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ОглавлениеAdvance Praise
“Only an experienced social worker with a heart for social justice could have written a thriller of this caliber. In a novel that challenges a radioactive core of secrecy, Dorothy Van Soest has deftly shaped a protagonist who balances integrity and idealism as she attempts to save lives and herself.”
— Carol Masters, You Can’t Do That! Marv Davidov, Non-Violent Revolutionary (2009), The Peace Terrorist (1994), Dear Descendent (2019).
“Some books entertain, some inform, some inspire. Nuclear Option does all three. This story weaves the lives of troubled, courageous, ordinary people who struggle to avenge and heal harms by challenging powerful corporate and government powers. Even more than most historical fiction, this is an exceptionally meaningful book for students, clubs, and study groups to discuss the timeless, universal question: why, what, and how are you willing to fight or die for?”
— Beth Brunton, Earth Care not Warfare
“Nuclear Option captures so well, especially in sleuth Sylvia Jensen, the brilliant and passionate peace and justice activists I have known over the years who are driven by heart and conscience to create the world we want to see. Kudos to Van Soest for conveying, in a bite-size and very personalized form that we can take in, the difficult and scary information about the nuclear threat we need in order to save the world.”
— Marybeth Gardam, Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom U.S. Section Committee Chair, Iowa Women for Peace co-founder, Iowa PSR
“Few writers are more deft at intertwining mystery with social issues of urgent concern than Dorothy Van Soest. Nuclear Option, her latest novel, reunites that unlikely duo, Sylvia Jensen and J.B. Harrell, as they investigate how a lethal past, both personal and national, detonates into the present. With results that are explosive!”
— Carol Mossman, Author, The Narrative Matrix, Politics and Narratives of Birth, Writing with a Vengeance
“This thrill-packed Sylvia Jensen mystery reminds us of the costs the world has paid and continues to pay for maintaining nuclear arsenals that threaten unimaginable horror. Dorothy Van Soest immerses us in the world of ordinary people who won’t go quietly into oblivion.”
— Charlie Cooper, Democracy and Justice Advocate, Baltimore, MD
“Nuclear Option shines a light on a little known history of when the U.S. government conducted nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands and exposed military troops to radiation for research on its effects on humans. Van Soest’s novel follows the inter-generational family of an Atomic Veteran whose outrage at the results of his direct exposure leads to their persistence to hold the government accountable. Helping to guide the activism of father and son is the anti-nuclear activist Sylvia Jensen, who has her own struggles related to her involvement in the antinuclear movement. Nuclear Option is a love story and a thriller in its own right. Anti-war activists will be intrigued with the struggles within the antinuclear movement to find right strategies and the challenging ethical decision the heroine is compelled to make. The novel made me sad and angry and it also gave me hope in the courage and creativity of people confronting a historic injustice and the lessons they learned. Enjoyable and thought provoking; highly recommended.”
— Dan Gilman, Past President, Seattle Veterans For Peace
“How do you reconcile memories of the distant past with the realities of the present? This intriguing question structures this story of Sylvia Jensen’s journey from active anti-nuclear protestor in the 1980s to reluctant participant in the politics of the 21st century. Like the afterlife of nuclear fallout, passions from long ago linger in Sylvia’s life and lead her to relive unresolved decisions and pathways. In this fascinating mixture of memoir, fiction, and history, author Dorothy Van Soest guides us through Sylvia’s haunting encounters with people and events that force both her and the reader to wonder if we can ever stop challenging the selves we constructed so long ago.”
— Dr. Louise Krasniewicz, University of Pennsylvania. Author, Nuclear Summer: The Clash of Communities at the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment
“Don’t start Nuclear Option unless you have sufficient time to read this absorbing and twisting mystery from the first page to the last! You will be pulled into an intricate plot that links the atomic tests of the 1950s and 60s, thousands of victims of those tests, and the inner workings of both antinuclear activists and the FBI. Dorothy Van Soest once again keeps you on the edge of your chair as you ride the curves and dangers of this stirring book”.
— Frederick L. Ahearn, Professor Emeritus and Former Dean, National Catholic School of Social Service, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC
“During the 1950s and ‘60s, thousands of US military personnel were deliberately exposed to ionizing radiation from nuclear bomb tests. For years the physical and emotional suffering of these Atomic Veterans remained hidden, due to government denial and veterans’ initial reluctance to speak about their experience. Dorothy Van Soest’s engaging novel Nuclear Option makes that experience real through the interwoven lives of an Atomic Veteran, his son, and a social worker activist. Their painful struggles mirror the stories of actual radiation survivors and their supporters. The heartbreak of radiation’s genetic impact and the survivors’ powerlessness to protect their children fuel the outrage that drives the novel’s action. Mobilizing against the massive force of the nuclear industry, some intriguing characters enter the story. Ominous developments threaten a tsunami. But as the novel surges to a dramatic finish, we are left with a glimmer of hope.”
— Priscilla Ellis, Ph.D. co-author, “Atomic Veterans and Their Families: Responses to Radiation Exposure”. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 60 (3), July 1990
“I was brought up short by how much I identified with the main character in Nuclear Option. Sleuth Sylvia Jensen’s tortuous inner tension is captured in a vivid action-packed story with atmospheric detail that plunges you right into the middle of her friendships, romance and protests. A must read!”
— Betsy Bell, Author, Open Borders: A Personal Story of Love, Loss, and Anti-war Activism
Nuclear Option
Nuclear Option
A Novel
Dorothy Van Soest
Copyright © 2020 by Dorothy Van Soest
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First Edition
Casebound ISBN: 978-1-62720-291-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-292-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62720-293.0
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Natalie Labib
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Apprentice House Press
Loyola University Maryland
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PROLOGUE
Journal of Norton Cramer
May 4, 1956
I woke up this morning thinking today was the day I would die.
It’s not that I’m afraid of death. We all have to go sometime. But I’d like to die someplace other than this godforsaken gray place with no trees, plants, or beaches. My buddies and me call it the Rock, like the inmates call Alcatraz, San Francisco’s island prison. It’s as bleak as that and more.
We’re stationed at a place called Enewetak Atoll, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii in the North Pacific. It’s about as far away from anything as you can get, which I guess is why the brass decided it’s an ideal place for nuclear experiments. The island is only two miles long, and pear-shaped, and it’s still the largest one in the Marshall Islands, a horseshoe-shaped coral reef of thirty small islands that surround a sheltered lagoon forty miles across.
Anyway, this morning, I lay in my bunk for a long time looking at a picture of Shirley and me. She’s so beautiful, and I’m just a skinny, pimple-faced kid. I wondered what she’d say if she could see me now, since boot camp pumped me up. I kissed her dimpled cheek and pressed her smiling face to my chest, my heart breaking all over again. Breaking up was the right decision for both of us, though. We were only eighteen years old then, twenty years old now. Too young to get married. Too young for me to die. Too young for her to be a widow.
I tucked the black-and-white photo back under my pillow and told myself I was overreacting. It was just my hangover talking. No one had ever said, or even suggested, that Operation Redwing would be my last day on earth. I told myself it was all in my head.
But it’s hard not to think that way, when we don’t even know why we’re stationed on this deserted island. After two weeks with no job to do but maintain the barracks, we couldn’t help but start to wonder why we were really sent here. I mean, who wouldn’t? And since we were all issued radiation badges to measure our level of exposure during today’s test, rumors ran rampant, despite all assurances that the exposure would be no more than getting an X-ray.
Master Sergeant Trayne’s voice—“This is it, men! Move! Outside and in formation now!”—got me jumping down from my bunk so fast my insides felt like they had rotted out. From all the gin I drank last night. We all drank too much, I wasn’t the only one trying not to think about what would happen today.
I stood outside in formation and checked my radiation badge one last time to make sure it was secured to my belt loop. My fingers were shaking.
“Eyes straight ahead. Arms at your side. Stand tall. Single file. Forward march.”
Our barracks are at the thin end of the island, which is only a few hundred yards across, so we had to march to the airstrip at the fat end, which is still only half a mile at its widest, though it counts for 90 percent of the island. My head pounded with each step.
“Backs to the center of the island.”
I turned and stood at attention facing the lagoon.
We’d been told the explosion would be one to two miles behind us, and if we faced the blast, our eyes could be permanently damaged, even if we closed them. We were also told there was nothing to worry about. I don’t know what kind of fools they think we are. I saw that the officers were wearing high-density goggles. How come we weren’t?
“H minus fifteen minutes.” A disembodied voice blasted through loudspeakers that had been set up along the water.
I crossed myself. I’m not even Catholic.
Master Sergeant Trayne walked along our rows, looking for any sign of an unshined shoe or a tarnished belt buckle. He stopped and glared at my friend Tom next to me. He flicked his fingers under Tom’s chin like he was chastising him for some great offense, but I think he just wanted to look good to the reporters on the nearby USS Mount McKinley, here to write about today’s test. But even though I thought it was all for show, the master sergeant’s cold, unfeeling eyes still sent a shiver up my spine.
“H minus ten minutes.”
I closed my fingers around the radiation badge at my waist.
“At ease. Relax.”
All around me were the sounds of shuffling feet, throats clearing, quiet conversations, strained laughter. I wasn’t the only one who was terrified. I scanned the landscape—nothing but perforated aluminum buildings and concrete slabs. All the island’s inhabitants were removed after World War II. The lush tropical foliage was leveled then, too. Now the only color on the island is the bluish-green water of the lagoon and our drab olive-green uniforms. And why were we brought here again?
“H minus seven minutes.”
I saw that the water tower had been tied down with steel cables. We’d been told that all structures deemed to be at risk would be secured. I mumbled under my breath to Tom, “Guess they don’t think we need to be tied down.”
“H minus five minutes.”
I felt Tom shaking next to me even though our bodies weren’t touching. I started humming a hymn from my childhood. It’s not that I was ever religious or anything. It just came to me. Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come? For His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches over me.
“Attention!” Master Sergeant Trayne paused. “You all know what attention means!”
“H minus three minutes.”
No one talked. No one coughed. No one moved.
“You are not to turn around until an announcement is made over the PA system at zero hour plus thirty seconds.”
The words to the hymn in my head got louder. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches over me.
“No one, repeat no one, will look directly at the fireball at zero hour.”
I held my breath. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
“H minus thirty seconds.”
For thou art with me . . . His eye is on the sparrow.
“Twenty seconds.”
I wanted to turn to Tom, grab his arm, but I didn’t dare. I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
“H minus ten seconds.”
“All right, men.” Master Sergeant Trayne’s voice was strained. “Arms raised and placed over your closed eyes.”
All I could hear was my own breathing, the words of the hymn in my head. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
“Five, four, three, two, one.”
ONE
2019
“Sylvia! Sylvia Jensen! Long time no see!”
Martin Lind still looks like a stereotype, albeit an aging one. No matter the season, even, like now, in early summer, he wears the same brown sport coat with patches on the elbows, now frayed around the edges, the same threadbare British ivy hat that he’s worn like a uniform for fifty-some years of his life. I wave once, tuck a stray strand of gray hair into the bun at the back of my head and scrunch down in the pew.
It’s not that I’m unhappy to see Martin. I like him, a lot, and have the utmost respect for him and what he’s doing. I just want to make sure that seeing him, as well as other activists here, doesn’t arouse in me a feeling that I should be doing more. Not that any of them can or want to make me feel that way. It’s my issue, not theirs, one grounded in an old childhood sense of not being enough that, in the past, pushed me to do too much and then left me feeling, always, that it still wasn’t enough. I don’t want to get sucked back into that pattern tonight. It’s an old and deeply rooted character defect I’ve worked hard to overcome. And now that my life is better than ever, more serene and accepting, I intend to keep it that way.
