And now we’re civil, kind, and good,
And keep the laws as people should,
We wear our linen, lawn and lace
As well as folks with paler face.
And now I take, where’er we go,
This cake of I——Y SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see.
She gets a letter stamped “Personal and Urgent.” Her address is typed right on the heavyweight bond envelope, so rare with her mail anymore. The return address is also typed: the Cancer Research Institute. Her first, frightened thought is that they want her to go to Houston or New York or Bethesda, some monstrous facility for special treatment.
But it couldn’t be that, she thinks; it can’t. Her doctors here would have told her about any plans on her behalf. Then she realizes: it must be this lawsuit.
The news has started to spread. The big, national groups must be trying to make a test case of it, for some reason. Don has sent them her address. They must be trying to get all the local cancer cases to turn out in support. To do their bit for the collective health.
She opens the envelope, her fingers shaking. Already, she is writing the apologetic response letter in her head. She’s not the woman they’re looking for. They need someone else, someone who knows what’s what, who understands what’s going on. Someone who can speak well. Someone who can say what everybody in this town is feeling.
Dear Mrs. Bodey, she reads.
She plunges into the first paragraph. But right away, she has to turn around for a second read. Please send $25. Or anything you can afford.
It doesn’t make sense. Solicitation letter. Why would they single out cancer patients? What kind of fund-raising drive is this, where they pass the hat not for the victims but to them?
It takes her a minute. A full, real minute, a pretty considerable unit of time these days. She’s not being singled out. It’s the same old list. The master database. The mass mailing to everybody.
She flips back to the envelope, the typewritten return address. A trick to make this piece seem like real mail. Hide all the tracks. Get the thing opened at least. Keep it from being pitched in the trash sight unseen. Maybe a letter that looks like first-class mail increases the chances of a contribution by another one percent. And one percent, on the scale things get done now, must come to millions.
A whole new art form: the protectively disguised bulk envelope. Like that one she got last week, a torn magazine page, pinned with her exact color Post-It note. “Hey, Laura! Check this out! Susan.” And she spent all afternoon tossing on the sofa, trying to reassure herself that she’d never had a friend named Susan in her life. Convinced that the cancer, the chemo, the rays were getting to her memory.
Avoid meat and fat. Don’t smoke or drink. Limit the time you spend in the sun. Don’t expose yourself to toxic chemicals at home or at work. Do not indulge in multiple sexual partners. And send twenty-five dollars.
Well, she’s had sex with three men in her life, and one had trouble with intercourse. Sure, she drank a lot in college, with the girls. But these days, she could probably have had half a dozen more glasses of red wine a week and still come in under the guidelines. She smoked for maybe three years, now and then after dinner, just to be sociable. But, ludicrous or no, she never really inhaled. Her diet’s not perfect, but because of the kids, she’s always been more careful than anyone else she knows.
Don’t expose yourself to toxic chemicals at home or at work. There’s the catch. They might as well say: Don’t get cancer. Well, she hasn’t exposed herself. She hasn’t, knowingly or otherwise, as far as she knows. She hasn’t even been exposed. No Love Canal under the house. No Three Mile Island just across the river. Whatever she’s getting by chance or proximity is no more than anyone else in the known world is getting.
She looks over the simple list of do’s and don’ts, counting in her head all the things she’s done wrong in her life. All the little carcinogenic amenities, the dangers she’s known but risked anyway, because the odds seemed so small or so hard to work around. From hair spray to charred barbecued burgers. The paints and paint strippers. The hair color treatments, so crucial to her self-image. The maraschino cherries she used to reward herself with, for being so good. All the diet sodas, which she loved, because they made her feel that she could drink as much as she liked while burning more calories consuming them than she was consuming.
She sends Ellen to the library, and tells her to ask for Marian. Ellen comes home with a book called Shopping for Safety. Laura reads it in tiny increments, in those moments when her head is clear and her eyes can focus. As far as she can make out, nothing is safe. We are all surrounded. Cucumber and squash and baked potato. Fish, that great health food she’s been stuffing down the kids for years. Garden sprays. Cooking oils. Cat litter. Dandruff shampoo. Art supplies. Varnish. Deodorant. Moisturizers. Concealers. Water. Air. The whole planet, a superfund site. Life causes cancer.
Lying awake at nights, afraid to take even those universally prescribed milligrams to help her sleep, she thinks about going clean. Cold turkey. Here is all the checklist anyone needs. With it, she could learn to buy only those goods that are above reproof. How hard could it be, to change a few habits? No beef, no chemical toothpastes, the right brands of polish . . . Nothing she would miss. Buy her way back to health, by choosing the recommended items.
The brief fanatical fantasy dissolves on her like pixie dust. She’d need a lot more health than she has to pull it off. And every plastic bottle of water she bought would just spew poisons somewhere else.
Another letter arrives to take her mind off the first. This one’s not really to her, either. It’s an open letter, a larger database. It takes up a quarter page in the Sunday Post-Chronicle. In the Public Notices column of the Classifieds. To anyone living in the area bounded by Base Line, Kickapoo, McKinley, and Airport Road—pretty much all Lacewood and Kaskaskia Heights, and most of the little farm towns and tax-evading subdivisions that hug them.
