Tabloid Dreams

“Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover”

I never thought I could fall for a spaceman. I mean, you see them in the newspaper and they kind of give you the willies, all skinny and hairless and wiggly looking, and if you touched one, even to shake hands, you just know it would be like when you were about fifteen and you were with an Earth boy and you were sweet on him but there was this thing he wanted, and you finally said okay, but only rub-a-dub, which is what we called it around these parts when I was younger, and it was the first time ever that you touched. . well, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, that’s what it’s always seemed like to me with spacemen, and most everybody around here feels about the same way, I’m sure. Folks in Bovary, Alabama, and environs — by which I mean the KOA campground off the interstate and the new trailer park out past the quarry — everybody in Bovary is used to people being a certain way, to look at and to talk to and so forth. Take my daddy. When I showed him a few years ago in the newspaper how a spaceman had endorsed Bill Clinton for president and they had a picture of a spaceman standing there next to Bill Clinton — without any visible clothes on, by the way — the spaceman, that is, not Bill Clinton, though I wouldn’t put it past him, to tell the truth, and I’m not surprised at anything they might do over in Little Rock. But I showed my daddy the newspaper and he took a look at the spaceman and he snorted and said that he wasn’t surprised people like that was supporting the Democrats, people like that don’t even look American, and I said no, Daddy, he’s a spaceman, and he said people like that don’t even look human, and I said no, Daddy, he’s not human, and my daddy said, that’s what I’m saying, make him get a job.

But I did fall for a spaceman, as it turned out, fell pretty hard. I met him in the parking lot at the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart. We used to have a regular old Wal-Mart that would close at nine o’clock and when they turned it into a Super Center a lot of people in Bovary thought that no good would come of it, encouraging people to stay up all night. Americans go to bed early and get up early, my daddy said. But I have trouble sleeping sometimes. I live in the old trailer park out the state highway and it’s not too far from the Wal-Mart and I live there with my yellow cat Eddie. I am forty years old and I was married once, to a telephone installer who fell in love with cable TV. There’s no cable TV in Bovary yet, though with a twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart, it’s probably not too far behind. It won’t come soon enough to save my marriage, however. Not that I wanted it to. He told me he just had to install cable TV, telephones weren’t fulfilling him, and he was going away for good to Mobile and he didn’t want me to go with him, this was the end for us, and I was understanding the parts about it being the end but he was going on about fiber optics and things that I didn’t really follow. So I said fine and he went away, and even if he’d wanted me to go with him, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve only been to Mobile a couple of times and I didn’t take to it. Bovary is just right for me. At least that’s what I thought when it had to do with my ex-husband, and that kind of thinking just stayed with me, like a grape-juice stain on your housedress, and I am full of regrets, I can tell you, for not rethinking that whole thing before this. But I got a job at a hairdresser’s in town and Daddy bought me the trailer free and clear and me and Eddie moved in and I just kept all those old ideas.

So I met Desi in the parking lot. I called him that because he talked with a funny accent but I liked him. I had my insomnia and it was about three in the morning and I went to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and I was glad it was open — I’d tell that right to the face of anybody in this town — I was glad for a place to go when I couldn’t sleep. So I was coming out of the store with a bag that had a little fuzzy mouse toy for Eddie, made of rabbit fur, I’m afraid, and that strikes me as pretty odd to kill all those cute little rabbits, which some people have as pets and love a lot, so that somebody else’s pet of a different type can have something to play with, and it’s that kind of odd thing that makes you shake your head about the way life is lived on planet Earth — Desi has helped me see things in the larger perspective — though, to be honest, it didn’t stop me from buying the furry cat toy, because Eddie does love those things. Maybe today I wouldn’t do the same, but I wasn’t so enlightened that night when I came out of the Wal-Mart and I had that toy and some bread and baloney and a refrigerator magnet, which I collect, of a zebra head.

He was standing out in the middle of the parking lot and he wasn’t moving. He was just standing still as a cow and there wasn’t any car within a hundred feet of him, and, of course, his spaceship wasn’t anywhere in sight, though I wasn’t looking for that right away because at first glance I didn’t know he was a spaceman. He was wearing a long black trench coat with the belt cinched tight and he had a black felt hat with a wide brim. Those were the things I saw first and he seemed odd, certainly, dressed like that in Bovary, but I took him for a human being, at least.

