The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  “Rupert married Matilda Jim, if you haven’t heard. And of course you haven’t, having flown the coop.”

  “I thought he might,” I said. “Where are they settled now? I’d like to mail them a letter, if I can.”

  “What business is it of yours? This isn’t your home anymore. None of it concerns you.”

  I made a small throaty sound of acknowledgment. Then, brightening, “Mother, I suppose you’ve received the checks?”

  “I don’t handle the money. Martha does, and that dull lump of her husband. He plods in and out of here like a dying animal. I can’t stand the sight of him.”

  “He adores you, Mother. He’s a good man. Try to be kind.”

  “I couldn’t go to church with them today because of my gout. It hurts something awful, Mildred.”

  I was comforted by the direct way she addressed me. I said to her, lovingly, “I would rub your feet for you if I was there, Mother.”

  “Dr. Sheppard agrees with me that I’ve worsened since you left. He says how very sad it is my children don’t support me in my weakened condition.”

  “Mother, I’ve sent you nine checks so far, much more money than we’ve had in a long time. Please check with Martha to make sure they’ve arrived safely. There are nine total and a tenth should arrive—”

  “Angel Shea,” Mother shrieked, “I know you’re listening, you rat. I can hear that damn dog of yours in the background. Hang up this instant! I don’t listen to your conversations with that redskin-lover of yours.”

  “Mother,” I said. “I don’t think—”

  A soft click sounded, clearly Mrs. Shea hanging up on the party line.

  “Mrs. Shea may be a good bridge partner, but she’s a terrible friend,” Mother said. “She told me I should forgive you as God would like me to. What a moron. God doesn’t give a flying pancake about forgiveness. He’s a vengeance man. He likes a firm swat on the rear.”

  A line formed at the phone booth, and I turned my back to it so that I wouldn’t see all of those expectant faces.

  “Mother, it’s good to hear your voice. You sound well.”

  “What is it you’re doing there, anyway, Mildred?” she said then, and I was startled by the question. It encouraged me that she might care about my work. I paused a moment, gathering up my excitement. I wanted to make her very proud.

  “It’s secretive, Mother. I work for one of the top scientists here. He’s a physicist.”

  “A scientist? Are they making a chemical inhalant? Like the showers at Auschwitz? No reporters will write about Hanford here. I check the papers every day and there’s nothing.”

  “No, no, they wouldn’t, it’s not allowed.”

  Journalists, I’d learned from Dr. Hall, were strictly forbidden to research or report on the Hanford site.

  “So how do I know you’re there? And not off gallivanting in an Egyptian harem?”

  “The checks I send you come from the government, so that means—”

  “You can’t even tell your own mother what you’re doing. You don’t even know. You’ve always been full of nonsense, Mildred. Your father thought you held such promise. ‘She’s a reader,’ he’d say. ‘She loves words and stories. She’s wonderful at math. She’ll be as educated as they come.’ But I knew, we all knew, that you were living in a fantasy land. And even now, even now, you have no idea—”

  “It’s a weapon, Mother. Something that will help us win the war. I think you’ll be very proud of me. We’re making something they all refer to as the product—” and I stopped here, horrified with myself.

  Secrecy. Safety. Loyalty.

  “I can’t talk about this, Mother, I can’t. I’ve said too much already.”

  “A weapon,” Mother said. “Big whoop.”

  Behind the gauzy veil of her labored breathing came the familiar creak of Mother’s front door opening, and I remembered how the bright winter light shone through the front windows and onto the enamel-topped table, a table Mother adored and showed off proudly to her bridge partners. I recalled weeping at that table as a girl, Mother standing over me and scolding me for embarrassing her in front of her friends. I couldn’t remember what I’d done, but it had something to do with talking too much.

  Mother’s tone changed now to one of entreaty.

  “Quit that silly work, Mildred. It’s time to come home. Save me from these cretins. Martha is a mean brute. She isn’t careful like you. Her children are loud and awful. She’s broken three dishes since you left and one of them was on purpose.”

