What had directed her attention that morning again to The Plant was noting how the Stop The Plant signs in Ariana changed to Safe, Clean, Essential as she moved south and closer to Aesopolis, Verde and The Plant. She tried not to dwell on them. Hadn’t she and her husband covered the topic adequately last night? What with the boys gone with some friends for hamburgers and a movie, alone with Lou, she had talked freely. They had discussed how they both regretted seeing the suburbs steadily turned into cities: concrete and steel gradually replacing the trees so that with each passing year when fall came there was less and less color to be seen along the James.
“Lou, do you think the commuters from Verde north are more in sync with our concerns about the safety of The Plant?” she had asked.
Lou had not been optimistic. “I doubt it. You have to remember that trains run on electricity, too.”
“So you think they too see The Plant as essential? Even safe and clean? Just like the other city dwellers? And people who live nearest it?”
Lou had given one of his nods to the side. “Yup. Sad and bitter as it may seem, that’s probably the truth of it.”
“I just can’t figure it, Lou. How, if we were to live even closer to The Plant, could we ignore the fact that it releases radioactive gases into the air at scheduled intervals a few times each week? Wouldn’t we certainly be aware of it even though we know it’s done in the dead of night? Or would we just take our chances on pollution or radiation-related health problems? How do we know it is less toxic than the gases emitted by other types of electric plants? Why would anyone choose to live close to any kind of a power plant anyway?
“Come on, Mare. You know how much they advertise the importance of The Plant in Sussex and East Cordaban. How they say East Cordoban Electricity is the cheapest, cleanest, easiest and only way to light and air condition Aesopolis, Verde and the expanding suburbs north and east is with the Magdum Heights Nuclear Power Plant?”
“Yeah. I suppose that as long as The Plant remains profitable nothing will change.” She looked crestfallen.
“Mary. What are you doing? Why do you wear yourself out with this? Denial is denial. The key is for us to move.”
They had been over this before, but Mary was on a roll. “But why is it that those who are here to stay don’t advocate for buying water power produced electricity from Canada? And what would be so ugly about lining the mountain ridges with wind generators? I’ve seen films where you can see the turbos turn in a kind of ballet. They even talked about how the wind so harmoniously varies their direction and speed. Prettily even. But even if they were ugly, doesn’t safety take precedent?”
“Maybe everyone is planning on moving.”
That thought had never occurred to Mary. It hit her like a low punch to the gut as the thought occurred to her that, my god, no one feels responsible.
Lou held Mary’s eyes; his own filled with sympathy. After a bit, Mary rose and began to slowly scrape the plates and stack the dishwasher. Her husband came to help her. They worked silently side by side. The task done, Mary caught Lou’s eye and mused aloud, “I wondered if I took the train instead of driving by car if I would feel the same.”
Mary might have been making a stab at humor couched in bitter irony, but she looked so hopeless at that moment, Lou could not be sure. So, daring not to laugh, he caught her hand and pulled her toward the stairs. “Enough of this morose mood.”
Dear Lou. Somehow he was behind her now, both hands upon her waist, half pushing, half lifting her up the stairs to their room. He was right. Enough was enough. Her feet moved easily ahead of his.
And so it was that long before the day The Plant went down, Mary Matters found fears caused by it for her family’s safety intruding on her life. Just as they dominated her thoughts on the ride that morning, they’d pop up during lunch at school, in an articulation therapy session, and on her trip home. Sometimes in the night she would wake breathless, convinced she had heard an evacuation signal only to realize that a low cloud cover had carried to them the sound of the train whistle as it rounded a bend near the James. However, in her discussions with colleagues at school Mary was careful to touch only tangentially upon her concerns.
Once at school the demands of the morning left little room for the preoccupations that had consumed Mary on her commute that morning, but at lunch in the teachers’ room thoughts of The Plant once again intruded to the extent that they made it difficult for Mary to keep with the iron clad lunchtime rule: Enough is enough; we are relaxing now; when at lunch, we teachers are to talk about anything other than students and weighty issues. Mary could only just manage to not mention her preoccupations. “The James was really pretty this morning.”
Mary’s friend Alicia was drinking her milk through a straw. “Hmm-mm.”
But the James strategy proved to be a weak one. At the mention of the James, other environmental issues entered Mary’s thoughts. But it was lunch; she would keep them to herself. So she did not mention how she thought the glisten of the James’ water belied its pollution level. Nor did she bring up, as she would have preferred to have done, how the use of winter road salt caused the fresh water streams that fed the James to come to it with as much as a quarter or more of the salt level of ocean waters. That would have been inappropriate.
By the end of the day Mary was more relaxed. Her trip home was unremarkable. When she pulled up before the house, she reached for her glove compartment, opened it and confirmed that it still held four packets of potassium iodide. KI. She had ordered the KI for her family over the Internet. With it she had also purchased a dosimeter for gauging ionizing radiation levels. Although she was optimistic she would never have to actually use it, neither she nor Lou believed anyone was really safe from the eventuality of a more extensive nuclear accident than any Lou had witnessed to date at The Plant. Checking the glove compartment had been almost unconscious. Having thought herself out on The Plant earlier in the day, even as she reached for the KI, there was no need to even bring the thought of it now to a conscious level. She was checking for KI. That was all. Just as sometimes as she brushed her teeth she checked the cabinet for band aids or aspirin.
