This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (16 page)

At first, Ginny did not understand the apology, and remained frozen, unsure, Marianne's hand on her knee. But then Marianne continued, saying: “There was nothing that anyone could do,” and, “Sometimes these things happen”—and then she knew everything.

GINNY WONDERED SOMETIMES
if things might have happened somewhat differently if the events of that summer had been left, instead, to Ginny's mother to explain. If it had been her mother who told her—that the baby had not been a baby at all, but only a collection of mismatched cells in the womb, which (Marianne said) could “trick you.” It might have seemed, coming from her mother, different—reasonable, even. Her mother would have made it that way. She would have mentioned
God
, and then it could have been
He
that filled up the holes if there were any, and pretty soon Ginny would have again been able to enter into a—how would you say it? An understanding with the world.

There was no understanding to enter into in Marianne's car. With the top down and the baby dead, or, what was worse, never
having been
, it was clear that she could never return, now, to that other sense of things. To the faith that, up until that point, had been maintained in her by an hour and a half of church every Sunday, and a nightly emptying out of her head, which was her attempt at prayer. Instead, ever after, she would have only that sense: a long-nailed finger on her knee, and a matter-of-fact voice in her head saying that that there was “nothing to be done,” that “these things happened”—and always after that, too, a firm resolve that she would never, unlike her mother, be “tricked” by anything.

GINNY HAD NEVER
been back to Los Alamos, but she and Marianne had managed to remain close, especially after Ginny's mother died. It was Ginny whom Marianne called,
even years later, when there was anything important to say. When Pauly got sick, for example, Ginny was the first to know. One year, a forest fire had burned within five hundred yards of a nuclear storage site outside the city, and Ginny was the first person whom Marianne—a week late—told about that, too. “We drove past that spot a thousand times when you were out here,” she said. “I could point it out now and you'd remember. Just out of town, right at the foot, on the Los Alamos side of the hills. You know the sad thing?” She paused and Ginny didn't say anything. “They didn't know it was going to go out,” she said. “Honest to goodness, they thought it was going to burn right down the hill, right to the foundation of that building … No one knew what was going to happen then,” she said, pausing again, and speaking hesitatingly slow, as if afraid that Ginny might not catch her meaning. “And still,” she said. “No one. Said. A. Word.”

Though Ginny was hazy on the details of the event and somewhat skeptical about those that she knew, she could not get rid of the image of her aunt at the other end of the line—as she had drummed out the final syllables of her story, as though they were her own long-nailed fingers drummed on her knee: “Lucky thing was,” Marianne had said, “it just—
happened to rain
.” Worse, still—the image of Marianne as she had apparently sat only a week before, waiting patiently in her Los Alamos living room: for the lightning flash. For the sun at once to touch the earth; for the last, dark cloud to billow up, finally, from behind the Los Alamos hills …

What, Ginny later demanded to know—still unable to rid herself of the image, and hoping to coax from Marianne some logical explanation, which she felt to be conspicuously missing from the account—of the unpardonable silence of the chemists and technicians? Of the government? Or even of Aunt Marianne herself? None of whom had had the clarity of purpose, or mind, to alert anyone—even poor Pauly, who was dying in the next room—that the last hour had come?

Marianne did not have any particularly satisfactory answers to offer—but nor did she defend herself, or deflect the blame. “What exactly,” she had asked Ginny instead, “would you have had me say?” Then, after a long silence, amplified by the low hum of the telephone, she said: “You know, I'd rather die by flood. What about you? Or by natural fire. People shouldn't be afraid of
real things
anymore.” Once more her voice was light, and untroubled—trilling slightly on her final note.

