Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“If you get through, what will you request?” Jenny said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I didn’t need to ask her what she would choose. Her favorite song was “867-5309,” since it was about “Jenny.”

There were girls at school who knew which bands were cool, who knew all the lyrics to the right songs, but I was always out of sync. On more than one occasion, I’d made the mistake of nodding knowingly at the mention of a band only to be humiliated when grilled about its discography. If you weren’t careful, you could be tricked. “You like U2? What do you think of November ?” a classmate named Lisa said to me. “It’s okay,” I said diplomatically. “There is no November !” she said. “Just October. And Boy. ” Jenny was almost as clueless about music as I was, but she listened to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 and took notes.

Jenny’s room was in a turret, so one wall was round, like a gazebo, with large windows that faced my house. I liked the shape of her bedroom—it usually made me feel like I was in a castle—but in dreary weather the fishbowl shape added to the sense that we were trapped. And because the room jutted farther out than the rest of the house, we seemed especially vulnerable to the storm. Every gust of autumn wind sounded dangerously close. The rain was furious on the windowpanes.

Jenny was on the bottom bunk, flipping through the yearbook from the previous school year. Each graduating student got a whole page of the yearbook and got to choose who was on the page opposite her. We were connoisseurs of those senior pages; in them we hoped to find clues about how to navigate preppy culture. We studied the photos of girls bracketed by friends, smiles perfected by orthodontics, and memorized their senior quotes. I still remember the page of a Caroline Winslow Corcoran, class of 1982. She was pictured with her black Lab and quoted David Bowie (“Time may change me / But I can’t trace time”) and Eleanor Roosevelt (“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”)

Jenny was already thinking about our pages. “If I have a boyfriend then,” she said, “I won’t put a picture of us together, because what if we break up by the time the yearbooks come out?” Seniors had to turn in their pages in September, but the yearbook was published in June.

“We won’t be seniors for seven years,” I said. I wasn’t sure we’d still be alive then. I sat on her plush pink carpet, scribbling.

“ What are you writing ?” Jenny wanted to know.

“A letter.”

“To your dad? ” In those days I often wrote to my father. He rarely wrote back. He had recently remarried. His new wife, Phillipa, was a barrister and an equestrienne.

“To Yuri Andropov,” I said.

“ Who? ”

“The new head of the USSR.” Brezhnev had recently died, and my mother was already worried about his successor. Andropov used to run the KGB; his shadowy past made him seem especially sinister.

“ Why? ”

“I want to know if he’s going to start a nuclear war.”

My mother subscribed to Time and Newsweek, to the New Yorker and the New Republic. But also to Mother Jones, and the September/October issue was devoted to disarmament. When it arrived that fall, I was the one who picked it up from the floor where it landed under the mail slot. THE RACE AGAINST DEATH, screamed the cover. And below those ominous words, four faces in four separate photos, arranged like the frames in the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch. But these were not smiling faces. In fact, when I looked closer, I could see that the faces in the bottom panes were not faces at all but masks. A bloodred skeleton on the left, with an expression so infernal it seemed possessed, and on the right a Picassoesque profile painted on papier-mâché. It reminded me of a KKK hood. The top two images were equally frightening: a wounded woman (or was it a man?) whose head was wrapped in a bloody bandage and whose expressionless gaze made me wonder if she’d rather be alive or dead. And on the left, a face stiff with white pancake makeup, the hair covered by a shroud. I didn’t know the context of these gruesome photographs. But the faces had been haunting me. For the last two months, it was those faces and that horrible headline, THE RACE AGAINST DEATH, that had dominated my dreams. It was more terrifying than any horror flick. I had to do something.

“ Can Andropov read English ?” said Jenny . This was an astute question. I’ll admit I hadn’t considered it before.

“ I’m sure he has people to translate stuff.”

“ Even if he is going to bomb us, do you think he’s going to admit that to you ? My dad says they have way more nukes than we do.”

“That’s true. They do,” I said. What I didn’t say was that it didn’t really matter who had more nukes. Thanks to the space-based detection technology developed in the 1970s, the United States would know about a Soviet strike as soon as the missiles launched and would immediately retaliate. If there were a launch on warning, we would destroy each other simultaneously.

I didn’t expect Andropov to reply. But I wanted him to know that regular Americans—people like my mother and me—were scared. If he listened only to Reagan, he might think of us as enemies, but if he heard from regular citizens, he might understand how many innocent lives were at stake. That was my mother’s logic. She’d been writing letters to American members of Congress for years. I don’t know exactly what I said to Jenny—probably something I parroted from the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign rally in New York that my mother had dragged me to in June. Nearly a million people had descended on Central Park to hear Helen Caldicott preach about civic responsibility. Bruce Springsteen sang also, but my mother and I were too far away from the stage to see him. Whatever I said to Jenny was persuasive, because she announced that she was going to write a letter to Andropov too. She sat at her desk and flourished a purple pen with a pom-pom on top.

“‘Dear Mr. Andropov,’” she said as she bent over to write in her notebook. “How do you spell ‘Andropov’?”

I told her.

“Thank God this pen has erasable ink.” She fixed her mistake. Then she said, “This is like writing to the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Except he’s in the East.”

“He can’t be as bad as he seems.”

“I hope not.”

“‘Dear Mr. Andropov,’” she repeated. “‘My name is Jennifer Jones. I am ten years old.’”

How long did it take her to write the letter that made history? I’d say she worked on it for twenty minutes. I knew she was concentrating hard, because she was sucking on a strand of hair, the way she did during math tests, her saliva releasing the unmistakable scent of Prell. And then in a burst of energy, as if breaking through a finish line, she said, “I’m done! Are you?”

“It’s not a race,” I said.

We sealed our letters in envelopes we took from her father’s rolltop desk.

“What are you girls up to?” he said when he found us in his office. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here without permission.”

Sometimes Mr. Jones spoke a little too loudly, as though addressing a courtroom. If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed he was a litigator. Most people we knew in Washington were lawyers, though there were also cabinet members and senators among the parents at our school. I didn’t know exactly what Mr. Jones did every day—his work was as nebulous to me as that of every other adult. I assumed that every office was like my dad’s old one at the IMF, where the occupants’ names hung on placards outside their office doors, where the copy machines were segregated in a room down the hall, where page-a-day Far Side calendars were exhibited on desks as proof that long hours spent restructuring loans for developing countries couldn’t dilute the employees’ sense of humor.