“Oh. Are you a Jewess now?”
“I don’t have to be to recognize offensive language.” She crossed the room and glared at Betty. “You were a WASP. Have you forgotten why we fought the war?”
“It’s okay.” It wasn’t, but I needed to pretend it was, so I stepped away from the sink. Our intervention wasn’t helping and might even make things worse. “Betty, I’m sorry. May I … I just wanted to talk to you. May we?”
She pursed her lips for a moment, then gave a cursory nod. “Go ahead.”
“Could you—could you not tell Life that I take Miltown?” Tension locked my ribs into a knot. “Please.”
She shook her head slowly. “Look … I’m sorry. This is my career.”
“Ours too.” I gestured to the five of us crowded into the bathroom. “Women in the space program are already on shaky ground. How do you think it will look if one of them is on tranquilizers?”
“If you don’t get to go into space, you can go back to the computer department. You have a husband who’s in the program. It is a colony effort, so it will just be a matter of time before they let you go up, even if I run the article tomorrow. Me … they’re never going to let me go. I don’t have another career. All I’ve got is this job with Life magazine.” Betty rested her hands on her hips and stared at the floor. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
Jacira cocked her head. “Do even you want to go into space?”
“Yes!” Betty’s voice cracked, and she balled her hands into fists. “Jesus. Why does everyone think that I don’t care? Parker keeps saying I’m not a pilot, but I am, and—forget it.”
“I’ll teach you math.” The offer came out before my brain caught up with me.
“What?”
“I used to tutor at university. Not just arithmetic, but the higher-level stuff.” This was like Parker offering to certify me on the T-38 if I didn’t tell anyone about the weakness in his left leg. Had he felt this gripping desperation wrapping itself around his middle when he’d been talking to me? I sighed, letting my ego out so I could keep going. “They want more computers. I can teach you to be one.”
“And if I say no?”
Behind me, Nicole shifted and sighed. “Then we go back to high school. I know about Parker. And I know about his wife.”
Betty’s face went pale. I’d thought that she might be sleeping with Parker, but whatever was going on with his wife was outside my awareness. And it didn’t matter. I wasn’t Parker.
“No.” I turned to face Nicole. “We’re not going to play that game. If Betty doesn’t want to help us, then that’s her call. We’ll respect that, and I’ll figure out something else.”
Nicole’s jaw set, as if she were about to argue with me. In the mirror over the sink I could see Betty, brows drawn together, leaning back on her heels as if she would flee if she could. Behind her, Jacira and Sabiha guarded the door. All of them watched me.
And in the mirror, I could see who I could become. I could become Parker, pushing with everything I had to get into space.
I let my breath out, counting through a Fibonacci sequence. “I’m sorry, Betty. I’m sorry I’ve treated you badly. And I’m sorry I tried to bully you into changing your story.” Turning, I rubbed my forehead. “The offer to tutor you in math still stands.”
She blinked at me and then, surprising everyone—including herself, I think—Betty burst into tears. For a moment, we all stood there, shocked. I don’t know who moved first. Maybe Nicole. Maybe Jacira. Maybe me. But in a moment, we all had her surrounded and held.
And that—that was when I knew that we really had something. We were Lady Astronauts. All of us. And, goddamn it, we were all going to go into space.
I was not the first woman in space. Nor would I be the first woman on the moon. My role was to fly the command module while my male colleagues went to the surface.
The night before we all went into isolation—it wouldn’t do to get ill during the eight days we were in space—Nathaniel and I threw a party. Nicole let us borrow her house, since our apartment was too tiny.
It is a strange thing, knowing that, in a little over a week, you will be strapped to a four-megaton bomb and hurled into airless space. Every time I spoke to someone, I couldn’t help but think, This might be the last time.
But I’d been given a second chance with Aunt Esther, hadn’t I? She sat next to me on the sofa in Nicole’s living room with a rum and Coke perched on her knee. The party might have been in my honor, but she was the life of it.
“The worst of it was that I’d lost Mama’s union card under the roller coaster! There I was, on the horns of a dilemma…”
Eugene Lindholm knelt on one knee to listen to Aunt Esther, while Myrtle perched on the arm of the sofa. He seemed to find my aunt endlessly charming. “What did you do, ma’am?”
I’d been a little concerned when I introduced her to the Lindholms. What would this old Southern woman think about our black friends? I needn’t have worried.
She laid her hand on Eugene’s arm. “Well, I’m glad you asked. I knew that if I didn’t find the card, Mama would know that I’d snuck out to the carnival, and worse, she wouldn’t be able to work … so Rose and I snuck behind the roller coaster, then I hitched my skirt up to my thighs and crawled under it. If Mama had known how much leg I was exposing, she would have been more upset by that than the loss of her card! But I got it back. Yes I did.”
Hershel sat in the chair to my right, his crutches propped against its side. He leaned over to me and gestured to Aunt Esther. “It’s like this at home. If we can get her telling stories from when she was a kid, there’s no end to them. What she had for breakfast? Not so much.”
“But it’s working out?”
He smiled. “It’s perfect. Well, all right, not perfect, but the kids love her, and she’s able to help Doris with cooking, so it’s pretty good. Speaking of kids … Tommy!”
“Now, I’ve been talking so much I haven’t had a drop to drink. Why don’t you tell me about yourself, young man?” Aunt Esther took a sip of her rum and Coke, bright eyes shining at Eugene.
I had to admire how skillfully Aunt Esther dodged the fact that she couldn’t remember Eugene’s name. I made a note to try that line next time I was “in the barrel” on a press junket.
Tommy arrived at his father’s side. “Yes, sir?”
“Go get the present we brought Aunt Elma.”
He nodded and ran off again, all long legs. I shook my head. “I swear he’s a foot taller than last year.”
“We can’t keep him in clothes.”
“—heading in for astronaut testing.”
I swiveled to Eugene. “What? When were you going to tell me? Congratulations!”
“They just sent the letters out.” Eugene shrugged, looking surprisingly sheepish. “You’ve been a little busy.”
“Which is understandable.” Myrtle rested a hand on his shoulder with proprietary pride. “He passed the tests be fore, so hopefully this time they’ll have the sense the good Lord gave them, and accept him.”
“Well, Parker likes you, which will help enormously.” I left alone our continuing animosity. At times it seemed as if it had vanished, but he never let me forget about the Miltown. “You said the letters just went out…? Excuse me.”
I stood and went in search of Helen. She, Ida, and Imogene stood near the punch bowl, giggling with Betty. “… still can’t belie—Shush!”
“Shush?” I stopped next to them and arched a brow. “So, you’ve either just spiked the punch, or you got a letter that none of you told me about.”