TO THE MOON AND BACK

A short story about a girl defying gravity, and expectations.

1

It’s 1969 and I watch a man stand on the moon for the first time. The entire room is holding its breath. I can feel my mother’s fingernails in my arm. She got them done yesterday. I feel these nails but I don’t look at them; I don’t remember what colour they are. I watch the moon through the brittle black and white of the screen. I imagine moon dust under white boots and the thick, empty void of black through the glass of a helmet from which eyes watch and see where eyes have not seen before.

It is exhilarating.

2

It’s Monday and I sit in a classroom where everyone is buzzing. There is no talk but of the first man on the moon. Two girls in front of me sit on their desks and cross their legs over their knees, their skirts big and full, and one touches your arm and laughs at something you say. It is the kind of laugh that more girls around me have been doing lately. Thin. You can almost hear her trying. I hear this but you do not, because her headband matches her skirt and her hair is thick and bouncy at the edges. I have not done my hair today.

Our teacher comes in and so we filter back to our seats. I am sitting behind you. Your hair is slightly curly today, like you’d just washed it. Usually you gel it back. But not today. I like the curls. I wish I could tell you this but I don’t think I can.

We are talking about personal development and Ms Benson asks us to each say what we wish to be when we grow up. Jenny with the matching skirt and headband stands and she grips her hands together, and she says, I’d like to be a wonderful wife and mother, and make strawberry pies and roast every night for my family. And she is very excited when she says this. She may be looking at you.

When it is my turn I stand and I can feel everyone watching me, even you. I am suddenly very aware I have not done my hair today, and that my skirt has wrinkles. I’d like to be an astronaut, I say.

A lot of people laugh. I would like to say you were not one of them, but I think you were. I am not really looking. I can’t.

Girls can’t be astronauts, says a boy near the front, and he’s still laughing. You’re stupid.

I don’t see why not, I tell him, and my face is red and my cheeks burn like I really am an astronaut, and the sun is right in front of me.

Mrs Benson tells us to settle down and we go back to wives and mothers and sometimes teachers or receptionists. We are going from the back so I wait until it is your turn to speak. You stand and you say, I’d like to be an astronaut, too. And then you look at me and you smile only the slightest. I feel as if I am in space again, tumbling through forever, and you are the star I will pass but never touch. Perhaps we may go to space together.

3

If we’re going for space metaphors, you are, most definitely, the sun. I know this is cliché but I really have no other way to describe it. I would say you were a black hole and all you do is suck me in, but that has far more negative connotations. I would never get that close to you anyway.

It is that fine line between winter and fall and I find myself walking this line in stockings that are too warm during the middle of the day. I sit with my legs crossed beneath a sycamore tree and I can feel the sweat beneath them. They are slick as I shift where I sit and I eat my peanut butter and banana sandwich with my fingers, and I say nothing to no one.

You are with Jenny again. I think you may be dating now. I’m not sure what else I expected. You are a match set. You are with her and another group of people who I never talk to. I sit under this tree and I feel as if each leaf above me is changing colour in the seconds I spend imagining her away – from green to yellow to orange to red.

She reaches across and she brushes something from your top lip, and I can hear you both laugh. Your hands are on her waist. I can see her making you strawberry pie and roast every night in her skirts that match her headbands, and she would smile and kiss you and you’d sit around with a family of six and I can see this on a magazine cover.

You are perfect together, and I hate it.

4

I still remember the time you said we may go to space together.

We are older now, and I think you may have forgotten. You and Jenny are still dating. You take her to the pictures sometimes, on a Friday night. I have seen you there. Or your shadow. I have seen a shadow that is not one person but two, the outline of her hair curled at the edges and her cashmere coat, faces lost in darkness. I did not go to the pictures on Friday anymore after that.

We are in the same class again and I think that maybe we could go to space together, one day. I am good at science, and maths. Better than you, I think. But I am not sure this is important. My future is far less interpretive than yours. I can see myself at a table eating stews and cheesecakes with a man who only says he loves me when he wants sex. After school ends, it will not matter if I am good at science or maths. I am nothing more than a common denominator.

