The Astronaut

by Maria Vorhis

In order to jump out of a moving car, you must believe in your ability to fly. You must surrender to the rage, which guides your hand to the passenger door, pulls, pushes, propels you sideways, or in your case, forward, when your boyfriend hits the brakes and launches you into the unknown. You have imagined this departure for some time (little did you know the impulse would seize you while in motion). Once midair, your arms become wings. Your ribcage, weightless. For a brief moment you are one with the breeze, which lifts you higher and higher until—smack. Palms to asphalt. Screech of tires. The smell of hot rubber over lilacs as you push yourself up to standing. Here memory snags. Did he lean over the passenger side to see if you were okay? Did he curse? You are left with the film in your head, which you play on repeat. His silver PT Cruiser speeding off, the flame decals along the sides of the car appearing to accelerate his getaway. But of all the images you will carry with you, it is this: the passenger door flung open like a mouth, screaming your exit down Clinton Street.

You meet him the spring you turn nineteen when he asks if you want to ride his electric blue moped. You had been picnicking with older men, wearing thin black dresses, Facebook messaging a pot dealer who smelled like a piña colada air freshener and had yet to message you back. You might have been lonely. “Okay,” you say, hiking up the same black dress, suddenly filled with questions: Where to put your hands? What about a helmet? Where is he taking you?

He turns the key and you fly into the night, squeezing your thighs against the plastic blue body, the wind tangling your hair. He smells of summer pine and patchouli, wears a V-neck tee, faded jeans, and cowboy boots. You arrive at a park where he pulls out a six-pack of beer from the seat of his moped and asks if you like poetry. “Prufrock,” you say.

He: Let us go then, you and I,

You: When the evening is spread out against the sky

Together: Like a patient etherized upon a table

There on a wooden park bench, beneath the yellow glow of streetlamps, you see him for the first time. An English major from small-town Iowa. A dreamer, just like you.

You drink in poems between sips of cold beer. You’ve never liked the sour taste, but you love the way it makes you feel, lets your eyes linger on his, your smile blossom when he says your name. Each time one of you finishes a beer, you place the green glass bottle on the sidewalk with a satisfying clink. He invites you back to his place where you borrow an oversized T-shirt. You sleep on opposite sides of the bed, because, like he says, This might be something more.

As a child you discovered your mother’s sex books in the basement. Colored illustrations of men with penises long as elephant trunks, women sitting atop them, their breasts as pointed and delicious as sugar cones, their index fingers held to thumbs in perfect circles. You drank them in, the colors, the contortions, the perfectly symmetrical joy of gymnastic-like positions. You opened book after book. Books with black and white illustrations, books with anatomical sketches, books with nothing but instructions. In one, a man’s hairy penis plunged into a woman’s hairy vagina, her arm flung behind her, revealing a hairy armpit. The man looked deep into her eyes. Armpit hair is an unexpected point of arousal, the caption read. You wanted to know what it was like to have a man look at you. To have a man inside you. Want you. To be, like one book said, complete.

The second time you have sex, he pulls you close and asks if you’ve ever considered shaving. You feel his stomach pressing into your back and want to crawl inward. He kisses your neck and goes to find his tools. You listen—to the bathroom mirror screech open, to his hands searching the metal cabinet. He calls from the bathroom, instructs you to lie on the living room floor. You walk naked into the living room and lower yourself onto the knobby cream carpet. You imagine the former tenant’s dried cum and clipped toenails mashed beneath the space where you now lie, tracing your fingers along the outline of your hips. He appears smiling, a can of shaving cream in one hand, a plastic razor in the other.

“I feel like a sheep getting sheared,” you say, praying you’re on the same side of this joke. His smile is a riddle. He applies the cream with medical precision to the inside of your upper thigh. It occurs to you that he has done this before.

“Ready?” he asks. You nod. He glides the blade against your flesh. Your stomach tenses and the Disney movie makeover sequence flashes through your brain. Mulan cutting her hair. Hercules lifting his weights. The hero preparing for battle. Only in this movie makeover, you do not wield the blade. You are not the hero. You are the ugly bird. Paper-doll body, two-dimensional beneath him. (Later you will imagine the horror film version, in which you grab the razor from him, and the razor grows teeth that tear and savage his private coarse curls into whatever petrified porcupine creature you decide, but that is later, and hindsight, as a rule, is always more bloody.) For now, he applies more cream. Shaves. More cream. You close your eyes and imagine watching the scene from above, and think, Someday I will write about this.

