Robert Butler: Mr. Spaceman

“What’s that for, honey?” she asks.

“We will tell them it is a custom of my home planet to wear our name tags in this manner.”

Edna Bradshaw smiles at me for doing this, a gentle smile, with her eyes filling, as they easily do, with tears. I am now rendered, as I usually am, utterly floppy-fingered helpless when I see her tears, even tears of appreciation and thanks, which is the case in this moment. I am struck, too, at the pleasure I am taking at her careful, indeed delicate, handwriting that identifies her as “Mrs. Desi,” for she is Mrs. Desi in the fullest sense, since I am Desi and she is my wife. Desi is the name she gave me at our first meeting because none of the people here, no dweller on this planet, is capable of saying my name, my true and full name.

My wife lunges forward and embraces me. I think of the bee sting on her precious knocker and I am sad at her ordeal and very happy to be pressing against her. Across her bare shoulders and back I let my sixteen fingertips deliver my heartbeat into her. Edna once likened my fingertips to the sucker pads on the feet of certain lizards on this planet, and this has caused me a curious torment ever since. I believe her comparison was meant in a purely superficial, visual way, but the very thought, even if untrue, of some gecko down there crouching in the grass this evening, smug in his tactile knowledge of Edna’s flesh — this makes me unhappy in a peculiarly intense way. I have vowed, however, never to ask my wife about this possibility. She continues her embrace, but I wish to remove these unpleasant thoughts from my mind, and I do have a bus full of sleeping and soon-to-be distressed subjects waiting for me.

“We must look in on our visitors now,” I say.

Edna ends her embrace and steps back and shifts about briefly in her dress once more and pats at her hairdo, though it is stiffly inert from All the Body and Holding Power She Will Ever Need, a state attainable from certain spray cans that I periodically beam up to our vessel. Since I married Edna, it is quite remarkable, the wondrous variety of seemingly commonplace things that one of the finest fruits of my planet’s technology has been used to acquire. Not that I have any regrets. My own daily life, like the lives of my fellow countrymen, can be rather stark in design: brush-textured alloys and tightly focused spot lighting and great, high-ceiling shadows. For all her stuff, which she has begun to bring into my existence, I am grateful to Edna. Personally, of course, since she is my wife, but professionally, too. These things are part of what I must try to learn.

I turn now to the great door into the Reception Hall and I move my hand and it opens. Edna and I have not discussed this moment in any detail. She asked me if she could be at my side when the next visitors arrived, and I thought this was a very good idea. There is always a period of anxiety at first, and Edna, being recognizable as one of their own, would put my visitors at ease. I said yes to her and she said she would handle everything and so I am not surprised at the name tags and the party dress. In the Reception Hall, however, there are some surprises.

The bus sits, just as it should, in a great swath of light in the center of the hall, which recedes into soothing darkness in all directions. Except one. Just as my vessel’s intuitive light — as natural as a cloudless morning — immediately picks up Edna and me and moves with us as we move — so, too, has a wide column of light appeared in a space to my right, about twenty paces away from the bus. I look carefully in this direction because the things being illuminated are very strange to me. There is a large hovering drape there with red roses marching around the edges — masking a table, I realize now — and on its top is a profusion of things.

“Come and see,” Edna says, taking my hand and pulling me toward the table. “This is going to be a lovely time for all. I’ve made everything here myself, nothing store-bought, except the ingredients, of course. That’s Southern Hospitality, and if you’re married to me, you’re married to Southern. Course you’re from the South in your own place, aren’t you?”

She pauses for me to verify this. She has made this inquiry before. The distinction is uncommon where I am from and so I compute the answer again and, from what I understand, latitudinally, of her question, I am able to reassure her once more. “Yes, I am from the Southern part of my own place.”

“See?” my wife Edna Bradshaw says, “this is just the touch you need. Now these are cheese straws and these are sausage balls — I had to make a choice between Jimmy Dean and Tennessee Pride, but I always tend to ‘Take Home a Package of Tennessee Pride.’ I like that, you know, thinking you can take home something that precious in a package, though my pride’d be Alabama pride, but never mind. At the end of the day, all you really have is just pride in your sausage, is all, and Tennessee is close enough for that.”

My Edna Bradshaw pauses with this thought and an unmistakable sadness comes upon her. I will ask her about this feeling at a more appropriate moment, but already she is transforming her face into a perky, welcoming thing and she moves on down the table. She says, lifting her hand toward a great round, creviced globe remarkably similar in appearance to the outer moon of my home planet, “Now this is a pecan ball. Dried beef isn’t good enough for me when I make it. This baby has three pounds of real beef jerky. You remember when I had you beam up some things from that truck stop near where I used to live? A truck driver should know good jerky, it seems to me.”

I work hard at understanding what Edna is explaining to me, but the best I can do is record her observations in my memory and hope that I will one day fit all of this together. Food. Hospitality. I do know these to be crucial concepts in this world, and Edna’s self-assurance in these complex matters makes me happy to have her good counsel, and — I am not reluctant to speak this, for on my planet we greatly revere learning and expertise — Edna’s understanding of these concepts makes me love her even more. She moves along the table and says, “Here’s the low-fat neighborhood at our little spread. Carrot curls and rosettes of radishes. We Earth-lings are fragile creatures, for all of that. You can put that down in the book you’re keeping on us, or whatever it is.”

“My records are increasingly full of your wisdom,” I say, though she resists the clear sexual invitation of my words. Which, I realize, is an act of the very wisdom I have spoken of, given our more pressing task at hand.

“And to top it all off,” she says, “we have a little indulgence for those of our guests with a sweet tooth. A tray full of Mississippi Mud.”

I quickly sort through all that I’ve learned about eating customs on this planet and I am at a loss to find a precedent for this taste in the primary species. Or even a subspecies, for that matter. Edna laughs at the apparent display of my confusion.

“Not real mud, you silly spaceman. It’s just a name. These are my best brownies with melted marshmallows, melted chocolate chips, and finely chopped pecans on top. You can see how versatile the pecan is, right here. I’ve used it in both a dessert and a main dish.” She motions back to our deeply creviced outer moon, and then gently tugs me to the end of the table and a large bowl full of a pale green fluid. It is precisely the color of the life substance flowing in my very veins, even foaming into more substantial eddies, just as in my body. Surely this is as deceptively figurative as the Mississippi mud, this bowl of my blood, but I am suddenly intensely conscious of my hands, which is where we feel fear in our bodies on my planet. My hands grow quickly hot and threaten to stiffen.