by Jessica Raya
I looked down at my sewing machine. They were making magical memories. And I was making culottes.
—
The Sisters were already gone, fleeing Golden for communes in Big Sur and family beach houses in Montauk. The house seemed quieter than ever. We heard the sounds of our neighbours again—weed whackers, barking dogs, TVs at all hours echoing our own.
Mom had passed her courses, but barely. “What a bunch of nonsense,” she said, burying her grades in the coupon drawer. “I’m glad, actually. It’s a relief. Saves me from wasting any more time.” But she didn’t sound relieved. She sounded like she wanted to go to bed and stay there for a really long time.
She took on more transcribing work. She spent three days a week at the hospital. The other two, she worked under the backyard awning, patio table for a desk, medical records stacked neatly beside her in wicker baskets she’d bought for the task. We reacquainted ourselves with the Lucky’s across town where everything was made with sugar and wheat and wrapped in cellophane. We picked up things for Mrs. Houston, who didn’t like to drive.
“You’re sure it’s no trouble?” she said that Saturday as she did every Saturday, standing on the other side of the fence.
“It’s our pleasure,” Mom said.
“I suppose I wouldn’t mind some nice peaches. Or black plums. Do you think they’d have some nice plums?”
“I’m sure we can manage that.”
“Only if it’s no trouble.”
“Poor thing,” Mom said when we were in the car. “Where are her children? That’s what I’d like to know. Promise me you won’t abandon me when I’m old.”
“What do you mean when?” I said.
At the store, Mom spent a long time with the produce, cradling, squeezing, sniffing, weighing. I wandered off in search of new ways to consume sugar. I was in the cereal aisle when I heard her shouting my name. She never did that. She said Canadians only raised their voices when it was absolutely necessary, like at rodeos and weddings.
I found her beside a magazine rack, various pieces of fruit congregating on the floor around her feet.
“Juggling?” I said.
Mom’s face was flushed and wet. Tears darkened the newspaper trembling in her hands. She lifted it to show me. A naked girl ran screaming down its grainy grey cover. Carol, I thought. Then: No, not Carol. Another girl.
“It was the napalm,” she said, crumpling against the Life magazines. “Our napalm. It burned the clothes right off her body. Burned them right off.”
I scanned for an exit, but it was too late. The cashiers were already circling. They liked Mom, who was always upbeat and complimented their frosted hair. They closed the express lane and sat her down on the stool behind the register. Shoppers with ten items or less were ushered, tongues clucking, to other lines.
“She needs water,” one cashier said, fanning Mom with a coupon sheet.
“She needs sugar,” another offered, scanning the wall of chocolate bars behind her.
Someone got the manager from the back, a sweaty little man with a pricing gun slung into his waistband. He escorted Mom to our car, hand cupping her elbow. Men often did this. Her lean frame gave the impression of fragility. Only Dad knew better, would give her jam jars to open, passing them silently over the breakfast table. The manager patted her arm and told her she was doing fine, just fine.
Mom speared him with a look and pulled her arm away. “Thank you so much for your assistance,” she said coolly.
“Well,” he said and scurried away.
Mom made me drive. I’d never done more than steer for her while she lit a cigarette. While I concentrated on not killing us, she stared out the window.
“How do they do it?” she said.
“Do what?” I was irritated by the store manager, the stares of the other women, the fact that this was my first time behind the wheel. I should have been excited. Dad should have been sitting where Mom was, filling the car with cigar smoke and telling me, Take it easy, Tiger. Would all my firsts be ruined?
“How do you see something like that and go home and make dinner?” Mom said. “How do you go on as if something horrific isn’t happening?”
“You don’t even vote,” I said.
“I can’t vote,” she said and started crying again.
“Now what?”
“We left the groceries. Silvia’s beautiful plums.”
On the bright side, we’d gotten a free newspaper. Mom had walked out of Lucky’s with it crumpled in her hands and nobody, not even that sweaty little manager, had said a word.
