Mireille is aware that her eyes are shining and that she could cry in about three seconds if she let herself. But she shouldn’t cry. If you cry as an actor, you rob your audience of the chance to cry for you—that’s practically a law.
“My dad chose the name Mireille. He was French, so he pronounced it the proper Proven?al way. I mean, my mom speaks Russian and Japanese fluently, she’s amazing, but she’s super midwestern, so everything comes out a little flat. Anyway, she probably agreed to the name because there was a Russian space station called MIR. It was famously sort of a mess, so, you know, appropriate for me.”
“Aw,” says Clara.
“You’re not a mess,” says Olive.
These friends are giving Mireille what she wants, but she doesn’t want to be the person who wants what she wants, and so she goes on wanting inaccurately and still her eyes shine.
Last night Mireille had linked the whole Anne Frank story back to her mom being in space, and then done a hilarious impression of one of the videos her mother had shot in space for schoolchildren, demonstrating how to brush your teeth in microgravity, which led to a comically exaggerated imitation of what her mom sounded like when she spoke Russian with a midwestern accent, which naturally caused someone to say: “Wow, so you speak Russian?” which allowed Mireille to describe traveling with her mother to Moscow for a commemorative space thing, and how Mireille had lost her virginity at Star City, a story guaranteed to impress because while everyone had lost their virginity, who else could say they had done it with the son of a cosmonaut in a formerly secret facility a hundred yards from a statue of Laika, the first dog to orbit the Earth?
And she had felt wonderful last night, knowing that she was that person, that person who could tell that story.
The Earth has not even rotated once since that feeling and she has already lost it.
“But I love the name Meeps,” says Clara.
“Me too,” says Olive. “It’s so you.”
? ? ?
WHERE IS HER STORY? How can she get it back? Mireille remembers Nestor, who took her virginity (or, more honestly, managed to just catch the virginity she heaved at him). She remembers the pine and birch trees of Star City. How she looked up into the dark Russian night and thought that she too was going places.
Mireille has to go now and have her picture taken to commemorate her winning spa employee of the month, before starting her shift. She makes her way down the corridor to Human Resources. The hallway walls are lined with posters spouting motivational slogans and seasonally appropriate puns. Winter Is Almost Over, So Let’s Put a Spring in Our Step!
Mireille earned her award because she put together a personal aromatherapy kit for an ultra-VIP client, and the ultra VIP wrote a letter to the manager of the hotel to rave about Mireille’s skills and thoughtfulness, and said the oils had not only changed her life, they’d also cured her chronically ill wheaten terrier.
Mireille is made to stand against a cream wall and hold up her employee of the month certificate. She smiles, and says her name, and her department, and why she loves working at the hotel, and what she did to get her award. She does not say, “I accidentally cured a wheaten terrier’s pancreatitis with essential oil,” because you can’t make sarcastic jokes with people who tape up posters that read Let’s Put a Spring in Our Step! and she is not going to misjudge her audience twice in one day.
Once clear of Human Resources, Mireille folds her certificate up into a tiny square and takes the employee elevator up to the spa.
Mireille hasn’t told anyone about her mother’s news. It’s preposterous, pretty much. Her mother had done the thing where she explained using her special-formula kind voice, and then asked for Mireille to share her thoughts and reactions, and Mireille had said, “I think if it’s important to you, then you should do it.”
It is only coming to her now that what her mother was talking about was going to Mars. Mireille wonders what she could have possibly been telling herself for the past month that wasn’t “My mom is going to Mars.”
She also can’t remember what was so funny about blaming Anne Frank.
“It’s training,” her mother had said. “Just like before, let’s focus on the training, not the going.” Except she always did go. Going was always the point.
If her mother goes to Mars, then that will be the only story of Mireille’s life. It will wipe out everything. Mireille wants to stay with that thought a little, but promises herself she will return to it later, when she has more time to savor how awful it is. Mireille has to touch people now, and there is a chance that people might feel the awful things through her hands. So instead, she will do the thing where she spins it the other way, like her mother is always suggesting.
She will start working seriously as an actress in really good things before her mother goes to Mars, and then, when her mother does go, people will be incredibly interested in Mireille’s point of view on the whole deal. Mireille sees herself and her mother on talk shows, being interviewed together, posing for photographs. She sees herself becoming gracious and generous and funny and tender toward her mom and she is attracted to this version of herself and this self snaps open and catches the wind, just like it’s supposed to, just like the parachute that brought her mother’s Soyuz capsule safely to Earth when Mireille was six.
Mireille kneads and exfoliates and makes sympathetic noises and tells people to breathe and is genuinely nonjudgmental about back hair and psoriasis. She keeps spinning. She has become great, she is big, she is important. And she is carrying her mother, close, close to her. This is the story of a daughter who was inspired by the accomplishments of her mother, who was empowered by them enough to choose her own path, which shoots just as high and as far, as daringly, as riskily, as nobly in its own way. This is the story of the daughter, and not the mother. Not the mother shooting into the sky, then higher than sky, bungling her daughter’s name and neither blowing up nor ever—really—coming home.
SERGEI