“What? It’s okay,” he said.
I put the phone down and fished through my mother’s small red leather pouch that held her jewelry, where I’d once found my baby teeth. Beside it on the tile shelf were a necklace and two bangle bracelets I coveted but was not allowed to wear. I put them on. It was Sunday morning, and my mother was doing errands and would be gone for a few hours. Holding my arm so the bracelets wouldn’t fall off my wrist, I went to her closet and rummaged through her clothing and took from her dirty clothes pile a peach silk shirt with buttons down the front, short sleeves, and a collar. I wasn’t allowed to wear it. I slipped it over my head so I didn’t have to unbutton the buttons. Already I felt different—stronger.
I grabbed the phone again and went to sit on her bed. I would call him to communicate my confidence, my new independent spirit, set him at ease.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me again. I just wanted to call and say not to worry. I’m fine.” As I said it, the stupidity of the idea became obvious: he wasn’t worried. “I just wanted you to know I’m okay, you know. After I got off the phone so fast, and everything.”
“Thanks.” There was a long pause.
I hung up, shaking. At least it had been quick. I grabbed my mother’s hairbrush and walked across the house to my room, wearing her bracelets, her shirt, and my pajama pants.
I brushed my hair as I walked, flipped it up and down a couple of times so that it would fluff and feather. I put on jeans from the dirty clothes pile in my room, grabbed my journal from the shelf, and lowered the scraping venetian blinds over the window that looked out on the street.
I opened my closet door so the mirror that attached on the inside faced the room—but I resisted looking. I sat in front of the mirror on the floor and began to write. I could see a fuzzy silhouette of myself in my peripheral vision, and I wrote in a slanted, adult style, as if this first painful breakup experience had already made me older and more mature. I sat on my knees and bent forward, my hair falling to one side, as if for a camera or another person watching—all of this mattered as a record of who I was.
I adjusted my arm to get the bangles to clack. I looked down and noticed my shirt, how the peach went with the cream bangle, how the cream went with the wood. Adults mentioned forgetting parts of childhood and memories of others, and it was not clear to me which moments would create memories and which would fade away; the moments did not indicate which type they were.
I wrote that I’d broken up with Toby—well, he’d broken up with me, I wrote—and I was sad about it. But, even so, I wrote, I was doing just fine. I described what I was wearing in detail, in case my older self would want to know and picture my younger self at this moment. I implied that the shirt and the bangles were mine, not my mother’s.
I flipped my hair and looked up. In the mirror my hair did not hang or cascade but fluffed, thin and foolish. The items I described did not look the way I imagined them: the shirt fell wrong from the creases formed in the dirty clothes pile; the short sleeves hit my arms below the elbows; I didn’t have breasts to fill out the front, which hung down hollow. The color was dingy, almost like skin. The bracelets were not glamorous, just big and foolish.
Runaway
I started up in the darkness, my heart pounding. Dread sat like a weight on my chest, the taste of tin in my mouth. A roar in the distance had displaced the air, a heaviness still tremored in the earth below my futon. This was the end, a nuclear bomb on its way to NASA.
I knew what to do. I’d planned for this moment, the short interval after I knew the bomb was coming but before it hit: I would run through the dark center of the house and wake my mother, tell her the bomb was on its way and we had only a few minutes. We would hold each other and cry before we dissolved into the awful radiation and light.
I was up on my feet when I understood the sound was only a freight train. The heavy trains came through at night, longer than the passenger trains. I’d never woken up to the sound of them before.
Before this, when I was eleven, I’d started getting migraines. I knew one was coming when I looked down at my hand and part of it was invisible, or when I looked into the mirror and half my face was gone, replaced by a gray cloud with a shimmering stitch. Within twenty minutes, the first silvery, electric saw would slip down from my forehead, move through my eye and into the center of my brain.
The migraines and the fear of an impending nuclear holocaust became intertwined. A woman on NPR explained that once bombs were launched, it would not be possible to un-launch them. Our missiles were pointed at Russia; theirs were pointed at us. The Russians would have bombs trained on NASA, I thought, because it was strategically important. NASA was only a few miles from us.
That fall I became certain there would be a nuclear attack at Christmas. I also felt it was up to me to stop it, to get the adults to believe me, even though I was only eleven. One day, another migraine starting, my mother called Ron, who still worked at NASA. I hadn’t seen him for a few years. I was lying on my bed with the blinds drawn, dreading the start of the pain. My nerve endings spread out to touch every worry on the planet—each individual suffering, actual or potential.
“How you doing, kid?” Ron asked, walking into my room, where I was lying in bed, the curtains drawn.
“I’m worried about a bomb,” I said. “They’d want to hit NASA, right?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But if it happened—and I’m not saying it would, because it won’t—you wouldn’t feel anything. Not a thing. It would be like, poof. Over.”
“But in Hiroshima—”
“The bombs are a thousand times more powerful now,” he said.
“You mean, faster?” I asked. “Or covering more space?”
“Both,” he said.
“But what about just before it hits? Those minutes after we know it’s on the way but before it explodes?”
“You’d be vaporized before you had any idea. You’d be dead”—he snapped his fingers—”like that.”
“Thanks for coming by,” I said weakly. I didn’t believe anything he said. There would be at least a second when I knew it was coming, when the world still existed and I was still material. I could catch that moment if I was vigilant.
A few days later my father came over, biting triangles off an oversize Toblerone bar. He didn’t usually eat chocolate. A gift, he said, from a woman he’d just started dating.
“It’s mine,” he said, when I asked for a piece. “You know, she’s really smart,” he said. “She’s pretty too. She looks like that model, Claudia Schiffer.” Who was Claudia Schiffer?
It had been only a month or two since the last break with Tina. I figured the attraction would blow over, so I wasn’t very interested. It was too much to keep track of. But I’d never heard him talk about smart before. I hadn’t known to want both: pretty, smart. I felt as if I’d been duped, trying for pretty when pretty was not enough.
“You know, at the end of things, you forget how easy and great the beginnings are,” he said.
When the bomb didn’t come on Christmas, I became sure it would come just past midnight on New Year’s Eve. My migraines continued. My father and Mona had reserved a long table upstairs at Chez Panisse in Berkeley on New Year’s Eve, and my mother and I were invited to come along. At least she and I would be vaporized together.