An Atomic Romance (4 page)

Ed cleared his throat. “I don’t really believe all they’re saying on the news. Everybody was real careful, and management took care of us. I wouldn’t worry about it, Reed.”

Uncle Ed had started work at the plant in 1960, when it still processed uranium hexafluoride on-site, mixing black uranium dioxide and hydrofluoric acid to make greensalt and then burning that with fluorine. Ed scooped piles of greensalt into hoppers—sometimes with his bare hands. He breathed black dust and even got it in his mouth. He always said it tasted terrible.

“Uncle Ed, remember when you used to come home from work all covered with greensalt?”

Ed laughed. “Hell, we were all green back then.”

“I’ve been wondering, Ed, what did your first wife think about that?”

“Do you remember her? Lucy?”

“Just barely.” Blond? Wore hats?

“Sometimes I can’t remember her either. She moved off to Akron, Ohio, after we divorced. She was a good woman!” Ed spoke in a sentimental voice. “When I used to come home from work green—and the next morning the sheets were green—that scared her.”

“I was wondering if she was afraid of the stuff.”

“She’d say, ‘I can’t sleep with you if you’re going to turn the sheets green.’ I’d shower at work, and I’d shower at home, but I couldn’t get rid of it. I even spit green.”

“Lucy probably liked a clean house.”

“She was the best woman. But I put my country first. Now I’m sorry I did. I never should have let Lucy go.”

Reed had been working days, but now he was swinging to the night shift, which meant fooling around with his caffeine intake. Burl gave him a few whites—he called them “speedies”—to make it through the transition. Reed was off Tuesday, then he was due to go in Wednesday evening at seven. That day he ate an early lunch, then took a sleeping pill to get some rest in the afternoon before the first evening shift. He had just gotten settled in his darkened nest when the telephone rang. He had forgotten to turn off the ringer.

“Hey, Dad?” It was his daughter, Dana.

“Yeah. Hi, babe.” He could visualize her in the pink tutu she wore when she was a child taking ballet lessons.

“I didn’t expect you to answer,” she said. “I thought you’d be at work. I was going to talk to your machine.”

“I’m on nights now. So you’d rather talk to the machine than to me?”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Not yet.”

“I just wanted to know how you were. Every week or two I hear about something awful going on at the plant.”

“Don’t worry, sugar. They’re talking about legacy waste, stuff from ages ago. They’re cleaning it up. It’s safe now.”

“I’m praying for you.”

Reed didn’t want to know what perversities his kids might be into. It was simpler that way. Still, he was moved by his daughter’s concern. He didn’t want his kids to think of him as diminished, like some gutless victim. But when did Dana start praying?

Reed lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, Julia on his mind. It was a fine spring day outside, and he thought he could hear birds chirping, but it was only imaginary music in the white noise of his box fan.

4

In retrospect, Reed knew he should have expected his mother to have a stroke. But he was thick-headed, oblivious, and too immersed in his own problems to monitor his mother’s health. About ten days after his camping trip, a Sunnybank aide called to tell him that his mother was in the hospital. It was seven-thirty a.m., and Reed had just arrived home after a twelve-hour shift. In a whirl, he threw food at Clarence and without showering or changing clothes, he flew his battered blue pickup to City Hospital. She didn’t seem to recognize him. She tried to speak, but her words rolled around in her mouth like marbles. Although her right hand was limp, she managed to point to her leg. It was a two-by-four, Reed understood her to say. He hadn’t known that tiny warning strokes called T.I.A.s had been puncturing her mind like BB shots for some time. She hadn’t complained.

Reed, in a daze of disbelief, took off work to stay by his mother’s bed. He spent the first two nights in her hospital room trying to sleep in a recliner chair, which realigned his spine with seemingly murderous intent. Her I.V. drip bag made him think of a douche bag, but he didn’t know why, since he had little actual familiarity with douche bags. Each morning, the doctor—on his five-thirty rounds—woke her up to check her responses and wrote on her chart that she was confused and disoriented. “She’s dreaming,” Reed told him. “I’m dreaming myself at this hour.” She was drugged to the eyebrows, he thought. The notion that she could die made him feel angry and helpless.

