Pat Boone Fan Club (13 page)

The next morning, still hoping to be discovered, I stake out the Henry Ford complex on campus, built in English Gothic style, with money from Henry Ford himself. Today, however, the grounds appear different. The grass is
painted
. I’ve missed something important. I rush over to the English Department. The secretary tells me that the movie people experimented to see
if they could make the grass appear . . .
grassier
. But no Harrison Ford. “They’re looking for extras, though,” she says. “Probably
Yankees
. Like you. It’s supposedly set in New England.” She tells me to go to Hermann Hall and fill out a form. “You’ll need a photograph of yourself,” she adds.

I slam back in my car and race home. I yank out photograph albums. I find one that’s not too bad. If they’re looking for Yankees, surely I’m qualified. I’ll tell the casting director I went to college in Boston.

I wait for the phone to ring.

Instead, a film crew from Italy arrives on campus to film a “spaghetti” version of
Gone with the Wind
. Italian look-alikes of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, dressed in Confederate finery, pose on the steps of the Hoge Building, the oldest structure on campus, more or less (less) resembling Tara. Student extras stroll in hoop skirts and gray uniforms. I’m too demoralized to try out as an extra. But I skulk around, trying to avoid bayonets.

I wonder how they’ll re-create the burning of Atlanta. Set fire to Broad Street? Only the Sara Hightower Regional Library will remain.

Later, as it turns out,
The Dead Poet’s Society
is filmed elsewhere and stars Robin Williams.

I sit at the library counter flipping through research books. The use of asbestos dates back thousands of years. Strabo, a Greek geographer of the first century, discovered one of the first asbestos quarries on the island of Evvoia. The name “chrysotile,” the most common form of asbestos, is derived from the Greek words
chrysos
, “gold,” and
tilos
, “fiber.” Gold fibers. Early on, it was used to make pottery as well as insulation to fill chinks in log cabins in what is now Finland.

Ancient Romans wove asbestos fibers into towels, nets, and head coverings for women. Roman restaurants used tablecloths
and napkins made of asbestos. They could be thrown into fire to remove food stains and crumbs. Afterward, the cloth was whiter than before. So the Romans named asbestos
amiantus
, “unpolluted.”

Pliny the Elder, doctor and historian, observed that asbestos was a magical material providing protection against spells. Yet he also noted that those exposed to high concentrations were prone to lung sickness. He recommended that quarry slaves use respirators made of transparent bladder skin to protect them from asbestos dust.

During medieval times religious crosses, resembling wood, were constructed from asbestos. Merchants claimed they were made from the cross on which Jesus was crucified. They proved their claims by setting them on fire.

Ancient Persians imported asbestos from India to wrap their dead. They believed asbestos to be hair from a small mythical animal that lived by fire and died by water.

I sense a presence. I glance up. A young girl stands before the counter, thin as a noon shadow, her gray eyes watching me. She raises an almost-invisible eyebrow, and I sense she has a question. I glance around, but no adult seems to accompany her. Her nose slopes to a small button. She places all ten fingers on the counter, the nails stubby, rimmed with dirt. Her dusty-blonde hair is chopped off below her ears. Her checked shirt strains across her shoulders, her dungarees rolled at the ankles. On her feet are plastic flip-flops, one of the straps split. She smells of grass and apples. I want to say her gray eyes resemble smoke or that gold streaks her hair. This isn’t true. Yet, as I watch her, the rest of the room fades to wallpaper.

“Hi,” I whisper. I stand up, leaning toward her. “Can I help you?”

She nods, a slight tightening of her neck as she swallows.
In the movie version
, she will tell me her parents abandoned her. No, she will tell me her mother died in a car crash and her father of
cancer. She will tell me she has no brothers or sisters, that she never knew her grandparents. She will tell me she is orphaned, has no one. She will ask me to save her.

“I have a goat,” she says. “How do you raise him?”

Goats, goats, goats.
My mind races. Goats roamed St. Thomas; goats grazed fields on the kibbutz where I searched for my unplanted Jewish roots. But I never so much as touched any of those goats.

“Oh,” I say, suddenly realizing she wants a book about them. “Here, let me help you.”

