The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  “No,” she said.

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “I don’t want you to finish. I have to get upstairs, okay? You have to go.”

  Driving home, I imagined what it would be like to drift off the side of the road and into a tree. I imagined the distraction that would be required to bring about such a moment of impact, and the chaos that would follow in its wake. Worth it? Not worth it? It didn’t matter. There were too many variables involved in such an act, and I was too cautious—too fussy—for that kind of recklessness. Maybe that was my design flaw.

  Dinner was waiting.

  She had her granddaughter in the backseat, groceries in the trunk, and a watermelon next to her hip when she decided it might be nice to start eating junk food again. Just one bad choice a day, like before things had gotten out of hand. Why not? She’d be sixty-one soon and had been counting calories for almost a decade. Now that her situation had changed, now that all these new responsibilities had been thrust upon her when she was supposed to be basking in her senior years, who would begrudge her a Milky Way in the privacy of her own home? She slowed the Honda until she was sitting in the middle of the southbound lane, turn signal on, waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass.

  “What are we doing?” Becca asked, head cocked to one side in the rearview mirror, her dark little eyes blinking.

  “I forgot to buy myself a candy bar at the grocery store, so we’re going to 7-Eleven.”

  “You don’t eat candy bars,” the girl reminded her. “You said you have too much self-respect to get fat again.”

  Lord, but there was almost nothing you could get away with in the presence of an eight-year-old. It was like having the Grand Inquisitor look over your shoulder every minute of the day. “Self-respect?” Gail said into the mirror. “That’s a high-minded phrase to be tossing around when you might not even be sure what it means. But never mind, I don’t feel like being judged, so we’ll just go home.”

  She rolled forward with a sinking sense that something wasn’t quite right. Then she slammed head-on into the side of a pickup truck coming the other way.

  “Jesus on the cross!” she said, her voice cracking. “Becca, are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure, honey?”

  “I’m in the backseat,” Becca said. She’d declined Gail’s invitation to “sit up front like a big person,” having pointed out to her grandmother that children were safer in the back.

  Gail got out and fast-stepped over to the other driver, a young man who was already standing in the road and staring at the spot where the Honda was crimped into the side of his truck. “Jesus on the cross, are you all right?” Gail asked him.

  He spit what she feared was blood but turned out to be tobacco juice onto the asphalt next to one of his flip-flops. “Great,” he said. “Just great.”

  As violent as the impact had been, the damage to both vehicles was minimal, could be hammered out by mechanics and paid for by insurance. But the watermelon had burst open on the floor beneath the glove compartment. They used the pay phone to call the police, and then the three of them sat on the stoop in front of the convenience store and waited. “You just had to have watermelon,” Gail said to Becca. She smiled at the young man, but he didn’t smile back. “I bought you granola bars, and veggie crunches, and peanut-butter rice cakes,” Gail said, “but you had to have your stupid watermelon.” She put her arm around Becca’s shoulder, pulled the girl against her and kissed the top of her head.

  —

  The driving class was held in the evening at the high school, in one of those portable buildings propped up on cinder blocks, and was scheduled for three and a half hours—an ungodly amount of time for something remedial and mandatory, Gail thought.

  The instructor opened his briefcase, took out a legal pad, and introduced himself as Mr. Burgher—which he spelled aloud so they would know there was an H in there. “If you’re in this room,” he said, “you’ve done something wrong. If you can see me, if you can hear my voice, you’ve screwed up behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and the state of Florida has ordered you to take this class. It’s your job to see it through to the end and learn at least one new thing. It’s my job to make sure you’re not bored to death.”

  Gail turned around in her desk and glanced at Becca, who was sitting at the back of the room doing her homework (or at least pretending to), then returned her eyes to the instructor.

  “Do I like my job?” Mr. Burgher asked them with a slight grin bending his mouth. “Absolutely. Do I want to be here any more than you do? No, I’d rather be home watching the play-offs. Regardless, ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be dazzled.”

