The Dream Life of Astronauts Read Free Page B

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.
    “Then you write one,” I said.
    “Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss. I was only kidding.”
    “You ought to try it,” Robbie said. “It might free your mind up, you know? I’ll start playing, and you jump in whenever the spirit moves you.”
    “The spirit’s not going to move me. I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”
    “The ukulele says different,” Robbie said, strumming.
    “Ukuleles can’t talk.”
    “Just close your eyes and say one true thing about yourself. The first true thing that comes to your mind. That’ll be the first line of the song.”
    She had her legs folded beneath her. With her hands resting flat on her knees, she closed her eyes.
    Robbie kept strumming, slow and steady. “Deep breath,” he said.
    She breathed in; her shoulders lifted and fell. I thought for a second she was going to smile, but a tremor set into her lips, and when she opened her eyes again, they were glazed with dampness. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “What do you want to hear? That I’d like to buy the world a goddamn Coke?”
    “If that’s what’s in your head.”
    “What’s in my head,” she said, suddenly getting to her feet, “is that I have a million errands to run. Will you all bring in the dishes and the blanket? I really need to get going.” Without waiting for us to answer, she tugged on her blouse, straightening it, and marched back into the house.
    “So much for that,” Robbie said. “Want to go a movie and then test-drive some cars? I need wheels, man.”
    We walked to the movie theater connected to the mall. He wanted to see something called
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,
but I begged him to see
Death Wish.
“Too violent,” he said. “Your parents would kill me.”
    “They won’t care,” I said. “They won’t even know.”
    “What if they ask us how we spent our afternoon? You don’t want to have to lie, do you?”
    They wouldn’t ask, I told him. They
never
asked. But he wouldn’t give in, so we compromised—a word that, as far as I could tell, meant not getting to do what you wanted to do—and saw
Chinatown
instead. I had a hard time following it. But I liked the part where the private detective had a glove compartment full of watches and put one under a tire so he