Atmosphere

On her last day, the Physics and Astronomy Department threw her a going-away party. By the punch bowl, Dr. Siskin asked—in a way that struck Joan as remarkably transparent—how she’d managed to pull this off. Joan said, “Luck, I guess,” and then regretted it.

Joan knew that Dr. Siskin, and most men like him, had never taken a good look at her.

“Do you know the difference between bravery and courage?” Vanessa said.

Joan considered the question. “I don’t think so.”

“My dad taught me when I was little. Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”

Her parents’ marriage seemed fine to her. Good, even. They still loved each other. Her mother, basically a vegetarian, made her father’s favorite meatloaf most weekends with a joy that Joan had scrutinized for years but found completely sincere. Still, when she thought about it, a gloom dared to take over. 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?

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.

“They have excused the college-degree requirement for certain members of the military. So why can’t they excuse the military requirement for certain civilians?”

Vanessa looked at her. “I mean, you already know the answer.”

Joan frowned. “Why didn’t you join the military?”

“Women couldn’t join the military as pilots, and now NASA will only take military pilots. Ergo, women can’t be NASA pilots. It’s a nice little work-around they’ve got themselves there. It’s not like I could go to the Naval Academy, like my father did.”

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.

Joan had let men like Jimmy set the terms.

But the terms were false, even to him. He was just as scared as anybody else.

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

“It’s 1981, and I’m done pretending sexist jokes are funny just so men will give me a chance at something I’m probably better at than they are.”

Lydia shook her head. “You just don’t get it. It infuriates me sometimes. Before Group 8, there wasn’t a single woman in this program. All men, and every man who’s been assigned a mission has been white.”

“I obviously know that.” “Group 8 they let in six white women, three Black men, and an Asian man. The rest of the thirty-five? All white men.”

“I know that, too,” Joan said.

“She’s saying we’re outnumbered,” Donna said. Joan looked at her. “NASA is run primarily by men. If we want to go up there, we have to convince a man to choose us. We have to be somebody the men here want to work with. We have to be smart.”

“This could really be it for me. This could be the chance to get my life together in a new way. For me and for Frances. This could be my do-over, Joan.”

“A do-over?”

“To fix things.”

“Are things so bad they need to be fixed?” Barbara frowned at her. “Joan, really.”

“I’m serious.”

“You think I don’t know how my life looks to people? Frances has no father. I’m barely making ends meet as a secretary working mothers’ hours, borrowing money from Mom and Dad. This isn’t how it was supposed to go for me.”

“Guys, if anything goes wrong on Saturday, anything…” she said. “If Sally so much as sneezes at the wrong time, everyone will blame it on the fact that she’s a woman. And then none of us will go up there for a very long time.”

Griff and Hank sat back.

Lydia grew more animated. “Little girls across the country will be made fun of at recess when they want to grab the ball, and teenaged girls who get straight A’s in science will be told to have a backup plan, and no one will dress up as Sally for Halloween. Girls’ understanding of who they can be will be smaller. If this does not go well. Whether we mean to or not, we will have done that to them.”

Donna put her hand on Lydia’s shoulder.

Lydia was entirely right. There were four men on that shuttle. But every American woman was […] It could be so easy for it all to go sideways. If it did, the backlash would be swift, and brutal. A wave overtaking all of them, each lost in the riptide.

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

“I went to his office to talk about Mission Control, and I was about to leave, but before I got to the door, he calmly reminded me of the importance of security clearances for astronauts, and that they require no appearances of ‘sexual deviation.’ He said it leaves one open to blackmail.”

Vanessa flinched. “Well, yeah, it leaves us open to blackmail because people act like who we are is shameful. If we didn’t have to keep it a secret, then people wouldn’t be able to blackmail us,” she said. “Did he ever think about that?”

“When one asshole scares you, you’re going to give it all up? No! I don’t accept it. I love you. And I love Frances, too, and you don’t get to take her away from me. Just because you’re scared. Or just because you think you know what’s best for me.”

“All you’ve ever wanted is to fly the shuttle,” Joan said.

“All I ever wanted—past tense,” Vanessa said. “But you changed what I wanted, and what I thought was possible.”

[…]

“But you might lose everything you dreamed of.”

“Then I’ll lose it,” Vanessa said. “Let them take it. Just don’t let them take you.”