Loving Cinnamon Blue

Excerpt:

The Four Corners area; 1953.
That area over by Glen Canyon called the Colorado Plateau, where uranium mining flourished. "Atoms for Peace" was trumpeted during the development of a line of atomic weapons at Los Alamos. Sampler pilots flew into the clouds of radioactive dust after detonation to measure radioactivity.
If you were a uranium miner you went to work and breathed the dust and came home, threw your clothes in the wash and showered. You breathed the dust and it was all over your body all the time, inside and out, and in your forties you came down with cancer, as did some of your family. Early on, your legs became red and blistered from rashes, even just out walking with a Geiger counter.
Yet garden parties were held in Denver and the mountains. Young girls danced and fell in love. Burlesque was in its last days, photography caught us at our best and worst, the weather was either hot or blowing snow across the mesas, people had a new zest for life and appliances, and the sheep still grazed, finding just enough to eat.

Excerpt:

Rebecca: Winter Night

"You might want to prepare something to say after I introduce you," Rebecca's friend Adelaid had said. It was she who had the gallery, and the show was two weeks from tonight.

So on this December winter night Rebecca had spent the evening finishing framing and matting her paintings, or pieces, as she more usually called them, because they were also collages. And then she had wanted to see them all together, so she carried them up from the basement to the living room and placed them around on chairs and the mantel and the two couches.

She was alone downstairs, her youngest daughter Allie upstairs sleeping; she was waiting up for Betsy, who was infuriatingly late. It was snowing and way after midnight, the proper curfew for a sixteen-year-old.

Rebecca was beginning to climb inside her own skin. She had downed three scotches during the course of a very long evening, and if Betsy did not turn the key in the door soon she was going to goddamn make another. Now at 1:30 a.m. she turned the lights down, lit and placed on the coffee tables several candles, and began to pull out of herself something in the way of a benediction, a consecration for the pieces, which were sacred objects, sand paintings. Revealed sacraments, like the Shroud of Turin.

She would commemorate their first entrance into the world, a baptism. She felt with one hand on top of the books in the bookcase next to the fireplace for one of the girls' little white communion copy of The Book of Common Prayer that had been living there for years, but couldn't find it. No matter, she'd wing it. Terrified of anyone except close friends seeing them, she would reassure her subjects about their terror of the world. They have good reason to be terrified; it isn't much of a world.

There was the additional worry about the parents of the children, who, her Headmistress has told her, might possibly be upset, or a little askance at the notion of their children appearing in and among images, photos, paintings — whatever they were! of bomb victims and mushroom clouds. Having their children up on the wall of a gallery per se for all and everyone to stare at was probably not their idea of privacy. Jayne Baldock's tone during this conversation, ("called on the carpet," was a phrase that came to mind as Rebecca sat in front of the rambling large desk with Jayne's prim figure behind it) was icy; Rebecca had at the time argued spiritedly back about how important it was for the children to be not kept away but be part of a larger world. Now she was just tired and jammed this fear back into the darker recesses of her Cave of Fears where it belonged.

And wasn't this, sadly, what her life seemed to be about? She was as afraid of all and everything as her children—not her own girls, who she hoped would stride fearless into the world— but her students; shoving back into the Cave whatever the latest fear which flung itself around her veins and arteries and nerve endings. She will tell the intermingled brain-damaged children and the Navaho Indians and the burned bomb victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima how she loved them. That she wanted the world to understand who they are, and to grant them some ascendancy, some power.

It was her habit to cut and paste her own photos and others onto her painted images of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki so that burn victims from the detonation of Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki) commingled with sheep and Kachina dolls, Navaho squaws, and the Anasazi civilization, wafted over with the hazy, blurry bedazzled smile of a Down's syndrome child running, catching a ball. If her husband wrote about uranium mines and oil wells in his magazines and did the business of science and commerce and utility and foreign competition, she could do this, pick up the pieces, so to speak, of morality, and attention to power—and powerlessness. The weak, the downtrodden, the victims, the forgotten and turned-away from in repulsion should have their day.

