Читать книгу Fear Itself - Candida Lawrence - Страница 9

We trade in the Packard for a practical, larger Oldsmobile, light green. On army orders, we go to Los Alamos National Laboratory for two weeks. No married couple housing, sour people urging us east, ordering us, forms to fill out. We drive on to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I read The Grand Inquisitor to my husband when he is at the wheel. I want him to understand it. He says it is a good story, the Russian can really get fired up, can’t he? I say there’s more, don’t you see? More? Tell me. But I can’t. He should know without asking. There’s something annoyingly dimbulby about him, a flickering light, as though he’s saving electricity. Is he just a simple soul, as my father says, a good boy, as my mother insists, someone I am safe with? Why is it that when he puts on a Pfc uniform, he looks diminished, thinner, sickly? He is wearing his summer issue uniform, and the beige monotone seems to have leached blue from his eyes, turning them a feeble gray. At gas stations he comes alive as he checks the tires, the oil, the carburetor, while I wonder if I can hitch a ride back to the coast with any driver headed in that direction. If he were a different kind of man, not so “good,” I could tell him that and he would laugh. I could even leave him, say “Bye, husband. I want my story to begin.” I want to be Jo but feel like Beth.

Oak Ridge. Six weeks. A place of gates, guards in uniform, fences, barracks, flatness in all directions. Hot. Army ID gets us in. Special permission gets us out only once—to Knoxville for dinner. We are prisoners, and I feel that is just punishment. My husband mutely disappears into his “work.” He is not free to say what that is. I am well trained and do not pry.

We live in a dormitory barracks, makeshift quarters for married couples. We sleep in our private bed-room, eat in a cafeteria, wash clothes in a laundry tub in the basement, hang wet clothes on a communal line. My trousseau begins to disappear. Also just, it seems to me. Our allotment is insufficient, and I get a job at the government employment agency, an aluminum cube. The applicants have no addresses, no last names, are black, won’t look at me. The facilities and water fountains outside the door are labeled: White. Black. I feel my name fading, my identity stuck to paper that might blow away. Cretins, I think. All of us. Brotherhood? When was that? Who said it? Sister, I think, but do not murmur. I push her job assignment towards her, tell her to go to Building 3E tomorrow morning.

In the evening that never seems to grow dark, I follow him in the cafeteria line, say again and again “Did you know that…?” but can’t hear his answer in the heat, the noise of crashing dishes. The sweat from black brows drips into the plates offered to us, the food left untouched on sticky tables. I crave raw fruit and vegetables, lose weight, drink whites-only water, feel myself vanishing inside state power. Though our portion of Oak Ridge is small, it is clear that taxes have gone to produce a city—area, massive buildings, thousands of employees. No one has planted a garden, created a park, set up a newsstand. There is dusty, cracked clay, but no earth.

My next job is in the town’s only bank, a bungalow with low ceilings and a guard with a gun at the front door. Our boss is a thin man in his midthirties who hovers over his all-female staff. He darts into his small office, bends over papers on his desk, comes out again, drinks water from our bottled water dispenser, teases his “girls,” worries over bounced checks, comments on what we are wearing. We are all tellers and Monday through Thursday we do next to nothing. Friday is pay day and the cages are open from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. Our hands turn grimy with ink and dirt as we push money across the counter into black hands, white hands, seldom looking up, dripping with sweat. We eat our hamburgers and down our cokes while we pay and count and stack coins.

My co-workers wear one-piece bathing suits—black, pink, striped, often with a teasing ruffle around the hips. I am amazed at the bathing suits and refuse to retrieve my two-piece Hawaiian cotton number from the bottom of my suitcase. I wear a pink sundress with a white bolero day after day, sometimes still wet from a washing the night before. My boss wears Bermuda shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. His legs are puffy pink with fuzzy blond hair. All the flesh in the office, except mine, is white, or white blotched with heat rash. They comment on my tan, tease me, tell me I might look “nigger” if I don’t watch out.

But I’m forgetting the last employee, so to speak. A black woman slumps on the floor behind our row of teller cages. She is pregnant and very thin. Her bony legs and dusty feet stick out straight from a sack dress, greasy and wearing thin over the lump of baby. From a standing position, I can see only the top of her head, sunk into her chest. On my first morning, I ask for an introduction, but for answer I get smiles and shrugs. At lunchtime one of the women takes orders—hamburger, hamburger with onion, cheeseburger, coke, coke, etc. She shouts to the black woman, who is standing with her head still bowed: “Okay. Three hamburgers, one with onion, one cheeseburger, and four cokes. Got that? Want me to say it again?” She hands the woman a five-dollar bill and out the back door she scuttles. So I say, “Oh, you pay her to go get your lunch?” More smiles. When she returns, she receives the pennies from the change and slumps down against the wall again.

I am learning not to ask questions, to stifle reaction, to avert my eyes. I postpone until dinner with my husband when I pour it out over the trays of sizzled food. I say, “Do you know what we did today all morning—or they did—just because there was no work? They sang hymns, lots of them, all the verses. In their bathing suits. They were jiggling up and down and singing ‘Oh, Jesus Wants Me For a Sun … beam,’ the beam up high like this, and ‘Come, Come, Come to the Church in the Wildwood’ and ‘Onward Christian So-ol-diers, Marching As To War,’ and what could I do? I tried to sing a bit but it was just too damn weird to be in a bank, so hot, with her sitting against the wall, and the boss singing too, in this rotten, foul, hot, surely this is not The United States place. Don’t you think?”

“Well,” he says, “we won’t be here much longer. By the middle of October, I should be reassigned to Dayton, Ohio.”

Why Dayton, I could ask, but don’t. It will all become clear or it won’t. Though I am here now and will be going there then, I think, I am not, in this new life of mine, supposed to seek reasons for long car trips.