I Love You, Michael Collins

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  I will give you an example of what a summer day with Buster is like.

  Today I get up at seven, brush my teeth, get dressed in orange shorts and a matching top, and go downstairs for breakfast, which is Cap’n Crunch. I do not care for Cap’n Crunch as much as some other cereals, but my mom says it is better for me than Froot Loops, which is my favorite. Froot Loops are just so much more colorful, and then after they soak in the milk for a bit, it is like having a bowlful of rainbow. Plus lots of sugar.

  “Can I go over Buster’s?” I ask my mom just as soon as the bowl is empty. My dad has already left for work.

  “I don’t see why not,” Mom says, “so long as you two don’t spend the entire day cooped up indoors.”

  I have learned that being “cooped up indoors” is something that adults are fiercely against kids doing, even though it is something adults do all the time. For example, after school in the winter, we have to put on our snowsuits and go outside to play, no matter how cold it is. This is the case even when we build an igloo and the snow somehow gets between our snow pants and our boots and then trickles down into our socks so our toes freeze and our feet feel like blocks of ice. We have to play outside until it gets dark. The cocoa afterward is good, but sometimes I think it is hardly worth the price of ice-block feet.

  Fall and spring aren’t too bad, but really, summer is no better than winter. You just can’t escape the heat. By late morning, even the shade doesn’t help much. And at night, it is so hard to sleep. In my house, we have two ways to get cool air. There’s a portable fan that gets moved from room to room depending on who’s doing what. So if my mom is cooking, it’s going to be in the kitchen, and when we eat dinner it gets moved to the dining room.

  The other way to get cool is by the air conditioner that is in the window of my parents’ bedroom. Sometimes, when it is still boiling hot by bedtime, they let me put my sleeping bag on their bedroom floor. It is like camping without the annoyance of mosquitoes or the threat of bears, which I think you will agree is quite an improvement. Do they have any air conditioners at NASA? I bet it gets pretty hot in those spacesuits you astronauts have to wear. I think if I had to wear one of those, I would just die of heat prostration, which is something my mother says can happen to people and makes me wonder why adults are always so eager to send kids out into the hot sun during the summer.

  Buster’s family is putting in a pool, right in the ground. Sometimes we sit outside and watch the men working, digging the big hole. But Buster’s mom says the pool will not be finished for quite some time. If you ask me, they should have started this project earlier. It would be nice to have cool water to jump into on a hot day like today.

  If we are lucky, in the afternoon Buster’s mom will let us turn on the garden hose and spray each other. But for now, on my way over to Buster’s house, which is where we spend most of our days, it is just hot, hot, hot.

  When I knock on the door, Mrs. Whitaker opens it and says, “Hi, Mamie.”

  Mrs. Whitaker is Buster’s mom. Instead of Bermuda shorts, Mrs. Whitaker favors harem pants and hot pants, and I don’t think she’s met a paisley print yet that she doesn’t like. Instead of pearls and plaids, when you see Mrs. Whitaker what you get are pinks and greens and oranges and the occasional swirling pattern that can make a person feel dizzy. I know all the ladies like my mom go to the salon to get their hair done, and Mrs. Whitaker does, too—the salon is called André’s—but no one’s hair looks like Mrs. Whitaker’s. It is black, just like Buster’s, but hers is high and poofy except for the very ends, which flip upward. It is called a bouffant hairdo. My mom sometimes wears one, but Mrs. Whitaker’s is the bouffantiest and my mom says no one should wear her hair teased up as high as Mrs. Whitaker does. My mom says it is tacky. Between you and me, though? I like it.

  Then there is the question of her makeup. My dad says only Cleopatra should wear eye makeup like Cleopatra, and don’t get him started on the white lipstick. My dad says that Mrs. Whitaker dresses like she thinks she’s still a teenager, and that even teenagers shouldn’t wear the things Mrs. Whitaker does, but she has always been only kind in the years I’ve known her, and that is good enough for me.

  Buster has a dad, too, but we don’t see much of him. He commutes to work. Before Buster’s bedtime got changed to nine-thirty on school nights, most nights Buster’s dad got home so late, Buster wouldn’t see him at all. He told me that on the weekends, his dad would look at him over his coffee at the breakfast table and say, “Who are you again?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Whitaker,” I say now, returning her greeting. “Is Buster up yet?”

  “He sure is.” She holds open the screen door for me. “You know where to find him.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I say as I pass her, hearing the door shut behind me as I race down the stairs to the basement. It has a linoleum floor that stays cool no matter how hot it is outside. Because of that, it is like square tiles of heaven. And it is where Buster and I can almost always be found in the summer until we get kicked outside by his mom.

  “Whatcha doing?” I ask Buster.

  “Reading.”

  This is hardly a surprise. Buster is lying on the linoleum, his back against a cushion he’s pulled from the ratty old couch, and there is a book propped up on his stomach. It’s hardly a surprise because Buster is almost always reading a book.

  Buster says that everything that has ever happened in the world and anything a person could ever want to know about the world can be found in books.

