Trinity, p.11
Trinity, page 11
But first I need to go back several steps.
Once upon a time, when I was twenty, before I worked for Robert at the institute, I was married to a person named Stan. Stan was a nice, decent person from New Jersey. I married him in 1952, two years before Robert’s security hearings, seven years after he left the position at Los Alamos. That was when we were still at war in Korea, and Robert was still advocating against testing the H-bomb, and I’m going to get to him in a moment, but I need to get this all out while I can.
When I met Stan, I was still a junior at Rosemont. I didn’t care much about science. Ever since I was a girl, I’d been caught up in secret ambitions to write a Great American Novel.
But that was something I never admitted out loud. It would have been an absurd thing to say, like announcing I hoped to become king of England. Who had ever heard of a girl writing a Great American Novel, let alone a debutante from the Main Line.
Anyway, my parents disapproved of their daughters’ pursuing the arts. A dignified, marriageable degree in art history was one thing, but actually pursuing an artistic life was for WASPs who could afford to flaunt their neuroses.
We, on the other hand, as representatives of our religion, had to show at all times how cheerful and mentally stable we were. How in control of our sensuous aspects.
My parents wanted us to play sports. We competed, but never too aggressively. It was essential to never reveal anything resembling a temper. My father rowed like Grace Kelly’s father. My mother played tennis, on the court my father built in the backyard, because the clubs on the Main Line weren’t open to Catholics.
Still, my secret dream was to write novels, though on the outside I took tennis lessons and worked hard to pretend that my great ambition in life was to accomplish an exemplary husband.
Unfortunately, however, in those days, I was twenty pounds overweight.
Sometimes, at night, in my dorm room at Rosemont, I ate bowls of cereal.
I stuffed my face full of soggy spoonfuls of Wheat Chex, which I’d bought during the day in the attempt to be healthful. By nighttime, however, when I’d finished my simpleton’s art history homework, I’d get caught up writing draft upon draft of some terrible novel, some sprawling, disjointed blob about American Characters in the Nuclear Era.
For hours and hours, I’d escape into the lives of the characters I’d invented. I’d duck into the personalities of people who weren’t like myself in any way, and while I wrote, giddy with freedom, I’d forget all appropriate concern for my figure. Then, in the morning, bleary eyed and appalled by how many bowls I’d consumed, I’d squeeze myself into a dress and go to class to be pretty.
MAYBE A STRONGER-WILLED GIRL WOULD HAVE GIVEN UP THE PURSUIT of a husband to follow her dreams of writing in earnest.
But then I had to consider the enormous effort my parents had made: the company my father had built out of nothing, the faultless veneer my mother had polished, the insults they’d so gracefully borne, and all in the belief that their daughters would flourish.
Every time I considered rebellion, the awareness of their sacrifice deflated my will.
At the end of the day, any rebellious energy I had left was spent on eating too much cereal, pointlessly and absurdly resisting my mother’s wish that we girls should stay slender.
I DON’T KNOW WHY I RESISTED SO FIERCELY. IT’S CLEAR TO ME NOW that my mother’s desire rose out of nothing but love. She herself had escaped a long line of women whose bodies were fed to their children. She hoped we’d rise above that. For us she wanted the dignity of life without a womanly body.
In other words, her intentions were pure. But for some reason, at night, I felt compelled to resist them. I stuffed my face with cereal. Then, in the mornings, with my undignified body spilling out of my dress, I went to class so unhappy.
I could barely keep it together to sit still and look pretty. I only just managed to make the right kinds of friends, in order to meet the right kind of husband.
LEFT TO MY OWN DEVICES, I’D NEVER HAVE FOUND HIM. I WAS TOO tired and unhappy after all those long nights. I was lucky my roommate Kathy had the energy to step in and assist me. The only reason I ever met Stan—and Robert, as a result—was because Kathy dragged me along with her to Princeton to go on a double date with her and her new boyfriend.
