Body Toxic - Softcover

Antonetta, Susanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582432090 ISBN 13: 9781582432090

Publisher: Catapult, 2002

Synopsis

A thought-provoking and dramatic account two families who hope to start a new life in the boglands of New Jersey only to discover, much too late, that their new living environment was riddled with radiation and toxic waste.

Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry patch was near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation, and the creeks were invisibly ruined by illegally dumped toxic waste. One by one, family members found their bodies mirroring the compromised landscape of the Barrens: infertile and damaged by inexplicable growths. Soon the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for radiation.

Body Toxic is an environmental memoir--merging the personal and familial with the political and environmental, fusing fact with meditation. Intensely intimate and starkly contemporary, it is a story of bravery and resignation, of great hope and great loss. This book presents American families in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream.

About this title

About the Author

Susanne Antonetta is the pen name of Suzanne Paola, an American poet and author who is most widely known for her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. In 2001, Body Toxic was named a Notable Book by The New York Times.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Body Toxic

An Environmental MemoirBy Susanne Antonetta

Counterpoint Press

Copyright © 2002 Susanne Antonetta
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781582432090

Chapter One

First
Words

               In nineteen question-mark question-mark my silentgrandfather came to the United States.

    He left the hot chatty island of Barbados and because he existed insilence no one knows when he came. He came for shade. To drink tea-coloredliquor we poured out, that scoured the tin sink. To watch everySaturday, as he did until he died, American cartoons like Rocky &Bullwinkle. He came to father my silent mother and find an Americathat seemed less like a place than an anti-place, a not-Barbados, not-Europe,not Asia or Africa, not meals of boiled monkey and coocoo orpotatoes rotted bitter and Argus-eyed in the ground. Not this, not that.

    My grandfather succeeded because silence succeeds. It can't beargued against. It is the last word.

    My grandfather, Louis Cassill, came from an Anglophone island toan English-speaking country, where people were like radios thatcouldn't be turned off. I think he would have preferred a place thatbabbled nonsense in his ears. He sat alone and kept his pale amphibianeyes averted. He slammed the door in the faces of solicitors andJehovah's Witnesses and Latter-Day Saints. He avoided even hellosand goodbyes, first cousins of speech.

    On the other side of my family, the Antonettas, my greatgrandparentscame with no English and an Italian dialect only people from thesame group of villages could understand. They floated in the bubblesof their own thought, leaving behind tenant farming, earthquakesand cholera. They came because people in that part of Italy had beguncoming to the U.S. to work, sending money home, planning to returnto Italy, as the U.S. began pocking its face with factories and blowinginto its air the hard breath of day labor.

    My grandfather on this side put the television on when he woke upin the morning and didn't turn it off till he went to sleep. He didn'tchange channels much and when I saw him the TV always followed anatural and inevitable evolutionary path, daytime soaps to news tositcoms and talk shows. My grandfather, whose name was Rafael andwho everyone called Ralph, floated against a backdrop of daylit peopledramatically fighting and cheating and falling into each other'sarms again, and then bland, real murder and exploding Vietnamesevillages at twilight, and nervous taped bizarrely repetitive laughter atnight. Rafael called Ralph moved in front of that like a character in anold movie pretending to drive in front of a flat unrolling landscape.He only read papers like the Weekly World News and the Star and neverunderstood much about what was going on in the world.

    My aunt Philomena told me once that when my greatgrandfathercame here he'd heard of the streets paved with gold and had no idea ofthe metaphor involved; he took a boat, steerage on a steamer, andemerged from the underdecks, from the Ellis Island ferry, to stare horrified?disgruntled? unsurprised really? at the disappointing asphaltof New York. He went, an older man, to Brooklyn, where my WestIndian grandfather would soon arrive. My Cassill grandfather camewith a mother who fled debt and a bad reputation. He talked aboutthis country, when he did, as open space.

    "New Jersey was a cow pasture then" he'd say irritatedly. "Therewas nothing at Holly Park. Nothing."

    He had little feeling for nature—I never knew him to go outsidewithout a reason, like fixing the well—but he resented the arrival toany place of human beings other than himself. In spite of that he hadchildren.

