Men to the Moon
My sixteen-year-old brother Robbie liked to wear a dull pink tee-shirt. It was May 1969, the last day of sixth grade for me, and I had just walked into our house from school. Robbie was sitting on the living room floor, his long legs crossed, the tee-shirt hiked up on his back. By then six two and broad like a trimmed hedge, Robbie was playing Zeppelin on our crate-sized stereo. “Did you see the crescent moon last night?” he asked me, his face (so like my own) drifting into a smile. “Our men will soon be heading there.”
I liked hearing about our men.
*
Two days before the moon landing, my lawyer father filed a brief at the court for a client, then hopped into his Buick LeSabre convertible—when looked at from the side, the car always reminded me of an oversized silver butter knife—and drove away. He sped away on thin-striped, whitewall Cornell Astronaut tires from Roanoke to Fort Lauderdale. He escaped from us and I plotted how he did it. I decided he must have taken the back state roads in Virginia—VA 220 south, VA 58 east, a little upturn on VA 33 near Richmond. He then tucked himself into I-95, a clear shot and easy slide to Florida. I’m sure he hated to drive I-95 because of its pulsing red tail lights and semi-trailers. At the end of the interstate, there was the payoff in Lauderdale: palm trees, white beaches, and a life without us.
*
Hey, bro, our father left us.
We were standing in the kitchen after school. Robbie was wearing his pink tee-shirt and sounded very grown up. I glanced at the apple cider in my glass on the counter and my backpack on the ground. I couldn’t believe his words. Then he ran off and left me with my cheeks burning. His words were like hot roof staples pounded into my head. I felt I was blushing like mad and I fled from the kitchen to the backyard.
I sobbed where no one would see me. I was pretty sure Robbie was doing the same somewhere. I looked down at the garden bed with the pansies my father had planted the week before, a little late in the season. But there they were with their yellow, white, and speckled red petals. He had puffed up the beds with black Canadian sphagnum peat moss. He told us this particular moss was hard to find in our town. Somehow he had found it. There in the garden bed was his footprint, twelve inches to be exact, toe to heel. It was an imprint of the waffle sole of his right shoe. Goodbye all, have a good life, his footprint said to me.
*
A day after my father left, and one day before the first moon landing, my mother walked out to the backyard. She picked up a gray metal trashcan lid, turned it over, and torched all of our family photos with my father in them. As the flames grew, she tossed in her wedding photos. Later, with just embers glowing on the lid, she dropped in the framed receipt from their honeymoon suite at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. She flung on to the embers his unopened Pall Mall cigarette pack, his Brylcreem tubes, shaving cream, his King Phillip loose-leaf tobacco pouch, and two ebony wood pipes. The Brylcreem sizzled and boiled while everything else on the embers clucked and clattered.
I stood just a couple of feet from her and could smell Juicy Fruit gum. The gum was her lousy attempt to cover up the Kent cigarettes on her breath. She had never smoked cigarettes in her life until that day. She radiated—or what seemed like radiance to my eight-year-old self. My mother vanquished my father from our house and our lives. Not once, throughout her memory-poaching barbecue on the trash lid, did she lose her smile.
*
I sank into the cream-colored couch in front of our RCA Victor New Vista TV, the first color television set in the neighborhood. A cherrywood console housed it. The seat cushions exhaled and the odor of my father’s unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes rushed over me. Robbie sat open-mouthed on the nearby recliner. I had a full view of his round cheeks and the mole, like a worn pencil eraser, on his right cheek. My father and Robbie both had a mole in the same spot on their faces. When Robbie looked in the mirror, I was sure he saw our father there. That made me sad, thinking about that permanent reminder of him.
On the side table next to me, my mother had left a copy of the latest LIFE magazine. The cover showed Neil Armstrong in his white spacesuit. He carried his oxygen tank in a suitcase. Armstrong waved as he strode to the capsule. His gloved hand was so still, frozen forever in the photo, wrapped in white plastic for the next century to ponder. The caption on the magazine cover was true enough. “Men Leaving for the Moon.” Men. Leaving. It would take me a few years to put two and two together.
On the television cabinet, above Walter Cronkite’s head, there was a fish tank with an orange warming light, which I had set up months before. Cronkite spoke and held up a plastic model of the white spacecraft like a bar of Dove soap. My foot-long iguana, Iggy, lay in the pea gravel. Iggy was scrawny, his tail was like a twig. Nothing moved on him except from time to time his globe-like eyes. He lay there unaware of the television below him.
Hold your breath, I told myself. I thought everyone in the world had to be as giddy as me. Astronaut Neil dropped down the leg of the lunar module. He grabbed the ladder with both hands. His white spacesuit blazed on television. White streamers on the TV screen followed him down the ladder. Maybe too much whiteness, I wondered. Then I saw a fierce orange dot, the full ball of the sun, right there on his mask.
