Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  After I’d dressed in my ShipCo Kids Club uniform (yellow skirt, spangled blue shirt, red ankle socks), Mom sent me next door to have my hair styled by Mrs. Donato. She and Mom had come to Canada at the same time, two little girls crossing the ocean to New York City, where Mom’s mom had lived for a time, aboard the good ship L’America. Their friendship, if you can call it that, was formed as the two of them hung over the railing to vomit into the waves. It was later cemented by the trauma of being herded with their mothers into the Great Hall at Ellis Island. Under a giant American flag, they were told that they couldn’t stay because America had enough Italians, thank you very much, but there was a cold country to the north, run by the Queen, who might just agree to take them in. After all that drama, Mom and Claudia Donato had little choice but to become lifelong friends.

  Whatever Mom did, Mrs. Donato did it, too. Babywise, Mom got a head start with Linda, but when she got pregnant again with me, Mrs. Donato caught up by having twins. When Mom named me after her favourite movie star, Debbie Reynolds, Mrs. Donato one-upped her by christening her daughters Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield.

  Over endless lines of laundry (diapers, housedresses, aprons, girdles, their husbands’ oily workpants and dusty overalls), Mrs. Donato told Mom that her girls were going to be majorettes. Mom responded that Linda would be a classically trained musician and I, a tap dancer, like my namesake. Sure enough, Linda ended up studying violin, and Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield became the top two baton twirlers in Shipman’s Corners (junior drum majorette division), winning the Queen of the Majorettes competition two years in a row. I, on the other hand, turned out to be as musically gifted as a fence post, flunking out of tap at age six.

  * * *

  When I got to the Donato house, Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield were sprawled in front of the RCA colour console watching Doc Von Braun’s Amazing World of Tomorrow, one of the children’s shows pumped over the border like oil. Standing at her ironing board in a black slip and high heels, Mrs. Donato squinted at the screen through eyes reddened by contact lenses and cigarette smoke. In his stiff Prussian accent, a famous scientist was explaining how we’d get to the moon after Earth blew up: “Und now Goofy and Pluto vill enter zee Mercury rocket . . . but look, zey are veightless!”

  “Boring old Kraut, he’s a pushier snake oil salesman than the Fuller Brush Man,” Mrs. Donato muttered around her du Maurier. “Okay, honey, let’s see if we can turn this mess into a pixie cut. We’ll give you the French girl artist look. Very sophisticated. How’d it get hacked off, anyway?”

  I told her about being in the Z-Lands, on the job with Dad, and getting caught in the fence. I felt her fingers quickly lift from my scalp.

  “Cara, you decontaminated at home, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Fifteen minutes, just like the bottle says.”

  Mrs. Donato grunted her approval, pushing my chin to my chest to trim the stump of my amputated ponytail. Once that was done, she backcombed the crown of my head, teasing my hair into a poofy dome not unlike her own. She emptied half a can of Final Net over it to turn it into a helmet.

  “It ain’t great, but it’ll do for the picnic,” said Mrs. Donato, taking a drag on her cigarette. “Tell your daddy to leave the haircuts to me next time.”

  I glanced up at her through a cloud of smoke. We both knew that Dad’s job involved doing a lot worse things than cutting off a ponytail.

  Afterwards, Mrs. Donato shooed me home while she backcombed the twins’ hair into towering beehives.

  Crossing the yard to home, past the vines where my grandfather, Nonno Zinio, was setting up a scarecrow to keep birds off the ripening grapes, I noticed right away that something was wrong: Mr. Holub was there, talking to Mom and Linda in the driveway. His car was parked out front. I didn’t see Dad anywhere. Worry radiated off Mom like heat waves.

  “No Carlo, no car,” I heard Mr. Holub say as I walked up. “We get to the roadway, it blocked by gate. Shut and locked up tight.”

  “I’d better call the plant,” said Mom.