BERTHA PICKERING 1920–2018 is projected in bold black letters on a giant screen at the front of the sanctuary, and there’s a photo of Bertha smiling under the weight of her signature hat, its floppy brim covered with dozens of what she called her kick-ass buttons. She was in her nineties when the picture was taken but looks ten years younger than I do now at seventy-seven.
My iPhone pings, a text from my friend J. B. Harrell. I’m in town. On a story. Save me a seat. I put my purse on the bench next to me and respond to his text. Last row on the main floor, left side. My history with J. B. goes all the way back to 1972, when I was a thirty-year-old social worker on the reservation and he was a seven-year-old child in the white foster care system. I encountered him again when I was a sixty-three-year-old foster care supervisor in Monrow City and he was a forty-year-old investigative reporter. Our relationship was rocky at first, but we became close after working together to discover the truth about the death of an American Indian boy in one of my foster homes. Later we solved another murder, of a former student of mine in the Bronx who’d gone missing in 1968. So now we’re fast friends. I’m eager to see him tonight, as I always am.
People pour into the sanctuary—many I recognize, and some I knew very well in the past but haven’t seen in ages. The crowd already numbers several hundred, and more are still coming, filling the balconies, jockeying for places to sit, exchanging greetings and hugs. Their friendly, increasingly boisterous voices echo off the cavernous ceiling and spar with the chants filtering in through the double doors that have been propped open to let in the warm June breeze. Keep America safe! Keep America safe!
People outside, many dressed in American flag attire, have come to protest Dr. Darla Kelsey, tonight’s speaker. J. B. is probably in town to do a story about her for the New York Times. Or maybe he’s doing a story about Bertha. That would be nice.
I’ll never forget the day I met Bertha, thirty-nine years ago. She held something in her hand that looked like a hollowed-out metal ball. “You know what this is?” I shook my head. “It’s a cluster bomb. The Nectaral Corporation designs them.” She shoved it in my hand. I almost dropped it. “About six hundred and sixty of these bomblets . . . cute name, huh?. . . are shot out of large bomb containers. Imagine, almost seven hundred of these bomblets spinning out at warp speed all around us, little steel balls exploding from each one, indiscriminately killing, injuring.” She paused. I handed, almost threw, the cluster bomb back to her and she caught it with one hand. With her other hand, she held up a photo of a dead Vietnamese baby. “This is who they kill.” She looked down at the metal shell in her hand. “You see, not all the bomblets explode right away. No, they lie in wait. In the ground. And when little children pick them up . . . Boom!” She whispered the word. “One more dead kid.” She lifted the photo higher.
Her big brown eyes drilled into my heart. “You’re going to have to do something about it, you know.”
She was right. I was never the same after that.
A squealing microphone on the pulpit interrupts my reflections, and a bald white man hunched over with arthritis jumps back like it bit him. He leans forward again. “My name is Henry Williams, and I’m a deacon in this church. We’ll be starting in five minutes, so if you would please get yourselves settled?”
The man hobbles off, and conversations come to an end. The young plop down on the floor in the aisles, others squeeze together in the pews, barely able to move, their elbows and thighs pressed together. People push in closer to me in the middle of the pew. I pick up my purse, give up J. B.’s seat.
A man in a nondescript tan button-down shirt and brown chinos passes by, leaving behind a trace of Aqua Velva aftershave cologne that invades my nostrils and moves directly to my heart. The man heads down the middle aisle, turning his head from side to side in search of a place to sit. A full beard, dark brown, almost black. A ponytail halfway down his back. Green eyes. His green eyes. But, of course, it can’t be him. Norton died more than thirty years ago. So who is this man who looks like him, who has the same distinctive gait, the same slight backward sweep of his left leg, who wears the same cologne? He squeezes into a pew several rows in front of me just as a ghostlike hush falls over the cavernous room.
A tall Black woman steps up to the pulpit. She has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and her ministerial attire—sleeveless lavender vest layered over a long white robe, clerical collar at her neck—could stir devotion in the staunchest nonbeliever and the conservatively religious alike.
“Welcome. My name is Reverend Jeannette Capen. Pastor Jean to most of you. We have gathered tonight to honor Bertha Pickering, a longtime fixture in our city who needs no introduction.” She pauses. “But I’m going to give you one anyway.” Warmhearted laughter. “Bertha was an unsung heroine, a lead organizer whose tireless work often went unrecognized, a woman who sought to live an authentic human and spiritual life and never stopped trying to do the right thing, even in the face of near certainty that it would make no difference. Bertha Pickering’s life was grounded in radical Christian values and pacifism. And yet, she was often denounced from pulpits in this town. Well, not now, not here, not in this church.”
Excitement mounts as the deacon reappears carrying, with some difficulty, a long rectangular object covered in white silk. He places it on the pulpit, and with a grand sweep of her hand, Pastor Jean pulls off the cloth to reveal a replacement nameplate for the church sign outside. Gasps pass from person to person and turn into clapping hands.
“By unanimous vote of the congregation, the name of our church has been officially changed to the Bertha Pickering United Church of Christ.”
The sign’s gold letters on black background are projected onto the screen behind the pulpit. People jump to their feet, clapping and laughing and chanting. Ber-tha, Ber-tha, Ber-tha.
Pastor Jean waits for everyone to settle down. “And now I invite you to talk about the Bertha you knew. Please limit your comments to a sentence or two so everyone has a chance.”
People rush to the front in waves, and soon there’s a long line stretching all the way down the left aisle. I squirm in my seat, fidget with my fingers, want to join them and don’t want to join them. There’s no way I could say everything Bertha meant to me in a sentence or two. And the line is already too long anyway. At this rate we’ll be here all night.
The first person to step up to the microphone looks familiar, but I can’t place her. She’s about twenty years younger and a few inches shorter than me, with coal-black hair.
“Bertha was the first woman to chain herself to the door of the Pentagon.”
At the sound of her voice I remember who she is. In 1984, I was attached to her at the gate to the Seneca Army Depot in New York. Bertha had been there, too, only that time she was fastened to the gate with yarn, not chains.
An elderly hippie with a headband streaking across his forehead is next. I recognize his face but never did know his name. “My dear friend Bertha Pickering served five years in prison, two in federal maximum security. My friend Bertha was beaten and jailed during the antiwar protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. She was under FBI surveillance for decades.”
One after another, they speak, and each one stirs a new memory for me. The last in line is Marianne. She’s my age, but unlike me, she’s still out there protesting. She’s shorter than I remember; maybe she’s shrunk like I have. All I can see over the pulpit is a shock of pure white hair and steely blue eyes encased in wrinkles.
“Bertha only got irritated with me once. It was on her ninety-sixth birthday.” Marianne’s deep voice reverberates through the sanctuary. “I told her she should slow down.” We all laugh. We know what’s coming. “Bertha looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Marianne, I will give up my activism on the day I die and not a day sooner.’”
I’m on my feet, cheering along with everyone else and, at the same time, wondering what Bertha would think if she knew what my life was like today. If she saw me loading and unloading boxes of food from my car during my weekly Meals on Wheels deliveries and doodling away the interminable minutes at the monthly Monrow City Retirement Association board meetings instead of going to all the protests and rallies. Would she think I’ve given up on the world? I wish she were here so I could assure her that I care as much as ever about what I see and hear—children being locked in cages on our borders, people murdered every day just for daring to be who they are, thousands of people sleeping on our streets and in our parks—and that, like her, I will never quit until the day I die. I would also tell her what I’ve learned over the years, and that now I’m doing what I choose to do, not what I think I should do or what I think I have to do in order to be an okay person. I wonder if, like me, she ever got tired, asked if she’d been arrested enough times, spent enough days in jail waiting to be arraigned, been on trial enough times, written enough letters, gone to enough protests and marches. I wonder if she had to learn, like I did, that she was just one person and the only thing required of her was to do her part.
Martin Lind, someone else who will never quit until the day he dies, steps up to the pulpit. The crowd applauds and whistles, then stops when he raises his hands. “On behalf of the Monrow City Peace and Justice Coalition, it’s my distinct honor now to introduce tonight’s speaker.” More cheers. “Dr. Darla Kelsey is a senior fellow with the Arms Control Association. With a master’s degree in peace studies and a BA in international studies and political science, she is an expert on nuclear nonproliferation, missile defense, Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and North Korea’s missile program.” He stretches his arms out and opens his hands. “But the most exciting thing about Dr. Kelsey, as you know, is that she is the granddaughter of our own beloved Bertha Pickering.”
The chanting outside—Keep America safe!—increases in volume but can’t compete with the raucous standing ovation inside. Dr. Kelsey, a frequent commentator on CNN, NPR, and MSNBC, would be the equivalent of a movie star to this audience under any circumstances, but for her to be the granddaughter of our heroine sends us over the moon.
She appears older in person than she does on the screen, her long blond hair stringier, with strands of brown that match her brown suit and add a commanding maturity to her bright smile and youthful brown eyes. Bertha’s eyes.
“We have nuclear weapons, so why don’t we use them? That’s the unbelievably dangerous question some politicians are actually asking today.” She pauses for effect. “Some of them are even asking why they should have to go to Congress to get approval to use them.”
The audience boos. Competing shouts from outside. Someone rushes to close the door. My gut lurches like it does when the news on TV is rife with conflict. But I know what to do now when my serenity is threatened like this: take in a deep breath, start counting, and let the air out through my mouth. After several attempts, my jaw starts to relax.
“North Korea has nuclear weapons capable of annihilating major cities in our country,” Dr. Kelsey says. I count to ten. “And now, they are threatening to test a hydrogen bomb over the ocean.” A hush falls over the sanctuary as her gaze moves from the upturned faces in the front row all the way to the people in the back. When it reaches the last pew, Bertha joins in and whispers in my ear. You’re going to have to do something about this, you know, Sylvia. I push back. That old familiar guilt that tells me I’m not doing enough may no longer rule my life, but that doesn’t mean it’s not crouching around the corner, ready to spring with claws bared given the chance.
The man who looks just like Norton breaks into the silence. “Not gonna happen,” he shouts.
Dr. Kelsey nods and smiles at him. “Not if we can stop it.”
He jumps to his feet and raises his fist in the air. “And we are gonna stop it! Don’t worry, we’re gonna.”
I lean so far forward I almost slip off the pew. The agitated pitch in his voice is as familiar as his appearance, his pattern of speech one I remember only too well.
“With that kind of enthusiasm, I believe we will.” Dr. Kelsey smiles at him again and he sits back down. “But not everyone is like you, sir. Some people say there’s no need for concern. Why worry, they say, when we have the capability to shoot down any incoming missile before it can reach us.”
“Bullshit,” the man who is the reincarnation of Norton shouts.
After that, only snippets of Dr. Kelsey’s speech—a smattering of acronyms like GMD, THAADS, and ICBMs; a missile defense system that won’t protect us; a petition supporting a United Nations treaty to ban nuclear weapons—slip through the images and memories now playing like a movie in my head. About the night Norton and I met. His irrefutable commitment to peace and his knowledge about the issues. His long ponytail and bushy beard. The twinkle in his green eyes. His biceps bulging under a long-sleeved black T-shirt with PEACE in huge white letters on the front. The two of us talking in the bar late into the night, too many glasses of white zinfandel for me, too many cans of Pabst beer for him. Then my mind jumps to the months after, the arguments, misunderstandings, secrets.
The man who looks just like him jumps to his feet again, and I’m jolted back to the present. “No! We will not allow it!”
