The Dream Life of Astronauts (2 page)

I heard music coming from the front of the house: violins and an earnest-sounding woman singing that song from
The Poseidon Adventure.
I felt a momentary surge of excitement, thinking the movie was on TV, but the music was coming from the stereo—the
Love Songs of the Cinema
album my father had given my mother last Christmas. Their highball glasses were on the coffee table (along with the cowboy hat and one of the bottles from the sideboard) and they were standing in the middle of the room, facing each other. His arm was around her waist. Her head was resting on his shoulder. And though they seemed not to be moving at all, they were—just barely—dancing.

R
obbie had come at a good time. There were a couple of other kids my age who lived in the neighborhood, but they were both on long summer vacations with their families. We got four channels on the television, but one of them was PBS and the other three were eaten up every day by Watergate. It was the only reason I'd been reading so much: daytime TV was either educational shows or men in suits talking into microphones. I'd spend all of a minute flipping the dial and watching their suits—and sometimes their complexions—change color just slightly from one station to the next; then I was done with Watergate. But Watergate didn't seem to be wrapping up anytime soon, and the summer was only half over.

With Robbie there, my mother seemed rejuvenated—at least, while my father was at work. She made quiches and frittatas for breakfast. She kept us at the table as long as possible, asking Robbie to tell stories about their childhood back in Ohio and then barreling over him to tell them herself. The time they stole a For Sale sign from a neighbor's house and planted it in the yard of their high school principal. The time they made rum and cokes from one of the booze bottles their father kept hidden in the garage and then rode their bicycles through the flowerbeds in front of the courthouse. “And you—
you
!”
—
lighter in one hand, cigarette in the other, rocking damp-eyed with laughter—“you mooned the mayor!”

“It wasn't the mayor,” Robbie said. “It was one of the town councilmen.”

My mother turned to me. “He did it on his bicycle and nearly crashed into a mailbox.”

“Well, that part's true,” he said.

“And we snuck in to so many movies. Back in the good old days, before all the doors had fire alarms, we put duct tape on the back door of the theater so it wouldn't latch. I think I saw
Singin' in the Rain
a dozen times. And what was that Western I couldn't stand, but you kept going back to?”

“High Noon.”

“With Gregory Peck—handsome, but boring as hell.”

“It was Gary Cooper.”

“Right,” she said. “Also handsome and boring.”

“Judy-paloodie,” he said, shaking his head.

“Robbie-palobby.” With the hand that held the cigarette, she reached over and jostled my shoulder, trailing smoke between us. “Sam-palamb!”

I felt like the three of us were siblings, only I hadn't been born for any of their shared memories. It was fun to see her so animated, so cheerful. We played board games. We went to lunch at the Piccadilly and Red Lobster and the restaurant at Mathers Bridge. In the afternoons, my mother would leave to run errands, and for long stretches it would just be me and Robbie. I asked him if it was easier to play a tiny guitar than a regular-sized one, and he told me it wasn't a guitar; it was a ukulele. He played me a few songs, then said, “If you could write a song about your favorite thing in the whole world, what would it be?”

I gave that some thought and told him my song would be about
The Six Million Dollar Man.

“Shoot,” he said, grinning. “How old are you?”

“Almost ten.”

“Tell you what—in a couple of years you're going to be singing a different tune, but that's okay. The
Six Million Dollar Man
will do for now.”

He played a succession of chords and helped me write the words. They went like this:

I'm a man with unusual power

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.”

N
ot 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.

T
he 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.