Margaret Dean: Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

This ritual satisfactorily observed, we get back into the bus and resume the last leg of our journey. A few minutes later, the bus makes another stop to let the train pass that has just fueled our rocket. The bus door opens and an unexpected face appears: my brother.

This is a breach of quarantine: my brother, having been on a series of germ-infested planes from the United States to Moscow to Baikonur just yesterday, could be carrying all manner of terrible illnesses. Dr. No has been saying “ Nyet ” all week, and now, suddenly, he sees my brother and says “ Da. ” The Russians enforce the quarantine with an iron fist, then let my brother break it for sentimental reasons; they make a ritual of sealing up our suits, then let us open them to pee on a tire. At times, their inconsistencies drive me nuts, but this gesture, letting me see my brother again when I least expect to, means the world to me. Mark and I don’t exchange many words as we ride together for the few minutes out to the launchpad. Here we are, two boys from blue-collar New Jersey who somehow made it such a long way from home.

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE of the warm summer nights when my mother tried to settle Mark and me to sleep in our house on Mitchell Street in West Orange, New Jersey. It would still be light outside, and with the windows open the smell of honeysuckle drifted in along with the sounds of the neighborhood—older kids yelling, the thumps of basketballs against driveways, the rustling of breezes high in the trees, the faraway sound of traffic. I remember the feeling of drifting weightless between summer and sleep.

My brother and I were born in 1964. Members of our extended family on my father’s side lived all up and down our block, aunts and uncles and cousins. The town was separated by a hill. The more well-off lived “up the hill,” and we lived “down the hill,” though we wouldn’t know until later what that meant in socioeconomic terms. I remember waking early in the morning with my brother when we were small, maybe two years old. My parents were sleeping, so we were on our own. We got bored, figured out how to open the back door, and left the house to explore, two toddlers wandering the neighborhood. We made our way to a gas station, where we played in the grease until the owner found us. He knew where we belonged and stuck us back in the house without waking my parents. When my mother finally got up and came downstairs, she was perplexed by the grease all over us. Later, the owner came over and told her what had happened.

One afternoon when we were kindergarten students, my mother bent down to tell us she had an important responsibility for us. She held a white envelope in front of her as if it were a special prize. She said that we were to put the letter in a mailbox directly across the street from our house. She explained that because it wasn’t safe to cross in the middle of the street—we could be hit by a car—we were to walk up to the corner, cross the street there, walk back in this direction on the other side of the street, mail the letter, then retrace our steps all the way back home. We assured her we understood. We walked up to the corner, looked both ways, and crossed. We walked back toward our house on the mailbox side of the street, Mark boosted me up to pull down the heavy blue handle, and I proudly deposited the letter in the slot. Then we pondered our return trip.

“I’m not walking all the way back to the corner,” Mark announced. “I’m just going to cross the street right here.”

“Mom said we should cross at the corner,” I reminded him. “You’re going to get hit by a car.”

But Mark had made up his mind.

I set off back toward the corner myself, satisfied that I would be praised for having followed directions. (It occurs to me now that following directions that seemed arbitrary was good early training for being an astronaut.) I got to the corner, crossed, and turned back toward the house. The next thing I heard was car brakes squealing and the thump of a collision, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something the size and shape of a kid flying up into the air. The next moment, Mark sat, dazed, in the middle of the street, while the frantic driver fussed over him. Someone ran for our mother, an ambulance came and took them to the hospital, and I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with my uncle Joe, pondering the different choices Mark and I had made and the different results.

As our childhoods went on, we continued to take crazy risks. We both got hurt. We both got stitches so often we sometimes would have the stitches from the previous injury removed during the same visit new stitches were put in, but only Mark was ever admitted as an inpatient. I was always jealous of the attention he got when he was hospitalized. Mark got hit by the car, Mark broke his arm sliding down a handrail, Mark had appendicitis, Mark stepped on a broken glass bottle of worms and got blood poisoning, Mark was taken into the city for a series of tests to see whether he had bone cancer (he didn’t). We both played with BB guns recklessly, but only Mark got shot in the foot and then damaged by a botched surgery.

When we were about five, my parents bought a little vacation bungalow on the Jersey Shore, and some of my best memories from childhood are from that time. It wasn’t much more than a shack, with no heat, but we loved going there. My parents would get us up in the middle of the night, when my father got off work, and load us into the back of the family station wagon in our pajamas with our blankets, where we’d go back to sleep. I remember the feeling of being rocked by the car’s movement, looking at the telephone wires out the windows and the stars beyond them.

At the shore, in the mornings, Mark and I would ride our bikes to a place called Whitey’s, a boatyard where we bought bait for crabbing. We’d spend all day on the dock behind our bungalow, waiting to feel a crab nibble on the bait. We built rafts out of spare fence planks, on which we set sail from the lagoon house on the approach to Barnegat Bay. We had a kind of freedom my own children never had. I remember falling off the dock before I knew how to swim and sinking into the dark and murky water of the lagoon. I didn’t know what to do about it. I simply watched the bubbles of the last of my air rising. Then my father, who had seen my blond hair drifting just above the water, grabbed a handful and pulled me out.

MY FATHER WAS an alcoholic, and sometimes he would take off drinking for long periods of time. I remember one weekend at the Jersey Shore when he disappeared, leaving the three of us with no food and no money. My mother explained to us that he had taken our only car to a bar; somehow we got a ride over there to find him. It was a ramshackle place, set off in the marshes that lined Barnegat Bay, built of brown pressure-treated wood that had been bleached by the salt air. He refused to give us any money or to leave with us. I remember my mother’s face as she led us out of there. She was upset, but her face showed determination: she would get us through this. We didn’t eat that weekend, and I’ll never forget how that felt; it affects me to this day when I hear of people who don’t have enough to eat. The physical feeling of hunger is horrible, but much worse is the bottomlessness of not knowing when it will end.

When Mark and I were in second grade, our parents sold the place on the Jersey Shore so they could buy a house “up the hill.” They wanted us to be able to go to a better public school. We moved onto a street lined with giant green oak trees, aptly named Greenwood Avenue. I remember the smell of springtime on that street, trees with new leaves and azalea bushes of pinks and purples. It’s odd that once we moved, we hardly ever saw our family on Mitchell Street again. My father was often not on speaking terms with various friends and family members, so it’s possible he had burned through all those relationships by the time we moved.