The Atomic Weight of Love (20 page)

He gripped the gutter, straightened his arms and began kicking. The tendons of his neck were taut.

“Good! You’re doing a good job, Alden!”

“A little less of the kindergarten teacher enthusiasm,” he said, standing and wiping water from his face. I saw him glance at the hook where he’d hung his towel.

“No one’s going to take your towel, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I joked, and prodded him in the side with an index finger. “How about we try floating? I’ll help you get onto your back.” I looked to see if there were a quieter spot in the pool. “Let’s go over to that corner,” I said, and set off. I looked back and could see his trepidation. “C’mon, Alden. Just hold onto the gutter and walk your way over.” He moved slowly, hand over hand, blinking exaggeratedly whenever water splashed him.

I helped him onto his back, kept my arm beneath his lower back as support, and told him to use his knowledge of physics to assess how to alter his body position so that he could maintain the float, adjust for the density and weight of his legs. “Archimedes,” I said. “Displacement!” I showed him that if he put his hands over his head, it would make his body take a different position in the water than if he held them out from his sides, and what a difference it made if he held even just his fingertips out of the water.

“If you can relax, you’ll find it really is easy.”

“Meri, I am not going to relax,” he sputtered. His face was red.

I tried moving my supporting arm out from under him for a moment, and he panicked.

“What the
hell
!” He began thrashing his arms.

I took him by a shoulder and helped him stand. He immediately searched for the gutter and grabbed onto it.

“Why on
earth
would you let go of me?” His hair was plastered to his head like the fur of a scrawny, wet dog.

“Don’t you trust me?” I said, teasing, and yet wondering.

“That’s enough for today. That’s enough.”

I knew better than to object—and I could see that he’d never agree to come back and try again.

“Where’s the ladder?” He was blinking, blind.

“To your right. Follow the gutter.”

“You stay and swim. I’ll get dressed and wait in the balcony.”

“OK,” I said, trying to mask my disappointment. I watched as he toweled off and put on his glasses. He wrapped the towel around his shoulders like a prayer shawl and headed for the men’s locker room.

I put in a quick half mile, promising myself that I would work to remember this as a brave attempt on Alden’s part. Still, I couldn’t help but remember Jerry, our long-ago swim at the lagoon in Jackson Park, and his unabashed leaps from high boulders into dark waters.

I REGISTERED
FOR A
drawing class at the Rec Center. An artist from Santa Fe drove up twice a week to teach Drawing Figures. The classes met in the mornings, when the children were safely tucked away in classrooms.

Anorexic Peggy Hillson dressed only in Beatnik black—black leggings, black skirt, black turtleneck, and thick-soled sandals. Her light blonde hair was cut in a pixie, and she was so thin that her knees looked like softballs balanced precariously on the batons of her lower legs. Her fingers were long and tapered, and she carried a miniature cooler filled with bottles of Coca-Cola. While we drew, I would listen for the clink of her bottle-opener against the glass, the hiss of carbonation. We started with perspective, drawing boxes. She talked about our cone of vision, setting the horizon line, and I was intrigued by the concept of a vanishing point. Peggy handed us wooden rulers and rectangles of soft, pink erasers. The hour went by quickly, and I disappeared into the paper, totally focused on my task. I immediately grew to love the process, and it was marvelous to use my brain in a different way. To
use
my brain.

Peggy looked over my shoulder. “You’re doing a fine job, Mrs. Whetstone,” she said. “I hope you’ll continue to work at it.”

“Definitely,” I said and heard her stifle a little effervescent burp. She moved on to Allison Montgomery, who was erasing with such vehemence that I heard her paper tear. It made me think of Belle—she’d tear the paper, I thought, and then swear a blue streak. I pretended she was there with me, nudging me in the side, calling me teacher’s pet. Someday, I wanted to be able to draw a portrait of Belle, to reproduce the contours of her face. A part of me was terrified I’d forget what she looked like, that I’d be unable to close my eyes and see her.

