A wind is moving the shrubs and tall trees around the red brick house swathed in English ivy and Virginia creeper. In the backyard are the gardens of flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees where much of the sisters’ table comes from in the summer. Tomatoes, beans, peas, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, and many herbs lie under the sun, and surrounding the borders of their yard, cherry, pear and apple trees thrive. This morning amid this profusion of early autumn abundance Anna is transplanting a small tree. She is a dramatic contrast to her sibling, lacking in the taste and care for her appearance that her sister exhibits. Skinny but not frail, she wears her father’s old plaid hunting jacket, faded brown corduroy pants, and battered construction boots. Where other women might look as if they were about to attend a tea as they gardened, Anna looks like a gravedigger. She moved in with Elizabeth and Leo ten days after they returned from their honeymoon and has outlived her sister’s betrothed.
Though the sisters are distinctly different in their appearance and they argue frequently, they remain inseparable. Just as a body needs a right and left hand, they are very much complementing halves. Anna would say to visitors about her sister, “She always loved the fancy clothes and the boys and they loved her. Now you can tell that I never was fancy, and maybe that’s why I never married. I’ve been happy and Betta’s been happy each in our own way and that’s that.”
Her sister is plump and wears a gray silk robe with an antique cameo at her bosom; silver hair is piled onto her head in thick curls, and her sturdy legs are smooth from waxing. She scrapes along the floor with soft felt slippers moving back and forth near the stove; battering frying turning, battering frying turning. She hurriedly takes an apron out of a drawer and dropping it open, ties it around her. The frying pan has begun to spatter. As she works, she hums an old song to herself: “O Marie, O Marie, tu stai bella.” Her voice is like a fragile piece of lace. She moves fluidly from one thing to another; buttering toast, pouring cream into the creamer, retrieving from the refrigerator the raspberry preserves which she has concocted from the berries she picked from hedges adjoining the house. Her name is Elisabetta, known to some of her family and friends as Betta.
She softly shuffles downstairs to the basement to replenish the ground coffee she has used this morning. Here is a world unto itself; raised on a small concrete platform at the base of the stairs is a washer and sink to protect them from spring flooding. Above this is a window where the sun comes through, tinted green by the Virginia creeper. Betta goes to the hand-driven coffee grinder and starts turning the reluctant handle, thinking of the many people whom she has done this for over the years.
“Lady of Spain I adore you, lady of Spain I implore you…,” She hears Anna croak in her strained contralto that seeps into the basement from the battered wooden doors which open to the backyard. She never could sing but this has never stopped her. The sound is akin to the drumming of stubby fingers on an out-of-tune piano or the failed note in a trumpeter’s solo. Betta cringes. The sound is quite horrible. But what Anna lacks in voice and pitch she makes up with brio. And isn’t it fortunate that however eccentric your habits, if you live with your sister, you can indulge in the luxury of expressing them?
Betta’s eyes reluctantly but inexorably drift to the barely visible thing that Anna is building which lies draped under a dusty tarpaulin in the basement’s next room. She shakes her head a little and sighs ever so slightly and nervously looks away. She can almost forget about it if she doesn’t look at it. Forget that she thinks her sister has lost her mind.
The wooden stairs groan somewhat as she ascends with her ground coffee. She goes to the window of the dining room which faces the backyard, opens it quickly and shouts, “Anna, breakfast!”
“I’ll be right there, Elizabeth,” Anna shouts, tamping down the ground with her foot, then hopping on it in practical but demented fashion. She never calls her sister Betta.
Anna walks quickly but stiffly onto the porch, careful not to slam the door and then goes rapidly into the house. She automatically heads to the refrigerator to get the fresh orange juice which has been chilling and sitting down at the table with her sister, pours each of them a glass.
“Oh! Elizabeth, a lovely breakfast. But I’ve got to eat quickly. Herr Fluffernutter will be here soon. He’s going to install the anti-gravity device today.”
The very mention of Herr Fluffernutter makes Betta wince and causes her stomach to tie up in knots. For one thing, it isn’t his real name and for another, she really doesn’t know what to do. Her sister has suddenly seized upon this idea of building a spacecraft and going to the moon. She knows that the space program always fascinated her, but it never occurred to her that she would try to initiate her own.
As a young girl on summer vacation, Anna marveled at the night sky, the hundreds of galaxies, the shooting stars and Venus rising brightly. All those things that were invisible close to the city. She felt drawn to the universe and its vast distances which were so far from the day-to-day routine that was her norm.
Watching Neil Armstrong’s lunar landing on the late news Anna had said out loud, “I’d love to go on their next trip.” They both chuckled at that. Then Anna phoned NASA, but not before agonizing for days over the expense of the long-distance phone call, and asked what she had to do to apply for the training program. The operator, thinking that she was a crank, had passed her onto a gently spoken colonel in public relations, who explained that they were not taking any new applicants at that time. Not to waste the call, she asked if she could be put on a waiting list.
