Monday, October 22, 1962. It was the start of a very long week, which quickly came to seem like the longest of my life. When I got home from school, Bunny was on the phone to my father. From what I could pick up, President Kennedy was going to make a speech that evening. Since the White House had scheduled a live television broadcast, everyone knew it would be important. CKNW Radio, on low in the background, spoke of the mood in Washington as grave, which I knew meant something beyond serious, with a shivery intimation of burial.
“I know,” Bunny was telling my father. “I know that. But we can’t protect . . . Not from everything, Hall.” A long silence on her end as my father spoke quietly, which allowed Bunny to nerve herself up to be brassy, “Well, I want to hear it,” she said. “I know it’s too much. Believe me, I’ve had just about enough of everything myself. But I can’t send her down the creek, and she picks it all up anyway.” A shorter reply involving the overhead words, stop you. “No, you can’t,” Bunny said. “Ribs for dinner.”
After she hung up, Bunny looked over at me as I innocently poured a glass of milk.
“When me and Punk were kids, we didn’t want to hear what our parents were saying. I’ll leave you to think about that one.” A brief pause. “Punk and I.”
The president was due to speak soon, at four o’clock our time. With the days shortening, we’d already entered the long northern gloaming that made the outdoors too meaningful for the mood I was in, even if I could have gone down the creek. An elfin light, mysterious, when I still felt unsettled from living through a typhoon, more so than other children seemed to feel anymore, certainly than Norman, although it’s true he didn’t demonstrate moods.
It was darker in the basement when we went downstairs, and Bunny turned on a floor lamp that was circled by its own metal tray. I claimed it for my milk and cookies, and Bunny put down a paper serviette beside them, a little damp and curled from her palm. With no other ceremony, she turned on the television, at first finding a commercial.
Then it began, tinny horns announcing the president of the United States. Without much preamble, President Kennedy launched the missile crisis, revealing that the Soviet Union had put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and saying they were aimed at us. I felt my stomach knot, a queasiness made worse by the fact I had trouble understanding what he was saying. I wasn’t used to accents, and Kennedy’s strong Boston accent confounded me. I only managed to understand that my father’s guess wasn’t far off. The Soviet Union was building nuclear bases in Cuba.
“The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere,” the president said, telling us that the Soviet missiles could strike as far north as Hudson Bay. I assumed he was referring to the Hudson’s Bay store over town, which meant we would be blinded in a Russian attack. I was also frightened by the way he kept calling the Soviet leader a liar, saying that Mr. Khrushchev had denied both publicly and privately that his country had put nuclear weapons in Cuba, while Mr. Kennedy now had photographic evidence that it had.
Any child could tell you that calling someone a liar was a good way to start a fight. Someone would take a sock at you, or call you a name, and that meant you had to push them away hard. I missed most of the rest of the speech as I pictured this fight, which would involve communist missiles. That was the other thing I retained, that the president said Soviets had put “communist missiles” in Cuba. The mushroom clouds I pictured took on a pinkish hue. Sunset. The end of the world.
As the president signed off, the network promised commentary, but after Bunny sat very still for a minute, she got up and turned off the TV.
“Come set the table,” she said. “We might as well go out in style.”
It started that suddenly. The shunning and the typhoon had both been sudden and the missile crisis was the same, even as the Hortons’ troubles simmered in the background. I didn’t understand what was going on, and the effort of trying to figure it out left me unfocused, my head hurting and my feet uncoordinated. I dropped cutlery getting it out of the drawer, making a clatter that left my stomach heaving.
“The forks go on the left,” Bunny said. “You know that. And steak knives for the ribs.”
My father got in while I was putting down the salt and pepper, maybe setting them up a little too straight. I could feel him watching me, even as he took off his hat and overcoat and put them in the hall closet. My mother appeared out of nowhere and gave him a drink on the rocks.
“Just like on the TV shows,” she said, clinking her glass against his.