  I heard voices rising behind her, Martha’s shrill peal, and Walter’s thin, watery request for his wife to remain calm. The phone was wrestled with, pulled this way and that, and I suffered through the shuffling sounds with much nervousness.

  Martha triumphed. Her shrill voice came on the line. She launched into me, shouting horrible words I’d never heard her say before. Spent, she finished by saying, “I hate you. You’ve ruined my life,” and surrendered the phone to Walter.

  Someone knocked on the glass door of the phone booth. The first service of the day must have been over, people were gathering in a line outside of the accordion door. I ignored them, hunching over the phone protectively. I hurriedly added more pennies.

  Walter said, simply, “Hullo, Mildred. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Walter,” I said, but I was so rattled that my hands shook. “And you?”

  “Martha is worried for you. That’s all she means.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” I lied. “It’s good for her to vent.”

  “She thinks you’ll get hurt or hurt someone else or wind up dead down there.” He laughed uncomfortably. “She’s smoking on the front stair with your mom now. She’ll come around.”

  “Have you been getting the checks, Walter?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. It’s a great deal of money you’re making. More than I am. We’re all grateful.” An awkward laugh. “Maybe I should get a job there.”

  Walter was a planer man at the local sawmill, but the pay was dismal and now and again Martha worked in the school cafeteria to make ends meet. In one of her bad moods, Martha had once told me that Walter was too clumsy with the planing equipment, and that the foreman always joked that one day soon Walter would saw off the tips of his fingers. I had hoped she was wrong and that the story was simply one of her usual moments of derision and nothing more, but one day he came home late from work with the tops of two fingers bandaged: he’d cut the top third of them off, joint and fingernails and all.

  Walter continued, “Your mother bit Martha the other day, and the stitches were expensive, and we’re lucky Martha didn’t haul off and smack her like she wanted to, but—”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “How awful.”

  “Right on the hand. Because Martha was trying to feed her an arrowroot cookie and—”

  “Mother is capable of feeding herself. Don’t listen to those requests of hers.”

  “But the hand is healing nicely, the bruising has almost faded although I’ll tell you I nearly dropped dead at the sight of the blood—”

  I was out of pennies.

  “Walter,” I said urgently, wanting to impart some advice, to contribute in whatever helpful way that I could. “Please tell Martha not to let Mother take over her whole life.”

  “I’m not sure I should tell her that, Mildred, although I’m sure you mean well. She feels very much that you—”

  The phone went dead. I felt dizzy in the small box, closed in as though I was standing in my own coffin. The man rapped on the glass again, not rudely, but I frowned at him anyway. I was so anxious. The muscles in my face cramped and trembled.

  I pushed through the annoyed crowd, some of them muttering at me under their breath, and picked my way to the bus station. A woman waited there, too, with her handbag dangling from her wrist. When she saw me she winked conspiratorially and asked me what I thought we were making up there at Hanford.

  Not you, too, I thought. Why d
o people ask so many questions? They ask and ask and then don’t listen to the answers. I regretted saying so much to Mother. I worried I couldn’t trust myself.

  “Loose lips sink ships,” I said.

  The woman grimaced, probably disappointed in my lack of good humor.

  “You know what I heard?”

  I feigned disinterest. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I heard they’re making toilet paper. Sounds silly, sure, but I think it might be true. We’re helping the war effort by making good-quality toilet paper for the troops.”

  I looked at her to see if she was joking.

  She was not.

  “Don’t make that face at me,” she pouted. “I’m no fool. I heard it from a good source. Think about how a solid roll of toilet paper could boost a man’s morale. Well, I’m half-convinced.”

  “I work in a physicist’s office at Unit B. It’s not toilet paper. I promise you, it’s not that.”

  The woman looked away from me, toward the approaching tan and crimson cattle car. Behind the bus were frozen brown waves of fallow earth, and curving through the brown was the Columbia, broad and gray, the color of Mother’s cataracts.

  “But it could be,” she muttered, “for all we know.”

