Now and Again (2 page)

“You're thinking there are multiple factors to take into consideration—genetics, parental health and drug use, environmental toxins, both naturally occurring and man-made. And you can't forget about random mutation and plain old bad luck. Not to mention that these women neglected to get adequate prenatal care.”

The doctor thrust the file he was holding at her, indicating the end of the discussion. But then he muttered, almost to himself, “And then there's the concern about munitions safety. I've been sent an eye-opening report.”

That was the night Dolly started to look into things. That was when she started to listen extra carefully whenever the doctor was on the phone. But it wasn't until January, when she heard about a baby that had been born with cleft ears and no eyes, that she started writing letters and emails. She wrote to politicians and to captains of industry and to the heads of research institutes, and when she didn't receive any satisfactory replies from those people, she wrote to their secretaries and administrative assistants. She even put a classified notice in the newspaper, but six weeks had passed since then, and she had yet to receive even a single form letter in reply. Now she guessed she never would.

W
ill Rayburn slouched in front of the television set and watched the penguins string out single file across the ice. Each step transformed four or five inches of the snowy expanse in front of them into the snowy expanse behind as the sturdy bodies trudged across the ice floe, shuffling footstep after shuffling footstep, a testament to survival through unquestioning singleness of purpose. The scenery was bleak—gorgeous and deadly. The narrator announced that the temperature was eighty degrees below zero, that Antarctic winds rose regularly to one hundred miles per hour, and still the penguins put one stubby leg in front of the other as they made their way back to the ancestral birthplace—home! Will's blue eyes watered to think of it. There was honor in conformity, beauty in unquestioning obedience to instinct, comfort in knowing what the next step was, even if it was genetically programmed and identical to the last million steps, which, he calculated in his head, was how many four-inch increments it was from the edge of the ice to the inland nesting ground.

A commercial for deodorant came on just as his mother entered the room. “Are you crying?” she asked. “What are you crying for?”

“Just something in my eye,” said Will without looking up. It certainly wasn't because he, too, struggled with hormonally induced odor or because neither of his parents had thought to clue him in about bodily changes in general or about the difference between antiperspirant and deodorant in particular, both of which it appeared he needed, or because Tula Santos had turned him down that afternoon when he'd finally gotten up the nerve to ask her out.

“Here, let me see.”

“No, no, it's gone now,” said Will, batting her hand away and sinking farther into the shapeless cushions of the couch.

“Well, you can't sit in front of the television all day. Don't you have homework?”

“Okay, okay,” said Will, hoping she would leave the room. He liked to be alone. He liked to think of himself as coming from and going nowhere—untethered, unaffiliated, even unnamed. But he couldn't figure out whether conformity or nonconformity was what he wanted. Of course he wanted to be an individual, of course he wanted to do something no human being had ever before done, but he also wanted to fit in. He wanted to merge with something bigger than himself, to be an integral part of something transformative and grand, though he also wanted to be completely recognizable and unique in case Tula ever looked in his direction and said “Hey” in the breathy way Sammi Green said “Hey” to whichever of the football players she was dating at the time.

“Look, Will. This letter is addressed to you.”

His mother was going on about something from the state university she had found among the junk mail and bills, an envelope with his name on it—what did it have to do with him! The show was coming on again, a distant shot of a lone penguin, a tiny black speck against the ice. Just as the narrator, his voice heavy with inevitability, started to explain what happened to stragglers, his mother hit the off button and repeated, “You can't sit here all day.” Then she went out of the room, leaving Will behind to ponder what lessons the penguin's plight might hold for his own.

He couldn't sit there all day.