I was opening my car door and he was still standing out there and I called out to him, “Are you lost?”

His head turns my way and I still can’t see him much at all except as a hat and a coat.

“Did you forget where you parked your car?” I say, and then right away I realize there isn’t but about four cars total in the parking lot at that hour. So I put the bag with my things on the seat and I come around the back of the car and go a few steps toward him. I feel bad. So I call to him, kind of loud because I’m still pretty far away from him and also because I already have a feeling he might be a foreigner. I say, “I wasn’t meaning to be snippy, because that’s something that happens to me a lot and I can look just like you look sometimes, I’m sure, standing in the lot wondering where I am, exactly.”

While I’m saying all this I’m moving kind of slow in his direction. He isn’t saying anything back and he isn’t moving. But already I’m noticing that his belt is cinched very tight, like he’s got maybe an eighteen-inch waist. And as I get near, he sort of pulls his hat down to hide his face, but already I’m starting to think he’s a spaceman.

I stop. I haven’t seen a spaceman before except in the newspaper and I take another quick look around, just in case I missed something, like there might be four cars and a flying saucer. But there’s nothing unusual. Then I think, Oh my, there’s one place I haven’t looked, and so I lift my eyes, very slow because this is something I don’t want to see all the sudden, and finally I’m staring into the sky. It’s a dark night and there are a bunch of stars up there and I get goose bumps because I’m pretty sure that this man standing just a few feet away is from somewhere out there. But at least there’s no spaceship as big as the Wal-Mart hanging over my head with lights blinking and transporter beams ready to shine down on me. It’s only stars.

So I bring my eyes down — just about as slow — to look at this man. He’s still there. And in the shadow of his hat brim, with the orangey light of the parking lot all around, I can see these eyes looking at me now and they are each of them about as big as Eddie’s whole head and shaped kind of like Eddie’s eyes.

“Are you a spaceman?” I just say this right out.

“Yes, m’am,” he says and his courtesy puts me at ease right away. Americans are courteous, my daddy says, not like your Eastern liberal New York taxi drivers.

“They haven’t gone and abandoned you, have they, your friends or whoever?” I say.

“No, m’am,” he says and his voice is kind of high-pitched and he has this accent, but it’s more in the tone of the voice than how he says his words, like he’s talking with a mouth full of grits or something.

“You looked kind of lost, is all.”

“I am waiting,” he says.

“That’s nice. They’ll be along soon, probably,” I say, and I feel my feet starting to slide back in the direction of the car. There’s only so far that courtesy can go in calming you down. The return of the spaceship is something I figure I can do without.

Then he says, “I am waiting for you, Edna Bradshaw.”

“Oh. Good. Sure, honey. That’s me. I’m Edna. Yes. Waiting for me.” I’m starting to babble and I’m hearing myself like I was hovering in the air over me and I’m wanting my feet to go even faster but they seem to have stopped altogether. I wonder if it’s because of some tractor beam or something. Then I wonder if they have tractor-beam pulling contests in outer space that they show on TV back in these other solar systems. I figure I’m starting to get hysterical, thinking things like that in a situation like this, but there’s not much I can do about it.

He seems to know I’m struggling. He takes a tiny little step forward and his hand goes up to his hat, like he’s going to take it off and hold it in front of him as he talks to me, another courtesy that even my daddy would appreciate. But his hand stops. I think he’s not ready to show me his whole spaceman head. He knows it would just make things worse. His hand is bad enough, hanging there over his hat. It’s got little round pads at the end of the fingers, like a gecko, and I don’t stop to count them, but at first glance there just seems to be too many of them.

His hand comes back down. “I do not hurt you, Edna Bradshaw. I am a friendly guy.”

“Good,” I say. “Good. I figured that was so when I first saw you. Of course, you can just figure somebody around here is going to be friendly. That’s a good thing about Bovary, Alabama — that’s where you are, you know, though you probably do know that, though maybe not. Do you know that?”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. I’m rattling on again, and it’s true I’m a little bit scared and that’s why, but it’s also true that I’m suddenly very sad about sounding like this to him, I’m getting some perspective on myself through his big old eyes, and I’m sad I’m making a bad impression because I want him to like me. He’s sweet, really. Very courteous. Kind of boyish. And he’s been waiting for me.