—
At Harvard University in the early 1940s, a chemist combined naphthenic and palmitic acids into a sticky gel that could be mixed with petroleum and then ignited. Because it clung to everything, including skin, the gel was a particularly efficient weapon against human targets. More than sixteen thousand tons were dropped on Japan during World War II. Almost twenty-five times that was used in the Vietnam War. This wasn’t one of Dad’s stories. There was no personal policy that protected against napalm. Acts of government are like acts of God: unfathomable and uninsurable.
We had seen the bombings on TV, though we didn’t know what we were seeing. The planes dove low to the ground, then shot back up to the clouds as the earth exploded with fire beneath them. Now the photo of that little girl bombed us. It ran on every front page until it reached even The Golden Gazette.
Missy Carter went from class to class handing out copies and telling us why we should care. Kids listened, riveted, unable to peel their eyes off that picture. They couldn’t put their finger on why exactly. There was just something about that photo.
When they finally figured it out, they papered the school with the picture, augmented it with doodled bucket hats. You’ll all burn in hell! floated above her in speech bubbles. He maketh me lie down in green pastures. It was superfluous. You couldn’t look at that picture and not think of Carol Closter screaming down the hall, hand clutching her wet towel.
Teachers appealed to Mr. Galpin. It was obscene, they said. The girl was naked, forgodsake. But Missy Carter argued civil liberties and freedom of speech and alienation of our basic rights, by which she meant that her father was a corporate lawyer with a large discretionary fund. From homeroom to last bell, that naked girl chased us, limp-armed and open-mouthed. Whenever Carol passed one of those photos, her whole body tilted away. For days she seemed to walk at an angle. “What’s wrong, Cloister?” Joyce barked. “Remind you of somebody?” Carol only lifted her head a little higher, walked a little faster. I didn’t know how she did it. Sometimes I could swear I heard that little girl screaming. Screaming! At least she’d screamed. At least she’d run. I wanted to shout every time I saw Troy Gainer punch the air to his Eagles eight-track, every time I saw Melanie sink into the dark of the Mustang’s back seat. Instead I locked myself in a bathroom stall—there I was again—and flicked my lighter on and off, counting down the hours, minutes, seconds. Those last days of school had the metal clench of a steel trap.
When my Bic was empty, I flung open the stall door. Enough was enough.
Jamie Finley lay flat out under the bleachers with a six-pack tucked into his armpit. A few feet away, a guy snored under a swarm of stringy black hair. Jamie’s right hand choked the neck of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. An opener stuck out of his front pocket. That and a lighter.
“Can I borrow that?” I said.
Jamie opened his green eyes behind a flop of bang and grinned. “Hey, hey! You’re just in time to help us celebrate.” Jamie took a swig of beer and wagged the bottle at me. I shook my head. “What? You’re not celebrating? Didn’t you hear? Troy got a scholarship to Arizona State. How about that?”
“Partial scholarship,” I said.
Jamie held up his beer. “To Troy and his partial scholarship.”
“So what? You’re going to college, right?” Jamie was smarter than Troy Gainer. Jamie was smarter than most of us. I pictured him on a campus out east, hugging his Kafka
against his wool coat, surrounded by stone buildings and snow-dusted trees.
“College is for suckers,” he said. He tipped the bottle back. Beer went everywhere—his chin, his shirt. He wiped his mouth, pointlessly.
“Aren’t you worried about the war?” I said.
“Are you worried about the war, Robin Fisher?”
“They say it’ll end soon,” I said. I heard this on the news a lot, but I didn’t really believe it. It felt like the war had been going on my whole life.
“Why does Troy get everything?” Jamie said. “He gets the scholarship. He gets the girl. What do I get?”
It was like swallowing a ball bearing, realizing what he meant. Jamie liked Melanie. I’d messed it up for both of them. I was like napalm, destroying everything, burning it all to nothing with one touch.
