A Woman Must Find Her Way

On a warm day in autumn, I take my niece to the science museum a few blocks from my house. Soon she is going to leave me and move to California. We walk to the museum, and on our way, we stop to watch four men putt golf balls on a tidy green. There are few people on the course today despite it being one of the last nice days of fall. We see a cart packed with clubs in plump leather bags parked nearby on a gravel path, the kind of path that makes a pleasing crunch underfoot. On the edge of the sidewalk, my niece finds a scuffed golf ball. “Keep it,” I tell her. “It belongs to us now.” She pockets the ball. 

I buy us tickets for a planetarium exhibit called Minnesota in the Cosmos. We are going to explore the skies of our home state. We sit in comfy seats that tip when we lean back. We grin at each other. The IMAX movie begins to play on a domed white screen that reminds me of the golf ball in my niece’s pocket. The movie tells us how the Earth was formed over 4.5 billion years ago. “That’s an old Earth,” my niece whispers. She asks me how old I am. 

I once almost threw up in a movie theatre. I was there to watch Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity, which stars Sandra Bullock as Ryan Stone, a medical doctor turned mission specialist on her first trip to space aboard the shuttle Explorer. Out on a spacewalk, Ryan Stone is repairing something on the Hubble telescope when the crew is pelted from incoming debris, killing most of her team and destroying the shuttle. To save herself she unsnaps the clasp of her safety tether. The Earth’s revolutions loop in and out of peripheral focus as her body, like a rock desperately flung from a child’s slingshot, hurls through the universe, legs over head.

Here is where I should mention how much I love space but loathe the idea of going into it. All that open expanse, a relative sense of nothing but helium and hydrogen, dust and gasses. Where sound doesn’t carry because molecules aren’t close enough for sound to bounce off them. Where chicken eggs, dogs, monkeys, and a select few humans have gone. Where we don’t know enough of what the body and mind are capable of sustaining. Out there. The dark and limitless tract that intersects science and fiction. The final frontier. 

Sometimes when I look at photos of space or watch movies like Gravity or Minnesota in the Cosmos, it’s not the movement from the camera that makes my stomach drop. It’s that gaping exposure, the lack of supporting borders. Like when I look at that famous old photograph of those ironworkers sitting on a steel girder. So cool and casual, holding their lunches and newspapers, smoking cigarettes. Staged or not, eleven men should never sit high above the Manhattan skyline. There is too much space between beam and sidewalk.

As she navigates an unfamiliar terrain on her own, Ryan Stone hallucinates. It’s up to the viewer to determine what we see is real. While I watched her body tumble untethered, I gripped the arms of my theatre seat as a sign verifying where I was.

Our planetarium guide tells my niece and me that people who live in cities as we do are unable to see the full spectrum of our galaxy’s stars. He says this is because of light pollution. I take this to mean that the stars I can’t always see are still out there among the moon and the planets, and the planets’ moons. Like a black hole, there are things that exist when we can’t see them. This is reassuring. I smile as our guide tells us more facts.

Fact: the word ‘exist’ comes from the Latin existere; to come into being. 

I keep having the same dream where I obsessively hoard books around my house. Piles of books accumulate on the floor, stacked on kitchen shelves. Books on my bed, books in the bathtub, books on the back of the toilet. Every spare space in my house is occupied by books. 

When our museum visit is over, my niece and I walk to my house. It’s still warm outside. The cars on Larpenteur Avenue roll past us. We stop again when we get to the golf course; still few people out there. We watch as a man tees off, and when I hear the plink of club meeting ball, I imagine the golf ball is an orbiter carrying women like Ryan Stone to space. A dizzying trail of egg white blazing through time, a tiny being floating in gravity.

We can’t see it, but gravity is everywhere, even in small amounts in space. Gravity keeps the planets and sun in orbit of each other. It pulls or pushes objects toward the other. Gravity is what keeps humans on Earth and Ryan Stone floating on her own. Thanks to its force, she doesn’t fly away to another universe or free-fall from the sky as birds sometimes do.

In space, our bodies weigh less than they do on Earth, and this made me think that maybe Ryan Stone exists just a little bit less in one space than she does in another. Nothing in orbit pulled itself to her; there was no gravitational attraction between her and something else. It bothered me to see her body float in wildness where being on your own is as dangerous as the approaching terror of some celestial object. 

Plenty of astronauts have talked about feeling weightless in space. Plenty of astronauts have written books of their space adventures. Mae Jemison, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride. Perhaps I should buy one of their books, see if I prefer reading about people in space than watching them on a big white screen. Add another book to my collection.

Ryan Stone collects pain. She tells her commander that she had a young daughter—about the same age as my niece. Her daughter died very suddenly from a tragic accident while playing tag. One day she existed, and then one day she didn’t. Ryan Stone is weighed down with grief.

Here is where people have told me I’m inserting my thoughts on motherhood. That I am projecting my insecurities of being a childless woman onto a story Alfonso Cuarón described as a drama of a woman in space. I have heard the interpretations before of how I use a metaphor to hide in the open. Ryan Stone’s pain is the structural framework of the film, and yes, maybe for me it reiterated a question on existential resilience that I have been asking myself for years: 

Can a woman exist if she is on her own?

In my recurring dream, people come into my house and take the books away. They are taking up too much space they tell me. But I keep collecting more to replace the ones I’ve lost. I need a safety tether. To feel reassured that objects around me mean I am being. I need to know I will exist if I am alone.

In the film’s final scenes, Ryan Stone makes a harrowing attempt to get home aboard a capsule from the empty Chinese space station. As she reenters the Earth’s atmosphere, the capsule begins to disintegrate. Like the Columbia’s demise. A voice from Ground Control demands she verifies herself, but instead of answering, she crash-lands in a lake. I finally released the tight grip on my theatre seat. I had witnessed that someone can free-fall from nothing and survive. 

Ryan Stone back-floats in the water, watching as flaming debris of an object that once encapsulated her showers down. When she pulls herself ashore wearing only her flesh-colored underthings, it takes her several attempts to pull herself vertical. To find her footing, to begin anew. This is where movie viewers said a metaphor existed. A woman, nearly nude, stumbling out of the water, was Cuarón’s projections on bodies of evolution. Of resilience. 

My niece pulls the golf ball out of her pocket as we wait for her parents to pick her up. She bounces it on the road in front of my house, and it makes a nice plinky sound as it hits pavement. The white orbiter going up and down, pulled in both directions.

ROBYN EARHART lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and pets.