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Overview
Alyson Foster is a writer of fierce lucidity, and Heart Attack Watch shows her at the peak of her craft.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620405437 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury USA |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2016 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Heart Attack Watch
Stories
By Alyson Foster
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2016 Alyson FosterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-543-7
CHAPTER 1
THE THEORY OF CLOUDS
IN SEPTEMBER, SCIENTISTS CAME to town to study the clouds. No one is sure how many researchers there are exactly — an undetermined number of men and a single woman who walks with quick and competent strides — and no one wants them there. The cashier at the gas station on Route 27 rings up the interlopers' purchases sourly, taking their proffered bills with two pinched fingers and grudgingly doling out their change, shorting them a quarter or dime whenever she can. The waitresses who serve them at the diner downtown leave their plates on the cook's counter until the mashed potatoes congeal and shun the tips they leave behind, making them fair game for the busboys who are untroubled by scruples.
Little surprise, then, Julia thinks, that the small group rarely ventures from their site at the southern perimeter of town just downwind of the plant. Every day, when she drives the school bus past the field where they work, she sees two or three of the scientists wading through the wet cresting grass, legs sheathed to the knee in bright galoshes, to where the spires of their instruments glitter. Or conferring over wide scrolls of graph paper that wave with hieroglyphics in the wind. Or draping themselves across the dented hoods of their Volvos, eating a sandwich with one hand and gesticulating skyward with the other. Their gestures are so earnest, so fraught with exclusive meaning that Julia looks up too, leaning forward in her seat to peer through the expansive windshield in front of her, as if something brief but majestic might appear.
She sees nothing. Her neck hurts, though. The hours of sitting, guiding the bus through the same rotation, twice in the morning, once at noon, twice at night — always right on Deerfield, left on Bluegrass, then left on Meridian, and then the whole pattern reversed — are tightening her joints like the cogs in a clock, everything forever grinding in the same direction. The fleshy undersides of her palms, that constant point of contact with the wheel, began to lose feeling several years ago, and now the skin there has a slightly deadened cast to it. She can see it in good light, faint smudges that never disappear, a bruising from wrist to pinkie finger.
She has never mentioned this to Danae; it doesn't occur to her. When Julia was a little girl, her mother used to call her stoic in an admiring tone. Now that her mother is gone, Julia likes remembering the word, the chime of it both melodic and steely in her ear. Another thing she keeps to herself. Danae has always thought Julia a touch sentimental. Danae, who works forty hours a week on the line at the plant sorting out the hardware that comes rolling off the belt. Her hands are as attuned to nuance as a blind woman's. Plow bolts from flanges, truss screws from pans, half-inch washers from three-quarters — Danae knows these distinctions by touch. Her fingers assess quicker than thought — all day long they sift out what they need and leave the rest behind. A metallic odor lingers on Danae's skin no matter how long she dallies in the shower. When Julia presses her lips to it the cold scent makes her think of snow.
Julia is out in the garden planting bulbs when Danae comes home late from the plant again. Three times this month, Smithson employees have been held after work for informational meetings. Julia isn't sure what information is being disseminated exactly. Danae can never quite seem to specify. But from what Julia can piece together these assemblies have an interesting tone — discussions that are strident and yet vague in their objectives. She patiently whittles out hollows in the dirt with her finger while Danae relates the most recent highlights. The summer flush of flowers has peaked and wilted away and now only a few hardy chrysanthemums remain, a spattering of stolid yellow and orange that glow in the gathering dusk.
"Are you listening?" Danae says, and when Julia looks up Danae repeats herself. "Joe Flynn was saying how we have to be careful," she concludes. "You know how these environmentalists are."
"Not really." Julia smoothes the soil with both hands and sits back on her haunches. The irises are tucked away now, ready for the cold and the waiting. She likes to sing a little song to her flowers while she lays them to rest for the winter, something to fortify them while the earth chills and hardens around them, but she would never let Danae catch her at it. "I mean I know how Joe Flynn thinks they are. But just because rabidity happens to be his natural state doesn't mean he should assume everyone else —"
"Rabidity." Danae shoves her hands in her pockets and tilts her head. "Is that even really a word?" She sees Julia opening her mouth and hastily continues. "I know it's a word word. But something people actually say? It isn't."
"Not Joe Flynn, anyway."
"Or anyone else." Danae reaches down and ruffles Julia's hair, traces the switchback of her part. "I get out in the world, Julia. I see things. One of us has to pay attention, even if you don't think it's important."
