I Love You, Michael Collins

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  As soon as I pulled the metal cord on the overhead lightbulb, I knew I’d made the right decision. For there, hanging right in front of me, was a pencil skirt in the reddest of reds. When I put it on, of course it was too big for me, too long and so loose in the waist that it fell right down off my hips. And because it was getting so close to leaving time, I couldn’t hem it or take it in at the waist—not that I’m much good with a needle and thread; whenever I’ve tried to make an outfit for one of my dolls from discarded fabric, it has never come out quite as planned.

  But that was okay! I just folded that skirt a couple of times at the waistband, and that raised it right up—plus all the folding made it tighter at the waist. When I found a belt to hold the folds in place and cinched it together, you could barely see any lumpy bunching. For a shirt, I found the perfect thing: one of my mom’s sleeveless, button-down linen shirts she wears in the summer with Bermuda shorts. This one was in the purest white. And if it was a little big, too, again, so what? At least it would cover any bunches still at my waist from the skirt. And then, for navy blue, I grabbed one of my headbands, and I even took the time to position it right so that there were no stray clumps of hair in odd places.

  Finally, I briefly considered taking a pair of my mom’s high heels. They’d never fit, but I could always put some tissue paper in the toes like I used to do when I was younger and liked to play wedding. But I immediately rejected that idea. I didn’t want to look like I was trying too hard. Besides, Keds really do go with everything. They are just fantastic like that.

  Then, I went and stared at the phone again, willing it to ring, right up until Buster knocked for me, wearing his navy-blue church suit and telling me that it was time. I told him about Campbell taking off on me, too, and I could see the immediate concern on his face, but we didn’t even have time to discuss it because his parents were waiting in the car. A part of me wanted to tell him to go on without me—I was sure that whoever had called would try again—but I couldn’t do that. Some things you have to leave home for. And I just couldn’t miss church. Not today. I had to go and pray for you.

  So I took the phone off the hook and went outside with Buster.

  “That’s an, um, interesting outfit you have on,” Mrs. Whitaker said when I climbed in the car with Buster.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  “How come you’re not going to church with your own family today?”

  “Because they’re, um”—I figured if “um” could work for her, it could work for me too—“getting ready.”

  This was not, strictly speaking, a lie. Wherever they were, they had to be getting ready for something. Aren’t people always?

  “Oh?” she said, a question.

  “We’re having a Moonwalk Party tonight,” I said.

  So what if this was in no way connected to whatever my parents might be getting ready for. This was also still a true statement. Our house was having a Moonwalk Party tonight!

  “It was nice of you to invite Buster to that,” she said. “We’re having one, too. Isn’t it exciting?”

  I agreed that it was.

  “At least since we’re both having parties,” she said gaily, “neither house will get upset at the noise the other house is making.”

  I agreed that this was true, too, although somehow I doubted our house would be as noisy as theirs.

  I have to tell you, going to a church you are not accustomed to is a strange thing. Sure, I recognized some kids from school at Buster’s family’s church. Some kids from school go to my family’s church, too, although, obviously, not the same kids who go to Buster’s. But the way the church was decorated was different, and the tunes to the hymns were different. Even what people stood up for and sat down for were different, so much so that I found myself constantly struggling not to fall too far off the tempo. And, of course, the preacher was different.

  “Let us bow our heads and pray,” the preacher said. “Our Heavenly Father, we ask that you protect those three brave men, that you guide Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin down to the moon and back again, and that you return all three astronauts safely back to Earth. We ask this in your name. Amen.”

  I tried not to hold it against the preacher that he didn’t mention you specifically by name. To him, you were just one of “all three astronauts.” Well, you and I both know you’re better than that.

  As I looked around the church at the people there, praying for you, it occurred to me that across the country, maybe even the whole planet, just about everyone alive, no matter what their religion, must be praying for your safety today. I wondered if my dad was one of those people. When you lifted off a few days ago, that look I saw on his face—I think he saw something in that moment that he had never seen before. So I think he, too, must be praying for you now, Michael Collins. I’m almost sure of it.

  After praying with everyone else for the astronauts, I said a silent prayer to myself for Campbell. I hope you don’t think that’s wrong—putting a cat so high up there with people—but she is just a little girl cat and now she is alone out there in the world. Plus, she was the only family member I had left when I got up this morning.

  When the car pulled into Buster’s driveway a short time after leaving church, Mrs. Whitaker leaned over the seat to look back at me.

  “Would you like to stay for Sunday dinner, Mamie?” she asked.

  Oh, how I would have liked to say yes! Just thinking about all that Sunday dinner could entail—probably some kind of roast, definitely mashed potatoes, a green vegetable that hopefully wasn’t too horrible and wouldn’t be if it was swimming in butter, and maybe pie or ice cream for dessert; maybe even both pie and ice cream. Thinking about it made my mouth water. Plus, thinking about it made me realize how long it had been since an adult had made a proper meal for me. Well, Eleanor made me that cold chicken salad, but that hardly felt like the same thing now. Still, tempting as it was, I couldn’t accept.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, “but no thank you.” I opened the car door and stepped out. “I need to go get ready for the party tonight. Thank you for taking me to church.”

