The Dream Life of Astronauts Read online

  I could prob’ly knock over a tower

  If you fight me, good luck

  I cost six million bucks

  I hope I don’t rust in the shower

  He tried to teach me to meditate. We sat in the backyard, side by side and cross-legged on the grass, and he told me to close my eyes, touch my thumbs to my middle fingertips, and say “Om.”

  “Um,” I said. I didn’t understand what meditation was any more than my father understood music therapy.

  “Each one of your thoughts is a cloud,” Robbie said. “So when a thought comes into your mind, you just watch it float from one side to the other, and let it go. It’s not you; it’s just a thought. Got it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “So here comes a thought. See it coming?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it?”

  “That I have to pee.”

  “Sam has to pee,” he said. “Sam has to pee. And there it goes, drifting by. See how that works?”

  “I still have to pee.” He laughed, told me I had “monkey mind,” and I asked him if we could play Barrel of Monkeys instead. We did, and eventually we invented our own game that combined the monkeys, Pick-Up Sticks, and dominoes.

  Then my father would come home, and my mother would get back from her errand running. They would fix drinks and sit around and talk and laugh and eventually argue—about what we should have for dinner, about whether or not we should get an aboveground pool (since we couldn’t afford a cement one), about anything that came up, really. Robbie wouldn’t say much while they were going at each other. He’d watch the news and make a comment now and then, express an opinion on the president that would get a rise out of my father. And I think my father enjoyed that. He’d warmed up to Robbie a little since that first day. When he got tired of arguing with my mother—her appetite for it was always larger than his—he’d turn his attention to Robbie, start questioning him about what his life had been like back in California and grilling him about whether or not he was making any progress with his business ventures. His questions started sounding like setups for jokes, and he had a smile crimping his mouth more often than not. “Did you live in a commune, out there? Like a Moonie kind of thing?”

  “I shared an apartment with a couple of people. But I did live in a commune for a while. Pagans, most of them. We had a garden about half the size of a football field.”

  “Pagans. What’s that, devil worship?”

  “No deities,” Robbie said. “No creeds. More like universal pantheism. One nature, one mind.”

  “One something. And how’s the magic-song business coming along?”

  “Man, go easy on me. I’ve only been here a week,” Robbie said. “Drip, drip makes a river.”

  “You tell him,” my mother called from the pass-through to the kitchen. “Drip, drip mayzuh-river.”

  “Ah,” my father said, lifting his glass, “first slur of the evening. We should have a bell.”

  —

  Not long after that, my father came home from work one night looking different. I thought at first he’d gotten a haircut, but it was the look on his face. Utterly flat, like his circuit breakers had been popped. He fixed himself a drink and sat down in the recliner with the newspaper, but he didn’t read it; he just kept his gaze low, focused on some spot on the floor beyond the footrest.

  I was on the couch finishing another Hardy Boys book. Robbie was at the dining room table flipping through the pages of a used-car circular. When my mother walked in, a little later than usual, she closed the door behind her and stood just inside the threshold, staring at the three of us. “What a lively bunch,” she said. “Thanks for the greeting.”

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Sis,” Robbie said.

  She looked at my father. “How about you, Prince Charming? Don’t I get a hello?”

  “We need to talk,” my father said.

  “Well, I just walked in the door. Let me discombobulate.”

  “Alone,” my father said as she was crossing the room.

  The word put a jolt in her step, as if one of her shoes had caught on the carpet. “Well, that sounds ominous,” she said, setting her purse on the dining room table. She took a bottle from the sideboard and carried it into the kitchen, and I heard the rattle of an ice tray being cracked. I knew how long it took her to make a drink, and this one seemed to take twice as long as normal. When she came back into the living room, she stepped around the recliner, sat down next to me on the couch, and kicked off her shoes. “It is so humid out there,” she said, pinching her blouse and snapping it away from her chest. “And the mall parking lot smelled like rotting fish today. I had to pinch my nose just to get through it.”