When he telephoned his sister, Shirley, in California, she told him she couldn’t come unless their mother took a turn for the worse. Kids, career. “Sounds like she’s over the hump,” Shirley said.

“Everybody asks where you are, Shirley,” he said. “They say what does a son know about taking care of his mother?”

“Let’s face it,” Shirley said. “She’d rather be around you than me.”

The edge in her voice was slight, like a faint lisp, but it stung. He felt alone. His mother’s scattered relations had put in ritual appearances, but they were all busy with their own lives and he could not ask any of them for help. He had not heard from Julia. Burl was his main support, but mostly on the telephone. Burl visiting the sick was similar to an excitable terrier gate-crashing a board meeting.

Burl dropped by the hospital room early one morning on his way to a painting job. Reed had just arrived. He had returned to work, thanks to some potent speed, and he was at the hospital early, after his shift ended. He was helping his mother with her breakfast. Her right hand was weak, and she dropped the spoon. Her speech was improving, though she was still addled from the drugs.

“That sausage looks almost good enough to eat,” Burl said to her teasingly. “And is that eggs? Hen products? Why, this place is a veritable spa! Who would have imagined?”

With some difficulty, she told him, “I felt hydrophobies in my stomach all night.” After eating a bite of cereal, she said, “A camouflage fell across my eyes.”

“I’ve had those too,” Burl said. “If not one, then the other.”

Reed could tell that his mother was glad when Burl left. Burl seemed to know, too, that he shouldn’t stay long with her, because he fidgeted too much and talked too loud, so he waited for Reed in the family lounge down the hall. A little later, Reed found Burl pacing by the window. Burl was wearing paint-splattered jeans, an immaculate white T-shirt, and a greasy, stained cap he had worn for several years. A man in blue work twills was asleep in front of a television set, tuned to the Golf Channel.

“He watched the Golf Channel all night long,” a pudgy woman in pink pants said to Reed. “His daddy had triple bypass yesterday.”

Reed joined Burl at the window and they watched cars in the parking lot.

Burl said to Reed, “Don’t forget I’m your Prayer Warrior.”

“Weren’t you my Prayer Warrior
before
she had the stroke?”

“I’m not God.”

“I thought you had a direct line.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.” Burl tilted his hand back and forth in the sign for uncertainty.

“I wish I could call Julia and tell her about what happened.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I’m afraid to. I don’t want to make her feel sorry for me.”

“Won’t she want to know about your ma? Didn’t she like her?”

“She’ll know. The hospital admissions are in the newspaper.”

“But she might not read it.”

“She’ll know somehow.” Reed rose from his chair and flexed his biceps. He felt stiff. He needed to work out. “I’ll call her. Just as soon as the time is right.”

“I’ll say a prayer on that.”

Burl’s faith was a quixotic, fluctuating matter. Reed, not knowing when to take him seriously, often teased him about it. Burl had thrown rune stones, practiced meditation, gone to a snake-charmer fortune-teller, tested out every charismatic leader in the area, even slipped into the large uptown Presbyterian church only to pronounce it the dullest and least inspired of the Christian denominations. Burl liked to say he had a searching soul.

Reed’s mother had given him a deliberately unconventional upbringing. She took him to a variety of religious services, although she was not a believer and did not expect him to be. She told him, “It’s refreshing to see how the other half lives.” They cruised Jewish temples, Catholic churches, and several black churches in an old part of the city where most white people at that time were too scared to go. And they dabbled in the Protestants. He thought the Baptists were more fun than the Methodists, but his mother found the plodding placidity of Methodists hysterical. Reed and his mother had attended church only sporadically. Most Sundays after church, they went to Captain Mack’s, a home-cooking eatery that featured liver-and-onions. On Sunday mornings when they didn’t go to church, she lounged on the wicker couch on the sunporch in her robe, sipping coffee and working crossword puzzles. “I’m a lady of leisure today,” she would say.