“May I inquire how old you are ma’am?” the colonel had asked as kindly as possible.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Anna said irritably. “The nerve!” she thought to herself. “Why, they can’t ask you your age!”
“I inquired because NASA has a requirement that candidates begin their training,” he paused a moment and decided not to mention anything specific, “early on.”
Anna was no fool. “What you’re saying then is that I’m too old.”
“Ma’am, I didn’t say that, I just meant to suggest…”
She hung up. Anna knew the corporate brush-off. After all, she had been an executive secretary in a big New York hotel for over fifty years. She had used the brush-off all the time on pesty salesmen and irate hotel guests.
For a few months, Betta didn’t hear any further mention of the idea. Then Anna started coming back from the public library where she volunteered with all sorts of books on aeronautics, physics, and space travel. Betta thought this odd, but never really considered it as anything beyond a passing curiosity. After all, these were highly technical books and Anna had had problems with high school geometry.
It was when Herr Fluffernutter started visiting that all this crazy talk of building a flying saucer and going to the moon began in earnest. There, she thought, now she was calling him Herr Fluffernutter! It wasn’t his real name at all; he was only their neighbor, Mrs Schmidt’s widower, a college professor in retirement, indulging his wish for a career as a stage magician. He appeared in nightclubs, schools and parties billed as “Herr Fluffernutter.” Professor Schmidt teased Anna into calling him by his stage name, and somehow this made the whole nutty project seem even more lunatic, if, indeed, that was possible. When Anna had told her what they were going to build and the trip they planned to take, Betta’s mouth had dropped open. Now every morning she woke up and this was the first thing on her mind.
What was worse, who could she tell? They would lock one or both of them up if she even tried to explain it. How could you explain it without making someone think that you and your sister have lost their marbles?
Anna finishes her toast and stands up. “I wonder what’s keeping him, Elizabeth?” she asks out loud. Going to the window, she jerks open the curtain and looking out, sighs, “Maybe he can’t carry the anti-gravity device alone. I’ll give him a ring and see if he needs help.”
“Do you really need to?” Betta starts to say, thinking that this has gone far enough, and she wants to continue, “Because maybe there isn’t any such thing. Maybe it’s just a joke that’s gone a little too far.” She knows that Professor Schmidt was quite attached to his wife, and Anna always claimed that she never wanted to marry, but there was something in all of this of two very lonely people who have found one another and can’t quite bring it into words. But she doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t want to hurt Anna or spoil the romance if it is one. And for the most part, her sister is as levelheaded as she has ever been. But they really keep working at this thing, and she hears her talking in the basement about orbital flight paths and excess payload and matter/anti-matter conversion systems.
“You think we’re crazy, don’t you? Herr Fluffernutter is just a senile old man? And that must mean that I’m nuts right? Well, Elizabeth? Don’t you?”
Betta sits at the table and pulls the robe closer to herself, “I never said that. I don’t know what you mean.” Anna looks at her a moment and declares a little defiantly, “I’m going to give him a ring.”
She boldly strides into the dining room to the phone. They had never been this close to discussing it, Betta realizes, and having started to, it makes her even more unsettled. She starts to clear the table. Her sister is supposed to do this, but this morning she doesn’t want to remind her.
The doorbell rings, and Betta goes to answer it as Anna springs into the kitchen. She is old yet spry. But Betta beats her to the door and is rewarded with the unassuming sight of Professor Schmidt standing on the stoop in a grey cardigan, blue oxford shirt, grey flannel pants and brown loafers. He is holding a small box.
“He doesn’t look like a rocket scientist or a magician. He just looks like a very ordinary college professor,” she thinks to herself. “Well, good morning Professor Schmidt. Isn’t it a lovely day out? Such weather.”
“Such weather I wait for all summer, Betta.”
Just then Anna pokes her head up to the screen door and lightly nudges her sister aside.
“Herr Fluf-fer-nut-er,” she says in a coy singsong voice.
“Oh, Anna, oh, ha, ha,” he answers into his sleeve, blushing.
“Are you ready to start work?” she asks more directly, “We’re almost finished, after all, aren’t we?”
“Let’s talk about it amongst ourselves, I don’t want to bore your sister,” he says quietly stepping into the kitchen. He doesn’t kiss or touch Anna in any way but stands at her side very closely, swaying ever so slightly in her direction.
“Have you had your breakfast, Professor Schmidt?” Betta inquires craftily, always trying to prevent them from working.
“Coffee and toast. Never anything else. I have a light appetite in the morning.”
