As the children slept, we watched the shadow men in their space suits floating back and forth across the screen, taking soil samples and running experiments, negotiating their way back into the capsule, closing the hatch again, all while the camera left on the surface of the moon sent back footage of an unwavering flag posted in front of the silent ship. I remember thinking about Michael Collins, the command module pilot who was destined to become the trivia question, the final Jeopardy! even though he spent the same eight days in space that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did. Not even able to watch these first steps on the moon that could not have been made without him. I wondered how they chose who did what; if it was alphabetical he got a bad draw, even as a C. I imagined him still orbiting in the spaceship, alone on the dark side of the moon, and how very happy he must be to see the earth rise over the moon's surface each time he came back around.
BRETT ARRIVED at the park by car that next Wednesday morning, and she got out on the passenger side, without Sarah in tow. She grinned bigger than you'd think that little-pout mouth of hers would go as she approached us, holding her very pregnant belly with one hand and four copies of her manuscript with the other. We launched into a big round of congratulations, but she interrupted us, saying she couldn't stay. “I've been in labor since four this morning,” she said. “Chip will burst a vessel if I don't hand you these and march right back to the car.”
She had the baby forty-three minutes later, a seven-pound, four-ounce boy: Mark Edward Tyler. He was the easiest baby there ever was to spot in the nursery, even through the fingerprint-smudged glass. That child had more hair than any newborn you've ever seen, the same remarkable strawberry blond as his mother's. It would all fall out over the next week, leaving him bald as the moon before the Apollo astronauts planted their unflappable flag. But it would grow back improbably thicker, a portent of things to come.
THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, Brett arrived pushing little Mark in a baby buggy while trying to hold Sarah's hand—she'd insisted we meet to go over her manuscript even though she'd just had the baby. The novel was a mystery in which a female graduate student, Elizabeth, finds a dead body in the physics lab and, in the course of disentangling herself from suspicion, learns that she is adopted and that her birth mother is a research scientist at the university. But the improbability of that coincidence wasn't even the biggest problem with the book, nor was the fact that only one credible suspect remained after page 42. The biggest problem was the protagonist, Elizabeth, who was, frankly, dull and unlikeable.
We all started with what we liked about the manuscript: the Stanford campus setting, the science (which was surprisingly interesting), the way Elizabeth talked things out with her favorite lab rat. “Ratty! I loved Ratty!” Linda said. “If Elizabeth were half as likeable as Ratty—”
“Y'all can laugh,” Kath said, cutting Linda off, “but I swear, Ratty reminded me of Brett's brother in that thing she wrote about the marble machine.” And we all did laugh, but she was right, there was a certain charm the two characters shared.
“It's awfully good for a first draft, Brett,” Kath said. “A mighty good li'l mystery.”
Brett, her watering eyes betraying her earlier insistence that this was just for fun, looked down at her gloved hands. “But it isn't a first draft,” she said. “It's a fourth or a fifth or a sixth draft, I don't even know anymore. What is a draft, anyway?”
Kath, not missing a beat, said it was great for a sixth draft as the rest of us sat there, trying not to look incredulous. A sixth draft?
Critiquing the manuscript was tough because a lot of what was unlikeable about Elizabeth was what might be unlikeable about Brett, too, if you didn't know her well. But Linda launched us, asking if Elizabeth even wanted us to like her, and Ally said, “Or maybe she doesn't want us to think she cares if we like her? Like a defense mechanism?”
Like the way Brett hid behind her smartness, her quotes, I thought.
“She's smart as a whip, sure,” Kath said, “but we need to know there's some meat on her skinny ol' bones.”
“Meat?” Brett said.
“We need to see she wears gloves,” Linda said.
Sudden silence, everyone trying not to stare at Brett.
“I'll bet she killed a man,” I said, that line from Gatsby, from when we first met Brett. “I'll bet she killed a man over the way he was tearing up her manuscript.”
“Justifiable homicide!” Ally said, with a very funny expression on her pale face, as if she'd just been released from the loony bin.
That made us all laugh—even Brett—and our laughter brought us back together, the way only laughter can. It was like admitting we all wore our own little white gloves over some part of us. And the vulnerability of admitting that made us a little emotional, I guess, and it's so much easier to laugh than to cry. Our laughter woke the baby, who'd been sleeping so quietly we'd practically forgotten him. And Brett leaned over to pick him up, but I said, “Let me,” because it was too much, to have to tend to a baby and listen to a critique of your manuscript at the same time. And I curled him up in my lap and jiggled him a little, ran a hand over his newly bald little cradle-capped scalp, and like most newborns he didn't seem to care much whose warm arms he was in.