Dr. Kelsey nods. “I know you folks won’t. You folks know that to allow nuclear waste to be stored here would be to risk radioactive contamination worse than any plague you can imagine, poisonous pollutants in the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the food you eat.”
She steps aside and hands the microphone to Martin Lind. He thumps his hand on the pulpit. “Dr. Kelsey is right, folks. The danger is real. The Nectaral Corporation is planning to store plutonium right here in our back yard.” People boo. “They don’t want us to know what that means. They don’t want us to know the risks.” People nod and call out in anger. “They don’t want us to know what happened at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Or at Three Mile Island.”
People chant: No they don’t. No they don’t. Martin raises his hands. He’s on a roll. “They don’t want us to know what happened at the Nevada test site.” They don’t care. “Or what happened at Fernald, Ohio.” They don’t care.
Martin lets the chanting continue for a while and then steps in. “So, do you think they care if mutated children are born here?” No they don’t. No they don’t.
Finally, he raises his hands, waits for the crowd to grow silent. “But we do know, don’t we?” Yes we do! “And we do care, don’t we?” Yes we do! “But we also know that knowing and caring are not enough. We have to stop them. We have to act.”
Stop the madness! Stop the madness! People are on their feet now, shouting, fists in the air. The protesters outside get louder, too. Keep America safe! Keep America safe!
Martin shouts over the din. “Our message is clear. No plutonium storage here. No war profiteering here. No nuclear weapons anywhere.” People repeat his words. Then he raises his hands and hands the microphone to Peter Minter, the Indian Child Welfare compliance officer I used to work with when I was a foster care supervisor. Peter and I have been friends and allies for years, serving together even now on a statewide reform task force.
“I want to remind you,” Peter says, “that the nuclear fuel cycle in this country began when the mining companies dug uranium from our Indian homelands. Our women had spontaneous abortions. Over half of our babies had birth defects, respiratory, liver, and kidney ailments.” He pauses with a swing of his gray braid. “And now that they can’t find any other place to store the damned stuff forever, they’re going to try to end the nuclear cycle on our homelands, too.”
The man who looks like Norton shouts. “Just say no!” Everyone chimes in. Just say no! Just say no!
My heart throbs with old passions stirred, screams at me to get in there, get involved, do something for God’s sake. But my head tells me to slow down, breathe in, breathe out, stay calm. I am enough. I do enough.
Martin steps back to the pulpit, and the chanting stops. “It’s not a done deal yet. When there’s a congressional hearing about the plutonium storage contract, we will be there! Our voices will be heard! We will stop this! Our first action is next Thursday at Nectaral Plaza. Be there! And on your way out, be sure to sign our petition supporting the UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons.”
I squeeze through the people crowding into the middle aisle and stand on my tiptoes by the door. My eyes light up when they settle on the man who looks like Norton. “There you are,” I whisper. Then everything stops, and with each step the man takes in my direction, I take a step back into another time. One step, and it’s 1984 and I’m being introduced to Norton at a coalition meeting. Another step, and I’m sitting across from him in a police van. One more step, and I’m seeing him for the last time as he walks away with two FBI agents.
And then the man who looks just like him is walking past me. I touch his arm and he stops, turns around. “Excuse me, sir,” I say. “Is your name Cramer, by any chance?”
He makes a half turn like he’s about to bolt, then hesitates and turns to face me. His eyes are narrow, suspicious.
“My name’s Corey. Corey Cramer.”
“I’m Sylvia Jensen. I knew your father.”
TWO
1984
It was an unusually chilly spring for the Midwest, cold enough to sleep with my winter comforter on the bed. The sounds of traffic on the street below woke me, and one at a time my eyes let in the bright light, the morning sun. I rolled onto my side. My panties were lying on the floor next to the bed, my jeans over by the door, my bra and blouse out in the hall. I turned onto my other side.
“Norman?” No answer. “Norman?” Had I gotten his name wrong? “Good morning.” I reached out to touch his head, thinking I could wake him by running my fingers through his long dark hair or tickling his beard. But the space next to me was empty.
“Damn,” I muttered out loud. When a man goes to bed with you and then sneaks out sometime during the night, it’s a pretty good bet he went home to his wife.
I rolled onto my back. A spider crawled across the ceiling. What day was it? It must be Wednesday. Last night was the Monrow City Peace and Justice Coalition meeting, always on Tuesdays.
Then what happened at work yesterday slowly came back to me.
“Mommy, Mommy,” two-year-old Lucy had wailed. Her face was flushed nearly as red as her tiny T-shirt and her eyes were filled with a panic so palpable it burned every bone in my body. But her mother, slumped over in a drug-induced comatose state, didn’t respond, didn’t even hear her.
“Come, my love,” I said as I gathered the toddler in my arms. “Mommy needs to sleep for a while. We’ll take care of you until she wakes up.”
In the car, Lucy howled, hysterical. She kept looking back, searching for her mother. At the temporary foster home, she went numb and silent. She had a fever. A child so young shouldn’t have to suffer like that. She wasn’t equipped. Neither was the foster mother. I stayed to help when Lucy’s little body went stiff and she wouldn’t eat. We had trouble taking her filthy clothing off so we could give her a bath. I wanted to stay longer, but I had to leave. There were other clients waiting for me. Other children, other foster parents who weren’t equipped to deal with the traumas they were forced to face.
Last night, even though my heart was broken and my body exhausted, I went to the coalition meeting after work. And that’s where I met him, the man no longer in my bed this morning. A jackhammer pounded at the concrete fog in my head and loosened chunks of the night before in little bits and pieces—a kind and thoughtful man, in his forties like me; green eyes, white teeth, crooked smile; our whispered comments during the meeting, our nonstop conversation over drinks afterward; tripping on the edge of the elevator and staggering down the hall to my apartment, and after that . . . after that . . . I couldn’t remember anything after that.
Not that that was unusual. That was my pattern. I poured all my compassion into the foster children I worked with during the day and then turned to alcohol, and sometimes men, for love at night. Well, at least the one last night hadn’t just been a stranger I found in a bar. At least I had something in common with this one. At least there was that.
I sat up and glanced at my bedside clock. Shit! Either my alarm hadn’t gone off or I’d slept through it. I jumped out of bed and raced to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, gulped down a couple aspirin, and ran a comb through my shoulder-length blond hair. I pulled my brightly flowered peasant blouse and long faded denim skirt from the closet, then tossed them on the bed and opted instead for the beige linen suit and navy blue cotton blouse I usually wore to court. If I was going to be late, I should at least look professional.
It was after nine o’clock when I rushed upstairs to the foster care unit carrying a cup of coffee from the café on the first floor of the downtown Health Services Building. I had just slipped into my cubicle when Betsy Chambers, our department administrator, headed my way. I smoothed down my knee-length skirt and tugged at the hem of the suit jacket, ready to tell her I’d make up for my tardiness by working late tonight.
“Good morning, Sylvia.” She flashed me a warm smile. “I’ll see you at the meeting this afternoon.” A little wave and then she was gone.
Whew! Except for my raging hangover, no harm done. She didn’t seem to have noticed I was late, and from her friendliness, I was pretty sure I was still her number one choice for the supervisor position after Rita retired. I lifted a stack of files from my bottom right-hand drawer and got to work. Today was my day to do paperwork and update case records.
A few hours later, the phone rang. If it was a foster parent calling to say a child had run away or been injured, or there was some other crisis requiring my immediate attention, I wouldn’t be able to finish my paperwork before the staff meeting and I really would have to work late tonight.
“Sylvia Jensen speaking.”
“Hi, this is Norton. I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye last night.”
“Oh.” So that was his name. Norton. “Okay.”
“That’s it? Just, ‘Oh, okay’?”
“How about, ‘Oh, you didn’t tell me you were married.’”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. “I am,” he finally admitted.
“Was that so hard?”
I listened to him inhale and exhale. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“What’s her name?”
“Chloe.”
“And your children?”
“One. Corey. He’s four years old.”
A few awkward seconds passed. “Well, no matter,” I said. “It was just a one-night stand. Thanks for calling.”
“Wait, Sylvia. Don’t hang up. Please. I really liked talking to you. I was hoping we could do it again.”
“Do what again?”
“Talk.”
“Sure.”
“Sure . . . what?”
“Sure, we can talk.”
He laughed. “Well, okay then. I’ll call you.”
“Sure.” Sure, meaning a married man who just wanted to talk would be a first. And sure, meaning I knew he wasn’t going to call anyway.
But he did call, the next day and the next. The following Thursday we met after work to talk. We met again the Thursday after that and the Thursday after that, then before and after the coalition meetings on Tuesdays. It was just talk, I told myself. Nothing more. Just talk. That first night had been a fluke, a drunken mistake, and I really didn’t know what had happened anyway. Several weeks went by before I finally asked him.
“I’m embarrassed that I don’t know,” I said, “but did we have sex the night we met?”
He laughed. “You passed out,” he said. “I was drunk, too, but I had enough sense not to take advantage. I tucked you into bed and hurried home.”
My initial instincts had been right: he was a good man, a decent man. I told myself there was no reason to feel guilty about our relationship. Norton might be married, but he and I were just friends, that was all. He probably went home and told his wife all about our conversations each week.
For six weeks we met every Tuesday and Thursday, still talking, just talking—mirroring each other’s terror about the world being on the brink of the final abyss and raging at Nectaral Corporation’s continued manufacture of weapons of mass destruction—always in the same back booth in the same bar with the same drinks, white zinfandel for me, Pabst beer for him. One night he brought his journal and read what he’d written about a dream he’d had.
I’m standing on top of a hill that’s almost tall enough to be considered a mountain, high enough to see a mushroom cloud in the distance. There’s a fire in the cloud, red, yellow, orange. First there’s only one cloud, but then I see another, and then another. It’s familiar. I’ve seen it before, in real life.
A flash of terror crossed his face and he stopped reading, then started again.
At first, the mushroom clouds are far away, but they’re getting closer and multiplying. There are people lower on the hillside. They’re not high enough to see what I see. I call out to warn them. “The end of the world is here! Hug your children. Hold your loved ones. Tell them you love them. Say good-bye to them.” But they all laugh at me. They think I’ve gone mad. They turn away as if they don’t hear and go about their business as if I don’t exist.
A woman in a long white robe appears before me with arms outstretched, palms up in a meditative pose. “Do not give power to fear, my dear,” she says. “Bring love to your fear.” I scream at her that it’s not just fear, it’s real, and we’re all going to die. But she just looks at me with a condescending smile and says “Bring love to your fear” again and then disappears.
Norton tightened his grip on his journal.
A young man in his twenties comes toward me and tells me I worry too much. He talks to me as if I’m a young child or a senile grandfather. “Our military has been on the cutting edge of missile defense systems for the past sixty years,” he says. “Nobody’s going to get nuked. They won’t let it happen.” I scream at him, tell him to wake up. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? He rolls his eyes and walks away, laughing. I fall to my knees and cover the back of my head with my hands just as I was taught to do during atomic bomb drills in public school. I howl. But no one hears me. No one will listen.
He stopped reading and sighed. Then he gathered me in his arms and his dream became mine. We clung tight to each other for a long time, bound together by a shared terror in the depths of our souls, a terror not felt by others.
After that, things were different. Something had changed between us.
“My wife is like the woman in my dream who told me not to give power to my fear,” he said after we finally broke apart. “Chloe’s a good person, but her only goal in life is to be happy.”
“I envy her that,” I said.
“It’s so different with you, Sylvia. You understand me. We understand each other.”
