Amanda Baldeneaux
Space Camp
Content Warning: Please note that this story contains themes of sexual trauma and familial abuse that may be upsetting to some readers. Sections of the text containing traumatic elements have been indicated with brackets in the text and in the right margin for reference. A bracket ( { ) indicates the following text will begin a potentially triggering section.
NASA aired commercials for space camp on the Nickelodeon network when Sadie still snacked on popsicles and dry cereal straight from the box after school. Back then, she’d paint her mouth purple or red with the domed tips of the melting pops and pretend they were lipstick, pouting her lips and dreaming about moonwalks and freeze-dried ice cream, the kind astronauts ate. Sadie knew all about NASA because she lived in Alabama and space camp happened every summer in Huntsville, just four hours up the highway from where she lived in the small town of Wakerobin with her mother and little brother, Allen.
Allen was younger only by a year, but Sadie still called him “baby” until he turned thirteen. She called him “baby” even though Allen grew bigger than her just two years into his life and stayed that way with the help of genetics, egg sandwiches, and the wrestling team he joined in sixth grade. The year Allen stayed behind at Wakerobin Elementary and Sadie got one year without him at Mount Holly Middle School was the last good year at home she remembered. Once she’d grown up and married, she didn’t like to think much about Wakerobin or her mother or Allen; she’d moved as far away as she could without going to actual outer space.
Allen never cared about space camp. Allen hadn’t cared about astronauts or Nickelodeon shows about kids lost in space with a robot or any of the things Sadie cared about. Sadie stopped calling him “baby” when he turned thirteen because she stopped calling him anything, then. Sadie folded the sound of his name into a torn flap of skin on the inside of her cheek and swore never to intentionally draw his attention again. Sometimes, their mother made Sadie speak to Allen. Ask him to pass the butter. Ask him if his friends think you’re cute. Ask him what to do to make more boys notice you. Every time she had to speak to Allen, Sadie pretended she was high up in a space station orbiting earth, her knees tucked into her chest as she somersaulted in zero gravity. She’d wear a blue jumpsuit with embroidered flags on the chest. Her hair would fly out like spikes on a mace. No one could touch her, then: prickly and airborne and branded by the United States and NATO and everything else treatied and armed to the teeth.
“Sadie?” her mother would say. “Sadie? I’m talking to you.”
Sadie would uncurl her knees inside of her head, straighten her legs and float up to the ceiling.
“Help Allen with his homework. Get him something to eat if he wants.”
When Sadie still watched Nickelodeon after school, her mother arrived home every night at 5:20 p.m. Sadie memorized every show that aired between 3:30 p.m. and the time her mother’s key twisted the front door’s lock. Sadie pictured the inside of the lock like a small metal bed, the key folding back the cylinder bedspread like her mother did to the quilt over her body each morning. For all that her mother didn’t do, Sadie appreciated how gently her mother opened things. Coverlets. Locks. Cans of biscuit dough so they wouldn’t pop apart into ribbons too loudly. Sadie figured her father was the reason her mother was against surprises, against things she’d find if she ripped off a Band-Aid or lifted a rock too quick. He’d moved to Ohio when Sadie was small, not long after Allen was born. Her mother would never admit it, but Sadie had heard her aunt say her mother caught her father with someone else when she came home sick from work. Now, Sadie’s mother liked to give things ample time to scurry away, to hide before she could see them. She preferred not to see. Sadie did not appreciate that.
When Sadie still dreamed about NASA, she asked her mother about space camp, but her mother said space camp was only for rich kids. Girls like Sadie went to vacation bible school or the overnight Girl Scout camp held once a year in the state park thirty minutes away. Sadie didn’t like Girl Scout camp because she didn’t like pit toilets and sleeping in tents with other people’s mothers who snored. Sadie wanted to spend the summer at space camp or Nickelodeon studios. She wanted to spin in the space camp gyroscope or feel slime slide down her hair in the Florida heat outside of the rooms where her favorite shows were filmed. She’d heard rumors the slime tasted like vanilla pudding and wanted to taste for herself. She wanted a producer to walk by and say, “Her. I want her on my next show.” Sadie wanted to be enclosed in a box, whether high up in space or grounded in living rooms. Sadie wanted to be sent through orbiting satellites and shrunk down again safely into people’s TVs.