  “You’re welcome, Mamie. What time would you like Buster over?”

  “Seven o’clock would be good!” I said, and turning to my best friend, added, “See you then, Buster!”

  And then I was slamming the door shut and running through the stand of trees separating our properties.

  Before going inside, I searched all over for Campbell again, but to no avail.

  Once inside, I went and put the phone in the kitchen back on the hook. Right then and there, I decided that whatever was going to happen with the phone was going to happen, and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about that.

  I turned on the portable fan and started looking for the fancy toothpicks, the ones with colorful frilly cellophane on the edges, to use later on with the cocktail franks. The phone rang, but it was Buster, telling me all about the Eagle undocking from the Columbia.

  Remember when I started keeping track of the days and I told you that I might even start keeping track of the minutes, too? Well, here it is, Michael Collins. Every minute is important now.

  Today, at 1:47 p.m., the Eagle, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in it, began the journey to the surface of the moon, leaving you by yourself in the Columbia.

  “They said so on TV,” Buster said.

  I told him to hang on for a minute. Then I dropped the phone so it clattered and ran to turn on the TV. But there was nothing to see, just men talking over a simulation.

  I ran back to the phone, snatched it up.

  “I wish we could see it,” I said, sighing.

  “I know,” Buster said. “But they say Neil Armstrong has some kind of camera he’ll attach to the outside of the Eagle and then we’ll be able to see everything, once they get to the moon.”

  “Which they hopefully will,” I said.

  “Hopefully,” he agreed.

  I wondered what you were th
inking then, Michael Collins. Were you wishing you could go with them, or had you somehow found a way to be happy right where you were?

  “How is it even possible,” I said, my mind moving on to something else, “for a little spacecraft to land on something like the moon when the moon’s always moving, too?”

  “You need to aim ahead of it,” Buster said, “so the moon’s own speed can catch you at the right moment. That’s how you intercept it.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take,” I asked, “them getting there?”

  “A few hours still,” he said. “That’s what they said on TV.”

  “Okay,” I said, “then I’d better get on with my cleaning.”

  “Okay.”

  It’s amazing how long it takes to clean a house all by yourself. But you can’t have a party in a dirty house. So I just got to it. I put on an apron so I wouldn’t get my pretty outfit dirty, and then I dusted and vacuumed and polished and straightened. I even did something about the bathrooms, although, I must confess, not much.

  Then I started decorating. There wasn’t a lot, just some red and white and blue streamers left over from the Fourth of July. I used those in the dining room and living room. I also found a couple of red-white-and-blue cocktail napkins in a pack and put those out, too. If we were careful with them, maybe we could make them last the night.

  A few hours later, the phone rang again.

  Each time the phone rang, I was disappointed that it wasn’t anyone in my family calling, but also glad that at least I still had Buster.

  “They did it!” Buster cried, excited. “They’re on the moon!”

  “Oh, no!” I cried back, disappointed. “You mean they walked on the moon already and I missed it?”

  “No, that won’t come until later. But at four-eighteen p.m., the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility.”

  “They landed in a sea?” What was Buster talking about? “Is that even safe?”

  “No. I mean, yes, it’s safe. But no, it’s not really a sea. There’s no water on the moon, Mamie. Just a flat plain where they are now. They just name all the places on the moon different things. It doesn’t have to make linguistic sense.”

  “Oh. Well. How soon will they be walking?”

  “No one knows.” He paused, then: “Do you want me to come over sooner than seven? Just in case?”

  I felt a Phew! run through me over things I hadn’t even known I’d been feeling.

  “Could you?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “When do you want me?”

  I thought about this.

  “Now?” I said.

  Buster arrived so quickly, it practically qualified as magic.

  He stood there on the other side of the door, holding his pitcher of Tang. Buster had on his navy-blue suit and tie and a stiff white shirt, just like he’d had on when we went to church that morning, only now there was something in his hair, slicking it down.

  “You still have your suit on?” I said.

  “Not still,” he said. “I took it off when I got home, but then I put it back on again.” He shrugged. “Well, it is a party.”

  “What’s that in your hair?” I asked.

  “Vitalis. Do you like it?”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

  “It’s different,” I finally said. Then I remembered my manners and invited him in.

  “The place looks great,” he said as I took the pitcher of Tang from him and set it down. Then he walked around some, like he’d never been here before. “I really like what you did with these decorations,” he said when he got to the dining room.

  “Would you like some hors d’oeuvres?” I asked. “I can get those started.”

  “That’d be great.”

  So I boiled the cocktail franks in water, remembering to turn off the burner when they were cooked, put them on a plate, stuck party toothpicks in them. Then I poured chips into a bowl and stirred together sour cream and French onion soup mix to make the dip in another bowl, because, as I believe I may have mentioned in a previous letter, you can’t have a party without chips and dip.