I knew he’d just crossed the invisible line that up until then we’d both honored. And I liked it, despite the tsunami of guilt sweeping over me. I waited for him to continue, wanted him to cross that line again, and he did.
“Chloe and I see most things differently. She’s not keen about my involvement with the coalition, to put it mildly. She says she doesn’t know why I want to be such a killjoy.” I should have stopped him. Instead, I downed another glass of wine.
From that point on our conversations deepened, became more and more personal. Norton told me stories about his son, Corey, whom he adored and lived for, whose future he’d be willing to die for if necessary. I told him about being married to Frank and living and teaching in the Bronx, how we’d moved back to the Midwest to live off the land in a one-room cabin and then divorced after I left for university to get a master’s degree and never returned. I told him stories about what it was like to be a foster care worker in a broken child welfare system. He told me stories about people he’d worked with at the post office for twenty years. As time went by, we dug further and further into our histories as if searching for special places where our lives converged, times when similar experiences meant we had somehow known each other before we even met.
It seemed like we could talk about anything, that nothing was off-limits. Until one night, when he said he’d enlisted right after graduating from high school.
“What was it like to be in the military?” I asked.
That was when I learned that a distant look could take someone away from you in an instant. He guzzled his beer, then raised the empty can to signal for another one. When he finally spoke again, he didn’t answer my question.
“You know, Sylvia,” he said. “It’s the accidents and near misses that scare me the most. Like last year, when the Soviets thought a nuclear attack from us was imminent and the officer in charge had only twenty-three minutes to respond. He told his superiors it was a false alarm even though he had no evidence that it actually was.” He stared off into space for several more seconds. “That man saved the world, Sylvia. That one man.”
Then, without warning, he jumped to attention and looked at his watch. “Time to call it a night.”
I longed for him to come home with me, longed to hold him, love him, have him hold me, love me, longed for him to let me in. “One more drink?” I said.
He shook his head. “Tomorrow’s Good Friday.” He stood up and slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “The vigil starts early in the morning.”
I gulped down the rest of my wine, so drunk I could hardly walk, much less do anything else, and went home. Alone. Norton didn’t answer my question about his military service that night, and I never asked it again.
##
At six o’clock the next morning we met in front of the sign that said “Headquarters of Nectaral: Worldwide Heating and Cooling Systems.” No mention of cluster bombs or guidance systems for first-strike nukes and cruise missiles. No mention of Nectaral being the biggest military contractor in our state. Over a hundred protesters were already huddled together on the sidewalk, bundled up in wool and shivering against a biting early morning wind. Some wore religious attire, their somber Good Friday mood blending with the muted colors of the two- and three-story homes in the historic neighborhood that circled the corporate compound.
The gate to Nectaral Plaza opened onto an immaculately groomed park shaded by large trees. Benches were strategically placed around a profusion of flower gardens for visitors who, unless informed, would never suspect, from such beautiful surroundings, that they were sitting in the belly of an agent of death.
Martin Lind, director of the Peace and Justice Coalition, shook all our hands and thanked us for coming. Martin had told us once that when he was in the army, some guys shouted “Jew boy” at him and then beat him with a duffel bag filled with rocks. I couldn’t help but wonder if Norton had witnessed something like that when he was in the military, if that explained his strange non-answer to my question last night.
Martin’s deep, booming voice cut through the morning chill. “Even after years of protesting, the monster inside these walls keeps growing and growing. Which is why we have moved from protest to resistance. So . . . how many of you are willing to risk arrest this morning?”
Many of those gathered were in affinity groups, support systems for people planning to commit civil disobedience in orchestrated situations such as this. They had been trained in nonviolent behaviors, strategies, and tactics. Half of the group raised their hands in response to Martin’s question, but this time I wasn’t one of them. After the police moved in, Norton and I planned to leave and spend the rest of the day together.
Martin smiled at all the raised hands. “My dear friend Meridel Le Sueur says you can’t live in this century and be for anything that is true and just without going to jail occasionally.”
“So do you think they’re going to arrest us today, Martin,” someone asked.
“I met with Bigger yesterday, and he didn’t tell me how they planned to respond to our action today. Maybe they don’t know yet themselves.”
Another voice rose up from the back of the crowd. “Who’s Bigger?”
“Thomas Bigger is the CEO of the Nectaral Corporation.”
Norton let out a snort and commented out of the side of his mouth, “Yeah, the charitable guy who adopted two orphans during the Vietnam War.” He snorted again. “Their parents were probably killed by his cluster bombs.”
Jim, who was in an affinity group with Norton and me, stepped to the front of the crowd. He had a wooden crucifix strapped on his back to which a replica of a nuclear missile had been nailed. In silence, we formed a single line behind him and with slow, laborious steps walked toward the main administrative building in the middle of the plaza. A soft and mournful soprano voice rose from the line. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? I knew the Easter hymn well from the church I was raised in. I tried to sing along, but a lump in my throat blocked the words.
At the entrance to the building, people who were willing to risk arrest formed a circle and fell to their knees. The rest of us stood behind them like a choir surrounding a sacred altar. Father Keagan, pastor of the Monrow City Episcopal Church, taped a five-foot photograph of little children on the double glass doors and then knelt in prayer before it. As I stared at it, the faces of the children in the picture became the faces of the many children I had been unable to save. Markus, a student of mine in the Bronx who had disappeared in 1968 and had never been found. Jamie, a child stolen from the reservation and lost in the foster care system. The words from an old Sunday school song rang in my ears. Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.
Rhona, Char, and Anita, three biological sisters who were also Catholic Worker House nuns, stepped forward, each of them holding a vial of red liquid, their own blood, which they lifted up and presented like Communion wine.
Oh, o-o-oh, oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
The three sisters splashed their blood onto the images of the children. At that point I broke away from Norton, joined the inner circle, and fell to my knees.
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross? Yes, I was there. I had been hypnotized once for past-life regression and remembered a former life as a Roman soldier, on the wrong side. I didn’t know if that was true or not, of course, only that it felt like it was.
A dozen policemen in black jackets appeared, one of them with a megaphone. “You are on private property. If you do not leave immediately, you will be arrested.” Soon three officers stepped into the circle, and they started to confront each resister one by one.
“Ma’am,” one of them said when it was my turn, “do you know that you are on private property?”
I looked at him. Unable to answer.
“Ma’am, you have one more chance to leave or you will be arrested.”
When I didn’t move, one officer grabbed my arms, another one my legs. My body went limp. I closed my eyes and saw the blood-splattered photo of the children as the officers bound my hands behind my back with plastic cuffs and then lifted me from the ground, carried me away, and tossed me onto a bench in a police van. Just before the door closed, Norton was thrown onto the bench across from me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I promised we’d spend the day together.”
He winked. “We are together.”
At the station, we were separated though, men and women held in different cells. At dusk a judge released us on our own recognizance pending trial, and Norton and I went to our bar. This time we sat side by side in our booth, hip against hip, shoulder touching shoulder, hands brushing hands. When the waitress appeared with my usual glass of wine and his usual can of beer, we both shook our heads.
“Gin and tonic,” we said in unison. We hadn’t even consulted each other first.
Norton laughed. “I do believe we have become one person.”
He reached for my hand and squeezed it. I knew I should pull away but I didn’t. He took both of my hands in his and looked at me for a long time, his eyes reflecting the same longing that was in mine. Then he kissed the tips of my fingers and tenderly caressed them one by one. I knew it was wrong. He was married. He had a son. I pulled my hands away and reached for my drink.
After several minutes of silence and another gin and tonic, Norton ran his fingers down my cheek. “It’s too late, Sylvia. I already love you. You already love me.”
I did love him. I loved everything about him. I loved his serious pontificating. The way he injected his monologues with doses of ironic self-mockery. I even loved his stubbornness. Once he decided what was right, there was no getting him to change his mind. He was like me that way. Maybe loving Norton was my way of loving myself. Maybe it was a way of caring for myself, a way to ward off my fears or at least manage them. Could that be so wrong? And in the face of nuclear annihilation, how important was right and wrong anyway? How could it be wrong to follow my heart?
My hand touched Norton’s cheek. “Do you think we have time?”
He nodded, his eyes full.
“Okay, then,” I said, my words slurring. “Let’s go to my place.”
THREE
2019
Crowds of people squeeze past us on their way to the exit while I gaze into Corey Cramer’s green eyes, the eyes of Norton, the man I adored, the love of my life, whose leaving, I now realize, I’ve never fully mourned. The face of his son is like a kaleidoscopic lens of shards from the past. Norton and me climbing a fence at a military base. Forming a human blockade, sitting arm in arm, singing Give Peace a Chance. Holding hands. Lying side by side in bed, sharing secrets. Laughing. Together. Always together. Until we weren’t.
Corey’s jaw is set tight. “You knew my father?”
I brush an imaginary piece of lint from my skirt. “We were good friends.”
His eyes see into me. My first impulse is to hide my nakedness; my second is to embrace it, scars and all. He shuffles from one foot to the other. He’s going to walk away.
“Your father and I were in the nuclear disarmament movement together in the eighties.”
He looks down at the floor. “I was only four years old when . . . I don’t remember much, about my dad.”
“He talked about you a lot,” I say.
His mouth shapes into a pout. He looks just like the child in the picture Norton always carried in his wallet.
“Coffee?” I say.
He doesn’t say yes or no, but when I turn and walk out the door, he follows. My left hand grips my long skirt so I won’t trip going down the steps. We skirt the edges of the angry protesters, and he cups my right elbow. Just like Norton used to.
“There’s an all-night diner around the corner,” he says when we reach the bottom step.
I nod. “Nick’s. Your father and I . . .” A deep ache in my throat swallows up my words, a longing to go to the diner with Norton just one more time, to feel the warmth of his hand in mine, his arm around my shoulders. For years after he was gone, I drowned my grief in alcohol. Later, after I got into recovery, I tucked our relationship into a compartment of drinking transgressions, labeled it an illicit affair with a married man who shared my passion for justice, sex, and alcohol.
When we reach the diner, I pour my ache for Norton back into its secret container in my heart. Jingling bells on the door announce our arrival; blinding lights reflecting off the steel panels behind the well-worn counter welcome us. We pass the floor-mounted counter stools, walk to the far end of the railroad-like dining car, and sit in the last booth—Norton’s and my booth. Corey, unaware of the unfinished grief his presence has unleashed, flips through the list of songs on the tabletop jukebox. He reaches in his pocket for a quarter (it used to be a nickel) and selects King of the Road, one of Norton’s favorites, then bobs his head up and down in time with the music just like Norton did. Unlike his father, who loved the diner’s tacky décor, Corey’s face registers distaste for the mismatched red stripes down the middle of the white Formica table, the white stripes on the red wall.
“You look just like your father,” I say.
“Hmm.” He picks up his menu, pretends to read it.
“He was a fighter,” I say.
He looks at me for a long time, then down, his palms pressed into the table. He’s not the talker Norton was. Finally, he leans back in the booth with a sigh.
“Mom said the FBI is what got him,” he says at last. “But she always changed the subject when I asked what happened. That’s what Mom was best at. Changing the subject.”
“Your dad did what he did for your sake,” I say. “Your future.”
“And yet Kim Jong-un still has a nuclear missile launch button on his desk, doesn’t he?” He spits out the words like bitter fruit on his tongue.
“I know,” I say.
Just then a waitress appears. She plunks two mugs on the table and fills them with coffee without asking if we want any. Some things never change.
“Okay, folks.” She pulls out a pencil and order pad from her apron pocket, then taps her foot on the worn linoleum and rolls her eyes. When I order a chocolate malt and Corey orders two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, she gives us a Well, it’s about time sigh and stalks off.