    Neither man could pass up the chance to breed American children,American progeny.

(Memoranda): I am Susanne Louise Antonetta. Right about now I am about 4'11" and weigh between 85-90 lbs. I live in the United States, at 345 East Washington Street ... I have brown hair, brown eyes, and wear a size 8 shoe. (3/11/68, age 11)

    I started keeping a diary when I was eleven. Someone had given methe diary of Anne Frank, with its foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt, andthe book infected me with audience. I had always written for myself,plays and poems and stories: a weakness bred into me by my soft lifein America. Now I pictured girls propped up with my book in theirlap. Presidents' wives, bored, crusading. This audience changed myvoice. I move from entries like

    And white lipstick is a must

    to what must have seemed the closest I could come to literary English,the strained diction of my English grandmother, the woman whomarried my West Indian grandfather.

I think I shall write memoirs about life in America, and my philosophy and opinions about it. Then I will wrap it in mud or clay, and someday I shall bury it for people far in the future to find.

My aunt Philomena, my father's sister, tells a story about running upto her grandmother's apartment, on the top floor of the brownstonewhere three generations of the family lived in Brooklyn, to borrow anonion. She asked for it in English.

    "SHE-pole, SHE-pole," my greatgrandmother screamed furiously—"onion"in their dialect—and flapped her hands to indicate she didn'tunderstand my aunt, didn't speak a word of English.

    "Oh, you're a stupid old woman" my aunt said, in English, whereonmy greatgrandmother yelled downstairs in Italian that Philomena hadjust called her a stupid old woman.

    My Cassill grandfather would have done the same thing, if he couldpossibly have pretended that Barbados was a non-English-speakingisland. As it was, he had a field around him that bounced off conversation.

I've been thinking of writing a story about a girl a lot like me, one that didn't have a happy ending. I want to write reality, not myth. The ending will be sad, but it will contain philosophy. (2/13/68, age 11)

I'm making up a list of the 10 most appealing words I know. Here are some candidates: photograph, phone, cents, choice, crystal, fish (believe it or not!), love, hope, list, sweet, charm, paw, rose, beauty, breasts, and soft. (7/12/68, age 11)

    A photographed fish: crystal. A choice phone. A fish made of crystallisting with love. Beauty breasted. Hopeful.

    O rose thou are sweet, charmed, soft.

    O rose thou art pawed.

My earliest diary, from the year I turned eleven, has a cover of plasticfaux leopard skin, very 1960s. I must have had a strong sense of mywords as type, because I wrote for a while in the closest writing I couldmanage to a plain typeface like Universe—the uncoordinated eleven-year-oldversion—even slanting some words very far to the right, oneletter at a time, to indicate I wanted them to be italic.

    My leopard diary had a key. I remember it: tiny and delicate andlovely slipping the little tumblers of its lock. I kept it in a place sosecret I can't remember, and when I found the diary a quarter centurylater (stuffed in some old boxes) I had to cut the strap binding it shutwith scissors. I'd kept it locked against my parents—who would haveread it and seen no irony in punishing me for invasions of their privacy—andmy brother and my friends. Nervous of the Word. So Icarefully turned the little lock every night and hid both key and diarythough I clearly saw the diary as in some ways a public thing. I wrotefrom both angles: the fiction that I wrote for myself only

For the past few days I've been thinking of giving you a name. Maybe Cindy. Or maybe Sue, since you really are a division of myself. (4/1/68, age 11)

and a chronic parenthetical note of nudging a reader along

(In case you don't remember who "the kids in the back" are, see Jan. 7)

(If that sounds like a rather dramatic opening, I tend to be rather dramatic sometimes—I enjoy it) (1/6/68, age 11)

    It may have been the fantasy that I had a friend desperate to understandme. Or maybe I'd already learned to split myself off into the selfand the critic—the one who acts and the one who watches, giving noquarter, too indifferent even to remember.