  He was goofy, but he had a friendly face and a full head of flat, graying hair that reminded Gail of Tom Brokaw. Driving defensively didn’t mean driving aggressively, he told them; it meant driving with the ability to anticipate what the other guy might do. On the blackboard, he drew diagrams of where to hold their hands on the wheel, how to visually correspond the left side of the vehicle to the center line, how to gauge blind spots—all of which Gail already knew. He asked them what possible scenario could exist wherein the driver of a car that had been rear-ended was cited for the accident.

  Someone coughed. Someone else suggested that if a person came to a full stop for no good reason, it was their own fault for getting hit.

  “Negatory,” Mr. Burgher said. “If you’re traveling behind a car and you collide with it, you’re going to take the blame. It’s why we have the two-second rule.” Then, with the help of another diagram drawn on the blackboard, he explained what the two-second rule was.

  “Brother,” a woman next to Gail said under her breath, but Gail had decided that Mr. Burgher was at least as sexy as he was goofy.

  “Another interesting fact,” Mr. Burgher said. “Some people think it’s a good idea to throw themselves from a car when it’s gone out of control. Well, that’s fine except for a little thing we call physics. If your vehicle is flying into a ditch, say, and you jump out, which direction do you think your body’s going to go?”

  The question made no sense because who would throw himself out of a moving car, other than a stunt man? But Gail took a chance. “Same as the car?”

  “Bingo,” Mr. Burgher said, touching the end of his nose and pointing at her. “You land in the ditch and you think, Good for me, I’m safe! And then, ka-wump, your vehicle lands on top of you.”

  He wheeled a cart that held a TV and a VCR out of the corner and popped in a videocassette. “Let’s take a look at a little movie called Better Think Twice,” he said, reaching for the light switch.

  The movie was a mix of reenactments and true crash-site footage: actors sitting in cars and pretending to drive while exhausted, while smoking dope, while doing a crossword puzzle; then footage of similar cars smashed to smithereens on the side of the highway and actual people dismembered, half-crushed, the top of one man’s skull sliced off like a Halloween pumpkin’s. Gail peered behind her, but Becca was still engrossed in her homework.

  “Fun and games,” Mr. Burgher said, switching on the lights. “Fun, and, games. Or is it?”

  During the break, Gail walked to the back of the room, pulled a plastic-wrapped candy necklace out of her purse, and laid it next to Becca’s copybook. “Surprise,” she said.

  “I’m almost nine,” Becca said, glancing at the necklace. “And those are bad for you.”

  “These, too,” Gail said, producing a box of Junior Mints. “All for being my well-behaved little girl who didn’t look at that awful movie.”

  “I saw most of it,” Becca said, reaching for the mints.

  How like a Thin-Makers meeting the whole setup was—right down to the coffee urn and the bland, cracker-like cookies on the folding table next to the door. Half the participants wandered outside to smoke. Gail poured herself a cup of coffee and carried it down the wooden steps.

  Mr. Burgher was standing apart from the other smokers, s
taring out across the football field. His short-sleeved shirt seemed to glow in the dark.

  Gail looked up at the stars and turned a little as she walked, as if trying to find a particular constellation. “Oh!” she said, feigning surprise at having come upon him.

  “What brings you here?” Mr. Burgher asked.

  “The craziest thing. I was going to make a left turn and changed my mind, and this joker—”

  “No, I mean what brings you to me?” Mr. Burgher asked, taking her aback. “Care for a cigarette?”

  “No, thank you,” Gail said. “It’s not my bag, as the teenagers would say.”

  Mr. Burgher exhaled a thin layer of smoke that fell like a curtain over his upper lip. “Aren’t you a button?”

  Gail found she didn’t mind being called a button. “How’d you get to be such an expert on driving?”

  “Common sense, most of it. I worked at the DMV for years, administered driving tests, even gave the eye exams. Guess you could say I’ve done it all. You married?”

  He was nervy, but she admired his moxie.

  She’d been married three times. Her first husband, the orthodontist, had been outwardly chipper and privately gloomy—so gloomy that he kept a dank little apartment she didn’t even know about on the mainland, where he sealed himself up a year after their daughter was born and swallowed sixty Nembutals. It’s not anyone’s fault, his note read, but my life has been no picnic. So there was that.

  Her second husband had been a tax attorney who announced his desire for a separation out of the blue one night and then moved all the way out to Wyoming, where he bought a thousand acres populated with buffalo and got himself named one of Roam & Herd’s Fifty Most Awe-Inspiring People.

