Linda Lands on the Moon

When Buzz Aldrin couldn’t make the moon mission, they called Linda. She was a single mother of two and a pool player. Well, player is the wrong word. She was a hustler. Linda would walk into pool halls in her sundress with her clutch held tight to her stomach. She’d claim to be looking for her no-good husband, and oh, while she was there, maybe she could play a game. Was it hard? Could someone--some nice man--show her how to play? Three hours later, she’d have rent money in her pocket and a few pissed off guys threatening her. Linda didn’t know anything about fear. The worst had already happened. Her husband had died overseas during some kind of training exercise that nobody would talk to her about. She loved her kids, but (and don’t repeat this) she loved her husband more. Her children were dependents who counted on her for their survival. Her husband had been her partner. Her best friend. He had great hair and freckles on his back that looked like the Perseus constellation. When she got the call to go to the moon, she was eating a Red Haven peach and trying to figure out how many guys she’d have to grift to buy her son a new catcher’s mitt.

Linda couldn’t swim.

Linda couldn’t help her son with his math homework.

Linda couldn’t dance.

Linda was going to the moon.

There was training and exertion and Neil Armstrong asked her if her kids liked roller coasters and she told him that her kids had never even been to a carnival so one day after training Neil took her and her family to this carnival near Tampa and her kids went on a roller coaster and Neil told her that they’d both probably die on the moon and Linda said “I know” and the kids screamed and the cotton candy churned in her stomach.

On liftoff day, Linda asks her younger sister to watch her kids and says she’ll be back soon. When her sister begins to cry, Linda tells her that there’s no way to prepare anyone for parenting so it mostly boils down to remembering who’s allergic to what and who has soccer practice. When her sister pointed out that neither of Linda’s kids play soccer, she told her that it doesn’t matter. There’s always soccer somewhere. Linda kisses her sister on her forehead and then goes into her living room where her kids are playing Trojan War. She tells them that she loves them more than anyone loved Helen of Troy and as they roll their wooden horse into their toy city, she walks out of the house with only one side of her lower lip quivering.

Sitting in the rocket, she looked over at Neil and saw that he was whispering something to himself. When she asked what he was saying, he told her he was repeating the lyrics to the Lone Ranger theme song. Linda didn’t know that song, so she hummed “People Got to Be Free” and when the rocket successfully fired off into the sky, she tasted burnt apple and sweet leather. Communications coming over the radio asked how each of the astronauts were doing, and Linda regretted skipping Latin class so many times, because she wanted to say something profound. Neil had been practicing what he was going to say on the moon, and most of it was trite, but there was a line about a small step for man that Linda really liked, even though it wouldn’t just be a step for man. She’d taken an unassuming approach to being the only woman on the mission. Michael Collins liked to tell her dirty jokes, but aside from that, he was a decent guy. It would be the three of them up in space depending on each other for survival and amusement. After what felt like years, they were able to unbuckle their seatbelts and experience zero gravity. They had practiced this in a pool, but they may as well have practiced mahjong to get a sense of what toppling Stonehenge would feel like. They passed a green ball back and forth to each other and Collins told a joke about floating balls and Linda laughed in spite of herself because any offense or insult or hurt feeling or jeer was nothing compared to the scope of the Universe, and she pictured herself as Athena and Christ and Vishnu, because now she was among the gods. She was in a place no other human being had ever been. She thought about murdering Neil and Michael so she could be the only person to ever say she’d stepped foot on the Moon. Then, she felt her breasts tingling and she wondered if space was causing her lactation to start up again. Life suddenly had mysteries inside it again.

Upon reaching the moon, Neil stepped out and said his rehearsed bit of sage wisdom. Linda was the second person out, which Collins might have grumbled about, but didn’t. He seemed overjoyed to have made it this far. The idea of the return journey hadn’t hit any of them yet. They were trying to enjoy the moment. Communications asked Linda what it was like to be the first woman on the moon, and she said--

“If you look around, it’s pretty clear,

That people want liberation.”

No one knew that this was Linda botching the lyrics to “People Want to Be Free.” They thought she was trying to say something about the feminine powers of the moon, and were there people there? Aliens? Conspiracies would go on for decades because of her statement and NASA made her issue a retraction and an apology. That would all come later. There, on the moon, Linda looked out into the vastness of the galaxies and thought about her two children rolling a toy horse into a tiny city in order to ransack it. To murder its men and assault its women. Could anything like that ever happen up here? Would the moon ever host anything so violent? She and her colleagues went about their work, and then returned to the ship.

As they settled in and prepared to go home, Armstrong asked Linda what she’d do first after she returned home, kissed her kids, and took a long shower. She told him she would probably go down to the pool hall and play a game or two.

“You’re full of it, Linda,” Collins chimed in, “You’re telling me you play pool?”

Linda thought about her answer for a moment. Outside, the environment could kill you the second you took off your spacesuit. Beyond that, there were comets and meteors. Back home, there was television and the Beatles and roller coasters. Collins was still waiting on her. She was a liar, right? A single mom with thin blonde hair who could walk on the moon and play pool?

“No,” she said, “I don’t. Not really. But maybe you can show me how when we get back, Collins.”

Quietly, she decided she’d let him win the first two games.

Then, she’d roll in the horse.