If you are suffering from any ailment that you or your physicians believe might have an environmental basis. If you have an interest in the current class action suit being lodged against the area’s largest manufacturer. If you would like to be considered for inclusion in this suit. Please respond to the following post office box no later than March 21.
It has the look of some paid advertorial. Serious text in a black box, the kind that Laura sometimes mistakes for public service announcements. Mass tort, punitive damages: the kind of products that her edition of Shopping for Safety fails to rate for danger. It’s the law firms’ best product anymore, so of course they’re going to hawk it. One efficient and profitable institution against another, both competing within the rules of the game that have made everyone rich.
She clips the open letter. She puts it up on the fridge so she won’t forget the due date. After two days, she gets sick of looking at it. She moves it to the ceramic letter holder on the hutch, wedges it in next to her quarterly payment vouchers. But she’s afraid she might forget about it there. She puts it on the dining room table, where no one has eaten for months. It keeps blowing off each time the kids walk past, so she weights it down with the money cowry shell that Ken gave her when she broke into the Million Dollar Movers Club.
Don comes over to clean the flue, fix the stuck window casement, and do a couple other things the kids can’t manage. “How are you doing?”
“How do I look?”
“Better than I expected. You see the notice in the paper, by the way?”
She gestures at the table, where the thing still nags at her, unanswered.
“You going to do it?”
“Do . . . ?”
“Come on. Get in on the claim?”
“Don. It’s hard for me, hard to think of this . . .” Her hands cup inward and sweep back over herself, her wasted torso. “As a claim.”
“I’m sorry. Bad choice of words.”
But
he can’t leave it alone. And she doesn’t really expect him to.
“Does it have any interest for you? There’s not a lot of time . . . I mean, March will be here faster than we know.”
He never meant anything but well, maddeningly well. “What would you do, Don? I mean, God forbid, if you were me?”
“No question,” he says. “Absolutely no question.”
But she has lots of questions. “It’s just not something . . . cancer’s not something that I really want to profit from.”
She sees him fighting down the agitation. “It’s not a question of profiting, Lo. Do you want to just stand aside and let them profit, while everybody else picks up the tab?”
She wants to say: Whose tab? Who ordered this meal? Who chose this life? Who invented these rules? Instead, she says, “Well, I doubt that my joining or not joining will have any bearing on the outcome at all.”
“You don’t know that. The numbers may help things. There may be something about your particular—”
“Don. My doctors won’t even guess why I got this.”
“You’re part of a cluster.”
“Ovarian cancer doesn’t cluster, apparently.”
“Oh, there’s a cluster here. Believe it. Haven’t you seen the statistics the paper’s been digging up? We’re way above average, for all kinds of cancers.”
She wants to say: The whole country is way above average. She says, “The old Rowen marksmanship.” For years, he compared the way her family argued to a kid who scatters buckshot against the barn wall, then draws a bull’s-eye around the densest concentration of hits.
He grins at her, clearly irritated. “I just think you deserve some answer. Somebody owning up. Some compensation.”
There can be no compensation. No owning up, no answering to something as common as she has.
“They can’t possibly make a case,” she says. “Think of what they’d have to show. That there are carcinogens somewhere loose—”
“There are.”
“—in a concentration that could cause people to get cancer. That Clare put them there.”
“Piece of cake,” Don says.
“That the victims were in contact with it. That they got their cancer because of the stuff they touched that the factories put there. That they wouldn’t have gotten cancer if—”
“I don’t know, Laura. If it’s as tough to win the case as you think, then why are perfectly shrewd law firms sinking so much money into it? It must have cost them half a million just to get it this far.”
“I don’t know.” And she doesn’t. “Publicity? Maybe they think that the company will settle rather than go through the hassle of defending?”
“If the company settles, for whatever reason, you will kick yourself for not getting what’s due you.”
She is due nothing. No more than anyone else with a body. No more than anyone who will get sick, which is everyone. As bad as she has it, millions will have it worse. She is on her own. She has always been on her own. Everyone who lives here is on her own. And anyone who promises otherwise is selling a bill of goods.
He putters about a little longer, shimming up the washing machine, which has begun to dance across the basement floor. He tries to fix the broken 5-CD changer, getting angrier and angrier, while she tries to tell him that it’s okay. She can listen to only one disc at a time anyway.
Before he leaves, he comes back to her chair-side. “It’s not just you,” he confides. “You have to think of the kids.”
“The kids?”
“If there’s any kind of settlement. Anything at all . . .”
“Oh.” She hears what he is saying. “Oh.” For the first time in the argument, she falters. His words set off her worst fear, her primal hope. He knows the nerve, the one that life has hinged on since she turned adult. The one contest that justifies any aggression, any tactic, any fight. She would steal for them. She would push any other kid out of the lifeboat. There’s nothing she wouldn’t give them. Except what gave her this.
