In 1979, the summer I turned ten, my dad took me and my brother Ian to weekly Skylab parties, where we sawed at gray, overcooked steaks on Styrofoam plates with plastic knives, moistening the dry meat with copious amounts of A. 1. sauce and waiting for Skylab to fall back to earth. We were not afraid of being the unlucky ones to get flattened when the space station reentered. In fact, we dreamed of a central Connecticut crash down. Our host—a tall, skinny family man named Phil, with frizzy hair, a receding hairline, and the kind of playful spirit I then identified as “fun dad” but know now was likely “hitting-lines-in-the-garage dad”—had painted a giant red target on a bed sheet and nailed it to the side of his house. The kind of target that would be visible to an unmanned spacecraft falling out of space on an unplanned flight path, I suppose. Every Saturday night in the summer of 1979, we partied under Phil’s target. The whole business of the first space station coupled with the big aeronautical screw up felt so historic. Everybody wanted to either get a piece of history or leave one.
Phil was always coming up with ways to celebrate the fact that the suits with the fancy engineering degrees had fucked up worse than he had. One sticky night, he emerged from the garage with a beer in one hand and a shovel and a lidded five-gallon bucket in the other. “We’re gonna bury a time capsule!”
Everyone started fishing around in their pockets, looking around on the ground, strolling over to their hatchbacks and snapping open glove boxes. I know at least one beer can went in, and a pack of cigarettes. I’m sure somebody put in a cassette tape—Donna Summer or the Bee Gees. Ian would have had a pocketful of Happy Meal toys—brand-new that year—but I didn’t have much in those days. I carried a notebook everywhere. I was into horses and books but also secret alphabets and elementary school origami. What would I give to the bucket?
Phil’s plan was to make a treasure map—treasure maps were big in the seventies—and ten years later, Phil would throw a Skylab reunion party and we’d follow the treasure map to the time capsule once all had been revealed: where Skylab had eventually crashed down, of course, but also who had gotten divorced (Phil, for one), who was dead (Tony, the Fresh Air kid who came to Connecticut every summer), who had moved across the country for college (me), and whether or not the band my dad and Phil were putting together featuring their cover of “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight” would make them famous. Also no.
In ten years, I would be twenty.
To a ten-year-old, ten years is a whole lifetime.
Beginning when I was a child, adults—often complete strangers—sought me out in quiet corners to tell me things I probably had no business hearing. My husband, Mark, calls this “the Christman mystique.” I have always wondered why me? Is there something the tellers hoped I would give in return? Or was my role entirely passive? Soaking in their secrets and making them disappear? Was there something about my face that said I wouldn’t tell?
The Skylab parties attracted a large crowd and one Saturday night I was minding my own business, drawing horse heads in my notebook—horse heads with halters, horse heads with Black Stallion–style flowing manes, horse heads encircled by derby wreaths—and a grown-up woman I’d never seen before approached me and told me that she liked to draw horses, too. She told me she could teach me how to draw the whole horse, even the tricky bit at the fetlock where the leg seems to go off in the wrong direction. I don’t know why she couldn’t do that right where we were, outside at the table, surrounded by all the other adults eating their steaks, drinking beer out of cans, and playing armchair astrophysicists. Instead, my new friend picked up my notebook, led me into the house, up the dark back stairs, and into an empty bedroom.
I remember sitting on the floor next to her, sharing the open notebook, and she really did know how to draw a good horse, a whole horse. And she started telling me things—about her boyfriend who was sleeping around with other women, and her sister who had betrayed her (maybe by sleeping with her boyfriend?), and how she didn’t even know what to do next with her life. She was lost, she told me, floating like an unmoored space station, tumbling out of orbit. I don’t remember the details, but I remember the horses she drew and the intense expression in her eyes. She just kept telling me things—until my father threw the door open, red in the face from searching, and yelled at me to go downstairs and back to the party. I never saw that woman again—not even that day—but my mind has held onto the memory: the first time a complete stranger opened up to me and let it all out.
I still draw that horse without a body. She is always facing to the left, as if she is looking at something behind us with her wishbone eyes.
I asked Mark to read an early draft of this essay, and he said, “You have to be more clear. What happens to you is weird. It’s not normal. I mean, people tell you things. Big things. That never happens to me.”
It’s true. For example, many years ago, when I was nine-and-a-halfmonths pregnant with my first baby, I wandered into a babyGap and the clerk, a woman whom I’d guess was around fifty, trailed me through the store, asking me pretty typical questions about my pregnancy—when was I due, did I have any cravings, was this my first. When I stopped moving through the racks and turned to face her, she looked almost surprised by what she was going to do next. I waited, holding eye contact, one hand following the knob of my baby’s heel across the top of my belly and the other clutching a fistful of impossibly soft onesies in a rainbow of gender-neutral colors. Right away, she started telling me her own birth stories, working backward chronologically. Four total. When she got to the last story, her first baby, she started to cry and shake. “First one—she said—that stupid doctor. That stupid, stupid doctor. He let me go too long. He shouldn’t a let me go that long. He shoulda just took her. Her heartbeat went down to thirty. Thirty!”
I felt unsteady. Taking my hand off my belly, I reached out to a rack for balance, but I couldn’t change the end of her story.
Sometimes it’s impossible for me to separate empathy from fear.
“She didn’t make it,” the clerk said. “She didn’t make it. Died in the last thirty minutes. He shoulda just took her.”
I told her I was sorry, and I was. So terribly sorry. We stood there, babyless, surrounded by the stuff of babies. Later, Mark found me standing in Sears in front of a display of hooded infant towels, holding a frog in one hand and a bunny in the other. Crying.
Mark was horrified. “She told you that? Couldn’t she see you?!”