We drove up together in the Studebaker her parents had bought as a present for her coming-out party: not the Charity Ball, but the private cotillion our parents threw, just so we Catholic girls wouldn’t miss out. Kathy and I wore white dresses beaded with seed pearls. We danced with boys from exemplary families, and I tried not to gaze over their shoulders at the engraved silver trays of petits fours and friandises.
WHAT A MESS I ALWAYS WAS. I WAS LUCKY I HAD KATHY TO LOOK OUT for my interests. She ruled them with an iron fist.
Sometimes, remembering how determined and unscrupulous Kathy was about building alliances on my behalf, I start to get angry. Then I feel so bad for her I could weep.
Building marital alliances was her only pursuit. In some other existence, she could have arranged to make me the seventh wife of Henry VIII, thereby reversing the ecclesiastical schism. But in the early fifties at Rosemont, all she had was me and her Studebaker and the eligible friends of her boyfriends.
While we drove up to Princeton, the leaves lining the highway were changing. Kathy was driving with both hands gripping the wheel, sitting up very straight, wearing a cute pillbox hat and the white kidskin gloves she’d bought for herself at Strawbridge and Clothier.
The radio was turned to a channel on which several panelists were discussing the war in Korea, and how Truman had ordered atomic devices to be assembled at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.
Apparently B-29 bombers were flying practice runs from Okinawa to North Korea, dropping dummy atom bombs. The panelists on the radio were debating the effectiveness of using nuclear weapons against North Korea, despite the fact that every important building in the country had already been destroyed by our bombers, and despite the fact that the Soviets had nuclear weapons as well, and had already tested two additional bombs since their original 1949 test.
And meanwhile I sat in the passenger seat with my hands crossed on my lap, looking at the changing leaves outside the window and wrestling with that hollow gnawing sensation I often mistook for real hunger.
When we crossed into New Jersey, I began to root around in the pockets of my camel-hair coat, where I was delighted to discover a Fireball I must have been saving. I tried to be subtle when I unwrapped it, but the cellophane was crinkly, and I could feel how tense Kathy was getting.
Nevertheless, however, I allowed myself to believe it might be possible to enjoy it.
Once I’d popped it into my mouth, however, the project became increasingly stressful. I had to suck it without making a sound, which involved shifting it from side to side while preventing it from knocking my molars.
By then, my eyes were watering. Kathy was forcing herself to keep her eyes on the road, but her expression was increasingly flinty. A few times, I glanced over and caught that telltale flare in her nostrils.
“Don’t you want to save your appetite?” she finally said.
Then I couldn’t enjoy it, so I spit the candy back into its wrapper. I noted that it was white and lightly veined with pink threads, so that it looked like the underside of an eyeball.
Not knowing what to do with it, I held on to it for a while, until I thought Kathy wasn’t paying attention. Then I slipped it back into my pocket.
“That’s disgusting,” Kathy said, five minutes later.
By then, the car was so full of her disapproval that for a moment I wondered if she’d make me get out and walk. In the end, however, she didn’t, and finally we came to Princeton and parked. Then I followed her into the restaurant.
We took a seat at the table and I removed my camel-hair coat, revealing my mohair sweater and the tasteful pearls my mother had bought me, which unfortunately did nothing to hide my dolphiny figure.
Still, I wasn’t too nervous. I was expecting Kathy’s boyfriend to show up with an unattractive but socially advantageous companion. That was the kind of alliance Kathy tended to forge me.
But when Kathy’s boyfriend walked in the door, it was with a person so tall and handsomely swarthy I felt immediately sick to my stomach.
Then they sat down—the handsome roommate on my side of the booth—and began to explain how they’d become friends in the air force. They’d both been deployed to Korea for several months before completing their service and returning to Princeton, and while they talked about their experiences flying planes, they both seemed somewhat larger than life and extraordinarily handsome.
Then I began to suspect that a person as handsome as that particular roommate would be disappointed to have been set up with such a fat girl, a dolphin in a pearl necklace.
