I sit at the library counter flipping through research books. The use of asbestos dates back thousands of years. Strabo, a Greek geographer of the first century, discovered one of the first asbestos quarries on the island of Evvoia. The name “chrysotile,” the most common form of asbestos, is derived from the Greek words chrysos, “gold,” and tilos, “fiber.” Gold fibers. Early on, it was used to make pottery as well as insulation to fill chinks in log cabins in what is now Finland.
Ancient Romans wove asbestos fibers into towels, nets, and head coverings for women. Roman restaurants used tablecloths and napkins made of asbestos. They could be thrown into fire to remove food stains and crumbs. Afterward, the cloth was whiter than before. So the Romans named asbestos amiantus, “unpolluted.”
Pliny the Elder, doctor and historian, observed that asbestos was a magical material providing protection against spells. Yet he also noted that those exposed to high concentrations were prone to lung sickness. He recommended that quarry slaves use respirators made of transparent bladder skin to protect them from asbestos dust.
During medieval times religious crosses, resembling wood, were constructed from asbestos. Merchants claimed they were made from the cross on which Jesus was crucified. They proved their claims by setting them on fire.
Ancient Persians imported asbestos from India to wrap their dead. They believed asbestos to be hair from a small mythical animal that lived by fire and died by water.
I sense a presence. I glance up. A young girl stands before the counter, thin as a noon shadow, her gray eyes watching me. She raises an almost-invisible eyebrow, and I sense she has a question. I glance around, but no adult seems to accompany her. Her nose slopes to a small button. She places all ten fingers on the counter, the nails stubby, rimmed with dirt. Her dusty-blonde hair is chopped off below her ears. Her checked shirt strains across her shoulders, her dungarees rolled at the ankles. On her feet are plastic flip-flops, one of the straps split. She smells of grass and apples. I want to say her gray eyes resemble smoke or that gold streaks her hair. This isn’t true. Yet, as I watch her, the rest of the room fades to wallpaper.
“Hi,” I whisper. I stand up, leaning toward her. “Can I help you?”
She nods, a slight tightening of her neck as she swallows. In the movie version, she will tell me her parents abandoned her. No, she will tell me her mother died in a car crash and her father of cancer. She will tell me she has no brothers or sisters, that she never knew her grandparents. She will tell me she is orphaned, has no one. She will ask me to save her.
“I have a goat,” she says. “How do you raise him?”
Goats, goats, goats. My mind races. Goats roamed St. Thomas; goats grazed fields on the kibbutz where I searched for my unplanted Jewish roots. But I never so much as touched any of those goats.
“Oh,” I say, suddenly realizing she wants a book about them. “Here, let me help you.”
I lead her to the card catalogue and flip to “G,” to “goats.” One book. My Pet Goat.
I rush to the shelves. It’s not there. I hurry back to the counter, searching through the checkout cards. It’s been checked out or else permanently “disappeared” for over three months. I show her the card, carefully explaining the procedure: that if she gives me her name and phone number, I’ll call her the minute it’s returned. I don’t say it’s probably gone forever.
She nods. I print her name and number on the form, tagging the card. “I’ll call you the second it’s returned,” I reiterate.
Then she is gone. For a long moment I watch the spot where she last stood as if her shadow remains.
I look at her name, the number. I retrieve the phone book to learn her address. No listing. No one with her last name with that number. Suppose the book on goats is returned when I’m not here? Suppose Belle is on duty when she picks it up? I remove the tag from the card, fold the form, and put it in my pocket. Every day I’ll check to see if the book’s returned.
A week passes. The book remains missing. One evening, I dial the number to tell the girl how sorry I am. The phone rings and rings. No one, not even an answering machine, answers. I never see her again. I don’t understand my sense of bereavement.
On April 10 the Floyd County Commissioner’s office finally releases its report. Laboratory tests confirm the presence of dangerous levels of asbestos fiber particles in five areas of the library.
