Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  But there is no consensus about what constitutes a “safe” level of plutonium, and even a pinch, according to the AEC itself, can be lethal. Glenn Seaborg, the physicist who isolated and gave plutonium its name in 1941 during the Manhattan Project, said that plutonium “is unique among all of the chemical elements. And it is fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts.” Internalized plutonium can be the most deadly. Plutonium emits alpha radiation, which cannot penetrate skin. (Gamma radiation or X-rays can be harmful by hitting the body from the outside.) Alpha emitters have to be inside the body to be dangerous. If plutonium is inhaled or ingested, or if it enters the body through an open wound, tiny particles can lodge in the lungs or migrate to other organs, particularly the liver or the surface or marrow of bone, where they bombard surrounding tissue with radiation. It may take twenty to thirty years for health effects such as cancer, immune deficiencies, or genetic defects to become manifest.

  A full gram of plutonium, which is denser than lead, is scarcely bigger than a grain of rice. One microgram—a millionth of a gram—of plutonium, invisible to the human eye, can produce a fatal cancer, according to standards set by the AEC as early as 1945. Plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life, the period of time during which the number of radioactive nuclei decreases by a factor of one-half. This means that every 24,000 years, half of a given amount of plutonium will shed energy, gradually turning into a nonradioactive material. Measured in human lifetimes, 24,000 years is almost unfathomable. And yet, after 24,000 years, half of the material will still be radioactive, and after 24,000 more years, half of that amount will continue to be dangerously radioactive. Even after ten half-lives—that is, 240,000 years—the radioactivity will still not be wholly gone. The physicist Fritjof Capra says plutonium should be contained and isolated for half a million years.

  Many scientists believe there is no safe level of exposure to plutonium.

  Martell and his colleagues are surprised by the AEC’s admission of off-site plutonium migration, but stunned by the news of where it came from. Dow Chemical and the AEC have known about the leaking drums for at least a decade, but they have kept the information from the public.

  Over time Rocky Flats removes most of the barrels and covers a portion of the area with asphalt. Some of the barrels are sent to a waste site in Idaho and some are buried on-site (eventually contributing to groundwater contamination). But even after their removal, wind continues to scatter plutonium for miles. Five particularly powerful windstorms in late 1968 and early 1969 suspend a large portion of plutonium as dust and carry it toward Denver. On January 7, 1969, winds reach 125 miles per hour.

  There’s no reason for concern, officials emphasize. Major General Giller declares that “The AEC is quite convinced that the plant in its present location and operating conditions poses no health and safety hazard either to its own workers or the local population.”

  But AEC guidelines for worker or citizen exposure to low-level radiation are under dispute. Dr. John Gofman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, worked on the Manhattan Project and was an expert on chromosomal abnormalities and cancer. In 1963 he established the Biomedical Research Division for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and began conducting research on the influence of radiation on human chromosomes. Concerned about the lack of data on the health effects of low-level radiation, with other scientists he reviewed health studies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as other epidemiological studies.

  In 1969, Gofman and his colleague, Dr. Arthur R. Tamplin, suggest that federal safety guidelines for low-level exposures to radiation be reduced by 90 percent. The AEC immediately disputes the findings.

  JUNIOR HIGH proves challenging. In gym I’m issued a blue polyester uniform too tight in the crotch—already I’m long-waisted and taller than most of the boys—and I loathe taking showers with the other girls, who scream and giggle and pinch. They make fun of the gym teacher, a serious-looking woman with muscular arms and legs. Each week we take a test on the climbing rope that hangs from the gym ceiling and each week I make it halfway up, hang just long enough to cringe under the gaze of my schoolmates, and slide back down in defeat. I come home with red welts on my thighs from dodge ball, and a healthy fear of the balance beam, a long wooden rail four inches wide that all the girls have to walk up and back on, our feet dusted in baby powder. The only place I feel graceful is on the back of a horse.

  Tina, however—who decided not to abandon me after all—is determined to make me into a real girl. On the day of the first school sock hop, she insists we walk to school rather than ride the bus so we can talk strategy. She wants to give me some advice on dancing with boys. She herself has her eye on a basketball player.