She moves her mouth twice before the words come out. “Sometimes I wonder if those two don’t already have more than they know what to do with.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Laura. Listen to me. Don’t you think you have a stake in any of this? Don’t you even want to know?”
She looks at the man. His earnest, irrelevant soul must be forgiven everything. She cannot remember now what she ever held against him. Nor can she remember why it mattered so much, or how they ever thought they might raise a family together.
She does remember trailing him for months, collecting the evidence even while he denied everything. She remembers pressing for divorce, not because he had had an affair and lied about it, but because he took the pitiful creature to such grimy places. Because he did the thing in such a discount way.
She looks at him and smiles. At least it feels like a smile, from inside her face’s withered sheet of muscle. “A court is not going to tell me what I need to know.”
“That’s not true,” he hurries out. “A court’s the only place that could tell you . . .”
She reaches out, rubs her tired arm on his. The hush, the interrupt of human touch. “Don. Don. What difference does it make now?”
A flat, narrow, rufous-colored box bears the sober Courier caption Certifast. Along one edge, the hint of an anxious female profile holds a test strip up to the light. $19.95
The name Engender flows across an ampler coral-colored carton in Corsiva italic. Upon the pastel, country-craft highlights, a rapturous couple cuddles their newborn. $29.95
The fine print on both reads:
A first trimester colorimetry home pregnancy test. This exam may produce up to 12 percent false positives and 10 percent false negatives. Consult your doctor for professional confirmation.
CLARE DRUG AND PHARMACEUTICAL
In the first year after reorganization, sales reached ten million dollars. The members of the new managerial class now threw themselves against the problem of unused capital, the most pernicious cost confronting any life, let alone the corporate one. In the fiercely awakened markets of the twentieth century, inefficiency could end only in death. Every ingenuity that the human spirit could throw against it, every strategy of rational management had to be enlisted in the fray.
Competition within the firm, between the different teams and departments, began to produce the same benefits that winnowing produced in the market at large. Clare got out of old lines in time, and into new ones even before it needed to. Whatever was too wasteful to survive did not, and good ideas spread like a plains fire in August. With the right corporate structure, decisions practically handled themselves.
Prosperity no longer meant inevitable subsequent shutdowns. When the water rose in the harbor, all the boats indeed went up. Yet when the snow came down the mountain, those at the foot still got buried.
“If we can continue to produce high-quality merchandise,” hoary-headed Douglas urged the firm’s cohorts in his annual Profit Picnic address,
the public will continue to buy, and it will keep right on buying. And we who have joined together for this purpose will continue to enjoy the fruits of our efforts . . .
But as you all well know, we can’t spend the profits until we earn them. And every one of you here is sharp enough to see that we have to hold back a certain portion of the gains. We have to plow them back into improved equipment, better distribution, and more jobs. That way, we can distribute even more gains tomorrow.
In truth, neither William Clare nor anyone in Finance could say just how much his profit-sharing scheme actually contributed to the steady gains in efficiency and the drops in production costs. Modern machinery and power, coupled with the highly cost-effective reorganization, might have made it unnecessary to pay out any more to labor than it had at the end of the last century.
Then again, workers stayed employed longer, and retraining costs fell dramatically. And when strikes broke out in Fall River, when the Mine Workers came above gro
und, when the IWW and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union took shape, when the Supreme Court turned the Sherman Act against organized labor, Clare’s factories stayed remarkably quiet. Even the renewed agitation inside the plants for an eight-hour day was met with hostility among those who wanted to keep their bonus dividends flowing.
For the first time since its earliest boilings, the company found an answer to the chronic problem of overproduction. Peaks and crashes in the demand could be met by easing out the throttle of direct sales and boosting the budget for advertising. Douglas toyed with fine-tuning the whole system, as if he were a backyard mechanic timing the firings of a primitive internal combustion engine. And for a while, his tuning attained the unthinkable Olympus of American business: guaranteed full employment without layoff, overtime, or any other whiplash.
The board voted two new public share offerings, one to fund a new seed-crushing mill in Georgia and another to build an expanded Kansas oil-making plant that began milking a new hydrogenation patent. Both lots of stock sold out quickly. The issues continued to trade actively on the New York Stock Exchange, for whom the company had opened its books in 1902. Dividends rose and remained rock solid. The public proved as eager for Clare shares as it had always been for Clare soap.
The name Clare now stood for valued things. People needed the goods Clare made. Any number of competing groups had gotten together for the shared purpose of meeting those needs, groups that sought ways to make those goods with incalculable industry. These groups would have picked up the slack in no time at all if Clare ever failed to meet its share of the public demand.
A national Pure Food and Drug Act came into existence in those years. For a long time, the law had trouble discerning between the desire to mislead and the desire to be misled. But it did hunt down products claiming secret, curative ingredients. In 1913, the amended law finally shut down the last production run of Native Balm tonics and soap. Government lawyers discovered there was nothing Indian about the extract, and nothing medicinal either. Douglas pulled the plug with deep regret, and the original magic name disappeared from circulation.
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