  Even though I’m itching for the day to get started, I wait patiently as Buster finishes his page. Since he’s my best friend, I know all his habits, and I know he hates to put aside a book before he’s finished the page he’s on. Me, I don’t mind if I have to put the bookmark in if I’m only halfway down the page, or even seven-eighths. But Buster? If the doorbell rings and he’s in the middle of a page and his mother yells, “Buster, can you get that, please? My hands are all greasy from ground beef,” Buster will get up from wherever he’s sitting, nose still in the book, never once tearing his eyes from the words, and go open the door. I know because I have seen this for myself. I have tried to impress upon him how reckless his behavior is. He doesn’t even look out the side window first. How does he know that whoever he’s letting into his house isn’t some kind of criminal? But that doesn’t bother Buster. Buster’s just going to do what Buster’s going to do.

  Aside from regular books, Buster is also a huge fan of comic books, Batman and Superman in particular. I think if Buster had to make a choice between being able to have his own utility belt with items like a bat-shaped grappling hook and cable strong enough to help you climb the side of a skyscraper or being faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, that would be a very hard choice for Buster to make.

  When Buster’s at a good place to set his book aside, he looks up, and that’s when I get to see his eyes, which are just the right shade of brown.

  “What do you want to do today?” he asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “We could ride our bikes to the library,” Buster says.

  The library is pretty much Buster’s favorite place in the whole entire universe.

  I shake my head hard to show I mean business. “Too hot,” I say.

  “We could stay down here and play with Matchbox cars,” Buster says.

  I shrug again. “Okay.”

  So that’s what we do. We play with Matchbox cars until midmorning when Mrs. Whitaker yells from upstairs for us to “Come have some Hi-C!” When we get upstairs, her back is to us and she is standing at the door, peering out into the yard with one hand over her eyes like a visor against the sun. We startle her and she turns.

  “Oh! I thought you kids were outside!”

  So of course, after the Hi-C, that is where she tells us we need to go.

  We lie under the biggest shade tree they’ve got, the grass underneath it s
cratching at any exposed skin. We watch the men work on the pool. We talk about life. Buster brings his book. Sometimes he reads quietly to himself, while I keep watching the men and thinking my thoughts. Other times, he reads the good parts out loud to me. I do think I’d like the good parts better if I knew what the story was. We do these things until we’re called for lunch—often peanut butter and jelly, although today it is bologna and mayo—and we do them after lunch, too.

  On a typical day, if we are patient enough, eventually Mrs. Whitaker will call, “What are you kids doing outside? It’s too hot out there.” Then she will let us come in and watch TV. We watch game shows. And if Superman is on anywhere, of course we watch that, even though it is an old show and therefore in black-and-white, unlike Batman, which of course as I’m sure you know comes in color. I only know this from Buster’s TV since ours is still only black-and-white. I’ll bet you have a color TV, being an astronaut and all.

  Sometimes Mrs. Whitaker sits with us, and then we watch As the World Turns or another of what she calls “my stories,” which is just a fancy way to say soap operas. My mom says they rot your brain, but so far my brain’s still feeling pretty good. When Michael and Claire on As the World Turns got divorced and Michael said he’d remarry her but then gave her his condition, which I did not quite understand because I don’t get to see every episode, and then Claire stabbed him with a letter opener? I tell you, I thought I was going to fall out of my chair. If I’d been Claire, I’d have simply said, “No thank you.” Some of the things these characters get up to in Mrs. Whitaker’s stories, you do not want to know.

  We do this until my mother calls to say it’s time for dinner. After dinner, I go over to get Buster and it’s back outside again. Buster and I can hear the kids playing elsewhere in the neighborhood, playing loudly as the mosquitoes come out to feast. I suspect they play games like hide-and-seek, kick the can, and spud. I do not care for these games. As my mother has said, speed is not my forte.

  When the mosquitoes are too thick, we each go home and get ready for bed.

  And that is what a typical summer day with Buster is like.

  Do you see what I did there, Michael Collins? I told all that in the present tense, or as best I could, so you would feel like you were there and it was happening right now. Did it work?

  Sincerely yours,

  Mamie

  Dear Michael Collins,

  I know I said Buster was the last important person in my life you needed to know about, but right after I put my letter to you in an envelope and attached the Plant for More Beautiful Parks stamp to it—do you like the stamp? I thought it was very pretty—and I put it in our mailbox, I wanted to hit myself on the head. How could I be so stupid?

  The last, the very last important “person” in my life is my cat, Campbell, who I have had for three years, since kittenhood. Someone was giving away free kittens from a box outside the A&P, and Campbell was the only one left. Campbell is named after my favorite soup brand and is a girl, but she doesn’t mind having what some think of as a boy’s name. We both think it’s original and quite elegant.

  Campbell is also not ever supposed to go outside, unless I carry her, because she is an indoor cat. Occasionally, she gets away, but she never stays gone for much more than an hour. Lately she’s been getting fat, which makes me wonder: Maybe she’s not getting enough exercise?

  That’s it.

  Now you know everybody.