In 2022, two children and nearly twenty years later, I was isolated to the back two rooms of our house for a week after contracting Covid-19, existing in a kind of fugue state dominated by sleeping, Mucinex, oxygen checks, and binge-watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. During this strange, plasmatic time, I developed a brief but passionate obsession with Arabella and Anita, the two girl spiders with fairy-tale names who went up to Skylab in 1973.
These bad-ass lady arachnids were the first spiders in space! By which I mean, I suppose, the first spiders we know about. The first spiders we sent up there—from here. On purpose.
Before the sun started dragging Skylab down out of her orbit, before the Skylab cookouts, before the whole thing came crashing down, the two cross spiders were selected as one of nineteen Skylab Student Projects chosen by NASA scientists in 1972 from a pool of four thousand student proposals. Only a handful of girls made it to Huntsville, as you might imagine, but one of them was a Massachusetts high school student named Judy Miles. Her research question: Could a spider spin a web in microgravity? The NASA guys thought that was pretty interesting and so Judy got to work on her plans.
We’ve all seen spiders weave on earth. We’ve all seen Charlotte’s Web. There’s a lot of dropping down a cast line of silk, Mission Impossible style. That kind of fall depends on gravity. Adjusting wouldn’t be easy.
Before they rocketed up into space, Arabella and Anita each enjoyed a fat housefly to fortify them for the journey. Then they were crammed into individual capsules with teeny tiny water sponges for hydration and another dead fly to-go. Back on earth, a control spider, who never gets a name in any of the reports, happily spun a perfect web in the faux window frame identical to the one the astronauts took up to Skylab.
Once on the space station, Arabella and Anita refused to crawl out of their opened capsules. Microgravity, it turned out, was not their thing. They weren’t feeling it. They hid out behind their drying sponges like introverts behind a potted palm in the conference lobby, feeling vaguely hungover from the night before. On day five, astronaut and scientist Owen Garriott shook the open capsule until poor Arabella came floating out; he described her behavior as eight-legged “swimming,” and she flailed around as if she’d had too much to drink until she hit the screen at the top of the frame and clung on. Eventually, Arabella made a web, and it was good effort, with all the parts it was supposed to have, but it looked kind of shabby. Shaken from her own capsule, Anita followed suit. However, Judy and the NASA scientists had made errors in their planning—they hadn’t packed anything for the spiders to trap and eat once they were in space. Seeing that the spiders were failing to spin a new web each evening, as orb weavers on Earth do, Garriott asked for approval of a new protocol: could he offer the spiders some rare filet mignon and see if that would sustain them?
I don’t know whether Arabella and Anita ate their steaks—I rather doubt it—but when I picture the moment, I anthropomorphize the living hell out of it, picture-book style. Our many-legged ladies sit at a tiny, white-clothed table, enjoying the view of the ever-expanding galaxy out a round window. Their plump abdomens and hard-working spinnerets discreetly tucked into tiny chairs, linen napkins protecting their pearly thoraxes from spills. Four legs under the chair, one holding a glinting knife, another a fork with a bit of steak at the tip, a seventh grasping a wee goblet of wine, and still a leg to spare, reaching across the table in sisterhood, clasping hands.
You can see them, right?
In my imagination, I want Arabella and Anita to be friends. I want them to confide in one another. Is it lonely up in space? I want them to gossip about the astronauts. How uncivilized without their wives around to make them behave! How boorish! Why, really, are men like this?! I want them to take comfort in the good company so far away from the comfort of home. I want their story to be a good one.
Since the horse lady, there have been strangers in check-out lines, on airplanes, after readings. Sometimes there’s small talk, but more often I hear intimate or painful or surprising things right away. Once, on my way into a campus building to teach a class, a young man I’d never met who was hanging around outside the doors stopped me in my tracks, and after hello, the first words out of his mouth were to ask my opinion about his relationship with his girlfriend. She’d forgotten their anniversary. Did this mean she didn’t love him? What should he do? Should he give her the necklace he’d gotten for her or take it back to the store? This was unusual because there’s not always a direct question. Usually, my only role is to listen and something I’ve tried to learn in life is that I don’t have to fix every problem. I love the phrase “holding space”—and that’s typically what the tellers need—space and another human heart to hold what they’re holding, to share the weight of a hard thing. But this young man had a direct question. Did her forgetting mean she didn’t love him?
“Well,” I said, “is it possible she’s busy with school and she just. . . forgot?”
The young man smiled, pulling a jewelry box from his pocket and stroking it with his thumb. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” And that was that.
Once, at a cocktail party at a literary conference, an older woman approached me with her chardonnay and told me her husband was having an affair. When my own daughter was a baby, a little girl on a Florida dock lay her towel next to mine and let me know that she’d never met her real father. On a job visit, soon after my first memoir was published, the chair of the search committee picked me up from the airport and we stopped at Panera for a quick dinner; over bread bowls, he told me his first child had died when he was only a toddler. Strep throat. I took the job and worked with this man for years afterward: he never mentioned the child again. Another colleague, also an older man, also in my first year on the job, caught me outside the building when he was on his smoke break—back when there were smoke breaks right outside doors and not in the humiliating parking lot smoker cages—and told me about his tour in Vietnam. He didn’t offer a lot of details, but he wanted me to know that a foundational trauma had preceded his own entry into academia. That was the gist. Years later, when I mentioned his service to another colleague, she didn’t know about it. It seemed nobody did. Had I made it up? I did some googling: I had not.
Gender, age, race, geography, situation: there is no pattern I can discern among the tellers.
Cross spiders, like Arabella and Anita, are orb weavers, the spiders who build the spiral wheel-shaped webs we all think of first when we think “spider web.” They’re the quintessential web weavers. Charlotte of Charlotte’s Web? Orb-weaving barn spider.
Imagine you are such a spider, and as such, you carry the blueprint for the web you need to weave every day to survive in your very DNA. You are architect, engineer, building supply store, and construction worker all in one. You are accustomed to certain conditions to do your work—hydration and gravity chief among them—but now you are in a box, in space, with no water. Honestly, you just want to curl up and die, but the giant humans in the funny suits are insistent.