Both sides of my family had elaborate silences, mantras of unspeech:You don't talk about it. You didn't talk about it then. Disease. Death.Wrongdoing. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could hoof usunder without our protest. My uncle Vito, an ex-prizefighter with asixth-grade education, bought an old garbage truck and arranged aroute on Long Island where garbage collection was a Mob business.

    "First comes the phone calls," my aunt remembers. This voice:`They'll find you face down in the East River.'

    "Then they started to talk about the kids. Then comes this big blackcar, parked in front of the house, just sittin there, every morning."

    My uncle sold the truck. I heard the story thirty years later, my auntPhil (my beloved aunt) susurrating in my ear. You don't talk about it,not those things. My father's uncle Manfredo with the Shylocks and theboth-somethings broken. My English grandmother with her dilly-dallying,her cabbage patches and her people no better than theyought to be who'd been born under the rose. Her husband who nevertold anyone how many siblings he'd had, where they were or how thedead had died. Barbados, which we never talked about except to say:it was British.

    Both families, asked direct questions, often respond with ludicrousinvention.

    "We're kin to the Lord Carrington of the House of Lords," mygrandmother would say.

    "I'm in with the Rackets," my uncle Tony said. "What do you want?I can get you anything you want."

You see, sometimes I get so involved in my daydreams that I have to give myself a mental slap in the face. (3/6/68, age 11)

I've been daydreaming much too much lately. I make up these stories in which I'm always the heroine. And all day long, I add to them, mentally. This is very bad. It makes me lose contact with reality, I don't know what's going on. (5/21/69, age 12)

    I know my father's family came through Ellis Island, maybe mymother's father too, though not my socially pretentious Englishgrandmother, who came in as war bride to a then-naturalized citizen.I remember my relatives talking about Ellis Island, the torpid, raw,bored officials with shirt buttons open in the heat, who sat with half-eatensandwiches and wanted you to answer their questions fast andeasy, no matter what you said. I think it set a tone: the first they saw ofthe rules and opportunities of their new home. Along with sidewalksthat could tarnish into asphalt from squares of pure value—the mutability,the alchemy, the lie of the place.

    I asked my father why our people moved here and he said, "It's theland of opportunity."

    Where it's clear that anything you don't want to say doesn't need tobe said.

To my mother and father and their mothers and fathers the wonderof this country stayed a given. An anxious thing, to live within theobject of desire. It became a national passion in the fifties: how wewere coveted from the outside. We poured money into an air defensenetwork, developing missiles and planes (secretly), arming many ofthem with nuclear weapons. Our intelligence reported a "missilegap"—Russian missiles, more missiles than we had, pointed at key targetsin the United States. No more Washington Monument, Bloomingdale's,Times Square and the ball that plummets to make each newyear. So we rushed to catch up. One promising nuclear missiledesigned by Boeing and Michigan Aerospace Research Center, calledBOMARC, looked like a well-licked paintbrush with dorsal fins. Concretebunkers flexed out of the ground in a remote part of New Jerseycalled New Egypt (in the middle of a sandy pine forest, where no onecould see) in southern Ocean County, where the BOMARCs couldstand launch-ready to intercept Soviet bombers. Secret bunkers forsecret bombs: not many people knew we put nuclear warheads onanti-aircraft missiles. Though it turned out Russia didn't have manymissiles after all. Still, the BOMARCs had been built, at a cost of $1million apiece. They were hauled in caravan to New Egypt and frozenin their attitudes of contemplation.

World War I had just guns and cannons and tear gas and mustard gas.My Cassill grandfather fought in it under two different flags and metmy grandmother when he got wounded, in the neck and in the fingers,and shipped to London, where she nursed him. She never lovedhim, she told me, or liked him (she hinted) but she loved the idea ofAmerica. Their marriage was a long affair of politesse, diplomacy andavoidance. They had four children. In 1932, when his children wereyoung, my grandfather decided to buy some land in a part of the NewJersey Pine Barrens, on the coast, and build them a cabin.