“Your father loved it that Nick’s serves breakfast twenty-four hours a day.” Corey furrows his brow. I don’t tell him he’s just ordered Norton’s favorite dinner.
My iPhone beeps, a text from J. B. Sorry I missed the memorial. Got caught up with the protesters outside. Where are you? I text back, tell him I’m at the diner and invite him to join us. “That was my friend J. B.,” I tell Corey. “He’s an investigative reporter with the New York Times. He was supposed to meet me at the church but didn’t make it.”
Corey doesn’t seem interested. “I s’pose you’re going to the protest at Nectaral.” His set jaw is a dare.
“I haven’t decided.” I don’t tell him about the tug-of-war in my heart during the memorial service, the struggle between two parts of me—the one that works to remain composed and serene, and the one that surges with passion to act, to be more impulsive, more unstinting. More like I used to be, more like I imagine Bertha Pickering was.
“How about you,” I ask. “Are you planning to go?”
He jerks his head from side to side. “Protests don’t change anything. No one pays attention.”
“I do plan to get signatures on the petition in support of the UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons. One hundred and twenty-two other countries have already adopted it.”
He shakes his head. “Nothing but pie in the sky. Another hollow effort. We have to do something to make things change fast.”
“That’s not how change happens, I’m afraid. I wish it did.”
His face freezes, hard, like a stone. “Then we’re doomed.”
“Not necessarily.” I could cite examples of how things have changed over time after long periods of struggle, but I don’t want to get into an argument. “I don’t know,” I say instead. “Maybe we’re doomed no matter what we do. Sometimes it’s hard to have hope.”
The muscles in his jaw tighten even more. He hisses, “We have to make ’em listen.” He looks from left to right as if checking to make sure no one else can hear, then lowers his voice to a whisper. “And believe me, Sylvia, that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”
The steely determination and deep passion in his voice sound like Norton, only there’s an edge of violence to it, like a volcano threatening to erupt. I wonder what he means about making them listen? Make who listen? How? My questions now are similar to the ones I asked Norton when I returned from the women’s peace camp in New York in the summer of 1984. Similar also to the ones I asked him when we were on trial for trespassing at Nectaral Plaza on Good Friday, the questions that threatened our relationship.
I flash Corey a conciliatory smile. “Your dad was a skeptic, too.”
His response is quick, automatic. “Yeah, well, a lot of good that did him . . . or us.”
I hold back, careful not to injure him like Norton and I injured each other with words.
He curls his hands into fists. “Mom kept Dad’s secrets, but after she passed, I found his journal. It’s all there. All documented. I know everything.”
My heart stops beating. He knows everything? Does that mean Chloe, Norton’s wife, knew about our relationship? Is that what Corey’s rage is about? Do I really want to know?
“That was a long time ago,” I mumble.
He reaches across the table and his hand bumps against my mug. Coffee splatters onto my blouse. He leans forward, points his finger at me.
“It’s not over,” he says through gritted teeth. “Mark my words, Sylvia, it’s not anywhere near over.”
FOUR
1984
By summer, my love for Norton was more intense than the hot sun; it bloomed brighter than the wildest and most colorful profusion of flowers ever seen in the Midwest. I loved the way his skin stretched down over his high cheekbones and settled into either frown or smile lines on the outsides of his lips, the way his green eyes twinkled with kindness and burned with anger, the tingle of his fingertips on my skin. But as my love for him deepened, so too did my guilt. He was married. His wife, Chloe, thought we were just friends. He had a son, Corey, who was only four years old and needed his father. Many times I told myself I had to let him go, but I never could. Instead, I drank.
A widespread sense that summer, among our activist friends, was that the world was a more dangerous place than ever. Norton and I, to counter our fear that we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation, went to more rallies, protests, sit-ins. We drank more. We made love with more intensity. Our passion for each other and our passion for saving the planet were indistinguishable. We saw ourselves as the warp and woof of a global tapestry without understanding that its design was too complex for us to grasp.
I decided that summer to go to the Seneca Women’s Peace Camp in New York, which had been established near a military base where nuclear weapons were being stored. How could I not do my part when women at a similar camp at Greenham Common in England had been protesting the planned deployment of those weapons since 1981? I didn’t know that my decision to go would mark the beginning of the end for Norton and me.
He came to see me off. “Do what you have to do.” That was his farewell to me as I boarded one of two buses that would take ninety-nine of us Monrow City women to New York. His voice was firm and he smiled, but the lines around his lips drooped, and he looked unwell. I didn’t think of it as an omen at the time. I just thought it meant he would miss me. The bus drove slowly away from the parking lot, and I stuck my arm out the window and waved and waved until he was an indistinguishable dot on the landscape. Then I settled back in my seat.
“Welcome, ladies!” Jennifer, the twenty-something, blue-jean-clad intern from the Peace and Justice Coalition, stood at the front of the bus with a microphone. “Thousands of women will be going to the camp between now and Labor Day, but our contingent is the largest.”
Expressions of pride rippled through the bus.
“Will there be enough room for us?” It was Maddie, our resident worrywart.
Jennifer flicked her hand in what could be interpreted as being either dismissive or reassuring, depending on how you felt about the question or the questioner. “The camp is on a fifty-two-acre farm,” she said. “Plenty of space to accommodate us. But, of course, the size of the camp is nothing compared to the eleven-thousand-acre Seneca Army Depot.”
“How many nuclear weapons are stored at the depot?” This time Maddie shouted louder and with a lot more anxiety in her voice.
Jennifer smiled, but she also let out a barely disguised sigh, like she thought everyone on the trip should already know the answer to that question. “The military neither denies nor confirms the presence of nuclear weapons,” she said. “So we don’t know.”
We passed some middle school boys playing soccer on a grassy field and that got me thinking about the children who lived near the Seneca depot. What would happen to them if there were a nuclear attack or, God forbid, a nuclear accident? I’d read that there were emergency evacuation plans only for on-base personnel.
Mary Lou, in the seat next to me, poked me with her elbow. “If I lived in the town of Romulus, I sure wouldn’t want to be so close to the depot.” I attributed Mary Lou’s propensity for giving voice to my thoughts to years of experience, given that she was eighty-nine years old and a great-grandmother of six, but maybe she’d always been a reader of people’s minds.
“Our briefing materials said that the town is totally dependent on the depot,” I said. “The military even controls its water supply.”
Mary Lou huffed her disgust. “Yeah. The depot land is valued at two hundred and fifty million, and you want to know how much it pays in property tax?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Not a cent. Not a single penny.”
“So I guess people must depend on the depot for jobs then,” I said.
Mary Lou shrugged and raised her hand. “Jennifer? Do you know how many townspeople work at the depot?”
“Only a few,” the intern said. “Most of the fourteen hundred jobs at the depot aren’t open to local residents.”
“You’d think they could at least hire people from the town to do the cooking and cleaning if nothing else,” Mary Lou mumbled.
“Two hundred to two hundred fifty of the depot jobs are for military police,” Jennifer said. “They’re trained in anti-terrorism and authorized to use deadly force.” She paused to let that sink in.
Gasps rippled up and down the length of the bus. Moisture seeped into my T-shirt from under my armpits. Would we be considered terrorists? Surely not. We were just a bunch of middle-aged white women, respectable-looking mothers and grandmothers from the Midwest. Surely the military police wouldn’t use deadly force against us. Or would they? I scrunched down in my seat with Norton’s words—Do what you have to do—ringing ominously in my ears.
“Ladies!” The microphone squealed. “Sorry.” Bertha Pickering looked a lot younger than her sixty-four years in a blazing orange T-shirt and long denim skirt that brushed against her ankles. “I have something to say. I know that’s unusual.” She chuckled. “Seriously. We must not be pessimistic. Our job this week is to stop the shipment of nuclear weapons to Europe. Our mission is not impossible! Remember, we’ll be less than fourteen miles from where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived. Where Susan B. Anthony traveled, to the first women’s rights convention, held right there in Seneca Falls in 1848. So if anyone tries to tell you we’re crazy, just ask them what would have happened if those women had given up when they were told that the right to vote was too radical and impossible.”
“Right on!” Mary Lou and I shouted to the sound of scattered applause.
“Did you know that Seneca Falls was a station on the Underground Railroad?” Bertha was emboldened, her voice louder.
“Yes!”
“And did Harriet Tubman give up the fight to end slavery when that seemed impossible?”
“No!” we shouted.
“Is eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the earth impossible?”
“No!”
“Are we going to give up?”
“No!”
“That’s all I have to say then.”
The bus erupted in laughter and applause. We clapped and clapped. We stomped our feet. We chanted. Won’t give up. Won’t give up. The bus driver honked the horn. Bertha laughed and returned to her seat. I knew she was a force, but I’d never seen her in action like that before.
After several minutes, the bus fell silent, with Mary Lou snoring on my shoulder while I slipped into an optimistic sleep.
We were on the bus for two days, getting off at truck stops for food and, for a lucky few, showers. It was dusk when we finally arrived at the camp. I stumbled down the bus steps with Mary Lou behind, a tight grip on my shoulders to keep from losing her balance. Acres and acres of parched land were visible at the darkest edges of twilight, not yet night, clumps of soil hardened into rock by months of drought, a dizzying new world from which I would return changed in ways I did not yet fathom.
“I thought the mosquitoes were bad at home.” Mary Lou swatted her forearm, then waved her hand back and forth in front of her face.
A black Lab sniffed my toes. I leaned down to pat her head, and she licked my hand and wagged her tail like I was her new best friend. To our left, a two-story farmhouse beamed light through open windows, women’s voices inside, floodlights outside exposing peeling white paint. Next to the farmhouse, a large open tent with long tables and benches, cooking utensils hanging from a board at one end, wooden shelves, stacks of bowls and plates. Behind the kitchen area, a barn on which were drawn nude female figures with their stomachs painted white, their beautiful bodies connected with black spider web lines.
The screen door to the farmhouse slammed shut. A Black woman in her twenties strode toward us, a long thick braid thumping her waist in time with her footsteps. “Welcome!” She skidded to a halt. “So glad you made it. We’ve been waiting for you. I’m Janice. From Toronto. I’ve been here since the beginning.”
Several more female figures, semitransparent halos in the dusky mist, appeared in different shapes and colors and smiles of youthful exuberance at the sight of our open mouths and wide eyes. One young woman was topless.
“Hi, my name’s Brenda.” I stared at her ample pale pink breasts and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
“And I’m Felicia.” She was a heavyset brown-skinned woman in a much too tight T-shirt and much too short jean shorts.
“Welcome, you can call me A.” She looked like an ordinary white boy with a butch haircut. “You know, like ‘hey there’ without the h? It’s short for Annabelle but I hate that name, so call me A. Just A.”
A slightly older and taller woman stepped forward, much more confident than the others, but maybe it was just the way her bright red hair set off her chalk white face that made it seem that way. “Jackie here. Hi.”
One by one, the rest of the women introduced themselves, each voice solicitous in its own unique and, in my view, delightful way. They grabbed our tents, sleeping bags, and knapsacks and walked off with our stuff while we trudged along behind.
“Now that we’re here,” I whispered to Mary Lou, “the average age of the camp just jumped twenty years.”
“More like forty.” Mary Lou chuckled under her breath.
Someone behind us muttered, “I feel so conservative,” and that set off a barrage of responses.
“So middle class.”
“So white.”
“So boring.”
“So clothed.”
“Well, I don’t care what anyone else does, I plan to wear clothes.”
