An Atomic Romance by Bobbie Ann Mason Page B

to feel a little stick, darling,” the girl said amid her procedure. Reed thought about Julia, in her lab coat. He longed to call her again but knew he shouldn’t. He had not heard from her. He knew he shouldn’t have called her.
    He made some small talk he was not sure his mother heard, and the aide finished her work, withdrawing the tourniquet with a snap and slapping a piece of cotton on the wound. Another aide arrived and replenished the plastic water pitcher. The TV was tuned to the House and Garden channel, but not loud enough for Reed to hear. In a while, his mother was asleep again. He studied the lines in her face. She had on no makeup, and age spots speckled her skin like the camouflage pattern on a quail. It did not seem possible that she could have grown so old.
    His chair fit in the meager space between the bathroom and a metal cupboard with two drawers. A drawer face was loose; the soap dispenser on the sink had lost its plastic cover. At the bottom of the drape on the window, a long string dragged the floor.
    He stared out the window. He had a wide view of the plant, several miles distant. The weather had been cool and the steam clouds were well defined. He watched the steam rising, rolling and accumulating into marshmallow clouds on the horizon. From this perspective, he could see his life tamped down by the sky, with its illusory lightness and fluff. To the far right of the cooling towers, the twin smokestacks, skyscraper tall and fishing-pole thin, were puffing a precise line of gray smoke trails—as if the Cascade were exhaling its dragon breath. He observed the necks of the construction cranes rising above their dark hole. In the foreground, gas-station signs rose on high stork legs; a brick office park occupied a large portion of the near view. The highway interchanges and access roads and ramps cluttered the view below the hospital and across the parking lot. An S.U.V. was leaving, and as it drove out the exit lane, the orange mercury-vapor lamps along the street turned off, one by one, as if the vehicle were deactivating them as it passed.
    He stood frozen at the window, his mother perhaps dying behind him, his future blowing before him like smoke rings. He tried to imagine what an astronaut would see, peering down on that patch of green earth with its gray scar, the earth still steaming from its little wound.
    H is mother had not been strict with him, as she had been with Shirley. He had spent his childhood looking for trouble, and he had found his share. Foibles. That was his mother’s term for his failings—foibles. It was a gesture of forgiveness, he thought.
    He remembered the time he went to see her just after her third husband walked out on her. When Reed arrived, buzzed on a little weed, she offered him some Old Crow, and they watched a tape of an old musical-variety show. He remembered her kick-stepping along with the June Taylor Dancers, a group from the days before aerobics classes. In the middle of her dance, the telephone rang and she answered, “Rainbow Room.” It was her nosy aunt Willoughby, who told her she had seen Danny Daly, the wayward third husband, with a woman at the mall. The woman was wearing a dog collar above her knee like a bracelet, and they were shopping for camping gear. Reed’s mother, radiant with the bourbon, spouted to Willoughby, “I guess they plan to shack up together, if you can do that in a tent.” She giggled. It struck Reed that his mother was astonishingly sexy, with a streamlined figure and bouncy, tennis-ball breasts. He could see how a man would fall for her and couldn’t see why Danny would go for a woman with a dog collar on her leg. Reed had an impulse then to make everything up to his mother, but all he could do was mumble and pull a joint from his shirt pocket. To smoke a joint with one’s mother seemed to Reed at that moment the height of sharing.
    That was years ago. Reed was still angry at the living ex—“Danny Boy,” now a retired