AS THE SIXTIES BEGAN,
I continued to take art classes, my favorite being a course on drawing from nature. I started sketching my crows, depicting the communicative body language I’d previously tried to describe in words. I drew my withered-footed male and his mate, the pin feathers of his just-molted head. I drew the pair open-beaked, cawing out warnings, mobbing predators, playing tug-of-war with a stick. I drew nests with striking blue-green, brown-spotted eggs and young crows with their pale-blue eyes, before they matured to brown. I filled the margins of my crow journals with their images, and as time went by, I was surprised at how far the drawings progressed beyond my first, primitive attempts.

Withered Foot was the only individual crow I could reliably identify without a banding system. He was my link back into the science, into reliable, reportable results. Year after year, Withered Foot and his mate nested in the same section of the canyon, losing portions of their offspring to high winds, predators, and disease. I drew naked, featherless baby birds with bulbous, unseeing eyes on spindly, weak necks and watched Withered Foot and his mate care for their newborns. I drew the dead baby birds.

I drew myself in my increasingly odd but practical outfits, my denim trousers and boots, my pearl earrings and army-green ball cap. I drew myself small, nearly invisible, a tiny human speck in a grand landscape. I drew myself alone, but contentedly so, and purposeful.

THE RINGING OF THE
phone woke us. It was late, after eleven. Alden put out a hand to tell me to stay put, and he made his way to the phone in the hallway. I heard his terse questions: “How did they get it?” “Oh, no,” and “Oh, sweet Jesus.” I turned on my reading lamp.

He returned, rubbing the furrow between his brows, his glasses slightly askew.

“It’s awful, just awful.” He sat on my side of the bed, his hands clenched in his lap, almost prayerful. “You know the fenced land along the new road? With the barbed wire, all of the no-trespassing signs and warnings about explosives?”

“Where they used to test rocket launchers and bazookas?”

“Right. Well, someone was there early this morning.” He looked at the alarm clock. “No, yesterday morning—Saturday.”

“OK.”

“He took his nephew—just ten years old. They found an unexploded bazooka shell.”

“Oh, God, no.”

“They took it home—put it in the trunk of the car and took it home, if you can believe that.”

“Oh, Alden.”

“Wait—it gets worse.”

I pulled up the bedcovers. It was mid-July, but I was suddenly cold.

“He gave it to his nephew and some of his nephew’s friends—five kids total. They played with it, and one of the children either dropped it or hit it with a hammer—that part’s not clear—but it exploded.” I put my hand to my mouth. “One child was killed outright. One little boy lost both of his legs. God, Meri. Little children with a bazooka—little children with live, unexploded munitions.”

Alden removed his eyeglasses, set them next to my glass of water on the nightstand. His face was ashen. His voice was a whisper, his face in his cupped hands. “This place is still killing people. Children. Babies.”

“Alden,” I said, taking his hands from his face. “Look at me. You know this is not your fault. You cannot make that connection—it’s completely invalid.”

“I’ve never gotten past it. I’ve tried.” He tilted his head.

“The bomb?”

“The damage done.”

“It had to be done. Even in retrospect, you know it had to be done. Alden,” I said with all the firmness I could muster. “Listen to me. Hear me. Really hear me.” I paused. What could I say that would give him absolution for a sin he believed he’d committed but that I would not admit was a sin on any level? “You’re making a connection between the war, the bomb, Japan, and the foolhardiness of someone who should have known better. An adult who lives in this community and who could read the warning signs but who—for whatever reason—call it hubris or pomposity or just sheer negligence, call it whatever you want. My point is that what happened today—as tragic as it is—it’s not your doing.”

He took a deep breath, and it caught somewhere in his chest. His shoulders slumped.

I went on. “I’m not going to argue the merits of the atomic bomb tonight—not at this hour. We can do that ad infinitum at some point, if you’d like,” I said, refusing to condone his train of thought by commiserating. “You’re a scientist, Alden, not a philosopher. Use your science. Apply your knowledge.”

He kissed me softly, and I ran my thumb beneath each of his eyes.

“I love you,” he said, and then reached for his eyeglasses.

“Where are you going?”

“To make myself some warm milk.”

“I’ll do it for you.”

“No. No, Meri, you go back to sleep. I’ll probably read for a while.” He left the room, closing the door softly behind him. I heard the pan when he placed it on the burner, the whoosh of the burner’s flame.

