Lise had an office all to herself at the far end of the compound. The guy next to her was also in particles and kept a carton of cookies on his desk. He was one of the last holdovers who didn’t believe in special relativity, but he was such a good ideas man that they took him from Minnesota in case something clicked out here in the heat. Lise argued with him all the time in the beginning, but eventually she just stopped by for an oatmeal raisin in the morning and waved when he went out, still busy over numbers.
I had dinner breaks then, and I would go visit once he was gone. Sometimes I kneaded her shoulders while she stared at her graphs. She had this idea that you’d be able to measure the theoretical explosion with entropy calculations. She was spending her time manipulating convergent series. When she wrote integral signs the muscles in her neck twitched.
One of the times with my hands on her shoulders, she stood up, took my hand, led me over to the extra chair, and pulled it over to her plush one. We sat parallel to each other and she leaned into me over the arm of her chair. She had her head turned away, toward the papers on her desk. The small hairs on her arm were visible from this close. Her lip quivered every few seconds, and I watched the smooth skin on her neck. I ran my fingers over her arm and let her hear my breathing get heavy. I didn’t move. I didn’t do more than that. After three minutes she stood up and said, get out, she had work to do.
I needed her to be with me. I set my watch to the point at lunchtime when she came and met me and hugged hello. I walked down different corridors trying to pass her when she didn’t know I’d be there. It was the way you can make yourself sick, and finally I was doodling abstract drawings at my drafting bench, running the .2-inch lead pen up and down in geometric and sinusoidal patterns, putting in circles for her eyes and obtuse angles for her bottom lip.
• • •
There were no Lise’s at home. Some nights I walked the empty streets for something to do, the dirt roads. In winter the snow piled so high the cars got stuck for days. Nobody ever locked their doors.
My father owned the hardware store. He said that he knew everyone in town; he knew what everyone ate for lunch. Sometimes he made sandwiches in the back room, and gave them out to the laborers or the drunks who hung around the store during the day. They talked about the Dodgers, always the Dodgers, as if they would get to heaven through them, and always the park. The park hung out there gleaming. Not in real life—not anything concrete—but the idea of it, all the promises. City Hall was eight miles away, but everyone read the newspapers. It was a college man had been picked, who won the design competition; a man from Connecticut, who loved walking in the outdoors up and over hills. That’s what the papers said. There had been mornings, years ago, when the drunks followed him around as he surveyed the area. He had a long coat, my father remembered. He put up a sign that said MARINE PARK.
My father had a little technical skill, and he ended up doing some of the drawings. We still had them, framed, in the hardware store. The architect’s name on the bottom. The paths that the speed rail lines would take, all three of them, to service the park and resort. The parking areas for 28,000 cars. Land reclamation for the Circumferential Parkway, bringing Manhattan as close to here as if we were the ones across the river. Two hundred sixty-four acres of walks. Seventeen acres of tennis courts, 9.6 of farm gardens, flower gardens, 38 planned buildings. My father drew them all. A zoo or menagerie. A stadium seating 100,000. A long canal, the big pool, larger even than the lake in Central Park, chlorinated so people could swim. A tunnel connecting the white-sand waterfront to Flatbush Avenue, where the buses would stop and the trains would have their terminus stations. The nine-mile trip from Manhattan would be part of the amusement. A bathing house, open all year for tubercular children, particularly poor ones, and on weekdays and Saturday mornings children could swim free of charge. The Connecticut man, the one morning he gave a speech, said he was bringing the Olympics here. The 1940 Olympics. This was 1933. The land was crawling with surveyors.
It all didn’t happen quickly. The money never came. The war started. We shaved our heads on the side and on the top in Marine fashion. Army recruiters came by on the roads, the only things built, meant to bring people to the park. They said, You can’t join the Navy if you’ve got both your parents. There was only three-hour overnight parking in case of invasion by sea. My father wouldn’t move the car, said he wasn’t helping Roosevelt. Nights, I watched the artillery demonstrations at Fort Tilden, the tracers coming over the Rockaway Peninsula like fireworks. For a moment they lit up the parkland, where nothing had changed. There were strange people who lived on houseboats in the canals running through the grass. They didn’t talk to anyone, and we didn’t talk to them. I was starting at Brooklyn. The teachers said that science wins war.