by Christina Tang-Bernas

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On October 4, 1957, all the adults clustered in the yard were talking about the Soviets. How the B-52 bombers had begun flying full-time in case of an attack.

I paid them no mind. At fourteen, all I cared about was that my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers had played their last game at Ebbets Field, the Giants had played their last game at the Polo Grounds, and it wasn’t fair California was getting them both.

Shelly Kenicke passed me a glass of lemonade. She wore a dress with red cherries all across it, and her thick hair looked almost-black in the deep cool of the early evening. “Heard your daddy got a new convertible,” she said. 

I nodded. Failed to think of something witty in response.  The condensation slicked my skin, ran down my wrist.

“There!” Someone shouted, “Over there. Do you see it?”

We all turned as one, craning our necks and squinting our eyes. I pushed my glasses higher up the bridge of my nose, wishing the lens were cleaner.

And there it was. A bright speck.

It didn’t look like much.

And yet, it was everything.

Something a human had made was flying around in outer space just like from Science Fiction Theater.

I slid my other hand out of my pocket, fingers twitching as if it were possible to reach out and pull that light out of the sky. What would it be like, up there, hitching a ride? A warm hand grasped mine, stilling it. Shelly smiled back at me, then tilted her chin back towards the sky.

Later that night, I leaned against my Daddy’s convertible. “Do you think someday people will go to space?”

His head peeked out from underneath the hood. “Hell, if they’re shooting monkeys up there, I figure people will follow.”

“I’d want to go, you know, in space.”

“Yeah? What’s wrong with Earth?”

“Nothing,” I said, pointing straight up. “I just want to see what the Earth looks like from way up there.”

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On May 5, 1961, I sat inside an Air Force recruitment office. The ceiling fan shook as it rotated, creaking and whining and making a fuss.

“How old are you, son?” the broad-shouldered man with the crew cut said.

I straightened my back and tried to look as solemn as possible. I’d practiced in front of my bedroom mirror. “Seventeen, sir. But, I’ll be eighteen in a couple months.”

“And why do you want to join the Air Force?”

“I want to fly.” My fists clenched in my lap, and I had to force them to relax. Don’t show any signs of desperation. Be cool. Be calm.

“Well,” the recruiter drawled, “we can always use more recruits over in ’Nam. But, son, can I be frank with you?” He continued without pause, “Your eyesight’s rotten. Look, the Army will take you. Hell, they’ll take anyone. But you can’t fly planes if you can’t see.”

“I have my glasses,” I began.

He snorted. “Is that what you call that hunk of glass in front of your face? Like I said, try the Army.”

I trudged outside.

I wanted to soar up into the sky and touch the stars, not march through jungles. Yuri Gagarin had been a pilot in the Soviet Air Force, and he’d flown for 108 minutes in Vostok 1 less than a month before. The first person to reach outer space.

“Where have you been?” Dad said, from the couch in the living room. “You’re almost late for dinner.”

I swallowed the truth down. “Sorry. Studying late in the school library.”

“Well, I don’t know if they told you in school, but that Alan Shepard, they shot him up in space today, like that other Soviet. Told you we’d catch up, didn’t I? They don’t have anything on us.”

Mom bustled around, hair curling damp against her forehead and the nape of her neck. “Aren’t you excited to be graduating?” She stopped for a long moment, beaming at me. “Our little boy, going off to college come September.”

“For physics, of all things,” Dad muttered around the lip of his coffee mug. “What are you going to do with that? You think you’re some kind of Einstein or something?”

“Oh, hush,” Mom said. “I’m proud of you, son.”

I read the newspaper the next day. Fifteen minutes in Freedom 7. One hundred and sixteen miles up into the sky. School was three miles away. I imagined walking to and from school almost twenty times but doing it in the span of minutes.

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On July 20, 1969, I watched the moon landing on Mr. Tate-from-down-the-street’s television and thought of about a hundred different things I would’ve said if I were there instead, all loads more interesting than Neil Armstrong’s crackling words.

Neil was almost thirty-nine years old. I was twenty-six years old, newly married, which meant I still had time to catch up.

Half-asleep in bed that night, I told my Shelly about wanting to go to space. She laughed and laughed until she about cried. After she caught her breath, she said, “Buy me a house first, then we’ll talk about a spaceship.” I told her those astronauts didn’t buy their own spaceships, but she wasn’t listening anymore.

I listened to her steady breath, her body already curling around her burgeoning stomach, not quite showing yet. When she’d announced her pregnancy, eyes bright with tearful joy, I’d filed away my acceptance letters to graduate programs. Four years of additional schooling, likely more, with no income coming in from my end, was not the way to raise a family. Plus the pittance granted to adjunct professors or, god forbid, lecturers, if I should be so lucky to find a position after graduation.

In September, I was to start as a high school physics teacher. I’d never heard back from my application to NASA to work on rockets. To pay for a wedding, to have a life together, this was for the best.

Shelly was worth it.

I remembered what Spock said in the final episode of Star Trek, that what seems impossible often is possible with science. Everyone had also said it was impossible to shoot a man straight to the moon, even if we’d dreamed of it often enough, spurred on by Jules Verne novels and Méliès films. The waxing crescent of the moon gleamed through the window, almost blocked by the cheap telescope I’d purchased from a catalog.

We were still young, our whole future ahead of us.

When I closed my eyes, I dreamt of standing on the moon’s surface, the dirt, white as bone, blinding me. There were also talking rabbits there. I knew there weren’t any rabbits, talking or otherwise, on the moon.