I lead her to the card catalogue and flip to “G,” to “goats.” One book.
My Pet Goat.

I rush to the shelves. It’s not there. I hurry back to the counter, searching through the checkout cards. It’s been checked out or else permanently “disappeared” for over three months. I show her the card, carefully explaining the procedure: that if she gives me her name and phone number, I’ll call her the minute it’s returned. I don’t say it’s probably gone forever.

She nods. I print her name and number on the form, tagging the card. “I’ll call you the second it’s returned,” I reiterate.

Then she is gone. For a long moment I watch the spot where she last stood as if her shadow remains.

I look at her name, the number. I retrieve the phone book to learn her address. No listing. No one with her last name with that number. Suppose the book on goats is returned when I’m not here? Suppose Belle is on duty when she picks it up? I remove the tag from the card, fold the form, and put it in my pocket. Every day I’ll check to see if the book’s returned.

A week passes. The book remains missing. One evening, I dial the number to tell the girl how sorry I am. The phone rings and rings. No one, not even an answering machine, answers. I never see her again. I don’t understand my sense of bereavement.

On April 10 the Floyd County Commissioner’s office finally releases its report. Laboratory tests confirm the presence of dangerous levels of asbestos fiber particles in five areas of the library.

In the April 11 edition of the
Rome News-Tribune
, County Commissioner Ronald Smith is quoted as saying, “We’re concerned. We’re going to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure there’s no risk to anyone.” He goes on to explain that they plan dust- and ventilation-control measures. They will post warning signs. They will wet-mop the floors.

Kim Leighton from the newspaper calls for my reaction to the report. “‘While I’d like to continue to work there, the asbestos is a very serious health problem that should have been acted upon sooner. Then I wouldn’t have had to get involved,’ said Sue Smith,” he writes.

Prisoners from the Floyd County jail arrive at the library to mop floors. They wear no face masks, no gloves or rubber booties. They laugh and joke, happy to be out of jail for a few hours. Every day it’s as if the ceiling itself metastasizes, producing more and more poisonous particles.

I prepare a letter to hand-deliver to Abigail Kane. “I cannot afford to breathe asbestos even one more hour. My resignation is effective immediately.” I xerox copies of the letter for the
Rome News-Tribune
, the Georgia Library Association, the American Library Association, and the Board of Trustees of Sara Hightower Regional Library.

The next day Don Hatcher of
WXIA
follows me up the steps of the library, camera whirring. I open the door to the business office. As luck would have it, Abigail sits at her desk as if expecting me. I march over and hand her the letter. “I resign,” I say.

The April 15 edition of the
Rome News-Tribune
reports my decision. “‘That’s a sick building,’ Mrs. Sue Smith said.”

I petition to present a statement at the April 23 meeting of the county commissioners.

I spend days writing and revising my four-page speech, as if I plan to address Congress.

The courtroom where the commissioners meet, in the county courthouse, smells of floor wax. The five commissioners sit on a dais. I stand before them wearing a plain oxford shirt and gray skirt. A large, curious audience sits behind me. “Every hour counts,” I begin.

“In one particular case,” I say, after a few introductory statements, “a person died of mesothelioma simply because she lived in the same house as an asbestos worker. In another case, in London, several people died who lived within a half mile from an asbestos plant. . . .”

Commissioner Smith, a Marine Corps veteran, tries to cut me off. He moves to adjourn the meeting. The other commissioners, however, won’t “so move.” I continue my speech, but before I finish, he again interrupts. “She’s through so far as I’m concerned,” he says, leaving the room.

The audience applauds when I finish.

For a week or so after the meeting, I receive crank phone calls from an unidentified man. “Silverman, you better leave town.”

How does he know my birth name? Why does he use it?

The crank calls don’t scare me too much, or not as much as if he would have said, “Smith, you better leave town.” What scares me more is that he knows my
real
name, my Jewish name, even after all my efforts to dodge that name, dodge the bullet, as it were, after all my efforts of disguise. Collective hatred is more dangerous than personal vendettas. For long moments after I hang up the phone, all I hear are those three syllables reverberating:
Silverman, Silverman, Silverman.