Fine. So you do what you know to do first: drop a non-sticky center line. Every web needs a bridge. Since any kind of dropping depends on the pull of gravity, this is complicated on Skylab. A puff of air sneaks through a crack in the frame from a passing astronaut and now your web’s going to be at a crazy angle. Embarrassing, but fine. Okay. Nothing to be done about that. Make sure both ends are securely attached to the sides of the frame—do the humans expect you to believe this is a real window?—and move out to the middle of the middle. The idea here is to let your own weight pull the thread down a bit to make a kind of a V—but again, this is complicated in zero gravity. You drop your next line anyway. You don’t care much for the English alphabet, that was Charlotte’s gig, but you understand that what you should have after step two is a kind of a Y-shape with the midpoint of the Y at the absolute center of your web. The rest of the spiral builds out from there. Back and forth you scurry, more slowly than usual, laying down a pattern of radials as best you can. After the scaffolding is constructed, you find a safe corner where you can sit for a spell and change up the silk spool for your spinnerets. Next you’re going to need the sticky stuff. Silk manufacturing is such a balancing act. The thicker the silk, the stickier you can make it, but of course, the more visible the lines will be to a passing moth or horsefly. But today you’ve got a problem: you’ve seen nary a gnat up here on Skylab.
What are you going for? It’s impossible to know, and Jesus, the fucking web looks like shit. Cattywampus doesn’t even begin to describe. Good thing your mother’s not here to see this.
While writing a collection of short stories for my senior thesis, I met with one of my faculty advisors, a seventy-year-old Pope scholar with pale blue eyes, at his house on a hill overlooking the university. Admittedly these were the days when the borders between students and faculty were more malleable. He was a professor emeritus, kindly taking on thesis students even in his retirement, and marking up all my drafts meticulously with a needle-sharp #2 Ticonderoga despite being a third reader.
On the day we met at his house, I’d given him a story about a girl remembering sexual abuse, and he told me how, when he was a child, a stranger had grabbed him in the field behind his house where he liked to play—and then he had been “buggered.” He told me he’d never told anyone until that moment. I listened sympathetically, and later, I went home and looked up the word in the dictionary, just to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. What was more sad? The greater tragedy? That my teacher had been raped as a child or that he’d held onto that rapist’s secret for sixty years?
I say it everywhere I go because I believe it. We think secrets protect us, but they do just the opposite. Secrets cast shadows. Secrets make dark places where the hurt never heals. I sent my teacher Christmas cards with updates on my life and writing until he died. We never spoke of his assault again, but I wonder, did the telling set him free? Or, at least, a little more free?
Often, I’ve done nothing to solicit the confession, but there have been times when another’s telling has followed my own, a confidence for a confidence. I once gave a reading in which I shared an excerpt about my choice to have a second-semester abortion because my baby’s condition was “incompatible with life”—after which, feeling a little shaky with vulnerability, I signed some books and went to the bathroom to pee. When I came out of the stall, there was a woman waiting for me by the sinks. She was holding a balled-up paper towel and crying. “You did the right thing,” she blurted out. And then she told me of her own son, born with the same congenital heart defect: in her case, she’d had no warning. He was born blue, stayed blue, and died blue within a week of his birth despite all efforts to save him. As I once heard a pediatric surgeon say: “Only God can fix half a heart.”
“You did the right thing,” she said, again and again—as if this were a thing she could know. As if this were a thing I could hear and take in from a stranger in a public restroom.
It was October of 2019 and I felt like a spider trying to spin a web in zero gravity. I was smack in the middle of teaching an intensive, fifteen-credit seminar on storytelling and campus sexual violence, working with a small group of dedicated, angry, passionate students to build a conversation on our campus, make a podcast, get loud. The intensity and responsibility of this task felt physical, and there were days, as their teacher, when I couldn’t find a sturdy place to bind my guide thread or when I dropped it down, it flew in the wrong direction, unmoored, impossible to find a pattern. Why, in the over thirty years since I was raped on my college campus, had the rate of assault not diminished? Was anything working to make change? What was working against us? Our questions filled the white boards around our classroom, threads of possibility we were trying to hold together, an elaborate interdisciplinary crisis we were trying to solve.
Needing something different, I drove five hours of two-lane highways, most of which turned out to be under construction, to arrive way later than planned at the hotel of the writing conference in Youngstown, Ohio where I was scheduled to teach and give a reading the next day. I knew no one. It was dark, unfamiliar, and a little creepy on the downtown streets outside the hotel, but the clerk pointed me towards a burger joint that would still be serving, and when I made my way there, lo, it was a sports bar and I and the waitress were the only women in the whole place. The drink special—I kid you not—was an entire bottle of non-descript but totally drinkable cab for $10 and that sweet angel of the night offered to pour me a glass while my burger cooked and then cork it back up and send it back to my room with me, all discreetly bagged up. “That’s what I would do,” she said, cocking a thumb over her shoulder where the bar teemed with loud bearded dudes drinking Bud Light and saying Dude on loop. Dude. “Bless you,” I said, accepting a glass filled to the rim like a Coke, and I absolutely meant it.
When the burger was ready, the waitress corked up my wine, as promised, packed it all into a paper bag, folded over the top with a neat crease, said, “I put some extra ketchup in there for you,” smiled, and walked back to the bar.
That was it. She didn’t tell me anything about her life. Not a whisper.