  DON’T WORRY YOUR PRETTY LITTLE HEAD

  One evening I returned home from work with a file under my arm, some manuscripts I needed to copyedit for Dr. Hall. As I passed by the payroll window I was happy to see Beth’s shining profile. She was speaking to our house mother off to the side of the avenue. Each barrack was assigned a house mother, a woman in charge of the dozens of residents. Our own was a jovial if silly woman. She snored away when I sleepwalked, and when she received word of a resident’s misbehavior, she waved her hand in the air and said in bad French, “Chacun à son goût.” In my opinion, she was the laziest and drollest of the house mothers, good for a laugh but not for any real comfort or advice, and most of us regarded her the way we would a generous if inebriated aunt. Her name was Sue Berry but Kathy called her “Beef Stew Berry” because of the way she slurped her soup in the mess hall.

  I walked up to the women cheerfully, glad to have finished another long day, looking forward to supper and maybe even a beer.

  “Yes, we’re close friends,” Beth was saying. “I care about her, is why I’m telling you. I just wanted to let you know.”

  Mrs. Berry gave Beth her usual useless, dismissive platitude, “Don’t worry, dear, all will be well.”

  Then Mrs. Berry saw me standing there.

  “Well!” she said. “Speak of the devil! Hello, Miss Groves.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked hesitantly.

  “I was just telling Mrs. Berry about your sleepwalking,” Beth said. “So she won’t hear it from someone else. And, frankly, I thought she might be able to help. In case there’s another incident.”

  I tried to smile. I told myself to be flattered by the attention. Beth meant well. Nonetheless, a vicious part of me snarled and thrashed.

  Never talk about me behind my back.

  “Ready for dinner?” Beth asked me, offering her arm.

  Shifting the file into my free hand, I took the offered limb with false pleasure. I pictured biting into her neck, that sweet, peach woman flesh, and I ground my molars together with such ferocity that my ears ached.

  * * *

  Our barracks were next to the barracks of the black women. We ate together in the mess hall, but they had separate sleeping arrangements and a separate dance hall. Beth worked with two of the women at the clinic. They did the fouler tasks there, cleaning up after men who had soiled themselves or changing out the urine bags, mopping the blood from the floors and wiping up vomit in the bathrooms. Beth said they were decent at their jobs but that she once overheard them complaining about the working conditions. One said her brother was a highly skilled welder but was forced to push a mop around in Unit B, and when Beth relayed this to me, I knew exactly who she meant, a man named Stanley Johnson. They muttered, too, about how they were banned from the Richland restaurants and all of the major entertainment; on holidays, they were allowed only card tournaments in their dance hall. One of the women called Hanford the Mississippi of the North. I thought of this when I went to watch the baseball games where the men played together, black and white. I wondered if people were grateful for that at least or if they would have rather formed teams of their own.

  For me it was exciting, all of the differences at Hanford. Some workers spoke Chinese, some spoke Spanish. There were beautiful variations in skin tones and facial features. I slowed down and listened excitedly when I passed people speaking in foreign languages. I was, in a way, seeing the whole world. I delighted at the idea of bringing my sister here. We knew many Okanagan Indians in Omak, but the rest of us were lily white. Martha would be terrified here; she would cower and whine. I imagined telling her, There, there, Martha, I’m used to this. I’m now a very cultured person. There’s nothing to be afraid of. None of these people will hurt you. I know, because I’m here every day. She would have no choice but to submit to my wisdom.

  Gordon said, “I don’t trust a Negro.” He said he had his reasons for it, that he’d worked with a few in Nebraska and had once been hoodwinked. He couldn’t say how exactly and I doubted the veracity of his story: He was gloating about empty hatred the way some men did. He loomed over us at lunch now, sitting next to Beth and me possessively. He called us “his girls.” Beth tolerated him, but she retorted once that he didn’t own us; we weren’t his anything. He always softened his tone when she scolded him, lowering his eyes and glancing at her timidly through his long lashes. He was so swift with his apologies that she accused him of being insincere.

