Summer, 1983

Televisions hadn’t been turned on for the night yet, and neither had porch lights. The neighborhood girls and I relaxed under the unfolding arms of the oaks
and pines that reached towards one another from opposite sides of the street.
We traded stories and jokes, listening to the sounds traveling freely between the small, tightly-packed homes—the murmur of after dinner conversation, the rhythmic beating of a box fan lazily circulating the cooling air, the soft clink of dishes being washed under an open window. After dinner on these summer nights the girls and I would mill around in the middle of the block waiting for Jerry,
Tina’s father.

Once he joined us, we would fan out on the ground so our feet pointed into the middle of a circle. Lying down with our hands behind our heads to cushion us, we made a brightly colored pinwheel of shorts and tank tops against the gray gravel. Jerry, tanned brown and tidy in his afterwork uniform of jeans and a t-shirt, smelled freshly scrubbed from his after-work shower. He would ask us about our day and laugh at our jokes until, just as the clouds turned from pink to violet, our chatter grew hushed and we all stared into the sky.

At first, the dark shapes looked like dry sheaths of leaves caught up in the wind, or sparrows darting drunk. Soon, the solitary forms would turn into threads of twenty, and then sheets of hundreds, as the bats flew out of their secret homes in the cool recesses of the Wildlife Refuge for the freedom of the night. Jerry shouted out numbers with us as we tried to count them, attempting to force order onto their flitting mass. Their ear-aching screams echoed against our bedroom windows, our mailboxes, our bikes propped against cement stoops, and other ordinary things from our daylit lives, seeping into them and claiming the objects. When we could no longer keep track of the bats we would shriek, overwhelmed, imagining that the creatures were swooping down on our circle, hard little bodies taking over our world.

Though the ritual felt much longer, the flight of the bats probably only lasted ten minutes. Slowly, as the night grew darker and the outlines of the packs of winged animals melted into the black of the sky, the streetlamps would blink on, turning our bedroom windows, mailboxes and bikes back into the things as we knew them. Finished with the dishes, our mothers would lean out of windows and doors and begin calling us home, one by one.

§

Once the Brookhaven National Laboratory was placed on the National Priorities List in 1989, the federal government took over and the testing continued, as wave after wave of diminishing house values and stigma washed over the town of Shirley. I read articles in local newspapers talking about different pollutants found at the Laboratory, and it seemed like they discovered some new leak every month, including soil and drinking water contaminated with Cesium-137, Europium-154, Plutonium-239, and Radium-226. The words used in the newspapers reminded me of the stories that ran on the Chernobyl reactor melt-down three years earlier, when radiation spread over the Ukraine and Soviet Union.

I thought of Jerry’s joke that he glowed in the dark, and I remembered images of the ghost towns left in the wake of Chernobyl, groves of trees growing fruit that no one would ever eat.