The Dream Life of Astronauts Read Free Page A

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