I stand in a cinder-block bunker at the 7 Hills Firing Range. I wear yellow-lens protective goggles and earplugs. I plant my feet.
I grip a Colt .22 Diamondhead in my left hand, my right hand steadying my wrist. Before me, several yards down a lane resembling a bowling alley, hangs a target of a male figure.

I know nothing about guns. I’ve never held one before, nor do I plan to purchase one.

But the thing is, I’m a good shot, I discover. Even if I miss the “important” parts of the paper anatomy, I rarely miss the figure itself. After I finish one round of bullets, I press a lever that activates a chain mechanism. The target whirls back to me. I clip on a new target.

I love the cool metal trigger against my index finger, the heft of the barrel in my palm. I love the scent of gunpowder, the residue lingering on my fingers. I bring the silhouettes home with me to admire. At least one shot pierces the paper heart.

In the
60 Minutes
version
, Mike Wallace asks about the cover-up. He asks if I fear for my life.

In the tragic play
, I’m a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, my body wrapped in gold-fiber asbestos, skin forever preserved against conflagration.

In the movie version
, Clint Eastwood enters Sara Hightower Regional Library. “I tried being reasonable. I didn’t much like it,” he sneers.

In the sequel
, Meryl Streep as Sue Smith glances in the rearview mirror. Menacing headlights follow her, closing in.

All summer, my husband researches and writes his book. He’s immersed in Riffaterre’s
Fictional Truth
, Remi Clignet’s
The Structure of Artistic Revolutions
, or Kant’s
The Critique of Judgment
. Since I am now unemployed, he asks if I’ll help type his manuscript. I agree. “The generic and world-testing characteristics of the realistic novels I describe bear a similarity to Bakhtin’s description of the menippean satire and its carnivalization of discourse. . . . An intertextual theory of realism precludes the pos
sibility of extratextual denotative reference because the linguistic sign refers (or, following Derrida,
defers
) not to an external reference but to a connotative series of other signs. . . .”

By the end of summer, I hate words. Every single one of them. Whereas once I loved them, studying sentences for hours in that library in the West Indies. But now, I wonder, maybe words—all words and ideas—simply get in the way of things. Real things. Things like goats. Things like girls with hair the color of wet sand in August. Things like regret. Or pure old-fashioned, unadulterated angst.

I climb the rutted road to the top of Lavender Mountain to escape my husband’s book for a few hours. I’m sticky and damp. I cross brittle grass past fruit trees and berry patches designed with the same plan as Castle Nemi in Italy, where Martha Berry’s sister lived. I cup my palms to the sides of my eyes and peer through a window of the rarely used House o’ Dreams. In 1926 students and faculty constructed this cottage for Martha as her hideaway. They even built the furniture and wove the fabric for curtains and slipcovers. Today the air feels vacant, as if I’m the only one who’s been here in a long time. The top of this mountain is the House o’ Dreams, but it’s also the end of the road.

Where to go now?

Why do I even remain married? Buried in his philosophical books, deconstructing words and sentences for a living, my husband never notices the absence of a
real
me.

Which must be what I’ve wanted.

After all, because of his inattention, I’m never exposed for the poseur, the fraud that I am: a hollow woman. One not yet constructed enough to be deconstructed.

In my secret life, unable to find an identity that lasts, I change roles like fads. I seek one style to fit this year, another for next year. But I end up as neither one thing nor another.

Nothing: on my way to nowhere.

At some point must I find my own fireproof—or fiery?—garments. But how? Where? When?

In another hour, the sky will deepen to the tint of the sea. Silhouettes of birds, the color of rain, wing toward evening, only the tips of their feathers studded with diamonds of light. I think of those mythical creatures living by fire, dying by water . . . floating across a shimmering edge of a soon-forgotten dream.

No, you
can’t
start a fire without a spark. Sometimes you can’t start one anyway. Sometimes you just smolder, waiting for your chance to burst into flame.