That one made Mary Lou chuckle again. “I always wanted to go braless,” she said from the corner of her mouth. I laughed out loud. I was secretly envious of these young women, so free and in love with themselves. When I’d been their age, and even now sometimes, I was uncomfortable in my own skin, my too skinny, too pimply, too unattractive, too not-perfect body.
We passed the kitchen area, a row of sinks to which hoses were attached to draw in water. Underneath the sinks were pipes to drain the water into plastic buckets. Beyond the sinks, a row of small tents with a portable toilet inside each one. A respectable distance from the bathroom area, hundreds of tents arranged in small circles. Neighborhoods within a village. In the center of everything, an open pavilion-type building, its roof supported by wooden posts, bales of hay inside arranged in concentric circles. A women’s meeting space. On the other side of the pavilion, the young women stopped and dropped our things on the ground.
“Ta-da! The Midwest section!” Janice pointed at the open field with a flick of her long braid. She started to say more, but the sound of a helicopter drowned out her voice. It dropped low enough for me to see the spinning blades and the bared teeth of two men inside, then made a sharp turn and flew off.
“They do that when it gets dark.” Janice laughed. “We don’t know if it’s some surveillance routine or if they’re trying to intimidate us.”
Butch-haircut-called-A shrugged her shoulders. “You’ll get used to it.”
“No worries,” Janice added. “We patrol the camp every night from midnight to six in the morning. If you like walkie-talkies, you can sign up to cover a shift.” Mary Lou grunted. I shook my head. Janice laughed again. “No worries. There are other chores you can do. The sign-up list is next to the fridge on the kitchen wall in the farmhouse. Breakfast is ready at six, put away at nine. If you’re hungry now, there are snacks in the house. But first, we’ll help you set up your tents and get you settled in. Every morning at ten we meet to plan the day’s action at the depot.”
I set up my little two-person camping tent next to the palatial tent belonging to the sister nuns Rhona, Char, and Anita, the funniest women I’d ever known. I’d shared a jail cell with them after the Good Friday protest, and they’d had me laughing for hours with their stories. My favorite was the one about the first time Char was arrested at Nectaral headquarters.
“So there’s Char,” Rhona laughed, “the one who’s always preaching about nonviolence, and what’s the first thing she does when the officer approaches her?”
“She knees him!” Rhona and Anita said in unison, to peals of laughter.
“I’ll be doing penance the rest of my life for that one,” Char said. Then she laughed louder and longer than anyone.
My tent was just wide enough for me to walk along one side of my sleeping bag, long enough for my knapsack to fit at its end, and tall enough for me to stand up bent over. I changed into the extra-large T-shirt that I’d brought along as pajamas, but instead of going to bed, I was lured outside by angry voices. A dozen or so women were sitting around a fire pit in the middle of our circle of tents.
“This isn’t what I signed up for.” Maddie’s slightly plump body was hunched over with a flashlight pointed at her lap. “I sure wish I’d seen this handbook before. I thought the camp was supposed to be about creating a nuclear-free world, not a woman-focused one. Have you noticed how everything around here is in a circle? It says here the circle symbolizes our wombs.” Her angry finger tapped on the page. “Like it’s gospel or something.”
“You knew it was a women-only camp when you signed up,” someone said.
Maddie’s huff emphasized what most of us already knew, that she did not like to be challenged. “I didn’t know it was an exclusionary, feminist-only one,” she said. “It says here that no male over the age of twelve is allowed onto the main grounds.”
“Really?” Mary Lou’s voice was strained from exhaustion. “What about my grandson? He’s just as firm a believer in the anti-nuclear cause as I am.”
“Well, if women are going to be running around naked, you wouldn’t want him here, would you?” Maddie’s negativity usually wasn’t contagious, but tonight, with everyone drained by the long trip, it snowballed into a string of complaints.
“I don’t have any problem with lesbians, but I draw the line at public displays of affection.”
“To each her own, I say, but I don’t want to see it.”
“What’s with the macrobiotic food anyway?”
My stomach grew queasy with worry. I hadn’t come here to sit around and talk about feelings or deal with lesbian/straight differences or work through my own personal issues. Or, for that matter, to build and maintain a community of women.
Pam, our Quaker, stood and made her hands into two stop signs. The silver strands in her gray hair glowed in the light of the fire. “We’re having a bit of trouble adjusting, that’s all. It’s late and we’re tired.” Her voice was calm and conciliatory. “I suggest we go to bed and get some rest so we’re fresh for the action at the depot tomorrow.”
“I was just trying to express my feelings,” Maddie grumbled. “Does that make me a bad person?”
“Of course not,” Pam said.
One by one, we headed for our tents. I tucked myself into my sleeping bag, but a string of worries kept me awake. Would Maddie’s attitude stir up conflict? Would we forget why we came? If we couldn’t live together in peace here, then what chance was there for peace in the world? And if we couldn’t work together, how the hell were we going to stop the deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing missiles to Europe? I longed for Norton, wished I could talk to him. Then I started worrying about him. The last time he told me he loved me, it was with such intensity that I’d wondered if he was thinking about leaving his wife. My heart fluttered at the thought, but I knew it was wrong to want that, wrong to even think that. I sat up and reached into the bottom of my duffel bag for the bottle of bourbon. I needed a nightcap.
Nobody would know. It made no sense for the camp to have an alcohol-free policy anyway. I opened the bottle and took a swig. Then another. One more, and I shoved the bottle back in the bottom of the bag and fell into a deep sleep.
At seven o’clock the next morning, I was startled awake by a helicopter hovering so low it shook my tent. Soon it sounded like several helicopters were circling the camp. I lay there, frozen, barely breathing. This couldn’t be normal. Something must have happened. I threw on the same T-shirt and shorts I’d worn for the past two days on the bus and stepped out of my tent. The camp was alive, buzzing with excitement. I grabbed the arm of the first person I ran into, a dark-skinned woman dressed in a purple Indian sari.
“What’s going on?”
Her eyes were as wide as golf balls. “Some women got into the Q zone at four o’clock this morning.”
“Q zone?”
“The highest security area inside the depot.” She stopped to catch her breath.
“What’s in the Q zone?”
“Sixty or seventy reinforced earth-covered bunkers and a twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot underground, temperature-controlled building for storing plutonium.”
“Are they dead? Did the armed guards shoot them?”
Her eyes opened wider. “They didn’t even notice. And the women were in there for at least twenty minutes! Can you believe it?” Her eyes widened even more.
“How in the world did they even get in there?”
“They climbed over three fences!”
“Why? What did they do in there?”
“They hung a banner with a clothesline of purple hearts on the innermost fence and sat there for a while. Praying, I guess. Then they climbed back out, over all three fences. They left a child’s stuffed lamb in front of the outside fence with a note attached that said And the lamb will lie down with the lion. And no one even noticed!”
Just then a helicopter swooped down and sent everything flying in its wake. I fell to the ground with my hands covering the back of my neck, a perfect duck and cover. The woman helped me to my feet. “They’re probably looking for them,” she said. “I heard they came back to camp and went to bed.”
Over breakfast there was talk of nothing but the women who got into the Q zone. How brave they were. How daring. What a coup it had been. No names were mentioned. The less we knew about who they were, the better. It was for their protection. They were young, someone said, which made me wonder if their action was a sign of courage or simply youthful foolhardiness.
Butch-haircut-called-A puffed up her chest and chuckled. “A depot spokesman has publicly denied all rumors that security was breached. They sure don’t want anyone to know a bunch of women—girls, to them—got inside. Undetected.” She snorted, then laughed so hard she started to choke.
Bertha Pickering sat down next to me on a kitchen bench. “Quite an exciting coup, hey?”
“But if there’s no news coverage,” I said, “what do you think their action accomplished?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe it was just something they had to do,” she said.
There it was again. Do what you have to do. But what did that mean for me? Did I have to risk getting shot, maybe even killed, like those young women had?
“I don’t know if I can do what they did. Maybe I’m too old,” I said.
Bertha laughed. “Never too old to do what has to be done. And the older you get, the less you worry about the consequences.”
At ten o’clock, during the meeting to plan the day’s action, I thought about what Bertha had said. Whenever suggestions were made that felt risky or scary to me, I imagined what I would be like in my fifties, sixties, and seventies if I already allowed myself to be overly cautious now at only forty-two.
At noon, one hundred twenty of us walked to the depot in a single file along the side of the highway. An army truck drove past and a hand popped out from under the tarp, its fingers flashing a peace sign. We all cheered. We walked through the town of Romulus, and some people waved to us, others gave us the finger. I smiled and nodded to all of them, feeling secure in the truth that what I was doing was what I had to do in that moment.
Three rows of soldiers stood at the gate to the depot. Straight and tall, billy clubs in front of rigid bodies. Stone faces with no expression. On the other side of the road, forty or fifty white townspeople, young and middle-aged men, angry-faced women, teenagers.
“Go home, bitches,” a woman with big blond hair screamed.
Aiming an American flag at us like a weapon, a young, clean-cut man shouted, “You’re nothing but a bunch of Communists, feminists, lesbians, and . . . and vegetarians!”
I laughed and poked Mary Lou with my elbow. “I’m not any of those things,” I said. But then two teenage boys threw rocks at us and one fell just short of my foot. I stopped laughing.
“Disperse!” an MP in full riot gear shouted into a bullhorn. “Disperse or you will be arrested.”
A soft, mournful song, in Pam the Quaker’s voice, arose from the middle of our group.
Child, child, child, child,
Will I ever see you grow?
I am fighting for your future
I love you so.
A few of us sang the first line again, then others repeated it after us, and soon our voices rose in a round, the words and melody alternating a message of love. Tears streamed down my face. I wiped them away and more kept coming.
The crowd across the road started singing, Oh beautiful for spacious skies. We fell to our knees and joined them. America, America, God shed His grace on thee.
“Hey, that’s our song,” someone yelled.
“Yeah, shut up, you don’t give a rat’s ass about America!”
“Why are you kneeling?”
“Yeah, you don’t even believe in God!”
The song ended and we stood up. We walked over to the depot fence and started hanging items that symbolized what would be lost in a nuclear holocaust. Norton had sent his army uniform with me, to do with it whatever was needed, he’d said. I fastened it to the fence with clothespins and then cut it into tiny strips with a pair of scissors from my backpack. Soon the fence was covered with precious items that broke my heart—baby shoes, a hand-crocheted baby blanket, a pendant worn by one of the nuns for forty years, a banner from a casket that said Mother on it, photographs, children’s toys, a diary, medals.
Someone took my hand and pulled me into a circle. In the middle, three lithe young women danced, their legs slowed by grief, disbelief, and shock, their arms outstretched, begging, mouths shouting out, raging at death.
NO! NO! NO!
We shouted back with hope for life.
YES! YES! YES!
One of the dancers stopped mid motion. “The bomb has just dropped,” she said, “and you have five minutes to say good-bye to everyone and everything you love.”
A moment of stunned silence. The eyes of the three dancers closed. Then their mouths opened to an intense mournful wailing, a keening expression of grief traditional for women in many cultures. Others joined in, their howling sharp and shrill. The sound swelled, died down, swelled again. Hands were thrown up, striking our breasts as we grieved together with a high-pitched divine madness that sounded like howling alley cats as large as lions.
The terrible, unpleasant din was more than the townspeople could bear. They surged across the road, started yanking our things off the fence. We dropped to our knees.
One of the dancers raised her palms to the sky. “Living day to day and knowing that you have no future makes your heart a rock,” she said. “Crying cracks the rock so something can grow again.”