  Then I brought it all out into the living room and set it up on the coffee table so we could keep an eye on the TV, although there wasn’t much to see yet: just a lot of people talking and a bunch of maps and charts and more simulations.

  That was okay, though, because Buster had ideas about everything.

  “Today when Armstrong and Aldrin exited the Columbia into the Eagle, Michael Collins pressed a button causing the two crafts to separate. Then Aldrin fired the rockets on the Eagle, and off they went.”

  “How do they even guide the Eagle to get it precisely on the moon?” I asked.

  “Rockets.” Buster shrugged. “Radar. The Eagle has sixteen small rockets around it to help position it: up, down, left, right. Hey, these franks are good!”

  “Thanks. Just be careful with that cocktail napkin. It’s got to last you through all of the courses.”

  Buster’s eyes widened. “You mean we’re having even more than this?”

  “Uh-huh. Which reminds me. I better go start my chicken.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “Nah, you’d better stay here so you can call me if anything happens.”

  There’s not much that my sister Bess is ever right about, but I’ll tell you, it turned out she was right about that chicken. In order to make it with the Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, all you do is set the oven, place pieces of chicken in a pan, open up the can of soup, pour it over the chicken, and then put the whole thing in the oven to bake. So nothing hard. I suppose for something to be considered special, it has to be hard or at least rare. But you know what? I don’t care. Even though I know the trick of it now, somehow that chicken is still special to me.

  While it baked in the oven, the house getting hotter and hotter as a result, and me not sure what to do with the portable fan—leave it in the kitchen where the hot oven was or put it in the living room where the hot “we” were—I asked Buster, “Don’t you want to take your jacket off?”

  “Can I?” he said, clearly relieved. “Tie, too?” He was already tugging at the knot.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Honestly, he looked good in his suit, but I didn’t want him to suffer for the sake of beauty.

  When the chicken was ready and still nothing new was happening on TV, I decided to serve us in the dining room, on the good dishes and things like I had with my sisters two days ago. Just to be on the safe side, I turned the volume on the TV in the living room up as high as it would go so we wouldn’t miss anything.

  As soon as we started eating, Buster got awful quiet.

  “Is the chicken okay?” I asked.

  “It’s great.” He took another bite. “My mom never makes anything like this. How do you make it? Maybe you could give her the recipe.”

  “Oh, it’s real easy,” I said, and told him how I did it.

  “Huh,” he said. “I don’t think my mom’s ever made anything with a can of soup before. Well, except soup.”

  Then he fell quiet again.

  All that could be heard was the sound of the TV blaring and, over that, noises coming through the windows from the party at his house.

  “Do you wish you were there?” I said. “At your parents’ party?”

  I thought for sure that must be it. It sounded so big and like everyone was having a good time.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m fine where I am. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “It’s like this. You look forward to something happening, you even dream about it. But dreaming and doing are two different things. When you’re actually doing, there’s still so much that could go wrong.”

  He may be my closest friend, the person I know best in this world, but sometimes the things that come out of Buster’s mouth, they are a puzzle.

  “What are you talking about, Buster?”

  “The astronauts, of course.”
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br />   That’s when it hit me. For the first time, Buster was worried. And if he was worried, what hope did I have?

  Still, I had to ask him. “They made it, Buster. They’re on the moon. What could go wrong now?”

  “What couldn’t? Take those spacesuits of theirs. Each spacesuit is like a mini pressurized spacecraft. It’s got a radio and its own oxygen supply. There are lunar gloves, lunar overshoes—you name it. Helmets with visors because of the sun’s light. A backpack with more oxygen in it—and there’s no gravity, so it’s actually easy to carry it all.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “No one really knows what will happen when they step out onto the moon. No one’s ever done this before! There could be dangers.”

  “Like?”

  “Like if they get a hole in one of those suits while outside of the ship? Blood and body fluids would come to a boil. You’d blow up like a balloon and suffocate.”

  I could feel my mouth falling open as I thought about this. Then: “Aw, that won’t happen. I’ll bet they tested those things a million times.” All the while I was thinking: Well, at least you, Michael Collins, don’t have to worry about that happening to you.

  “Still.”

  “What do you think they’re doing right now?” I asked, to change the subject, to get Buster’s mind off things—mine, too. “What do you think is taking so long?”

  “They have to make sure the Eagle will be ready for takeoff again. Before they can even leave it at all, they have to make sure the Eagle is ready, in case they have to depart suddenly.”

  “What about Michael Collins?” I said. “What do you think he’s doing right now?”

  “Spinning. Waiting. The Columbia has to keep spinning. Otherwise, it would get too hot from the sun striking the same side all the time, and then it would burn up. He’s spinning and orbiting the moon while he waits for them to come back. It takes him two hours to orbit. And for half of each orbit, when he’s on the far side of the moon and therefore turned away from Earth, there’s no radio contact at all.”

  Somehow, that idea felt too big for my brain. So I didn’t think about it, not just then.