Everyone had a good story about Debbie Quartz. My story is simple, and I haven’t told it so far because I didn’t want to embarrass Debbie in this web diary — especially given how much trouble she was having from the moment we broke free of Earth’s gravitational pull. The story is this. In the last six or eight weeks before launch, it was becoming abundantly clear that there was trouble in my marriage. I’m not telling you anything that you haven’t been informed of here already. But somehow I was among the last to know. My daughter was spending most of her time at school, and listening to music I really didn’t care for, like that noise that is referred to as dead girlfriend. She had the piercings, the skull implants, you name it. Like any junior high kid, full of attitude and busy with extracurriculars. Impatient with parentally imposed anything. This was compounded by the times when my daughter didn’t really have enough to occupy her. She didn’t play field hockey or soccer. She was not an athlete. Some days, therefore, she came over to the mission campus near Cape Canaveral. My wife and I took advantage of the supervision opportunities that were available to us there. Older kids killed some time there now and then because the family center offered wireless digital networking and a small library of uploads, study aids, and games. Sometimes the kids were even allowed to watch satellite launches live.
Even though Debbie didn’t have any close family, or maybe because of it, she always took time to go down to day care to look in on other people’s kids. She seemed to know everybody’s kids. She knew all the birthdays. She gave Steve’s son a home rocketry kit for his birthday one year, and she went out with Arnie and his twin girls to one of those animatronic restaurants, where, she later said, she’d accelerated a case of upper-frequency hearing loss. Of course, Debbie Quartz also knew my daughter, Ginger. In fact, my daughter, Debbie said, was her favorite kid of all the children of the mission. My daughter, according to Debbie, had that mixture of brilliance and melancholy and realism that makes for the most fabulous adults. Debbie volunteered to get me a GPS lapel pin for my daughter, so that I’d quit losing track of her and so that I could take a more active role.
I laughed this off, because maybe I just didn’t want to hear it. Until the one night I was supposed to go pick Ginger up. It was during the first trial separation. I drove all the way to my wife’s brother’s place, where she and my daughter were staying, I knocked on the door, and my wife appeared in some kind of slutty outfit that had definitely not been donned in order to impress me. She said, “Where’s Ginger?” To which I said, “What do you mean, where’s Ginger? I’m here to pick her up!” Probably you could write some of the scene yourself. Almost immediately, there was a lot of shouting back and forth, or at least a lot of shouting on my wife’s end of things. This despite the fact that we were supposedly parting amicably, which means with tremendous feelings of failure. But no bloodshed. No! It’s your turn to pick her up! No, it’s your turn! How could you be so callous!
If you start thinking about space-time, and living in space-time, which you do when you’re about to get into an Orion-class rocket and blast out there into the blue, you inevitably start feeling philosophical about how human beings can have their own little wormhole-type moments, moments when, for example, the mistakes of your marriage come clear before you. Such a time might be when your kid goes missing. It is true that what I have mostly done is put everything ahead of my marriage, put my work ahead of my marriage, put my country ahead of my marriage, put my hobbies ahead of my marriage, put my individual retirement account ahead of my marriage, you name it. If I needed to go back for another round of hyperbaric-chamber training, I did it right then; I didn’t care if my wife was nursing the baby. If there was another soirée where attendance was optional, I went first and stayed last, and let my wife bail out whenever she needed to. I was a mixed blessing as a human being, and I knew I was a mixed blessing, but I allowed the space mission to be the one thing I could do. A long stint in emptiness between planets, where I am alone in my thoughts for weeks at a time? I can do this. Other people join the space program because they like military protocol, or the fraternity, or they want an adventure, or because they want to be famous. I wanted none of these things. I just thought I’d be good at the loneliness.
Anyway, so my wife and I got into my car, and between bursts of yelling at each other, we tried to reconstruct where Ginger might have been. Ginger was just at that age when she was wearing those fashionable short shorts, through which you could practically see her labia, and there were the piercings I already mentioned, and the subcutaneous, cranially implanted jewelry, which went with the partially shaved head, and she hadn’t yet realized that she was no longer the innocently unsexed girl, but was now becoming the sex machine of puberty, the desiring machine. I had to avoid looking at Ginger sometimes, because I was embarrassed about how proud I was of her very adult body. This all made it that much more terrifying not to know her whereabouts. My wife was on the wrist assistant, dialing up Ginger’s friends and their mothers, and that horrible walkie-talkie bleep those things make was driving me insane, and then it hit me! It was obvious: Ginger was back at the campus, not at oboe lessons, not at ballet. And we drove all the way back to the family center at Cape Canaveral in silence, scarcely a family in our sub-mini coupe that was just big enough to fit two people whose marriage was falling apart.
We found Ginger with Debbie Quartz. In fact, the two of them were in stellar engineering, which is a simulation program that Debbie helped to design. You gather up a certain amount of liquid hydrogen, and a certain amount of stellar dust, add some gravitation, a little bit of galactic convection, and so forth, and you make up a star and a star name. You watch to see how your star will affect the gravitational fields of the stars around it. Maybe you try to spin off some planets; maybe you attempt to terraform. It’s a helluva game. Debbie was in on the ground floor with this one, had a percentage on it, which was why she had a waterfront house and a palm grove. She had a friend trying to market the product to the big game behemoths from China and India. But that’s not the part I’m remembering. The part I’m remembering is that I found my daughter, Ginger Stark-Richards, with Debbie Quartz, sitting by a console, designing a solar system, and when I started in on Ginger, like a dad will do sometimes, asking her why she hadn’t called either of us (even though it was probably all my fault), Debbie said, “Jed, Ginger and I had this appointment on the books for a couple weeks, and I just forgot to tell you. I’m awfully sorry about that.”
Some people just have that smile, the one with the many constituent hues. The rainbow coalition of smiles. Not only a smile because there’s no longer a problem, but also a smile because the person smiling somehow knows more about the situation than you do; it makes her happy not to require recognition of her kindness, because she actually cares about you and doesn’t care about her own glory; it’s a generous smile, a confident smile, a happy smile, but also a smile with a gradient that indicates there’s not much left to smile about these days; we do the best we can. Only a sad person can smile so memorably. That was Debbie Quartz’s smile, especially when she took my wife’s hand, and said, “Pogey, I should’ve called. I’m really very sorry. I have just been so excited about this stellar modeling, and Ginger was the very first young person I wanted to try it out on.”