  “Let’s go to the bedroom,” my father said.

  “I just sat down. Can’t we talk here? We’re all family.”

  My father folded the newspaper into thirds. He held it in one hand and tapped it against his thigh. “You were at the mall?”

  “Don’t worry, I was just window-shopping. The end-of-summer sales haven’t started yet.”

  “Where else did you go?”

  “The Green Thumb, to look at some ferns.”

  “Play any ping-pong?”

  “You’re coming in fuzzy,” my mother said. “What was that?”

  He kept tapping the newspaper against his thigh. “I’m asking you a very simple question, wife. Did you. Play any. Ping-pong?”

  In the books I’d been reading that summer, people seldom laughed. They chortled or guffawed. I would read those words with little idea of what they meant, but the sound that next came out of my mother seemed to fit the bill. “I think the heat’s getting to you,” she said. “Who wants chicken pot pie?” She pushed up from the couch and carried her drink back into the kitchen.

  The meal that evening was painfully quiet. My mother tried to keep up the conversation, and Robbie did his best to participate. My father silently nursed a single drink while my mother had four, and when, after a long stretch of quiet—just the ticking of our forks against the plates—she lit a cigarette and asked my father if the cat had his tongue, he said, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Do you really want to pursue this?”

  “I can do things,” my father said.

  “So can I. So can everybody. It’s a free country, last time I checked.”

  He shook his head—so subtly, he might have been shivering. “I can do things,” he said again.

  What things? I wondered. We watched a variety show after dinner, and while the studio audience chortled and guffawed its head off, none of us laughed. When the next show started, my father got up and made another drink. Instead of carrying it back to the recliner, he opened the sliding glass door, stepped out onto the patio, and closed the door behind him.

  “Go talk to him,” Robbie said to my mother.

  “He gets crazy ideas in his head, Robbie. I can’t stop the world every time he gets like this.”

  “I’m not saying you should stop the world. Just talk to him.”

  She folded her arms. “Not when he’s like this. He’s drunk.”

  “He’s not drunk,” I said.

  She took her eyes off the television and looked at me as if I’d just been beamed into the room.

  “He’s only had two,” I said. “Not even. He just got his second one.”

  “Since when did you start counting drinks?” she asked.

  From when I was about seven, would have been my best guess, but I didn’t think she wanted that answer. I shrugged.

  “You know what?” she said. “It’s probably time for you to go to bed. It’s probably time for all of us to go to bed. It’s been a long, hard day.”

  None of which made sense, because it was just after nine and I got to stay up till eleven in the summer, and because what had been hard about the day for any of us—except maybe my father, who’d gone to work?

  “I want to watch Ironside,” I said.

 
“No, you don’t. You said last week that he was a fat grouch.”

  I’d been talking about Cannon, not Ironside. As I was heading out of the room, Robbie said, “I still think you should go out there and talk to him, Judy. He’s obviously upset about something.”

  “Men,” my mother said. “You know what men are? Bizarre. With their little suspicions and their little tantrums. ‘I can do things. I can do things.’ ” She flapped her free hand like a startled bird. “What does it even mean? What things?”

  Exactly what I was still wondering as I said good night and walked down the hall to brush my teeth: What things?

  A week later, she started her adult-education class in economics. And two weeks after that, my father attacked her teacher’s car with a croquet mallet.

  —

  The mallet incident was never mentioned again—not around me, anyway. My mother kept making her fancy breakfasts; she and Robbie and I kept playing board games and eating lunches out. We churned up a strip of backyard along the fence and planted a vegetable garden (nothing grew but the tomato plants, which were spindly, and bore tomatoes the size of peas), and we had a picnic out there one afternoon while Robbie played “Garth, the Magic Garden” on the ukulele. When my mother looked at him, there was a brightness in her eyes I rarely saw, almost as if she were wearing a lot of eye makeup—though she put that on only when she was getting ready for her afternoon errands.

