Strong Motion (36 page)

“All I can hear is the incredible stupidity and lameness of the things I’m saying. And the girls know it. At least, the oldest one definitely knows it. She knows I’m not one of those women who think there’s nothing better in the world than having a child like her, and so of course she doesn’t like me, why should she. And there’s this little scene where she won’t come near me, and I hate her and she hates me, and the reason is that I’m more like her than I’m like any of the four parents, and she knows it.” She nodded positively. “I’m almost thirty years old, and I’m more like her than I am like them. And it’s one thing to be three years old and be a child, but to be me and still be so selfconscious— I could still stand it if they didn’t all so obviously pity me. They give me these pitying looks, and they actually have the gall to tell me that I can’t imagine what a grownup life is like—I can’t imagine how
busy
you are, and how
little time to read the newspaper
you have—because I don’t have children myself. As soon as I have children, I’ll understand. And what I want to say is, Let me tell
you
some of the things
you
don’t know about life and
never will
. But these women, it’s like they’ve been waiting all their lives for a chance to ignore a person like me, and now that they have their babies they’re allowed to. They’re allowed to be totally self-absorbed and totally rude to me, because they have
children
. As soon as you have children you’re allowed to close your mind. And no one can say you’re not grownup. And any kind of life that
I
might have, any different kind of life, any kind of life that could be envied—it’s obviously not working, because I’m still just this incredibly embarrassing adolescent. I can’t possibly compete with these twenty-four-year-old parents, all their narcissism and basic human decency. There’s just no contest.”

She fell silent, shaking her head and staring into the closet. Howard had begun to bounce on his toes with his hands in his pockets and elbows flapping. He raised a leg for balance and peered into the hall, as if he’d heard a sound. There had been no sound. When he turned back, Seitchek’s eyes were on him.

“And this is what I see,” she said bitterly. “In my free, exciting East Coast life. This is what I look up from the screen and see. This is the great alternative.”

He bounced on his toes. “Think I gotta go now,” he said. “Gotta see some people, think I better go.”

She smiled at him horribly. “What about your core cuts? Don’t you want your core cuts? Don’t you want to go poke your cow in the diveway?” She turned away in disgust. “See, I don’t even care what I say anymore. I don’t even care who’s listening.”

Howard continued to bounce, wandering and tilting like a top in the latter stages of its revolution, his vibrations jarring his hands out of his pockets. He veered close to Seitchek. When she looked up at him, he slapped her so hard that she fell back on her elbows.

They stared at each other. There was an odd, silent moment of discovery. It was as if the time of day had changed. Then Seitchek’s face twisted and she covered it with her hands. “Oh God. Oh God, I am so embarrassed.”

Already Howard was bending down, his hands in the neighborhood of her head. He patted her cheek and touched her ears and then patted her shoulders with both hands, not remorsefully but impatiently, as if he’d bumped a table and was rushing to right the stupid vases that had fallen. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

She hit him on the jaw with her fingernails. “Get away from me! Get away from me! Go dive your cow, get away from me.” She struck at his eyes, and he had to grab her wrists and pin them cruelly as she fought to break free. She struggled beneath him, gulping air and breaking into what he thought was sobs but turned out to be something more like laughter, because things were not at all the way he’d thought they were. Her fingers were in his hair. She was pressing his face into hers, and he squeezed his eyes shut, the short lashes interlocking like the stitches a rag doll has to see with, because he was not yet ready to look at the person underneath him and believe his luck in obtaining a girl like this, in a house like this, with four large bedrooms and a thirty-foot pool and a wet bar in the living room.

8

E
ARTHQUAKES AREN’T A MAN’S
murder of his pregnant wife. They’re not court-ordered desegregation. They’re not Kennedys. For several weeks after the last network news crew packed up and left Boston, you could feel the city’s disappointment with the earth. Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers. A hundred dead would really have been something. A thousand dead: historic. But the earth had reneged on its promises, mutely refusing to reduce buildings to exciting, photogenic messes; and the death count never made it off the ground. For all the impact the numbers had on local viscera, the thirty-seven earthquake-related injuries could have been caused by boring car accidents, the $100 million of property loss by neglected maintenance, and Rita Kernaghan’s death by a boring heart attack. Journalistic aftershocks dwindled to an article or two per week. Local reporters still scoured Essex County in search of lives ruined by the disaster, but, to their dismay, they couldn’t find a single one. Homeowners were repairing walls and ceilings. Questionable structures were being inspected and reopened. It was all so morally neutral, so sensible.

Fortunately for everyone, the Red Sox began June by sweeping a series with the Yankees at Fenway and carrying a streak of seven wins on a trip to the American League West. No sane person believed the Sox would actually end up winning their division, but at the moment they could hardly be said to be losing ground, and what was one supposed to do? Boo in advance? Later in the summer there would be plenty of opportunities to revive the old hatred and envy—Bostonians’ hearts would pound and their throats would tighten at the very thought of baseball’s winners, their soporifically effective pitching staffs, the arrogant baby-cheeked sluggers whom God unbelievably permitted to hit homer after homer, and the horrible fair-weather fans, cheap euphoria smeared across their faces like the juice of sex and peaches, who thought that this was what baseball was about, that it was about winning and winning handily—but as long as the streak lasted, the city was full of heathen haves blissfully oblivious to the have-nots of the sports world, and in the absence of further tremors, the fear of death and personal injury had retreated to its rightful place, far to the rear of people’s minds.