“Can’t I make you something? Some bacon? Eggs? No? Some nice melon then.”
Anna grabs Professor Schmidt by the sleeve. “Let’s get to work. There’s still so much to do.” And giving Betta a trifling little wave, Anna whisks them off to the steps leading to the basement where they both disappear.
A few hours later, Betta sits in her rocking chair overlooking the backyard from the dining room window, dressed in a crisp linen house coat and black suede pumps. She is wearing her cream-colored crepe turban and is listening to a radio program which is frequently overwhelmed by jarring hammering and the cacophonous whine of the metal cutter that creeps from the basement. She leans forward a little in her chair trying not to listen and gazes out the window at her luxuriant flowerbeds, colorful prolusions of Black-Eyed Susans, sunflowers, Tiger Lilies, marigolds and carnations and beyond their property the not-so-tidy backyard of Professor Schmidt.
Betta realizes after a time that the house has gone silent. Curiosity seizes her and she tiptoes awkwardly downstairs, her left leg a little stiff from the damp weather which is only just beginning. She hears the hushed voices of Betta and Professor Schmidt and an ever so subtle vibrating sound. She comes down within two or three steps of the stairwell, and hiding herself, secretly peeks at the basement room where her demented sister and the oddball professor are working and is so startled for a moment that she almost trips down the steps.
The glow of an amber light slowly throbs on and off, again and again, from the top of an oval structure which she can barely make out in the dim basement. The circular amber light is positioned at the center of a gray metallic dish which appears to be about ten feet across and fifteen feet long. The light grows bright and then fades completely into darkness. At its height the faces of her sister and Professor Schmidt appear lurid and yellow, and their eyes shine with a macabre delight.
Betta, surprised and shaken, tiptoed delicately upstairs clutching the bannister, her eyes wide and her chest fluttering with panic. “They must really be meaning to do this! I’m surprised they haven’t blown up the house already with that strange machine. Oh, what to do?” She frets and goes outside to pick up some flowers in the backyard to distract herself. But even as she collects a basket on the porch, and puts on her gardening gloves, she can’t put out of her mind what she has just seen. She thinks something awful is going to happen, and she knows she can’t stop it. “I’ll just wait, maybe I’ll tell Anna that I think this is getting dangerous, and they either have to stop or move their project elsewhere. But I can’t tell her to stop. She won’t listen to me. Besides they might just move the whole project over to Professor Schmidt’s house, and then I won’t know what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, in the basement, Professor Schmidt summons enough courage to pull Anna’s bony body to his portly one and gives her a kiss on two very unwilling lips.
“Herr Fluffernutter!” she shrieks, twisting around in his grasp and pulling away from him. “How can you do such a thing when we’re so close to the completion of our work? You told me this was the most important project in your life and you would spoil it with animal passions? I know now that I’ve waited my whole life for you to come along. It’s your great work, your great mission! My great purpose! Our great achievement.”
Professor Schmidt sighs. He really should tell Anna that this whole thing is just a prop, a magnificent one for his nightclub act. He really doesn’t know what possessed him to deceive her so unfairly. But it was she who asked him if he could build a spacecraft.
“I’m not really to blame,” he muses. “She wanted inspiration, and I wanted company, and she’s always seemed more interested in the ship than in me. It didn’t seem to be quite so unfair.”
Professor Schmidt was amazed that Anna had believed they were going to the moon in the first place. He thought it was both touching and pathetic. But it had clearly gone far enough. How was he going to explain it to her?
“What was I thinking about when I started this?” he wonders.
“Herr Fluffernutter, now that we’ve installed the anti-gravity device, when do you think we’ll leave for the moon? Have our space suits arrived from that mail-order company?”
“Can’t she see that the anti-gravity device was really the inside of a transistor radio? And who would order space suits mail order?” he thinks, a bit contemptuous of her now that she has rejected his advances.
“The suits haven’t arrived Anna. But…there’s something…” He can’t continue.
“What is it, Professor?” she asks, studying his face intently, “Is anything wrong?”
“There’s…something…,” he looks at her looking at him in the shadows, twisting the buttons on his sleeve around. Her gaze is anxious; her mouth is rigid with tension. He can’t bring himself to tell her that the whole project is a fraud. His contempt melts into pity.
“I…I…am afraid that…there are certain…indicators…” and having seized upon a method of escape, pursues it vigorously, “indicators that make it seem improbable that we will leave soon…”
He has burst into a sweat and feels almost dizzy, but he’s on his way.
Anna is not to be dissuaded so easily. “Indicators? What indicators? Do you mean the position of the moon? Of the planets? Meteor showers? What do you mean by indicators?”