As my father examined his glass, she added, “Not the kind of TV we watched this afternoon.”
“We heard it on the radio,” he said. When Bunny gave him a questioning look, my father added, “I gave Dan Lake a ride.”
“And what did two old army men conclude? That war plans are an oxymoron?” she asked. “I looked that up in the dictionary, by the way. A contradiction in terms.”
“Can I sit down?” my father asked, taking his seat at the top of the kitchen table and looking around hopefully. “Something smells good.”
“The last meal before execution.”
“Muriel . . .”
“I don’t like that word,” I said. “They called Norman a moron and he’s really smart. You can’t call someone a Moron and Brains all at once.”
“Haven’t they stopped?” my father asked.
When I shook my head, he started to put out his arm, then hesitated, probably remembering the way I’d rejected it last time.
I went over and leaned against him.
“Dan pointed something out,” my father said, putting his arm around me but speaking to my mother. “Kennedy wasn’t announcing an invasion of Cuba. None of this, ‘At 8 a.m., our troops landed, or will land.’ He’s just putting a naval quarantine around the island. Dan pointed out that he used the word ‘quarantine’ when the military term is ‘blockade.’ The fact he avoided saying blockade means he’s trying to avoid military action.”
“Words,” Bunny said.
“Well, they’re important. And as Dan says, everyone on the reserve has a Ph.D. in interpreting white men’s double-talk.”
“He’s speaking about the president of the United States!”
“With respect for his intelligence. Which we’re going to have to rely on.”
The next morning, I stumbled around the kitchen, having spent a restless night. Hudson’s Bay. The mushroom cloud. When I pushed aside my bowl of cereal, my father insisted on walking me over to the Hortons’ place to pick up Norman for school. I dragged along wishing that he wouldn’t, having had enough of adults to last me a lifetime.
Mrs. Horton met us at the door in her dressing gown, saying that both Norman and Rosa had stomach aches.
“I’m keeping them at home,” she said. “And called in sick myself, in case we’ve picked up a bug. We wouldn’t want to spread anything.”
She and my father looked at each other unblinkingly, then he looked down at me.
“How’s your stomach, Mary Alice?” he asked. “You think you’d better stay home, too?”
I shrugged.
“It might be a good idea,” Mrs. Horton said. “These things can be catching.”
I thought of the girls who’d begun to talk to me, and how that might be catching, too. I didn’t quite admit to myself that they might be even friendlier if Norman wasn’t there.
“My stomach doesn’t hurt,” I said. “My head hurts from all the nuclear missiles. But my stomach’s okay.”
“If you’ve got a headache . . .” my father began.
“Let’s go,” I told him. This caused Mrs. Horton some degree of amusement. She seemed ready to close the door, but my father lingered for a moment.
“Then I’ll see you at the school board on Thursday.”
“Presuming we’re all still here,” she said. “And they don’t postpone.”
“I imagine that’s a possibility,” my father replied, adding, “Postponement.”
For some reason, this made them both smile, although crookedly.
I found the whole incident unclear and annoying, and at the end of the Hortons’ driveway, I told my father I could go to school myself. I knew the way. What was the problem?
“Well, without Norman,” he said, thinking it through, “you’re probably right.”
Even so, I could feel him watching me all the way along Connington Crescent until I turned downhill.
This was Tuesday. Walking into the schoolyard, I had to try to remember again what to do when I got there.
“Where’s the commie?” Jamie Manners called, swaggering toward me. Jamie was the grade six Manners. No one claimed he’d inherited anyone’s brains. “Where’s your commie friend?” he repeated, stooping down to stare in my face.
Everyone was watching. I stepped back, balling my hands into fists in case I had to fight.
“I’m your sister’s friend,” I said.
This confused Jamie. “You’re not her friend,” he tried saying, but sounded unconvinced. He tried again: “You’re not her friend. You’re her pet.”