Her husband Jeremy was in New Mexico now, his standing date the second week of the month. She was fairly certain he would be home for Christmas and her opening the week after, the latter not something he had shown much enthusiasm for, the grumble about the event exactly matching his disinterest in her work. It was too much, he said. Keep things separate. "Such a jumble, Rebecca, really." He also did not approve of her work, indicating she had crossed a line. But truly, she thought, she had gotten here because separately, the images were at once cliched, and flat; too pointed. As she began to commingle, very carefully, it felt like working with visual language. It felt like art, and it mirrored what was in her head, where things were not separate. So now they were matted and framed, a work itself that had taken many nights.

She put down her drink and stood in the dimly lit room, then turned down the crooning of Frank Sinatra on the victorola. The room sank with an expectant hush, the furniture, the paintings, the rugs, waiting.

She approached the paintings and addressed them.

"You are demented, dazzling, brain-injured, burnt by radiation. Eaten alive. I am with you, all day long. Don't be angry that other people are going to see these pictures. They need to see them, to remember, to know you, to not hold themselves separate from you. This is the intersection of morality, science, power and powerlessness. And greed. It's an intersection I can make. Another Four Corners area. What slides off the Colorado Plateau. The pieces show you beautifully — your creativity, your delight with life. You are beings of light, you are courageous, especially those of you who died. I want you to know you are loved by us; we who teach you love you. It's a big wide world out there, with wondrous ineffable things in it.

"I wanted to catch you, children and Indians at work and at home, in all different moments. Being quiet and working hard, feeling displaced, feeling happy and confident. You have the anguish and moments of gaiety we all have, in a difficult world. People have asked me, why the horrific backgrounds of dark purple, green and blue? Why the northern lights, the luminous bands and streamers of the Aurora Borealis? Why the images of the atomic bombs behind the children, behind the Navaho Indians, in the eyes and foreheads of the Anazazi at Mesa Verde?

"Because I have been terrified, ever since the war ended and I had my third child and started making art. Because the war ended the way it did. Was this the right way to end the war? Was it the only way? But what it has spawned: did we understand that that quick decision to use the bomb would put us on this course of fear? We're terrified, not just me. We all are. But we forget about it, most of us never think about it. We don't even talk about it. The awesome power of the atom bomb is outside of our understanding, and we're all rendered children beside it. Do we have faith that it might never be used again? Is it going to be used on us by the Russians? Why are our children all over the country having bomb drills, hiding under their desks, if that isn't a real fear? We worry about this, and it's a fair worry.

"Is what happened to the citizens of Hiroshima and three days later Nagasaki going to happen to us? Our leaders don't talk about our fear, probably because they don't want to instill more fear, since they are working against public panic. But we eat uncertainty and fear in our Rice Krispies every morning. Our future is obscure and our survival is not assured, because of this weapon that ended the war."

She sat back down on the pink velvet chair and thought, who was loved, exactly? Not the bomb, but the children and Navaho Indians and the dead and burned A-Bomb victims. She had a frission about her always, worrying. We could be incinerated, vaporized like they were, she thought often, driving, gardening, making love with her husband, being with her children. Teaching. In an instant, gone, vaporized. She lit a cigarette and sat looking at the pieces, musing on whether she could talk like this at the opening. Probably not. Let the art speak for itself, Adelaid would probably say. Don't try to explain it.

A click at the door. She put down cigarette and drink and walked down the hall to look. But the door had not been opened. Still, she needed some air. She opened it and the world of everyone asleep at 2 p.m. opened up, everything white and muffled. Snow sifting down, quietly. She stepped out a few feet, looked up and down the block, and then looked up at the snow swirling dazzlingly, dizzingly, in the brightness of the street-light; she was a figure inside someone's snow paper weight.