You Are One of Them Read Online Free Page B

“No,” she’d say, and then pause, and I knew she was startled by the sight of her own manic fingers.
    I liked to flip the atlas to the Soviet Union, its borders drawn in a muted red. I couldn’t even fit the top of my pinkie inside Luxembourg but could press both my palms onto the Soviet sprawl. The Russians fascinated me. My mother and I watched clips of Brezhnev on the evening news—his chest clotted with medals, his eyebrows bristling under his fur hat—but it was ordinary Russians I was curious about. Moscow, as the capital of the other superpower, struck me as Washington’s twin. Was there an eight-year-old girl somewhere in Moscow whose sister had also died, whose father had also left? “They live in communal apartments,” my mother said. “So that eight-year-old probably shares a bathroom with nine other people.”
    Some parents might have hesitated to expose their children to the gloomy realities of the hydrodynamic front, but I was six when my mother explained the concept of half-life. I was seven when she began stocking our basement with canned goods. Baked beans and tuna fish. Creamed corn. Beef jerky. Whole peaches in syrup. My mother did not hide anything from me. I knew that Khrushchev had promised to bury us. I knew that Carter had ordered the Olympic boycott because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. In those days I’d squint at the sun, knowing that it could vanish, that omnivorous darkness could descend at any time. That a mushroom cloud could swallow us whole or leave us to shrivel in an eternal winter. In my nightmares the landscape was as barren as a photographic negative, the reverse of everything I knew. A world silent and still. Was I scared? Yes, but the fear was so constant that it was like a hum barely audible below our daily chatter. I went to school, I came home. I went to gymnastics. I practiced the piano. I did my homework. But the bomb was always on my mind.
    Jenny and I settled into a rhythm that fall. We walked the two blocks to school together—we’d meet outside our houses at exactly five minutes past eight and arrive before the opening bell rang at eight-fifteen. After school, on the three days I didn’t have gymnastics, we’d go to her house and do our homework and, more often than not, bake brownies. There were always Duncan Hines mixes in the cupboard. Mrs. Jones was always there to ask about our day. She smiled a lot. At first it made me nervous—there was something unsettling about all that grinning—but my mother said that people smiled more in Ohio.
    We rode our bicycles around the oak-canopied streets of our neighborhood. There were a lot of kids in Cleveland Park. They congregated on the Macomb Street playground or at the community club on Highland Street. We were all allowed to roam without supervision until dusk, when a chorus—mostly the accented voices of nannies and housekeepers—summoned everyone home for dinner. For years I had lingered on the fringes of the other kids’ society—I would occasionally be drafted into kickball when their numbers were uneven—but now Jenny was with me. She could have picked anyone to be her friend. I’ve come to understand that some people are suns that pull others into their orbit. The first time we went to the Macomb Street playground together, the others swarmed around Jenny like mosquitoes around a light. She dictated the terms of the interaction. Before they could ask her name, she announced it. Before they could ask where she was from, she told them. “Do you call soda ‘pop’?” asked one of the older boys when he found out she was from the Midwest. His name was Josh, and he was in sixth grade. He and his younger brother lived two blocks away from me but had never acknowledged my presence. “I do,” Jenny said without apology. “Pop is way more fun to say. POP!” Josh invited her to join their soccer game. But Jenny chose me. We ignored the others and created our own world.
    The National Cathedral was just