The TV images from the moon bloomed across the screen. They looked like gray and white flowers. Iggy stayed rock hard. He didn’t budge as the very first moonwalk unfolded under his belly. He was a lonely observer, only hearing the events that happened far away from him. The launch of the Apollo rocket. The long space journey of the three astronauts. The landing of the beetle-like lunar module. I wanted to shout at Iggy and rouse his stone age blood: Don’t you know what’s happening under you? It’s everything, Iggy, everything.
*
When Robbie turned eighteen, he left us for good. He only let us know the day he left. My mother stayed in bed smoking, her door closed, thunderstruck by another loss of a family member. I was ten at the time. I walked with Robbie to the bus terminal in town. I liked that I had a chance to say goodbye to him, unlike with my father. I figured if the men in my family were leaving our home, then I’d just as soon say goodbye to them.
I never thought Robbie would leave. When we arrived at the bus terminal, I knew it was real. He told me he planned to ride buses all the way to Moab, Utah, on the northern edge of the grand Colorado Plateau. I imagined the highways Robbie traveled to reach Utah, I-80 or Route 66, both the fastest routes out west. His journey just stayed with me. I thought about it often over many years.
I waved to Robbie from the street outside the bus terminal. His bus sputtered and pulled away from the curb. The Greyhound dog frozen in a sprint on the side of the bus rolled by me. I leaned on a newspaper box at the curb. The sidewalk was studded with squashed gingko berries and stepped-on chewing gum. Two teenaged girls stood next to me and blew kisses at the bus. They probably had a brother on the bus, just like me. I never asked them. The bus disappeared and I stopped waving at him. My raised arm was as stiff as a tree branch. Departures should count. It did with Robbie.
Days later, Robbie phoned us collect and said he had arrived in Moab. All was good, he said, although I sensed he was a little troubled talking to our mother. He had never properly said goodbye to her. My mother listened to him on the phone and said nothing. His life with us was over, he told her. The Zeppelin LPs would go unplayed. He would no longer shout into my mother’s face about her burnt cooking, as he had done nearly every night. He wouldn’t hug me out of the blue, the way I liked, coming at me from behind. He craved something else, maybe a change in air and climate, a new life in the Utah desert, which is what I always called it.
His phone call was crackly like fallen and live power lines snaking on the lawn. On my end, I listened to him for a long time. I noticed the phone had warmed against my ear. It all ended well for him, I thought, because he had reached his spot in the desert. I wanted nothing more than to stay in the house with my mother. I felt I owed it to her. The other two had left. I would stay and not be like them.
*
My mother pulled into the driveway. It was late for her, close to seven. Her idling car trembled from side to side. Its cranked-up radio pounded the windows. I stood at the living room bay window, hidden in the folds of the curtain. I had a good view of her. The car windows were rolled up tight. I watched her cigarettes flame—one, two, three times. White smoke filled the car. She disappeared inside the smoke. After her fourth cigarette—this last one burned like a flare—she stepped from the car. She pulled down her skirt. She was carrying her big white purse, the one I had joked with her about saying it looked like a giant steamed dumpling. She always laughed whenever I made fun of her purse.
*
“One good car is enough to save us,” my mother said. We stood in the garage of Carl’s Auto Repair. I was sixteen and a day. I carried my newly issued driver’s license in my pocket.
“This is the car,” she said to me. I looked at my mother’s cantilevered chin (so like my own chin), surveyed her slender face (so unlike my own face). I followed her rounded arm to where one of her blue-painted fingernails pointed at a car. This was no ordinary car, this 1972 four-cylinder Mustang Ghia. The car was the color of gray fog. It had metal shark-like gills on the engine side panels. It looked like no other car in the world.
“In place of a father, you get a Mustang Ghia. How about that, Timmy?” my mother said. Her words came from nowhere. I wished she hadn’t talked about him, my father, his long absence. It was better left unsaid—no point in airing family laundry in public. Carl shook his head, wore a ragged smile like a torn envelope.
“We don’t have the money for the car,” I said. I had to remind her. Carl winced and the smile ran from his face.
“Of course we do, sweety,” she replied. She wore a pink barrette clip in her hair that, at thirty-eight, said she didn’t care. Maybe she clipped it on for Carl, to grab his attention, get him to give us a discount on the car. Her eyes stayed on me and said I had no business telling her anything about buying a car.
“We don’t and you know it,” I repeated, rushing the words. I wondered if she had lost her mind. I felt heat on my face. Our electricity had been turned off once already. Two days after, we lost a gallon of milk and three hangar steaks in the freezer.
“Carl, how can we make it work?” she asked him. She turned her face toward him, giving him a good view of her barrette and her pink round cheeks. Would Carl deny this woman anything? She played him.
“No problem. Don’t you fret over the money,” Carl replied, his voice deep as a basement. His voice belonged at a car lot. “You just go ahead and pay in installments. I’ll take a deposit today.”
“You’re the best, thank you,” she answered. She was the head of the family. I was blanked out from their conversation.
Carl unlatched the hood. He raised it and checked the idling engine for my mother. Rainwater and bird droppings had yellowed the skylight window over the garage bay. Very little sunlight came through the window. But nothing about this dirty window mattered to Carl. He wanted to close the sale. He hovered over the engine of the Ghia muscle car, squeezed a hose and tapped on the manifold. Yes, everything was working out fine for Carl.
