep putting stuff out by the curb,” I said. “The neighbors are going to complain.”

  “It’s been free bounty up till now. Whatever I put out there, someone takes away. But today we’re having a yard sale, you and me. Out with the old, in with the moola. We’re going to make some serious lemonade.”

  “God, I hate living here!” I said.

  “I’m not so crazy about it, either,” she said. With her free hand, she pulled out a raincoat I hadn’t worn in years and laid it across my desk, then laid on top of that the coat hanger that had all my belts on it, and from the top shelf she took down the wicker basket full of hair bands and scrunchies. “Go through everything. Take no prisoners.”

  “People don’t buy used hair bands.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Her head roostered around, scrutinizing. “This goes, for sure,” she said, reaching into the back of the closet to take hold of my beanbag chair.

  The beanbag chair had been a present from Roger, not long after he and my mother had gotten married. “Let go of that!”

  “If you can tell me the last time your butt touched it, I will. I’ll bet you can’t even remember.”

  You know how when you first wake up, it takes a few heartbeats for your life to come back to you, and how that’s not always such a pleasant experience? Mine was coming back to me as she turned to walk out of the room, and the sight of her dragging that big tangerine blob across the floor made me feel both panicked and furious. I scrambled out of bed, and she saw me coming and quickstepped down the hall. I ran after her, smashing my big toe on the doorframe. “Fuck!”

  “Language!” she said, but I was still coming and she was practically running now, the floor lamp scraping along the wall.

  I threw myself onto the beanbag chair just as she reached the living room. She didn’t let go of it, lost her balance instead, and went down. Her head connected with the wall and made this loud, awful thump.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  The lamp was lying next to us, its shade buckled in. She rolled herself into a sitting position and cupped the back of her head with her hand, her face contorted and her eyes squinted shut. She was either nodding yes or just rocking with pain, I couldn’t tell.

  “Mom?” I reached over and touched her arm.

  You don’t have to pop a balloon to let the air out of it. All you have to do is stretch part of it really thin and bite a little hole so the air squeaks free. That was the sound that came from her while we were sitting there on the floor. At firs
t, I didn’t realize she was crying; I thought she was just gearing up to cuss me out. But then she stopped rubbing the back of her head and let her hands drop into her lap, and her whole body started jerking up and down with sobs. I sat there with my hand on her arm.

  “Does it still hurt?” I finally asked.

  She sucked in a wet shot of air through her nose. “Everything hurts!” she snapped. “Would it have killed him just to have stuck around for a little while longer? Just till you graduated? We could have gotten through that much, at least—like a family—and then you could have moved away to college and he could have gone off to ride buffalo, and I could have disappeared for a while, gone on one of those half-year cruises, instead of sitting here like everybody in the world’s worst ex-wife.”

  Deep-end stuff. I didn’t know where she came up with “the worst ex-wife” part, since it wasn’t her fault my real dad had died of rare cancer and, technically, she and Roger were only separated.

  “He’s a jerk,” I said.

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  “A boring jerk, and that’s the worst kind. How’s your head?”

  She took a couple of deep breaths, then wiped her nose with her hand. “Thick,” she said. “I’ll live. Do you really want to keep this hideous thing?”

  I glanced at the beanbag. “I guess not.”

  “Let’s get moving, then,” she said, pulling herself up onto her feet. “It’s already ten o’clock.”

  And this, I thought, was surely going to be one of the most miserable days of my life: co-manning an impromptu yard sale with my mother. Only, it wasn’t. We spent the next hour dragging stuff out of the house: things we didn’t care about anymore or had never used in the first place (like the pizza-maker, the fondue set, and the umbrella stand). We arranged it all on blankets and then sat down in lawn chairs and drank Cokes while the neighbors showed up one by one and mulled things over. “Get a load of that one,” my mother whispered out the side of her mouth, motioning with her chin toward a woman wearing sunglasses and a headscarf. “Jackie Oh-Brother. Ugh,” she muttered as an old man peered into a box marked Misc. “Tell Rip Van Winkle the alarm clock works.” But whenever anyone expressed a hint of interest, she sprang up from her chair, polite as could be. I just sat back and watched, for the most part. When one of the neighbors asked how much we wanted for the fondue kit, she said, “Good afternoon!” then told him the set was made in Boston, had never been used, and was only twenty dollars. The man said he’d give her fifteen, and she beamed at him as if she’d just won a prize. She wanted twelve dollars for the Franklin Mint plate set but sold it to a woman down the street for seven. We got rid of almost everything, including the God Bless Our Home sign—bought by old Mr. Burke, the cranky, white-haired scoutmaster who had a perpetual grimace and who hooked his cane over one arm while he counted out his money. By dusk, the only items left were the beanbag chair—maybe because I’d been using it as a footrest all afternoon—and the lamp with the dented shade. I dragged them both to the curb and left them there.

  “Whew!” my mother said, once we were back inside. “That was something, wasn’t it?”

  I followed her into the kitchen, where she dropped the money onto the counter, opened the refrigerator, and took out a Sarah Lee pie. I got the peanut butter down from the cabinet. I heard the pie box being ripped open and the tin plate waffling as I brought the spoon to my mouth, and a moment later I heard her let out a sigh. When I turned around, she was leaning against the counter, fork in hand, smiling at me—the same smile she’d been giving people during the yard sale, but her eyes were filled with tears again. “There’s just no knowing,” she said with a shrug. “That was so much harder than I thought it would be!”

  —

  Derek is done with his beer. He’s got a finger sunk into the bottle and is swinging it like a pendulum between his knees. “Who’s ready for another?” he asks.

