I am thirty-seven years of age. Before Warday I was a freelance writer. I had done work for all the major women’s magazines—Cosmo, Good Housekeeping, Bazaar, The Journal, all of them.
And then your next question is where was I on Warday. Well, I was on my way to Killington, Vermont, to ski. I was thirty-two years old, making good money, single, and there had been an early snowfall. So off I went for a long weekend. I heard nothing, saw nothing. The car radio went off. I thought, thank you, Mr. Ford. I continued on to Killington. When I got to the Holiday Inn, it turned out that all the radios and TVs were out in the whole place. There was an uproar. Nobody knew what had happened.
I skied anyway, all that afternoon. I remember it was powdery and not very settled, but it was still fun. I’ve never skied since, not after that day. So that’s where I was on Warday. Skiing.
It wasn’t until the next day that people started saying stuff—New York had been bombed, there had been a nuclear accident, a reactor explosion, that sort of thing. We saw a couple of helicopters. The out-of-town papers didn’t get delivered. The second morning of my trip, I found the dining room of the hotel closed. No breakfast, and no explanations. That scared me. So I headed for home, which was New York.
I was in Hartford when I started seeing this immense black cloud to the south. It wasn’t a mushroom cloud or anything. Just a huge black thing like a giant blob or something. By the time I was in Middletown, it was all the way across the southern sky.
It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. I stopped in Middletown and asked about it at the gas station. The man said there had been a bomb. He told me not to go any farther, because New York was burning.
I remember I just stood there staring at that old man. There was nothing to say. The radios and TVs were out. Many car ignitions were out. Even so, cars were streaming up from the south.
And there was that cloud.
I stayed that night in Middletown—I was very lucky to get a motel room. Refugees were all over the place. When I got to the room, I found that there were six other people in it already. Two of them had these disgusting swellings, one all over his back and one on his face. I did not know then what flash burns look like if they’re left untreated. I learned, though.
When the sun went down, we saw that the cloud was full of lightning. I decided then and there to stay inside the motel as long as I could. Other people did too. We were scared there was radiation.
We had a very hard time. Food ran out. My car got stolen. I lived at that motel for months. Nobody knew what to do. The manager kept a tab, but he couldn’t get the bank to pay him on his credit-card chits. Then the bank closed. Food got really scarce. I used to get a slice of bread and make it into soup, seasoned with salt and pepper. No, wait a minute, that was months later. In the famine.
What saved me was staying in that motel as long as I did. I’m over thirty, single and childless. I didn’t get much of a dose. I don’t think I’m in a high-risk cancer situation. I have a little cluster of B cells on my nose, but they slough off as rapidly as they form, which is a good sign. Even if they do become cancerous, they will treat me because skin cancers are curable.
I was in that motel for six months. We became a family. The Brentwood Middletown Motel People. We had deaths and a marriage, and we foraged together during the food shortage.
One day a man came through, traveling from the West. He said Pittsburgh was good. There was food, and the people were okay.
Outsiders were welcome there. So I thought, why not? Our motel family was down to ten or twelve people. We’d gone through the worst winter of our lives together, and we were ready to say good-bye. You don’t necessarily want to stay with people you endured hell with. Every time you look at them, you see the past.
It took me two weeks to get to Pittsburgh. I hitched, took the bus, took the train.
You know, talking about Warday has a funny effect on me. I used to be very unemotional about it. But now I think about it in terms of humanity. And places. Not that motel. My beautiful prewar places. I had a loft in SoHo, can you believe it? A big white loft with the kitchen in the middle of the space. Light on three sides. I could see the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. I remember the way the brick streets looked in the rain. I remember my friends. And my editors and co-workers. Cassie Stewart. I loved Cassie. She was full of laughter and fun. Sometimes I dream about those people. Cassie and Mindy and Janice and all the people at Cosmopolitan. That was really my best market. I did sort of self-help articles. “Glamorize Yourself for that Special Him”—that sort of thing.
In those days I wanted to be a novelist. I dreamed of being a female William Kotzwinkle. Do you remember him? He was a novelist in those days. He did this novel called Fata Morgana that was practically unknown. But it was simply wonderful. I always wanted to write like him. And Swimmer in the Secret Sea, which Redbook published in ’76. I was working on a novel called Shadowgirl.
It was about a woman who thinks she is a shadow. About how she discovers she is real, and this basically destroys her. Before that, her life was a fairy tale of submission. Easy, but dangerously self-defeating. I had about three hundred pages done, and my agent really liked it. God knows where it is now. I must say, I do fantasize about going back to Manhattan and seeing what my old place is like. I bought my loft for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Forty thousand dollars down. My parents bought it. I hired a locator, a guy here in Baldwin, and he found out they’d died during the famine. I felt awful about it. For a while I had this nightmare where they are sitting in the kitchen in our house. It’s a sunny morning and the birds are singing and the apple tree outside is blooming. Only the kitchen doesn’t smell like bacon and eggs and coffee. And I look at them, and they are human skeletons.
I couldn’t help them, I know that. The locator got the state of New Jersey to issue me a provisional deed to their house. It’s a ruin, I guess. Nobody lives in Morristown, New Jersey, anymore.
I have gotten to the point where I say, Amy, you just get through today. Or this morning. Or this minute. Whatever. I just want to survive the next ten minutes.
I love my job. Teaching is so very important. It’s incredible to realize, but some of the very small children in the Baldwin Elementary School were born after Warday. They’re going to grow up without reference to the old world. They’ll never know what it was like.
So what are we teaching your children these days, you ask? Actually, most of the parents don’t ask. They’re too tired. The people of Pittsburgh work very, very hard. We’re highly organized. This is a free-enterprise town, but we really do a lot of cooperating with one another. Our area is the most radiation-free in the whole Midwest. West of here, they got the dust from the missile fields.
Pittsburgh is an important place because it’s healthy and strong. There is a lot of farming toward the Pennsylvania border and in eastern Ohio, just this side of the radiation areas. I heard there was this giant dust storm out there recently, but it didn’t get as far as Canton, so we’re okay. Pittsburgh sends its own agents to the farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia to buy up food. We have a unique system. The whole city is on a co-op food plan, the Greater Pittsburgh Sustenance Program. The program figures out what we need and where to get it, and allocates the food by person. We all have these ration cards. You can get hung in the Allegheny County Jail for a class-one ration violation. That’s if you steal food and sell it. That’s the worst. To give you an idea of how well put together we are, the Relief has designated us a Prime Recovery Area, meaning that we get such things as computers for the school and demonstrable-need programs like Sustenance. We also get extra shipments of medical supplies.