  “I don’t know why you insist on bothering us,” she told him. “Milly and I just want to eat our biscuits in peace.”

  Gordon grinned. “And how I enjoy watching you eat!”

  She turned to me. “He’s as receptive as a bedpan.”

  But I noticed she fought with him less and less, issuing complaints and then shrugging off his responses and simply ignoring him rather than pushing him away.

  “I wonder if he isn’t in love with you, Milly,” she said one evening. “He just won’t leave us alone.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m not good enough for him.”

  Beth’s eyes shot up to me. She’d been scrubbing a stain from her nursing uniform as we spoke. Our barracks smelled of baking soda and vinegar. “What did you just say?”

  “I’m not worthy of him.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you, Milly?” She watched me for a long moment, and I grew awkward under her piercing stare. “That’s absurd. You couldn’t be more wrong. You have more beauty in your little finger than he’s got in his entire body.”

  I started to say something and she stopped me.

  “Don’t give me that ‘He-looks-like-Richard-Quine’ business, Milly. In the right light, he looks like a constipated moose.”

  I laughed.

  “We should tell him to buzz off,” she said. “Once and for all.”

  When we saw him next, however, Beth was distracted. After a long night at the clinic, covering for a sick nurse, Beth was allowed to go to work later than usual, and so, following a cheerful breakfast, she accompanied me to the bus stop. As we arrived, there was a scuffle. A short, burly man whom I recognized from the Unit B control room—Clarence was his name—hauled off and shoved a black man in the chest. This was the Stanley from Unit B, the welder-turned-janitor whose sister worked with Beth.

  “What are you doing that for?” Beth said.

  “He called me a fool,” Clarence cried. “I won’t let no spook call me a fool.”

  Gordon appeared behind us. Stanley rose to his full height: He was big, slightly shorter than Gordon but broader. He straightened his shoulders and gave Clarence a hard look.

  A group of men, Gordon included, stepped toward Clarence, but Beth, before I could stop her, hurried forward
, put her arm on Gordon’s, and whispered something in his ear.

  “He called me liver lips,” Stanley said. “‘Move back, Liver Lips,’ he said.”

  “Stating the obvious,” spat Clarence.

  Gordon had taken Beth’s arm and was leading her over to where I stood. Clarence watched this spitefully.

  “What’d she say to you, Gordo? She’s no coon lover, is she?”

  Gordon raised his eyes to Beth’s as he settled her next to me.

  “Don’t matter,” Clarence said. “We’ll teach him, anyhow.”

  The men pressed in around Stanley, who put up his hands and said, “Now, listen here.”

  “Okay, okay,” Gordon said loudly, breaking into the circle of men. “Let’s knock this off.” He looked at Stanley. “That means you, too, Stan.”

  Stanley lowered his hands but his fingers remained clenched into tight fists.

  Clarence frowned. “Whose side are you on, Gordo?”

  “We’re fighting for the same side, aren’t we?” Gordon scrutinized the other men. The armpits of his work shirt were stamped with damp circles but the river water of his voice was big and steady.

  Silence dropped over the group like a disorienting fog. There was a muffled discussion, a few low voices.

  “At least he ain’t a Jap,” someone offered, more loudly.

  “Goddamn Japs,” another said. “Good thing they’ve been put in the camps.”

  “It’s time to get to work,” Gordon said. “We’ve got a job to do. All of us.”

  Clarence kicked at a stone and it skipped noisily across the frozen ground. “What the hell are we even making here? I’d like someone to tell us that at least.”

  “That’s enough from you,” Gordon said, and the other men, even Stanley, nodded around him.

  A piercing squeal sounded in my right ear, high and desperate like a pig at the slaughter.

  “Secrecy and security,” I said loudly, and a few people in the crowd glanced at me, surprised.

  I half-walked, half-floated toward Stanley.

  My tongue narrowed into the rattlesnake’s tongue, forked and black. The world shook slightly at its edges and a bright pain licked at my brow.