  “Me,” Emerald says. She gulps down what’s left of her screwdriver, then shudders as she holds out the empty cup for him to take.

  “Angel?”

  I’ve barely had any of my Sunny D because my stomach is wobbly, so I tell him I’m fine. He smiles, stands, and walks into the kitchen.

  Emerald crosses her arms over her chest and stares at me. I roll my eyes as if to say, Isn’t all this wild?, then glance at the shelves of ceramics along the wall. Dolphins, cats, big-breasted mermaids. I slide my hand down the arm of the recliner and turn on the magic fingers, but they feel kind of like having your bowels rumble, so I turn them off. When I look back at Emerald, she’s still staring.

  “What?”

  She swoops toward me, leading with her chin. “You think you’re hot snot, don’t you?”

  I want to laugh because I haven’t heard anyone say “hot snot” since maybe fourth grade, but I can tell she’s angry. “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re not that good of a dancer, you know. I wouldn’t go dancing around anybody if I were you. Not if you’re trying to make a good impression.”

  “I was just answering his question.”

  “Right,” she says. “Goody fucking Two-shoes. I’m the one who can dance.” She sits back on the couch.

  “Girls, girls,” Derek says, coming into the room. “Are we getting along?”

  “Sure.” Emerald takes the cup from him. “How soon do you think you can start getting us auditions for stuff?”

  “Depends on what you want to go for. Also depends on how bad you want it. The key to success is talent plus what?”

  Luck, I think. Timing. I don’t really care at the moment, because I’m still surprised by Emerald. She’s always been quick to get mad, but never at me.

  “Nice skin?” she says.

  “Doesn’t hurt,” Derek says. “Speaking of which, you might want to go easy on the makeup, Emmie. You’re looking a little like a color wheel.” He squats down beside my chair and rests his arm next to my elbow. “The key to success is talent plus hunger.”

  “Talent plus hunger,” Emerald repeats, then tilts the Slurpee cup so high that it eclipses half her face.

  “So which one of you is hungrier?” Derek is touching my arm now, and I can smell the beer and gum on his breath.

  “Why does it have to be a competition?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Everything’s a competition. You ought to know that if you want to be Miss America.”

  “Yeah,” Emerald says. “That’s kind of a no-brainer, Dani.”

  This, coming from the girl who once labeled Cuba “Hawaii” on a geography test. “You don’t want to be Miss Anything,” I tell her. I’m not trying to sound bitchy; I’m just trying to point out that I’ve never heard her mention wanting to be in a beauty pageant before. But as soon as I say it, I’m glad it came out bitchy. And as soon as I feel glad about that, I feel guilty. I can tell by Emerald’s expression that she’s even madder than she was a few minutes ago; around the blush and eye shadow, her face has turned red as a beet. Derek’s right eye is creeping out of whack again. “Can I use your bathroom?” I ask, moving my arm away from his and reaching for the footrest lever.

  “Sure thing,” he says. “Second door on the left.”

  Walking down the hall, I decide it would probably be better if we weren’t here. Whatever Derek can do for us, is it really worth fighting over with Emerald? A local TV commercial, a company training film? Actually, I’d take either one of those in a heartbeat and so would she, but I can see now that we’ll both have to succeed at the same time—at the exact same moment—if we want to stay friends, and that’s not going to happen if Derek is more enthusiastic about me than he is her.

  I’m sitting on the toilet, finishing my pee, when I hear a sneeze that sounds like it’s right next to my ear. I whip my head around, and after a moment I yank the shower curtain back and see a boy sitting in the dry tub. He’s around five and is dressed in a T-shirt and underpants, and he’s surrounded by little piles of Legos and is holding a knobby cluster of them in one hand. His hair
is red, like Derek’s, and he’s got a booger bubble pulsing under one of his nostrils.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Taking a bath.”

  “There’s no water.”

  “I’m not really taking a bath. I’m making my own Transformer.”

  “Were you spying on me?” I ask, reaching for the toilet paper.

  He shakes his head. “Did you just poop?”

  “No!” I say. “I only peed.”

  “Then why are you using toilet paper?”

  I think about how I might answer this, then decide not to answer it at all. With one forearm covering my lap, and without lifting my butt much, I manage to get my underwear and skirt back up. Then I stand, flush the toilet, and wash my hands in the sink. “My name’s Dani,” I tell him. “What’s yours?”

  “Philip.”

  “Nice to meet you, Philip. How long have you been in here?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  He’s an only child, I suppose—like me. Only children don’t keep track of things the way other children do. I squat down in front of the tub and compliment him on his Transformer. Then I reach over, pull off some more toilet paper, and hold it to his nose. “Blow,” I say.

  He barely blows at all.

  “Harder,” I say, and he blows harder, flooding the toilet paper with so much junk I can feel it on my fingers. “Good job,” I tell him, tossing the paper into the toilet. “Sounds like you’ve got a little cold.”

  “We’re going camping next weekend,” he says.

  “You and your dad?”

  He nods. “I get to make the points on the ends of the marshmallow sticks with my pocketknife.”

  I find it surprising—and a little worrisome—that a boy so young would have his own pocketknife. But I’m even more surprised that Derek is the kind of person who would take his son camping. “I bet you’ll have fun,” I say.

  “Can I see your squeezebox again?”

  “My what?”

  “Your squeezebox.” He motions with the cluster of Legos toward my crotch, which I guess I wasn’t so good at hiding when I was pulling my skirt up.

  “I have to go,” I say.