"Well, I'm glad you're up to the task." Julia stiffly hazards a standing position; dirt drizzles around her fraying tennis shoes. "I'm certainly not." Without thinking, she glances up. Too dark to see anything now — all she can make out is the pines' pitch and sway against a shadowy expanse. Beyond that everything is lost to the eye. Maybe the bats setting out above them or the birds returning to rest can still make something out, a glimmer of the clouds' churning passage, but how would anyone know?
"Hey." Danae gently scuffs Julia's foot with her own. "What are you looking at?"
Julia sees plenty. If you were to draw a map of her routes, they would spread out for miles in a series of intricate loops, widening like a net unfurling and coming back into itself. She drives the bus along gravel roads nearly hidden in the undergrowth. Three, maybe four times a year the county sends men through in giant threshing machines — they beat the weeds into shimmering clouds of pollen. Two weeks and the foliage has crept back up the shoulders and covered them over again. In some places oaks soldier up so close to the dirt tracks that the bus scrapes along their branches. The trees release their acorns like revenge. Hundreds drum down on the roof in peals of aluminum thunder before they scatter to the ground, each one to become a tree or nothing at all.
Julia no longer remembers many particulars from her high school education. But there is a vague concept from science class about time, how it's a dimension, like space. A dimension that can't be seen, only moved through. She thinks about this sometimes and wishes she understood it better. As the seasons pass, Julia travels along her convoluted orbit and watches the world change daily, hourly. Stones rising and sinking in the river beneath the bridge. Wildflowers blooming incrementally. A mailbox succumbing to rot and ditches filling with earth. An abandoned house accruing stars in its dark windowpanes, each one shining with its own crystalline light. Every year the kids coming back taller and more reluctant. While always in the distance the plant's three smokestacks jut like rust-tinged peninsulas into the sky. The smoke rising from them twists like musculature — a dense bunching that swells and darkens as it gains altitude.
In her mind's eye, Julia tries to merge this vast collection of moments, as if she could hold them all simultaneously. She can almost picture it, the fields layered with every color there is, a frozen streak of train along the horizon, Julia herself coming and going, and the scientists suspended like ghosts watching the clouds hurtle through the sky, luminous mountains moving at the speed of light.
And then she snaps to again. Coming back into town, the bus passes the field where the scientists are working. The woman striding through the grass on the far end of it loses her grip on a sheaf of papers, and the wind takes them. In her rearview mirror, the inverted figure stoops and chases the sheets as if trying to call back a startled flock of birds. While the kids in the back turn to jeer.
Most days she's back at the garage by a quarter to four. The day is then her own. From there she often drives her Honda to the town's library. It's a one-room brick building with green carpeting, its ivy pattern nearly scuffed away by years of passing feet. Julia walks along the quiet rows as lightly as possible, imagining that she can draw up the creaking of the floorboards inside herself and leave behind nothing but silence. She closes her eyes, trails her fingers along the softening spines of the hardcover volumes, the splintering paperbacks. And then she stops. If the book beneath her hand isn't one she has read, she pulls it. If it is, she closes her eyes and moves on.
She rarely takes a seat at the table next to the sighing radiator in the corner. There's something vaguely depressing about watching the late-afternoon sun sink in the window covered in faded construction-paper stars from story hours long ago forgotten. She checks out her books from the wordless librarian and heads back out into the evening with the small stack of them clutched to her chest.
When she arrives home the paper is waiting, nestled in the top branches of the enormous jade plant on the porch next to the front door, placed there for her by Danae when she leaves the house each morning. It's a shabby little local publication, never more than fifteen pages long, and the photographs are poorly set, the red and yellow ink misaligned so that every figure trails behind a forlorn blue ghost of himself.
The reporting isn't so bad, though. Tim Kelley, the Herald's editor, has a reputation for being eccentric. The property where the scientists are now at work belongs to him; he's letting them camp out there for free. But Kelley also has family that goes back generations in the town; he's related by blood or marriage to school board members, plant foremen, and town councilmen, and is therefore a known element. His loyalties cannot be called into question, and besides there is nothing else for them to read.
Julia reads the paper every day from first to final page. She's not especially interested in the particulars of any one story — the conflagration of a granary out on North 46 or the deranged high school band director fired at last with great fanfare. It's more habit than anything else, following the dramatic arcs of business and personal tensions like plots in a mediocre sitcom, predictable but still moderately diverting.
And then even the humdrum offers up a revelation from time to time. When Julia opens the paper one fall afternoon she finds a letter to the editor on page two written by one Christopher Tenley, leader of the enemy conclave, the authoritative addendum to his surname: Ph.D., Atmospheric Science, Cornell University. Who around here can compete with that? She puts the water on to boil, shakes out the paper, and sits down at the kitchen table to read.