  As for her third husband, the water-park owner, she couldn’t even say for sure which one of them left the other; they seemed to inch apart slowly, like continents, until he was living four towns over with a woman half his age. But, like the rancher, he paid his alimony.

  “Not married,” she said. “Most decidedly not. You?”

  “Most decidedly,” Mr. Burgher said. “Is that your daughter in there?”

  “God, no. My daughter’s run off to California to ruin her life. That’s her kid.”

  “Well,” he said, throwing what was left of his cigarette onto the sidewalk, “we should get on with it.”

  He was even sexier during the second half of the class. He explained ambulance and fire-truck etiquette, told them what to do when they were in the vicinity of a school bus or were confronted with a funeral motorcade, lectured them on the dangers of hydroplaning. He told them an ironic story about Johnny-the-time-saver who just had to speed and ended up spending most of his time in traffic court. Then he sat on the edge of the desk with his legs spread wide and gave an impassioned closing speech about how safety was a communal responsibility, how no one was above it, and how no one—but no one—was beneath it. How could anyone be beneath safety? Gail wondered if he’d written this out ahead of time or was just making it up as he went. Never mind; he was taking hold of the air in front of his chest as if holding a volleyball and he was talking directly to her, as if she, more than anyone else in the room, needed to hear it.

  At the end, he handed out Certificates of Completion.

  Becca had eaten all the Junior Mints and was wearing what was left of the candy necklace. There were little tattooed dots of color on the back of her neck. Gail licked a finger and rubbed at one of the dots. “Let’s go,” she said.

  At the door, she turned to face Mr. Burgher. “Captivating.”

  “I aim to please,” he said, closing his briefcase. “Did you learn anything?”

  “I did. I never knew to put the sun visor so it’s not aimed at my forehead.”

  “Common sense, like I said.” He looked down. “What’s your name, princess?”

  “Becca,” the girl said.

  “I’m William,” he said, smiling, “but I go by Billy.”

  “Billy Burgher? You should open a restaurant,” Gail said—a silly joke she immediately wished she could retract, but he didn’t even seem to have heard her.

  “Becca’s a pretty name,” he said.

  “It’s Rebecca without the ruh,” Becca said and looked up at Gail. “She told the police officer I was distracting her and made her have the accident, but I wasn’t. I was just sitting there. She wanted junk food.”

  “Ha ha!” Gail blurted, reaching down to smooth the girl’s bangs against her forehead. “If you made any sense, I’d have a heart attack.”

  Mr. Burgher smiled at Becca, then smiled at Gail. “I wonder if you might benefit from a private driving lesson.”

  —

  She’d torn off a corner of her Certificate of Completion, written her phone number on it, and palmed it to him while they were saying goodbye. And now, just watch: two weeks would pass, then three, and during all that time she would think about Billy Burgher, each and every day, and he wouldn’t call. That was just the way some men were: interested when you were standing right in front of them and oblivious to whether you lived or died once you were out of their sight. And he was married, wasn’t he? Most definitely, he’d said, but that was an odd way to say you were married. If she fluttered her mind’s eye, she couldn’t be entirely certain there’d been a ring on his finger.

  It didn’t matter, because he wasn’t going to call. She told herself this over breakfast, muttered the words aloud while power walking through the mall. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to call.

  But two days after the class, while Becca was at school and Gail was at home bent over the bathtub with a bottle of Tilex and a scrub brush, she heard the phone ring from the bedroom and then this smoky voice rising out of the answering machine. She banged her knee against the side of the tub getting up. “Lord almighty,” she said, limping toward the phone. “Hello?”

  “Is this Gail?”

  She sat down on the bed. “Yes, it is. Who’s calling?”

  He could have said his full name. He could have reminded her where it was they’d met. Instead—an encouraging sign, she thought later—he said only, “Billy.”

  “Oh, Billy! I’m so glad you called.”

  He chuckled. “Why’s that?”

  Tilex was running down her wrist toward her elbow. She angled her arm so that the scrub brush was over the floor and not the bedspread. “Your class made me realize how I really do need a hands-on refresher about road safety.”

  “Never hurts,” he said.