Carl and my mother signed the sales papers on the hood of the Ghia. They ignored me. I scraped an oil slick on the floor with my shoe, then looked up. Through the yellowed skylight, 0I watched a Cessna Cub plane climb into the air.
*
The Ghia broke us. Or maybe, it just broke us some more. We gave up eating out. We ate Salisbury TV dinners around a shaky pressed-wood table. When I removed the crinkly foil from the dinner tray, a warm vapor rose into my face. It felt like a blast of sky clouds. After dinner, my mother would wipe the tabletop, the sponge in her hand moving like a scythe. There were never any crumbs.
The heat rose from the baseboard vents. It was gas heat, costing way more than electric. The heat swept over us. She sweated, first on her forehead, then her neck. She never asked me to turn down the room temperature. She wanted the heat, that rich gas heat. The pipes crackled with the heat. I’m sure the pipe noises sounded like coins from a slots machine to her.
After one dinner, she left me and went outside for a cigarette. I remained at the table and wondered if I’d ever could move from my seat again. When she disappeared to smoke outside, that was when I felt it the most, my load of responsibilities. Me, alone, I was the one family member remaining with her. The others had left. I had to keep everything running smoothly, whatever it was. The trains had to arrive at the station on time. The minute hand of the grandfather clock (we didn’t own) had to show the right time. We needed more money because of the Ghia.
It all fell on me.
At one dinner, she told me that she had applied for the assistant principal job at her school. The next day, she spoke to the hiring committee, three tired white men. She never got the job. I was surprised, but then I really wasn’t. We had become the kind of family where nothing good came to us. We still had our TV dinners. I mowed a hundred lawns the following summer, which kept the lights on for another two months.
*
When I was seventeen, I liked to sit on the hammock in the backyard after school. I would rock in the hammock and watch my feet rub the hard ground. I would stay out on the hammock until it grew dark. Sometimes I’d do my homework in the hammock, my writing on the page full of scratchings like dry pine needles.
One night, my mother walked out to the patio, spotted me, and came over to sit on the hammock with me. I slumped on the edge, head forward, like a bag of laundry. She sat down next to me and the hammock whooshed backwards under her weight. She had just returned from a date. Clumpy mascara stuck to her eyelashes. The mascara had punched out her eyes. She had a red wine stain on her dress, but it had dried by then, and I didn’t say anything about it.
“What are the chances Robbie returns home?” I asked her. I smelled the rising curtain of her perfume. Maybe L’Oreal, or Estee Lauder. She bought all her perfume at one time, once a year, from Belk’s in Roanoke. I sniffed at her and the rose-scented perfume wrapped around my face. I liked its lingering scent around me. She looked good in her dress and mascara. The wind strengthened and the bird feeder groaned over our heads.
“Robbie can return, any time,” she said, steadying her face and locking her eyes on my eyes. I knew I had gotten to her by asking about Robbie.
“I just thought we could finally get back together,” I replied, dropping that request on her. I didn’t want to sound mean, or cruel, but my words had come out already. “You, me, and Robbie. Like old times.”
“Look, we’ll see him again.” Her face lolled toward me, like a full yellow sunflower leaning over a fence. I was ready to hold that face—but no, I had to keep my distance. A month from graduating high school, I was old enough and I had to put some distance between us.
“Maybe when I’m forty,” I replied. For some reason, maybe because of the torch-like porch light on us, her eyes held me.
“He has his life in Utah,” she replied, frowning slightly. Her cheeks seemed deflated. She didn’t want this conversation with her youngest son, that was clear, but I just felt I had to push her for those words. Maybe for the first time ever, we had an adult conversation. We spoke to each other without any guardrails.
“He can be in Utah and still be part of our family,” she added.
“I just want the family part, again. All of us. I mean, of course, not him,” I said and looked up at her. I bent my head away and looked down at my feet hovering over the ground. “He can stay in Florida. But Robbie, yeah, for sure.”
“You wanted somebody else here,” she said, a smile unfurling on her face. Her smile was always shiny and clean, even holy. “Was it Neil Armstrong?”
I felt the heat rise in my face again. A year after my father ran away from us, I had suggested Armstrong as a replacement for him.
“No, not him, not Armstrong,” I answered. My breathing slowed. It felt like the best answer to give her. I reached up and hugged her. My arms belted her back. She cried, then stopped, and after a minute twisted out of my arms and walked back into the house. I felt her turbulence in the swaying of the hammock.
*
That night, after my mother went inside the house, I slept on the hood of the Ghia as I did at times. The car kept me out of the house, which reminded me too much of Robbie. It was a warm late-spring night. I crumpled my jacket against the sloped windshield for a pillow. Heat came off the cooling engine and the hood metal. I liked the feel of the heat from the car. The light in the night sky was almost purplish.
A horned owl sounded from a maple tree alongside the house. It was one of those nights when the moon flexed its light in the night sky. It was a night like no other one.
I was happy to see the moon. Happy the moon saw me.