That's where she's sitting when Danae comes home. The water has boiled away and evaporated into nothingness, and not until the thump and shuffle of heavy shoes on the linoleum does Julia smell the empty pot, a metallic scorching in the air. Danae appears before her in the haze, jacket in one hand, her face wrinkled up wryly. "Smells great," she says. "Hope you saved some for me." With her free hand she gestures toward the paper. "What do people have their panties in a twist about now?" she says. She herself never reads a word of it.
"The usual, lately." Julia sits up and rubs her elbow, which has gone numb. "They think the EPA is going to come in here and close us down, and we'll all be jobless and starve, and the children will turn feral and run naked through the streets."
"Oh yeah?" says Danae. The second syllable bows a little under some kind of extra thought she's not saying, but Julia has jumped up to rescue the pot, to keep the bottom of it from adhering permanently to the burner, and so she doesn't notice.
"You should read it, Danae," she calls into the living room. It's too late — the burner has singed a scar of concentric rings into the pan's copper underside, and the entire kitchen is rife with a poisonous stench. "Kelley printed this whole long piece by the guy that's heading up the study. Tenley is his name. He's trying to explain what it is they're looking at. He says there have been some studies about certain airborne industrial emissions — that there might be something in them affecting atmospheric patterns. They think the plant is actually making new clouds. How crazy is that?"
The window above the kitchen sink won't open — it has been carelessly painted into its sill. Julia's handiwork. Danae would never have done something so shoddy. Julia leverages all the power of her pitiful biceps for one last push, and finally it gives in a burst of white flakes.
"They just want to know, that's all, Tenley says," she continues when she catches her breath. "I mean, it could have important environmental consequences. But of course Kelley put this guy's letter — which is very dispassionate and well-written — next to these accusations that people like Flynn wrote in. And he didn't edit out any of their typos. He just put sic in brackets next to all their mistakes. Then over the top he put a big headline that says, Whom do you believe?"
No answer. Still waving her hands at the smoke, Julia steps through the doorway to see Danae standing by the table, frowning down at the paper. Finally, she looks up. She's been rubbing her short brown hair against the grain, and now it bristles up like an animal pelt. She says, "Kelley better be careful."
"Oh, come on." Julia starts to laugh, and then she sees Danae's scuffed knuckles tighten against the seams of her corduroy pant legs.
"No, you come on, Julia." Danae picks up the paper and begins twisting it into a funnel, wringing it tighter and tighter until her fingertips blur the newsprint and come away dark. "I know you think bad grammar is funny, but this isn't a joke. These are people's jobs — it's my job."
"Don't you think it's possible you're getting just a tad ahead of yourself?" Julia puts her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. The room sways, just slightly, around her ears, but she's startled at how ready she feels for a fight, pitched forward on her toes in a battle stance. "No one's talking about shutting anything down, Danae. It's science. Widening the scope and depth of human understanding so we can better our situation. So they find out it's true. It doesn't mean they're going to do anything about it. But the thought of facing a few unpleasant facts —"
"Blah, blah, blah." Danae folds her hand, fingers to thumb and snaps them open and closed in Julia's face. "Facts, my ass. You're the one who reads the paper. They went up to that electric plant in Grayling just to do a study. They sent people out on that forest property owned by the Hyatt Mill just to do a study. They went out and took samples of phosphate or whatever the hell it is up in the Titabawassee just to do a study. And what happened afterward in those places? Not nothing. Kelley may think he's being smart, and you might get a kick out of it, but he's not doing anyone around here any favors. And neither are you."
And with that pronouncement she whirls, a single tight and enraged pirouette, and marches out of the house. A moment later the truck engine throbs to life, but Julia can't hear it. She's still rocked back on her heels, dumbfounded, ears ringing.
Overnight the wind swings around to the north. It scrapes abrasively across the woods and fields, the benign remnant of summer suddenly sucked out and gone in the night. Danae appears in bed next to Julia sometime early in the morning, and she doesn't stir when Julia cautiously loosens the blankets from around her hips and leans over her. Danae's boyish face with its square jaw is still fierce even in sleep, her fists tucked under her chin. Neither one of them is old exactly, but in bad light like this, the embalming gray tints before dawn, Julia sees the future. Her own flesh has already begun to separate out: tendons, muscles, and veins all coming slowly toward the surface. It is now apparent that Danae will be one of those old women chiseled down into sinews by the passing years while Julia will simply go soft.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heart Attack Watch by Alyson Foster. Copyright © 2016 Alyson Foster. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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