His eyes are bloodshot when you knock on his garden apartment door at any time of night. As far as you know, he makes it to class most mornings, but by late afternoon, he’s always lit. You think of him as your astronaut, orbiting some other galaxy, just beyond your reach. The slow curl of his smile makes you want to orbit, too. And you do. You sit on his bed, the floor, the countertop, and try to make rings out of the smoke, rings that will encircle him, rings that will bring him back, make him orbit you. You arrive high to his friend’s party and the two of you disappear downstairs. There on the basement couch you put on puppet shows with your tiny breasts, knowing that only in a haze of reverie, only under smoke clouds and dry kisses can you share yourself with him. You mark the left breast with a sharpie. Your nipple is a mouse’s nose and you celebrate this fact with whiskers. The right breast transforms into a rat, and soon you are ready for curtain up, introducing “Mouse vs. Raton on the Couch at 2 a.m.” Everyone else at the party is too stoned or too drunk making banana splits or ordering pizza or doing whatever college kids do past sundown, so you put on a show for this one man. Your moon man.

You come to equate affection with weekend Wal-Mart runs where he fondles you in the gardening aisle and asks if you want to raise a plant with him. You go on daring adventures hitchhiking the Apostle Islands, crashing a stranger’s wedding, kayaking the glass lake home in miraculous darkness. You hold on tight to him, to the memory of the two of you rocketing down Highway 1 on his electric blue moped through freezing rain in search of tacos. You write him poems just to say all the dopey nothings (that you know are somethings), hoping that one day, he’ll write you nothings, too.

Late one night he pulls out canvas and paints and you raid his closet for costumes. You wear his sweatpants, his furry hunting hat. He wears a rainbow wig and boxer briefs. You stay up all night painting at the card table in his garden apartment, floating along with the music, lost in the creation, each other. You are invested in this purple kangaroo you are shaping, and his hand painting a cloud—no, a penis. You look into his eyes, catch him childlike. He feels your stare and sees what you see, his cloud penis penetrating your purple kangaroo, before you both fall off your folding chairs laughing. Nobody will hear your laughter turn to tears as you try to catch your breath. Nobody will see your face when he pulls you close and whispers, “I love you.”

You begin to wonder why he never quite comes down. You begin to wish he would. You cannot keep up with his last calls, his lighting up, his constant consumption. When he visits you over summer break at your mother’s condo, you assume he will be clean. But he disappears one night after dinner and you find him in the Tae Kwan Do parking lot puffing on his one-hitter. Too late: you watch as your astronaut ascends, lifts off into the starless sky without you.

You do not jump out of the moving car because he is high. You jump out of the moving car because your astronaut has finally come down to earth. When you look into his hazel eyes, his gaze is a light-year away. He yells when you salt his cooking, scowls when you scratch his pans. He becomes all hard angles and sharp corners, and you, a magnet to his edges. But worst of all, he grows quiet (so quiet that you wish he’d start using again, if only so you could feel seen).

You don’t know what you did wrong, only that for the last two and a half hours, you’ve sat in the back row of an air-conditioned theater shivering, wondering why he refuses to hold your hand. Later your friends will ask how you liked the play, what you thought of the ending. What can you say? You were agonizing over where to sleep. Your bed? His? How many more nights can you lie awake next to him? How much longer can you make a home out of a man who floats above the world? By the time you make it to the parking lot, by the time he starts the car, your heart has lodged itself in your throat. 

“Can we talk?” you say. His eyes are trained on the road, his jaw, a blade. Surely, he heard you. Surely, he won’t ignore you. His silence lights your fuse. You hold your breath through the first red light. Then the second. When he finally takes a left on Clinton Street, you explode. Who knows what holy hell you unleash, only that in the center of that sound you hear a voice not wholly your own.

I wonder what it would be like to fly, it says.

And so, you do.

Published April 25th, 2021