“Believe me…there are…are…”
“I’m beginning to think Professor Schmidt that there’s something you’re not telling me,” she says coldly, “there’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
“The position of the Earth in relation to the sun!” He triumphantly declares, satisfied that he has found the appropriate excuse.
“But three months ago you picked our departure date as this November, surely you knew and took into account the position of the Earth?” she acidly retorts.
“I…made…an error?”
She answers bitterly, “You don’t sound very sure of yourself Professor Schmidt. You don’t sound sure of yourself at all. It sounds like you’re making this all up. After we’ve worked so hard, after I’ve worked so hard, you seem to be changing your mind. Or perhaps you’re not as brilliant as I thought. Maybe you could make a mistake with the calculations. Then I wonder if it’s safe to make this trip with you. If you could make one mistake…”
Stung by her dismissal, a frown creases his forehead, and that feeling of contempt that he’s harbored blossoms, “Yes, yes, if you must know it has been a mistake, to work with a foolish old woman like you. Go to the moon! Indeed! I wanted your help building this toy for my magic show. There isn’t anything real about it. I’ve hoped all these months you would see that this ‘going to the moon business,’ was just my way of talking. It was a joke. It has all been a joke.”
“Joke?” she questions weakly. Her gaunt, ungainly body begins to tremble and she hides her face with her hands as a child might. “Please go Mr. Schmidt. I think that you are telling the truth, finally. And I think you have made a fool of me.”
“It was not my intention,” he answers with his head bowed.
“Please go, Professor.”
He slowly, heavily climbs the stairs and looks back once to see Anna leaning against the washing machine, crying. “I’ll come and get the things next week.”
Anna sobs heavily for a few minutes under the weight of her humiliation. She hasn’t felt so sad since her father died. It’s a similar feeling of loss. She had wanted so much to go to the moon. She wanted so much to have something extraordinary happen. She needed that spark that rose against the routine and the expected to give her life some flavor. She had played the game, working for years, caring for her parents when they were ill, and now she believes little has come of it besides her pension and her loneliness.
Recovering herself, but sad and slow, she opens the doors to the backyard where her sister is bent, cutting flowers.
“Has Professor Schmidt left?” Betta asks her as she clips the long stems of some sunflowers. Then she turns and sees the stricken look on her sister’s face.
“Are you alright?”
Anna, depressed and mortified doesn’t want to talk about it yet, but she does anyway. After all, this is her sister. She doesn’t need to save face.
“There isn’t going to be any moon trip Elizabeth. Herr…Professor Schmidt has deceived me. He has only wanted what men have always wanted from me.”
At first, Elizabeth is disoriented and confused at this news, being unexpected. She wonders what men have always wanted from her sister.
“Has Professor Schmidt been…has he done anything?”
“There isn’t going to a moon trip. I’ll explain later Elizabeth.”
After dinner, she reveals the denouement of their project. Betta is not surprised, but still wonders how Anna could have taken the whole thing seriously.
When the table has been cleared and the dishes washed, the newspaper read and the sun has set, Anna takes from the basement her portable telescope and sets it up in the chilly backyard. The air is damp and crisp. She scans the skies awkwardly, examining a sliver of moon, a star here, a galaxy there. Tonight the universe is Anna’s oyster. When the chill begins to penetrate the hunting jacket, she packs up and opening the trap doors, carries the small telescope into the basement.
She switches on a hanging light bulb as she sets down the telescope in a corner. Then Anna turns and looks at the tarpaulin covering the locus of her dashed dreams, but she smiles and laughs out loud. “How silly I was,” she giggles, “it was just Herr Fluffernutter’s way of staying close to me. He just missed his wife, and it was the only thing that we had in common. He was probably just too embarrassed to ask me to help with something for his kiddie show, and I gave him a reason for working together. Going to the moon indeed!” she chuckles. Then with a glimmer of an idea she thinks to herself, “Perhaps he can use an assistant with his magic show! I’ll have to ask him.”
“Who are you talking to?” her sister calls from upstairs.
“Nobody.”
Betta shakes her head at her strange sister, immensely relieved that the moon trip business is over. She takes an orange from a basket near the stove and rolls it firmly under her smooth, strong hands. When she feels it begins to yield, she slices it in half. The orange interior glistens with juice, and she crushes its pulp against a glass juicer, doing this with ten or twelve oranges, pausing at every two or three to pour the juice through a strainer and into a small pitcher. She places in the pitcher in the refrigerator for the next morning.
“O Marie, O Marie, tu stai bella,” she sings and pausing, shouts down the steps, “Hurry! You’ll miss Huntley and Brinkley!”
“Coming Elizabeth!” Anna shouts back as she comes up the stairs, herself singing, “There was love all around, but I never heard it calling, no I never heard it at all, till I met youuu…”
