The Atomic Weight of Love (18 page)

I sat beneath the helmet of hairdryer while the chemicals worked their magic, and I picked up a copy of
Redbook
magazine with an illustration of a blonde, pony-tailed woman wearing a strapless green dress and diamonds, flourishing a cigarette in a long holder. The magazine fell open to reveal a smaller magazine secretly inserted within the pages:
True Confessions
. I looked up at the other women, wondering who might have tucked the magazine within the magazine. I scanned the stories, all of which seemed to be about women who crossed the line, paid for it, and saw the error of their ways—swearing
never again
. Dark, handsome men unbuttoned blouses, unhooked brassieres, and lifted skirts, and repentant women faced unwed pregnancies or the loss of a husband.

I closed the magazine and returned it to the pile. It made me wonder about the secret lives of these women who floated upon the scents of shampoo, peroxide, and nail polish remover. Layers of artifice atop a bedrock desire to transgress.

I stopped by Clement and Benner, the town’s only department store, and I bought two pairs of clip-on earrings—one a pair of little gold-plated seahorses, the other round, mother-of-pearl buttons. At the women’s foundations counter, the clerk pulled out various plastic drawers and lifted tissue paper to show me slips. I chose a pretty, knee-length white nylon slip with spaghetti straps and wide lace edging the bust. As soon as I got to the car, I put on the big, round earrings. They pinched terribly, but I liked what I saw when I examined my new self in the rearview mirror.

IN MAY I HELD
a baby shower for Belle. She gave me a list of people to invite, and her younger sister came from Corpus Christi. I liked Amy immediately—she was just as vibrant as Belle, but with red-brown hair and a thicker accent. We had the usual baby shower fare: crepe paper strung across the ceiling beams, pink and blue balloons, a white cake with the image of a baby carriage drawn on top in frosting, some dreadful pink fruit punch, and those lovely little pillow-shaped, pastel-colored mints in tiny, individual paper cups, mixed with salted peanuts. Alden spent the afternoon at the library, and so we were free to be as silly, as girlish as we wanted—except that Belle and I had agreed: no stupid baby shower games.

That didn’t stop the women from reminding Belle of the predictive nature of her every movement. If the ribbon came off of a package in one piece versus two or more, then the child would be a boy. Or a girl—I cannot for the life of me remember which. I do remember that Belle broke a fingernail—the room grew silent for a moment when she stuck the nail in her mouth, sucking away the pain. I got a pair of nail scissors, and when I tried to help her, I saw the nail was broken off to the quick. No wonder she’d cried out.

Amy put me in charge of keeping tally of Belle’s loot: several one-piece outfits in gender-neutral tones of green and yellow, a set of very nice glass baby bottles with a dozen rubber nipples, a bottle sterilizer, crib sheets with lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!). I gave her a finely knitted, cream-colored blanket edged in colorful silk butterflies.

She held it up for everyone to see: “Look, girls! Meri made this for me!” She turned and winked at me. “Now, Meri, before you even start, I’m going to tell you to stop—do NOT. I repeat: do NOT be bashful. These women appreciate your talents.” I blushed and dutifully logged in the item as “One baby blanket, with butterflies. HAND MADE BY MERI.” I drew stars before and after the item and included several exclamation points for good measure.

When everyone had left, Belle and I sat on the couch sipping coffee.

“You never said if Alden liked your hair.”

I touched the bare back of my neck, pulled off the eternally painful clip-on earrings and set them on the end table. “After two weeks, I finally asked him what he thought. He hadn’t noticed.”

“No!”

“He’s oblivious to everything but the world inside his head. You know that. But once I asked him, he wanted to know if my neck got cold, without my hair.” I rolled my eyes.

“Hah! Well, I like it. Shows off your lovely neck.” Belle took a sip of coffee, put a hand to the bulge of her abdomen. “He kicks me. And sometimes,” she laughed, “I can tell he has the hiccups.”

“He?”

“Well, he or she. Today it feels like a he. Other days, she.”

“You promised to tell me names.”

“Oh, hell, Meri. We can’t make up our minds. But there’s still time.”

“Then give me the names
du jour
.”