Fahrvergnügen

A Road Trip Through a Marriage

Synchronicity

One Christmas vacation my husband insists we drive (instead of fly) from Georgia to Houston to attend his mother’s second wedding. Which means we’re to drive in his 1972 dual-carburetor Volkswagen camper despite the fact, as I frequently point out, that the carburetors aren’t, ever, in sync. Despite the fact that the hubcaps periodically frisbee off the wheels at any speed over forty miles per hour, that the heating system works only in muggy weather, that the windshield wipers wipe depending on mood and climate, although infrequently in actual rain. To say nothing of the fact that, only last week, the camper sprung a gas-line leak. It dripped a combustible trail from our house to the mechanic—me, waving good-bye to my husband from the front stoop—expecting to see a fireball at any moment, unsure, at this point in our marriage, whether this would be an altogether upsetting event.

My husband loves the pumpkin-colored camper to distraction. He invests hundreds of dollars on the carburetors, their synchronicity lasting only as long as it takes to pull out of the mechanic’s garage. He spends hours tinkering and cleaning. He snaps Polaroids, displaying them on his desk. Once he asked
me to crank the engine while he investigated under the chassis to determine the cause of its latest ailment. When I turned the key I forgot to put the transmission in neutral. The camper lurched forward. I almost plowed over him before I slammed on the brakes, stalling the engine. He survived with nothing worse than pale red tire marks on his stomach. Although I apologized, profusely, he never again asked me to help.

The Intricacies of Foreign Car Repair in Lanett, Alabama

I’d prefer to fly to Houston, but I don’t want to attend his mother’s wedding in any event. As maid of honor, I’ve been coerced into wearing a pink dress as frothy and frilly as cake icing. But the preparations are finalized. My husband washes and waxes the camper. He cleans the orange upholstery, the matching stool with metal legs, the storage chest. He vacuums the carpeting and shines the windows. He pops the top to dust for cobwebs. Two days before Christmas we pack up the camper, setting out for our initial stop in Pensacola to collect my husband’s aged aunt before continuing on to Houston.

We pull out of the Berry College campus, where we still live in that log cabin, onto Martha Berry Highway, follow
US
27 south to
US
29 before reaching
I
-85. We have driven 124.85 miles, a total of two hours and twenty-two minutes (but who’s counting?), when the camper drops an engine rod outside Lanett, Alabama.

We’ve barely made it over the border from Georgia. Really, we’re on the cusp of the border, hardly in one state or the other. We’re stranded on the side of the road, loaded down with Christmas and wedding presents, suitcases, frilly dress, duffle bag, Styrofoam cooler.

While my husband walks to a service station, I (fuming) theoretically guard the camper, as if anyone would want to—or even could—steal it. He returns, hours later, with a tow truck and driver. We stand on the shoulder, vehicles whizzing past. My
husband discusses cars, engines, options, while the driver hooks the bumper to the towing mechanism. I, meanwhile, consider pushing my husband into the path of an oncoming semi.

The driver tows the camper to the only place in Lanett where he thinks, maybe, if we’re lucky, a mechanic might work on a foreign car. A sign taped to the door says it won’t reopen until after Christmas. We unload the presents and suitcases, piling everything into the tow truck. We’re driven to a Super 8 on the edge of town.

“How long will you be staying with us?” the receptionist asks.

“One night,” my husband says. “Maybe two.”

I glance at the ceiling.
Indefinitely
, I think.

The room is cold, airless. Still in my jacket, I lie beneath the blanket and bedspread. My husband turns on the combination air conditioner/heater window unit. The fan rattles like out-of-sync carburetors.

Years ago I find my own 1969 green Volkswagen beetle, used, at a dealer in Washington
DC
. I work on Capitol Hill at the time, am tired of relying on
DC
Transit, so finally save enough money to purchase it, my first car. The salesman, young and blond, accompanies me on a test run. Since I’ve never driven a stick shift before, we stay on flat streets. I have considerable trouble shifting from neutral to first on a hill, or even a small incline, if stopped at a red light. I can’t simultaneously synchronize the brake, clutch, and accelerator. Therefore, the car drifts backward, which means trouble when another car pulls up too close behind. Really, I have trouble shifting, period. But I love the
putt-putt
engine. I love the sound of the
Blaupunkt
tuned to my favorite rock-and-roll station. I fill up the tank for three dollars. I slide it into a space less than half the size of one of the ubiquitous limousines with diplomatic plates. I get a House of Representatives staff parking sticker for the underground lot beneath the Longworth Building. Sure, the two little heating levers on
either side of the gearshift are more for show than actual heat. Still, it’s all mine. And I’m in love with the sheer
bugginess
of it.

