“I just find this a fascinating moment.” Boone is about to tell a story he has told many times, she can tell: his voice takes on the confidence of one who has whole paragraphs ready for delivery. Helen puts herself into a good listening posture.
“No one knew exactly what kind of spacesuit would be needed for walking on the moon,” Boone says. “They knew it had to be a sort of portable spacecraft, that it needed to contain a total life support system, but the rest was mostly guessing. The other vendors competing for the contract all had experience making military equipment, but only International Latex had worked with fabric and seamstresses and making something a person can lie down and then get up in. Their design won. My grandmother was making girdles until one day her supervisor pulled her aside and told her she needed to start working on another project.”
Helen loves these stories, like they all do. The early years of NASA: slide rules and pocket protectors and “Failure is not an option.” How little they had known; how much they had dared.
Boone picks up his narrative. “The tension was high. Everyone was racing against the clock, trying to get a working suit together but also adhering to the most rigorous safety standards ever. Seamstresses were assigned a different color pin, and their worktables were inspected to make sure that every single pin came out. The sewing machines paused after every stitch. My grandmother worked on the lining of the gloves.” Boone holds up his hands, more callused than you might expect from a person who made his first billion in networking routers, and is wearing a cardigan. “A new fabric,” he says. “Woven chromium steel. Two thousand dollars a yard. Not an easy thing to stitch. Even decades later, my grandmother still had calluses on her fingertips.”
Helen, despite her distraction, or dehydration, or sadness, feels a rush of genuine liking for this man, this respecter of calluses.
In the third month of her longest mission aboard the International Space Station, Helen had removed her socks and seen the calluses from the soles of her feet come completely off with them and float up in front of her face. She then had to chase them down—flying, since she could not chase her feet on foot—and secure them in a trash bag because otherwise someone else might have had to vacuum her calluses out of a vent and that wasn’t fair. Boone would probably enjoy this anecdote. When Helen had told it to her daughter, Meeps had laughed, but also said, in one of her funny-angry voices, “Okay, I won’t ever have a story as cool as that in my entire life.”
“Incredible,” says Helen. “My daughter studied acting and I remember her telling me that there are no small roles. That’s absolutely true, I think. Your grandmother’s contribution could not have been more vital.”
Boone executes a double thumbs-up in agreement, or perhaps that’s what he always does when he reaches this point in the story. “She and her coworkers took their jobs very seriously. They knew what was at risk. Later, my grandmother watched the Apollo 14 crew bouncing around on the moon, being silly, having the time of their lives, and her heart was in her throat. She said she kept whispering, ‘Get back inside, get back inside, stop horsing around.’ Because of course the astronauts were enjoying themselves. But people like my grandmother knew the truth. They knew the truth about how fragile everything is, because they had stitched every stitch of that fragile truth.”
“Indeed,” agrees Helen, but in the gently repressive tone of someone who would like to dial down the emotional level of the conversation a notch or two. Possible imminent death was her business, and not a subject for poetry, even if it’s only the whimsy of Boone’s speechwriter. “What a lovely tribute to your grandmother.” Helen takes a few steps back and makes a show of surveying some of the other artwork. “This is all just great.”
They begin touring the lobby. The white and gray paint scheme, the sprung floor that swallows the sound of their feet, the curved lines, all contribute to a sense of the space as a kind of airlock: a place to transition from one world to the next. Boone points out that one of the other tributes is a small screen running video loop of Helen herself, giving a demonstration meant for schoolchildren of brushing her teeth in microgravity.
Her first trip to space, the hair floating around her face not yet gray. Helen’s daughter had been six at the time, Helen’s husband still alive.
She’d worn an ILC-designed suit on that mission. And fourteen years later, Helen had been giving a commendatory address at ILC headquarters in Delaware on the day her husband died. NASA had sent her: it was important for the makers of spacesuits to connect their work to an actual human who was capable through human error—possibly theirs—of dying. So at the moment when she had been thanking men and women for their heroic efforts to keep her, a hero, alive, her husband had expired in the parking lot of a Houston hospital for want of an aspirin. Helen’s best guess was that Eric had felt some sort of chest pain, but had not wanted to call an ambulance for some reason, and had driven himself. No one knew for sure. Five years ago, now.