We held on to each other and swayed from side to side. The sound of our keening lurched over the depot gate. It drove the townspeople back to the other side of the road. Then a horrifying scream pierced my ears. A howl so terrifying and from a place so deep it consumed me with unspeakable pain. A grief beyond words. A sound that silenced all other sounds. It was only when I felt gentle fingers touching my face and arms encircling me that I realized the scream had come from deep inside me.
Everything happened fast after that. I was bound to a woman on each side with nylon wristlets that cut into my skin. Hands reached around me and over me, winding brightly colored yarn around my body, weaving me to other bodies, to the gate. An MP’s helmet got caught in the yarn’s web and he cursed, shouted “Disperse! Disperse!” as he struggled to untangle himself.
Other MPs in riot gear repeated the warning. “You are trespassing on federal property. If you do not leave, you will be arrested.”
Women stood outside the yellow line chanting their support. The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! A news reporter took notes, a photojournalist took pictures. The MPs charged: “Disperse!” The supporters responded: The whole world is watching!
To the sound of a banjo playing America the Beautiful across the road, my hands were cuffed behind my back. Hard fingers dug into my armpits and the backs of my knees. My body was carried away. Supporters cheered. Townspeople jeered. I was thrown onto an army bus. Driven away with military police jeeps on each side of the bus. Taken to a makeshift detainment center, fifteen women in a plywood and chicken wire cell. Ushered out one at a time. Fingerprinted. Photographed.
“Identification, please.”
I shrugged. It’s over. It doesn’t matter anymore. Rough hands on my shoulders. Pockets of my shorts pulled inside out, emptied of nothing.
“Your name?”
I shook my head.
“So you want to do this the hard way, huh?”
I was pushed onto a chair off to the side while others were processed. For crossing the yellow strip on the road that separated federal and Seneca County property, they were given a “ban and bar” letter. If they came back to the depot, six months in a federal prison and a $500 fine. Two women who were repeat offenders were carried away. The others were released. Then I was the only one left.
“So, are you ready to tell us who you are now?”
I opened my mouth, tried to say Jane Doe, but my lips were stuck together. What was I doing? I hadn’t planned to resist, hadn’t even planned to risk arrest. I had no driver’s license or ID with me. I had no control over what I was doing. I raised my shoulders and they froze up like I’d gone catatonic.
“Okay, sit there until you’re ready to cooperate. All night if you want.”
The MPs talked among themselves. What should we do with her? Should we call someone to come get her? No, we can’t let them think they can get away with this. Do you think something’s wrong with her?
A tear trickled down my cheek. My hands are cuffed. Can’t wipe it away. No matter. It’s over. I’m dead. We’re all dead. Nothing matters any more. The bomb has already dropped. It’s too late.
I was pulled up from the chair. I opened my mouth. Air rushed in. I’m dragged into a tiny room. There are no windows. Plastic cuffs cut off my wrists. The door slams shut. Is it night or day? I close my eyes. I lie on the floor. Hard. Concrete. My back hurts. My legs cramp up. My feet.
Hours pass. Maybe days. I rolled onto my back and opened my eyes. Pitch-black. A brief flickering of flame in my head, a brief flash of thought, but then it went out. I sat up, pulled my legs to my chest. My head started to clear, just a little at first, then a bit more and a bit more. Had anyone at the camp noticed that I was gone? Surely Mary Lou did. But how would they know where I was? I hadn’t designated anyone to be my support person, so there was no one to make sure I was okay, no one to come and bail me out. A slow awareness came to me at last, and I began to understand what had happened. I had lost touch with reality. I got so caught up in the death ritual that for a time I believed, really believed, we had all died. That it was over. I had lived the darkness of human nonexistence. That was how I’d ended up here. So now here I was, all alone and in trouble, and I had no clue how to get out of it.
I straightened my legs, pulled myself up to a standing position. I lifted one foot, then the other. Leaned backward, then forward. Jumped up and down. Someone must have heard me, because all of a sudden the door flew open. The overhead light came on. I squinted at an MP I hadn’t seen before.
“My name is Sylvia Jensen,” I said.
FIVE
2019
Corey’s stony green eyes seem to demand a response, while my brain scrambles to decipher his words. It’s not over. Mark my words, Sylvia, it’s not anywhere near over.
“What?” His one sharp word slices into me like a teenager’s whine.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He grins and seethes at the same time. “You’ll find out.” He pushes his shoulders back. “In due time.”
His voice, eerily like Norton’s, turns the lights in the diner suddenly too bright, its smells too greasy and sugary. “You remind me of your father,” I say. Right away I regret it. Young people don’t like it when someone says they’re like their parents, and Norton didn’t always sound like Corey sounds right now either.
Music blares from the jukebox. Two hours of pushing broom buys an eight-by-twelve four-bit room. Tension crawls across the Formica table. Corey’s attitude, so much like Norton’s during the summer and fall of 1984, leaves me nervous, uncertain about what and how to say something that won’t alienate him.
After several seconds, he shakes his head. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I was remembering what your father said to me once, when I asked him what he was thinking.”
I can’t tell from his sideways look if he’s irritated or curious. I decide to go with curious. “He said he couldn’t tell me,” I say, “so I asked him why not.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“And he said . . .” I can hear Norton’s exact words in my head. “He said, ‘I can’t tell you because I’m not as strong as you.’ Then he said, ‘I wish I were, Sylvia, but I’m not.’”
Corey’s eyebrows are now scrunched together in a V. “Did you ever find out what it was he couldn’t tell you?”
I study his face. Is he ready to hear the answer? Am I ready to tell him? “It’s a long story,” I say.
“What made him think you were strong?”
“I resisted arrest at a military base in New York where nuclear weapons were stored. I refused to give them my name.”
His eyes widen. “Brave.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was stupid. I lost control. Your father thought I’d done what I had to do. He saw my action as something pure and unadulterated. But the truth is, I got overwhelmed and lost touch with reality. I didn’t decide to do what I did. I was in no state of mind to decide anything.”
“So what’d they do to you?”
“Held me in custody for twenty-four hours and then let me go. They made me sign an agreement that I’d appear in New York federal court to be arraigned on two charges—trespassing and resisting arrest. If I didn’t show up, it would mean prison for six months and a thousand-dollar fine. I flew home filled with regret and shame.”
Corey leans across the table, his eyes gleaming with interest, even excitement. “Why? You got people’s attention, didn’t you? I mean, you exposed our country’s nuclear policy, right?”
I shake my head. “No. There never was an arraignment.”
“Why not?”
“Who knows? There was no news coverage either, but that was a good thing. The media would have made me look deranged, and the Seneca Peace Camp, too. All I did was put the camp at risk and create dissension among the women there.”
“But you tried. Isn’t that what’s important? To try?”
“Not if it means doing things without thinking them through.”
“Still—”
“Not if it means losing control of your feelings and actions.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing good came of it. That’s what’s wrong with it,” I say, my final word on the subject. I don’t want to argue with him like I did with Norton that summer. Those arguments always ended the same way, with him declaring me a heroine and with me angry and consuming more drinks, up until I blacked out. I finally grew tired of his stubbornness, and he became quiet and withholding, which led to me drinking more at home, alone, and many nights passing out on the couch cradling a bottle emptied of wine and filled with regrets about going to New York in the first place. As if redemption lay in doing good, I put in harder and longer hours at work placing children in foster homes and making sure they were safe. Too often, then, hangovers got in the way, until I feared collapsing from exhaustion, losing control again, and having another meltdown. Even losing my job.
“But . . . you don’t . . .” Corey’s argument is cut short when the waitress shows up with our order and plops it on the table. She tops off our coffees, again without asking, and trudges off without a word. Corey slathers his hash browns with ketchup, just like Norton did, then digs into his bacon and eggs. Just like Norton did.
“I remember when you were in preschool,” I say. “And now here you are, a grown man. How old . . . ?”
His fork clanks on his plate. His body stiffens. “Thirty-nine. Old enough to know what I’m talking about.”
I shake off his rebuke, try to smile, change the subject. “So, are you married? Any children?”
His eyes stare out the window like he’s searching for something far away. I flip through the pages of songs on the jukebox.
“I’m married,” he says at last. Then he turns away from the window and looks at me like he’s made a decision. “Well, separated, but neither of us has filed for divorce, so I guess, yes, I’m still married. I have a son. Little Norton. He’s four years old.”
My throat swells. Norton lives on in a grandson he was robbed of ever knowing. “He’s in preschool, then,” I say.
Corey’s eyes, suddenly consumed by a terrible sadness, stare down at his plate on the table. “When he can go,” he whispers.
I lean forward. “When he can go?”
He sits back on the bench and averts his eyes. “Some days I have to pick him up early. We play video games and stuff until Rhonda gets home from work, and then I leave.” He looks at me, a quick glance, turns away. “I got laid off from my job, so . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
His shoulders go up and stay there when he says, “My fault,” and then drop back down when he adds, “but it gives me time to be with Pickles.”
“Pickles?”
For the first time, his lips make a smile and his eyes brighten. “Little Norton’s nickname. It started when he was teething. Rhonda was . . .” His voice fades away, but when he jerks his head it comes back. “When my wife was pregnant, she had a craving for pickles and ice cream. One day Norton was fussing, and she had a pickle in her hand, so she stuck it in his mouth. He sure did love that pickle, sucked on it like you wouldn’t believe. He still loves pickles.” The brightness disappears from his eyes and he stares at the wall. “She had a miscarriage.”
I reach across the table to touch his arm. He flinches and pulls away, sits farther back on the bench. “Did you know my mom, too?”
I wince. “Not well.”
“She had to raise me alone.”
I nod.
“She lied about my dad.” He spits the words out through pursed lips. “She never told me the truth.”
My tongue freezes in my mouth. What truth? What does he know?
“She should have told me.” He tightens his jaw and shakes his head. “It could have made a difference.” He stares down at the table again. “But now it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late, Corey.” It’s a dumb thing to say. I don’t know why I said it.
He jerks his head back, his eyes flare. “And maybe, Sylvia, sometimes it is too late.” He jumps up, tosses a ten-dollar bill on the table. “Maybe sometimes it is.”
He turns on his heel and stalks off, leaving me stunned and confused and holding my head in my hands, chastising myself for saying it. I don’t know what he’s talking about and I’m not sure I want to know. The truth is, I’m afraid to know.
“So this is where you’re hiding out.”
I look up at J. B. and smile. “You are a sight for sore eyes,” I say, admiring his salon hairstyle, his clothes, worn to perfection like a model in GQ magazine. He grins and sits down across from me.
“Some guy almost knocked me over when I came in the door.”
“He was with me.”
“What’d you do to him to make him run out of here like a bat out of hell?”
I laugh. It feels good to laugh. “It’s a long story,” I say.
“I’ll take the short version.”
“His name is Corey Cramer. He’s the son of a man I knew a long time ago. I just met him tonight.”
J. B. raises his eyebrows. “And?”
“His father’s name was Norton.”
“And?”
“I was in love with him.”
He grins.
“It’s complicated. I’ll tell you about it sometime. So, what happened? I saved you a seat at the memorial.”
“Got caught up with another angle for my story.”
“What story?”
“It’s complicated. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” His back-at-you teasing makes me laugh again. “So what’s with this Corey guy? Why’s he so pissed off?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did but I probably never will.”
SIX
1984
For weeks, Norton and I stubbornly performed, like a memorized script, our different interpretations about what I’d done at the women’s peace camp. We finally closed down the show when the fissure between us grew so wide we feared we’d never find our way back to each other. But that didn’t mean the conflict was resolved, only that it went underground. Until the night of our affinity group meeting, when it bubbled to the surface and brought us another step closer to the end.