    He arrived as he tended to do on the heels of disaster. The Barrenshad always been poor, a million acres of unproductive land both boggyand sandy: a place for people hiding out. It had a brief boom, though,in the start of the twentieth century. Something about belief in thehealing powers of pinesmell and seabrine. In the twenties slappedupbuildings held balls and the Astors came, in fox fur (those rich enoughto wear eternity around their necks, uroboros, head eating tail) andtheir own beautiful rich skin. In 1926 a developer built a subdivisionof small cottages on a peduncle of coast land, a subdivision designedto be summer homes for up-and-coming New Yorkers. He named itHolly Park. In 1929 the stock market crashed and those New Yorkersceased to exist (as the developer knew them) and the property revertedto its pre-boom values of $20 or $30 a lot.

    Nearby this subdivision, a symbol of enduring poverty brushed upagainst, transformed by and then dropped from the coattails of greatness,my Cassill grandfather chose our land. When he finished jury-riggingup our cottages (there were two) my grandmother took thechildren and rewarded him by spending summers there, leaving himin the north, to make it down on weekends when he could.

    (Every morning first thing my grandmother crossed the gravelroad. As she crossed the road her spirit rose and kited out of her life.She threw off her cotton shift and the hydraulic system that was 1930swomen's underwear, and skinnydipped for a long time in BarnegatBay. Still her children weren't allowed to use the words "pregnant" or"God.")

    Separation and separation and separation.

Ocean County eats into the hourglass of New Jersey in a triangularbite, smooth on the land sides and rough on the third that fronts thewater. Down the Atlantic side runs a long peninsula, akimbo like anarm but too skinny: a humerus and radial of peninsula. This peninsulacuts off the Atlantic and forms our bay, Barnegat. Because of itsposition Island Beach holds the county's valuable property—goodsurf, sand beaches, boardwalks—though it makes up a tiny percentageof the land. Our bay tends to stagnate and grow what look likefloating molds and mildews. Rather than sand beaches we havemarshes and weeds spreading up to the water. Swimming's lacklusteras is fishing; crabbing's good. We always had the things that neededcover and barrier to grow: crabs, cranberries, blackberries, the secretpleasures. Most people in New Jersey considered the Barrens ugly,with its monotonous landscape of sparsely needled pitch and scrubpines, cattails and bogs.

    When my grandfather came to this area, Holly Park in BerkeleyTownship in south Ocean County, only a few thousand people livedthere. Island Beach hadn't been developed much. There were very fewjobs and people often lived in ways inconceivable in the rest of thestate, catching and picking their food, making charcoal and gatheringcranberries, slapping together their shelter. As my grandfather did.

The bungalows my grandfather built faced a small inlet of BarnegatBay and backed onto a large lagoon that kept the plain rooms awhinewith mosquitoes.

    My family and my aunts and uncles and cousins spent most of oursummers there. We still go, now and then. I feel that place in my ear, ina spot where it cannot be slapped.

    By the time I existed and had memory, someone had taken theunpromising curve of land along our side of the inlet and built awooden bulkhead along it, with a few piers for crabbing. A piece ofland the size of a housing lot in a subdivision tolerated the dumpingof much clayey sand and served as a beach. It had steps leading intothe water. Ostensibly this was a private beach—nearby families gave afew dollars a year and got badges my mother and my aunts fussedabout but nobody remembered to wear. An old wooden building hadbeen thrown up by the gate, where someone had the job of beachkeeper,always somebody old and sagging and bristly in a bathing suit:tensed to run my cousins and my brother and me off. We were badchildren, and flooded the beach by damming the baby pool drain withcarefully packed layers of clay and rocks.

    We loved things that soaked and flooded, or seared and burned andwizened. Firecrackers. Matchbombs. And the bleached remarkablyinfertile soil of the Barrens, like sand but close enough to clay to clumpin your hands; we could (and did) sit at the beach and construct elaboratecities. Next to our house was a field of cattails, with maybe a red-wingedblackbird or two bobbing on a tassel. Smallish and spindlyneedled pines, white cedars here and there, ash; a sparse tree line andbrackish water, so weedy it looked like a cauldron of wigs.

I've been down the shore a week now. I just love it down here. Especially the lagoon in the back. It is beautiful. The grass is long there, and its bent to the side, so that from far away it looks like velvet.

