Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

If you can spot the stars Altair, Deneb, and Vega during the summer, you will see that they form a triangle. And that triangle always points south. If you are ever lost, you can find those three and know which way to go.

Nothing you or I could do will ever alter them. They are so much bigger than us. And they will not change within our lifetime. We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes.

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.’ ”

To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

But it felt, to her, like people were making a very big deal out of what was, essentially, no different from eating a cracker.

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.

Joan knew that society was changing and some men were changing with it. Some of them now understood that a woman’s career, her life, her passions were just as important as their own. But still, all Joan could think was that it was now just two people cutting off parts of themselves to make themselves fit together. A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.

“Of course we look for the gods there,” Vanessa said. “And if we make it up there, we’re going to have to fight against that sneaking suspicion that we might just be gods ourselves.”

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.

Just watching them, Joan liked her own body more. As she saw Duke tip a topless waitress, Joan made so much more sense to herself for one crystal-clear moment. Of course men were uninteresting to her. They were fundamentally uninteresting. We are interesting.

“I…” Joan tried to find the words to convey something that lived so deep in her chest. “I felt…left out,” she said finally. “In this way that burned me up. Like I had been fine until humans touched the moon. But once somebody had, I had to, too.” “And now?” Vanessa asked. “Now I will settle for the stars.”

Joan knew that she would not need to find a way to tell Vanessa how she felt. Vanessa would understand it. Which meant Joan would not need to learn how to be anything other than who she already was.

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.

If she was not exactly sure where Vanessa was, then Vanessa was everywhere.

This probably wasn’t what an astronaut looked like to most people. But she was one, and she was going up into space. So the definition was going to have to change.

“Plenty of women bring friends to weddings,” Vanessa said. “It’s not like we’re going to slow dance with your head on my shoulder.” Joan did not say anything for a moment. And then: “It’s not fair,” she said, finally. “That part is not fair.” “No, honey,” Vanessa said. “It isn’t.” Later, before they fell asleep, Joan said, “Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.” “That’s because you’re too good for the world you love so much,” Vanessa said.

But that—also!—her opinion would still matter even if she hadn’t. Even if Joan had never fallen in love, she would still matter. She wasn’t a child just because her life looked different from Barbara’s.

The rules of society came for everyone eventually: the too big, too small, too wild, too quiet, too strong, not strong enough. When Barbara had been kicked out of the main group, she’d never stopped to question the injustice of it all, she’d just been so desperate to get back in.

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. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.