And so I think now that we may never go to space together. I am feeling the ending of this freedom very much. I am staring at a board thinking that these few years are all I have left until it’s empty days reading confessions and singing love songs to myself over the stove.

So for a second I let myself revel in this youth, and freedom. I watch the way the light catches your hair and your shoulders, and I imagine them beneath your shirt. Your finger taps on the desk. I wonder if you are tapping a song. If you can sing. These are things I will never know.

Outside, the world turns slowly. Time is precious here. I look at the board. We are doing integers today.

5

Today we graduate. I’m walking out the doors of a school I neither loved nor hated and you are right in front of me. I did not do this on purpose and yet here you are, and Jenny is not with you. I realise this may be the last time I see you.

Hey, I say, touching your shoulder, and you turn around. I have imagined this moment for a long time. Your eyes are heavy with brown and seem to stare right through me. Do you remember what you said to me, in eighth-grade?

What? You laugh a little. I said a lot of things to you in eighth-grade.

I want to tell you that you didn’t, not at all, because I counted each time on my fingers and I never got to ten. But instead I humour you. You told me that we’d go to space together.

Did I? You seem surprised by this, and it hurts more than it should. I think for some reason because you were always so important to me I thought at least some of that would go the other way. But it is then I realise how insignificant I am to you. Space feels like much more than a metaphor here. I can grip at the lightyears between us but it’s like a magic trick, and I never get any closer.

It doesn’t matter, I say, and I say this quickly. I brush past you and I hear Jenny behind me. Maybe she is asking you what we talked about. And you would say nothing. We talked about nothing. I look down at my hands. I have made it to ten.

6

I don’t see you again until we are twenty-seven. I am walking from my car to get dinner and I can feel someone watching me. I’m wearing expensive navy suit-pants that shift around my calves. I bought them yesterday with my own money, and I revel in it.

I am looking at my keys in my hand, watching the metal in the light and thinking about work, and then I look up and you are right in front of me. You look as surprised as I feel.

Oh, you say, and I think that you may have forgotten my name. It is strange seeing you like this. I recognise your youth between the slight lines around your forehead, and the stubble on your chin. I haven’t seen you in years. How are you?

I’m good, I say, and I smile like someone would smile at a stranger. Because you are a stranger, really, but I feel as if I know you better than I should from all those years ago. Looking at you now I wonder why you were ever so perfect to me. Your belly already protrudes like a small, cancerous lump from the too-tight grip of you belt. I wonder if it is from too many strawberry pies. Are you and Jenny still together?

You hold up your finger and give it a slight wiggle. There is an old gold band on your forth finger. Two kids, and another on the way. Are you married? You ask this, and I tell you no. You look sympathetic. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Someone will come along.

You say this like I am worried about marriage. I am not. I don’t think I would have said it before but I do now. I’m not worried, I say. I’m working, anyway. Full-time.

Oh. Where do you work?

NASA.

You nod your head and smile. This exchange is so cordial that it hurts. There must be a lot of reception work there.

And I suddenly want to laugh. I want to laugh so hard. You are standing in front of me in a suit you don’t fit, and I think God, how could I have ever been so in love with a man like this? I don’t laugh, though, because now I feel sorry for you more than anything.

No, I’m training to be an astronaut.

You stare at me. I had wanted you to look at me for long enough to notice things like the way my nose scrunched when I smiled or the slight freckles on my nose, things that take time and care to notice. You were staring at me now but it was not that type of stare. Congratulations, you say slowly.

We never got to go to space together.

What? You still seem lost in the word astronaut, and me, in my navy pant-suit and my ring-less finger.

It doesn’t matter, I say, and for the first time, it really doesn’t. Give my best to Jenny.

And that night I sit in my tiny apartment and I eat greasy Chinese takeaway and I think of only you for the first time in nine years. I watch the skyline outside my window. Lights sit and dance like jars of fireflies, and I imagine you walking home to her, kissing her on the cheek. I wonder if she’s sick of making pie for you every night. And I think today the roles have switched. It will be you who sits and lies awake and thinks of no one but me. Of me in white boots on the moon, boots meant for you but you never even got to try on.

I look up at the sky from where I sit on the couch. It is a beautiful night tonight.