She worked like the devil to correct that. She dug up new dinner recipes and spent hours in the kitchen; she was forever on a diet; and she was, if possible, even tidier about her clothes. But the effect of all the effort was just awful. She was a little slimmer, yes—even with her new efforts to be a gourmet chef—but it was like watching her shrink into herself, watching her revert to some Southern version of the timid souls so many of us were in junior high school, when all the girls had discovered boys while so very few of the boys had discovered us back.
Writing-wise, we finished Aspects of the Novel that April, so that now anyone overhearing us in the park might think we actually knew what we were talking about. We'd say things like “Even when we talk to ourselves we're never completely honest, so our characters shouldn't be either.” (That was from Kath's favorite chapter, the one on characters, which she called “people” because Forster did; he was forever using Jane Austen as an example in that chapter, and Kath knew the “people” in the Jane Austen novels about as well as we knew our own children.) We started typing our work, too, and making multiple carbon copies—just stick four carbons behind the original and bang as hard as possible on the keys—and we were taking each other's writing home and reading it, which is a different experience from listening to it being read, believe me. We could reread lines and consider them more carefully, and jot down notes in the margins, which led to much more detailed critiques. And we could take each other's notes home with us, so when we couldn't quite remember what exactly Ally, say, had disliked about a particular line of dialogue, we could turn to her very words.
Our writing was getting better, too. Kath's journal pages were filling, and Ally's “Not Some Duck” was beginning to seem like it might someday actually quack. Linda was integrating Golda Meir's becoming prime minister of Israel and the war protests at Stanford into her stories in a way that enriched rather than overwhelmed; her setting might be the law commune on Alma, where the Shell station is now, or her character might wear a women's lib “brassy” on a chain around her neck (as Linda herself had started doing), but the stories were more and more about the emotions of her characters, rather than their politics.
Brett was at the head of the class in this, as in all things. Late that June, she swore that before the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon a few weeks later she would finish a draft of her novel—“her Breakfast,” we called it even though it was a mystery, even though it wasn't anything like Breakfast at Tiffany's except that in both books a young woman walked away from her past. By then, she was big-as-a-mansion pregnant, due at the end of July, and she was working so hard to finish you'd have thought she was afraid her free hand for writing would be taken with this second hand to hold, this new baby, and she'd never find time to write again. Never mind that she was quite sure the novel was nothing. It would be “such fun” to have a draft of a novel finished, she admitted, but she wouldn't allow the possibility that it might be published someday. “Such fun.” That was all this was, she was quite sure of that.
We all thought she was just being modest.
Then it was July 16—a Wednesday—and Danny and I woke at three-thirty in the morning to follow Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins up the elevator and across the swing arm to their places on the rocket ship, and then Buzz Aldrin, too, and to watch the lines of scientists in white shirts sitting in front of monitors like gamblers at slot machines. I thought of Brett as I watched them—not trying to imagine her with a flag patch on her shoulder and a space helmet securely on her head anymore, but rather picturing her hunched over her typewriter, finishing her novel.
We met in the park that morning, everyone showing up early because we were so excited about going to the moon and we'd been up for hours anyway. Brett was the last to arrive, and we fell upon her like Noah must have fallen on dry land.
“Eight days,” she said. “Splashdown, I said. Not launch. I still have eight days.”
“Splashdown!” Ally said.
“You better get going, honey,” Kath said, “'cause your own water'll be splashing right down your skinny li'l legs before that capsule splashes into the ocean or I'll choke down my best Derby hat!”
The lunar landing was scheduled for Sunday, with the first lunar walk to be Monday morning. “The astronauts have eight hours of work after they land, before they can walk,” Brett said. “They land at three eastern time, and another eight hours is midnight—too late for the East Coast to see the walk on TV.”