by Laura Passin
When Sally Ride suited up for America, the NASA engineers asked her if 100 tampons was the correct number for one 32-year-old woman to spend one week in space. That is not the correct number, she said. I tell this to my students because they are teenage girls and they already know the world thinks they are a mystery. We know more about the surface of Jupiter. The engineers counted everything, limited even the souvenirs each astronaut could take because pound for pound, fuel was so precious. How many gallons of menstrual blood did they calculate for? What horror as they imagined a female body escaping the Earth? In class we are talking about Penelope, how she fooled the suitors for three years because they knew nothing of weaving, of women’s work. Didn’t they get suspicious? one girl asks. Once I told my dad I had PMS for six weeks straight and he believed me, replies another. Men don’t know anything. They hate Odysseus, these girls, they have him pegged as the villain. When I was in school they wheeled an ancient television into our classroom one day, spent eternities hooking every plug to every socket, and then we watched seven people die, live on TV. Sally Ride was scheduled for the next mission. She never flew again. My students don’t know about the Challenger explosion, they are living through different disasters. They are angrier than I knew how to be at 15. Why does it matter if Penelope is faithful when Odysseus sleeps with every woman he meets? they ask. I tell them it doesn’t matter to us but it matters to Ithaca. Ithaca isn’t fair. When Odysseus, salt-crusted and naked, flirts with Nausicaa, so young that she still plays catch, my girls talk about the grown men who follow them, the men who call after them, the men who scare them. I’m sorry this happens to you, I say, it happened to me too. Earth isn’t fair. Sally Ride knew the Challenger inside and out. She lived in that ship, further at sea than Odysseus could dream of. In the press conference before launch, they asked Do you ever cry on the job? When Penelope weeps, Homer says her mind moves elsewhere. No one knows what she knows.
Laura Passin is the author of Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe Press). She earned her PhD in English Literature at Northwestern and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Toast, Rolling Stone, Electric Literature, and Best New Poets. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net anthology. Laura lives in Denver with too many pets.