    I loved to be there, loved the greens and blues and the sense of openspace, even as it all filled me with a desire to tear apart.

There is also snake-grass, which is multi-colored green & gold. When the wind blows, it looks like gold is rippling through it. I love the snake-grass, but it makes me very sad. I remember the first time I ever went there. I was young & wearing shorts. Now the snake-grass has a very sharp tip, which will cut you if you don't wear pants. I went through a patch of snake-grass, and came out with legs covered with innumerable tiny cuts. It was almost like it was saying, "go home—you don't belong here."

    My grandfather built the larger house on concrete blocks like stilts,with a three feet high space under the house, damp and dark and stinking:mud, brine, septic system. We kids played there. It always seemedto be housing the feral: a wild cat we called Mama Cat because she hadkittens there every year, a muskrat I fed that dragged back one daywith a bullet in its gut.

I don't like the word "lagoon." It sounds like something ugly. (6/27/70, age 13)

    Lots of local people hunted muskrat for pelts and meat.

* * *

We call the houses the Big Bungalow and the Little Bungalow, orthe Little Cottage and Big Cottage. They have no heat and had nohot water until I was out of childhood, when we put hot water and ashower into the Little Bungalow. Before then we took cold showers atthe beach, along the side of the beachhouse, or sponged off from thesink. We boiled teakettles of water for dishwashing. The Little Bungalow,basically two tiny bedrooms and a toilet, has a flat roof thatalways had a wooden ladder leaning against it and made a favoriteplay area, especially at night, when you could see stars and stay slightlyabove the densest layer of mosquitoes.

    The Big Bungalow has a galley kitchen, a living room/dining roomspace: big table covered with oilcloth, a woodframe sofa with mildewywhiskeycolored cushions. Two bedrooms lie in the back, one with twosets of bunkbeds and the blue table that is possessed. In the forties orfifties my grandfather added a porch in front to provide extra sleepingspace.

    The houses stand one behind the other, painted the green of peasoup or old khaki.

Here are sounds: the thrush of wind in the cattails, the shreddingAmerican flag snapping on the beach, sounding like a solemn flagellation.There might be swings instead of empty chains on the decrepitswing set and if so, they skreek by themselves.

    Odors: two notes of bay and lagoon. Around the inlet in the half-circlethe bulkhead doesn't reach cattails grow to the ruff of washedupseaweed at the edge of the water, several feet of it knit with dead anddying fish and shellfish, moss bunkers, blueclaws, horseshoe crabs inthe old days, maybe flipped over and straining their ladders of littleclaws. The lagoon's black stagnant mosquito trenches and greasy gunmetalsoil. Marshgas, brine, dead things, too much breeding.

* * *

In 1960 (June), a tank in a BOMARC bunker caught fire, in New Egypt,fifteen miles or so from our houses. The fire fed on the TNT in themissile detonators and burned out of control and the nuclear warheaddropped into the molten mass of the rest, which flamed fornearly an hour. Radioactive particles spread over the ground and thegroundwater. Firefighters' hoses rained pools of plutonium-lacedwater. About a pound of plutonium was left there, too radioactiveto move. In 1972 the government, answering cries for protection,installed a chainlink fence to protect civilians.

    Psycho had been released that summer—my parents and aunts anduncles went to see it. The movie posters featured Janet Leigh andAlfred Hitchcock and, especially, Alfred Hitchcock's finger, pointingupward to the title, or held in a silencing gesture to his lips. Nobodywas supposed to talk about Psycho. My parents came home unable tosleep. Hitchcock had decided to make the cheapest movie he couldmake, black-and-white, no special props, and my elders came hometerrified, possessed by visions of Janet Leigh pretending to die in apuddle of chocolate syrup.

    I ask my parents if they remember the BOMARC fire and theydon't. I ask them if they remember Psycho and they do.

    "That bastard movie," says my dad, who loves to swear.

I almost never wrote diary entries at the shore—I have just three orfour, so my summer days ruffle on, blank, as if they never happened.I brought a diary with me everywhere else but sleeping in my place—thebottom lefthand bunk in the back bedroom of the Big House—Iprobably had nowhere to hide it. My cousins would have taken it, ormy brother, or my parents and uncles and aunts.

