All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (5 page)

Journeys, however, are important in people’s lives, although they are probably accorded more importance than they strictly deserve in fiction. They’re not simply, in narrative terms, a relocation but also a metaphor for change—and for Ginny and Walden, great change has indeed entered their lives. This lonesome drive across Arizona and Texas is a threshold moment for Ginny. She is alone in the car, often alone on the road, in the desert, with nothing but herself and perhaps intermittent radio stations for company. She has been briefly enfolded in the maternal bosom, but now she is once again independent, her own woman—albeit linked to her husband of almost eight years by a strong thread of love and respect, and still identified in official correspondence as Mrs Walden J Eckhardt, as if she possesses no name of her own, no history prior to her marriage. Perhaps the landscape she drives through reflects her changing moods, perhaps it triggers trains of thought which speed alongside the Impala as it follows the endless asphalt, accompanied only by the hum of the car’s tyres, the throb of its engine and the whistle of the wind. She wonders if the surface of Mars resembles this near-lifeless land, she considers writing a story about the Red Planet. She remembers a serialised novel in
Analog
last year which was set on a desert world, where tribes from the deep desert fought Imperial occupiers who had seized their planet to control a unique substance required for interstellar travel. The author’s name was Frances, but they all knew it was a man—editor Kay Tarrant, conscious of her magazine’s readership, felt a female pen-name more appropriate.

The Impala is not fitted with air-conditioning and once out of the mountains the interior of the car quickly heats up. Even with the windows down, the air is close and seems to possess a hot and smothering weight. Ginny has anticipated this and is wearing a pair of white cotton shorts, but when the backs of her thighs begin to stick to the seat she realises she has chosen badly. She feels quite invisible in this vast empty landscape, a brightly-coloured mote adrift on a sea of sand grains… But she proves sadly all too visible when she stops for gas at a station on the outskirts of Tucson. The shorts, her bare legs, attract male attention, not just eyes she can feel creeping all over her, but comments and whistles too. She’s not in California now, she has spent too long in military society, it has slipped her mind the impact a lone woman, especially an under-dressed one, might have among male strangers. She pays for her gasoline quickly, eager to return to the solitude of the road.

#

#

The route from San Diego to Houston is very different in 2015 to how it existed in 1966. A single Interstate, I-10, now stretches from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, crossing the state of Texas at its widest point. Much of I-10 was built during the 1970s and so predates Ginny’s migration—and sometimes not everything required for research can be found online. This is one of the perils of writing a story set in the past and in another nation, “a different country” in both senses of the phrase.

Ginny spends the night in a motel in El Paso, and the following morning she dresses more comfortably, and modestly, in a mid length checked cotton skirt. She takes to the road early, driving south out of El Paso, scrubby desert to either side and the road running runway-straight through it, and off to her right a line of dark green marking the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, and beyond it the tumbled purple blocks of the Sierra Madre louring on the horizon. She finds the scenery bleak and oppressive and elects to push on, thirteen straight hours behind the wheel; and though San Antonio promises a welcome haven when she reaches the city in the evening, she presses on and arrives in League City just after nine at night.

Walden seemed unconcerned at the prospect of her “solo flight”, and his directions to the apartment he has rented in League City are perfunctory—she has to forgive him, he has other things on his mind—but she finds the Cardinal Apartments easily enough, turning off the Gulf Freeway onto Main Street, and there it is, on the other side of US 75 in one of the new subdivisions, at the top of Texas Avenue, two or so miles from the junction.

She slips her bare feet into her sandals, clambers from the Impala and stretches. Pulling her sunglasses from her crown, she throws them onto the car’s bench seat, and then turns about and regards her surroundings. The Cardinal Apartments, looking more like a motel than an apartment complex, with a balcony giving access to second floor apartments. But the area is certainly greener than she has been used to, greener than the Mojave around Edwards with its bent and twisted Joshua trees, greener than the scrubby garden of their house on 16
^th
Street, greener than the desert she has spent the last day driving through. She can see the black clouds of trees against the glowing night sky across the street, and hear the conspiratorial whisper of their leaves in the faint breeze. From somewhere over the trees, the hum of traffic faintly intrudes. The temperature is about eighty, a little warmer than Edwards. She turns back to the apartment building, and is hit by a flood of tiredness. In a single moment, she feels all those hours of driving, and her lack of motion gives her a sharp and momentary sense of vertigo, a brief spin of nauseating dizziness.

It was a long drive, and an echo of those hours behind the steering-wheel seems to hang in the dark and muggy air, but she thinks she might like it here, this sprawling verdant city, with its subdivisions of low houses and wide featureless lawns, so very different to the desolate sandy expanses of Edwards; and though she can taste the bite of pollution in the air, her heart lifts.

Which is more than Mary Irwin, wife of James Irwin—and the “role” Ginny is playing in this novel—felt in her autobiography
The Moon is Not Enough
: “But as we entered Houston after three days of cramped travel in our camper without airconditioning, and as I saw the murky pall of smog hanging over the city, and felt the muggy, suffocating heat, a little part of me withered inside.”

From her purse, Ginny pulls out the scrap of paper on which she has scribbled the address given her by Walden. At one end of the apartment building is a staircase leading up to the second floor, and from the apartment number on the paper, her new home must be up there. She locks the car and climbs the stairs, and is soon standing before the door of the right apartment. She knocks.

Moments later, the door swings open and there is Walden, his face bearing that frown Ginny knows he wears when he has been interrupted at some important task. She smiles wanly at him. His eyes widen, his arms open, he grins and steps forward and pulls her into a hug. She is so tired she almost falls against him.