  Sitting on the blanket we’d spread next to the garden, Robbie got me to sing my Six Million Dollar Man song for her while he accompanied me on the ukulele. She laughed and said it was the silliest thing she’d ever heard.

  “Then you write one,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss. I was only kidding.”

  “You ought to try it,” Robbie said. “It might free your mind up, you know? I’ll start playing, and you jump in whenever the spirit moves you.”

  “The spirit’s not going to move me. I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”

  “The ukulele says different,” Robbie said, strumming.

  “Ukuleles can’t talk.”

  “Just close your eyes and say one true thing about yourself. The first true thing that comes to your mind. That’ll be the first line of the song.”

  She had her legs folded beneath her. With her hands resting flat on her knees, she closed her eyes.

  Robbie kept strumming, slow and steady. “Deep breath,” he said.

  She breathed in; her shoulders lifted and fell. I thought for a second she was going to smile, but a tremor set into her lips, and when she opened her eyes again, they were glazed with dampness. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “What do you want to hear? That I’d like to buy the world a goddamn Coke?”

  “If that’s what’s in your head.”

  “What’s in my head,” she said, suddenly getting to her feet, “is that I have a million errands to run. Will you all bring in the dishes and the blanket? I really need to get going.” Without waiting for us to answer, she tugged on her blouse, straightening it, and marched back into the house.

  “So much for that,” Robbie said. “Want to go a movie and then test-drive some cars? I need wheels, man.”

  We walked to the movie theater connected to the mall. He wanted to see something called Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, but I begged him to see Death Wish. “Too violent,” he said. “Your parents would kill me.”

  “They won’t care,” I said. “They won’t even know.”

  “What if they ask us how we spent our afternoon? You don’t want to have to lie, do you?”

  They wouldn’t ask, I told him. They never asked. But he wouldn’t give in, so we compromised—a word that, as far as I could tell, meant not getting to do what you wanted to do—and saw Chinatown instead. I had a hard time following it. But I liked the part where the private detective had a glove compartment full of watches and put one under a tire so he could tell what time somebody’s car was moved, and I liked how he had to wear a bandage on his nose after the rat-faced guy sliced him with the knife. I was still trying to piece the story together when we walked to the used-car lot across the street from the mall.

  “Corvette,” Robbie said. “Too rich for my blood, but that’s a nice-looking ride.”

  “So the lady who got shot at the end was crazy?”

  “She wasn’t crazy; she was just upset all the time.”

  “And that old man was her father?”

  “Yeah. A real creep, too.”

  “And the guy at the beginning who was crying a lot—he beat up his wife?”

  “We probably should have seen something else,” Robbie said. “A comedy or something.”

  “Hey, there!” A salesman had come out of the office and was waving hello as he walked toward us.

  I followed the two of them around the lot, still thinking about the movie. The salesman showed Robbie one car after another. They talked prices and gas mileage and down payments. “You got something on the low, low end?” Robbie finally asked. “A clunker you want to get rid of?” The salesman pulled a folded handkerchief out of his back pocket, dragged it across his forehead, and walked us over to a ’65 Mustang the color of a beet. There were dime-sized spots where the paint was missing. The front and back bumpers were speckled with rust. “This one’s talking to me,” Robbie said.

  We took it for a test drive. The salesman got behind the wheel first, Robbie took the passenger seat, and I sat in the back. I was wearing shorts and my legs stuck to the vinyl.

  “You folks local?” the salesman asked.

  “He is,” Robbie said. “I might just be passing through.”

  This was news to me; I’d thought Robbie was here to stay.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” the salesman said. “Some folks are in a panic about the Apollo program shutting down, but I think the island’s got plenty to offer. You can’t beat the weather.”

  Also news to me—sort of like hearing Robbie say our house was nicely decorated. You wouldn’t know you were on an island unless you looked at a map, and as for the weather, it was either hot, or less hot.

