Ian Sales: All That Outer Space Allows

Which is more than Mary Irwin, wife of James Irwin—and the “role” Ginny is playing in this novel—felt in her autobiography The Moon is Not Enough : “But as we entered Houston after three days of cramped travel in our camper without airconditioning, and as I saw the murky pall of smog hanging over the city, and felt the muggy, suffocating heat, a little part of me withered inside.”

From her purse, Ginny pulls out the scrap of paper on which she has scribbled the address given her by Walden. At one end of the apartment building is a staircase leading up to the second floor, and from the apartment number on the paper, her new home must be up there. She locks the car and climbs the stairs, and is soon standing before the door of the right apartment. She knocks.

Moments later, the door swings open and there is Walden, his face bearing that frown Ginny knows he wears when he has been interrupted at some important task. She smiles wanly at him. His eyes widen, his arms open, he grins and steps forward and pulls her into a hug. She is so tired she almost falls against him.

She is home.

Those first two months in the apartment, Ginny spends her days at the typewriter. New places always have this effect on her—until she feels settled she exorcises her discomfort with the written word. It was the same in Germany, though she never grew used to life in that country; and she did this too when Walden was transferred to Edwards and she found herself living in Wherry Housing. She has explored this new home of hers: the apartment building, the city and its meagre shopping clustered at the junction of US 75 and Main Street, the scattered subdivisions either side of the Gulf Freeway. There is nothing to see here, and even less to do. Walden disappears into the Manned Spacecraft Center every day, leaving her to her own devices, and though there are several astronaut families in the area and in the Cardinal Apartments—including Dotty and Charlie from Edwards—the other wives have their kids to keep them occupied. She sees the women in the yard and on the street and at the stores, and she stays on friendly terms with them, even offers to provide transport on occasion for those who lack it, since Walden has left her the Impala. (All of the astronauts will be paid ten thousand dollars per year by Life magazine for exclusive rights to their stories. Walden has used some of the money to buy himself a car he feels better suited to his new career.)

Ginny sits at the table in their one-bedroom apartment and travels to the Moon and beyond in her imagination. She writes three stories in short order. But a deputation from the Astronaut Wives Club, a social club founded that summer by Marge Slayton and Louise Shepard, Ginny has already missed two of the monthly meetings, it’s four of the New Nine wives calling round to see her. Faye, Marilyn, Pat and Barbara, there to welcome Ginny into the fold, to her new life in “Togethersville”; but she is writing and when they see her in slacks and rough shirt, and the typewriter on the table, they purse their lips and she gets the lecture. It’s all very friendly, they sit in the apartment’s tiny lounge, drinking Ginny’s coffee, some of them smoking. Barbara talks about the need for the right breakfast, a “hot, nutritious breakfast” in NASA’s own words, but Ginny already knows this, she’s a test pilot’s wife, she had the “5 am breakfast” lecture years before.

This is tougher than being a test pilot’s wife, says Marilyn, ten times tougher.

What you do, adds Pat, reflects not only on your husband but on NASA, on the USA.

Ginny is in the public eye now, they tell her; she must at all times be proud, thrilled and happy. And well-groomed, always well-groomed.

But there are rewards. Once your husband has flown in space, says Barbara, you get to go places and meet people. NASA likes to have us there at parties and functions, like an astronaut’s accessory.

This generates knowing laughter from the other three New Nine wives.

Gemini 11 is due to launch next week, which means to date seventeen astronauts have been into space, some of them even twice, including the husbands of both Faye and Barbara.

Faye leans forward and puts her coffee cup on the carpet by her feet. There should be no problems at home, she says, looking up at Ginny, nothing that might jeopardise your husband’s chance of a flight. You need to stand by your man.

…her words eerily presaging the song, which is released a couple of weeks later, although Ginny does not hear it until months have passed. Tammy Wynette may be a native of Mississippi, but in 1966 the song’s sentiments are universal.

The women leave after an hour. Despite the 85°F heat, Ginny opens the windows to dispel the smell of cigarette smoke and commingled perfumes worn by the wives. She looks back across at the dining table and the Hermes Baby sitting on it, and wonders that they never thought to ask her what she had been typing. Perhaps the clothes she’s wearing shocked them so much it slipped their minds. She is amused at the thought: the slacks and shirt are mannish but she could never be mistaken for a man. Nor for some sort of genderless human being, neither man nor woman—and a line of thought, no doubt triggered by the hot humid air pushing its way into the room through the open windows, has her imagining a race of androgynous people who, like many animals, are only sexually active when in heat, and then they can be one sex or the other. It’s not a bad idea for a story, she thinks; but she decides not to make a note of it—no way to use it occurs to her and it’s not an idea she feels qualified to explore.

The next month, on the first Tuesday, Ginny puts on makeup, more than she usually wears, and a dress bought in Neiman Marcus only the week before, styles her hair, and drives over to the Lakewood Yacht Club for her first AWC meeting. There are forty-eight of them now, drinking tea and coffee and nibbling on cakes and cookies in the ballroom. Ginny spots Pam, but she also recognises Mary, and Dotty too, of course, and she sees Louise, another Mary, Joan and Wanita, who were also at Edwards. Ginny doesn’t know most of the other wives, so Pam and Dotty help out with the names, but it’s too many to take in at once, and Ginny is feeling a little uncomfortable, something of an outsider at this gathering, as she can see how closely knit the various groups are, how confident and assured and polished are the wives of the Original Seven and the New Nine. It occurs to her that her standing in this group is a consequence of her husband’s achievements. Right now, he’s just one of the new guys, spending his time in a classroom training to fly the new spacecraft. He may never go to the Moon, he may never even make it into space. The real pioneers are the ones who have flown; and their wives are golden in the reflected glory. There’s Louise, the Boston Brahmin, in white gloves; and Rene, as Ginny has heard, does indeed look very glamorous—and Pam tells Ginny in a whispered aside that Rene has been writing a newspaper column, ‘A Woman, Still’, for the past year. It’s a connection, Ginny thinks, we’re both writers—except Ginny writes science fiction and she’s pretty sure Rene is not going to consider that equivalent to a newspaper column; there’s no way the lurid covers and contents of Galaxy or If or Fantastic can compete with the prestige of the Houston Chronicle .

Not that it matters, anyway. Even at Edwards, Ginny didn’t feel much like an Air Force wife, a test pilot wife, though she took care to make all the right noises. And this astronaut thing is too new—she’s read books on Mercury and Gemini, she’s seen the photographs of the missions in Life magazine, the space walk last year; but a connection between that and this room full of smartly-dressed women seems too fanciful to willingly suspend disbelief.