Nevertheless, however, the dinner progressed, and the roommate seemed inexplicably happy.
That only aggravated my panic. It was almost as if he couldn’t see how fat I really was.
It was as if he’d missed it completely, so the awful revelation was always just coming.
Then I began to wonder if Kathy had given up on arranging a socially advantageous connection, and whether that roommate was in fact somewhat low on the totem pole of people I should have been dating. Perhaps, I realized, that was his motive for missing the fact that I wasn’t slender.
It was as if he’d been told in advance that I’d make a good match: that my parents had a house on Cape May and a tennis court in the backyard. As if, given those details, he’d decided before showing up that no matter what I happened to look like, no matter which flaws he discovered in my character, he’d inevitably manage to like me.
I wondered about that while I sat beside him at the table, keeping my flippers pinned to my sides. And the more he seemed to miss the true facts of my physical form, the more hollow and hungry I felt, and when the waiter brought out the bread, I grabbed myself a whole fistful.
I felt Kathy watching. Her nostrils were beginning to flare. So then I returned the bread to my side plate.
Meanwhile, her boyfriend started talking about how the whole point of bombing campaigns was to shatter enemy morale. He said we’d been so successful in our campaign in Korea that every last trace of North Korean civilization had been reduced to heaps of smoldering rubble. North Korean leadership, he said, had instructed its remaining population to start tunneling underground in order to solve the shortage of housing.
And there I sat like a good dolphin, overflowing in my seat beside that handsome roommate, who still hadn’t managed to notice my fatness. He seemed to be sitting beside me in a state of perfect contentment, and after a while, it was simply too much to bear. Then my hunger took over. I heaved my fins up from my sides and cut an enormous bloody bite of my steak.
There I was, a dolphin cutting her steak. I knew it was a ridiculous sight, but I didn’t care. By then the rebellious streak had kicked in, and even though Kathy was poking me under the table, I just kept eating.
The straighter Kathy sat up, the more I slouched like a slob. The more daintily she nibbled her cod, the more bloody steak I stuffed into my snout.
Then I ordered a bourbon. I didn’t even like bourbon. I just ordered it with the same glee I usually felt when I’d given a character an interesting trait.
Still, however, the roommate managed not to notice. When my bourbon arrived, he was still smiling, and treating me very politely, as if he wasn’t at all disappointed with the manner in which I’d started behaving.
Then I almost laughed, because I realized that nothing was real. This was a purely literary adventure. Kathy and I were only two differing protagonists, one thin and one fat, one good and one bad, perfect opposites of each other.
I SHOULD MENTION, AT THIS POINT, THAT I HAD A TWIN SISTER.
This has to do with Robert, I promise.
Before we get to that story he told me, I need to establish that my poor mother had suffered the indignity of bearing twin daughters.
Despite her refinement, and the fact that she spoke perfect French and was skilled in the art of flower arrangement, she conceived twins, and it was when that news was delivered that my father’s mother, who suspected my mother of putting on airs, laughed and brought her down a few pegs by saying, “My dear, only sheep carry twins.”
It sometimes can’t be countenanced, these bodies we go around with, like chattel.
Despite her perfect French, my mother was inflicted with the indignity of carrying twins, so you can understand why she was later so concerned that her little girls should be slender.
And it wasn’t her fault that I was always so hungry, or that beside my sister, in photographs of our ballet class, I always looked so stout in my tutu. And it certainly wasn’t my mother’s fault that I hated ballet and took to secretly writing, and that rather than writing attenuated little ladylike sonnets, I wanted to cram it all into a novel.
It was nobody’s fault but my own that I was so fat and insistent, which meant that my sister had to get thinner and thinner in order to compensate for my fatness, so that by the time I got to Rosemont, where I ate too much and wrote novels, my sister was at home wasting away, having given up college and everything else to dedicate herself to the art of her thinness.
I’M GETTING TO ROBERT, DON’T WORRY.
