Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

But I want to go somewhere so few people have ever gone that you could name them all—and when people do name them, I want them to name me.” “I understand that,” Joan said. “I understand that completely.” Vanessa looked at her, her gaze intense. “You do?” “Absolutely. To do something so few people have ever done? No one will ever be able to take that away from us. If we do it, if we leave the planet, we will carry that with us into every room we enter for the rest of our lives.”

I told my mom that I wasn’t going to help him, and my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.

People say opposites attract, but Joan had found this to almost never be true. People just couldn’t see the ways they were drawn to exactly who they feared—or hoped—they might be.

Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.” “Oh,” Joan said. “Neither of us are particularly brave right now,” Vanessa said. “But both of us are going to be courageous.”

You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own?

We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets. Remembering that connection brought Joan comfort. It also brought her some sense of responsibility. And what was kinship but that? Comfort and responsibility.

She was trying to prove that she could be just like a man to all of them. To Jimmy. To Lydia. Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have.

But you—you’re easy to talk to. And you’re trying. I’m on the other side of it, tryin’ like hell, too. My mother always said, ‘I like a try-hard.’ I agree with her. I like somebody scrappy. Man or woman, I don’t care.”

Success would be found together or not at all.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said. “Why not?” “Because people never fall in love with who they should. This whole world is full of stories of people falling in love with exactly who they weren’t supposed to.”

Maybe rushing would be better. Maybe, if she didn’t have a moment to think, it would all be easier. Gravity is underrated. It gives us something to fight against.

“Then why not just go to Mass when you visit her and ignore what they say?” Vanessa turned onto her side, to face Joan. “Because I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”

I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”

All she could think about was how grateful she was that the Earth was ninety-three million miles away from the sun today, far enough to be warm but not too hot, just the right distance for life on this planet.

Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted.

“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.”

The rules of society came for everyone eventually: the too big, too small, too wild, too quiet, too strong, not strong enough.

But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent. Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all. Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there. Humans had gone to the moon.

Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.

Joan marveled at how easy Barbara’s inner life must be. How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered.