Warday

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.

In junior high, we teach land management and radiation control, animal husbandry, principles of small-scale farming, FAN-TIX, reading skills, and business math. The kids endure it all, except FAN-TIX, which of course they love. And the new Phillips and Apple computers are great fun. We get feeds from the British via satellite, which is a great improvement because now the kids can communicate with students in England. They can have conversations, and it means a lot to them to know that somewhere across the sea, there is an unhurt world full of people who care about us.

I remember when we just assumed Europe had been hit. During the famine, for example. The world was ending, I thought then.

One evening a funny-looking jet flew over the school and we thought, oh God, the Russians. We lost the war and now the Russians have come.

All night there were planes landing at the airport, which is only a couple of miles away from us here in Baldwin. We hadn’t seen a plane in six months. Boy, was this place in an uproar! I’ll never forget, we were planning to surrender the town. I went out there with half the rest of the people and we saw all these planes on the runway with target insignia on the side. Most of us were on foot, a few in trucks and cars. We were coming up the road to the terminal when a man in a white uniform came out with a bullhorn and called out, “We are a Royal Air Force Relief Support Unit. We are friends.”

The RAF! I just sat down in the road and cried. They came over and checked us for radiation. When they found we were clean, they sent up a cheer.

They were all in white uniforms. They’d come up from Atlanta.

They gave us kippers. They had zillions of kippers that had been salted in Ireland and packed for export in plastic bags, so they were totally uncontaminated. We filled our pockets with kippers and went home.

One of the most vivid memories I have is of those kippers. They were so good. I’d never had one before in my life.

You know, another thing I’d like to tell the rest of the world about the people of Baldwin is this: we work hard, but we also have lots of fun. We have a rugby team and a baseball team and a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and a little theater and reading clubs and a thriving 4-H. Pittsburgh has the only satellite uplink in the Midwest, and we have been allocated short-wave receivers so we get the BBC North American service. As a teacher, the one special allocation I get is books and computer programs.

Which, by the way, reminds me of my Prince Andrew story, because it has to do with books. How long have I been talking? I’m getting hoarse! But this is really fun. I haven’t actually sat down and talked like this before. Not ever, just talked and talked.

Now I have to tell you I was really impressed with Prince Andrew last June. We were so excited. I remember Martha Dorris—she’s our Relief General Officer—got the RAF to give us shoe polish so we could get ourselves fit to