She didn’t keep liquor in the house, but on his eighteenth birthday she brought home a pint of bourbon and poured him his first drink—the first one she would acknowledge. Reed had tried everything from amaretto to zinfandel by then.

“This is your initiation,” she said. “If this generation of the family still lived in Ireland, your father would take you to the pub, and all his friends would celebrate your manhood.”

“This is the first I’ve heard we’re Irish,” Reed said. “When did we get to be Irish?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Pretend.”

Not long before, she had buried her second husband, Mort—after a long illness—and she was on grief leave from her bookkeeping job. That day when Reed pretended to take his first drink and pretended to be Irish, he felt, curiously, as if there were no secrets between him and his mother. A long, dark bedside vigil was over, and she was free. Reed was free too, free of the stepfather whose lackluster presence and long dying made it necessary for Reed to wreck two cars, fail trigonometry, and cause one girl to have an abortion. His mother always claimed she loved Mort, but after he died she let loose like a rocket. “I’m not even fifty,” she told friends. “I’m going to have a good time.” They all said she deserved to have a good time.

5

Every time he rode the elevator in the hospital, Reed thought achingly of Julia. He had met her a year ago in one of the elevators here when she was attending a conference. After visiting a coworker who was recovering from colon surgery, he had headed for the basement cafeteria. He was alone in the elevator when she boarded at the fourth floor. She stabbed the B button, even though it was already lighted. Her name greeted him silently from the photo-I.D. laminate on her lab coat. Julia Jensen. Her glance acknowledged him—as though he were a decent person, not a stranger about to accost her. The elevator—or perhaps his heart—seemed to stand still.

“This feels like we’re on Einstein’s elevator,” he said.

Her eyebrow shot up. She half smiled. The door opened and they both aimed for the cafeteria. He was aware of her flitting around the food stations, picking fastidiously but decisively from the salad bar, while he loaded up on meat loaf, gravy, mashed potatoes, and carrots. They emerged from separate checkout lanes simultaneously, and he followed her to a table halfway down the room. She parked her food and sat down, facing him. He said, “Would I be in the way if I sat in front of you and gnawed on this meat loaf while I admire your hands?”

“Be my guest.”

He sat and waited for her to arrange her napkin, doctor her tea with artificial sweetener, squeeze in the lemon.

He was studying her graceful hands—no rings—when she said, “
So.
What do you think of Stephen Hawking’s explanation of space-time?”

He was quick. “It’s turtles all the way down,” he said.

She burst into laughter and choked on her tea. The tea splattered on him. She crumpled her napkin in front of her reddening face.

“I don’t know many people who have read Hawking,” she said, gasping.

“I can’t say that I have, exactly,” he admitted. “About every five years I try to bone up on Einstein and learn about time and relativity all over again. You think you’ve got it, and then it escapes again. And then along comes quantum mechanics, and I just beat my head against the wall.”

“And what about string theory?” she asked, a glimmer in her eye.

He laughed. “String theory’s too deep for me.”

They chatted long past the meat loaf. He hadn’t meant to be that funny. He was just repeating the punch line of the anecdote at the beginning of Hawking’s mind-smashing book: a woman had declared that the world was flat as a plate and resting on the back of a tortoise; when asked what the tortoise was standing on, she said, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

“You’re not from around here,” Reed said, listening carefully to Julia’s accent.

“Chicago,” she said.

He liked her sound, the clipped spurts, hurried words yet precise and polished, like pretty pebbles.

“Where do you work?” she asked.

“Atomic World—or that’s what I call it. The gaseous-diffusion plant. But that doesn’t reflect on my character. I’m not a gasbag.”

“You’ve got a wit,” she said.

“I need it to do what I do.”

“Is there anything funny about working with uranium?”