Specifically, Sadie wanted to be on a show that kids at school would turn on one afternoon over snacks of microwave pizzas cooked on folded-back box tops and recognize her, that girl who didn’t like dodgeball and laughed too hard at her history teacher’s jokes. The most attention Sadie ever got at school was the day she accidentally wore the rival middle school’s colors—yellow and green—on the Friday their basketball teams played each other. Everyone called her “Traitor. Elm Creek lover. Elm Eagle slut.” She’d thrown her sweatshirt in the trash and walked around in her undershirt, wondering if her nipples poked through the thin ribbing of the undershirt’s cotton. Other girls wore bras, but she didn’t need one, yet, so her mother wouldn’t buy them. “Still flat,” she’d say when they walked past rows of petite, lace triangles in the aisles for developing girls.
People on TV couldn’t be called names because they lived in boxes and had shiny white teeth and had people to screen through their phone calls and mail. Sometimes, Sadie took her stuffed animals out of the cedar trunk where she’d shoved them at the end of elementary school and stationed them behind the closed door of her room, willing them to come alive and screen whoever tried to come in. { No more Allen or his friends, that way. They came in, anyway, kicked the animals and called her “baby.” }
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If Sadie got on TV, no one would call her baby, or traitor, or ignore her, or snicker if she liked a teacher’s joke too much, inferring things about a relationship that made her squirm.
It couldn’t be just any TV, though. Not like the low budget commercial for a local buffet place that featured her classmate, Sydney Frond, chewing lettuce. Sadie couldn’t do a commercial for cleaning products or play someone’s niece on one of the soaps that her mother watched before leaving for work. Her mother worked at a gym where the treadmills and weights smelled like Clorox and sweat. On weekends, Allen went with her and came home poking his bicep like bread dough, checking for rise.
“You could jog on the treadmill,” her mother said to Sadie. “Movie stars work out every day.”
What she really meant, Sadie knew, was “Why are you round here, and not there?” Still, Sadie did sit-ups in her room with the door closed, checking her stomach each night for flat abs. Even the kids on Nickelodeon had flat abs. Astronauts probably did, too.
Sadie thought “nickelodeon” was a made-up word until she learned otherwise, something fun for children to slide back and forth on their tongues while elongating vowels and shoving consonants out from between their teeth like sunflower seed shells or spit. Sadie never thought knowing about the past could be fun until she read in a book about film that “nickelodeon” was the name of a type of theater—the first movie houses—with a nickel ticketing fee and hard wooden seats that folded up with a smack when you stood. She learned that when people went to nickelodeons, they went to see moving pictures, not movies, and then she realized that “movie” was short for “moving,” and that’s why photographs could be called “stills.”
Her mother liked the word “still.” She asked Sadie to “be still” and “sit still” and “why was she still asking about vacations in Florida?” Selling gym memberships meant Sadie’s mother couldn’t afford sleepaway camps or vacations. She said even if they could, she wouldn’t be caught dead in a pool or the beach or a swimsuit. Sadie had ruined her body. Never Allen, though. Sadie did the damage, first.
Sadie knew this from church already. Women always did the damage first, and even though Sadie was only a child, God didn’t see that as any excuse. Thistles and thorns, her mother said when Sadie didn’t behave. Your mouth is a deep pit.
But Sadie didn’t see ruin as her mother dressed and dried her hair in the morning. Her mother worked at the gym but didn’t work out. She wore jeans that buttoned up to the pinch in her waist with a roll of skin that wouldn’t stay in. Sadie asked her, once, why she didn’t buy the next biggest size and her mother made her go to her room.
Sadie had seen ruins in books. Buildings without roofs and broken things left after long years without anyone around to mend them. Sometimes things went to ruin much quicker, like after a war. Childbirth must have been quick, like war. Her mother had not been ruined before Sadie, then was. Sadie didn’t think her mother looked broken or ruined, so she considered that maybe she didn’t understand the word. Words seemed to say exactly what they meant. Space was full of space. Movies moved and stills didn’t. Nickelodeons charged a nickel. Learning the words let Sadie see the connective tissue between present and past, how the way things were didn’t disappear, but stretched forward into the future and if you stood at one end and walked around to the side, you could look back down its length and see all the way to the thing’s birth. After she grew up, finished school, and got married, Sadie could look down the long hallway of the word “brother” and see how it was reborn when he was, a word meaning “of a shared parent” that shifted to “of the dark and the taking.”
Before sex education in health class at school, Sadie would ask where she came from and her mother pointed at her own belly and said, “In here. You folded yourself up like a pretzel inside.” Sadie couldn’t imagine herself, even as a baby, folded up tight enough to fit into her mother’s soft middle. And who put her in there? Was she something her mother ate, like a seed?