The seven of us met at my apartment to prepare for going on trial. All seventy-eight of the folks who were arrested at Nectaral headquarters on Good Friday had pleaded not guilty to trespassing and had requested trials, which would have jammed up the court docket for a year and a half. So the city attorney’s office had agreed that we could go on trial in our affinity groups. Ours was scheduled for November, and this was our first planning meeting.
Norton came early. “I’m really looking forward to this,” I said. Our trial was an opportunity for me to atone for losing control in New York, a chance to prove that I was able to channel my passion in a thoughtful way. But I didn’t tell him that. I knew he still didn’t think I had anything to atone for.
I hugged him, and felt his body pull away ever so slightly. “There’s beer in the fridge. You can help me put out the snacks.”
He seemed distracted and his feet dragged. I noticed a slight weave to his step as he headed for the kitchen. He grabbed a bottle of beer, then emptied a box of crackers into the basket on the table. Moving more slowly than usual, he tucked the bottle under his arm, picked up the basket and a plate of cheese slices, and went to the living room. I followed with a tray of wine, beer, and glasses and set them on my old chipped coffee table.
I patted the space next to me on my faux-leather couch. “A little snuggle before the others get here?”
He didn’t answer, just walked over to the pulpit chair next to the couch. I didn’t recall him ever sitting in it before. Nor had I ever seen him look this anguished. Tormented, actually. He lowered himself down on the red velvet cushion and pressed his back against the elaborately carved wood, gripping the left armrest with one hand, a bottle of beer with his right. Then he glanced at me from the corner of his eye.
“What’s wrong, Norton?”
His eyes were moist and he attempted a smile, but it came out more like a grimace. Like he was in pain. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. I poured myself a glass of white zinfandel, raised it in a toast to him. He took a swig of beer without raising his bottle first. His hand was trembling. At the sound of a loud knock on the door, his bottle slipped onto his lap and splashed beer onto the red velvet cushion.
I invited the other five affinity group members into the living room, one eye welcoming them with a smile and the other eye watching Norton, my head running down a list of things that could be wrong. Number one on the list—that he was going to break up with me—I found unbearable to think about.
Madeline grabbed a napkin, half a dozen crackers and cheese slices, and a bottle of beer. “Too busy at work for lunch today, and I’m starving,” she said. She had come straight from the office and was still in full-fledged work mode in a lawyerly black pantsuit and matching black thick-framed glasses.
Jim, who’d carried the cross with a nuclear bomb on his back at the Good Friday action, gave me a warm hug, his eyes twinkling with affection. Then he went over to Norton, talking to me over his shoulder. “What church did you get this beautiful chair from, Sylvia?”
“It was in the Bronx,” I said. “My ex-husband did his seminary internship there, in the sixties.”
His head tipped to the side with surprise. “You, a minister’s wife?”
I laughed and said, “A lousy one.”
He nodded like that was just what he expected and then reached down to shake Norton’s limp hand. He gave it an extra squeeze, a kind of reassurance.
Katyna plopped down on the couch, ecstatic about being free of the demands of her kids for a few hours. “I love your apartment. It’s outrageously unique, s-s-so much personality. S-s-suburban houses like mine are so sterile.”
Jane, a mother and grandmother in her fifties, gave Katyna a sympathetic look. “I sure am glad I’m done with all that,” she said. She held up her knitting bag as if to say the day would come when Katyna, too, would be able to enjoy making nice things for her family without having to cook for them every day. She poured herself a glass of wine and then looked from me to Norton. She was always good at picking up on emotions and could tell something was amiss right away. She’d probably suspected long ago that Norton and I were having an affair, but, thank goodness, she wasn’t a gossip.
Tony trailed the others into the living room. He greeted Norton and me with eyes that melted into grandfatherly crinkles at the corners and then claimed my desk chair, just as I knew he would, so he could swivel around to face people when they were talking.
In the flurry of everyone arriving and getting settled, things almost seemed normal, but then I noticed the fixed smile on Norton’s face, a look I’d never seen before. Instead of sitting next to Katyna on the couch as I’d planned, I sat on a wooden chair directly across from the pulpit chair so I could keep an eye on him.
There was no need for introductions or formalities at the beginning of the meeting. We all liked and trusted each other. We’d gone through several nonviolent training sessions together. We’d had each other’s backs at several actions. We knew who wanted to be bailed out and when. Who planned to cooperate with the police and how. Whom to contact if someone was held in jail overnight. Who had special medical or other needs. Who wanted or needed a lawyer. All critical pieces of information that, to my shame, I’d failed to provide to anyone before I was arrested at the military depot in New York.
Logical, plainspoken Madeline took charge. She tucked in her chin and looked at us over the rims of her glasses. “Okay, our trial starts November seventh, only a month away, so let’s get to it. Everyone ready?”
Jim gave her a thumbs-up. “You bet, boss.” Madeline and Jim were night and day. She was an in-charge person, he was laid-back. She dressed in formal business attire, he in a gray hooded sweatshirt and faded jeans. She was a legal assistant in a high-powered corporate firm, he a former minister turned addictions counselor.
Everyone nodded that they were ready. Except Norton. Madeline either ignored him or didn’t notice. “Before we get down to the nitty-gritty,” she said, “a quick reminder about why we’re going on trial instead of pleading guilty, okay?” She didn’t wait for a response. “We’re using the trials as educational tools. It’s a way to get the message out that one of our local corporations is producing parts for nuclear weapons, including cruise missiles.”
Tony raised his hand and swiveled his chair to face Madeline. “But it’s not just information for information’s sake.” His voice was patient and paternalistic, honed through decades of working with people who have developmental disabilities. “We hope that, when people become aware of the danger of nuclear annihilation, they will do something about it.”
“Yes,” Madeline said. “That is our mission. Everyone agreed?”
“Agreed,” everyone said. Everyone but Norton. He shrugged his shoulders and stared at the posters on my living room wall like he’d never seen them before.
“Okay, then,” Madeline said. “Martin Lind gave all the affinity groups a sheet of instructions.”
“I have it here,” I said. “Want me to read them out loud?”
Everyone but Norton nodded.
“The first decision each affinity group needs to make is whether to request a trial by judge or by a jury of your peers.” I heard Norton shuffle his feet. I stopped reading and looked at him. His hand dismissed me, so I continued. “The second decision each affinity group needs to make is if you want to have a coalition attorney assigned to your group as counsel or if you want to go pro se.”
“Excuse me,” Katyna said. “I don’t know what pro s-s-se means.”
Madeline eagerly jumped at the chance to explain things. She smiled indulgently at Katyna, our youngest member and a neophyte to the nuclear disarmament movement. “Pro se means we would represent ourselves without an attorney.”
“Legalese,” Norton grumbled under his breath.
Madeline either didn’t hear him or decided to forge ahead anyway. “Okay, folks, you heard the instructions. First decision. What’ll it be? Trial by judge or jury?”
“Jury,” everyone said. Everyone but Norton, who sat still as a statue, his eyes downcast and his arms crossed over his chest.
Madeline laughed. “Well, that was easy! Let’s move on then.”
Jane put her knitting down, her face laden with concern. “A jury is a way to reach more people with our message, Norton, don’t you agree?”
“I’m sure it is, Katyna.” Norton’s words dripped with sarcasm.
Jane’s lips formed an O like she was going to correct him, tell him her name was Jane, not Katyna, but she furrowed her brow instead and picked up her knitting again.
Madeline clapped her hands. “Absolutely, Jane. A trial by jury is a way to reach more people. Okay, next decision. Do we ask for an attorney or do we represent ourselves?”
“Represent ourselves,” everyone but Norton said.
“Hell yes!” Katyna’s outburst was completely out of character. We all looked at her, bemused. “What?” Her cheeks flushed pink.
“Just agreeing with you,” Jim said, with a kindness derived from decades of rough-and-tumble life experiences.
Tony rolled the desk chair over to Katyna and patted her hand. “We share your enthusiasm,” he said.
Madeline slapped her knees. “Okay, pro se it is then.”
Norton raised his hand, then dropped it onto his lap. I noted with alarm how bony it was. Jim slouched down in his chair like he’d noticed it, too, and it was weighing on him.
Jane put down the scarf she was knitting. “What is it, Norton?”
He didn’t look at her, just shook his head. I caught myself biting at the cuticle on my thumbnail and quickly wrapped my hands in the soft cotton folds of my green peasant skirt. Something was wrong, and I didn’t think it was just about our trial. Maybe something had happened at home. Maybe Chloe found out about us. I looked into Norton’s eyes, but they offered up no clues.
After a few minutes, Madeline leaned forward with her hands out, palms up. “Okay, then, moving on to some of the other things we have to do.” She reached in her purse and pulled out a notebook. “I made a list of five questions we should ask during voir dire.” She paused and glanced around the circle, eyebrows raised. “Voir dire,” she said, “is what jury selection is called, okay? In addition to deciding what questions to ask potential jurors, we have to decide who will make the opening and closing statements, too.”
Norton held his face in his hands and moaned, so loud that even Madeline, despite her enthusiastic desire to keep things moving, couldn’t ignore him anymore.
She crossed her arms. “What is it, Norton?”
He sat up rigid, his hands fisted on his lap, his knuckles white. He shook his head but said nothing.
Tony raised his hand like a student in school waiting to be called on. “I’m thinking that maybe.” He paused, then started again, slow and patient. “I wonder if . . . I think each of us could maybe write out our testimony first? Maybe if we saw how they all fit together, it would be easier to make other decisions?”
Norton unclasped his hands, leaned forward and shouted, “No! We have to take more drastic action than any of you are talking about.” His hands slapped the armrests of the chair. “We don’t have a choice.” The lines around his downturned lips were a mournful gray, an indication of pain or fear I couldn’t tell which.
Katyna leaned forward. “I don’t understand. Can you s-s-say more?”
Jim drew his legs in and pulled himself out of his slouch. “What are you suggesting, Norton?”
“We resist. Refuse to cooperate. Shut the system down.”
I massaged my temples. Please don’t do this, I silently begged him.
“Resist how?” Tony asked.
“We turn our faces to, I mean, we turn our backs on the judge.” He shot me a quick look. I told him, with my eyes, that this argument was between him and me and that’s where it should stay. But he ignored me and went on. “We refuse to give our names. We don’t answer any questions.”
Katyna fidgeted with the wedding band on her left hand. Madeline scowled. Mostly, the others gaped, baffled, confused. This wasn’t the Norton they knew. They didn’t understand what he was doing or why. But I did. He was saying we should all act in court like I had in New York. He was resurrecting our argument.
Jane cleared her throat. “What do you think we’d accomplish by doing that, Norton?”
Emboldened by the sincerity of her effort to understand, he leaned toward her. “We’ve been negotiating with the top folks at Nectaral for years, right? And where has that gotten us? The Department of Defense is literally throwing money at Nectaral, and it keeps developing and producing more and more weapons of mass destruction. Think about it. We’ve changed nothing. It’s only gotten worse.”
I had to admit he had a point. Despite all our efforts, all our protests and acts of civil disobedience, the war-making machine was thriving, and with almost no public notice, comment, or objection.
Norton leaned into the circle. “It’s time to resist. Refuse to coalesce . . . I mean . . . cooperate or negotiate. Shut the system down.”
Madeline’s eyes flashed like she’d reached the end of her tether. “We’re already shutting the system down, Norton. It’s going to take three or four months to get through all the trials.”
Tony squinted and raised his hand again. “If we resisted, the judge would have no choice but to throw the book at us.”