During my Skylab obsession, I got stuck on a photograph of Judy Miles, the Massachusetts girl behind the space spiders. In the photo, Judy is holding up a frame with what I assume to be a live spider at the center of a beautifully spun orb. Is this the control spider? The caption tells us that Judy is at the l Space Flight Center in Hunstville, pitching her experiment—“Web Formation in Zero Gravity”—to a Mr. Keith Demorest (who has a handkerchief in his breast pocket and a cigarette in his hand). In front of Keith is one of those big, amber glass ashtrays that were everywhere in the seventies. Also on the table, a rectangular tape recorder, the kind with a handle and space for a regular-sized cassette tape. I can hear the ker-thunk of the big buttons and the whir of the gears in my mind’s ear. There are no women in the photograph. It’s just Judy surrounded by men with receding hairlines in suits—seven that I can see in frame, all looking at her with a range of expression between disinterest and amusement, all of them whiter than white. Judy herself is pale and she looks appropriately uncomfortable. I was going to say “terrified,” but that’s not right. She doesn’t look happy or excited, but she’s there in a classy shift dress shot through with some playful stripes and dots, and she’s getting the job done. She’s protecting herself with her face, and she’s also making sure her spiders go to space. While she can’t know this from where she sits in 1972, folks on Earth are going to be talking about Judy’s spiders for a long time. From nearly fifty years in the future, I hope Judy felt safe in that male space. I hope Judy was safe.
At the conference the next day, at lunch, I sat with a group of women who, having come from a reading on gender-based violence and my own workshop on writing difficult experiences, shared their stories of sexual assault: girls touched by their fathers at bedtime, former prostitutes raped and threatened by Johns, college students drugged at parties and dragged into bunkbeds—survivors, advocates, and teachers. Every woman to the last had learned how unsafe we could be in the rough hands of other humans, and here we were, some of us having known each other for under two hours, sitting around a cafeteria table under a big window, eating salads and sandwiches—What are these crunchy things? They’re so good!—and feeling safe enough to make a space where our stories could push through the thorny brambles and take a few tentative steps out of the dark woods of traumatic memory. This was not a psychology conference, not an organized meeting to address sexual trauma—this was a writing conference in the Midwest.
We think secrets protect us—from judgement? shame? censure?—but I have never met a secret that did anyone a real service. I’m sure there are exceptions involving exposed spies in enemy lands, but for the average human, secrets feed shame, and Shame comes with her dripping bucket and paints the windows black, blocking the light and creating a screen for the perpetrators to hurt again—and again and again.
Our stories are power.
A couple months into the first wave of the Covid pandemic here in the Midwest, I called our local women’s shelter to offer a reference for a student, but before I hung up, I asked a few questions of my own. Were calls up or down? Way down. Were residents up or down? Also way down—but the shelter director didn’t attribute this fall in reports to a parallel drop in incidents. Years of working at a women’s shelter in Indiana hadn’t taught him to believe that the forced family togetherness of shutdown had fostered some kind of goodwill in erstwhile batterers and abusers. No. The theory was that women and children were trapped. Without easy access to other people—at school or work, or out shopping or eating or playing—physical evidence of abuse could be more easily hidden. There was no one for victims to tell, and even if they did find a way to call, the specter of the virus made group shelters extra scary. It came down to facing the devil they knew or the devil they didn’t—and most of the women stayed home.
We’re not a species that fares well in isolation. We’re also not a species that behaves well when we believe no one can see us.
The other day, I heard an interview with a cognitive scientist on the radio, and he was saying that rather than doing enormous crossword puzzles every day to stay sharp, we need to be caring for our brains by decreasing stress and increasing social interactions. Of course, social interactions don’t need to be in person. Different connections work for different people.
For example, I maintain a single social media account. I enjoy occasional interactions, but unless I’m corresponding with a human I actually know, I’m not convinced these interactions are feeding my need for other people. This could be the platform, but more likely, it’s the way I use the platform. I can forget about it for days at a time, and when I stop doing that—the forgetting—I’ll delete the account. Once upon a time, I’d go there to learn about work I needed to read, stay current with other writers, especially in nonfiction, and get my own writing out to readers. Sure, I like a good animal video as much as the next person. Possibly a smidge more. I’m a fool for baby sloth or a puppy hopping like a bunny. And I grieve lost dogs the world over. Last week, I asked about high school literary magazines—and editors and teachers from across the country showed up with resources. But whenever I find myself checking my phone to see how many people like me after I’ve said something funny, or harder yet, after I’ve done something vulnerable? I try to understand that I’m looking for something on that day that a social media account will never deliver in any kind of real and sustaining way. I try to pay attention to those moments. Social media is a tool and I want to use it appropriately. For me.
I do have one real and true friend who sustained me during one of the most devastating and lonely times in my life. I have never met this friend in person—we’ve never even talked on the phone; all our correspondence has been written, mostly in email, but sometimes on paper in packages and cards mailed from halfway around the world. I met Meagan—a.k.a., “my Australian friend”—on a listserve for women who were trying to get pregnant after losing a baby. Meagan’s premature son had died as an infant and mine—whom we let go at nineteen and a half weeks gestation—had only half a heart.
In our decisions to try to get pregnant again, Meagan and I both had a lot to fear. We were obsessive and single-minded. We were grieving, but we also needed to talk in meticulous detail about vaginal mucus and temperature charts and chorionic villus sampling. It all started because she and I both had short luteal phases and we began sharing ideas we’d gotten from our doctors on how to maintain a pregnancy. The crazy talk on the listserve scared us, so after we found each other, we left the list and became each other’s support. We told each other things our husbands were too tired or too man to understand, no matter how hard they tried. We needed another human being who had been near enough to the place we had inhabited to hear us without needing a lot of explanation. At exactly the time we found each other, we needed each other.
During the most intense phase of our relationship, when we were both pregnant with sons—who are now alive, well, and fifteen-years old—we wrote to each other nearly every day. Now, we check in once a year or so: our baby boys are taller than we are, her then-husband is dead, and she has remarried. Time passes, the planet spins, and sometimes—maybe even often—someone comes into your life just when you need them, whether that need lasts a lifetime or just a few minutes.
My Australian friend has told me things, big things, things I will forever hold in confidence—but that life-and-death intimacy is, after all, the whole reason we came together.