I was ready to fight him on that one. But Harry Manners arrived and lifted his chin subtly, signalling his brother to look to one side. Looking over myself, I saw Mr. Eisenstadt watching from under the awning. He seemed to be watching me, not Jamie, and I met his eye. Not that it told me anything, not from so far away.
When I turned back, I found Harry leading his brother off, even though Harry was the younger one. Everyone else looked away from me, so we were back to that. Lining up, going to class, sitting down next to a vacant desk—there were quite a few—I was generally ignored.
Or inattentive, as I half heard Miss Oliphant say.
“Are you listening, Mary Alice?” she asked loudly, not long after lunch.
“No, ma’am.”
I looked at the map of South America that she’d unrolled over the chalkboard, wondering what question I was supposed to answer.
“Russian missiles can reach most of Latin America from Cuba,” I said.
A hysterical cry from Fiona Krawchuk. She was a dramatic girl, but she meant it.
“Well done, Mary,” Miss Oliphant said.
“Alice,” I replied.
Miss Atkinson would have hugged Fiona, who had broken out sobbing, but Miss Oliphant just hovered at the front of the room like a balloon on a string.
“She can go to the nurse’s office, Miss Oliphant,” I said. “She knows the way.”
“I’ll take her,” Lucy Oliver said. She did a quick sliding double step as she stood up, and I looked over to find that someone had wet themselves near Lucy’s desk. I would have said to send Gord Brewster for the janitor, but Gord was so red he must have been responsible.
“I’ll get the janitor,” I said.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Miss Oliphant said.
But I opened the door so Lucy could lead Fiona out of the room, and once they were on their way to the nurse’s office, I got the janitor, Mr. Mountcastle, and his bucket of sawdust. He was a spry old man who smelled of cigarettes and a particularly strong aftershave. After he’d cleaned up the puddle, Mr. Mountcastle told Gord Brewster, “Gordon, why don’t you come help me with this,” and Gord sidled out of the room close to his side.
After it was all over, Lucy and I exchanged a nod, proving that I was growing more visible again, a wavering presence. Afterward, I settled back and waited for the three o’clock bell.
The air raid siren revved up half an hour before dismissal. That rising, throat-clearing er-er-er followed by a long metallic shriek holding endlessly without human intake of breath. It hurt my chest, but I didn’t panic. None of us panicked. It was more a case of being paralyzed, including Miss Oliphant.
The P.A. crackled with Mr. Eisenstadt’s voice. “Teachers, this may not be a drill. Your classes to the auditorium in orderly fashion. I repeat, this may not be a drill.”
We got out of the classroom to find ourselves in the hall in rows behind other classes in rows, including Mrs. Horton’s class with a substitute teacher. I knew who she was but couldn’t remember her name, although coming up with it struck me as important.
We were on the upper floor so we had to go down the stairs, accompanied by teachers’ cries. “Orderly fashion! Orderly fashion!” Downstairs, turn right, go down another hallway and we reached the gym, which was also the auditorium. It was a huge empty square with small windows along the top of the side looking outdoors. Banners hung on the walls, and there were basketball hoops, and the big caramel-coloured wood floor wasn’t scuffed up too badly, since it was a fairly new school. At the front was a stage with a red curtain and chairs stacked across it. The wail of the air raid siren bounced around inside those walls like a banshee.
When I got into the gym, I saw people being told to crawl under the stage through the open storage doors. Usually, the chairs were stored under there. That must have been why they were stacked on the stage. Mr. Mountcastle had been busy.
My heart clenched. I didn’t want to go under there. I wasn’t afraid of spiders, not more than usual, or of the dark, not that much, or of suffocating when the roof caved in like the famous Springhill Mine Disaster. But all these things combined to make me pull back from the stage even as I was carried toward it by the shuffle of people around me. My back wanted to retreat as my front moved ahead, and something inside me felt stretched between them.