In the April 11 edition of the Rome News-Tribune, County Commissioner Ronald Smith is quoted as saying, “We’re concerned. We’re going to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure there’s no risk to anyone.” He goes on to explain that they plan dust- and ventilation-control measures. They will post warning signs. They will wet-mop the floors.
Kim Leighton from the newspaper calls for my reaction to the report. “‘While I’d like to continue to work there, the asbestos is a very serious health problem that should have been acted upon sooner. Then I wouldn’t have had to get involved,’ said Sue Smith,” he writes.
Prisoners from the Floyd County jail arrive at the library to mop floors. They wear no face masks, no gloves or rubber booties. They laugh and joke, happy to be out of jail for a few hours. Every day it’s as if the ceiling itself metastasizes, producing more and more poisonous particles.
I prepare a letter to hand-deliver to Abigail Kane. “I cannot afford to breathe asbestos even one more hour. My resignation is effective immediately.” I xerox copies of the letter for the Rome News-Tribune, the Georgia Library Association, the American Library Association, and the Board of Trustees of Sara Hightower Regional Library.
The next day Don Hatcher of WXIA follows me up the steps of the library, camera whirring. I open the door to the business office. As luck would have it, Abigail sits at her desk as if expecting me. I march over and hand her the letter. “I resign,” I say.
The April 15 edition of the Rome News-Tribune reports my decision. “‘That’s a sick building,’ Mrs. Sue Smith said.”
I petition to present a statement at the April 23 meeting of the county commissioners.
I spend days writing and revising my four-page speech, as if I plan to address Congress.
The courtroom where the commissioners meet, in the county courthouse, smells of floor wax. The five commissioners sit on a dais. I stand before them wearing a plain oxford shirt and gray skirt. A large, curious audience sits behind me. “Every hour counts,” I begin.
“In one particular case,” I say, after a few introductory statements, “a person died of mesothelioma simply because she lived in the same house as an asbestos worker. In another case, in London, several people died who lived within a half mile from an asbestos plant. . . .”
Commissioner Smith, a Marine Corps veteran, tries to cut me off. He moves to adjourn the meeting. The other commissioners, however, won’t “so move.” I continue my speech, but before I finish, he again interrupts. “She’s through so far as I’m concerned,” he says, leaving the room.
The audience applauds when I finish.
For a week or so after the meeting, I receive crank phone calls from an unidentified man. “Silverman, you better leave town.”
How does he know my birth name? Why does he use it?
The crank calls don’t scare me too much, or not as much as if he would have said, “Smith, you better leave town.” What scares me more is that he knows my real name, my Jewish name, even after all my efforts to dodge that name, dodge the bullet, as it were, after all my efforts of disguise. Collective hatred is more dangerous than personal vendettas. For long moments after I hang up the phone, all I hear are those three syllables reverberating: Silverman, Silverman, Silverman.
I stand in a cinder-block bunker at the 7 Hills Firing Range. I wear yellow-lens protective goggles and earplugs. I plant my feet. I grip a Colt .22 Diamondhead in my left hand, my right hand steadying my wrist. Before me, several yards down a lane resembling a bowling alley, hangs a target of a male figure.
I know nothing about guns. I’ve never hel
d one before, nor do I plan to purchase one.
But the thing is, I’m a good shot, I discover. Even if I miss the “important” parts of the paper anatomy, I rarely miss the figure itself. After I finish one round of bullets, I press a lever that activates a chain mechanism. The target whirls back to me. I clip on a new target.
I love the cool metal trigger against my index finger, the heft of the barrel in my palm. I love the scent of gunpowder, the residue lingering on my fingers. I bring the silhouettes home with me to admire. At least one shot pierces the paper heart.
In the 60 Minutes version, Mike Wallace asks about the cover-up. He asks if I fear for my life.
In the tragic play, I’m a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, my body wrapped in gold-fiber asbestos, skin forever preserved against conflagration.
In the movie version, Clint Eastwood enters Sara Hightower Regional Library. “I tried being reasonable. I didn’t much like it,” he sneers.
In the sequel, Meryl Streep as Sue Smith glances in the rearview mirror. Menacing headlights follow her, closing in.
