A huge bloom of white exploded on the screen, making my heart pound as the rocket disappeared behind all that smoke. I was sure the thing was about to blow—I couldn't help thinking about the explosion of the first Apollo—but Brett said that was the way rockets launched. She knew all the crew's names and what they were supposed to do, too, and she talked about them that way—Commander Wally Schirra, Command Module Pilot Donn Eisele, Lunar Module Pilot Walter Cunningham—when the rest of us were just saying “the guy with the Cary Grant hair” or “the fella with the smile the size of Jupiter” or “the goofy-looking one.” Yes, we did that. We talked about the astronauts the way we talked about the Beatles or Miss America, as if the sole criterion for sending them into space ought to be how handsome their faces looked through the glass bubbles of their space helmets.
Which were not glass, but rather an ultraviolet plastic. Brett told us that.
As I watched the arms holding that big white monster of a rocket swing away and the thing rise slowly, almost as if it wasn't going to make it more than a few feet, I imagined Brett's face peeking out at me from one of those not-glass bubbles. It seemed as far-fetched as imagining a woman president, or a woman priest, or a woman God.
“Brett,” Linda said with a measure of clairvoyance, “have you ever considered writing about this space stuff?”
“Miss Marple in Murder on the Moon!” I said.
Brett didn't write about “this space stuff” that week, though, and Linda didn't write any more about her mother, and Kath and I didn't tap into our deepest emotions either, though Kath did say she'd written a few lines in her journal—a fact we did not make a big deal about, for fear of scaring her off. Linda didn't write about the Olympics even though she was as wild for them that fall as Brett was for the space race, not even after Brett suggested it and I echoed her, saying, “Sylvia Plath Goes to the Olympics: A Girl Jock's Guide to Suicide”—which I could tell amused Linda by the way she tugged at the bill of her Stanford cap. She went on and on the way she does about the state of women's sports, then—“Out of five thousand Olympians, only eight hundred are women.” “Only three sports to the men's eighteen.” “Only twelve athletics events to the men's twenty-four, with no races longer than eight hundred meters because fifty years ago, some woman collapsed in a longer race!”—at which point Kath threw up her arms and asked, “What are you wantin', Linda? For the girls to be boxing? Wrestling? Or, I know, how about weight lifting?” Which cracks me up every time I remember it, because Kath lifts weights at the gym three times a week now—free weights, too; she stands there looking at her muscles flex in the mirror, and she has muscles to flex, too, which she didn't much back then. But as I said, Linda didn't write about any of that. What she wrote was page after page of her amorphous stories (often political rants disguised as fiction, I thought), while Brett wrote chapters of her unmysterious mystery and I wrote beginnings that never seemed to go anywhere. We hadn't yet learned that our best writing comes from pushing our emotional buttons with the kind of force needed to push that rocket ship into space.
And still everything we wrote was “nice,” even when I asked specifically for more critical feedback. Which was how I ended up bringing a few pages one Wednesday that I claimed were the start of a novel—pages I knew were, without a doubt, terrible. Maybe they'd be mad at me for this deception, but the point needed to be made.
When the appalled silence after I'd read the thing grew unbearable, Kath said, “Mighty nice,” and Linda asked what the novel would be about.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It's absolute drivel. I wrote it to be absolute drivel. I wrote it as dreadfully as I could, and I knew you would still say it was just nifty, and here's the thing: we won't ever get anywhere if we aren't honest with each other.”
Kath ran a finger over her braid headband. “Are we hankering to get any particular somewhere?”
Linda leaned over the splintered table, frowning down at the pages she'd written that week. “I am,” she admitted. “I'd like to publish something someday. Wouldn't you, Kath?”
“Publish?” Brett said so quietly that for a moment I thought it was Ally's voice. It made me miss Ally suddenly, made me wonder if she was still writing about her duck who was not “Some Duck,” and what she was doing on Wednesday mornings now, and if she'd ever come back to the park.
“I don't think I could ever publish anything. I don't think I even want to,” Brett said. She tucked her hair behind her ear—once, twice, and again; it was too short to stay. “But I would like to improve.”