I wasn’t the only one. A boy balked when his turn came to go under the stage, holding up the line. His teacher barked at him and he whimpered but did it.
“Quickly now!” the teacher said, then followed her class underneath.
It was a small school but we had a big gym. The standard auditorium had been built to allow for the school’s expansion as the suburb grew. Yet I knew we’d only get a tiny space to ourselves and be closely packed in, and didn’t like the way I’d have to rub elbows with people who were scorning me out, especially Miss Oliphant.
At least there weren’t any windows, I told myself, and ducked underneath.
The smell of dust tickled my nose and there was a strong whiff of Mr. Mountcastle’s aftershave. Little children were sneezing like kittens, and there was a fugitive sound of glass rolling on the concrete floor. I heard a teacher say, “Bay rum,” which left me frightened about the Hudson’s Bay. There were a few cries when the doors were closed and the light went dim, but at least the siren was muffled.
“Well, isn’t this cozy,” my old grade one teacher, Miss Barnes, called loudly. “Why don’t we sing a song?”
I suppose she was the senior teacher, or at least the oldest, and that made her the one to take charge. Yet having said that, she didn’t seem to know what to sing, and another teacher started “God Save the Queen,” which we all knew from the P.A. announcement every morning.
It was eerie, singing “God Save the Queen” under a stage as an air raid siren wailed, threatening us with the end of the world. A number of the littler ones sobbed, while a few of the bigger ones whimpered quietly. We were cramped together amid dust and cobwebs and spiders with heavy doors holding us in as if we’d been locked inside a mausoleum. Grave. The word beat in my head even as the anthem beat out. Long to grave over us. God grave our grave.
“Again!” Miss Barnes cried.
When I went to sing the second time, my throat choked up. In this moment I knew I would die. Not that I would die soon in the missile crisis, although that could happen. It was the solid certainty that I would die one day like everybody else. I’d always been afraid that my parents would die and leave me alone. But now I knew for a fact that I would go too, and I felt riven. Our minister, Mr. Culver, and the hope of heaven turned as insubstantial as echoes. I was unsubstantial, here on Earth so fleetingly, and I vibrated with horror.
The siren ended, an abrupt absence that made people raggedly trail off singing.
“Now we wait for the all-clear,” Miss Barnes called, and everyone held their breath.
In the silence, I heard Miss Oliphant muttering to herself, and realized from the rhythm of her words that she was praying. She wasn’t far behind me in the darkness, which was growing increasingly odorous and stuffy. I didn’t know you could feel sorry for teachers, but my sore heart cracked open and I felt sorry for her.
“You should sing, Miss Oliphant,” I told her. “You’ve got a pretty voice.”
“Who said that?” she asked sharply.
“God,” Nancy Workman replied sonorously. She’d deepened her tone like a comedian, but I knew it was her. Mrs. Horton’s class was next to ours under the stage, although of course with the substitute teacher instead of Mrs. Horton.
“All right, Nancy, that’s enough,” the substitute said.
Mrs. Walton. Remembering her name felt like a victory. She was a nice substitute, sparky, although she was like all of them in having several pairs of eyes in the back of her head. She also sounded as if she was having trouble not laughing, and it’s just as well she didn’t, or the entire school would have crashed into hysteria.
The drill ended soon after that. A drill, teachers reassured us. Of course it was a drill, and people emerged in just as orderly a fashion as they’d gone in, except looking dazed.
Miss Oliphant looked more dazed than most, and in the few minutes before class was dismissed, she gaped awkwardly at our faces, trying to figure out who had praised her singing. I suppose that being under the stage had distorted my voice because she should have recognized it. Maybe she had a block: I couldn’t have possibly said anything nice to her. I loathed that teacher, but understood as she gaped that there was something off about her. Standing at the front of the class, she couldn’t identify a telltale smirk, since I was innocent and looked innocent, and she finished the day in a defeated droop while I walked home traumatized, but at least unscolded.