“All right then. But keep in mind I don’t need a critic just now, even if she is the godmother in waiting.” She grinned. “Dementia. Chlamydia. Rubella.” We were both laughing, but she kept at it. “Oblivion. Catharsis. Catatonia.”

“Perdition. Peccadillo. Paragon. Plethora.”

“
Not
Doris.
Not
Brunhilda.
Not
Simon.”

“
Not
Alden.”

“No, certainly not Alden. No offense to Alden, of course,” she said, and we dissolved into laughter.

“I’ve thought of some names I like,” I said, refilling our coffee cups.

“Shoot.”

“Olivia. I like Olivia. It’s happy.”

“Not bad,” she said, absent-mindedly rubbing a hand across her belly. “What else? Any boys’ names?”

“Aaron.”

“Too Biblical.”

“Holden.”

“Too Salinger.”

“I give up.”

“So do I,” she sighed.

I could tell she was tired. I took her cup and saucer and went to find her sweater.

“The damned thing is practically useless anymore,” she said, demonstrating how far it had to stretch to cross her abdomen. “You know,” she picked up her purse from the table by the door, “that’s what women ought to give each other at these shindigs—clothes to last the rest of the pregnancy. Now that would be practical, useful.”

“Sure, but we like to give pretty things, things you’d never buy yourself.”

“Oh, don’t think I don’t appreciate that blanket, sweetheart. You know I love it.” She put her arms about my neck, smiled. “Now, take me home so I can put my fat feet up and get Butch to rub them. That man owes me.”

JUNE 7, 1952, WAS
a Saturday. I got home from the grocery store to find Alden pacing in the living room. His face was ashen gray, and the room was dense with cigarette smoke. He took the grocery bags from me and set them on the kitchen counter.

“Come sit down for a minute.” He led me to the couch, disconcertingly solicitous.

“There’s ice cream.”

“The ice cream doesn’t matter right now.”

“Why? What’s happened? Is it my mother?”

“No, your mother’s fine.” He sat down beside me, pressed my hand to his cheek, kissed it and then held it in both of his hands.

“You’re scaring me.”

“I don’t mean to. I’m sorry,” he sighed. “Meri, it’s Belle.”

“Her baby?”

“No. Well, yes, but more than that. Look,” he said. He lifted our hands together and let them fall back into my lap. “Belle and Butch were headed to Santa Fe. They missed a curve on the Hill Road. Meri, my love, they’re dead. The car went off the cliff. They can’t even recover the bodies for a while. The rough terrain.”

I didn’t cry, scream, or yell. I didn’t even crumple. I just sat.

“Meri?”

“Alden,” I said, a simple statement of fact, without inflection. “Alden,” I said again, just to see if I still had my voice.

I couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched me tenderly, and I felt his touch, even through the numbing shock that so quickly took hold of my body. There must have been some part of him that liked Belle—even if only because I loved her so.

I stood and walked into the bedroom. It was a quiet, tranquil room, the single window shadowed by a rosebush that had just begun to open into deep, pink blossoms. I cranked open the window, smelled freshly cut grass, heard a house finch singing in the pyracantha bush. A tentative breeze entered the room. I sat on the side of the bed and unbuckled my sandals, laid them side by side on the rug. I lay down on our white chenille bedspread, folded my hands across my belly, and stared at the ceiling. I saw a cobweb in a corner of the room and told myself that tomorrow I’d go through the whole house, take a broom and find all of the cobwebs. It didn’t matter that tomorrow was a Sunday—I’d put it on my to-do list. I heard Alden come to stand in the doorway, felt his eyes upon me.

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.” I rolled onto my side, facing the wall. I didn’t want him there. I didn’t want anyone—other than my Belle. I’d never get up. Never again. I’d lie there, whittle away to nothing, end my life in a gray miasma of pain, of lonesomeness.

That’s when the tears came, the gut-wrenching sobs—it was when I realized, when I knew in my heart, that I would be lonely for Belle for the rest of my life.

HER SISTER AMY
CAME
to Los Alamos and packed up everything, took the bodies to Corpus Christi for burial. Los Alamos had no cemetery. No one really believed the town would have a postwar life, that people would spend their lifetimes there, die there. I also suspect the existence of a collective, tacit understanding that the reality of death would not be dealt with—that there had been enough death associated with the place. And so, for years, the dead went somewhere else to rest in peace.

