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America was over.
    “I can run fast and I can write,” Linda said, a response, apparently, to Kath’s “It’s a beauty contest!” “Neither of which would look particularly nifty performed on TV.”
    Kath said she could play the piano, and Ally said she could, too.
    “I’d have to fall back on my baton-twirling skills,” I admitted.
    “Which would trounce the test tubes or incline planes or star charts I’d be reduced to dragging out,” Brett said.
    And somehow we were talking about Brett’s little sister. Yes, Brett had taught Jenn (and her brother, Brad, too, for that matter) how to focus a telescope, how to mix potassium perchlorate and aluminum powder, how to distinguish a blood cell from one of bone. Still, Brett never imagined Jenn would be applying to medical school. Brad, yes, but her sister?
    Ally said she’d thought about being a nurse but she couldn’t imagine cleaning bedpans, and I glanced surreptitiously at Brett’s gloved hands, wondering if she was afraid of germs.
    “Your li’l sis is fixin’ to be a doctor?” Kath asked.
    “You could still go to medical school yourself, Brett,” Linda said, and Brett looked startled, as if Linda had just put her finger on a truth Brett hadn’t seen, that she was jealous that her little sister was going to be something Brett had thought girls weren’t supposed to be.
    “Would y’all ever take your babies to see a lady doctor?” Kath asked. “Lordy, Lordy.”
    “Jenn doesn’t want to be a pediatrician, she wants to be a surgeon,” Brett said, which shocked us all; even if you could imagine a woman doctor, you pictured her working with children, like the closest doctor there was to a mom.
    And all the while those girls on the TV were walking across the stage in their one-piece bathing suits, not with bathing caps on but with their hair ratted up and sprayed into place, their mascara ready to run dark black the moment they got near water.
    Linda said she’d nearly gone to graduate school; she’d applied to the creative-writing program at the University of Iowa, but Jeff had wanted to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (which had a fine creative-writing program, but Linda hadn’t been accepted there). “And then I was pregnant with the twins and they were born and I couldn’t get any sleep with them waking each other all night, much less go to school or write.”
    “I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be an astronaut,” Brett said, and we all burst out laughing, even Brett—we were getting a little tipsy. I thought for a moment that she must have been joking about her sister, too—a girl surgeon! But she wasn’t kidding about any of it, you could tell that by the sudden look in her leaf-bud eyes, all shaded and down-looking and watery even as she laughed.
    “You’d make a great astronaut, Brett,” I said. She would have, too. Brett would have made a dynamite astronaut.
    “Even before President Kennedy said we’d put a man on the moon—the ‘greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked,’ remember that?—Brad and I used to imagine it for ourselves,” Brett said. “Even before Yuri Gagarin, we used to imagine being the first two people to step on the moon.”
    We were quiet for a minute then, watching Miss Illinois flip through the air over her trampoline and drinking our drinks and remembering. It had been nighttime when the Russian cosmonaut had flown over Chicago, and my whole family had gone out to watch, to see the reflection of sunlight off his capsule. But I hadn’t even felt the awe of it—a man in space! I’d felt only the eerie fear of a Russian flying over me, looking down on my world.
    “I’m rooting for this girl even if she is too young to win,” Linda said as Miss Illinois finished her routine, and somehow Linda’s choosing her seemed almost as if she was saying she thought Brett really could fly to the moon. That we all could. That, as Esther in
The Bell Jar
wanted to believe, a