Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

1.1 Maggie

Maggie Rayburn had just come from eating birthday cake in the employees’ lunchroom when a document sitting in plain sight on her boss’s desk caught her eye. It was one o’clock, and a shaft of late-winter sun was stabbing through the plate-glass window behind the desk, blinding her enough so that at first she wasn’t sure exactly what was signified by the thick red border on the document’s cover or by the stern capital letters or the string of acronyms and slashes. Curiosity — was it a useful trait or a dangerous one? But who isn’t curious, she thought as she lifted the cover and peered inside: Discredit the doctors, she read. Flood the system with contradictory reports.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, causing a shiver to prickle her neck. She glanced out the window and cocked her head to listen. It was getting brighter out — or no, it wasn’t really, but now and then a band of light cut through the pervasive cloud cover and illuminated the stretch of farmland she had been looking at for what seemed like a thousand years. It was gray and frozen now, but in a few more months it would burst with life, aided by the antlike tractors that crawled along the corn rows and the spindly wheeled irrigation contraption and, a few months later, the big green harvesting machines. And in the distance…

But she didn’t have time to think about the distance, where the corn gave way to wheat and where a phalanx of oil rigs were drilling into the sub-shelf of the Arkoma Basin, and beyond the oil rigs, Oklahoma City, and beyond that…

Beyond that, an entire world she had never seen.

The footsteps were coming closer, pausing — surely they belonged to Mr. Winslow, who would have finished up his meeting with the army brass by now — and anyway, there was never time. There were documents to be typed and filed, telephones to be answered, an outfit to be chosen for the special birthday dinner Lyle was planning for her — in secret, he thought, but Lyle was an open book. The more furtive his movements, the easier it was to guess what he was up to. All of the hours in the day were spoken for!

Unless she made time. Unless she announced: “Thursday evening you boys are on your own” and went to get her nails done or meet up with True and Misty for a girls’ night out.

But today something was different. Whatever it was caused Maggie’s heart to clench with a dangerous possibility, and before she knew what she was doing, the document was in her hands, and then it was tucked up inside the baggy sweater Lyle and Will had given her that morning for her birthday — Lyle, who had no fashion sense! Will, who wanted her to be presentable, but not the kind of mother his friends eyed from under the brims of their baseball caps. Where had the years gone? She might as well slap a used-up mother sign on her forehead if she was going to wear a sweater like that.

But as she stood in a stray shaft of February sunlight, watching the distant oil rigs pump their greasy dollars out of the ground, she wondered if certain seemingly indelible aspects of her life and personality might change. If Lyle might become her accomplice in whatever lay in wait for her as the earth made its lonely way around the sun and Will spun off into ever-farther orbits and she took another step along the Path to Becoming, which was something she had read about in a magazine she had bought herself as a birthday treat just, coincidentally, the day before.

She was thirty-nine. In another year she would be forty — she still had time. Time for what? was the obvious question, but like all the other big questions, it couldn’t be easily answered, if it could be answered at all. The author of the magazine article had stressed boldness of action in the process of becoming, so Maggie, who had been struck by the aptness of the advice for her stage in life, heard Mr. Winslow hesitate and reached for the document almost without thinking. Almost without realizing that the acronyms and slashes referred to control systems and compartments, which were divided into sub-control systems and sub-compartments as part of a security clearance system she knew about but didn’t completely understand. Almost without looking over her shoulder to make sure she was alone, but in the back of her mind picturing a letter she had received out of the blue several weeks before.

She moved some papers into the blank spot where the document had been before scurrying back to the secretarial bay, and at the end of the day she took it home with her and hid it away in the tall mahogany chest of drawers that had been handed down from her grandmother to her mother and from her mother to her, not daring to look beyond the cover with its red TOP SECRET banner for another week and a half, but now and then catching her own eye in the mirror that sat atop the old chest and seeing there — if not exactly boldness and youth, then not timidity and middle age either. She had never been timid, but maybe she was a little too predictable. Or a little too content. A little too willing to be what other people wanted her to be.

On the first Saturday in March, Lyle announced that he was going to drive Will to the tryouts for the baseball team just the way he had always driven him, but instead of quietly acquiescing, Will planted his feet on the speckled linoleum and said, “Thanks anyway, Dad, but now that I have my license, I can drive myself.”

“I’ll tag along,” said Lyle. “You know I like to watch.”

“Okay, Dad, okay. But after today, I drive myself.”

“Unless I need the truck,” said Lyle, winning a small battle in the unwinnable war of keeping Will from growing up. “Or maybe you happen to have a little money stashed away and can buy your own set of wheels.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Will, sounding just like his father as he said it. The money from his summer job had run out months before, and now that baseball season was starting up, there was no chance of working on the weekends for a little pocket cash.

Maggie listened to the sound of the tires spinning down the gravel driveway and out onto Old Oak Road before sitting down on a scrap of carpet she had hooked in what seemed like a previous lifetime. Her hands trembled as she opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and tried to understand the difference between alpha particles, which persisted in the environment upon detonation, and gamma and neutron radiation, which quickly dissipated but were extremely destructive before that point. The document, which was called Countering Misconceptions, made the point in no uncertain terms that the weapons manufactured by the company she worked for had no unintended health effects on the people who made, transported, or deployed them. They were perfectly safe. People who said otherwise were misguided or politically motivated or, in some cases, mentally ill. Here were ten talking points on the subject along with four things to do if a colleague poked his nose where it didn’t belong.