The Wednesday Sisters(28)
“You think all the Yankees in Manhattan wouldn't be able to keep their li'l Yankee eyes open on a Sunday night for this?” Kath said.
“They want the astronauts to get some rest first, too,” Brett said.
“But they'll be sitting on the moon, honey!” Kath said. “Can you imagine shutting your eyes for even one minute with your piggy toes dangling out over the moon? You put your chapter break anywhere you want to on this one, no one is turning out the light without turning the page.”
We all watched the landing from our homes that Sunday: the cockpit alarm sounding constantly, and you could tell from the astronauts' voices that they didn't know what it was and they sure wanted to know. As that was sorted out (too many signals overloading the computer), they realized it was too rocky to land where they'd planned. They kept talking about how many seconds were left—“They're running out of fuel,” Danny said—and finally they landed, just in time. When you read the reports of it, you imagine the first thing they said was, “Houston, Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.” But it wasn't actually the first thing they said. Just the most memorable. Which is something we remind ourselves when we're critiquing: generally, dialogue shouldn't be what people really say, but more like an edited version.
Though that rule—like all writing rules—was made to be broken. The unedited version of what Blanche, Kath's family's cook back in Louisville, had to say about those men being on the moon? “They ain't on no moon.” And when asked where she thought they were? “I don't know, but they ain't on no moon.” Sometimes real life hands you something you simply can't improve upon.
When we learned the lunar walk would be Sunday night after all—the NASA doctors had apparently come to the same conclusion Kath had—we all had the same thought: Let's watch together. Ally already had plans to have dinner at her sister's, but the rest of us pulled our half-cooked dinners out of our ovens, gathered our families, and hightailed it over to Linda's. Impromptu potluck. We gathered in Linda's living room, bouncing off the walls with excitement, and introduced our husbands, which was odder than I had imagined, meeting these three men I knew so well through their wives even though we'd never met. Lee was the most surprising to me; I'd pictured a much bigger man, maybe because he was Southern or because he was a doctor or because he was an adulterous bastard (goodness, did I say that?). I had never imagined he would be so charming, either—especially to Kath. Watching him bringing her tastes of all the desserts, and Anna Page sitting on his lap with the wildness seeping out of her almost the moment he wrapped his stocky arms around her, the sweetness filling in under the pretty straw hat that she kept on all evening, I saw why Kath thought he'd never leave his family.
Danny and Chip hit it off immediately, both in their dark, unfashionable but indestructible glasses, both so smart in a way that most of us couldn't really grasp, but there they were finishing each other's sentences like they'd shared a room growing up and did not once lay masking tape across the floor to define their separate, inviolate territories like my brothers had. Jeff was neither as smart as Danny and Chip nor as charming as Lee (though he was plenty smart and plenty charming, don't get me wrong), but he won hands down in the looks category—think Warren Beatty without a hint of arrogance—and he had that same restlessness that Linda had, too, that made you think the things that happened in the world would happen to him because he would make it so. I liked them all. Even Lee. I wished Ally and Jim had been able to come. I wondered if they were really at Ally's sister's house, and if they were having as good a time there as we were here.
We sat on the floor, huddled around Linda's new Zenith Giant-Screen color television—a twenty-three-inch screen set in an oak-veneer cabinet—watching the footage from Cape Canaveral for the longest time, beginning to despair of ever seeing a man step out of the landing module. When you remember it and you don't think carefully about what you remember, you think Neil Armstrong just stepped down the ladder and onto the moon and said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but in reality it was just like “The Eagle has landed”: we listened to audio of them opening the door forever, feeling more tension than any thriller movie could ever deliver. We sat watching, and explaining things to the children: “No, honey, the man's name isn't Houston, but he's in a city called Houston, Texas.” There was a picture finally, and the fellow in Houston said there was “a great deal of contrast” and it was upside down but they could make out a fair amount of detail. Even knowing it was upside down, though, I still couldn't make out one speck of anything, just gray at the bottom and a band of sunlight cutting diagonally across the top, and something that had to be some part of the landing module but you wouldn't know that if you didn't know.