Leaving the car, she hurried up the walk and opened the front hall door. Home. Just being there gave her a lift. She appeared smiling and refreshed. Part of the reason her boys always looked forward to her arrival.
Once in, Mary’s goal was to immediately wash her face and hands. Old teachers’ trick she called it. To which Marty would invariably respond, “Oh, come on, Mom, you’re not that old.”
After the wash-up, Mary changed into sneakers, blue jeans and a light spring top. Then she grabbed first Jason and then Marty for a hug and a kiss hello. There was a rhythm to the routine that followed.
“Mom, could you help me with my science project?” asked Marty, stuffing a slice of turkey from the fridge into his mouth.
“After supper. But do what you can before we eat. If you need quick help with any of the other stuff before supper, I’ll help you if I can. I just can’t sit with you now.”
Some play time outside and then the boys returned, Marty to the kitchen table, Jason to the dining room table. Jason worked silently, but Marty talked as much as he wrote. “Kara got a new pup.” He spread his papers out across the table. “She calls it Felicia. It’s a French poodle. Black.”
Mary’s voice came muffled from the within the pantry. “How old is it?”
“Six weeks.” Marty decided to do his math first. “Still wants a bottle.”
Mary drifted seamlessly between helping Marty with his homework, occasionally wandering into the dining room to converse with Jason, and preparing dinner. By six-thirty dinner was ready, Marty had set the table, and Lou arrived. When Lou had showered the four of them sat to dinner. Serving bowls were handed around the table and the boys shared the events of the day with their dad. As Mary had heard most of it before, once again she drifted into her own preoccupations, remaining only vaguely cognizant of her husband’s s
upportive comments and his treatment of the boys’ reports of things they had learned that day as scholarly events worthy of discussion.
“Mom, could you pass the potatoes?” It was her younger son speaking.
Mary sat at the end of the table facing her husband. Absentmindedly she reached to the right for the potatoes, knocking over the salt as she passed them to Marty on her left. Jason, who sat to the right of her, made a quick grab for the cellar, returning it to upright.
Marty scooped himself the potatoes and passed them on to his dad. “What do you think, Dad? Time to start the garden?”
Jason recognized the swagger of us-big-guys camaraderie in his younger brother’s voice. But there was no denying it; Marty sure had a way with vegetable gardening.
“You know, Son, that’s a good idea. Why don’t we get the pitchforks and rakes and go to work on the soil? Whatdaya think, Mary?”
Mary was still muddling over their nearness to The Plant. She looked up half-absently at Lou.
“The garden. Marty wants to get it started.”
“Oh, sure. Good idea, Marty.” The smile she tossed her younger son was weak and unconvincing. But Marty was in with his dad right then and would not have noticed even if he had been looking at her.
Marty threw half a glance toward his mom and added, “And the beans, too, Mom.”
The conversation swirled about her. Jason, smart lad that he was, took note of his mom’s abstract state. For Marty’s sake, he pretended to ignore it and entered into cahoots with Lou and his brother. Now the three of them went on about the garden tools and how they would need to get some peat moss and fertilizer. Jason and Lou would do the deeper digging and Marty could work on breaking up the clods and mixing in the peat moss and fertilizer with a pitch fork and rake.
Long before Mary could manage her way out through the fog and respond to Marty’s request for the beans, Jason had handed them across the table to his brother, grabbed the potatoes in the return reach, and passed them so near beneath his mother’s chin that she was forced to look up. He then jutted his head forward and raised his eyebrows in such a way as to imply a question. Mary shrugged and looked down, avoiding responding further to the question in his eyes.
Next Jason addressed his father. “How were things at The Plant today, Dad?” Maybe that’d wake his mom. But he knew the answer even before it passed his father’s lips. But so did his mom. Even when the next day’s papers announced emergency plant shut-downs, the answer was always the same. Still, it was worth a try.
“Oh, fine. A little busy. Had to show some visitors around. Nothing special. How was school?”
Marty was directing lava flows of butter down from the top of his mashed potatoes.
Jason gave a jerk of his head toward his mom, but Lou didn’t take the bait. So Jason responded to his dad as any good son might. “Oh, school was fine, Dad. I got an A on my math test.”
Mary remained distracted by her thoughts. But it’s ridiculous! Living with KI in your closet. Carrying one pill with you wherever you go. Making sure you’ve each got a week’s supply for the family in your car. And one at home. And as for an escape plan! There is no escape plan! Just a bunch of words on paper.
While Jason and Marty were caught up in a side conversation, Lou studied his wife. Her hair had fallen forward over her brow and she was toying with her beans. “Hear that, Mary? Jason got an A on his math test.”