  Walking to school is complicated. It involves passing the historic Bunce house, crossing an increasingly busy street, wading through an irrigation ditch (originating, unbeknownst to us, at Rocky Flats) and crossing the railroad tracks. Tina shows up at my door in a blue miniskirt and white fishnet stockings.

  “Hurry up,” she declares. The morning is cool and her breath hangs in front of her face. “We have to go before everyone starts showing up at the bus stop.”

  “Hold on.” I’m still tugging at the elastic waist of my pantyhose. The crotch is stuck midway down my thighs like a tourniquet.

  “Your mother let you buy those?”

  “Yeah.” The plastic egg-shaped container sits on my dresser. “Finally.”

  “You have to stretch them up from the bottom,” Tina advises. “Don’t you know? Like this.” She squats down and inches the nylon up past my ankles to my knees. “Now pull.”

  “They’re too tight.”

  “Just suck everything in. And don’t use your nails. Use your fingertips, like this.” Tina touches her own stockings delicately, then stands back to watch as I struggle. “That’s good enough,” she sighs, and slings her purse over her shoulder, leather fringe dangling.

  We walk side-by-side through the silent neighborhood, Tina’s long brown hair swinging with her stride. The houses look empty. Most of the fathers have already left for work. I wonder what the women do all day, each in her own little fairytale tower. How much cooking and cleaning can a person do before she goes crazy?

  We cross 80th Avenue, slink through several backyards, and emerge into the long field before the railroad tracks. Sunlight streams across the dry meadow and the weeds tickle my ankles.

  “Lots of thorns out here,” Tina says. She wears go-go boots, white vinyl to match her stockings.

  “I think I have a snag.”

  “Don’t let it run!” Tina orders. She opens her leather bag and digs around in the bottom. “Here.” She holds up a squat bottle of clear fingernail polish. “This will fix it.” She paints a ring of wet polish around the hole and blows on my ankle to make it dry.

  I feel like a new member of a secret female club.

  We reach the railroad tracks, where my sisters and I put pennies on the tracks and wait for the train to come along and flatten them. Every mother in the neighborhood threatens her child with details of what will happen if you get a foot stuck between the rails. It never happens. Once the train roars by, the pennies are gone. The only flat penny I ever get is from a machine at a museum. The real risk is that kids who set off to walk to school in the morning get sidetracked by various attractions along the way and arrive late or not at all. Tina has no time for childhood games, but when we step over the tracks, we stand for a long moment between the rails just to taunt fate before crossing over to the irrigation ditch.

  “Damn,” Tina says. “The water’s up.”

  “What?” I feel a prickly sensation climbing up my inner thigh as my pantyhose begin to disintegrate.

  “Why are they running the irrigation ditches this time of year?” She tiptoes down the bank. “That water’s over a foot deep.”

  I look down the tracks to Simms Road, the narrow two-lane where the school bus passed fifteen minutes ear
lier. “We could walk down the tracks to the road, cross over, and then walk back,” I offer.

  “We’ll be late for school,” Tina says. “We’re late already. Today’s the one day we don’t want to miss, remember?”

  “We have a test in French, too,” I say.

  “Who cares about the test.” She bends down and unzips her boots. “It’s the dance that matters.” She jumps in, right foot first, and makes it in three strides. “Shit! That water’s cold.”

  I tug off my new heels and inch into the water. Mud oozes through the nylon and up between my toes. I scramble up the bank and fall in line behind Tina, my feet squishing in my shoes. We’re both shivering.

  We take our seats just as the bell rings. The teacher speaks with a French accent. Tina and I have agreed it’s fake. What would a real French person be doing in Arvada, Colorado? The school has grown so quickly that half our classes are held in the “temps,” temporary trailers propped up on cement blocks behind the school that sway with the wind and are always too hot or too cold. Today is a cold day and the teacher wears her coat. She passes the tests down each aisle, and the class sits with heads bent over their papers. I begin filling in verb conjugations. I won’t admit it to Tina, but I actually like French.

  “This is stupid,” Tina hisses. She turns her paper over without filling in any of the blanks. “And look at your legs.” A brown water mark crosses each thigh, and my pantyhose, or what’s left of them, are a complex network of criss-crossed fibers. “Can I see your notes?”