  “Seriously, I’m a menace behind the wheel.”

  “Just remember the old adage,” he said. Then he cleared his throat and went quiet, as if he couldn’t remember the old adage.

  “To err is human?” she offered.

  “All learning starts with unlearning,” he said.

  “Is that right? Well, there are a few things I’ve learned to do quite well that I wouldn’t want to unlearn—know what I mean?” She waited for him to run with this; he didn’t. “Anyway, you’re the teacher.”

  He suggested three o’clock on Saturday, and she told him that would be perfect. She would arrange for a sitter and be free as a bird. Should they meet back at the high school, for old times’ sake?

  “I’ll be in a white Mustang in the Denny’s parking lot,” he said, and then clarified: not the local Denny’s, but the one two towns over, in Titusville.

  —

  Becca’s grandmother was wearing her church dress and had gotten a new hairdo that was rounder and higher than Becca had ever seen it. The whole inside of the car smelled like hairspray. She’d asked Becca what she wanted to bring to Mrs. Kerrigan’s, and when Becca had told her nothing, her grandmother had said, “Nonsense,” and had taken a grocery bag from under the kitchen sink and filled it with Safari Suzie, Safari Steve, and all their safari equipment. She’d added a My Little Pony activity book and a matching glitter pen she’d bought at the drugstore.

  The paper bag sat next to Becca on the backseat, its top rolled up and cr
inkled.

  “You’re going to be nice to Mrs. Kerrigan,” her grandmother said, “because I’ll pluck you bald if you’re not. Mrs. Kerrigan is a sad, lonely woman, and she doesn’t need to hear anything idiotic coming out of your mouth. You understand me, baby girl? No shenanigans.”

  After her mother had moved away, Becca had been switched from Freedom 7 Elementary School to Tropical Elementary, which was closer to her grandmother’s house. Becca preferred being in school to being at home. At Tropical, nobody threatened to pluck her bald. Nobody warned her not to say idiotic things. Half her class thought she was from Paris, France (she was very good at fake French).

  “Are you listening to me? I thought I told you to put that bag on the floor.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “God, I’m looking forward to being around somebody new. That’s not a reflection on you, honey; I’m talking about men. Somebody who appreciates a grown woman’s company!”

  “Your hair smells,” Becca said.

  From the front of the car, her grandmother shot her a look in the rearview mirror.

  “It does. It’s making me sick.”

  “Stop it,” her grandmother said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, that sarcasm you think is so cute. You’re not going to ruin today for me. Nothing is going to ruin today. Do you know what you are?”

  They were sitting at a red light. As soon as the light turned green, the car behind them honked and they both flinched. Her grandmother tried to honk back, but this wasn’t her car, it was the car they’d given her while hers was in the shop being fixed, and she pushed the wrong spot on the steering wheel.

  “Bastard,” she muttered, moving the car forward. She found Becca again in the mirror. “You’re a hardheaded girl who’s actually nice, deep down, and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you’re going to start enjoying life.”

  Becca traced a finger over the flower petals printed on the skirt of her jumper. She’d decided that if she didn’t like it at Mrs. Kerrigan’s house, if it was as boring as it had been the last time, she would pretend to be poisoned. She would moan and clutch her stomach, and she would scream if Mrs. Kerrigan tried to touch her. She would become delirious, start flailing, and break something precious. Then, while Mrs. Kerrigan was weeping because whatever Becca had broken was irreplaceable, Becca would dump all the toys out of the bag, fill it with food from Mrs. Kerrigan’s refrigerator, and leave. She would find a bus station and get on a bus that would take her to the airport, and at the airport she would follow some woman who was about to get on a plane to Paris, and as soon as the woman boarded the plane, Becca would start crying, “Mamá! Mamá!” and push her way through the other passengers. She would slip into one of the bathrooms on the plane, and by the time the stewardesses figured out she was a stowaway, they’d be airborne, nothing to be done about it. In Paris, she would buy two postcards of the Eiffel Tower and send one to her mother in California and the other to her grandmother in Florida, and both postcards would say the same thing: You had me to lose. She didn’t know what this meant, exactly, but a lady in a TV movie had written it in a goodbye note to her fiancé, and the words had left him teary eyed and speechless.