I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (26 page)

So I decided that I would take actions, regardless of my feelings of fear. I’d already bought the plane ticket to Boston. I flew on Thanksgiving because it had the cheapest fare. I’d reserved an inexpensive hotel room for five nights, but when I did a budget and found I couldn’t afford the hotel after all, I asked for help. I hate asking for help, for people to put me up. But I emailed my poetry publisher. I got the place in Newton for a night. I emailed Julia a few days before I was to leave, and she invited me to stay with them.

But by the time I was actually on the bus from Boston to my aunt and uncle’s house, it wasn’t just a set of isolated actions—drive car, check bag, buy bus ticket—I was about to enter a house full of people I barely knew, for no apparent reason. On the bus, I had that panic attack. Alone in the dark, I remembered my friend Janean had called me earlier on my cell. I called her back. I think she said she loved me. Maybe not, but I felt it anyway. Before I’d left home, I’d emailed my sponsor from the last town I’d lived in. I didn’t have a new sponsor. Told her what I was going to do. She said that she was reminded that gratitude was an action. I knew she meant that I was expressing my gratitude toward my relatives, that I would thank them for raising my son. But I would be taking
from them too—I knew my talking would hurt them. Still, I also thought of action, of the taking of action, as gratitude. Gratitude for being alive. I thought of action as good, like exercise, like lifting a weight.

I don’t know how much I’ve hurt my relatives. The way my uncle seemed unanchored from whatever place he’d been in. Like someone drowning and still talking about Tommy for me, because I needed him too. I know he needed it too, but what if he couldn’t take it? While I’d been staying at their house, we’d all learned that Anne was dying. The freezing of her body continuing. She’d been hospitalized. Julia sent me an email when I got back home, said she wouldn’t have recognized Anne if my uncle hadn’t gone in the room first. “She gave me a thumbs-up,” Julia said. She said it was hard not to cry. They told Anne I’d been to visit, that I had a new book of poems. Anne typed on her machine. “She said she’d love to have any of your books,” Julia said. “One of the nurses can read your poems to her.” Anne had also typed, “Don’t be sorry for me. I’ve had a good life.” For Christmas, I sent a book to Julia to give to Anne, and a T-shirt with a dog saying for Julia, a mug with dog talk for Mark, and six dog biscuits wrapped in a bow. I didn’t hear from them. I don’t know if Anne is worse, or if they were expecting the tapes of Tommy made into a DVD (instead of my silly presents) or if my dad told them that I’m likely to write about them. Or what.

There is still another action to take—finding a place that can make the pre-videotape reels with Tommy into a DVD. It’s something I can do for my aunt and uncle, something they couldn’t do. That I can do because I love them. And it’s what I was after from the beginning, to find my son. Who I now see in my face, and who is alive in the world of 1981 and 1982 on these tapes. I can go there pretty soon.

When I’d come home from the trip, gone back to work, I was
reluctant to talk about anything that happened, afraid I would talk it away. The way so many things can be talked away, minimized into anecdote by a listener, a commenter. But I thought of Kim, the poet, and her husband, whom I had stayed with in Newton. How talking to them, those kind strangers, how it hadn’t been like that at all. When I’d returned home, I’d written them a note. Kim wrote back, said, “Frank brings up your visit as a sort of touchstone for change we want to make in our lives.” She said, “I wouldn’t have known that you were frazzled coming to my house. You were radiant.”

1.

In
Labyrinths,
Borges said “the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.” The spiral mirroring the Milky Way, the underworld, even our bodies inside, our falling for many nights. That year in Massachusetts, before my son was born, I’d loved running at night, especially in snow. Starting at midnight when things quieted, past factories, empty highway, Dunkin’ Donuts the only yellow light. That girl in the Bridgewater dorm warned me against running alone at night, but I’d always felt safe. Even with the prison nearby. At night the buildings in town became older, defined, each factory window empty and full with everyone who’d ever looked out year after year, each blink. The snow clearing a mirror.

But then in August 1979, I moved to Florida again, and couldn’t run. Everything meant to burn, palmetto, pine needles, the sun kindling everyone into a drunken candle. I took sweltering walks at night past sand pits, the mall’s cool air-conditioned hand, wearing Levi’s, tube top, dollars in my pocket for a magazine. A man jogging ahead in jeans had seemed strange, chunky in a sweatshirt, too many clothes. But the sky was pink, there was a little breeze.