Someday, maybe when we’re very very old, we will meet for the first time. On a beach somewhere with a basket of treats and a bottle of wine, we’ll make quick business of talking through the tragedies that brought us together in the first years of the century and spend the tipsy part of our evening, as the sun sets over the water, lying on our softening bellies on the raggedy quilt I’ll remember to bring, kicking our heels in the air like schoolgirls, and dreaming things we still want to make—books, sculptures, cakes, the memory of drinking a bottle of wine on a beach with an old friend you’ve only just met.
I tell my writing students that we mustn’t be afraid to make it weird. Lean into the weirdest things your mind wants to weave, I implore. You can always gobble up that part of the web later and begin again, but usually? The weird will be where you’ll find the most wonderful surprises. Don’t let the playground bullies into your writing brain. This is your house now.
Today, I want to resurrect two orb-weaving spiders who died for science and set them loose from history to spin in full earthly gravity. Even female orb weavers down here live for only a year. In fall, as the evening temperatures grow colder, she lays a clutch of eggs, tucks her hundreds of unborn babes into a thick silken blanket, and with the first frost, she dies. The little orb weavers hatch from their eggs looking exactly like their mom, but tiny, and then, just like in that final scene from Charlotte’s Web, the spiderlings spin a strand of silk that lifts them into the wind and they go ballooning away. Spiderlings ballooning. Linguistic delight—but of the variety that squeezes the heart, no? There’s no reason to stay. Mom is already dead and gone. It’s as if they’re hatched college-aged. It hardly seems fair.
What does is say about me that I want Arabella and Anita to have lived and died well? What, for the love of God, am I after? I’m embarrassed to say the answer to that question out loud: I want, for them, a species of happily ever after. And for my children and my mom and my friends and my friends’ children and my sisters and brothers and my sweet husband and our dogs, one after the next. I’ve seen enough in this life to know how each story ends.
In the penultimate chapter, before Templeton the rat takes her egg sac in his mouth and carries it gently to Wilbur’s crate to travel back to the farm without Charlotte, Wilbur asks Charlotte why she worked so hard to save him from slaughter, why she bothered writing all those words for him—and the answer was simple: “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”
Honestly, I’ve never met a web metaphor that could stand up to all I wanted to give it to hold—despite the fact that spider silk has a greater tensile strength than steel. We always want web metaphors to be about patterns, nature’s perfect design, interconnectivity—but a spider web is a literal death trap, no? Its sole function is to ensnare hapless passerby, the juicier the better.
But while you’re dispensing sympathy, consider the poor orb weaver herself. Every evening, she has to eat the whole web, recycle the proteins, and get to weaving the next day’s web—an endless cycle of redecorating, food prep, and cleaning.
So, yeah, I want Anita and Arabella’s story to end happily. And I want the image of their space-woven webs, as wobbly as they may have been, to bring it all together. Perfection is a detriment, not a requirement. But, mercy, there’s a lot of ugliness here, too.
At the fancy dinner on the first night of the conference, there was plenty of food and everything was more sparkling (candles in tiny glass boxes!) and lovelier than we had any reason to expect from a small writing conference in Ohio, but there we were, beginning our meal together as near strangers, seated elbow to elbow, the linen tablecloth hanging into our laps and confusing itself with our napkins, all of us as different as we could be. I was getting right down to it with E, a conference goer I had exchanged phone numbers with earlier, and her friend, D. As we talked and talked, I didn’t think, Look at us, we three women! As different as we can be, getting right down to it!—because I was simply there. Fully present. With these wonderful human beings I had never seen before that weekend and wouldn’t see again when the weekend was over. Nobody paused to check a fact or pull up a post on our phones. In fact, we made it through the entire meal unmediated by electronics. We asked each other questions, questions without answers, questions from our deepest curiosity, not the kind that can be confirmed or denied with an internet search—and we leaned in to hear the answers.
We talked about wanting children and not. We talked about sex—too much, not enough, the shifting nature of desire. We talked about husbands and wives and divorces. After D’s divorce, she was living in Baltimore, but she began to get sick, a dizziness that wouldn’t let up. She needed to come home to Ohio and be near her family, care for her mother, plant herself back in her love base. In time, back at home, D’s equilibrium came back to her—and only she knew why. We talked about doctors who never listen. We talked a lot about bodies and about love—how ours had surprised us or saved us or changed.
Jack Lousma, the pilot on Skylab 3, produced televised updates about life and work on Skylab and admitted he was jealous of Arabella and Anita—who were the responsibility of Owen Garriott, the scientist on board. In his travel log, printed in Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, Lousma wrote that everyone sent up a lot of questions about the health and activities of the spiders: “It really disappointed me a little bit that on the ground the general public got more insight into what was happening with Arabella than what we were doing.” I read this and laugh out loud. Lousma also tried to pee upside-down on Skylab: it didn’t work. He peed into his own eye. Humans will be humans, even in the most extraordinary of circumstances. After Lousma was told at breakfast that Arabella had completed her web, he replied “well that’s good, I like to see a spider doing something at least once in a while.”
Skylab 3 returned safely to earth on September 25, 1973, after fifty-nine days in space. I never found any information about whether the spiders ate the bits of filet mignon in lieu of the forgotten flies, but Anita died on Skylab and Arabella died on the way back home.
You can visit Arabella’s body at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville if you want. She’s white as a ghost.
At the dinner, we talked about teenagers—having been teenagers, raising teenagers, the hope we had in them. We were unanimous in our decision to never again be teenagers ourselves, as if that option were being offered to us. As a teenager, I was certain I was the most damaged and cast out wretch—then, or in the history of the world. I used to think about how no one loved me best of all, above all others. If I were to disappear in a poof of hormones and Aqua Net, sure, my mother would miss me, I figured, but she’d get over it. She had other loves. She’d move on. D and E had felt just the same way.