  “No.” My ethics are flexible, but this is one test I’ve studied for.

  Tina sets down her pencil in defeat. “What’s in your bag?”

  “A book,” I say. “You can read it.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “I borrowed it from my mother.”

  “Who wants to read a book you borrowed from your mother?”

  “Page nineteen,” I say. “Take a look.” I pull The Godfather out of my backpack.

  “I heard about this book.” Tina grins.

  “Read the wedding scene,” I whisper. “The page is bent.”

  She flips it open and begins reading. “Wow. Your mom gave you this?”

  “Sort of.”

  She begins reading in a low voice. “ ‘On the landing Sonny grabbed her and pulled her down the hall into an empty bedroom.’ ”

  “Ssshh—”

  “Listen to this: ‘Her legs went weak as the door closed behind them. She felt Sonny’s mouth on hers. At that moment she felt his hand come up beneath her bridesmaid’s gown, heard the rustle of material giving way’—”

  “Tina?” The teacher stands in the aisle. “Are you finished with your test?”

  “No.” Tina sits up straight.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Nothing.” She smiles. “Just Kris’s book.”

  “I’ll take that, thank you.” The teacher holds the book up for the class before setting it on her desk. Then she scoops up our tests. “I think you girls have finished your work for the day,” she says.

  The class snickers. After what seems like hours, the bell rings. Randy Sullivan sits a few seats ahead. Has he noticed? Students tumble down the makeshift steps and head for the warmth of the main building.

  In a metal stall in the girls’ restroom, I roll the nylon off each leg, peel off the checkered film of nail polish, and tuck the small brown ball of nylon deep down in the trash. That afternoon I walk home alone and avoid the irrigation ditch. I’d be too shy to dance anyway.

  A FEW weeks later Tina announces she’s going to have a boy-girl party. The thought makes me feel a little sick. Girl parties are bad enough. My mother, pleased that I am venturing out into the social world, takes me to the mall to buy a new blouse. Suddenly we veer toward the cosmetics counter. “Now is the time to begin thinking about your face,” she says.

  “Yes indeed,” the salesclerk concurs. She’s a petite woman with eyelashes as long as her fingernails. Fake, I’m sure. “What you do now determines what you’ll look like years from now. Your face is everything.” She peers at me closely. I realize my face bears serious deficiencies.

  “Are you one of our regular customers?”

  “She’s not. I am. I’ve used the same products for years,” my mother says with pride.

  “What does she use now? Does she exfoliate?” the woman asks.

  I have no idea what that means. “I don’t use anything,” I say.

  “Right,” my mother says. “Can’t you tell? Look at her. She needs the whole shebang.”

  “Well, that is certainly not a problem,” the saleswoman purrs. In ten minutes I have a lineup of products that should guarantee my face for the next twenty years. “Remember, thirty minutes every morning, thirty minutes every night,” the saleswoman says. I can’t imagine how my schedule might accommodate this type of regimen. I roll out of bed ten minutes before the bus reaches our streetcorner each morning and sometimes sleep with all my clothes on, I’m so tired from horseback riding. I nod and take the bag.

  “Years from now, you’ll be glad we talked,” the salesclerk chirps as she hands my mother the receipt. “Come back and see me when you start to run low!”

  We move on to the clothing department. “Are you a misses’ or ladies’ size now?” my mother asks. “Let’s look in the ladies’ section.” She smiles.

  The ladies’ department holds racks and racks of blazers, cuffed slacks, and polyester pantsuits. If this is what it means to be a lady, I’m not interested. We finally agree on a lilac blouse.

  I take the blouse into the dressing room, my mother fidgeting outside, and slip it on. I face the three-way mirror. The bright light enhances every defect. Something isn’t right. I turn to the side and catch a glimpse of my face, newly exfoliated. What is it?

  It’s my nose. I have my father’s nose. The chin, too. In fact, my entire facial profile is identical to his.

  My mother is waiting by the cash register. “Aren’t you going to buy it?” she asks as I put the blouse back on the rack.

  “No,” I say. “It’s not my style.”

