Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “That’s okay,” he said in a tone of voice like it wasn’t, really. “But I thought you were Miranda’s friend.”

  “We just work together. Do you have a dog? You have magnetic dog poetry on your fridge.”

  “Miranda has a Lab. It’s probably around here somewhere but it doesn’t like crowds. It usually hides in the bathtub.” He said it like he was jealous, as if he were tempted to go fight the dog for its bathtub and be alone.

  The patio was getting crowded—people arguing over the music, a bunch of girls wanting to dance, and Miranda trying to keep things mellow. I was hoping Sasha would suggest we go somewhere else.

  “You want to see something?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Follow me,” he said, and stepped off the patio into the grass. I followed him, keeping his back in front of me, the person-shaped darkness that showed up against the dark of the yard. He didn’t go far, just to the high wooden fence at the back of the property. We passed the trampoline, the smoking people, and the grapefruit tree. When the yard matched his description—trampoline, tree—I felt weirdly as though he’d confided in me, that he hadn’t just been making small talk. It was quieter away from the house. “Wait here,” he said and went behind a small shed that stood in the corner. He came back with a stepladder, kicked its legs out so it stood flush against the fence. “Climb up, look over,” he said, and I set my wine down in the grass beside the ladder. I thought he’d maybe take my hand, touch my arm or my back to steady me, but he didn’t.

  There was a narrow dirt alley behind the house, black trash cans and blue recycling bins lined up along either side. It smelled warm and dirty, food softening in plastic bags, animals staking out their territories. The only light came from a streetlamp at the end of the block, dim and orange, and a floodlight in the yard across the alley. Sitting behind the neighbor’s fence was an enormous silver pod, like an old Airstream trailer but slicker, no seams or antennas or visible doors or windows. Just smooth metal walls, a trailer-size lima bean. It had a circular hole in its top left side. The branches of a tree poked through, lit from underneath. The tree was green, not just the leaves, but the bark, the funny green-skinned trees they had here.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The neighbors are architects, built their own pod. There was a thing about them in the paper and a whole feature in some architecture magazine.”

  “They live in it?”

  They slept there, he said. They used the kitchen and bathroom in their regular house, but they’d knocked out the remaining walls—anything that wasn’t load-bearing—to make an enormous studio.

  “It doesn’t seem very comfortable. Living in a pod.”

  “I think you’d either bake or freeze. And then when you wake up, you have to go outside just to take a piss and start some coffee.”

  “What’s the point?” I asked.

  “Search me,” he said, and he smiled just a little.

  “They make cool neighbors, at least. I should come to more parties here.”

  “Miranda and Sam are moving when the lease is up. They’re looking for a place for just the two of them. No more pod people.”

  “You could find new roommates.” I was still on the ladder, fingers hooked over the tops of the fence boards. They were rough and smelled damp and I knew I’d have the smell on my hands, of soaked wood and splintery fence.

  “I won’t be here when the lease runs out.”

  “Where will you be?” I asked.

  “Prison,” he said, but he looked so sad to say it that coaxing it out of him wasn’t much of a victory.

  “What did—it’s none of my business.”

  “Reckless driving. Someone died. Twenty-three months.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m sorrier. But then I guess that’s the point.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “Day after tomorrow. Yesterday was my last day at work. I drop my stuff by the storage place tomorrow and then report Monday morning for—whatever.”

  I asked if he was scared and he said he was. “I’m sorry,” I said. “For being so nosy.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” he said. “Is that wrong? That I don’t want to go?” He was staring straight ahead into the fence, the cracks between the boards seeping light from the pod planet onto his face.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I think I’m supposed to welcome it. I’m supposed to do my penance and be graceful about it, but I—I feel like I’ve already been punished. And she’s gone, regardless. She’s just gone.”

  I was a little disappointed in him, that my murderer was so selfish, that what he really wanted was just his life back. It didn’t seem like a very worthwhile confession. I wondered what I should say to him next, if it should be comforting or something sharp, to remind him of his crimes.

  “And Miranda’s having a goddamn party. She said she’d had it planned for ages when my reporting date got pushed back. Then she said she wanted to throw me a going-away thing, but it’s not like I want everyone Miranda’s ever met to know.”

  “So it’s a secret going-away thing where no one knows you’re going away.”

  “They probably know. They probably all know, everyone at this party,” he said, and he looked at me like he was so thankful, so grateful that I was a stranger. “They’re out of town, the pod people,” he said. “Asked us to pick up their mail for the weekend.”

  “You guys? All the way around the block?”

  “There’s a gate. We’re the closest neighbors if you cross the alley.”

  I waited for him to offer to take me, because why else had he told me the pod people were gone, but he stayed quiet. “I’d like to see it up close,” I said finally. “The pod planet. If you don’t think they’d mind.”

  “I think it would be okay. Wait a minute.” He headed back to the house and all of a sudden I felt silly standing on top of the ladder at the edge of the yard by myself. I could hear someone being sick near the grapefruit tree. Sasha came back with a bottle of wine, two cups. He held his right hand out flat and bounced his palm up and down so a set of keys jingled.

  “For the gate?”