Amy brought me a cedar wood box with some of Belle’s things: a handkerchief embroidered with pink rosebuds, a silver flask engraved “Belle Watling,” a crow feather I’d given her, Belle’s pearl studs and matching pearl necklace and bracelet, and a portrait of Belle and Butch on their wedding day. I put my nose close to the box, smelled the cedar and the musk of Belle. How long before the molecules dissipated, before I’d have only a vague memory of Belle’s scent? I closed the lid carefully and stroked the smooth, polished wood.

“She saved me, you know. Six years ago,” I said, fighting tears. And then, as if it mattered I added: “I don’t have pierced ears.”

“You know what Belle would say.”

“Pierce them, goddammit, Meri.”

I did. I drove to Santa Fe and got them pierced. I didn’t care about my deformed ear, if I drew attention to it. I ignored the advice about keeping in place the earrings that came with the price of the piercing and instead pushed the posts of Belle’s pearls through the still-bloody holes, fumbling until I got the backs on properly. And then I drove carefully up the Hill Road, never once looking over the precipice.

IN THE MONTHS THAT
followed Belle’s death, Alden came back to me. I saw his love where I had not seen it for years. I saw him fight the habitual impulse to disappear into a book every night and instead to try to engage me in conversation about the evening news or tales of his coworkers. He took me to dinner in Santa Fe so that I could dress up, wear my nylons, and he paid me compliments.

Belle and I had been friends for six years, and it was the closest friendship I’d ever had. In the wake of her death I felt like a part of me was missing—as if I’d lost an arm, a leg. I thought about the soldiers with their missing limbs, their phantom pain so real and yet so untreatable.

In November, five months after Belle’s death, I turned twenty-nine. Before he left for work on the morning of my birthday, Alden actually donned an apron and made pancakes. In the center of the dining table he’d placed a vase of five red roses and a wrapped box. He steered me toward the couch and set the box in my lap.

“Before you open it, I need to say something.” He bowed his head and took a deep breath. I noticed that his T-shirt was too tight—I would need to buy him a size larger from now on. “I have neglected you,” he began. “I am truly, truly sorry, Meri.”

I compressed my lips, determined to let him deliver the speech he’d no doubt practiced. Scientists such as Alden do not ad lib, they do not speak extemporaneously—they plan, refine, practice, and revise.

“I have been an unduly harsh judge of you, of your friends. No one deserved to die the way they did, as young as they were. I did not give Belle credit for her intelligence, and I did not give you credit in your choice of friends.” He ran his hand through his hair, and his Masonic ring flashed in a tidbit of winter sun. “I love you, Meri. I want to do better. I want for us to do better.”

He stopped. I’d been fiddling with the pale green bow on the package, half reluctant to look at him as he pleaded.

I held my left hand before me, looked at the diamond of the engagement ring we’d bought so long ago in Chicago, when both of us had such strident hopes, when I was naïve and ignorant of the work of love. In that moment, I knew that I needed to forgive him. I set the package aside and stood.

“There is no better birthday gift I could have dreamed of,” I said softly, my arms about his neck. I felt the cheese-grater harshness of his as-yet unshaven cheek.

The box was surprisingly heavy for its size. I opened it without tearing the paper, folded the paper and laid it to the side to use again. I slit the taped lid with my fingernail. Resting on top of a thick layer of cotton was a card on which Alden had written:

Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed upon it.

— Sir Isaac Newton, The First Law of Motion, from
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

“I thought I was the one who was always trying to make physics into a description of human behavior.” I smiled at him.

“Belle was a force of nature.”

“I think she’d like the idea of moving us in a different direction, compelling us to change our state. I think she’d like that very much.”

Beneath the protective layer of cotton there was a necklace, which I drew from the box and held before me.

“Oh, my. Oh, Alden.” It was an ornate squash blossom necklace, with heavy silver beads and fluted squash blossom flowers. The turquoise was special, veined with black like a spiderweb. Alden must have paid over $200.00 for it. It extended well below the line of my breasts.