“Excuse me,” he says. “I have been translating. You speak many words, Edna Bradshaw. Yes, I know the name of this place.”

“I’m sorry. I just do that sometimes, talk a lot. Like when I get scared, which I am a little bit right now. And call me Edna.”

“Please,” he says, “I am calling you Edna already. And in conclusion, you have no reason to be afraid.”

“I mean call me just Edna. You don’t have to say Bradshaw every time, though my granddaddy would do that with people. He was a fountain pen salesman and he would say to people, I’m William D. Bradshaw. Call me William D. Bradshaw. And he meant it. He wanted you to say the whole name every time. But you can just call me Edna.”

So the spaceman takes a step forward and my heart starts to pound something fierce, and it’s not from fright, I realize, though it’s some of that. “Edna,” he says. “You are still afraid.”

“Telling you about my granddaddy, you mean? How that’s not really the point here? Well, yes, I guess so. Sometimes, if he knew you for awhile, he’d let you call him W. D. Bradshaw.”

Now his hand comes up and it clutches the hat and the hat comes off and there he stands in the orange lights of the parking lot at three in the morning in my little old hometown and he doesn’t have a hair on his head, though I’ve always liked bald men and I’ve read they’re bald because they have so much male hormone in them, which makes them the best lovers, which would make this spaceman quite a guy, I think, and his head is pointy, kind of, and his cheeks are sunken and his cheekbones are real clear and I’m thinking already I’d like to bake some cookies for him or something, just last week I got a prize-winning recipe, off a can of cooking spray, that looks like it’d put flesh on a fencepost. And, of course, there are these big eyes of his and he blinks once, real slow, and I think it’s because he’s got a strong feeling in him, and he says, “Edna, my name is hard for you to say.”

And I think of Desi right away, and I try it on him, and his mouth, which hasn’t got anything that look like lips exactly, moves up at the edges and he makes this pretty smile.

“I have heard that name,” he says. “Call me Desi. And I am waiting for you, Edna, because I study this planet and I hear you speak many words to your friends and to your subspecies companion and I detect some bright-colored aura around you and I want to meet you.”

“That’s good,” I say, and I can feel a blush starting in my chest, where it always starts, and it’s spreading up my throat and into my cheeks.

“I would like to call on you tomorrow evening, if I have your permission,” he says.

“Boy,” I say. “Do a lot of people have the wrong idea about spacemen. I thought you just grabbed somebody and beamed them up and that was it.” It was a stupid thing to say, I realize right away. I think Desi looks a little sad to hear this. The corners of his mouth sink. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“No,” he says. “This is how we are perceived, it is true. You speak only the truth. This is one reason I want to meet you, Edna. You seem always to say what is inside your head without any attempt to alter it.”

Now it’s my turn to look a little sad, I think. But that’s okay, because it gives me a chance to find out that Desi is more than courteous. His hands come out toward me at once, the little suckers on them primed to latch on to me, and I’m not even scared because I know it means he cares about me. And he’s too refined to touch me this quick. His hands just hang there between us and he says, “I speak this not as a researcher but as a male creature of a parallel species.”

“You mean as a man?”

His eyes blink again, real slow. “Yes. As a man. As a man I try to say that I like the way you speak.”

So I give him permission to call on me and he thanks me and he turns and glides away. I know his legs are moving but he glides, real smooth, across the parking lot and I can see now that poor Desi didn’t even find a pair of pants and some shoes to go with his trench coat. His legs and ankles are skinny like a frog’s and his feet look a lot like his hands. But all that is unclear on the first night. He has disappeared out into the darkness and I drive on home to my subspecies companion and I tell him all about what happened while he purrs in my lap and I have two thoughts.