This wasn’t to say that Essex County had entirely stopped shivering. Portable seismographs installed cooperatively by Boston College, the USGS, and Weston Geophysical were registering as many as twenty shocks per day in the vicinity of Peabody, and the occasional blip near Ipswich. The Richter magnitudes seldom exceeded 3.0, however, and although no two scientists agreed about exactly what was going on, the activity was generally taken to represent aftershocks to the events of April and May. Granted, aftershocks to moderate earthquakes usually tail off quickly, and granted, the aftershocks in Peabody weren’t doing this, but in view of the unusually strong foreshocks to the May 10 events, Larry Axelrod and other seismologists theorized that the rupture of rock beneath Peabody had for some reason been “unclean.” As Axelrod explained it to the
Globe
, the chicken with its head neatly lopped off convulses for a moment but soon lies still, while the chicken with a mangled neck can go on thrashing for an hour, though ever more feebly.

Almost no one in seismology would absolutely guarantee that Boston had seen the last of strong motion. The sole exception was Mass Geostudy, a private research venture sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers and the nuclear power industry. Overlooked in news articles, Mass Geostudy wrote a testy letter to the
Globe
and informed readers that “there is zero probability of greater Boston experiencing an earthquake as severe as the May 10 temblors in the next 85—120 years.” Many other scientists agreed that the stress release on May 10 had indeed diminished the risk of further major earthquakes, but a substantial minority, including the venerable Axelrod, continued to warn that “it ain’t over till it’s over.” They pointed to the unusual aftershock pattern and to evidence of deep, fault-like structures in the dozen miles separating Ipswich and Peabody. While there was no reason to expect a rupture over the entire twelve miles (this would be a major earthquake), a smaller rupture couldn’t be ruled out either.

The phrase of the hour, applied willy-nilly to all things geophysical in the eastern United States, was “not well understood.”

Rather than spend a billion dollars making Massachusetts as catastrophe-resistant as California, the state legislature chose to allocate a million dollars for immediate seismological research. (Even a million seemed like a lot to a state with serious budget troubles.) Much of the money went to Boston College to fund a full-scale seismic mapping of Essex County. Exposed faults were inspected for fresh offsets (none was found), and Vibroseis equipment was put to work. Students drove a truck-mounted machine to selected sites and surrounded it with a grid of listening devices called Geophones. At carefully timed moments, the machine chirped into the earth, and from the underground refractions and reflections and dilations of the chirps, as recorded on the Geophones, buried structures could be mapped in much the same way as a fetus is mapped by ultrasound.

Early results of Vibroseis mapping revealed a tangle of discontinuities crisscrossing Essex County and extending to greater depths than had previously been supposed. Ambiguity escalated as seismologists tried to correlate earthquake hypocenters with mapped structures. The new data lent support to a variety of competing models. It also gave rise to new models that contradicted not only each other but all the earlier models.

On June 7, a BC student planting a Geophone in a wooded lot in Topsfield discovered the naked body of a Danvers teenager who had been missing for a month, and the Red Sox edged Seattle in ten innings.

The rest of the state money was being spent on studies in short-term earthquake prediction, organized by scholars from as far away as California. One group planted sensors in the bedrock to measure changes in its electrical conductivity. Another was monitoring magnetic fields and listening for extremely low-frequency radio waves. Four independent groups were studying less glamorous but equally well established indicators: changes in the depth and clarity of water in wells, release of methane and other gases from deep holes, oddities in animal behavior, and foreshock-like clusters of tremors.

A mini-scandal broke when Channel 4 learned that the state had given a Michigan post-doc $15,000 to import a tank of Japanese catfish and observe them in a darkened motel room outside Salem. Several studies had indicated that this species of catfish became upset on the eve of earthquakes, but the Michigan postdoc was shy and made a poor impression on camera. The Channel 4 reporter, Penny Spanghorn, called the experiment “perhaps the ultimate rip-off.”

By and large, the media and the public assumed that the research groups would issue urgent warnings if a cruncher appeared imminent; that this was what they’d come to Boston for. The groups themselves had no such plans. They were scientists and had come to gather information and advance their understanding of the earth. They knew, in any case, that the governor would never take the economically disruptive step of issuing an all-out warning unless most of the prediction methods agreed that a major shock was due. In the past, the methods had specifically not agreed about the timing, severity, and location of major earthquakes. This was why the methods were still being tested. When the groups said so, however, the public took it as modesty and continued to assume that somehow, should a disaster loom, a warning would be issued.

Aside from the catfish story, press coverage of the prediction efforts was enthusiastic, and the experimental installations became highly sought after by local young people. A report of muddied water in a pair of wells in Beverly was later retracted when a teenager confessed to having dumped dirt and gravel into them “as a prank.” Soon after this, a far-flung earful of Somerville youth was arrested by Salem police while “box-bashing” in a lonely place. The youths had thought it would be fun to confuse a portable seismograph by jumping on the ground and simulating tremors, but it was not much fun, and so they attacked the seismograph with baseball bats.

In the first week of June every household in eastern Massachusetts received a brochure called
TREMOR TIPS
. The brochure, which had been printed in California, was illustrated with palm trees and Mission Style houses and recommended that children crouch under their desks at school, that downed electrical wires be avoided, that gas leaks be reported pronto, and that supplies of canned food and bottled water have been purchased well in advance. Supermarkets and discount stores responded with special Quake Survival displays, and gun dealers throughout the region reported a jump in sales.