Yet my love affair is problematic almost from the start.

One evening a week or so after I purchase it, I receive a crank phone call. The sound of a man’s heavy breathing floats through the phone line into my ear. I slam down the receiver. A few days later, the man whispers obscenities. Worse, he knows my first name, which isn’t listed in the phone book. His voice sounds familiar. After a few weeks, I recognize it: the man who sold me the car.

Then, mornings when I leave my apartment for work, I suspiciously eye the car as if
it
is making the phone calls. I unlock the door, almost afraid the man lurks inside.

Keeping It on Mute

My husband finally reaches the owner of the car-repair shop by phone. But the mechanic says he won’t have time to examine the camper until after the first of the year, more than ten days from now. My husband explains about his mother’s wedding, the Super 8 motel. The owner himself is on his way out of town. Ten days. Take it or leave it.

My husband calls Greyhound Bus Lines. He can’t get through. Two days before Christmas, everyone’s calling.

I’m awake most of the night watching soundless images on the television screen.

The next day, about noon, my husband finally reaches a person at Greyhound. No bus station in Lanett. We have to go to Opelika, a half hour away. I don’t ask my husband how long it’d take to walk carrying presents, frilly dress, etc. Assuming we even get to Opelika, it’s an eighteen-hour bus trip to Houston, with two transfers. Plus, there’s still Aunt Beulah waiting for us in Pensacola. Opelika to Pensacola is ten hours, one transfer. Pensacola to Houston is another eleven hours with one transfer.

By car or camper, which we no longer have, it would be only an eleven-hour drive, total.

I don’t mention it to my husband but, given the options, I’d prefer to stay in the Super 8 in Lanett, Alabama, for the rest of my life.

As the Crow Flies

“Let’s see if we can rent a car,” I say.

We both glance out the motel window. Across the street is a field of winter grass. No Avis or Hertz. I look up car rentals in the phone book. After calling an 800 number, I learn that the closest car rental is at the airport in Columbus, Georgia. Forty-six miles away, about an hour on
US
27 north, Martha Berry Highway. In other words, retrace our footsteps. Or tire tracks.

It takes another night and most of a day before we locate a taxi willing to drive us to Columbus. For a small fortune. On the way out of town we pass the garage, the orange camper hunkered in the lot.

German Engineering

A few years earlier, when we live in Missouri, where my husband teaches at that Southern Baptist college, he arranges for a Holocaust survivor to speak to a class of students. The temperature hovers near zero on the appointed day. Should he pick up the Holocaust survivor in the camper or the bug? The heating and defrost system work about as well in each, but he figures he might as well drive the camper since it’s roomier. On the return forty-five-minute trip, the Holocaust survivor begins to shiver. My husband apologizes for the lack of heat. The survivor asks if there’s a box in the car. A box? My husband pulls over to the side of the road and, in fact, finds a corrugated box in the back. The survivor props his feet on top of it. He says he learned in a concentration camp that you’re less likely to get frostbite if there’s space between your feet and the ground.

Volksmarch

Our first October in Rome, we plan a day trip in the camper to Helen, Georgia. We follow
US
53 to Dalton, meandering through the Chattahoochee National Forest to Dahlonega, before cruising north on
US
75 into a 1970s re-creation of a Bavarian mountain village. Oktoberfest is in full swing. We drive amid traffic and crowds along cobblestone streets until we find a parking spot close to the Chattahoochee River. We wander boutiques and specialty shops selling beer steins, candles, and cuckoo clocks. During the rest of the year, Helen boasts winefests, Alpenfests, all-American Fourth of July fireworks, as well as Bavarian Nights of Summer.

Sun drills the north Georgia air. I wear a short-sleeve t-shirt and sandals, which balance precariously on the uneven cobblestones. After an hour of tramping through hoards of sullen children and beer-crazed parents, I’m ready to go home. But first we decide to eat. Restaurants sell schnitzel, sauerbraten, and sausages. Others offer country ham, grits, biscuits and gravy. Street vendors hawk funnel cakes and homemade fudge. I buy a Caesar salad, my husband a brat dripping grease. We carry the boxes of food back to the camper, open the sliding door, and sit on the cushioned seats in the back, our food on the table. I prop my feet on the camper stool, watching the Chattahoochee flowing south to Atlanta.