My sister pursued the precise art of her thinness with the cool, detached serenity of the most gifted artists.
All day, while she moved through her routines, her eyes seemed to be fixed on a point just beyond the visible world. In the morning, she made her bed very neatly. At night, she spent a long time calmly moisturizing her hands.
She had many routines of that kind, which she pursued while I was at Rosemont.
She spent hours in the library, where she conducted the majority of her research. Otherwise, she spent a lot of time in the car with my mother. By then, she looked simultaneously like a very young girl and a very old woman. Placidly examining her well-preserved hands, she waited while my mother ran errands. Otherwise, she rested in our childhood bedroom, and during those years I thought I despised her.
WHAT I WANT TO MAKE CLEAR—AND THIS, I PROMISE, IS RELATED TO Robert—is that our roles seemed to have been predestined.
We had no control of the system.
It was an archetypical issue, bigger than just me and my sister.
It was an issue represented on cave walls. My sister was Persephone married to Hades. I was Persephone over the summer.
All summer, I ate the fat fruit, and to atone for my greed, my sister chastised herself through the winter. She remained in the penitent dark, while I ran around in the wheat, enjoying that golden splendiferous season when swans rape pretty girls on the hillsides.
We were stuck, in other words, in the hands of a myth.
It took us up in its sway well before we were conscious that it was at work. On Sundays, for instance, when we went to church, my sister’s exemplary socks stayed pulled up to her knees, and mine always sagged down to my ankles.
When my sister kneeled down to pray, she kept her eyes closed like a saint. But mine kept popping open, some voice inside my head commanding me to disobey, to open my eyes and watch the more obedient people.
With their eyes closed, they prayed for those fallen members of our congregation, slain overseas, and watching them pray, I always felt hungry.
Sometimes, on the way out of church, a member of the floral committee would stop my mother to talk, then look down at me and my sister in our matching camel-hair coats. “What beautiful girls,” she’d say, or “Such pretty children.”
And my sister took the compliment well, gazing off into the distance as if she hadn’t heard it, like Mary in a Renaissance painting, inexplicably mournful already, though Jesus is still only a fat little baby.
My sister took those compliments well, and beside her, sweating in my camel-hair coat, I felt nothing but the demands of my hunger.
ONCE, WHEN I WAS MAYBE ELEVEN, A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE WAR ended with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my parents threw a victory party.
Their friends all came over, and we celebrated with firecrackers on the hill behind the tennis court.
A few weeks after that, I came down to have breakfast before heading to school and happened upon a newspaper my father had left on the table.
By then, I guess, stories had begun to come out about the extent of the damage caused by the A-bombs: the steadily growing numbers of dead, the diseases and starvation and homelessness and birth defects.
And there must have been a feature article about the damage that day, because the photograph on the front page showed a row of bodies in a Japanese hospital room, all of them emaciated, prone on thin mats, many of their limbs badly burned. It was over a month after the bombings, and there they were still, lying in pools of blood and pus, and I only glanced at it for a moment before I felt too ill to look anymore.
Nevertheless, however, before I’d looked away, I’d already seen a man with no face.
His face was a smudge of black charcoal.
Seeing it knocked the air from my body.
Some people celebrate, I thought. Some people set off firecrackers on the hill behind the tennis court, and they wear camel-hair coats and knee socks and go to school and eat breakfast.
And some people starve, wasting away in crowded hospitals full of people who no longer have faces.
It made me feel sick. But God help me, it also made me so hungry.
I felt the claw of my hunger, and I wanted to eat. I wanted to be a well-fed survivor.
So then I finished the bowl of cereal that I’d poured, and I went back for seconds, and when the box had been emptied I went to the refrigerator, where I devoured both string beans my mother had saved.
Then I opened the freezer and pulled out the cookies my mother kept hidden. And I knew I didn’t have very much time, so I didn’t bother to thaw them out or even put them in the oven, I just started using my teeth to tear off rock-hard hunks of those cookies.