First, if you’ve never seen a cat in your entire life or anything like one and then meet a cat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the middle of the night all covered with fur and making this rumbling noise and maybe even smelling of mouse meat, you’d have to make some serious adjustments to what you think is pretty and sweet and something you can call your own. Second — and this hits me with a little shock — Desi says he’s been hearing how I talk to my friends and even to Eddie, and that sure wasn’t by hanging around in his trench coat and blending in with the furniture. Of course, if you’ve got a spaceship that can carry you to Earth from a distant galaxy, it’s not so surprising you’ve got some kind of radio or something that lets you listen to what everybody’s saying without being there.

And when I think of this, I start to sing for Desi. I just sit for a long while where I am, with Eddie in my lap, this odd little creature that doesn’t look like me at all but who I find cute as can be and who I love a lot, and I sing, because when I was a teenager I had a pretty good voice and I even thought I might be a singer of some kind, though there wasn’t much call for that in Bovary except in the church choir, which is where I sang mostly, but I loved to sing other kinds of songs too. And so I say real loud, “This is for you, Desi.” And then I sing every song I can think of. I sing “The Long and Winding Road” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Everything Is Beautiful in Its Own Way” and a bunch of others, some twice, like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Then I do a Reba McIntire medley and I start with “Is There Life Out There” and then I do “Love Will Find Its Way to You” and “Up to Heaven” and “Long Distance Lover.” I sing my heart out to Desi and I have to say this surprises me a little but maybe it shouldn’t because already I’m hearing myself through his ears — though at that moment I can’t even say for sure if he has ears — and I realize that a lot of what I say, I say because it keeps me from feeling so lonely.

The next night there’s a knock on my door and I’m wearing my best dress, with a scoop neck, and it shows my cleavage pretty good and on the way to the door I suddenly doubt myself. I don’t know if spacemen are like Earth men in that way or not. Maybe they don’t appreciate a good set of knockers, especially if their women are as skinny as Desi. But I am who I am. So I put all that out of my mind and I open the door and there he is. He’s got his black felt hat on, pulled down low in case any of my neighbors are watching, I figure, and he’s wearing a gray pinstripe suit that’s way too big for him and a white shirt and a tie with a design that’s dozens of little Tabasco bottles floating around.

“Oh,” I say. “You like hot food?”

This makes him stop and try to translate.

“Your tie,” I say. “Don’t you know about your tie?”

He looks down and lifts the end of the tie and looks at it for a little while and he is so cute doing that and so innocent-like that my heart is doing flips and I kind of wiggle in my dress a bit to make him look at who it is he’s going out with. If the women on his planet are skinny, then he could be real real ready for a woman like me. That’s how I figure it as I’m waiting there for him to check out his tie and be done with it, though I know it’s my own fault for getting him off on that track, and me doing that is just another example of something or other.

Then Desi looks up at me, and he takes off his hat with one hand and I see that he doesn’t have anything that looks like ears, really, just sort of a little dip on each side where ears might be. But that doesn’t make him so odd. What’s an ear mean, really? Having an ear or not having an ear won’t get you to heaven, it seems to me. I look into Desi’s big dark eyes and he blinks slow and then his other hand comes out from behind his back and he’s got a flower for me that’s got a bloom on it the color of I don’t know what, a blue kind of, a red kind of, and I know this is a spaceflower of some sort and I take it from him and it weighs about as much as my Sunbeam steam iron, just this one flower.

He says, “I heard you sing for me,” and he holds out his hand. If you want to know an exact count, there’s eight fingers on each hand. I will end up counting them carefully later on our date, but for now there’s still just a lot of fingers and I realize I’m not afraid of them anymore and I reach out to him and the little suckers latch on all over my hand, top and bottom, and it’s like he’s kissing me in eight different places there, over and over, they hold on to me and they pulse in each spot they touch, maybe with the beat of his heart. It’s like that. And my eyes fill up with tears because this man’s very fingertips are in love with me, I know.

And then he leads me to his flying saucer, which is pretty big but not as big as I imagined, not as big as all of Wal-Mart, certainly, maybe just the pharmacy and housewares departments put together. It’s parked out in the empty field back of my trailer where they kept saying they’d put in a miniature golf course and they never did and you don’t even see the saucer till you’re right up against it, it blends in with the night, and you’d think if they can make this machine, they could get him a better suit. Then he says, “You are safe with me, Edna Bradshaw daughter of Joseph R. Bradshaw and granddaughter of William D. Bradshaw.”