THE WAY THAT GINNY
imagined it, nothing had changed in Marianne's house since the summer she was almost twelve. The photos still hung darkly. Everyone leaning a little forward in their frames. Ranchers. Ranchers' wives. Ranchers' daughters. (All Pauly's family, and therefore Ginny's own. Marianne didn't have any family—at least not to speak of.) Generations of almost-cowboys, who, with a staunchness of character and a firmness of mind—which had become, it seemed, in ensuing generations,
increasingly difficult to pass on—had crossed continents, built homesteads now long demolished, raised children now only dimly recalled … The land they'd cleared was still cleared land now, no doubt—a parking lot, or a shopping mall—but everything else had long since grown over or faded away. Still, though—they were men of whom a person, descended from that line, could be frankly proud; men on whom
reality
, as Marianne would have put it, fire and flood, for example, had had an effect. It seemed sad to Ginny, because of this, that on the nearly fateful afternoon her aunt had described, the one-dimensioned characters of that house had continued to regard it all—Marianne, ankles crossed, her feet touching at exactly one central point on the carpeted floor—from the ludicrousness of their over-large frames.

ALTHOUGH IN HIROSHIMA
it was described as a single
instant
, there would have also, invariably, been those who had waited, like Aunt Marianne. Ginny considers this.

There would have been those, necessarily, Ginny thinks to herself—as, out from the museum, they begin to make their way across the Aioi bridge, toward the gas station, blinking, on the opposite shore—who had written the letter, tested the equipment, readied the plane … But, no. It was impossible to think of it. Easier, instead, to imagine the instant, the flash. Like the earth had, without warning, collided with the sun. One moment: there had been a dragonfly, alighting somewhere. And the
next … ? Who could calculate the distance between one single moment and another? It had long seemed to Ginny that things happen not at any particular or recordable time, but at an indeterminate midpoint. Somewhere, that is, between the verifiable and measurable
tick
and the ensuing, and otherwise unremarkable,
tock
… in that incalculable interval of both space and time. As in the moments after a bad fall—when, for a long, extended moment that is not a moment, you are unsure if you exist at all, and it is only by great effort that you locate, at first, your elbows, your fingers, your knees, and then begin to understand again in slow successive waves that you are
alive
, returned to your body. A hand is raised, and a shout, and it is your own throat that has yelled it out—to say, before you know yourself that it is true, that you are
all right
, that no great damage has been done. And it is only in that moment of speaking, in the use of an
I
, in the channelling of a voice—your own—through a singular throat, in sending it out from its central point in the middle of your chest, that the moment comes, and you realize that you have fallen; that you have raised yourself again. And in the moment of return, the long interval (in which you felt yourself to be diffuse, hardly corporeal) disappears almost completely. You realize that, in fact, it has been only a fraction of a second, the slight effects of a shock. Hardly worth mentioning.

THE BABY HAD NOT
been a baby, Marianne said, but, instead, “a cluster of cells.” Years later, it was only
because this description corresponded perfectly with the description of the cancer that was to cause her mother's death that Ginny realized the connection between the two things. Returning to California, after her New Mexico summer, Ginny had confided the new information to her best friend, Valerie, telling her everything she knew about the non-baby that, over the summer, her mother had not had. Valerie, though—who always thought she knew everything—had only snorted through her nose. “All babies are ‘a cluster of cells,'” she'd said. “That's all anybody is.” Ginny asked Marianne about this later, on the telephone, and Marianne had explained. The difference, she'd said, was that this baby's cells had been put together in a jumbled-up sort of way that made a sickness, and not a human being. It had confused, but rather comforted, Ginny to think that the line that separated what was good from what was bad was a tangible thing that could exist inside someone like her mother. It wasn't until three and a half years later, when her mother died, that Ginny realized her mistake. There was nothing, it turned out, that separated good things from bad, or that kept the bad things from happening. Still more years went by before it first occurred to her that what had happened to her mother had begun all those years ago, in the summer she had spent with Marianne and Pauly in New Mexico. Uterine cancer was the actual disease that had killed her mother, she learned, finally. Though with her own family they had always just referred to it as being “sick.”