She is home.

Chapter 4

Pitch and Roll Maneuver

Those first two months in the apartment, Ginny spends her days at the typewriter. New places always have this effect on her—until she feels settled she exorcises her discomfort with the written word. It was the same in Germany, though she never grew used to life in that country; and she did this too when Walden was transferred to Edwards and she found herself living in Wherry Housing. She has explored this new home of hers: the apartment building, the city and its meagre shopping clustered at the junction of US 75 and Main Street, the scattered subdivisions either side of the Gulf Freeway. There is nothing to see here, and even less to do. Walden disappears into the Manned Spacecraft Center every day, leaving her to her own devices, and though there are several astronaut families in the area and in the Cardinal Apartments—including Dotty and Charlie from Edwards—the other wives have their kids to keep them occupied. She sees the women in the yard and on the street and at the stores, and she stays on friendly terms with them, even offers to provide transport on occasion for those who lack it, since Walden has left her the Impala. (All of the astronauts will be paid ten thousand dollars per year by
Life
magazine for exclusive rights to their stories. Walden has used some of the money to buy himself a car he feels better suited to his new career.)

Ginny sits at the table in their one-bedroom apartment and travels to the Moon and beyond in her imagination. She writes three stories in short order. But a deputation from the Astronaut Wives Club, a social club founded that summer by Marge Slayton and Louise Shepard, Ginny has already missed two of the monthly meetings, it’s four of the New Nine wives calling round to see her. Faye, Marilyn, Pat and Barbara, there to welcome Ginny into the fold, to her new life in “Togethersville”; but she is writing and when they see her in slacks and rough shirt, and the typewriter on the table, they purse their lips and she gets the lecture. It’s all very friendly, they sit in the apartment’s tiny lounge, drinking Ginny’s coffee, some of them smoking. Barbara talks about the need for the right breakfast, a “hot, nutritious breakfast” in NASA’s own words, but Ginny already knows this, she’s a test pilot’s wife, she had the “5 am breakfast” lecture years before.

This is tougher than being a test pilot’s wife, says Marilyn, ten times tougher.

What you do, adds Pat, reflects not only on your husband but on NASA, on the USA.

Ginny is in the public eye now, they tell her; she must at all times be proud, thrilled and happy. And well-groomed, always well-groomed.

But there are rewards. Once your husband has flown in space, says Barbara, you get to go places and meet people. NASA likes to have us there at parties and functions, like an astronaut’s accessory.

This generates knowing laughter from the other three New Nine wives.

Gemini 11 is due to launch next week, which means to date seventeen astronauts have been into space, some of them even twice, including the husbands of both Faye and Barbara.

Faye leans forward and puts her coffee cup on the carpet by her feet. There should be no problems at home, she says, looking up at Ginny, nothing that might jeopardise your husband’s chance of a flight. You need to stand by your man.

…her words eerily presaging the song, which is released a couple of weeks later, although Ginny does not hear it until months have passed. Tammy Wynette may be a native of Mississippi, but in 1966 the song’s sentiments are universal.

The women leave after an hour. Despite the 85°F heat, Ginny opens the windows to dispel the smell of cigarette smoke and commingled perfumes worn by the wives. She looks back across at the dining table and the Hermes Baby sitting on it, and wonders that they never thought to ask her what she had been typing. Perhaps the clothes she’s wearing shocked them so much it slipped their minds. She is amused at the thought: the slacks and shirt are mannish but she could never be mistaken for a man. Nor for some sort of genderless human being, neither man nor woman—and a line of thought, no doubt triggered by the hot humid air pushing its way into the room through the open windows, has her imagining a race of androgynous people who, like many animals, are only sexually active when in heat, and then they can be one sex or the other. It’s not a bad idea for a story, she thinks; but she decides not to make a note of it—no way to use it occurs to her and it’s not an idea she feels qualified to explore.

The next month, on the first Tuesday, Ginny puts on makeup, more than she usually wears, and a dress bought in Neiman Marcus only the week before, styles her hair, and drives over to the Lakewood Yacht Club for her first AWC meeting. There are forty-eight of them now, drinking tea and coffee and nibbling on cakes and cookies in the ballroom. Ginny spots Pam, but she also recognises Mary, and Dotty too, of course, and she sees Louise, another Mary, Joan and Wanita, who were also at Edwards. Ginny doesn’t know most of the other wives, so Pam and Dotty help out with the names, but it’s too many to take in at once, and Ginny is feeling a little uncomfortable, something of an outsider at this gathering, as she can see how closely knit the various groups are, how confident and assured and
polished
are the wives of the Original Seven and the New Nine. It occurs to her that her standing in this group is a consequence of her husband’s achievements. Right now, he’s just one of the new guys, spending his time in a classroom training to fly the new spacecraft. He may never go to the Moon, he may never even make it into space. The real pioneers are the ones who have flown; and their wives are golden in the reflected glory. There’s Louise, the Boston Brahmin, in white gloves; and Rene, as Ginny has heard, does indeed look very glamorous—and Pam tells Ginny in a whispered aside that Rene has been writing a newspaper column, ‘A Woman, Still’, for the past year. It’s a connection, Ginny thinks, we’re both writers—except Ginny writes science fiction and she’s pretty sure Rene is not going to consider that equivalent to a newspaper column; there’s no way the lurid covers and contents of
Galaxy
or
If
or
Fantastic
can compete with the prestige of the
Houston Chronicle
.