Riding Rockets

We fell into conversation about our training and new issues on our communication satellite deployment procedures. I joined in halfheartedly. She was the only astronaut present on that beach. My mind was busy dealing with the scent of her shampoo, the feel of her body heat radiating across the gap between us, and the voices in my head. Those whispered that it would be different with Judy and me. Mortals had dirty, sinful, sordid affairs. But we weren’t mortals. We were astronauts. We were demigod and -goddess, alpha male and female. The rules didn’t apply to us. Not on this beach, they didn’t. This was a place separate from Earth where vows and social conventions and the Sixth Commandment didn’t apply. Of course, it was all testosteronic bullshit, but I listened to those voices with the same intensity I listened to MCC in our simulations.

As I was popping another beer, Judy left the subject of communication satellites. “Tarzan, I want to thank you and Donna for including me in your family.” I was glad to hear Donna’s name. It was a reminder of what I was…married. My thumb folded onto my wedding band.

“You’re welcome. We’re always glad to have you over.” Donna and I had extended numerous invitations to Judy for dinner or other social get-togethers.

“Well, you guys are the only ones. Most of the wives hate me.” She was right. Many of the wives did not like Judy. They were threatened by her. Their husbands jetted across the country with her in private planes to train in factories and go jogging together and perhaps, as I was doing at that very moment, to sit on a beach together enjoying a sunset and a beer.And what happened then? the wives wondered. At one TFNG party I saw a visibly shaken JR leave early. Later I heard the reason. One of the child-widened wives had taken her aside and screamed at her, “Stay away from my husband!” Though I had not heard a single rumor connecting JR to the woman’s spouse and strongly suspected the accusation was completely groundless, I could understand where the woman was coming from. She understood what female youth and beauty did to men (and was doing tome on that beach) and she was dropping a preemptive nuke. Judy was feared by most of the wives. At one of our earliest TFNG get-togethers, she arrived wearing formfitting jeans and a white knit T-shirt. Every head, male and female, turned and the hubbub of the party diminished noticeably. A few of the wives looked into their man’s eyes to read his thoughts. Some stepped closer to their husbands. There was nothing trashy about Judy’s dress. I had seen many of the wives similarly dressed at various casual functions. It was just that Judy looked like one of those impossibly curvaceous mannequins in a boutique window. It was a fact of life that wives never looked like that.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was Judy’s beauty and its effect on men and their wives. I mumbled some bullshit about her misreading the women and attempted to switch the conversation back to our training. A segue of “How ’bout them Astros?” would have been more sincere. Judy knew I was lying and I sensed she was hurt by the rejection of the wives. She ignored my training question and continued to talk about relationships, this time about her childhood relationship with her mother. I was shocked by this intimacy. I had never heard her talk about her past. She had been a TFNG for years before someone discovered she had been previously married and was divorced. Now she was opening her soul to me as if I were some harmless confidant. I could only assume she was trying to justify a heated telephone argument with her brother that she had recently conducted in my presence. The topic had been invitations for the Resnik family to attendDiscovery ’s launch. In that conversation it was obvious there was some tension in the family.

I wasn’t trained for this. I ached to return to the subject of communication satellite deployment. But Judy continued. She revealed a deep bitterness with her family’s demands that she date only Jewish boys and other aspects of teen oppression in the name of religion. (Gee, and I thought only us Catholics were screwed up.) I had more in common with this woman than I had previously thought. But Judy’s coming-of-age trauma had been significantly greater than mine. It had led to an estrangement from her mother. I couldn’t imagine a daughter dealing with that.