Bottle empty, Jamie tossed it over his shoulder and took another from the six-pack. “Troy gets everything and I get warm fucking beer.”
“Some people don’t even have warm beer,” I said.
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? It’s just that—fuck, you know, everyone keeps saying these are the best years of our lives. What if they’re right? What if it doesn’t get better than this?”
“That’s not even funny,” I said.
“Do you see anyone laughing?”
Jamie drained the bottle in one go. This one hit the bleachers, ringing out like a gong. The sleeping guy mumbled under his hair.
“Hey,” Jamie said, “wake up. Today is the first day of the end of our lives.”
The guy rolled away from us, hands over his head as if he expected more shelling.
Jamie’s eyes closed. He let his arms flop to his sides. I marvelled at anyone who could sleep on his back with his arms open, like a dog or a baby, beings that don’t know the world is a dangerous place. I always slept bent at the waist, my whole body a fist.
His breath grew ragged edges, then he was snoring. When I was sure he was asleep, I knelt beside him. I reached out, fingers hovering at the top of his thigh, and slid the lighter carefully from his pocket. I was close enough to feel the heat of his body. His beer breath was not unpleasant.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“I need this for a while. I’ll bring it right back.”
“Take it,” he said. “You deserve it. You deserve everything, Robin Fisher. I hope you get the partial scholarship of your choosing. I hope you get a beautiful fucking life.”
Jamie rolled over and spooned what was left of his six-pack. I pushed the lighter back inside his pocket. Something told me he needed it more than I did.
—
When the fire alarm was pulled that afternoon, nobody threw so much as a snide glance at me as they rose from their desks and filed out the door. It was the last day of school—a false alarm could be counted on as surely as the dry heat. While men with axes stormed the halls, kids dispersed quietly into the shadows of emaciated trees and the hot recesses of parked cars. A half-hour later, they shuffled their boneless bodies back to class, disappointed their school was not a smouldering pile but uncomplaining. It would be another hour before anyone noticed the missing pictures. Every one of them had been torn down, every screaming naked girl gone.
Mr. Galpin called me to his office during last period. Moody Miller was leaving as I got there.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said.
Mr. Galpin sat in one of his own visitors’ chairs, looking uncomfortable. Mr. Boyd stood over me, breathing loudly. I could smell the peanut butter he’d eaten for lunch.
“Where were you during the fire alarm?”
“On the field?”
“Were you? Were you?”
“Now, hold on,” Mr. Galpin said. “Let’s back up a bit here. Miss Fisher, you’ve probably noticed that somebody took those pictures down. It appears to have happened while everyone was outside.” My dad had the same tie he was wearing, little white diamonds on a navy sky. I’d picked it out for Father’s Day from a mail-order catalogue. For the disappointed man in your life. “Nobody is accusing anybody of anything, you understand. We’re trying to get some information, that’s all.”
“The janitor found the pictures in the boiler room,” Mr. Boyd said. “What was left of them. Someone put them in the furnace. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that whoever put them there was the same person who pulled the alarm.”
“Apparently not,” I said.
“Are you being smart?”
“With my grade point average?”
Mr. Galpin stood up and waved his hands. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Like I said, Miss Fisher, we’re just hoping to clarify a few things.”
“So if we were to look inside your locker,” Mr. Boyd interrupted, “we wouldn’t find matches or anything else of that nature?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Probably?” Mr. Galpin’s eyes crinkled at the corners. Kind, my mom would have called them. Sad, I would’ve said.
The counsellor tried, unsuccessfully, to hold back a grin.
“People put stuff like that in my locker sometimes,” I said. “Matches and lighters.”
“I see,” Mr. Galpin said. He shook his head. “I see.”
A fire truck cruised by outside, probably en route to another high school. It wasn’t in any rush.
“Anyway, you wouldn’t need matches if you had a furnace,” I said. “Or vice versa, I guess.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Mr. Galpin said. “No, you sure as hell would not. Thank you, Miss Fisher. Thank you very much for your help. Have yourself a good summer.”