It still made sense somehow.

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On June 18, 1983, Shelly and I finalized the papers of our dream house. We’d long outgrown our first tiny, ramshackle home, bursting at the seams with four loud dirt-stained kids.

“Ready?” I asked her, as we stood in front of the two-story beauty. I hefted her into my arms, her protesting all the way, and walked over the threshold.

We’d achieved the American dream. I should be happy. And most of the time I was, consumed with making enough to put dinner on the table and maybe buy my Shelly that pretty red dress she’d been eyeing.

“Dad, look,” my youngest, our only daughter, called from the family room. She’d made it a priority to plug in the television first thing. “The first woman in space, Sally Ride.” Together, we watched the newscaster talk.

I pushed the lump in my chest away, remembering the advertisement in a Stanford newspaper one of my college buddies who’d ended up a professor there had sent my way with the note, “Thought this was up your alley.” NASA was seeking applicants to the space program, and I’d applied secretly, just to see if anything would result. I would’ve told Shelly and the kids if they’d responded. I’d heard over eight thousand people had applied, but only a few had succeeded, one of them being Sally Ride. Sally Ride, physicist, and I thought about what-ifs and could-have-beens.

But Shelly wrapped her arms around me. “C’mon, honey. Dinner.”

Over the clang of silverware, our first night in the house still smelling of new paint and cardboard boxes, I asked the kids if they had ever wanted to go to space. They were smart enough, even Jimmy who’d never managed decent grades out of sheer laziness.  But they didn’t care for it, said only little boys dreamed about things like that. 

I hadn’t been a little boy in a good long while, yet I still dreamed at night about blinding white dirt crunching underneath my boots and the black velvet star-strung sky above.

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On January 28, 1986, I gathered my whole family together to watch a schoolteacher rocket into the sky on CNN. I’d applied for the spot, Shelly’s hesitant support behind me. This was my chance. NASA actually wanted a normal person like me. It felt like I’d been preparing my whole life for this moment.

And while it wasn’t to be this time around, all it meant was that I needed to try harder. There would be more chances in the future. The door had opened.

We counted down together.

Seventy-three seconds later, quiet descended as a huge fireball swamped the Challenger shuttle.

Shelly joined me in the backyard that night and pressed a coffee mug into my hand.

“Once they figure out the issues,” I said. “It’ll be safer than ever.”

“I don’t want to hear of you going up to space anymore.” Shelly said in a low voice.

I looked over and caught her swiping damp cheeks. “Shelly.”

“No,” she said. “It could’ve been you in there. It could’ve.”

“That was an accident,” I said. “It’s not always like that.”   

“But sometimes it is,” she retorted. “Like that Apollo 13 back in ’70. They were lucky they were able to come home. And when something terrible happens, I won’t be able to do a thing except watch you being torn to pieces on the television.”

She shivered, and I shrugged my jacket off.

Shelly wrapped the cloth around herself, as if shrugging on armor. “Think of me, of the kids. What would we do without you? Our oldest is getting ready for college, our youngest is barely ten. We need you. That—” she gestured upward. “That doesn’t need you. It’s just there. It will always be there. If we were meant to all fly into space, God would’ve made us able to survive up there without all these contraptions.”

She grasped my hand. “Promise me,” she said. “Stop all this talk.”

I looked down, at the white knuckles, the ragged edges of her fingernails betraying how hard she worked to hold our family together, and the tiny faux-diamond set into her engagement ring that she’d never complained about.

Swallowed.

Nodded.

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On July 21, 2011, the day Atlantis landed back on Earth and shut the space program down with it, I bought a ’57 Mercury Montclair convertible. It cost a ton of money, but I’d wanted it as soon as I saw it sitting there all lonesome on the auction block.  Hell, I hadn’t purchased one special thing for myself since I retired. I figured I was due.

Shelly slapped me over the head when I pulled into the driveway. “Why’d you buy that big boat of a car?”

I told her, “It’s not a boat. It’s a spaceship.”

“You’re crazy, you know? Good thing I love you so much.” Shelly tapped the hood, “At least it’s bright red to match my favorite dress.”

She’d gotten old and wrinkly and a bit ugly over the years, but I loved her with the same burning ferocity I had since she’d stood beside me in that cherry dress as Sputnik passed overhead, and told her as much.

She asked if I’d looked in the mirror lately.

The National League had just won the 82nd All Star Baseball Game at Chase Field, and we were in the middle of another war I didn’t understand. But none of that mattered as I slid my hands along sleek shining metal. I rapped my knuckles against the side-view mirror, pleased at the sharp tinny ping, like the noises the control panels of spaceships always made in movies.

On full moon nights now, while Shelly reads by the fireplace, I drive my spaceship to a stretch of road near the house. It goes on for about ten miles straight and doesn’t have any street lights. The whole world is bathed in a shimmery gloom, dark and light at the same exact time. I park at one end, put the top down, turn off the headlights, and sit there breathing the chilled air. 

My spaceship shakes underneath my feet when I turn the key. 

It’s ready to go, ready to fly. 

When I’m ready too, I slowly press the gas pedal down, down, down all the way to the floor, feeling the metal surrounding me rumbling, roaring, building up speed. The wind whistles past my ears, and I’m laughing. I laugh until my throat burns, the rush of air flying past, snatching away the sound. Stars streak by me in flashing lines, and the moon grows bigger and bigger, closer and closer.

And sometimes, when I get close enough, I can see those talking rabbits waiting for me on that blinding white dirt. 

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