“Okay,” E said, “So what age then? What age would you go back to if you could?”
I say twenty-nine. I had met my not-yet husband, so I knew love, the kind that holds you up instead of pushing you down, but we were still living the grad school life, I was just finishing my first book, and the very first dog I’d chosen to be my companion on this planet—my soul-sister with a tail, sweet Tango (like the dance, I used to say)—was still alive. She and I lived together and alone in a big Tuscaloosa house with scratched wood floors and a deep covered porch with a ceiling painted a pale blue to fool the spiders into thinking it was the sky so they wouldn’t spin webs there. I suppose there was a lot to worry about—like the whole future, this business of establishing a career and building a life—but I don’t remember feeling worried. I was in love and throwing pots and writing a book and I had the constant company of a good hound.
E said thirty-one, which for her was not long ago, and D said thirty. Now what’s that all about? That three-year cluster of joy right around thirty? Our brains fully formed, our bodies still doing everything we told them to do—and tingling to do more.
I drained the last, tiny, warm puddle of gin from my glass and picked up the bamboo skewer with my thumb and forefinger, anticipating the funky botanical twang of the olive between my teeth. A bleu-cheese stuffed olive that had been bathing in juniper goodness was pretty much all I needed to locate perfect happiness in this moment. I watched my new friends leaning towards each other, touching knees, and the depth of our sudden intimacy felt like a superpower.
Arabella and Anita gave their short lives to science, but the experiment had been a success: indeed, spiders could adapt to microgravity and get the job done. When the web was taken back to Earth for analysis, Miss Miles observed that Arabella’s silken threads were uneven—sometimes too thick, sometimes barely holding together—but all and all, they were good webs.
We can adjust to almost anything.
Maybe this is the only true thing: Arabella did her best—and then she died.
As an essayist, I’m a maker of patterns, and maybe that’s why I’m stuck on spiders and the webs they weave, here and in space, spinning out the radials, and then, the orb-weaving ones anyway, attaching them with spiraling silk in perfect concentric circles. How mind-blowing the way connections beget connections in surprising and world-altering ways. In my own life, when I was in my second year of graduate school, I was tasked with picking up the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly at the Birmingham Airport, and of course, I was as nice to her as I could possibly be. But here’s the thing: she went back to Illinois and my not-yet-husband Mark, whom I hadn’t even met yet, whom I didn’t even know was breathing air on this planet, showed up during Brigit’s office hours to ask for a letter of recommendation. He was applying to graduate school. And perhaps because I was nice to her, because I helped to make her feel good and happy while she was with us in Tuscaloosa for her reading, she said to my very young not-yet husband: “What about Alabama?” She convinced him to apply to a school he hadn’t even been considering and here we are twenty-five years later, happily married with a couple of teenagers. Both of us still writing. Because I made sure a visiting poet had tampons and snacks in her hotel room and because that poet was the kind of person who valued kindness. Because of the web of human connection. Because of poetry.
“It’s a crazy world,” I say out loud from my writing chair, quoting Raising Arizona.
“Someone oughta sell tickets,” Mark says predictably from the other side of the room.
Skylab did not come down for the last time in Connecticut on a Saturday night, but you can bet we were there on our blankets, waiting and wondering, with our steaks and beers, drawing pads and firefly jars, gazing up towards the stars and imagining something so much bigger than Phil’s sloping lawn. I don’t remember who the oldest person there was at our parties, a dad of a dad, I think. But the youngest was my baby sister, the first child in my own dad’s new family with his new not-yet wife, a woman who’d been my grandmother’s homecare nurse when she was dying in 1975 and who gave birth to my sister in 1976. I wasn’t thinking about this then, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that my stepmother served a central role in comforting my dad, an only child, in his grief. I was six when my Grammy Sarah died. Her funeral is one of my earliest memories, and what I remember is panic. When the men started tossing shovelfuls of dirt on the coffin lid, the smack of soil on wood, a kind of knocking. Get her out, I screamed, get her out get her out get her out. I don’t know whether the screaming was on the inside or outside of my young head.
We look up, we look down. We are always looking looking looking. What are we hoping to see? What do we want to bury? What do we want to exhume?
What, in the end, are we trying to save of our lives?
Skylab—unmanned and despidered—crashed down in Western Australia on July 11, 1979, spraying debris for about ninety miles across a remote stretch of outback. It was a Wednesday. Hump day in the outback and the sky was falling. There were a few farmers who got quite the scare when Skylab re-entered, emitting a series of sonic booms that shook the sky. A NASA scientist remarked that they were a bit surprised by how long Skylab took to break up. The station was even tougher than they thought. In a tv interview, one scientist laughed and said, “We build ‘em good”—confident until, and right through, Skylab’s fiery demise.
No one was hurt. From Connecticut, we didn’t see a thing.
An outback crash down had never been the plan for Skylab. Launching in May 1973, almost fifty years before I landed myself in Muncie with my first case of Covid and a fever-fueled obsession with orb-weaving space spiders, Skylab hosted four missions in nine months. By February 1974, NASA had sent four crews of astronauts up to Skylab and was planning a fifth. In fact, the last Apollo crew to visit the space station even left a welcome pack for the anticipated next arrivals, and then, as they were departing for Earth, Apollo used its thrusters to give Skylab a little boost. At this higher level of orbit, NASA believed Skylab would be able to keep circling for another nine years. At least. The scientists figured this would give them plenty of time to get another shuttle up there, to give it the next bump of energy it would need to keep going. The idea, in space and in life, is to move faster than the atmospheric drag.
Always and everywhere, we are falling.
