Atmosphere(10)

The morning of the first all-astronauts meeting, Joan, Donna, and Griff walked over to JSC together, already cracking up at their own inside jokes, overusing their new punch line: “But that’s not going to happen here.”

Griff had said it the first time a few days prior, talking about how he’d been the big man on campus at his New England prep school: valedictorian, class president, and captain of the lacrosse team. When Donna arched her eyebrows, implying that maybe he expected to be just as big a deal at NASA, he quickly added, “But that’s not going to happen here.” And all three of them laughed.

Donna then used the line not even a half hour later, when talking about her previously dramatic and volatile love life.

Then Joan told them about how she’d been considered an astronomy nerd by almost everyone she’d ever known and added, in a sarcastic tone that surprised her in how well she nailed the joke, “But I bet that’s not going to happen here.”

As they made their way onto campus that morning, they spotted Lydia Danes up ahead. She was slight—no taller than five-two, her body wiry—but to Joan there was something terrifyingly invincible about her. Perhaps it was the way she moved with such intense focus. As if enjoying the walk would threaten to waste her time.

The night before, Donna had asked Lydia if she wanted to walk over with them in the morning. Lydia had never given her an answer.

“There’s always one in a group who thinks their shit doesn’t stink,” Donna said.

“Oh, but Donna . . .” Griff said.

“Don’t!” Joan said.

“That’s not going to happen here,” he said.

Joan shook her head and smiled.

“I’m telling you,” Donna said. “She’s rude.”

Joan watched Lydia walk ahead of them. “You can’t take it personally,” Griff said.

“She thinks she’s better than everyone else,” Donna said. “As evidenced by the way she keeps clarifying for people that I’m only an ER doctor, but she is a trauma surgeon.”

As Donna spoke, Joan began taking in the architecture around the campus. All brutalist, boxlike buildings made of windows and concrete. Somehow dated, and yet timelessly plain.

But as she glanced at the Mission Control building, something buzzed inside her. It had a personality to it, a spark of the ’60s Apollo program flair. And Joan nearly froze in her tracks.

I’m at NASA.

They got to the conference room one minute early, which Joan considered four minutes late.

The three of them crammed in along the sides of the room, obeying the clear and unspoken hierarchy that the chairs were only for the astronauts, and the candidates would remain standing on the periphery. There was already a tension in the room that Joan could not name. Some of the astronauts were seated with their legs extended, taking up as much floor space as possible, making no attempt to create room for the new candidates. Joan, Donna, and Griff stood wordlessly along the wall. Lydia barely looked at the rest of them. The last person to dash in, just before Antonio began to speak, was Vanessa Ford.

Her curly hair was pulled back, her posture was tall and straight, her shoulders broad. She took off her sunglasses and tucked them into her shirt pocket, with her eyes narrow, her jaw tight. Then she clasped both hands behind her back and faced forward, her full attention on Antonio, at the front of the room.

And the thought that went through Joan’s head was: That’s an astronaut.


Later that night, Griff and Donna headed out with some of the other astronaut candidates—which Joan now understood was what everyone meant when they said “ASCANs”—for drinks. They invited Joan, but she declined. She’d promised Frances she’d call her to tell her all about her first day, so she headed straight back to her apartment.

“Did you know that there are two pins I might get eventually?” Joan said to Frances over the phone.

“Like my Mickey Mouse pin?” Frances said.

“Yeah, close to that. But these pins are shaped like a star with three rays behind it, coming out of a halo. One is silver and one is gold.”

“And they give you them for being an astronaut?”

“Hopefully, but not yet,” Joan said. She was pulling at the twisted telephone cord in the kitchen, unraveling it as she spoke. Just two weeks ago, the phone had been brand-new. Now it was already tangled from use.

“A year or so from now, if I pass this program, they will make me an astronaut. And they will give me that silver pin, which means I am ready to fly. And then one day when I get chosen for a mission, and go up there and come back, that’s when they’ll give me the gold one. To symbolize that I have flown in space.”

“I can’t believe my aunt is going to space.”

“Maybe one day,” Joan said. “Yeah.”

Joan kept the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she pulled a frozen dinner out of the freezer and popped it into the oven.

“I want to be an astronaut,” Frances said.

What a time Joan lived in. To be able to tell her niece that she could be an astronaut.

“If you work hard at it, then you will,” Joan said. “Now go brush your teeth. Every quadrant. You remember what the dentist said now that your molars have come in.”

“I know,” Frances said. “I will.”