Wednesday. The Hortons still had stomach aches. The nice substitute Mrs. Walton patrolled the schoolyard with her several pairs of eyes so I was roughly all right. After school, Bunny and I learned from the radio that there was no response from Chairman Khrushchev to the American insistence he get his missiles out of Cuba. I wondered what my father would have to say, and went to the picture window in the living room to look for the car.
A long sleek silver airplane flew in low over the city, just above the rooftops of the highest buildings. It was coming in from the east but headed for the west of the city, which was a relief. Then it banked around and circled back. I was paralyzed, and my father came in to find me clinging to the back of his lounge chair, panting like a frightened cat. He picked me up and sat me on his lap and waited.
“We’re all going to die from cancer like the people in Hiroshima,” I said. “After the radiation gets here.”
“That’s not going to happen, Mary Alice.”
“But we’re going to die.”
“Not for a very long time, I hope.”
“But we’re going to die.”
“It’s an airliner coming in to the airport. See how he’s circling, waiting for permission to land. The pilot’s giving his passengers a good look at the city.”
He sounded like Bunny, and I felt forlorn.
Thursday, the day of the special evening session of the school board. It hadn’t been postponed, and my mother didn’t know why not. I heard her say so when I was standing outside my parents’ bedroom door. I needed to ask whether I should change back into my school uniform or if ordinary clothes were all right.
“Why are you insisting on doing this? Sacrificing your family for the sake of what? Sacrificing your daughter. Just like the Hortons, running roughshod over their children.”
I hadn’t intended to eavesdrop. I’d more or less stopped eavesdropping because Bunny was right, I no longer wanted to hear what people said. I no longer wanted to hear anything. I just wanted it to all go away. Or at least, go back to the way it was before, when we were safe.
I went and changed into my Sunday clothes, which I had decided would be best, then headed for the living room to wait. Hearing a rattle in the kitchen, I looked in and found Debbie putting away the dinner dishes, which had been draining. When she turned and smiled, I saw that her mid-section was bursting out round and shiny under her navy blue maternity dress, which had a white collar and cuffs. Debbie refused to wear maternity clothes with flounces. She hadn’t lost her sense of style, she said. She was just pregnant.
I realized Debbie was looking at my clothes as seriously as I was looking at hers.
“Oh, little Tinker, there you are,” she said. “And they haven’t told you you’re not going.”
A truck hit me.
“It’s all right. I’m here to babysit.”
“But Norman’s my friend.”
“Well that’s true,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’re not going.”
My father and mother came in, both of them in Sunday clothes as well, my mother even carrying a pair of gloves. Neither looked happy. I was going to speak when Debbie cut in.
“Tink didn’t realize she’s not going with you. But we’ll be all right.”
Debbie put a hand on my shoulder the way Bob had put his on Uncle Punk’s. I hadn’t realized before then how heavy a hand could be. It kept me rooted in place as my parents left.
But it wasn’t all right. After they’d gone, I felt like howling. When Debbie let me free, I raged around the living room, feeling as trapped as if they’d put me under a stage. Barred the doors, forgotten me. I threw myself into my father’s lounge chair and leapt out. Threw myself on the chesterfield and jumped up. Threw myself against the wall, which hurt my shoulder.
“Hey, hey, hey, Tinker,” Debbie said. “I’m going to have to ask you to calm down.”
She came over and tried to hold me against her belly. I knew to be gentle, but spun away and stood there furiously.
“Norman is my friend. Daddy doesn’t even like Mr. Horton, and Bunny hates him. She hates him.”
Debbie looked down at me; at my hands balled into fists. My cat was looking at me, too. Wilma sat in the doorway, ballooning out behind her front legs. She was expecting as well. The only thing that would have distracted me was if she’d started having kittens right there.
“All right,” Debbie said. “Go get your coat.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard that.
“Go get your coat.” Smiling. “I want to go, too.”