Ginny closes the door slowly and returns to the lounge. She tidies away the iced tea, rinsing the glasses, drying them and putting them in a cupboard, returning the jug to the refrigerator. It’s getting close to five o’clock and Walden will be home just after six, so she heads out onto the patio to pack up her typewriter and manuscript. She sees the note she scribbled earlier and gazes down at it; and then thinks, Oh my, you silly. F-104. She knows about them, Walden has flown over a hundred hours in F-104s. It’s the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. She knows that, why would she write something as silly as “like a star fighter”. It was Bob, his appearance threw her.
Ginny gathers up her typescript into a buff folder, and carries it and the typewriter inside. After she has put away her writing things, and the magazines from the lounge, she makes herself ready for Walden. She brushes her hair, puts on lipstick and powder, checks her appearance will pass inspection, and goes to make dinner. It’s all part of the job of being an Air Force wife, presenting a normal home-life so her husband can briefly forget how close he comes to “buying the farm” each day. It’s a small price to pay, she loves Walden, her love remains undiminished from the day they wed—although that doesn’t mean they haven’t argued, they haven’t spent days refusing to talk to each other. Ginny’s mother brought her up to be independent, to have expectations, ambitions and, okay, marrying an Air Force pilot wasn’t the smartest move she could have made in that regard—
Unlike many of her friends, Ginny didn’t go to university to catch herself a husband, she stayed and matriculated, married Walden a month after she received her Lit degree. She never used her BA, of course, she joined her husband in the United States Air Force. But she has her stories, she has her imagination, and because Walden allows her that she’s willing to play the dutiful Air Force wife for him.
At six thirty, she hears a car pulling up, and then the tigerish roar it makes as it slides into the carport and the engine-noise bounces off the walls. She smiles, her flyboy is home.
He strides into the kitchen minutes later, where she’s stirring gravy, puts his arms about her waist, sticks his nose into her hair, breathes in deeply and then plants a kiss on the top of her head.
You hear about Scott? he says.
Bob was here, looking for Judy, she replies.
Damn bad luck. He’s going to be grounded for months with that leg.
And that’s all Walden says on the matter.
Ginny exits the house carrying a tray on which sits a platter of raw steaks. The guys are standing about the barbecue—Scott in a chair to one side, busted leg held out stiffly before him in a cast. Walden is making some point emphatically with jabs of a pair of meat tongs. She stops a moment and watches them, watches him, her husband, wreathed in a cloak of grey smoke, her flyboy, in his white T-shirt and tan chinos, aviator sunglasses, that wholesome white-toothed smile. And she thinks, so strange that his parents should name him after a book subtitled “Life in the Woods”…
They didn’t, of course; I did, I named him Walden for Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 polemic. There is a scene in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 movie All That Heaven Allows—the title of this novel is not a coincidence; the movie is a favourite, and, in broad stroke, both All That Heaven Allows and All That Outer Space Allows tell similar stories: an unconventional woman who attempts to break free of conventional life… There is a scene in the movie in which Ron has invited Cary back to his place for a party. While he and his best friend, Mick, fetch wine from the cellar, Cary is at a loose end and idly picks up a copy of Thoreau’s Walden lying on a nearby table. She opens the book at random and reads out a line: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Not only is Walden Ron’s favourite book, she is told, but he also lives it—
Walden Jefferson Eckhardt, however, is indifferent to Thoreau’s book, not sharing his parents’ admiration of it or its message, for all that he is a test pilot; and they see themselves as a breed apart, at the top of the pyramid, men of independence and daring and achievement. Walden stands there with his fellow test pilots—and Ginny knows them all—and though they’re tall and stocky, blond-haired and brunet, craggy-featured and smooth-faced, they all look the same. Cut from the same cloth, stamped from the same mould.
She starts forward, her heels tock-tock-tock on the patio, because for this gathering she’s playing the dutiful Air Force wife and has dressed accordingly. She approaches the men at the barbecue bearing bloody meat for them to char and broil, and they turn carnivorous grins on her, teeth bright through the smoke, eyes invisible behind aviator shades.
Hey, Ginny, let me take that, says Al, reaching out with both hands for the tray, the neck of a beer bottle clutched between two fingers.
She hands him the steaks, then turns to Walden. Chicken next? she asks.
He has interrupted his anecdote because it’s not for her ears. Sure, hon, he says off-handedly.
She’s tempted to ask him what he was talking about, but she’s uncomfortable under the mirrored eyeless gazes of the guys, so she gives a faint smile and tock-tock-tocks away.
The women are sitting about the table at which Ginny likes to write, nursing drinks, their faces powdered and lipsticked, some wearing sunglasses, a couple with fresh hairdos. And it occurs to Ginny there are more stories at that table than there are when she has her typewriter upon it—and they are real stories, not the science fiction she writes, which are set on worlds constructed from, and inhabited by, figments of the imagination; nor are they the stories which appear in Redbook or McCall’s or Good Housekeeping, what Betty Friedan calls stories of “happy housewife heroines”—and it’s those very stories which drove Ginny, and no doubt women like her, to science fiction and its invented worlds. Ginny dislikes words such as “prosaic” and “quotidian” because she believes what she writes employs a dimension beyond that, she believes her stories use science fiction to comment on the prosaic and quotidian without partaking of it.
But right now the prosaic and quotidian are signalled by a sky like a glass dish hot from the oven and the phatic chatter of four women in bright dresses, the most colour this yard of sparse grass, and its trio of threadbare cottonwoods, has seen for weeks.
Pam looks up as Ginny approaches, leans forward and slides a martini slowly across the table-top. This one’s for you, she tells Ginny.
I still have the chicken to bring out, Ginny replies.
Later, Pam says with a smile. Drink first.
Alison and Connie add their voices, so Ginny takes the free chair at the table and it’s a relief to stop for a moment. She lifts the drink and toasts the other women.
These barbecues are a regular occurrence, though they each take it in turn to play host. Here in the Mojave Desert, the days are bright and blue-skied, endless dust and heat, and so they lead summer lives throughout the year. Ginny sips her martini and lets the chatter of Judy, Alison, Connie and Pam, and in the background the boasting of the men, wash over her. She has maybe fifteen minutes before the steaks are ready and Walden starts demanding the chicken; because when he wants something he expects to get it, she’s here to cater to him after all. Perhaps in private she can make her own demands, set her own limits, but he brooks no dissent on occasions such as this. She takes another sip of her martini and tells herself her “feminine mystique” is for her husband’s eyes and ears only—