Gravity. Gravitas. Both from the Latin meaning “weight” or “heaviness,” but that’s not really right. Disappointingly, it’s unlikely Newton was actually konked by an apple with momentum sufficient to knock the idea of gravity into his head. More likely, Newton saw an apple fall while home from college avoiding an outbreak of bubonic plague. He had the wherewithal to wonder why it fell straight down rather than sideways or even up—which led him to his chalkboard to concoct, over decades, not only a mathematical formula for the law of universal gravitation, but also the three laws of motion we all memorized in high school physics—an object in motion remains in motion and whatnot. Nevertheless, the simple idea I’ve held in my mind since those early apple days is that gravity is this powerful force that pulls everything and everybody towards the center of the earth as if there is a giant magnet in Earth’s core and we are all wearing steel shoes. And, honestly, I should have thought about gravity a little harder. When I was an undergraduate, I took a two-semester science course in which we kicked it all off with theories of how the universe began. As one does. But it apparently wasn’t enough to knock any new ideas into my head.
In my brain, gravity has always been this big pull. But recently I attended a talk on black holes with Janna Levin. Early in the talk, Dr. Levin walked out behind the lectern in her black dress and black tights and wedge-heeled shoes and started talking about gravity because here was this foundational concept that she knew from years of telling people about all things space-time continuum was likely something most of us misunderstood from the get-go.
“Gravity is weightlessness,” Dr. Levin said, and I felt as if I were one of an entire pack of expectant shepherds, all cocking our heads ten degrees to the right, ears perked, trying to mesh this idea—“gravity is weightlessness”—with this idea we’d all been carrying around about gravity as this giant force pulling us all toward the center of the earth. “If I throw something, it’s not going to go in a straight line. It’s going to curve.”
“Gravity is weightlessness,” Levin said, noting that if this was the only concept we managed to take away from her talk, she would feel satisfied. (I think it’s likely it is indeed the only concept I managed to take away from her talk.)
“Gravity is weak.” Levin flopped her arm around loosely, demonstrating gravity’s weakness. Nothing in the ease with which she moved her arm provided evidence of some great force pulling her down towards the earth.
“Gravity is falling.” Gravity is falling. Not being pulled, but falling.
At this point in Dr. Levin’s demonstration, she strode over to the lectern, snatched something off the surface and tossed it through the air over the gleaming wooden stage. There was a flash, a sparkle, something falling in a curve towards the stage and then tinging onto the wood. A pen. She laughed. “I didn’t plan that,” she said. “It was just there.”
Things stop us from falling—our chairs or the ground, our nice soft beds or a lethal rock cliff. Levin asked us to engage in a thought experiment. Black holes, she told us, are nothing—and thus, just about the most perfect mind canvas for thought experiments. So imagine, if you dare, a whole universe of nothing. Now, Levin explained, in this place, we would move in a straight line because there would be no other molecules to exert their pull. If we threw something in this nothingness, our trajectile would travel in a perfectly straight line. No other molecules to pull it off course. No planets, no moons, no asteroids. Nada.
Nothingness. It’s a hard place to find.
Here is what I’m trying to say: I thought I understood enough about gravity to understand why it was hard for the girls to spin their webs on Skylab, and later, why Skylab fell. But now I’m pretty sure I don’t understand anything.
“What you feel,” Dr. Levin told the crowd that night, “is not gravity but rather the atoms in the mattress pushing against your atoms. If only the bed would get out of your way, then the floor, and all the lower floors, you would fall, and falling is the purest uninterrupted experience of gravity. Only in the fight against gravity do you feel its pull, an inertia, a resistance, a heaviness. Give in to gravity and the feeling of a force disappears.” Give in to gravity and the feeling of a force disappears. Dressed all in black on that blond wood stage, Levin was incandescent, always in motion, as if with the force of her mind she’d given herself over to gravity and walked the stage with a lightness few of us ever experience.
This is not true, of course. I’m just trying so hard to hold these things in my mind. And I was grateful to be in Levin’s orbit, as we say so casually, even if only for an evening.
Levin reminds us: “Once the launched spacecraft get where they need to be, the engines are turned off and they can fall forever in orbit around the Sun or, more commonly, the Earth. . . Gravitation is curved spacetime.” But in the case of Skylab, the 1970s NASA scientists underestimated our sun. In the late seventies, the sun sent out more solar energy than the projections had, well, projected.
All those hyper, jiggling, fast-moving solar molecules pulled Skylab down like a pack of middle school kids bringing down the star running back in his sprint towards the endzone.
Skylab had no thrusters to save itself. The scientists watched Skylab droop, and they made plans to send up a shuttle on a rescue mission, to give Skylab a boost, but when it became clear they were too late to save Skylab, NASA sent a final set of commands to the doomed space station, aiming reentry for a lonely bit of ocean south of Cape Town, South Africa. (Who agreed to that? I wonder.) But NASA screwed that up, too, because Skylab hung together much longer than they predicted, finally surrendering when it rained down cosmic debris on the fields and small towns of Western Australia.
Before the crash, a British newscaster reassured the public that the chance of anything substantial hitting anyone was quite remote, but then he added, seemingly unscripted, as if he couldn’t help himself: “But it will fall somewhere, because what goes up, must come down.”
I want an ending that’s not everything crashes or falls apart or dies. Although I know that’s true. Eventually. Still, I want an ending that glues us back together, an ending that ties together orbiting space stations, surprise lifelong love, the engineering strategies of orb-weaving spiders, the exhilarating uncertainty of the landing, strangers at a party, and the brilliant illumination of our darkest corners into an essay that, for once in my damn life, ends in an answer.
Yes: telling does set us free. Yes: love.
What if Rilke was wrong? What if we needn’t learn to love the questions themselves?
Stories! Love! I insist. But I keep snarling up the silk. I’m a sticky mess.
What do I want most? Easy. I want my children to be safe from everything. I want my children to know the power of their own stories and feel—always, without ever having to suffer the wound of betrayal—a love that holds them aloft.
I really believewe’re connected by invisible silk in a cosmic way. Have you ever met someone for the first time and had the feeling you know them, like really know them? Other than standing at the top of a mountain, this feeling is the closest I get to understanding God. A soul web of humanity.