He knew he couldn't, but somehow he was powerless to move. Where there's a will, there's a way, he told himself the way his parents had always told him, as if his name conferred special powers, but all he could do was twitch his wrist in the direction of the remote control, which had fallen to the floor on top of the envelope from the university. Not that he had any doubt about what happened to stragglers and not that the next day wouldn't find him going through the motions at school—not because of some burning desire to better himself, but because he didn't know what else to do. Sitting on the worn corduroy couch, he was suddenly assailed by questions of free will and self-determination that couldn't be easily answered, not by the narrator, who was clearly reading from a script, and not by people who willfully stepped out of line but who were still completely bound by convention—if not the convention of going along with everyone else, then the convention of reacting against them—the way they were all bound—or were they? Suddenly the answers to such questions seemed critical before Will was able even to consider taking the next step.

He sat for a while deciding what he would need to survive in the Antarctic, what he would take with him if he had only a sled dog and a sled to carry his gear, or if he had only snowshoes and a backpack and the clothes on his back—no dog, no sled, and certainly no GPS. He would take a down parka with a fur-lined hood, a box of matches, a compass, a pair of sturdy boots, a sharp knife in a leather sheath. He would take a magnifying glass because he liked magnifying things and because a full-sized microscope probably wouldn't fit. Then, with a huge effort of will, he bent forward and stretched his right hand toward the remote control, clawing until he could just reach the edge of the envelope it had fallen on and slide it toward him, inch by inch, until both the remote and the envelope were cradled in his big outstretched hand.

A
s a young girl, Tula Santos had been able to convince herself that her lowly birth was an advantage, that her feet were firmly planted on the hard rock of existence instead of on unstable elevations, but at sixteen, she knew she was deluding herself. She now suspected that she had been invited to join the Order of the Rainbow for Girls more as an experiment or an act of charity than as a statement of equality, and that her mother's employer, who was next in line for the position of Mother Advisor and who had no children of her own, thought of her as a project. “I am fortunate to be in a position to give back,” Mrs. August Winslow would proclaim whenever the spotlight shone on her silken shoulders and well-coiffed head. Tula knew that Mrs. Winslow wouldn't have chosen a project who was ugly or blemished, which is why she spent her pocket money on lotions and oils—not out of vanity, as her friend Sammi Green did, but out of self-preservation, as a stay against the sucking circumstances of her birth.

It was her induction as a Rainbow Girl five years before that had first allowed Tula to see being fatherless as an advantage, for the Rainbow organization was meant to celebrate womanly virtues, and who was more womanly, a girl who spent her days in a house ruled by a man or a girl who had been raised solely by women?

Tula had often fantasized about an eighth bow station with white as its color. There were already stations for virtues like love and patriotism. The eighth station would stand for purity, which in Tula's mind was the epitome of the female principle, unmixed with anything hard or protruding or loud. She had harbored this idea ever since the Virgin Mary had come to her in a dream, but she was waiting until the end-of-summer ceremony to bring it up. If all went well, her idea would be adopted for the all-assembly project, which would solidify her position as a leader and set her up for eventual election as a jewel officer. She was confident that her plan for establishing an eighth bow station would far surpass the offerings of the other girls, who came up with ambitious but predictable projects like sending clothing to remote corners of South America or tutoring people with skin even darker than Tula's skin while they cooed over them and called them cute. One of the girls wanted to plant a garden of biblical herbs in a weedy patch of land behind the church, and Sammi Green talked about honoring the famous men of Red Bud with handmade plaques describing their heroic deeds.

“What about the women?” asked Tula.

“Of course I'll honor the famous women too—if there are any,” said Sammi.

“Don't forget Sandra Day O'Connor,” said Mrs. Winslow when Sammi bragged about how many influential men she knew. “She was the first female Supreme Court Justice, and once upon a time she was a Rainbow Girl too.”

“I'm talking about local heroes,” said Sammi. “They can be men or women, but they have to be from around here.”

Most of the proposals seemed derivative to Tula, while her own, which she kept secret even from Mrs. Winslow and her mother, had never been attempted before—never even thought of!—while still being in keeping with the spirit of the founding charter. Her idea would change the very structure of the order—or not really change it, but build on what was already there, making it better for future generations of Rainbow Girls and freeing them from their subjugation to men.