“That’s it?” Mr. Boyd said. “I guess we’ll just let them burn the school down, then.”
“Yes, Mr. Boyd. I’d say that’s more than enough.”
—
I stepped out of Mr. Galpin’s office and into a giant snow globe. The halls had exploded with a million pieces of paper, tests and essays with fat red letters on them that didn’t mean anything now. At the other end of the hall, the janitor swept up flurries of foolscap. It was after three, I realized. Somehow I hadn’t heard the bell. I ran to the front doors and threw them open. Not a single car or soul remained in the parking lot. Toilet paper fluttered silently in the trees.
My throat tightened, then my chest. The ending I’d been praying for had came and gone without my knowing it. I’d been holding my breath for over a year and now—was that really it?
Whoosh. My chest sprung open. My throat released. I gasped and sputtered, something halfway between a laugh and a cry. And then I did cry.
I pushed my fingers against my eyes. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I headed to my locker to get my things. There was nothing in there that I wanted, but that’s what you do on the last day of school—you clear out your locker. As I rounded the corner, I saw Carol. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life.
When she saw me, she tugged her hat down low on her forehead and crossed her arms.
“Why did you do that?” she said. “I never asked you to do that.”
“Do what?” I started to shove my hands in my pockets, but Carol grabbed my wrists and held them tight between us. For a small person, she was surprisingly strong. She turned them in her own small hands, over and over like a palm reader who’s forgotten how to do her job.
“I hope you’re happy,” Carol said. “You’re ruining my life.”
As she stormed off down the hall, I examined my hands. For the record, they were as clean as a newborn’s. That myth about fire alarms staining your hands with ink was just one more thing I’d heard in school that turned out to be bullshit.
13
When the great Krakatoa erupted in the summer of 1883, the sky over the surrounding Indonesian islands was already choked with ash. There had been a series of smaller eruptions that spring, an ellipsis en route to the exclamation point. This was the part of the story that really got my dad—not that thirty-five thousand people had sunk to their ocean graves,
but that the Krakatoans had seen it coming and done nothing. “For months they woke up, ate their papayas, and went to work as if everything was hunky-dory. Can you believe that? Months.”
“What should they have done?” Mom said. “They lived on an island. What choice did they have?”
“That’s not the point, Lainey. That’s not it at all.”
“No, Jim. I suppose it’s not.”
—
The summer of 1972, it felt like we were the ones living beside a volcano. The air was oven-hot at all hours, so hot you wanted to run away from your own skin. Families fled west for the ocean breeze or east for cold clear lakes. Those who stayed put made the most of their air conditioners, their pools, their ice-makers. The town council asked the good citizens of Golden to cut back on water usage, to use the AC only when absolutely necessary. Resources were scarce. Americans everywhere were pitching in. But conservation was not a popular idea in Golden, where lawns were green twelve months a year and nobody minded too much if in the evenings, when all the fathers came home and turned on their televisions, the living room lights sometimes flickered and dimmed.
In our house the television was almost always on. I had gotten used to the voices, the soothing electric hum, that eternal blue glow. It was a third presence in the house, one that I could count on. Now, suddenly, Mom wanted it off. Hadn’t I heard about peak oil? Energy shortages? Didn’t I watch the news?
“How can I watch the news if the TV’s off?” I said.
Mom couldn’t stand television anymore, that was the real problem. She got mad at everything now, even the game shows. She threw a slipper at Richard Dawson’s head because he called a contestant “sweetheart.” But I liked knowing that somewhere out there people were winning washing machines and snow blowers just for knowing the price of canned gravy. Mom still read the newspaper, cover to cover, every day, though it made her just as miserable. “They’re all a bunch of con men,” she’d grumble, holding the morning paper with one hand and raking a brush through her hair with the other. “Who put these maniacs in charge?” Later, I’d find the paper in the kitchen garbage, shreds of newsprint wilting under wet coffee grounds and clumps of hair.