Everything I write ends with love because love is love is love is love. And yet. And yet: Everything and everyone we love will die. It’s a horrible thing to contemplate. Maybe this is the function of the more fleeting of our human connections.
Once, coming up on the high-rise elevator from dinner in the hotel restaurant with a pair of drunk women, I struck up a conversation about female bodies and male gazes as my new friends tipped in their heels, hanging onto the metal rail for balance, the gist of which was Hell yeah we get to be different shapes and sizes and wear whatever the flip we want. My family stood silent and wide-eyed when I waved goodbye at their floor and one of the women paused, turned unsteadily, and said clearly, “I love you.”
I mean, she didn’t. I know that. Maybe, in the morning, she didn’t even remember meeting me, but maybe she did. Maybe she woke up with this warm and wonderful feeling of having shared space in an elevator with a fellow strong, beautiful woman who really saw her complexly. Maybe she smiled and asked her friend if she remembered me, too. And maybe the friend did, and maybe these two real friends drank their coffee in a big bed with many wonderful pillows and remembered me together. And they never have to lose me. For them, I will never die. They will never think about my death. They will never even have to know.
Arabella and Anita are no longer together. Arabella is at the Space and Rocket Center in Hunstville, Alabama, and Anita’s body is displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Here is something I didn’t learn until recently: Arabella was the “prime spider.” Anita was back up. For over forty years, the two have been shipped around with space exhibitions to various museums, Arabella in a glass cylinder and Anita in what looks like a cough medicine bottle decorated with outline shadow letters bearing her name. The display is straight-up middle-school science fair project, but Anita’s eight legs are curled under her dark body as if she’s coiling energy to pounce. Her placard is upsettingly simplistic—she flew on Skylab with another spider named Arabella and was part of the “web formation experiment.”
I imagine children gathering around Anita’s floating body, squealing and pointing, pretending to be icked out and scared by the dead spider, and there’s no one there who remembers Skylab—not really. There’s no one there to tell them about that summer in 1979 when a dad in Connecticut caught Skylab fever and nailed a bedsheet target to the side of his house. No one there to describe how every Saturday we all gathered under Phil’s target as the long summer dusk fell into black and everything felt planetary and celestial—the spray of Phil’s lighter fluid onto the glowing briquettes, the bright-assed fireflies we chased into jars, the sparks flying from the fire like sprites, the orange tips of crackling blunts, all the stars we could see and the billions more we imagined—our collective Skylab brain lit up by community and possibility.
Isn’t that so cool, kids? No one thought they could do it, but Arabella and Anita spun webs, real webs, in space.
What a wonder.
Children tell us things—until we teach them to be quiet. Until we teach them about trouble and shame, about judgment and secrets. Until we teach them that the acceptable thing to do is shove it all down, to hold their stories inside where nobody can see them.
Three years after Skylab crashed down, thousands of miles away from the Connecticut lawn where my contribution to Phil’s time-capsule was a note to my future self that I folded into a paper balloon and tossed into the bucket, my wish came true. I got my own horse. Her name was Moona, and I rode her to school every day on a mountaintop in northeastern Washington state. By the time I wrapped my fingers in the coarse hairs of Moona’s mane, throwing my leg over her strong back and pulling myself up, I was safe. I was free.
Inside their bodies, orb-weaving spiders produce the raw materials to spin the threads to weave their wagon-wheel webs, building bridges and spanning the empty air, day after day, for as long as they live, weaving the inside out. “Spinneret,” I find myself whispering as I study Anita’s shadow on the thick bright glass of her transparent tomb.
Say it slowly. Spin-ner-et. Spinneret. Spinneret.
Back in 1979 Connecticut, the dads didn’t let Skylab’s actual decimation spoil our fun. Two months of summer remained, and the parties raged on. I don’t remember ever seeing the horse-drawing lady again, but now I think I understand what she saw in my face. At my other house, on an island where we lived most of the year with my mother, my red-faced dad hadn’t been there when a different someone took me into a bedroom to show me something. My dad wasn’t there the first time—or the next or the next or the next. Nobody was there to stop what happened, again and again, behind that other closed door. If I could keep this someone’ssecrets, I could keep anybody’s secrets—and I did. I never told. I was ensnared in a well-made web, paralyzed and silenced. Or maybe my two homes were like two black holes colliding. Or the two versions of me—the one who people told things to and the one who never told—were like two black holes colliding. Or maybe ten-year-old me was like the space explorer who ventures too close to the nothingness of the black hole, not even knowing I was in danger until my very atoms blasted apart. Until I, too, became part of the nothingness.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” King Lear tells his daughter Cordelia. “Speak again.”
And so I have tried. Will try. Again and again and again. Speak speak speak. Be loud, I tell my students. Say it clearly, I remind myself. Let the telling set you free.
When I was a child, I was assaulted and no one saw. There was no one there to protect me and I was so ashamed and so afraid. I couldn’t say a word to save myself. I lied to protect him—he was giving me a ride home or I went for a walk or I just spent the afternoon reading—thinking somehow I was also protecting myself when, in fact, I was only clearing the room for him to do it again.
I was a child. I didn’t feel like a child, but I was a child. It wasn’t my fault.
Say it clearly, Jill. Be as clear as the sky in the Connecticut countryside on a July night in 1979—the fireflies, the stars, and the moon, everything illuminated against the perfect black. As clear as a gin martini in a crystal glass shot through with candlelight and the reflections of new friends. As clear as the love we carry for our children, a glowing heartlight, tender to the touch. As clear as the tiny glass bottle holding Anita’s body in a forever bath of ethanol.
Look at her. Just look, will you? Here is a spider who traveled into space—space!—and spun a web in conditions no one thought she could overcome.
What a fucking miracle.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen; horse illustration courtesy of the author