All summer, my husband researches and writes his book. He’s immersed in Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth, Remi Clignet’s The Structure of Artistic Revolutions, or Kant’s The Critique of Judgment. Since I am now unemployed, he asks if I’ll help type his manuscript. I agree. “The generic and world-testing characteristics of the realistic novels I describe bear a similarity to Bakhtin’s description of the menippean satire and its carnivalization of discourse. . . . An intertextual theory of realism precludes the possibility of extratextual denotative reference because the linguistic sign refers (or, following Derrida, defers) not to an external reference but to a connotative series of other signs. . . .”
By the end of summer, I hate words. Every single one of them. Whereas once I loved them, studying sentences for hours in that library in the West Indies. But now, I wonder, maybe words—all words and ideas—simply get in the way of things. Real things. Things like goats. Things like girls with hair the color of wet sand in August. Things like regret. Or pure old-fashioned, unadulterated angst.
I climb the rutted road to the top of Lavender Mountain to escape my husband’s book for a few hours. I’m sticky and damp. I cross brittle grass past fruit trees and berry patches designed with the same plan as Castle Nemi in Italy, where Martha Berry’s sister lived. I cup my palms to the sides of my eyes and peer through a window of the rarely used House o’ Dreams. In 1926 students and faculty constructed this cottage for Martha as her hideaway. They even built the furniture and wove the fabric for curtains and slipcovers. Today the air feels vacant, as if I’m the only one who’s been here in a long time. The top of this mountain is the House o’ Dreams, but it’s also the end of the road.
Where to go now?
Why do I even remain married? Buried in his philosophical books, deconstructing words and sentences for a living, my husband never notices the absence of a real me.
Which must be what I’ve wanted.
After all, because of his inattention, I’m never exposed for the poseur, the fraud that I am: a hollow woman. One not yet constructed enough to be deconstructed.
In my secret life, unable to find an identity that lasts, I change roles like fads. I seek one style to fit this year, another for next year. But I end up as neither one thing nor another.
Nothing: on my way to nowhere.
At some point must I find my own fireproof—or fiery?—garments. But how? Where? When?
In another hour, the sky will deepen to the tint of the sea. Silhouettes of birds, the color of rain, wing toward evening, only the tips of their feathers studded with diamonds of light. I think of those mythical creatures living by fire, dying by water . . . floating across a shimmering edge of a soon-forgotten dream.
No, you can’t start a fire without a spark. Sometimes you can’t start one anyway. Sometimes you just smolder, waiting for your chance to burst into flame.
Fahrvergnügen
A Road Trip Through a Marriage
Fahrvergnügen: Driving enjoyment.
Volkswagen advertisement
Synchronicity
One Christmas vacation my husband insists we drive (instead of fly) from Georgia to Houston to attend his mother’s second wedding. Which means we’re to drive in his 1972 dual-carburetor Volkswagen camper despite the fact, as I frequently point out, that the carburetors aren’t, ever, in sync. Despite the fact that the hubcaps periodically frisbee off the wheels at any speed over forty miles per hour, that the heating system works only in muggy weather, that the windshield wipers wipe depending on mood and climate, although infrequently in actual rain. To say nothing of the fact that, only last week, the camper sprung a gas-line leak. It dripped a combustible trail from our house to the mechanic—me, waving good-bye to my husband from the front stoop—expecting to see a fireball at any moment, unsure, at this point in our marriage, whether this would be an altogether upsetting event.
My husband loves the pumpkin-colored camper to distraction. He invests hundreds of dollars on the carburetors, their synchronicity lasting only as long as it takes to pull out of the mechanic’s garage. He spends hours tinkering and cleaning. He snaps Polaroids, displaying them on his desk. Once he asked me to crank the engine while he investigated under the chassis to determine the cause of its latest ailment. When I turned the key I forgot to put the transmission in neutral. The camper lurched forward. I almost plowed over him before I slammed on the brakes, stalling the engine. He survived with nothing worse than pale red tire marks on his stomach. Although I apologized, profusely, he never again asked me to help.
