over a woman spooning stew into her mouth, the cafeteria tray before her holding an opened can, an apple, and a carton of milk. What she took inside her that day, carried home to bed with her that night.
Today, there is no second-best for family’s civil defense. The urgent need to prepare now against the threat of atomic warfare. Or will you, like a mannequin, just sit and wait?
—“Declassified US Nuclear Test Film #33”
(Apple-2/“Cue”), 1955
When you see the explosion, even from a distance, you might be stunned into repeating inanities: Pretty pretty pretty pretty. (You see it visually but it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, just gorgeous.) The song gets caught in your head and you run through it again and again without realizing it; the song enters your life like a new reality. One quart of water per day. Food in bare rations. In the film about fallout shelters, the narrator advises you calmly to make your way to the shelter, unpack, and “take your bearings.” Someone chose actors; someone directed them. But you don’t think about that when you watch the film. Instead, you unconsciously select one person on screen to identify with, the woman with the child in her arms, taking neat steps downstairs and finding a place in the damp room, setting up the smaller cot beside her own and spreading a plaid blanket smooth.
There’s no other product that gives me as much fear and respect for the power of mass culture as the Hula-Hoop. It has a life of its own.
—Dan Roddick, director of marketing at Wham-O, 1988
The Hula-Hoop demands a lot of space. It has no place in a fallout shelter, the domain of compact games that pass time until the radioactive isotopes decay enough for a family to return to normal life. (Two weeks, says the narrator in the film.) Checkers, dominoes, or pickup sticks would all make better choices, or marbles or cards, or View-Master, “The World at Your Fingertips.” The hard-shell box is packed with reels in paper envelopes: The Grand Canyon, Beautiful Rock City Gardens, Petrified Forest, The Islands of Hawaii, Disneyland. Little Sister savors the quiet satisfaction of pulling the Yosemite reel from the Yosemite envelope. Summer vacation without the headaches, Father might say, the box of reels shelved between the powdered milk and the canned beef. Just about better than fresh.
And View-Master’s images are sharper than life, more saturated with color, Spider Rock’s crisp shadow a deep black on the desert valley, the polished spume of Old Faithful standing tall above a crowd of tourists leaning in to get a better look. Little Sister presses the viewer to her face and clicks through the shots, and when she gets up from the floor, Mother looks at her strangely; the viewer has left a mark. Time to go outside, she says. Get some fresh air.
Click, click, goes the hoop against the button of her jumper. Click, swish, go the button and the breeze. She can keep it going. The plane crash in Iowa behind her, the fallout shelter before her, but here she is, now, feet planted firmly on the ground, eyes on the horizon. Click swish, click swish, and when the hoop worries downward she kicks it back to the right place with a little jab of her hip. The drumbeat of “Peggy Sue” goes faster than her heart ever has, tacka tacka tacka tacka, like gumballs dumped onto a corrugated roof. The singer had been twenty-two, exactly twice her age. Impossibly old.
The Hula-Hoop fad begins in ’58 and peaks by ’59. I want my Hula-Hooping girl to be the same girl who pressed the View-Master to her face, the same girl who listened to records in the living room, but that’s impossible. The girl with the View-Master waits in a dark room underground; the girl with the record player lies buried inside the ruined house. But as long as the machine in the mannequin factory pours plaster into a mold, as long as a conveyor belt sends the shape through the oven to cure, as long as a worker’s there to stretch a sleeve over the arm and pull the torso upright and snap it to a pair of legs, I can have my girl, standing in a silent room full of dozens of her kind. You’d never mistake her for the real thing. Leave her in the house; make her your substitute. Send her through hell and see how she holds up.
Someday this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.
—The Searchers, 1956
One night in Vegas, I stood under the neon in Fremont Street and watched as a crowd of strangers linked arms, swayed, and sang along with the chorus This’ll be the day that I die, smiling like it was a lullaby. Then I read about the phenomenon of nostalgia for the A-bomb as a symbol of a “simpler time.” For me, these iconic images of the late 1950s—Buddy Holly’s grinning face, the exploding Cape Cod house, and the mushroom cloud—all signify the same thing, death. And they all demand that we grapple with them.
Despite all the documentation of Apple-2 and tests like it, there is something fundamentally unknowable about an atomic explosion. Physicists can explain how it happens and why. Historians can place it into the larger context of time and place. Eyewitnesses can tell the story of how it felt to watch it rise from the desert, unfold into the sky, and veer off toward the mountains. But for me, the atom bomb represents the breakdown of certainty. Here is a weapon that enacts hell in three ways: fire brighter than the sun, wind stronger than a cyclone, and fine particles that imbue the air with death. Only myth can explain it. This is the salamander that lives in the fire and eats of the fire. This is the basilisk that binds you, once you look. And this is the hammer that fractures time: the house is gone in the space of a moment, but the radioactivity of the fallout, what the house becomes, will be deadly for millennia, longer than our languages will last.
Let’s be honest. To really imagine what happened, you have to put yourself in her place. So make me the girl with the View-Master. Me with the Hula-Hoop, staring at the horizon, watching for something terrible. Me on the living-room floor, listening to the song with its bridge like baby-doll music. And on the television, light fills the screen, and thunder pours from the speakers. (Should the girls be watching this? Mother says. To which Father replies, You can’t shelter them forever.) Man, woman, and child, millions of them, exposed to these tests, whether or not they drove out into the desert to watch. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “the National Cancer Institute estimates that around 160 million people—virtually everyone living in the U.S. at that time (mid-1950s)—received some iodine dose from fallout.” All water exposed to the upper air since 1945 contains radioactive signatures. The A-bomb is in us all, its isotopes in all our blood: the tests, all 1,021 of them, live on through us.
Well, I’m either going to go to the top—or else I’m going to fall. But I think you’re going to see me in the big time.
—Buddy Holly, to concert promoter Carroll Anderson, before the show at the Surf Ballroom, February 2, 1959
How we paw over these old relics, a picture of his overnight bag stuffed with Ban, a half-used roll of adhesive tape, a Stanley hairbrush exactly like mine, all these ordinary things freighted with disaster. Twelve years after the crash, a man wrote a song about it. Thirty years after Apple-2, moviemakers repurposed its footage for The Day After’s depiction of atomic devastation. To simulate fallout, they used cornflakes, painted white. The man who flipped Ritchie Valens for a seat on the plane bought a bar and named it Tommy’s Heads Up Saloon. In the gift shop at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, you can buy a Buddy Holly Spinning Snowflake Ornament.
“This is the way we get our word out,” said the atomic veteran. “This is the way we get the word out. It’s the only way.” At the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, you can turn a thumb reel and watch a school bus burning, smoking, tipping, and being swept away, or you can turn the reel the other way, and put it all back together. In the gift shop, you can buy a T-shirt of Miss A-Bomb wearing her rictus of a grin. Or sterling silver earrings, one of Fat Man and the other of Little Boy.
Well,
