The Wednesday Sisters(29)

“I don't see it, Daddy,” Anna Page said, and Maggie echoed her, and then all the children were starting to whine that they couldn't see. We couldn't hear either, then, and all we could do was shush them and watch and listen more closely. Linda grabbed a box of cookies finally and said as long as they were quiet they could eat as many as they wanted.

There was movement in one corner of the lighted slash, something blocking the sunlight right by the module. Brett leaned toward the television and touched the screen.

“See that?” she said to the children. “That's the . . .” Her voice faltered, and for a moment there was only the clean white of her glove touching the shadow of the screen, her eyes pooling and blinking.

Watching her, I wondered about her gloves for the first time in months; they'd just become part of her to me, and yet there was something more than that, really. There was some sadness under those gloves that none of us—not even Linda—would ask her to revisit just to satisfy our curiosity. I suppose we all felt she'd share it with us in time.

“That's the astronaut coming out onto the moon,” she managed, and Chip pulled her to him then, and linked his fingers with hers.

“It is?” Anna Page said, disappointment thick in her voice.

Lee touched a lock of hair under her hat. “The camera has to send the signal all the way from the moon, punkin,” he said. “It isn't as good a picture as the Saturday-morning cartoons because it has to travel all that way.”

Linda's Julie said, “And it's real. Cartoons aren't real.” And we were all silent then, absorbing that. This was real.

The camera angle changed somehow, which made me wonder where this camera was until Chip explained they'd just flipped the image. We were seeing it right side up now, and closer in. And Houston said, “Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now,” and then I could see that the thing cutting off the sunlight could maybe be Neil Armstrong's legs making their way toward the moon. You couldn't see much, though. You couldn't see his body or his head. Just darkness at the top of the screen.

“These guys need to do a stint at film school,” Jeff said.

In the laughter that followed, Chip pulled Brett closer, her cropped red hair brushing against his black glasses as he whispered something in her ear. That should be you, I imagined him saying. In a more perfect world, Brett, that would be you stepping out onto the moon.

Houston said something about shadow photography, and the camera view changed again, and there was Neil Armstrong—ghostlike, yes, but you could see the ladder and the whiteness of a huge-headed man in a white space suit, with a big pack strapped to his back. You could make out that he was turning toward the camera, and looking down, and he was talking about the surface, saying it was like powder and the feet of the landing module had sunk into it, but not too far. Then he said he was stepping off “the lam,” and it was just as Maggie was saying, “Daddy, he's standing on a baby sheep?” that Armstrong finally said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Not until then. His words were all crackling, too, and I wondered if that was the transmission or if the tears were welling in his eyes the same as they were in mine.

“Mama, why are you crying?” Anna Page said, and I saw that Kath's eyes were tearing, too, and Linda's were moist, and Brett was wiping whole streams from her cheeks.

And while Neil Armstrong was talking about his footprints, how he only sank into the surface a little bit and he had no difficulty moving around, Lee put his arm around Kath and pulled her toward Anna Page and him. “It's the first time in history, Anna Page, that man has his feet down on something other than this earth or what was made on this earth,” he said. “You watch closely, punkin, this is something to remember your whole long life.”

The children, tiring of a picture that was often too wavy or too dark or too fuzzy to make out anything much, began dropping off to sleep. They missed Neil Armstrong half running, half floating across the moon's surface, the sunlight reflecting off his space suit so he looked like the Holy Ghost himself. They missed Buzz Aldrin's joke about being sure not to lock the door on his way out of the module, and the plaque we come in peace for all mankind, and the raising of the flag—not so much a raising as an opening and planting, the Stars and Stripes sticking straight out as if hung from a taut laundry line.

“No wind on the moon,” Brett explained, “so they ran a pole through the top of the flag, to make it look good.”

And it did. It looked beautiful, catching the sun, the stripes so clear even the children could have seen they were watching an American flag being placed on the moon. Then President Nixon was saying the heavens had now become a part of our world, and for once all the people of the world were truly one, which seems a little sappy now, and, yes, it was Nixon, but he wasn't Watergate Nixon yet, and it was moving. It was.