Sadie’s teacher told her seeds were folded up plants, tucked tight inside hard shells that would soften with rainwater and sun. Astronauts folded themselves up into shuttles. Movie stars folded themselves into roles. Sadie’s mother folded herself up into pantyhose, tucking a slab of her stomach over itself so she’d fit, flat but puffy, into her skirts. Sadie tried this with her own skin, but there wasn’t enough. She tried stretching the sides of her belly button and folding herself up like a letter. Not enough.
In junior high, when other girls had grown breasts and Sadie had not, Allen reminded her that she didn’t have enough to make his friends want to look. { That didn’t stop him from running into the bathroom with the glass-doored shower when she bathed and yanking the cord on the blinds so the sunlight shone through. His friends in the neighborhood stood, gathered in the yard outside, glaring in. Allen laughed as he stood on the toilet and dangled her towel out of reach as she squatted in the tub, arms and knees crossed over herself like a pretzel.
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I’m spinning in a shuttle in space. I’m spinning in a shuttle in space.
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“Stand up,” Allen said. “Get your towel.”
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Faces pressed against the glass and Allen pulled the blinds to the top of the sill so his friends could better see in. Sadie called for her mother, but she wasn’t home; the gym opened early on weekends. When Sadie refused to stand up, Allen turned the knob on the shower to cold and Sadie jumped up, unfolding her body from the shell of her limbs as fists pounded against the evaporating fog on the window. Sadie thought Allen would at least look away in front of his friends, but he didn’t. He threw her towel into the hall, then left.
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As Sadie wrapped herself in the towel, she heard jeers from the yard. She peeked over the ledge to see boys handing quarters and wax-wrapped gum and trading cards to Allen. Sadie told her mother, but she didn’t get mad. }
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“They’re boys,” she said. “There’s not even enough to see.”
As she grew, Sadie found this to be a theme in her body’s development: lacking “enough.” She didn’t have enough fat when her friends began to wear bras. She didn’t have enough leg to stretch out from under her Sunday dress to make the brown-haired boy from Sunday school turn away from doodling volcanoes and crossbones on tithe envelopes with stubbed pencils. Sadie was all torso, too long in the middle and short on the ends. Sadie wished she could unfold her body from inside itself to make it just how she wanted: longer and fuller in just the right places. She wished she could step to the side of her life and look forward toward herself in the future and see if she’d stretch where she wanted to go. Space camp. Florida. Nickelodeon studios. Far away from Allen and his laughing, staring friends.
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When Sadie still wanted to spend summers at space camp, before she reached middle school and decided she wasn’t good at science because her lab partner said so, she’d ask her mother in the frozen foods aisle what she would say if a talent scout came up to her and said he had to sign her daughter for shows. For movies. Would she get to go to a studio, then? Sadie dreamed about being discovered.
“What talent scout shops at Winn-Dixie in Wakerobin, Alabama?” her mother asked. “What’s there to discover? It’s not like we’re Pompeii.”
Sadie knew about Pompeii from school. She knew it had been a beautiful city full of people who were all buried under volcanic ash that rained down like comets or falling stars. She knew a Spanish engineer discovered the ruins in 1748 and that millions of people visited them to see how lovely and tragic they are today. Sadie felt buried under her sweatshirts and Allen’s old jeans. Sadie was older; shouldn’t Allen get hand-me-downs? He was bigger than her, though. { Strong enough to pin her wrists above her head with one hand and tickle or hit her with the other. She hated the feel of his clothes on her skin. }
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Her mother loaded their cart with frozen fish sticks and vegetable medleys. She got Wheaties for Allen and generic rice crisps for Sadie. Sadie examined what everyone in the store wore, looking for hints of Hollywood in the cuts of their clothes. Didn’t talent scouts eat? She imagined that agencies sent scouts all over the country, searching for fresh faces to ship back to studios in Hollywood, Florida, New York. Sadie dreamed of palm trees on streets rolled out before mansions. They’d be tall, their necks stretched like giraffes. Nobody called them gangly or flat-trunked or plain.
Sadie weighed apples and okra in the large metal scales for her mother. She sucked in her cheeks and studied her reflection in the sheen of the scales. She was young. She was fresh. She could play a kid from the future on a rocket ship hurtling through space. There was no moving in this town, though. Only standing still.