It later turns out these family things are important where he’s from but I say to him, “William D. is dead, I only have his favorite fountain pen in a drawer somewhere, it’s very beautiful, it’s gold and it looks like that Chrysler Building in New York, and you should forget about Joseph R. for the time being because I’m afraid you and my daddy aren’t going to hit it off real well and I just as soon not think about that till I have to.”

Then Desi smiles at me and it’s because of all those words, and especially me talking so blunt about my daddy, and I guess also about my taking time to tell him about the beautiful fountain pen my granddaddy left for me, but there’s reasons I talk like this, I guess, and Desi says he came to like me from hearing me talk.

Listen to me even now. I’m trying to tell this story of Desi and me and I can’t help myself going on about every little thing. But the reasons are always the same, and it’s true I’m lonely again. And it’s true I’m scared again because I’ve been a fool.

Desi took me off in his spaceship and we went out past the moon and I barely had time to turn around and look back and I wanted to try to figure out where Bovary was but I hadn’t even found the U.S.A. when everything got blurry and before you know it we were way out in the middle of nowhere, out in space, and I couldn’t see the sun or the moon or anything close up, except all the stars were very bright, and I’m not sure whether we were moving or not because there was nothing close enough by to tell, but I think we were parked, like this was the spaceman’s version of the dead-end road to the rock quarry, where I kissed my first boy. I turned to Desi and he turned to me and I should’ve been scared but I wasn’t. Desi’s little suckers were kissing away at my hand and then we were kissing on the lips except he didn’t have any but it didn’t make any difference because his mouth was soft and warm and smelled sweet, like Binaca breath spray, and I wondered if he got that on Earth or if it was something just like Binaca that they have on his planet as well.

Then he took me back to his little room on the spaceship and we sat on things like beanbag chairs and we talked a long time about what life in Bovary is like and what life on his planet is like. Desi is a research scientist, you see. He thinks that the only way for our two peoples to learn about each other is to meet and to talk and so forth. There are others where he lives that think it’s best just to use their machines to listen in and do their research like that, on the sly. There are even a bunch of guys back there who say forget the whole thing, leave them to hell alone. Let everybody stick to their own place. And I told Desi that my daddy would certainly agree with the leave-them-the-hell-alone guys from his planet, but I agreed with him.

It was all very interesting and very nice, but I was starting to get a little sad. Finally I said to Desi, “So is this thing we’re doing here like research? You asked me out as part of a scientific study? I was called by the Gallup Poll people once and I don’t remember what it was about but I answered ‘none of the above’ and ‘other’ to every question.”

For all the honesty Desi said he admired in me, I sure know it wasn’t anything to do with my answers to a Gallup Poll that was bothering me, but there I was, bogged down talking about all of that, and that’s a land of dishonesty, it seems to me now.

But he knew what I was worried about. “No, Edna,” he says. “There are many on my planet who would be critical of me. They would say this is why we should have no contact at all with your world. Things like this might happen.”

He pauses right there and as far as I know he doesn’t have anything to translate and I swallow hard at the knot in my throat and I say, “Things like what?”

Then both his hands take both my hands and when you’ve got sixteen cute little suckers going at you, it’s hard to make any real tough self-denying kind of decisions and that’s when I end up with a bona fide spaceman lover. And enough said, as we like to end touchy conversations around the hair-dressing parlor, except I will tell you that he was bald all over and it’s true what they say about bald men.

Then he takes me to the place where he picked the flower. A moon of some planet or other and there’s only these flowers growing as far as the eye can see in all directions and there are clouds in the sky and they are the color of Eddie’s turds after a can of Nine Lives Crab and Tuna, which just goes to show that even in some far place in another solar system you can’t have everything. But maybe Desi likes those clouds and maybe I’d see it that way too sometime, except I may not have that chance now, though I could’ve, it’s my own damn fault, and if I’ve been sounding a little bit hit-and-miss and here-and-there in the way I’ve been telling all this, it’s now you find out why.