Mary noted Lou’s increased loudness level. She looked up. Marty was trying to thread a string bean onto a fork tine by holding it down with his knife and pushing the end of the tine into the end of the bean. Jason and Lou were looking at her expectantly. She shrugged. Then after a second thought she said, “I was just wondering about how we might bring about some change in the community?”
“Wanna talk about it?” her husband queried.
She gave a little sideways tip to her head toward Marty. It threw the lock fallen over her eyes closer to the middle of her forehead.
Marty was still absorbed by the bean.
It was clear to Jason that she didn’t want to talk about her ideas in front of Marty. Jason knew his mother well. It probably had to do with The Plant.
But Marty only had one thing in mind. “So Dad, are we going to turn over the garden?”
Mary passed the chicken thighs along to Jason on her right. Her thoughts were racing again. Why doesn’t anybody ever get it? What do the people in Aesopolis care if they put up turbos to be run by wind power on a shore that isn’t even their shore? Or a mountain ridge where they will probably never even visit? Or the people who work at the Heights? Can’t they face that what they are protecting is only an enormous time bomb? “Safe. Clean. Essential.” What a lot of bull. Thank god Lou has at least agreed to put out his resume again.
“Mom?…Mom?”
Mary smiled questioningly at her younger son. Lou paraphrased Marty’s question and added, “I was saying, I think we ought to begin turning the soil in the garden.”
“Oh, yes,” agreed Mary. “Yes, of course.”
It occurred to Lou that later he should talk again to Mary about why she was so preoccupied. He had a pretty good notion that it had something to do with The Plant again, but ablutions he was in conversation with the boys. He turned to his older son. “So Jason. What do you say after supper we drag out the spade, rake, and pitchfork to work in the garden?”
“I’m with ya, Dad.”
Lou smiled. He loved both his sons very much. Marty, his extroverted, creative, and entertaining one, and Jason, his steady, caring, and perceptive one. Before the boys had come into the picture, Mary had filled Lou’s capacity for loving, or so he thought. But with each son’s birth Lou’s soul seemed to expand by at least one Mary-measure and now, if Mary was his clipper ship then the two boys were his balance and ballast. Perhaps it was better they had had only two children. Might not there be a limit on just how widely love could expand?
10. Locklee, Still Early in the Year 2020: Natalie
North Country winters could be grim, so Thaw covered his canvases with the most vivid contrasts he could find: oranges and purples, yellows, deep greens and reds. When in the bitter days of January he was forced to do most of his work indoors, he used his sketches from warmer seasons and translated them into works of art.
Typically Thaw began his paintings almost frantically, quickly covering most of the canvas. Eventually, however, he slowed to a crawl as he liked to take special effort with the delicate shaping and shading of the work’s central representation. When the paintings were done, they offered an impression that the viewer had stumbled upon something lovely caught in depths of a dark forest or glen.
With time and some encouragement from Natalie, Thaw had changed from oils to acrylics. The change had not come without discord. However, as a result, Thaw learned that he was not the only one who preferred that the cabin not reek of oils. But until Natalie refused to take it, their smell had permeated the cabin, always worsening in winter.
Like no one else Thaw had known, Natalie could move him. He wanted her happy. He wanted her near him. And since the confrontation he continued to associate with burnt potatoes, things had gone pretty smoothly between them, and disrupting that calm was not something he was eager to do.
“Thaw, doesn’t it give you a headache?” she would query.
Or, “I’m sorry. I know it’s good. But I just can’t eat. The fumes are making me nauseous.”
The day she’d had it with the noxious fumes was their second major show down. The upside of it, however, was that Thaw did get the point, and despite the challenge to his work that it presented, he could do something about it almost immediately.
“Fuck it, Thaw! I’m fed up! I can hardly breathe with those volatile organic compounds and chemicals, as you so delicately refer to them! Fuck them! FUCK them! FUCK all the VOCs!”
Out she had stormed, grabbing only her purse, her makeup case and her keys, slamming the door behind her, and for almost a week, refusing to even
pick up the phone when he called.
So Thaw, well aware of the rightness of Natalie’s concerns, had switched to acrylics and occasionally to the use of water colors. And although initially the switch had impacted his style, with time and some effort he was eventually able to acquire the rougher quality he sought and had previously achieved easily with oils.
“Yeah, Nat,” he explained, once he had succeeded in getting her back, “if I use the high viscosity acrylics, I can get almost the same effect I got with oils. And if I combine the use of both higher and thinner viscosity acrylics, I can create an appearance of both oil and watercolor within the same painting.”
Natalie was impressed. If anything she liked his new works better. “It’s pretty powerful, Thaw,” she observed about one of his works. “The contrast between that strong, rough background and the way it fades into those delicate, almost water-color-like shades around the nestling rabbits is both eye-catching and unique.”
Over time Thaw increasingly incorporated the thick-thin viscosity contrast into his paintings. Sometimes when the animals were active or aggressive, he would let the background imitate the watercolor and the more refined core image imitate oil. At other times he would reverse this so that the painting almost faded from an opaque background of oil to a delicate translucent watercolor-like central image of a flower caught by sun or a tiny bird in flight.
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