As an adult, Sadie reflected that there’d never been risk of discovery by scouts in the aisles of Winn-Dixie, or the food court of the mall, or the bleachers at Allen’s wrestling matches. College scouts came for him. Everyone wanted Allen. But Sadie was never a beauty with her blunt bowl cut, the deep fold in her chin and the lumps of her cheeks. She looked like a child. When Sadie had a child of her own, she knew looking like one when you are one isn’t a bad thing. But back then, she felt wronged.
She felt wronged after learning how she’d “ruined” her mother. She figured it out from the covers of Seventeen magazines. Sassy. Bop. Tiger Beat. Sadie bought them all with found quarters and nickels. From their pages, Sadie surmised that beauty was the ticket to everything that could rocket her out of her life: a film career, money, an all-expenses paid flight out of Wakerobin to Hollywood. She wanted attention from boys, even a few who were her brother’s friends who’d grown handsome since that day they laughed at her from outside on the lawn. They’d pressed their face to the bathroom window to see her in every detail but ignored her, full and unfogged, at school and in church. Sadie thought lipstick could fix this. Or her mother’s mascara. She began to think about kissing. Whenever a couple kissed on screen Sadie got a feeling like she needed to pee and couldn’t understand the connection between what she saw and what she felt. Something about nerve endings and hormones and want.
Sadie wanted a lot of things through the years. The first that she could remember were Cabbage Patch dolls with plastic highchairs and bassinets. Then Barbies with rubber-molded high heels. Crop tops. Pizza. By twelve she already felt ugly and stuffed if she had three pieces of pizza instead of two. Even if her stomach still growled. Allen called her a cow and mooed at her over his tomato-stained plate. That’s when she learned that sometimes being enough meant being less, and that words and who spoke them didn’t always make sense.
{ Allen called her a cow but still came into her room in the night. He had wants of his own— revenge for her eating the last Cosmic Brownie, scissors for a project from the cup on her desk. Giving and taking meant hair pulled, her shirt pulled. He told her the same things their mother did, and some that she didn’t: “Hold still.” “There’s not even something to see.” “Are you still flat?”
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I’m spinning in a shuttle in space. }
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After Allen had got or done what he came for and left, Sadie thought of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, from pictures she’d seen in an ad campaign for perfume. She thought of the animals tucked into black blankets they couldn’t escape. She imagined the tar heavy, sticky against fur and feathers and skin. { Allen sweated above her, heavy and sticky, black in the shadows with her nightlight plugged into the outlet behind him. He called her baby, then, for still having a nightlight. }
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“Who is the baby, now?” he asked. “Gonna cry?”
In ninth grade, Sadie took health and nutrition as an elective and decided the secret to beauty was to drink a smoothie every morning for breakfast. Her mother obliged, providing a consignment store blender and a gallon of skim milk. In the days before Sadie grew up and bought a Vitamix and collagen powders and kale, the smoothies she made in her mother’s kitchen were merely milkshakes masquerading as healthy. They were a potent mix of frozen orange juice from concentrate, bags of frost-bitten fruit, and sugar-thick vanilla yogurt. If she added drops of green food coloring, the smoothies could look like Nickelodeon slime.
Grown, now, Sadie is wiser. Grownup Sadie throws in a banana and a handful of spinach. She uses unflavored yogurt. She knows that no matter how much spirulina she adds to the slush that orange juice and strawberries could never have made her acne dry up, her hair curl into ringlets, or her lashes grow long, black, and thick. No amount of liquified fruit would have made her beautiful enough to attract a boyfriend that would ward Allen away from her space.
She blamed Disney for her concoction of this solution, but not till much later. A boyfriend, she reasoned, would be like a knight, or a prince who could protect her from evil. Or perform the modern equivalent: a code where one boy couldn’t bruise her if she belonged to another. None came around, though, and she wondered, in the hallways at school, if it could be because everyone already knew.
Sadie once heard their pastor, who moonlit as the junior high wrestling coach, tell Allen that nuts made muscles grow. Sadie spent a month eating nuts, hoping to prove she couldn’t be pinned.
In seventh grade, Sadie learned about organic versus conventional food but declared she wouldn’t eat organic and her mother was happy not to buy it. Sadie’s refusal wasn’t economical, though. In the car on a road trip to visit her aunt, Sadie read in a magazine that dairy hormones made girls grow breasts preternaturally early. Sadie didn’t have breasts, but she wanted them. Breasts would make people like her. Breasts would bring in a boy who could keep Allen away.
The article paired text with a stick figure girl watching her stick figure breasts lump out on her chest while holding a pesticide and artificial-fertilizer-laden apple. All Sadie wanted after that were conventional apples. She still didn’t get breasts, and years later, her son on her lap, she wondered what the pesticides on the fruit may have done to her eggs or her brain.