“Oh, uranium is hilarious. It’s pretty funny for a fissionable element.”

“Enrico Fermi was at the University of Chicago,” she said.

“The father of atomic energy? My main man?”

She nodded. “The very one. There’s a plaque on campus.”

“Really?”

“There’s a big sculpture too,” she said. “Right on the very spot where he split the atom. I probably went past the thing a thousand times.”

“What’s it like?”

“Like a skull, but it’s supposed to look like a mushroom cloud too.”

They shifted the subject. Reed hadn’t used any pickup line of distinction, but she had snared him with the best pickup line he had ever heard. He marveled over it from time to time. The way she said “
So
” echoed in his mind even now.
So. What do you think of Stephen
Hawking’s explanation of space-time?
She scared him a little. But a woman with smarts had reached out to him as an equal. After that, they often bantered about science, tossing at each other tidbits that teased their minds. It was flirtatious, like foreplay. Burl laughed at them when they tried to spin his head around with quantum mechanics. Yet it wasn’t just intellect that turned the key in the ignition of his relationship with Julia; it was erotica amidst the mysteries—and maybe microbes. She was crazy about diseases, he learned. Julia, the cytotechnologist. She had loved diseases since she was a small child. But she had no kind words for nuclear energy. She told him soon after they met, “You know, when Fermi was laying that atomic pile, he could have blown up Chicago—or the world. Nobody knew where that experiment was going.” She implied that the same was still true, as if she expected the world to self-destruct at any moment.

The first few weeks with Julia swirled in his memory like the puffing plumes from the cooling towers. Reed and Julia were like kids with no skates on a frozen pond. They were easy together, willing to be adventurous. With her, Reed seemed to forget the block of pain that he usually carried inside him. She had a way of letting go, embracing the moment. She had married very young, divorced early, raised two daughters while eking out a college degree, and now, with her daughters grown, she seemed to be grabbing a second chance. Reed felt they were young lovers—in a way that young lovers never got to be because their youth made them stupid, except in the movies. She had an eye for ironies. They sat on a bench at the center of the mall and watched people. (“That woman with the stroller of twins has identical bruises on each bicep,” she observed.) They ate popcorn in the park, danced at a roadhouse across the river. They watched their money float away when they went on a gambling-boat excursion. They saw a cartoon festival at the drive-in theater. He introduced her to barbecue. She taught him to like wine. They tried wine with barbecue, which both insisted was unheard of. She made him feel more sophisticated than he really was. Glenda had been purely suburban, but Julia brought in intriguing layers of urban textures, like a magician’s scarves.

But even when they were together, from last June to February, Julia had kept some distance between them. She told him, “I’ve had a bad marriage and a few disappointing love stories that you don’t want to hear.”

Divorced after only three years of marriage, she had left Chicago and brought up her two girls by working at a hospital lab, then advancing to the cytopathology lab. Now one daughter was attending the state university on a scholarship and the other had a partial scholarship with a student loan. She spoke of them like women friends, not children. She gave her older daughter a book on how to achieve an orgasm—a book recommended by Oprah, she said with a laugh. Julia’s pride in her daughters was part of her radiant self-assurance, Reed thought. About Oprah’s orgasms, he wouldn’t care to speculate.

“Why can’t I meet them?” he asked her. “You met my kids.”

“I don’t want them looking you over like you were a stepfather candidate. It’s really none of their business.”

“But their orgasms are your business?”

She had to think quickly for a comeback to that one. “Well, I wouldn’t want my girls to meet your kids. What if Lisa and Dalton hit it off and wanted to get married?”

“Would that mean we couldn’t double-date?”

They laughed. That was one sweet warm day last fall when he took her to the levee and they watched flocks of migrating birds, whose honks and shouts merged with the barge horns. She showed him pictures of her daughters, Lisa and Cassie. He could see the resemblance to Julia in the curve of the cheeks, the pale eyes. The daughters seemed real enough.