Robert Butler: Mr. Spaceman

Hudson says, “You give us our memories, but if we tell the truth, we sound like lunatics.”

“I will personally give you confirmation,” I say. I pause and look at Edna, not wishing to dash her hopes in this public way, but I must explain myself to these people so that they might advise me.

Edna leaps into my pause. “This is the homemade Thousand Island dressing I was talking about on this salad here. I wanted to have shrimp cocktail, too, but this was short notice and I’m not able to shop on my own, as it were. There’s special machines and all.”

“This is fine,” Viola says, lifting a forkful of lettuce dripping with the homemade dressing.

Another murmur goes around the table, affirming the quality of the salad. My wife Edna Bradshaw takes the compliments with a humble lowering of the face.

“What kind of confirmation?” Hudson asks.

I must think clearly now. And simply. It is time. I say, “At midnight I must descend in a public way and reveal to your planet the existence of my species and, by implication, the existence of a multitude of other species out among the stars.”

Wordless sounds of surprise and interest come from the table at this announcement, but more noticeable for me is the severe cry of my wife’s scooting chair. I look up at her, as she is now standing. She declares, “I must go and get the entree and so forth.” But she goes nowhere. I look down from the struggle of her face to maintain its mask of the cheerful hostess and I see her hands trembling.

“Please,” says Viola, “don’t bother, Edna honey. You’ve done enough. We can all go out to the kitchen and serve ourselves.”

“Of course,” says Claudia. And then others say “of course” and “no problem” and they are all rising and Viola shows them the way to the kitchen.

Edna remains standing beside me, letting our guests serve themselves first. When we are alone I know I should speak to her but I am afraid. Then her hand is on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Desi honey,” she says. “I’m being a baby. A man is his work, I guess, and you have to do what you have to do because orders is orders no matter if it’s dirty work because somebody’s got to do it and if you can’t be a help you should at least just get out of the way, which I want to do for you, out of respect, Desi, you honorable and obedient spaceman you, here’s your sausage and there’s the door.” Her hand suddenly squeezes tight at my shoulder. “I’m going a little crazy here, I realize that, going crazy in my usual babbling way. But that’s what you liked about me when you were first listening in to me and my friends with your machines before you and me ever met in the Wal-Mart Supercenter parking lot in Bovary. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that what you told me? That you liked the way I talked?”

I wish to affirm this to be true for my sweet and prolific wordmaker of a wife Edna Bradshaw, but she does not pause even for a breath with these questions, she rushes on, “And the proof was, after you heard me doing a lot of talking over a period of — what? months? — you asked me out for a date and then you asked me to marry you and that marriage proposal didn’t happen because I’d clammed up, though part of me had been advising that, but I never did listen to that advice, you heard the real me and even so, you still wanted to marry me and that was a very sweet thing, a kind thing.”

I insist now on the insertion of a few words of my own, regretfully overriding the voice of my wife. “It was not a kind thing, Edna Bradshaw,” I say. “I wanted to marry you. I got what I wanted.”

“See what a good idea this was?” she says, and she lets go of my shoulder and moves off toward her kitchen.

I do not follow her. I remain where I am. Now Jared is coming back with a plate full of food and Mary after him and Lucky right behind and others are following and I lower my face, turn my attention inward. I begin to hum soundlessly inside myself, an avoidance, I realize, a copping out, but I want now only to be left alone in my life — which, of course, would still include my wife Edna Bradshaw and our yellow cat Eddie — no, I yearn for the three of us to be left alone — I am afraid this is more than a simple want. And like so many yearnings, this is ultimately impossible to have, because for one reason, the yearnings inside all these individuals who are bearing their plates full of Chicken Wiggle to my table even now, their yearnings are an inseparable part of my most intimate concern, as well. I would carry a deep sense of all of them with me to my place of aloneness, and a deep sense, too, of all the others, all those I have interviewed over the years, those who have forgotten me utterly or who are dead. They, too, would follow me wherever I went.

I have one pleasant thought now. The memory of me, of Desi the Spaceman, will not pass from those who are sitting here at this table. And as the last of these coming from the kitchen — Viola Stackhouse — sits down, my hands flop foolishly about in front of me, striving to do something for them, for each of them, and there is a brush of warmth past my face and a wicker basket lands before me and a plate of food and Edna sits down with her own plate now and she motions to the wicker basket. “Why don’t you pass the homemade buttermilk biscuits, Desi honey,” she says.

And I take up the basket and I fold back the cloth and there are, within, many biscuits. I hold a great, steaming trove of Edna Bradshaw’s homemade buttermilk biscuits, and I am happy to have these biscuits, for this is something I can do for these dear and fragile creatures before me — recognizing that I am myself fragile, that all sentient life in this universe is fragile — and I say, “Here, have some biscuits.”

And I take one and I pass the basket to Lucky and he takes one and passes the basket on and the biscuits move around the table and I realize everyone is holding his or her biscuit, neither laying it down nor eating it, and the basket reaches Edna and she takes a biscuit and sets the basket before us. I gaze about the table. “Why are you all not eating?” I ask.

Some of my guests look down at their biscuits and they, too, seem puzzled, but still no one is eating. And then Citrus says, “They’re beginning to understand, is why. We’re waiting for you to break the bread.”

And I look at the biscuit in my hand. And I look up at all the faces turned to me.

And I say, “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven.”

Then I break the biscuit, and one voice — I do not exactly know which one, because it remains isolated for only the briefest of moments — a voice begins, “Nothin’ …” and the rest of the voices — all of them, I think — instantly join in, and all the voices say, “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven.”

And I have broken my biscuit in two and they all break their biscuits in two and all eyes are on me and I do not like to have anyone watch me eat, especially not members of another intelligent species, but everyone is clearly waiting for me and I put one piece of the biscuit in my mouth. It is, by the code of daily conduct adhered to in Bovary, Alabama, far too big a piece of biscuit, but my mouth is large and the pressure on me is great and so I take in half a biscuit and I wait until the others turn away before I chew, since I expect to inadvertently expel crumbs of my biscuit in the process. But they have all done what I did. They have all taken fully half a biscuit into their mouths and their cheeks are pooched out and they are still watching me, still not chewing.

So I chew. And they chew.

“See how nice this all is?” Edna Bradshaw says, though her words are muffled through the biscuit. I discern an ongoing nervousness in my wife, since, by the same Bovarian standards, she normally would not be speaking with her mouth full.