  Despite it being a Saturday morning and a long weekend, Dad’s boss answered her call right away. He said: Don’t panic. They would find Dad. No need to get all het up. In the meantime, it was very important that Linda, Mom and I go to the company picnic. Act like nothing unusual was going on. Because nothing unusual was going on. Dad was lost or maybe confused, that was all. To be expected. Stress of the job. Sometimes a guy just needs time alone to think things through. They’d call the company medic, just in case Dad needed a little something to help him relax when he finally showed up. Maybe he should take up golf. Or book a few comfort meetings with one of the ShipCo Snugglegirls, if Mrs. Biondi had no objections. Most wives of managers at the senior command-level were more than happy to delegate their husbands’ tension relief to skilled professionals, leaving the wives with more energy for their bridge clubs and volunteer work.

  Just before hanging up, he asked Mom a question: was there any reason for her husband to desert his family on purpose? Mom was left speechless by that one.

  After she hung up the phone, Mom stood staring out the kitchen window for a long time, then washed a sinkload of dishes she’d already washed. Linda and I sat at the table, doing one another’s nails, keeping an eye on Mom while we waited for her to snap out of it. Eventually, she made coffee for the three of us, sat down at the table and told Linda and me, word for word, what Dad’s boss had said.

  “But Mom, we can’t just go off to the picnic without Dad,” said Linda, wiping tears. “People will ask questions.”

  Mom held up her hands wearily. “I know, cara, but if Dad’s commanding manager says go, we go. You drive us in the Morris. I’m too upset to be behind the wheel. And not a word to Nonna Peppy or Nonno Zin.”

  At Plutonium Park, the picnic was in full swing. Mom went off to the tent where the women were dropping off their cakes and casseroles and Jell-O salads. Linda and I bought a string of tickets for carousel rides at a card table set up in front of the cenotaph, a huge black granite bomb with Cadillac fins hung in mid-plummet on almost-invisible steel wires. Behind it stood an older stone statue of a soldier fainting into the arms of an angel. TO OUR GLORIOUS DEAD read the faded inscription beneath the soldier’s boots, followed by a list of Shipman’s Corners men who had laid down their lives in two world wars. The angel and the soldier were overshadowed by the big stone bomb. Its plaque read:

  TO OUR RADIANT DEAD

  In honour of the gallant machine operators

  of ShipCo (Canusa division, Shipman’s Corners unit)

  who answered the call of industry

  to build nuclear arms for peace.

  May the Almighty Manager grant them eternal rest.

  * * *

  At the carousel, a bulky-shouldered boy was tearing tickets and boosting kids up onto painted horses frozen in mid-gallop. He was wearing a ShipCo Schooners baseball cap over his crewcut and a shirt buttoned to his neck, despite the heat. When Linda and I tried to hand him our tickets, he shook his head.

  “No charge for you, gorgeous. Little sister rides free, too.”

  His eyes kept walking up and down Linda, catching on her like fish hooks, his smile a lure. With blond, blond hair and dark, dark eyes, he was what my sister and her friends called “a hunk,” except for one thing: his left ear ended in a chunk of ugly scar tissue. Amputations weren’t unusual in an industrial town like ours, but most people lost limbs, not parts of their head. I couldn’t stop staring at the pink worm of flesh coiled below his ear canal.

  Linda made a little noise in her throat like a hum. “Giving us special treatment hardly seems fair to the other customers.”

  The blond boy shrugged. “Life isn’t fair, is it? You’re not like the rest of them. You two are exceptional. No charge.”

  I could feel Linda hesitating, until the boy boosted me into the saddle of a horse with flared nost
rils. “There you go, little sister. Best seat on the merry-go-round.”

  Linda let the boy put his arms around her waist and sit her sidesaddle on the black charger beside me.

  “He’s crazy about you,” I whispered to Linda.

  “He’s just a carnie,” she said.

  “Did you see his earlobe?”

  “Maybe a dog bit it off,” said Linda.

  Impaled on poles, the carousel horses slowly began to drop and rise to the sound of a tinny pipe organ:

  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.

  I’m half crazy all for the love of you.

