Читать книгу Fear Itself - Candida Lawrence - Страница 10

The army assignment is Monsanto Chemical Company, where I check in as assistant to the safety engineer and my husband disappears into rooms where I am not allowed. It is a beautiful, blustery fall, and we rent an un-insulated cabin beside Elm Lake, ten miles outside of Dayton.

In our dwelling, we learn about banking the woodstove at night, living with mice in our sweaters and cookie boxes, wearing long johns to bed, taking baths half-clothed. We discover chilblains and frostbite. We learn how to stay inside and be cozy, and become devoted observers of ice forming on tree branches, of icicles lengthening into translucent spears that grow from our porch roof. Our landlady warns us that we have to wait until the temperature has been five below for three weeks before we can safely skate on the lake. We buy skates and feel a curious satisfaction at bundling up, slinging our skates over a shoulder, then walking through the snow to the icy stone bench where we don our sliding shoes over three pairs of socks. There are snapping turtles under the ice, and I wonder if our kre-e-ek above them disturbs them in their winter sleep. Do they sleep? There is a swing with a seat set up on the bank and we can swing high and then whoop and let ourselves land any which way on the ice. We improve each weekend until the spring thaw.

On Monday mornings we bank the fire for our return, start the car for its ten-minute warm-up, put on our Monsanto Chemical Company IDs, then coats, mufflers, mittens. My husband seems to grow smaller and more flat as each olive-drab garment affixes itself. Some mornings he looks like a soldier paper doll.

In the entry room at 8:00 A.M., we remove our shoes and put on white overalls that obscure our semi-civilian bodies. White cloth booties enclose our feet. Each Monday morning a nurse pricks one of our fingers for a blood sample. On Fridays, on the way out, we wait for another blood sample to be taken. White count is thus monitored. My husband then vanishes until five o’clock, and I enter my work area, which houses all clerical workers and the safety engineer. We know we are working in a “hot” building and that the pursuit of a “clean” environment is the first priority of our boss. On the right-hand side of his desk is his Geiger counter, on the left, his in-out basket. He is seldom at his desk. He and his machine spend most of each day walking through the building, counting, recording, ticking. His findings are rendered into numbers and sober prose, which are deposited each day in my in-box. I type the reports in six copies (carbon paper) and return them to his in-box.

He is a silent man. We do not chat and when occasionally I ask for clarification of blood-count whiteness or “hot,” he blinks his watery eyes and suggests I ask my husband. Does he know that a postwar conscript is not going to open his top-secret mouth unless I bully and weep? Which I do, of course. But I remember only the feeling of victory, not the information. The facts presented seem to have no place to fit in, but like a good secretary (which I am reluctantly becoming) I file them in my mind under a new category—post–atomic bomb health.

In December, my white count falls and I am excused from work, ordered to stay home and to return for a finger prick in five days. My face blooms pimples and there are two boils on my back. My head aches and I am too tired to take advantage of my free time. I keep the fire going and sleep all day beneath additional blankets on loan from the landlady. She brings me hot soup and tells me Californians are simpletons who shouldn’t be allowed to leave their state until they’ve learned a few easy lessons about winter. I need more fat, a reserve to draw on. My husband is even less prepared, so thin and subject to colds, respiratory ailments. I look up at her from my bed—such rosy cheeks, abundant graying hair, clear green eyes, strong stocky legs clad in black wool trousers. This morning I heard her chopping wood, then stacking it on her porch. There is a husband, a truck driver often on the road, and one day I watched their reunion after a brief absence. She is taller than I am and weighs fifty pounds more, yet she ran to him and he picked her up in his arms and carried her to the porch where he slowly set her down and kissed her close and good. Then they disappeared inside their house and the lights did not go on at sunset. As she bends over me, I feel tears coming and close my eyes. I vow to apprentice myself to her if she will allow it, lest we, her California simpletons, die before spring. I don’t tell her about our “hot” building. I assume she wouldn’t understand, and those who do are not yet allowed to speak about it in public. More potatoes, butter, fresh brown bread, vegetables, she says. You are truly what you eat; she’s read that somewhere, and it is certainly true, or true enough.

At the end of my reading, dozing, eating week, my white count is up, my skin looks better, I’ve gained a few pounds and my headache has receded to a dull ache above my right eye. On Monday, my first day back at work, a female calibrator, who works inside the area off-limits for the office staff, spends the entire day in the office, unable to leave the vicinity of the john. She is having her period in such copious quantities that there is hushed discussion of insisting that my boss drive her to a hospital. She resists. He sets up a cot beside the restroom and goes out to purchase two large boxes of extra-thick Kotex. While he is gone, the telephone operator and I push close to her and learn, in whispers, that she’s been bleeding for ten days and, dammit, wishes her body would adjust to her new circumstances or she’ll lose her job. She says she always bleeds heavily, but not this much, she must be rundown or something. When she turns over to get more comfortable, I can see blood staining her white booties. This is a new experience, to be in an office with a bleeding woman, my boss sent out to bring in stanching supplies, to know that we will be discussing normal and abnormal menstruation with him as soon as he returns.

I know I am angry and that it has something to do with “hot,” lassitude, boils, pimples and headaches. We go back to our desks and await his return. He is a nice man, mild and courteous, but he is a wall around information we suddenly need. We are going to press against him, refuse to do our jobs until we get answers. What is the meaning of “hot,” why does it lower your white count, what is the source of the “radiation,” and why, if the war is over, are we still working with such materials? He stands beside his desk, his arms around a brown bag of Kotex. He is calm, unswervingly polite as we push closer, our hands darting forward for emphasis. “Hot” means radioactive, exposure produces lowered white count, the source he is not at liberty to reveal, and he hasn’t the faintest idea what Monsanto is researching or producing and wouldn’t be allowed to tell us even if he knew. At that moment, our patient groans and lurches towards the john. The telephone operator grabs the Kotex bag and holds the door open for her. I glance over at her switchboard and can see five red lights blinking, wires erupting from plug-ins, a headphone set lying over on its side.

Whatthehell. Why am I here? Can I leave? Can my husband?