Read Online Falling Angels by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online Page A

going to take them to Disneyland in a top-of-the-line trailer that slept five.
    “When, Daddy? When?” the girls cried.
    He pulled the string on Sandy’s beatnik doll. “I’m hip, like, uh, you know, beatnik,” the doll said.
    “This summer,” their father answered. “So for the next six months, thrift is the watchword.”
    In January air-raid drills started at school for when the Russians dropped the bomb. The principal made a speech in the gymnasium. If it ever suddenly got very light, he said, like a huge flashbulb going off in the sky, you were to cover your eyes with your hands and crouch under your desks until the teacher said it was safe to come out. Then, two by two, you were to file down to the cellar. You were not to try to run home.
    “The hell with that,” their father said when they told him. “You run home.” In spite of the watchword being thrift, he had decided to build a fallout shelter. He had a pamphlet that he’d sent away for called “Pioneers of Self-Defence,” all about how to do it.
    As soon as the ground was soft enough, around the end of April, he hired a man with a bulldozer to dig a big hole in the back yard. The next day another man in a truck delivered a pileof concrete blocks and some pipes and boards and sheets of metal, and their father went right to work.
    It took a month. Every minute that their father wasn’t sleeping or working, he was down in that hole. He even ate his meals there. He let Norma help, and she got pretty good at mixing mortar and hammering nails, as long as he didn’t yell at her that she was doing it all wrong, which, if he stood over her shoulder, she did. In the morning she woke up yearning for the feel of the hammer in her hand, all day at school she dreamed about hammering. She wished she could do it when he wasn’t around, and yet sometimes, when he wasn’t mad or tired, she liked the fact that they worked as a team: she mixing the mortar, he setting the blocks; he sawing the boards, she nailing them down. He had to have everything perfect, and the longer she helped him, the more she wanted everything to be perfect, too, the more she couldn’t blame him for his tantrums. She wondered if he wished he had a son—Jimmy (who would have been thirteen by now)—to help instead of her.
    When the outside was done, the man came back with the bulldozer to shovel the earth back on the roof. Inside, Norma and their father built shelves and fold-up bunks and painted the walls canary yellow, which was supposed to add a note of cheerfulness. Even though Norma said that they never played hopscotch anymore, their father painted a hopscotch on the floor, as recommended by the pamphlet.
    He bought two weeks’ worth of canned food, jugs for the water, candles, lanterns, paper plates, a chemical toilet, canned heat, a fire extinguisher, a camping stove, and a bow and arrow for hunting game when the bullets ran out. The rest of what the pamphlet said he should buy—bedding, Band-Aids, a transistor radio, a flashlight, batteries, board games, a shovel in case they had to dig themselves out from the house falling on top of them—they already had. A small library of books on nature and American history would prove useful and inspirational, thepamphlet said, but he said, did they know how much a book cost nowadays? and he carried down a box of his old
Life
magazines. He also brought down his World War II gun and three cases of their mother’s whisky.
    Every Monday and Friday the girls had to empty the water jugs and refill them with a fresh supply. They didn’t mind this chore. It was small payment for the notoriety and security of being the safest children in the subdivision. Their friends begged to be able to come in when the bomb dropped, and Sandy said “Sure” to whoever asked her. Norma, understanding just how strictly the shelter was designed for a maximum of five people, said she didn’t think so—at first she always said that—but she ended up saying