The Intricacies of Foreign Car Repair in Lanett, Alabama
I’d prefer to fly to Houston, but I don’t want to attend his mother’s wedding in any event. As maid of honor, I’ve been coerced into wearing a pink dress as frothy and frilly as cake icing. But the preparations are finalized. My husband washes and waxes the camper. He cleans the orange upholstery, the matching stool with metal legs, the storage chest. He vacuums the carpeting and shines the windows. He pops the top to dust for cobwebs. Two days before Christmas we pack up the camper, setting out for our initial stop in Pensacola to collect my husband’s aged aunt before continuing on to Houston.
We pull out of the Berry College campus, where we still live in that log cabin, onto Martha Berry Highway, follow US 27 south to US 29 before reaching I-85. We have driven 124.85 miles, a total of two hours and twenty-two minutes (but who’s counting?), when the camper drops an engine rod outside Lanett, Alabama.
We’ve barely made it over the border from Georgia. Really, we’re on the cusp of the border, hardly in one state or the other. We’re stranded on the side of the road, loaded down with Christmas and wedding presents, suitcases, frilly dress, duffle bag, Styrofoam cooler.
While my husband walks to a service station, I (fuming) theoretically guard the camper, as if anyone would want to—or even could—steal it. He returns, hours later, with a tow truck and driver. We stand on the shoulder, vehicles whizzing past. My husband discusses cars, engines, options, while the driver hooks the bumper to the towing mechanism. I, meanwhile, consider pushing my husband into the path of an oncoming semi.
The driver tows the camper to the only place in Lanett where he thinks, maybe, if we’re lucky, a mechanic might work on a foreign car. A sign taped to the door says it won’t reopen until after Christmas. We unload the presents and suitcases, piling everything into the tow truck. We’re driven to a Super 8 on the edge of town.
“How long will you be staying with us?” the receptionist asks.
“One night,” my husband says. “Maybe two.”
I glance at the ceiling. Indefinitely, I think.
The room is cold, airless. Still in my jacket, I lie beneath the blanket and bedspread. My husband turns on the combination air conditioner/heater window unit. The fan rattles like out-of-sync carburetors.
Years ago I find my own 1969 green Volkswagen beetle, used, at a dealer in Washington DC
. I work on Capitol Hill at the time, am tired of relying on DC Transit, so finally save enough money to purchase it, my first car. The salesman, young and blond, accompanies me on a test run. Since I’ve never driven a stick shift before, we stay on flat streets. I have considerable trouble shifting from neutral to first on a hill, or even a small incline, if stopped at a red light. I can’t simultaneously synchronize the brake, clutch, and accelerator. Therefore, the car drifts backward, which means trouble when another car pulls up too close behind. Really, I have trouble shifting, period. But I love the putt-putt engine. I love the sound of the Blaupunkt tuned to my favorite rock-and-roll station. I fill up the tank for three dollars. I slide it into a space less than half the size of one of the ubiquitous limousines with diplomatic plates. I get a House of Representatives staff parking sticker for the underground lot beneath the Longworth Building. Sure, the two little heating levers on either side of the gearshift are more for show than actual heat. Still, it’s all mine. And I’m in love with the sheer bugginess of it.
Yet my love affair is problematic almost from the start.
One evening a week or so after I purchase it, I receive a crank phone call. The sound of a man’s heavy breathing floats through the phone line into my ear. I slam down the receiver. A few days later, the man whispers obscenities. Worse, he knows my first name, which isn’t listed in the phone book. His voice sounds familiar. After a few weeks, I recognize it: the man who sold me the car.
Then, mornings when I leave my apartment for work, I suspiciously eye the car as if it is making the phone calls. I unlock the door, almost afraid the man lurks inside.
Keeping It on Mute
My husband finally reaches the owner of the car-repair shop by phone. But the mechanic says he won’t have time to examine the camper until after the first of the year, more than ten days from now. My husband explains about his mother’s wedding, the Super 8 motel. The owner himself is on his way out of town. Ten days. Take it or leave it.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 13