  “The house and the pod. I can give you a tour.”

  We crossed into their yard and shut the gates behind us. The door frame of the pod was marked with puckered ridges of welded steel, and it had a little round, flat lock like a car door. Inside was a single room with curving silver walls, a futon mattress on the floor beside the palo verde tree. The bedding was all hospital white, blinding; Sasha and I sat on the end of the mattress and I took up fistfuls of the duvet while he poured the wine.

  “Down,” I said. “The comforter and pillows. Real birds in the bedding.”

  “Architecture must pay okay,” he said, and we got drunk for a while. We were pod people in our thin-shelled home, the walls shivering a little with the noise from the party. We owned a green-skinned tree and bedding so full of feathers it could fly off on its own. At some point we put down our cups and lay down on our backs, side by side.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” Sasha asked me, and I thought it was kind of a weird question, because in two days it couldn’t matter to him whether I was or wasn’t. He wouldn’t be in a position to see anybody.

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someone in Minneapolis. But only sort of.”

  “We don’t have to do anything.”

  “I know. I’d like to,” I said, and reached my hand out so it touched his, and our arms made a V on the bed between us.

  “Why?” He didn’t sound like he was fishing for a compliment. He sounded tired and confused, like I was one more thing at this moment in his life that didn’t make any sense.

  “I don’t know. Give you a send-off?”

  “You’ve got a guy in Minnesota.”

  “He hit me,” I said, and in that moment, Sasha, the sad-sack murderer with the grapefruit
tree, became the only person I’d ever told. “My cousin got me a job out here. Just to get away for a while.”

  “You’re going back?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “You’re saying that because you’re supposed to. You’ve watched a bunch of domestic-violence PSAs.”

  “Still. You shouldn’t go back.”

  “What if I deserved it?”

  “I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “You don’t know that. I’m not a very nice person.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said, and he pulled his hand out from under mine so he could pet me with it, just brushing over my knuckles, down my wrist, smoothing the little staticky hairs on my arms.

  “It is,” I said, and I rolled toward him, closed the V of our arms into a long straight line.

  Neither of us said anything else for a few minutes, just did the usual things, the kissing and the fumbling with each other’s clothes, and before Sasha pressed inside me he asked, “Is this okay?” and I nodded.

  I waited for a couple more minutes, his forearms under my shoulders and his face a little sweaty and his ear right above my lips and then I whispered to him that I’d known all along. “Miranda told me,” I said. “When I got here. She told me about your girlfriend.”

  Sasha raised his head and stared at me, betrayed, and for an instant I wanted to brush his sad hair out of his sad eyes and take it all back. Then he closed his eyes and kept moving, hard, like he couldn’t let go or didn’t want to, and he went on so long I started to hurt. “You knew,” he said, pushing, angry. “The whole time.”

  “The whole time.”

  “Maybe you did deserve it. When your boyfriend hit you.”

  Sasha finished and rolled away from me so that our heads were on separate pillows. I turned to look at him but he was staring at the ceiling, and his nose was longer, sharper in profile than I’d thought it was.

  “I think I did,” I said. “And if that’s true, then it means he didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Maybe you should go back.”

  “Maybe I should,” I said, but I was still lying beside Sasha when he said, “I meant you should leave.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I got up, started pulling my dress back on. He tugged the duvet up over his legs and watched me. I stacked the empty cups beside the bottle and found my left shoe beside the tree, the toe edging over the hole in the trailer floor above the spreading roots. I was standing at the door, my hand on what looked like the stainless-steel handle to a refrigerator, when Sasha asked me, “Do you still love him?”

  “I think so. I want to.”

  “Then maybe you do go back. To Minnesota. Maybe you shouldn’t fuck things up.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and pushed my way out of the pod and down the steps to the yard. The door fell shut behind me and as soon as my eyes adjusted to the light I was walking through the grassy yard of the pod planet to the driveway, down to the sidewalk, and around the block to my car. The party drifted in and out of earshot, snatches of music and laughter and conversation. I was scared to be driving, worried about cops and the way the world spun a little when I turned my head, how the lights along the freeway were haloed with a furry glow. I was glad to make it home.

  I woke up with a bruise in the middle of my forehead, plum round and tender to the touch, and it took me until Sunday evening to realize it was from pressing my head too hard against the tap while being sick in the bathroom sink.

  Two months later I quit my job with AHHA, and two weeks after that I moved back to Minnesota. Miranda and I never became friends, and we didn’t pretend we’d stay in touch. I never knew Sasha’s last name or the names of the pod people, and I wouldn’t be able to find that house again if you flew me into Phoenix and gave me a rental car, Google Maps, and a month.

  When Sasha got out of prison I was shoveling snow, sharing a bed with a man I told myself I wasn’t afraid of anymore. I told myself everything was fine again, and it became mostly true and stayed mostly true for four mostly good years. I never told him about Sasha. There were a lot of things I never told him, which was maybe part of our problems, but someone told me once that I seemed like a better person when I kept my mouth shut. It sounds mean, but it was pretty good advice.