  Also, this letter fits in the envelope just fine, but that last one about Buster? It was so long, I was barely able to get the envelope to close, even after I folded all the pages as small as I could make them. I got some other envelopes from my mom’s desk, the larger envelopes that people send business material in, like contracts and things. You know, just in case I write another long letter.

  At some point, if this keeps up, I may need to walk into town to the post office to get more supplies. You may think I’m too young to walk “into town,” but it is not too many blocks away, we don’t get all that much traffic in our town, and my mom says any exercise can only do me good. I had to wait until I turned ten to gain this privilege, and I am very proud of it. Mostly, I walk with Buster, just to be extra safe, but if I do need to go to the post office, I will find a way to go alone. For some reason, I feel like these letters should be just between us. I hope that is okay.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mamie

  Dear Michael Collins,

  I finally figured out why you never write back. Can you figure out how I figured this out? If not, I will tell you. I did the math.

  Okay, I didn’t really do the math, since I don’t have all the information. But it struck me that I might not be the only person writing to you. I thought, if every school in the country has just one class that is writing letters to the astronauts and if in each class there is just one kid like me writing to you, then that is still a lot of mail.

  It’s no wonder you can’t write back to everyone. And of course you do have other things to do right now.

  I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of you getting more mail than I originally thought you did. On the one hand, I’m really happy for you. I’m glad you’ve got more than just me. On the other hand, it was kind of nice when I thought I was the only one. It felt special. Like I was the only one who knew about you. Which of course isn’t true. The whole world knows about you. It’s just that most of them don’t seem to appreciate you very much.

  Does it ever bother you that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin get so much more mail than you do? I hope not. It certainly wouldn’t bother me. There was a time I thought it might be nice to be popular—you know, to have a lot of friends. But then Buster came along, and then Campbell, and I realized that that is quite enough for me.

  Of course, I used to wonder why I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I didn’t have an answer for it. Now I think it might have something to do with that question Mrs. Collins my teacher asked us, about what we want to be when we grow up and how the boys said they want to be astronauts and the girls said they want to marry astronauts and I said I didn’t know. And I don’t. So maybe that’s why I’m not more popular: because other people always seem so sure of what they want and where they’re going and I just never seem to know.

  I’ve also been wondering something else about you.

  Does it ever bother you, that whole thing about how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are going to get to walk on the moon but you won’t, at least not this trip?

  Okay, that’s the last time I’m going to ask that question. I won’t bring it up again. My lips are sealed.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mamie

  Dear Michael Collins,

  I hope you won’t take this poorly, but my dad is not a fan of yours. You shouldn’t mind, though. He’s not a fan of Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin either. As a matter of fact, he’s not a fan of NASA and the entire space program. Or President Nixon.

  This subject came up yet again last night at dinner.

  There we sat: me, my mom, my dad, and Bess.

  My mom had made the best dish in the world: chicken smothered in Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and then baked in the oven. Does Mrs. Collins your wife ever make that for you? I hope she does and, if so, you know what I’m talking about: M’m! M’m! Good!

  Before getting to that, though, we had to eat the salad course first, which consisted of iceberg lettuce, tomatoes from our garden, and green goddess salad dressing. If there’s enough dressing on the other stuff, I barely even notice how much I don’t like them. Does Mrs. Collins serve you salad with green goddess? I hope she does. Green goddess is one of the wonders of nature.

  I’d barely finished my salad and taken a first bite of chicken when trouble started.

  “What’s that new TV set doing in the living room?” my dad asked.

  Uh-oh. It’s not like I couldn’t have seen this coming—anyone could—but still. Uh-oh.

  “I didn’t think I needed your permission befo
re making a purchase for the home,” my mom said.

  “No one said you did,” my dad said. “But when a man comes home from a hard day at work and there’s a new television set replacing the perfectly good old one, I think he has a right to ask about it.”

  Whenever my dad starts talking about himself in the third person—“a man” and “he” instead of the usual “I”—it’s plain to see that no good can come of it.

  “I just thought it’d be nice for us to join the modern era,” my mom said. “You know, replace the old black-and-white with color.”

  If it were up to me to be the judge of this one, I’d have to come down on my mom’s side. I’d seen that color TV in the living room, a great big Magnavox even bigger than the Whitakers’, as soon as I’d come home from Buster’s house and I was itching to get my fingers on the knobs.

  “Why now?” my dad asked.

  “Pardon me?” my mom said.

  “Why now?” he said again. “Why, exactly, do we need color at this moment in time?”

  “Why, to watch the space launch next week, of course,” my mom said, “and then to watch the astronauts walk on the moon.”

  My dad pointed the business end of his fork at her. “And that right there is what’s wrong with this country.”

  “Color television sets?” my mom said, playing dumb.

  We all knew what my dad was getting at. We’d all heard versions of it before.

  “I suppose you’d like to watch the space launch in color, too, Mamie?” my dad asked, delaying the inevitable.

  “I guess it could be nice,” I said quietly, staring at my plate of chicken.

  “And how about you, Bess?” my dad asked. “What do you have to say about all this?”

  At the sound of her name, Bess looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

  “Useless,” was my dad’s response. “You might as well be on the moon for all the attention you pay to what goes on in this house these days.”