From the time she was a middle schooler, Tula had seen how Sammi and her friends curried favor with boys—some of them in a very direct and obvious way. Even Sammi, who was athletic and strong and mostly resistant to peer pressure, rolled the waistband of her skirt so that the slightest lifting breeze would have shown the edges of her panties if Sammi had worn the kind of panties Tula wore underneath the pleated skirts that even the updated version of the Rainbow Handbook said were supposed to come within two inches of the knees.

But Tula didn't. Tula, who was modest inside and out, could only marvel as Sammi teased the boys by flexing her abdominal muscles and arching her back. Even when Tula stood alone in front of her full-length mirror, she couldn't twitch in a way that made her skirt swing from side to side the way Sammi's did, so she watched uneasily as the boys and girls paired off and wondered how their behavior fit with their avowed submission to a patriarchal religion. Tula herself had sworn fealty to the same God and Savior, but in her heart she revered the Virgin Mother above all other deities and saints. Who was more pure than Mary, the mother of Jesus? She knew from the stories her own mother told her when they lay together at night, unable to sleep because the full moon, which her mother said was male, was pulling at the female tides within them the way men had always pulled at women, causing the tides to shift the way women had always shifted—even physically fit women like Sammi shifted, women with rock-hard abdominal muscles and intelligence. They all shifted like the tide the minute a handsome man winked in their direction.

After such a night, it was a relief when the sun rose, restoring to earth the female principle of sunlight and, even Tula had to admit, fertility. When Tula had mentioned the gravitational effect of the male moon to her benefactress, Mrs. Winslow had smiled indulgently and said, “You have it backwards, darling. The moon is the female principle. It is we women who affect the tides of men!”

Tula was still trying to figure out which made more sense, but whichever it was, she knew she owed it to the Virgin Mother, who smiled down at her from the niche above her bed, to resist the male principle for as long as she could. So she said no when Will Rayburn asked her out. She said no out of principle, but she also said it because Will Rayburn scared her. Or it wasn't really Will who scared her, it was the feeling of the tides within her shifting whenever Will walked by.

T
he cherry trees on Main Street were blooming big and pink when Maggie decided she could no longer continue in her current line of work. “You'll lose your pension,” warned her friend Misty Mills, and True Cunningham added, “You don't actually shoot the bullets, do you? Technically, you don't even make them.”

“Bullets,” said Maggie as the three friends stepped from the cool aluminum shadow cast by the munitions plant onto the crazed asphalt surface of the parking lot. She stopped short of saying that she might have been able to make her peace with bullets, but the company they worked for produced everything from missile components to armor-piercing artillery shells, and the solid core of the shells was made of a toxic substance that had a half-life of four and a half billion years.

“We're not the only ones making bombs,” said Misty. “We're making bombs in a world where other people are making bombs. Do you really want to live in a country that doesn't have them?”

“You don't even work on the line—you work in the office,” put in True, but nothing anyone said would change her mind.

“Does that mean we won't drive to work together anymore?” asked Lyle, and Maggie replied, “No.”

“No, we won't drive together or no, that isn't what it means?” asked Lyle.

“We won't drive together anymore, Lyle. That's the part that breaks my heart.”

When Lyle had lost his job at the prison, it was Maggie who persuaded him to apply for a job at the munitions plant, and for the past four years she had packed turkey and cheese sandwiches for Lyle and Will and turkey without cheese for herself, and then squeezed her knees against the truck's gearshift until they dropped Will off at his school before continuing down the New Road, past the turnoff to the Choctaw Casino and along the New Road extension to the plant, but now she wondered how she could have been so glibly confident when she had said to Lyle, “Come work with me! You'll know half the people there, and you won't have to worry that an inmate will take you hostage if you make a mistake or turn your back.” Years before, there had been a riot at the prison, and people still talked about it as an ominous and continuing threat.