  I figure it works the other way too, though—that if you are going to tell a story, you should try to make it good, make yourself look nice. So the pod-people story, I’ve already decided if I ever tell it to anyone how it should go. How I arrived in Phoenix unattached and outgoing, brought bagels and coffee to the girls in the office my first week and made friends with them all. How Miranda even asked me to come early to her party to help set up and how I brought little hors d’oeuvres from Trader Joe’s and warmed them in the oven and they were a big hit. How I’d already read about the pod people in Architectural Digest, because I read that kind of thing. How I didn’t even get tipsy before Sasha and I went to the pod planet and how the sex when we got there was lunar. And then we didn’t say anything afterward, nothing at all, didn’t try to be funny or mean or smart. Just slept all wound up together in our own private cell, my head on his shoulder and his arm not even tingly when he pulled it from under my waist in the morning. We woke up together on the pod planet, I’ll say, and it was fine and happy and fearless, to be a pod woman with her lover, woken by the sun slanting through the branches of a palo verde tree.

  And then I’ll say, “The end,” and it’ll be a story sweeter than the truth.

  Better Not

  Tell You Now

  Daisy picking daisies, is how it all started. We were sitting outside the cafeteria, early spring, and wildflowers sprinting out of the overgrown soccer fields. Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and daisies, white with soft-boiled yellow centers. We finished our sandwiches and fidgeted in the grass. Daisy dismantled a flower, playing he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not. The final petal was he-loves-me-not, so we told her the stem could count too, that she should toss the flower over her shoulder to end on he-loves-me.

  We didn’t think the stem really counted, but we also really thought he loved her. Daisy and Brett were one of those high-school couples who seemed to actually mean something, like each of them might, at sixteen years old, have stumbled on the person they’d be twenty alongside, and forty, and eighty. We’d seen the way they looked at each other, heard how they said “Love you” unselfconsciously in the hallways. “That flower,” we told Daisy. “It doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

  But that afternoon, during fifth-period U.S. history, he stopped loving her.

  As quick as that. There was a test on the Spanish-American War that they’d studied for together, divvying up the questions and arranging a system to share answers during the exam. As the teacher patrolled the rows of desks, Daisy tapped Brett’s shoulder with her pencil, increasingly desperate for the date of the Battle of San Juan Hill. Finally he passed her a folded scrap of paper, but all it said was to meet him in the parking lot after school. “I think we should be friends,” he told her there, leaning against the Econoline van where they’d had sex for the first time. The very first time, for both of them. “If you want. But I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

  “I love you,” she said nakedly.

  He shrugged. “I loved you. I just don’t, anymore. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t.”

  We spent days trying to analyze Brett—his heartlessness, his sudden, mystifying cruelty. “I just can’t believe it,” Daisy said, and we shook our heads in commiseration, as if shock and heartbreak were emotions we could simply refuse. But we felt foolish for talking about belief when we spotted Brett’s varsity jacket in another girl’s locker two weeks later. We broke the news to Daisy during lunch, while we sat in the grass outside the cafeteria; Brett was just an ordinary cheater, it turned out. We thought she’d be relieved. “I don’t understand when it would have happened,” she argued. “We were together every day after school
.” The last of the wildflowers were all around us, crinkling and browning in the sun. Daisy kept her hands in her lap.

  We tried to find other things to talk about during lunches. We bought sodas from the vending machines and brought sandwiches from home, and we worried about Callie, who ate nothing all day except a single piece of fruit. One day, bored, Zora twisted Callie’s apple off its stem. I started to count the twists. “A, B, C, D”—we chanted nearly all the way through the alphabet until the stem gave way, at X, and we groaned—the worst letter, almost impossible, the odds astronomical that Zora would ever marry anyone whose name began with X.

  “Well, I’m named Zora,” she said. “So anything’s possible.”

  In sixth-period biology that day, her teacher introduced a new transfer student named Xavier and assigned him to be Zora’s lab partner. She met us that afternoon by our lockers, her eyes as wide as petri dishes. “I can’t hang out today,” she said. “I have a date.”

  They went to his house in the afternoons and to the movies or the mall on weekends, and we disliked him a little because we almost never saw Zora anymore. But she seemed happy. Then she asked us to skip class one morning and meet her in the third-floor bathroom, where she had a pregnancy test shoplifted from CVS. She didn’t want to do it at home. She wasn’t sure how to hide the box from her parents, and she didn’t want to be alone when she found out what she already knew.

  “You don’t have to marry him,” we told her. “You don’t have to have the baby. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

  But they got engaged during finals week. For Zora’s bridal shower, her mother requested practical, if depressing, gifts—bottles and diapers and rash cream to prepare for the baby. Nothing for Zora. “Xavier didn’t even want me to keep it,” she told us when her mother went to the kitchen to cut slices of cake. We didn’t know what to say.

  We left her house and drove to the Dairy Queen to be girls again, to sit on the picnic tables and sing songs from the spring choir concert. We played would-you-rather and truth-or-dare. Isabel had a notebook in her car, and I wrote out a MASH game. I left off the traditional categories predicting the husbands we’d grow up to have and the number of children. To a list of possible houses, I added jobs, pets, luxury possessions. We wanted ridiculous, impossible futures. We drew numbers, calculated the results.