Machine Dreams

Mitch maintained we’d never be in this fix if a Catholic hadn’t been elected president. People around town were talking about fallout shelters. The VFW organized a Civil Defense League: classes at the post office one night a week for four weeks. Mitch took them in the summer, when those old rooms must have been airless. Then he taught the same class in September. He was working for a construction company then, selling aluminum buildings on commission. Always yelling at you kids,
Get the hell off the telephone! Don’t you know I earn a living on this phone?
Things were easier when he was involved in the civil defense work; there were books and pamphlets and construction details. Which basements were to be used for town shelters: the courthouse, the high school, all the churches.
    It would have been October, and grainy aerial photographs of Cuban missiles were appearing in the newspapers. People werealarmed and news was broadcast on the hour. I didn’t care much; I remember thinking myself strange. I spent eight hours a day with six-year-olds bused fifteen or twenty miles from hollows back in the country. Did they have fallout shelters? They didn’t have mittens or winter coats unless I could find enough at the Salvation Army. Civil defense seemed crazy to me but it was important to Mitch, so I kept quiet. He talked about building a shelter in the little room behind the garage, a utility room where he kept tools, where the hot-water tank was, and the big cabinet that held canned goods. A ladder up the wall led to the attic door, which had to be shoved open from underneath. You kids were never allowed in the attic—there was no floor except for a narrow walkway, just insulation between the boards. Every change of season, I’d find myself up there, opening Mother’s big cedar chest in a corner under the eaves. Packing woolens away with moth balls or shaking out summer cottons, hoping they weren’t all outgrown.
    That night, I was in the attic, trying to find enough winter school clothes. Dresses with big hems, pants to let out, but there would have to be new boots and coats. I had a whole pile of woolens and thought I’d get you both to try everything on while I finished ironing a basket of Mitch’s shirts, and my blouses. Teaching, I wore skirts and those Ship ’n’ Shore cotton blouses with roll-up sleeves and Peter Pan collars; two white ones, a pale green one, a blue one. Those are the details I remember, colors and clothes and the smell of chalk at the blackboard, going over your homework at night—the red arithmetic book Billy had in the sixth grade called
Fun with New Math.
No questions about the meaning of things; you don’t think that way if you have children. The meaning is right in front of you and you live by keeping up with it.
I have my house and my children
was a phrase I kept in mind. Piling up clothes, I calculated which would do and which wouldn’t. The light in the attic was dim, one bulb glowing and the sun setting outside with a gold tinge. Underneath that yellow color was the cold of the fall coming on. It was a Sunday night because I was thinking I had the week’s lesson plans to do, and thirty-five big jack-o’-lanterns to cut from orange construction paper. I loved decorating that classroom and spent hours on adifferent display every month. Just that day I’d gotten two big rolls of brown paper so the kids could trace each other’s shapes and color their own portraits. I could put the shapes up all around the room, with the movable arms and legs holding vowel sounds, and the jack-o’-lanterns for heads, each with a different expression. In October I was still teaching letter recognition to kids from the country who hadn’t seen many books, kids who’d never seen themselves full length in a mirror. At Halloween, a third of the class would be too poor to have costumes; I could take staples and elastic string to school to make masks out of the jack-o’-lantern faces. I’d ask Bess and Gladys for worn-out linens again, and use torn sheets for capes. I stood there in the attic with all these plans, looking at shirts I knew Billy couldn’t wear; in the half-finished top of the house, I felt as though I were standing behind the scenes of some production. I couldn’t move for a minute, the feeling was so strong. Nothing seemed real. I thought of my mother hemming my dresses on the porch, letting down hems one after another while I sat playing with soap bubbles, a skinny dark