Warday

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 Red-book 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.