But if there wasn't a line, there were certainly still distinctions that needed to be made. That was what it meant to be a grown-up person. Still, it was appalling the extent to which a person could come to think of herself as autonomous, singular,
accountable
for certain things, but at the same time remaining always as if in between everything. Incapable, finally, of extricating herself from a sequence that led, moment to moment—always, and without recourse—to a final and inevitable conclusion. It was horrible. To think of it. Simply sitting, toes touching, and ankles crossed … To think of simply floating chronologically room to room, as one did in a museum. Getting closer: '43, '44. Now February, now March; just waiting, and waiting.

“FAT MAN,”
Susan says. They have reached the centre of the bridge, and stand, looking down at the river, which is black, and calm.

“What?” says Ginny.

“Fat man and little boy,” Susan says. “Isn't that something.”

They are the names of the dropped bombs, Ginny knows, but for some reason it makes her angry the way that Susan has said them. Casually, like that, and out of the blue, with the cars whizzing by over the bridge and the lights from the JOMO gas station blinking on the corner. In the end, there was only the river. And the lines of traffic on either side. The dragonfly, or not. The bicycles. The world
had continued. It had gathered its relics, and proceeded on. On and on without pause. The letters, the stopped timepieces—these were only the after-effects of a thing that hadn't even happened yet. It was all, Ginny thought, just—a waiting. A waiting to end, a waiting to resume. And it continued. In the museums and the history books, which were always, inevitably (therefore) incomplete, and obscured. The ankles crossed. The carpeted floor. For lesser or greater degrees of renewal and of destruction. For the dragonfly to lift. For ourselves, finally, to realize—and with startling accuracy—the intricacies in the body of the fly, which, previously, had gone unnoticed for the wing. For example, the length of single moments. The proximity of things, object to object. Waiting; and then again, waiting, for everything to settle, and resume itself. Object to object again in a blur, moment to unchecked moment, wing to unconsidered body. Again.

IN A FEW MOMENTS,
Ginny will turn and—following Susan—continue slowly to the opposite shore. For the moment, however, this is very difficult to imagine. Even her return to Paris seems remote suddenly—too much to ask. There, Ginny thinks, there will be, again, the inevitable longings, and corresponding wearinesses; the relative smallness and bigness of things. The limits—or lack thereof. She feels a sharp, caught feeling. High in her chest, as though she's drawn up—
fixed
. Pulled into sharp focus, somehow—as the T of the bridge had one time been.

Maybe she should take Susan's advice and stay. Find a small house to fit inside. Or, if that was impossible—go home instead. Repaint the flag at the end of the drive with her father for the Fourth of July. Drive out to the city limit—maybe even buy a plot of land out there. Go to the supermarket on the weekends. Bump into people she knew from high school in the aisles. Valerie, maybe. With one or two of her “clusters of cells” in tow.

But no, that was wrong, too. She could
not
just pick up and move—to Japan, this time, like Susan, or even home again, to California, if the spirit moved her. Could not begin there—wholly anew—as if an entire other life spread out before her there. That was just it. It
could not be done
, and yet—the desire persisted. In that respect, at least, she had something in common with her dimly remembered relatives—and with the world. She was caught, at that exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. Trapped into it, just like everyone else, no matter how—or how variously—she attempted to extract herself. Without faith, and yet … an errant sense of direction, and of purpose, all the same. Always that—yes. The very
process
of everything as it occurred (always as if for the first time, and so without contrast) leading to the perpetual and most likely false conviction that there actually existed, at the under-layer of things, something infinitely resilient, immutable, and forgiving; that it would be possible, always, to pause … to defer … to destroy, even, if necessary; begin over again.

“
FAT MAN!
” Susan says again. They have once again begun in the direction of the opposite shore, Susan closest to the rail, looking down at the river, which is flat and calm. “Little Boy! It's just
sick
,” she says. “To have named them something so—benign.”