    By my twelfth year my diary changes a lot, losing the fantasy ofaudience. No print, just furious rolling littlegirl script, and no internalreferences. No Cindy, just "Dear Diary," though I included the salutationand signed my name no matter how little I had to say.

Dear Diary,
Oh God!
Susanne (5/2/69, age 12)

    No matter how moody—I feel a ful. Today has totally confirmed yesterday'slamentations. Right now I feel as if I'm leading such a happy life!—myentries still maintain that formality, always on the page under theright date, abruptly cut off if I ran out of room. I felt a responsibility.A sense of purpose. I apologized on and on for my silences, as if someonewould be hurt by the blankness of August 6, 1969. I wrote detaileddescriptions of practically nothing, grass or cattails or

a sand "city" & a reservoir system for it. It was pretty clever. First, there was a main stream of water coming down from the baby pool, which ended in a deep water hole. Against this water hole was a large dam. From this main stream of water branched three deep water holes, to drain water from the stream & keep too much pressure off the dam. Behind the dam was a deep, unfilled lake, so that if the dam broke, the water would go into it. All of the walls were high, sturdy; of mud, but the dam was the strongest of all. It had a base of driftwood, plastered with mud, and strengthened with stones & seaweed. Beyond that lay the city, with a drive-in, a department store, school,& lots of pretty little houses, all of sand. Sincerely, Susanne

    —someone chokeholding her existence, finding it improbable,vital in its parts and slipping.

When I asked my mother how long the DDT trucks had driven pastour cottages she said since she was a girl, which shows the obsessivenessof memory mingled with repetition; after a certain number oftimes seeing a thing the image reproduces in your head, wildly, likecells in a cancer. My mother was twelve in 1932 when her father builtthe cottages. DDT arrived commercially in 1942, making my motherat least twenty-two. I don't blame her usually dry and precise memory.I feel like those trucks powdered me in the womb.

    They came once a week or so, supplemented by planes: a spume, around gray meteorological event of pesticide. The trucks stoppedonly when the United States banned DDT in the seventies. A localman, an environmentalist named Willie DeCamp, remembers alamewinged robin touched down on his front steps in Mantolokingwhen the truck went by, the bird twittering, dead after.

In 1952, four years before the year at the end of which I squeezed intothe world, the Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corporation bought 1,400 acresalong Toms River, a nearby river feeding into Barnegat Bay. Ciba-Geigychose this land, marshy, scrubbily woodsy with longtailed grass,for an operations site, as distinct from its corporate headquarters inNew York. Cheap, eager labor, lots of useless land for landfill. The lowbuildings churned out commercial dyes and epoxy resins and plastics,and chemical waste byproducts. These last were disposed of in variousways: in 14,000 drums buried and stored in nonhazardous wastelandfills lined with plastic wrap; in a pipeline that a former employeesaid led from one building straight into the woods, dumping cyanidein the ground; in liquid waste pumped in an underground pipelinebuilt beneath Barnegat Bay into the Atlantic Ocean, a mile from apublic beach.

    In 1984, armed with search warrants, the New Jersey Division ofCriminal Justice raided the Ciba-Geigy plant and spent two days collectingsamples and searching.

    A long investigation concluded that Ciba-Geigy left a plume ofcontamination in the aquifer, the natural underground water systemthat provided drinking water: a poison plume a mile square and dozensof feet deep, containing ninety-five different chemicals. A migratoryplume. A strange new life like a huge amoeba. The EnvironmentalProtection Agency is trying to pump it out but estimates it will bethere another thirty to fifty years.

    Ciba-Geigy also used its pipeline to transport military waste,including nuclear waste, for a base in nearby Lakehurst. The pipelineruptured in April 1984 at the intersection of residential Bay andVaughn Avenues in Toms River, spewing out a puddle of toxins.

Continues...

Excerpted from Body Toxicby Susanne Antonetta Copyright © 2002 by Susanne Antonetta. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1582432090
• ISBN 13: 9781582432090
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256