On my way home from the drugstore, I’d seen the jogger up ahead, he’d turned too, running the way we’d come. But then he’d disappeared. I was coming up on the 7-Eleven, remembered that they carried
Rolling Stone
, picked up the issue with Joni Mitchell on the cover, powdery, aging. Later, I guessed where the jogger had gone, understood the way he’d appeared like a figure in a board game, then vanished near the 7-Eleven. The back of the store secluded and dark. I thought of him there, overdressed, wondering why I didn’t pass by his knife and the green Dumpster—imagining the ease of my wings folded, legs a basket, jumbled. Impatient, he’d run down the road ahead while I read in the store. He waited again, in the near dark close to my house. Ski mask, yellow hair like a broom sticking up, cut eyes, mouth.

When I turned the corner into my development, I saw him near a tall bush, almost a hedge, something to hide behind. When he spoke, I tasted how easily I could be leaves in a hidden place. Rain and blood, earth, where a body can go maneuvering between woods and bushes. His knife at my belly, diagramming an entrance, while I kept near the white center line. I was losing ground until a car came, scared him off, headlights bright as snow.

If time is the soul of the world, then this moment must be somewhere. My moments of escape. Is all time somewhere? The tapes I have of Tommy (Tom? I no longer know what name to call him), is the time on them somewhere too, playing over and over? Is he alive somewhere? I’ve had the tapes for more than a month. I asked a couple of people at work if they knew where I could get them converted to DVD. Just asking Nick and then Nancy about it, getting the question out, was slow going. I felt as if I was deep underwater, exhausted by each word. “Call Speedway,” Nancy said, “They’ll know.” When the weather turns cold, I put the tapes in my childhood dresser, protect them with my clothes.
I tell myself the tapes could be brittle, they could be ruined if handled. I think that as long as I have the tapes, he’s alive on them, even if I can’t see him.

Five hundred million years ago, radiolarians lived in the ocean. The fossils of their single cells tell how old rocks are in the deep ocean. Fossil, from the Welsh
bedd,
meaning grave. The beds of the radiolarians. Their skeletons of silica in the beach sand. How far back does time start? Every time I go back to Orlando, I feel as though I’m walking through my past. One of the last times there, I just wanted to sit in my old driveway and the house was gone, just gone, a swath of grass. As if they’d taken who I’d been in that house—me and the Sugar Mountain man along with the boards and nails. I’d been with Nick from the artists’ residency center. We were in a van, bringing three of the artists to Orlando for a salon in a patron’s home. As we drove by the empty lot, I’d turned to Nick in the driver’s seat, said I used to live there. Dismayed. Nick had said, “Let it go,” very matter of factly, as someone who is fifty and has let a lot of things go can say it. But I still see our bodies, our hair, our hands on each other in the mouth of an earthmover, crumpling easily like dolls into one of those big trucks full of dirt, off to the burial, the bed. I wondered how it could be left behind like sawdust, peanut shells on the floor, like those songs sung in a room, and then just left there when he walked out the door.

The magnetic field of the earth is comforting, the way it keeps the sun from burning us up. Solar winds passing by. Without it, we could have been another Mars, everything on fire. It’s a miracle anything’s here. One night I sleep almost twelve hours, wake up, call Speedway. “You want Carlton in South Daytona,” a man said, “but thanks for calling us first. Here’s the number.” I call, leave a message. A girl calls me back. I describe my reels. “Are they all about an inch and a half?” she asks. “It sounds like you have two
hundred fifty feet of film.” She says, “We can do it. We say a week, but usually it’s two days.” “Thanks,” I say. “Thanks.” Dave Carlton can convert the tapes into something I can see. “He gets here at seven in the morning, even though we open at nine. You can knock on the door.”

2.

In 2009,
Boston Magazine
doesn’t seem to do its surveys rating quality of life anymore. Instead, the cities are in competition for specific categories, like “Do-It-Yourselfer.” Brockton wins in the category of “The Sports Fan.” I can’t find the earlier article I’d seen from the late 1990s, the high rates of childhood leukemia I thought I’d found. Instead, using Brockton’s Mortality Records from 2005–2007, I find that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported fifteen leukemia deaths in the city. One of these deaths was a child. I’m surprised. Was I wrong about the numbers? About the city? My intuition—was that off too? It’s good news for everyone, but I’m still stunned.