  I rode a white horse with a gold bridle; Linda rode a black horse with a silver bridle, plunging ahead and falling back in an endless race. Like the good and bad sisters in a fairy tale. The younger sister is always the good and beautiful one, the one who gets to marry the prince and live in the castle, leaving the jealous older sister with the wicked stepmother. I liked to remind Linda of this story. I said it could be about us, because we were sort of like princesses, since our father was the Decontamination Supervisor of Shipman’s Corners.

  When a siren sounded the end of the ride, the blond boy came back to lift me down.

  “Another ride?”

  Linda shrugged. “Maybe later.”

  “My name’s Billy. I’m off in an hour. Buy you a soda?”

  Linda shrugged again. “We’ll see.”

  “See you later, gorgeous,” said Billy, and he flashed us a two-fingered V. The anarchist’s salute.

  “Your boyfriend’s a Yammer,” I whispered to Linda.

  “Shut up,” she responded.

  We walked away from the carousel, past a pink gazebo reserved for a troop of Snugglegirls costumed as cheerleaders, French maids and Shetland ponies. Employed by ShipCo, the girls were always on duty during family picnics, in case any managing executives required tension relief. Mom had repeatedly warned us not to stare at the Snugglegirls, but I glanced in anyway. They were lounging around a table, smoking and playing cards. In a tent not far away, Mom and the other mothers were setting out platters of hot dogs in buns like rows of babies swaddled in puffy white blankets. By some unspoken agreement, the ShipCo Snugglegirls ignored the ShipCo wives, and vice versa, even though they were always stationed side by side at the company picnics.

  Linda stopped outside the mothers’ tent and glanced casually back at the carousel, where the carnie was still lifting kids onto horses.

  “Why don’t you run along and find your friends?” she suggested.

  “So you and Romeo McAnarchy can be alone?” I teased her.

  “You are such a brat,” she said, letting go of my hand.

  I watched my sister disappear into the crowd. It felt good to be on my own. Now I not only looked like a boy, I felt free to act like one, too. I pressed on the top of my head, trying to flatten the poofy helmet of hair as I walked to the playground where the Donato twins were playing Fallout Shelter under the high slide. Judy-Garland waved an aluminum pistol in the air.

  “Let’s pretend to shoot people who try to get into our shelter,” she suggested.

  “Why not just let them in?” I asked.

  Judy-Garland snorted. “You dummy, you’d run out of food. You have to look out for number one.”

  These words sounded straight out of the mouth of the twins’ father, Al Donato. I’d heard him say pretty much the same thing at a barbecue a week earlier. Dad had argued with him: “You want to stay alive when everyone else dies? What kind of a world would that be?”

  “You kiddin’? Someone has to re-people the world,” Mr. Donato said, grinning and grabbing Mrs. Donato’s bottom while she was handing him a beer. She smacked his hand, but she was smiling.

  Dad had looked away, embarrassed.

  I was arguing with the twins over whose turn it was to have the gun in our game of Shoot the Neighbours when a policeman and a nurse walked up. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like. All I saw were two uniforms.

  “Miss Debbie Biondi?” asked the nurse, with a bright smile. She was wearing a white dress, white stockings, white Oxford shoes and a stiff white hat with little meringue wings.

  I raised my hand. “That’s me.”

  “Come with us, miss, please,” said a tall skinny body in a blue uniform that smelled sharply of solvents, as if it had just been dry-cleaned. The policeman wore a silver badge reading OFFICER SMITH, #ABC123. He took my right hand. The nurse took my left.

  I had a wild idea that I should twist out of the grown-ups’ hands and start running, just as Dad had said to do when we left the Z-Lands. I shook that idea out of my head. I was a good girl with a boy’s haircut and a missing father, heading off with two unknown authority figures. What could possibly happen?

  “Did they find my dad?” I asked as we walked away from the playground.

  “Still looking,” said the policeman in a monotone.

  “What’s your favourite ice cream?” asked the nurse, a smile in her voice.

  I looked up at her. “Butterscotch.”

  “Well, honey, you’re in luck. Where we’re going, there’s a whole tub full of Scutterbotch with your name on it.”