After eating, we buckle ourselves into our seats. My husband turns the key in the ignition. It starts right up. I’m surprised, having convinced myself the camper would develop some new ailment in order to stay in this German village, no matter how faux.

We Have a Problem

We rent a gold Plymouth at the Columbus, Georgia, airport and drive south to the Pensacola trailer park and Aunt Beulah. Originally, we planned to spend the night, but now we’re running late.
We can’t miss the wedding, so we pack Beulah and her suitcases into the backseat before heading west to Houston . . . Houston, which floods during rainstorms since it’s built at about sea level with too much asphalt and concrete.

During the time I live there, after leaving Galveston, the starter on my Volkswagen, placed
beneath
the engine (an engineering breakthrough that no mechanic can explain), floods out. Three times. All three times I have to replace the starter box.

One flood is so severe that, glancing out the window of my small house, I watch my Volkswagen float down the street.

I run through near-hurricane conditions to rescue it.

I Spy

My husband, Aunt Beulah, and I partially follow the route a boyfriend and I once took, years ago, in his tan Volkswagen camper. Then we drove cross-country from Washington
DC
to California before traveling the Pacific Coast Highway north to Portland. Where the Volkswagen stripped its gears. Where we lost second, third, and fourth. Where we were stranded for several days waiting for a mechanic to fix it.

Later, following the northern route back to Washington
DC
, somewhere east of South Dakota, after visiting Mount Rushmore, I got food poisoning from eating at a Stuckey’s. I vomited for more than three hundred miles in the rear seat of the camper.

Now, for eight hours, from Pensacola through muggy Alabama, stifling Mississippi, humid Louisiana, and into east Texas, Aunt Beulah points at swamps out the window and says, “I bet there’s a lot of cottonmouths in there.”

Superbug to the Rescue

Once, when I fly back to Georgia from visiting friends, my husband plans to pick me up at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. The plane lands a little after eight o’clock at night, but no husband at the gate. No husband at baggage claim. I try calling from a
pay phone. No answer. We recently purchased a Ford Escort station wagon to replace the camper (foreshadowing here), the first new car for either of us, so it can’t be car problems. It is, however, storming, so I imagine a collision or accident on a slick
I
-75.

I sit in baggage claim until two o’clock in the morning, virtually alone in the airport. The custodians sweep the floor around me.

My husband finally rushes in. He’d made it halfway to Atlanta, over an hour away, when the Ford developed (we later find out) vapor lock. He left it on the side of the road, walked to a gas station, had it towed, called friends who picked him up and brought him back home to get another car. We owned three.

He decided to try the yellow Opel next, figuring it’d be more reliable than my Volkswagen. The secondhand Opel was a dubious present from my parents. It had to undergo a complicated and elaborate ritual—almost an exorcism—in order to start the engine in such a way that it wouldn’t stall out: pump the gas five times, wait a full sixty seconds, pump the gas ten times, wait exactly three minutes, turn the key with your foot off the gas, allow the engine to idle precisely four and a half minutes, slowly,
slowly
ease the automatic stick from neutral to drive. Put your foot on the accelerator.

My husband must have either missed or rushed through one of the steps. Or, since it lacked a working gas gauge, perhaps it ran out of gas. In any event, a mile from home it stalled out on the side of the road.

He walked home and got the Volkswagen bug. Which made it to Hartsfield Airport without a hitch.

Taking It and Leaving It

After the wedding and Christmas, we leave the aunt in Houston and drive the Plymouth back to Lanett. It feels as if we’re returning to the scene of a crime. The mechanic, at whose place the camper has taken up residence since the breakdown, says it’ll
cost at least a thousand dollars to fix. Probably more. My husband is tempted but says he’ll think about it. He asks the mechanic if he’ll consider purchasing the camper as is, for parts? Or, of course, the mechanic could fix it and sell it, recoup his investment. I’m mum about the dual carburetors. Hubcaps. Windshield wipers, etc.