Desi and I stand in that field of flowers for a long while, his little suckers going up and down my arm and all over my throat and chest, too, because I can tell you that a spaceman does too appreciate a woman who has some flesh on her, especially in the right places, but he also appreciates a woman who will speak her mind. And I was standing there wondering if I should tell him about those clouds or if I should just keep my eyes on the flowers and my mouth shut. Then he says, “Edna, it is time to go.”

So he takes my hand and we go back into his spaceship and he’s real quiet all the sudden and so am I because I know the night is coming to an end. Then before you know it, there’s Earth right in front of me and it’s looking, even out there, pretty good, pretty much like where I should be, like my own flower box and my own propane tank and my own front Dutch door look when I drive home at night from work.

Then we are in the field behind the house and it seems awful early in the evening for as much as we’ve done, and later on I discover it’s like two weeks later and Desi had some other spaceman come and feed Eddie while we were gone, though he should have told me because I might’ve been in trouble at the hairdressing salon, except they believed me pretty quick when I said a spaceman had taken me off, because that’s what they’d sort of come around to thinking themselves after my being gone without a trace for two weeks and they wanted me to tell the newspaper about it because I might get some money for it, though I’m not into anything for the money, though my daddy says it’s only American to make money any way you can, but I’m not that American, it seems to me, especially if my daddy is right about what American is, which I suspect he’s not.

What I’m trying to say is that Desi stopped in this other field with me, this planet-Earth field with plowed-up ground and witchgrass all around and the smell of early summer in Alabama, which is pretty nice, and the sound of cicadas sawing away in the trees and something like a kind of hum out on the horizon, a nighttime sound I listen to once in a while and it makes me feel like a train whistle in the distance makes me feel, which I also listen for, especially when I’m lying awake with my insomnia and Eddie is sleeping near me, and that hum out there in the distance is all the wide world going about its business and that’s good but it makes me glad I’m in my little trailer in Bovary, Alabama, and I’ll know every face I see on the street the next morning.

And in the middle of a field full of all that, what was I to say when Desi took my hand and asked me to go away with him? He said, “I have to return to my home planet now and after that go off to other worlds. I am being transferred and I will not be back here. But Edna, we feel love on my planet just like you do here. That is why I know it is right that we learn to speak to each other, your people and mine. And in conclusion, I love you, Edna Bradshaw. I want you to come away with me and be with me forever.”

How many chances do you have to be happy? I didn’t even want to go to Mobile, though I wasn’t asked, that’s true enough, and I wouldn’t have been happy there anyway. So that doesn’t count as a blown chance. But this one was different. How could I love a spaceman? How could I be happy in a distant galaxy? These were questions that I had to answer right away, out in the smell of an Alabama summer with my cat waiting for me, though I’m sure he could’ve gone with us, that wasn’t the issue, and with my daddy living just on the other side of town, though, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t miss him much, the good Lord forgive me for that sentiment, and I did love my spaceman, I knew that, and I still do, I love his wiggly hairless shy courteous smart-as-a-whip self. But there’s only so many new things a person can take in at once and I’d about reached my limit on that night.

So I heard myself say, “I love you too, Desi. But I can’t leave the planet Earth. I can’t even leave Bovary.”

That’s about all I could say. And Desi didn’t put up a fuss about it, didn’t try to talk me out of it, though now I wish to God he’d tried, at least tried, and maybe he could’ve done it, cause I could hear myself saying these words like it wasn’t me speaking, like I was standing off a ways just listening in. But my spaceman was shy from the first time I saw him. And I guess he just didn’t have it in him to argue with me, once he felt I’d rejected him.

That’s the way the girls at the hairdressing salon see it.

I guess they’re right. I guess they’re right, too, about telling the newspaper my story. Maybe some other spaceman would read it, somebody from Desi’s planet, and maybe Desi’s been talking about me and maybe he’ll hear about how miserable I am now and maybe I can find him or he can find me.

Because I am miserable. I haven’t even gone near my daddy for a few months now. I look around at the people in the streets of Bovary and I get real angry at them, for some reason. Still, I stay right where I am. I guess now it’s because it’s the only place he could ever find me, if he wanted to. I go out into the field back of my trailer at night and I walk all around it, over and over, each night, I walk around and around under the stars because a spaceship only comes in the night and you can’t even see it until you get right up next to it.