Sadie cares less about being beautiful as an adult, except when people ignore her in lines. After thirty, Sadie learned if you’re not beautiful or young then others don’t see you. Men step in front of her like she’s not even there. It got worse after having a baby. Sometimes, Sadie folded her son’s knees up to his chest and held him on her lap, saying, “This is how you fit here, folded up with your knees tucked into your chin.” Sometimes, she took her wedding dress off the rack in the closet and held it up to her body, measuring how far past each side of the dress her body crept since giving birth to her son. She bought shapewear and practiced folding the front of her stomach into the stiff, suctioning panels. She thought of her mother and put them back in the drawer. Maybe she’d wear them to an anniversary dinner, or her son’s high school graduation. Maybe.
She contemplated buying shades of wrinkle-fighting foundation to counterbalance the invisibility curse of her thirties. She still ate three slices when she and her husband ordered pizza. She put chlorella tablets in smoothies, though, and continued to take prenatal vitamins even though she struggled to get pregnant again. She read in a magazine that celebrities took prenatal vitamins to make their hair and their nails grow in strong. The B vitamins packed into the pills just made Sadie’s urine turn bright, neon yellow. Her husband told her this meant they were passing right out of her body. He was a history teacher, what did he know? She took them anyway. Her husband told her she was beautiful, whenever she asked. He liked to sleep with a hand on her breast. She never mentioned Allen, divorced with kids of his own back in Wakerobin.
Her husband didn’t want another baby, but Sadie did. She stopped taking birth control, but her eggs seemed invisible to her husband’s sperm. Sadie figured this was because her eggs, like the rest of her body, were in their mid-thirties. She ate spinach to make them more beautiful. More ripe and more full. The secret is folic acid. The secret will be vitamin C.
When Sadie thinks of the eggs in her body, she thinks of nickelodeon theaters, of stilted movement and rough film and people who open their mouths but don’t speak. She thinks of depth that cannot be explored. Of black holes like infinite cones in space, folding time over and over upon itself. Sadie sees herself as an accordion, folded up like paper doll chains, people upon people. Open her up and string her out and you’d see egg upon egg of potential humans. She wonders if copies of Allen hide in one of those people. She looks at her son and she worries.
At the mall, Sadie likes to stand in dressing rooms with a mirror in front and a mirror behind, seeing her body unfolded. She squints down the long hall of herself and tries to see the point out in space where the Sadies begin. They spiral and she tucks a knee to her chest.
She tries on swimsuits with the tissue paper stuck in the crotch for good hygiene. Her stomach is folded down the middle. Diastasis recti, her doctor told her. The tearing of abdominal muscles in pregnancy. Sadie considers how she is torn inside and folded outside. Her middle can’t knit itself back together from within, so it folds her in half, not meeting quite right, like fitted sheets. Her mother said her body was “ruined.”
Sadie’s son kneels in the dressing room corner, pressing hand and lip prints into the mirror. Her husband wants to find him an agent, place him in ads for plastic toys and portable snack foods. Sadie considers. His nursery is blue and plastered with stars. His mobile, which still hangs over his bed and the mesh-covered guard rail, dangles a planet and spaceship and moon. She blends his baby food from steamed squashes and bunches of greens. She feeds him organic fruit. He tangles the chains of her jewelry into infinite spirals and she thinks of DNA and time and the minimum age for space camp as she picks at the knots with her nails.
Sadie feels that she never fit neatly in the spaces she tried hard to squeeze in. The bikini’s bottom is too tight; her torn stomach hangs over the edge like two sub-torso boobs. She should do sit-ups. She should eat less pizza. She should say fuck it and tell anything that tries to pin her into small, flattened spaces to get lost in a gravity-crushing black hole.
A hallway of eyes in the dressing room mirror, shrinking in scope as they stare up through their deepening layers, make Sadie feel seen. She imagines if she stepped out to the side of the hallway of Sadies, she’d see herself as she was in the beginning, small and pinched, elongating into who she is now: unfolded, unbent, and discovered.
Amanda Baldeneaux’s writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and is forthcoming elsewhere. She was awarded The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith 2018 Editors’ Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the Yalobusha Review’s 2019 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction. She studied English and creative writing at George Washington University and the University of Arkansas, and now lives in Colorado with her husband and two daughters. She works as a fiction editor and is a contributing writer to the speculative fiction blog, Fiction Unbound.