  “Feel that?” the salesman asked, bringing us to a stop at a red light. “New brake pads on her. New dust caps and bleed valves too. Let me find a place to pull off and you can see how she handles.”

  He drove another block and turned in to the parking lot of a motel that was chalk white, but decorated with sherbet-colored panels along its second-floor railing. They both got out while I stayed in the back, and as Robbie was rounding the front of the car, he came to a dead stop for a moment. Then he resumed walking and climbed in behind the wheel.

  “You’ll like the way she handles, I think,” the salesman said. “Decent pickup. You might want to drive around the parking lot a little, first, just to get a feel for her.”

  “Nah, I’m good,” Robbie said. He rolled the car forward, tugged the wheel as far as it would go, and U-turned us out of the lot with enough speed to make the muffler bounce off the asphalt.

  “Whoa,” the salesman said. “Easy, there.”

  Something was eating at me as we drove back to the car lot. It was like I was half-remembering a thought without even knowing what that half was. Some part of the movie we’d just seen, I assumed, because I still didn’t understand what it was about. There was the kid on the horse in the dry riverbed. The guy who looked like a math teacher who drowned.

  “Not today,” Robbie told the salesman as we stood next to the car. “Soon, though. I’ve got a girl back in California who’s holding some money for me. If I can get her to wire it over, we can do business.”

  “I’ve got tell you,” the salesman said, “somebody was giving this baby serious consideration just yesterday. They might be back this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Robbie said. “Do what you have to do.”

  During the walk home, he explained to me how car salesmen worked, how there was always somebody about to buy the car you were interested in, and how the previous owner was always a li
ttle old lady who only drove to church on Sundays. My thoughts were ricocheting around inside my head, and I felt an antsiness in my stomach that bordered on panic, all because I couldn’t decide what I wanted to ask. The salesman hadn’t said anything about a little old lady. What did water rights have to do with the woman getting shot through the eye at the end? And what the hell were water rights? Up ahead, something small and furry waddled from one side of the road to the other.

  “Jeez!” Robbie said. “Did you see the size of that rat?”

  “It wasn’t a rat,” I said. “It was a possum.” And then it came to me: the colored panels on the second-floor railing, the name of the motel. “Was that the ping-pong Dad was talking about, that time?”

  Robbie cleared his throat. “Say what?”

  “The place where we turned around. The Ping Pong Motel.” I could see the name spelled out across the sign. It was a building I’d ridden past so many times that it usually vanished into the background.

  “Aw—no,” Robbie said. “Heck, no. I think your dad was talking about real ping-pong. Like, with an actual ball and paddles? I think he was just jealous that your mom might have been out, you know, having fun while he was stuck at the office. I wouldn’t even mention it, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay?” he asked again.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I got it.” But I was smarter than that. I could spot a clue for what it was, follow the evidence, and figure things out. Where there was smoke, there was fire, and where there was an argument between your parents about ping-pong, and a place called the Ping Pong Motel nearby, well, that mystery was at least partially solved. My mother had gone to that motel, and my father had spotted her there. She’d gone to meet friends, maybe have drinks. Whatever the reason, she’d gone there without my father, and it had made him angry. It didn’t explain what had happened with her teacher and the croquet mallet, but in all likelihood there was a line connecting one thing to the other. You didn’t have to be Columbo to figure that much out.

  —

  Robbie had been with us for almost a month when he went out alone one morning and came back with the Mustang. The sticker was still in the window as he drove me and my mother down to Mathers Bridge for fried shrimp and ice cream. We were sitting at one of the picnic tables and I was done eating and was staring at the river, wanting a ship to come by so I could see the swing bridge turn, when I spotted a dark shape on the surface of the water, close to the shore. A dead body, I thought. Or a shark. I asked if I could go look and my mother waved me away with her cigarette, telling me to be careful.