I closed my eyes and saw five children in a totemic circle, taking turns ritualistically pounding on a bazooka shell. The empty sound of the metal when the hammer head hit, the percussive rhythms. A flash of light, a boom, like lightning in the forest cracking the length of a giant pine. Arms and legs and hands and bellies and faces shot full of scrolled metal shavings. I smelled burned flesh. Burned hair. I saw multicolored ribbons blown from pigtails descending softly to the ground. I saw the incinerated birds over Hiroshima.

Where could we bury all of our sorrows, our regrets, our guilty responsibilities—deserved or undeserved? How deeply could we burrow into that place of oblivion? The scent of Alden’s pipe tobacco made its way to where I lay and, worn out from crying, I fell asleep breathing that calming aroma.

One of the children—the boy who lost both legs—lived in our neighborhood. Some time after the accident, I saw him first in a wheelchair and later learning to walk with crutches on two false, plastic legs. A few years later, his parents moved from Los Alamos, spiriting their son away from the nightmare, but every time I drove along that stretch of barbed wire, saw the signs that said
DANGER
—
EXPLOSIVES
, I thought of that circle of children.

IN LATE AUGUST OF
that summer of 1962, Bessie, my mother’s neighbor and longtime friend, found Mother lying dead, her head pillowed in a mass of full-throated, deep red peonies, her feet in their sturdy black work shoes awkwardly splayed. Mother’s wet laundry lay scattered in twisted clumps beside her, and angry red insect bites covered the tender skin of her arms and neck.

Bessie and members of Mother’s church helped me to make the long-distance funeral arrangements. Alden’s reasons for not accompanying me were all rather vague—he needed to meet some deadline for an experiment. He did agree to drive me to Albuquerque for my flight, and once in Pittsburgh, I’d rent a car for the trip to Greensburg.

I felt a pleasant tightening at the base of my throat as we taxied down the runway, the plane gained momentum, and the wheels let go of the earth. Although I was nearly thirty-nine years old, it was my first plane ride. I enjoyed the tiny salt and pepper shakers that came with my meal, the efficiency and perfect fit of the puzzle pieces of food on the tiny plate, the cup and saucer with their red TWA logo, the crisp presentation of the fat-free stewardesses.

And then there were the clouds. It was magic to be above them, to see their uppermost contours, the way they caught the light and held it, their vast shadows moving upon the face of the earth. I wished I could open the window and know what the world sounded like at that altitude. I thought about the solitude of that world, how it must be inhabited by the voice of the wind, only. I put my head back and closed my eyes. I thought about what my crows saw as they flew above canyons and treetops, the birds-eye view of life. They would recognize specific trees, perches, and nesting sites from a completely different perspective than I could. Their maps differed from mine; they knew the topography, the contours of the landscape, on a much grander scale.

I stretched my neck muscles, kneaded them with my fingertips. Mother was gone. She had not ascended into the clouds, knocked on any pearly gates, or donned any gently curved angel’s wings. She did not walk the streets of a land of milk and honey, of jeweled lampposts, and she did not dine upon airy tidbits of meringue and chocolate. I hoped she’d found her God, the God that had bolstered her when my father died. I hoped that regrets hadn’t tugged at her between the time when the vessel in her brain exploded and she fell to the ground, dead.

For the remainder of my life, I would not be able to ask her questions about the things she’d done or thought, how she felt about me. I’d not be able to ask her to help me remember some childhood event, some part of our family’s history. My link to the past was gone, and my link to my father and his history gone with her. I’d never had more than superficial connections with Mother’s treasured Somerset County cousins, and I knew they’d fade after the funeral service, that at most we’d exchange cards once a year. I wouldn’t feel the reassurance of Mother’s encompassing embrace, smell her Pears soap, or unwrap her Christmas gift of homemade tea towels and dresser scarves. Without her, I wondered if centrifugal force would be powerful enough to keep me from spinning off like some errant planet, or if I would become lost in the cosmos.

IT TOOK ME NEARLY
three weeks to go through Mother’s home and find a realtor to sell the house. I said goodbye to the banister I’d polished as a girl, the kitchen that had held the delicious memories of stuffed cabbage and apple butter, my father’s reading spot in the light of the front window, and last of all to their bedroom, which still smelled like Mother.