  “You need that blouse. You can’t go around all the time wearing T-shirts and cowboy boots.” She takes the blouse back off the rack. “This is perfect for you.”

  Tina’s house has a basement as large as the first floor. Dusty wooden stairs descend to a cold cement floor. The room is windowless. A wooden rack with canned goods and a radio stands against the wall—a pint-sized bomb shelter. For the party, her mother sets up a couple of card tables and chairs and tapes paper Chinese lanterns over the hanging lightbulbs. Tina brings down her eight-track tape player and sets out bags of corn nuts and party mix. She invites four boys and four girls.

  “Are you inviting Randy?” I ask.

  “Not this time,” Tina says. “I think you should get to like David.” She prefers Bridledale boys to Meadowgate boys.

  “I don’t even know David.” I wear the lilac polyester blouse, which itches.

  “Well, you won’t talk to Randy, so what does it matter?” The closest I’ve come to getting up the guts to talk to Randy is riding Tonka past his house after school, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. If someone’s in the yard I turn around and go the other way.

  We start out by playing hearts, then Twister, arms and legs tangling. “Let’s play spin the bottle!” Tina exclaims, and I know it’s been her plan all along. My heart sinks. Truth be told, I’ve never been kissed except by Tonka and our string of dogs. We sit cross-legged in a circle. My heart sinks when the Coke bottle spins to me and David, a sullen boy with long blond bangs who rarely speaks at school. He glances over at Tina, then leans over and pecks my cheek.

  “Oh, come on,” Tina says. “The rule is you have to go to the back of the room and kiss at least a minute.” She’s keeping time on her watch

  “Over here, then,” David mutters, and pulls me away from the group. His mouth is wet and cool and tastes of cigarettes. He stops kissing when I don’t kis
s back. Tina spins the bottle again and it flips to her and her basketball player. They’re gone longer than a minute.

  The next morning on the school bus, I wince as we approach David’s stop. He stands waiting, expressionless. “There he is!” Tina says.

  David strides up the steps. “Hey, Kris,” he says.

  I stare at the floor, cringing. I hate Tina.

  “Kris?” It takes some effort on his part to repeat my name. The other kids pile up behind him, waiting to get on the bus. “Come on!” someone shouts.

  I feel the tips of my ears turning pink.

  “Ah, hell,” David says. He saunters to the back of the bus.

  Tina turns to me. “Well, that was stupid,” she says. We ride the rest of the way in silence.

  I TURN thirteen. I feel electric.

  I love Joni Mitchell and Carole King. I know all the lyrics to “Big Yellow Taxi” and “A Natural Woman.” I embroider the bottoms of my bell-bottom jeans in brightly colored thread and love the way they flop over my cowboy boots. My skin and clothes smell like hay, horses, and sunshine, and my face and the back of my neck are tender with sunburn. I love the way my hair whips in the wind when I’m riding, and the way the hair rises on my forearms just before lightning arches across my backyard sky. I like the sound of a meadowlark’s call on a hot afternoon under a cottonwood as I lie back on Tonka’s broad, warm haunches, and the dry wheat-and-tobacco smell of the tall prairie grass and the occasional stink of skunk.

  It’s a fierce love, a love for small things. The scent of cigarettes on my father’s clothes. The way he settles back into his big recliner with a smile, his belly rounding over his belt. His technique of making hamburgers by rolling them into golf balls and scorching them on the grill. The way he looks in the morning on his way to work, his shirt pressed and hair slicked back, clear-minded and serious. I think of him as a kind of dark genius, buffeted by the world but bravely setting forth.

  And my mother: the way her closet smells, sweet and musty with a touch of Joy perfume. The way her hair curls up in an elaborate blond beehive and how she taps it with her fingertips or searches for an itch with a long knitting needle. The way she sits at the kitchen counter and paints her nails a deep pink. The way she sings “Moon River” while she makes dinner and tells us long stories that make us laugh. I love the way she says, “I gave up everything for you kids,” or “I would do anything for you kids.” She is a displaced queen, unseated, usurped, somehow denied what the world promised her, always waiting for her ship to come in. I love the way she tells me I’m her best friend.