Using the 2004–2006 Calendar Year Hospital Discharges record, the Massachusetts Community Health Information Profile counted twenty-five leukemia hospitalizations in Brockton. Leukemia incidence was drawn from the 2001–2005 Cancer Registry. MassCHIP reported a total leukemia incidence of forty-seven. None of these are children. I don’t know if I am reading the profile correctly, so I send an email to MassCHIP, ask for the most recent Leukemia Report for Brockton. The director sends me directions to download the software and an imbedded tutorial to form queries and retrieve historical date on cancer incidence in Brockton from 1985 to 2005, hospitalization data from 1989 to 2006, and mortality data from 1989 to 2007. He says it will be
worth my time to download if I will need the data on a regular basis. The data includes births, deaths, cancer incidence, hospitalizations, ER data, substance abuse treatment, admissions, HIV/ AIDS incidence and prevalence, STDs, et cetera. I wonder who he thinks I am that I would need access to this data on a regular basis.

Then, he says, “A technical note: there are too few cases of childhood leukemia in Brockton in an individual year for us to release the number without threatening to violate confidentiality. You can get past this by forming groups of years (e.g., 1985–1987) using the group function in MassCHIP.” He tells me to disable my firewall to form groups of years. He’s very helpful, even kindly. There are too few cases? In every year? I don’t know. What made me think it was high? Did I misread that quality of life survey? See a number on one line that belonged on another?

I start to look at the health of the city, the water. According to Sperling’s Best Places, Brockton rates a 27 in Water Quality (100 is best; U.S. average is 55). In Air Quality, Brockton got 28 out of 100 (U.S. is 48). For Superfund Sites, Brockton got a 30 out of 100 (U.S. is 71). The Superfund number is based upon the number and impact of EPA Superfund pollution sites in the county, including spending on the cleanup. When I looked up the Environmental Justice Report for Plymouth County, I found that the most common contaminant detected at this Superfund site was ethylbenzene. I remembered benzene from another report, “Childhood Cancer in New Jersey: 1979–1995.” It noted that “some parental occupational exposures have been suggested as risk factors for childhood leukemia. Maternal exposures include benzene.”

The Superfund site in Plymouth County is next door to Brockton, on three acres in Bridgewater, where I went to school the year before I got pregnant. The Cannon Engineering Corporation
(CEC) is the Superfund site. It was cleaned up in December 1982, a year before the date my son got an earache, when he started to get sick. But I don’t see a direct connection from this to my son’s illness. I saw that the EPA found that “from 1974 to 1980, CEC was licensed to transport, store, and incinerate certain types of hazardous wastes. [As of December 1982] on-site structures include 21 storage tanks, three buildings, an office/ warehouse, and an incinerator. Ground water south of the site is contaminated with benzene, 1.1.1-trichloroethane, and toluene. To date, no contamination of drinking wells has been detected. A pond to the south and a swamp to the west are also contaminated. Owners of CED were indicted for illegal storage and disposal of hazardous wastes. In October 1982, the state contracted for removal and disposal of hazardous wastes in tanks (about 150,000 gallons) and in about 600 drums.” The on-site air, the groundwater, and the soil and sediments contained VOCS—a suspected carcinogen. The site is thirty minutes from where I went to school, forty-four minutes from where my son lived. But it’s cleaned up, fenced off. And according to the EPA, Plymouth County has a “good” Superfund rating as of 2004, with just the one site.

A 2008 study says that Brockton ranks in the “top 10 most extensively environmentally overburdened communities in Massachusetts (out of 362 communities).” Brockton “grossly exceeds” the statewide average of 166 environmental hazard points per community, with 709 points. There are 347 hazardous waste sites in the city—“an average of over 16 hazardous waste sites per square mile.” The study says that “exposure to industrial chemicals is also believed by scientists to be contributing to dramatic increases since the 1950s in cancers—an epidemic that kills half-a-million Americans each year.” The author says that cancer “now kills more American children that any other single disease for the
first time in history.” But a public health official at Northeastern University tells me that nationally, cancer doesn’t meet the public health definition of an “epidemic.” She also gives me the rates for childhood leukemia incidence in Brockton, and they are very similar to the rates for Massachusetts as a whole. She mentions that this doesn’t take into account geographic clusters of leukemia incidence in Brockton, but she says clusters are very difficult to determine.