  “Underlying conditions,” muttered the policeman in his dead-sounding voice.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said the nurse. “Honey, you look like a healthy young girl. You don’t have any, oh, let’s call them ‘troubles’?”

  My slick-soled shoes slipped on the grass as the two of them hurried me along. Off in the distance, I could hear the tinny sound of “Daisy, Daisy” again. I suddenly wished I were sitting on a horse in full gallop. “What kind of troubles?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you need to take needles for sugar? Or you get sick when you have your friend?”

  The policeman grunted impatiently. “Get to the point. Is she bleeding? Affects blood pressure, sweat glands, all that.”

  “There’s no need to be crude,” the nurse told him, the smile gone from her voice.

  I shook my head. “I’m invulnerable.”

  The nurse gave a funny little laugh, as if she was worried about something. The policeman grunted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I got the U-shot. Nothing can hurt me now,” I told them.

  “Isn’t that nice,” said the nurse vaguely. The policeman tightened his grip on my hand.

  We reached the brick building that housed the park’s snack bar, shut tight for the season. As the policeman unlocked the door, I stared at the giant cardboard strawberry ice cream cone stuck to the outside. We went into a room with lumpy white walls, then through it into another room with a grey metal door and no windows. Rakes and shovels hung from hooks along the wall. Once the door to the second room was closed, I couldn’t hear anything from outside anymore, not even the music from the carousel. The lights in the room were twilight-dim.

  The nurse sat me down in a straight-backed wooden armchair, the kind you’re sent to when you’re in the principal’s office, next to a table with a box on it, wires hanging down. The box was bright pink with blue polka dots and glowed palely in the gloom. The top of the box was full of knobs and dials, like a shortwave radio or the cockpit of a jet. I’d seen pictures of both in magazines with names like MEN and Action! that Dad left stacked in the bathroom.

  “What’s that thing?” I wasn’t scared yet, but it was starting to dawn on me that maybe I should be.

  “Have you ever heard of a polygraph, honey?” asked the nurse.

  I shook my head.

  “A lie detector,” said the policeman. “This here’s a special one, just for kids. So we know which of you are naughty and which are nice.”

  He laughed at his own joke. The nurse glared at him.

  “It’s a machine that shows us if you’re telling the truth,” explained the nurse.

  “How’s i
t do that?” I eyed the machine with growing fear. The electrical wires reminded me of the barbed-wire fence.

  “It picks up signals from your body. It shows us if you’re getting all tensed up and scared, the way people do when they’re lying,” said the nurse. “See that graph there? It jumps when you get scared. That’s when it knows you’re lying.”

  “Don’t tell her how to beat it,” growled the policeman.

  “I’m not; I’m simply explaining to the child,” said the nurse. I could tell by her tone of voice that she didn’t like him.

  They slid my arm into a sleeve, like the one at the doctor’s office, right up to my armpit. The nurse pumped a little rubber ball attached to it and the sleeve went tight. She stuck wires on the tips of two of my fingers, then pulled a strap tight around my chest. The nurse said that Pat Boone had a lie detector just like this one in his own home to keep his kids honest. Every time they did something bad and he thought they were lying, he hooked them right up to the machine to sort things out.

  “Who’s Pat Boone?” I asked.

  “He’s a world-famous operatic tenor! Kids these days,” the nurse said, sighing, as if only a juvenile delinquent wouldn’t know who Pat Boone was. For a crazy moment, I thought he might be the Trespasser’s secret identity. Stall for time, I told myself. That’s what captive girls always did in comic books while waiting for a superhero to show up.

  I said, “The strap around my chest is too tight. It hurts.”

  The nurse laughed her phony laugh again. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”

  The policeman sat down at the table across from me, loosened his tie and switched on a metal gooseneck lamp, illuminating a gauge that looked a lot like the one on Dad’s Geiger counter. I tried not to stare at him. I’d seen police only on TV shows. We didn’t have any cops in Shipman’s Corners. ShipCo looked after all the troublemakers.

  “Let’s get a base line,” said the policeman. “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Debbie,” I said.

  “State your full name,” he said, louder than before. I figured this meant the test was starting for real now.