work. We are shift engineers at a Farm Services fertilizer plant, glamourless jobs in the chemical engineering world. When the recruiter came to campus during the last semester of my M.S., eight years ago, I was the only one who signed up for an interview, and the only woman, to boot. They didn’t look too deeply into my background. No security checks for “mud chemists.” Michael’s father and brother run a farm that’s been in the family for a hundred years, up north, and his uncle has the Farm Services coop in their town. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. From air and natural gas we make ammonia. The plant is seventeen years old, and what we do at work is check seams and tolerances and operational procedures, organize repair schedules,file reports about plant safety, and set an example of cleanliness, heed, and order for the production workers.
Ammonia is poisonous. It should never get into the air, but it does. What we chat about is how you might jell it into long, inert strips, strips that a farmer could lay like rope in his furrows, then disk under. Strips that would contain cow manure and diatomaceous earth and alfalfa flakes, a whole meal for the soil. You’d buy it by the roll, like Christmas ribbon. Or you could sell, not ammonia, but ammonia-producing bacteria. The farmer would buy it in bags and spread it over the soil in the fall. With the cover and moisture of snowfall, the bacteria would go to work, and by spring the soil would be ammoniated. What we argue about is why the production workers don’t always follow safety procedures. This argument has moved into the realm of the personal and habitual. I always point out to Michael that he has the same complaint about his ex-wife and his children—they won’t follow instructions. He says of me that relying on explanations rather than discipline (“Threats!” I say. “Just call it threats!”) allows the workers too much leeway and is my refusal to take appropriate responsibility for things. There have been no accidents in six years and we have the best record of leak detection in the state. We make a good team.
My father was an exterminator. He started out in the thirties, shooting rats with a .22. He died when I was twelve. He left my mother money enough to make it just possible for her to do nothing at all. His name was Sidney Stein. When I left New York after the bombings, I changed my name to Alexandra Day. I am still known as Sandy, though. I used to be Jewish, and now I am not. I used to be a New Yorker, and now I am a Missourian. I used to live an urban life, andnow I live in the country. I used to be a history and political science major at Barnard, and now I am a chemical engineer, and I don’t open a book from one month to the next, unless it is some kind of manual. Michael started out as a theoretical physicist. He talks a lot about beauty. I don’t see a lot of beauty around me. But I think that the world is a serviceable and solid place.
I could have told my grandfather about building bombs. His hero was Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist. For practical matters he accepted socialism, but the endless business of political meetings tormented him. He was an impatient man. When I was four, I picked all the tulips he had planted in front of his apartment in Brooklyn. I asked to have one; then, in a kind of greedy trance, I broke every crisp stem and made a bouquet. The tulips were pink and fragrant and I remember deliberately turning my back to him while I smelled them, then turning to face him. He was standing on the steps of the apartment building, and he looked down at me. He said, “You are a little capitalist, that you must have every one and leave nothing for the others?” Then he spit contemptuously into the areaway that led under the building to the trash cans. I didn’t dare throw down the flowers, though they embarrassed me now, or depreciate them in any way. Without him telling me, I knew that his trip to the flower shop,
Ammonia is poisonous. It should never get into the air, but it does. What we chat about is how you might jell it into long, inert strips, strips that a farmer could lay like rope in his furrows, then disk under. Strips that would contain cow manure and diatomaceous earth and alfalfa flakes, a whole meal for the soil. You’d buy it by the roll, like Christmas ribbon. Or you could sell, not ammonia, but ammonia-producing bacteria. The farmer would buy it in bags and spread it over the soil in the fall. With the cover and moisture of snowfall, the bacteria would go to work, and by spring the soil would be ammoniated. What we argue about is why the production workers don’t always follow safety procedures. This argument has moved into the realm of the personal and habitual. I always point out to Michael that he has the same complaint about his ex-wife and his children—they won’t follow instructions. He says of me that relying on explanations rather than discipline (“Threats!” I say. “Just call it threats!”) allows the workers too much leeway and is my refusal to take appropriate responsibility for things. There have been no accidents in six years and we have the best record of leak detection in the state. We make a good team.
My father was an exterminator. He started out in the thirties, shooting rats with a .22. He died when I was twelve. He left my mother money enough to make it just possible for her to do nothing at all. His name was Sidney Stein. When I left New York after the bombings, I changed my name to Alexandra Day. I am still known as Sandy, though. I used to be Jewish, and now I am not. I used to be a New Yorker, and now I am a Missourian. I used to live an urban life, andnow I live in the country. I used to be a history and political science major at Barnard, and now I am a chemical engineer, and I don’t open a book from one month to the next, unless it is some kind of manual. Michael started out as a theoretical physicist. He talks a lot about beauty. I don’t see a lot of beauty around me. But I think that the world is a serviceable and solid place.
I could have told my grandfather about building bombs. His hero was Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist. For practical matters he accepted socialism, but the endless business of political meetings tormented him. He was an impatient man. When I was four, I picked all the tulips he had planted in front of his apartment in Brooklyn. I asked to have one; then, in a kind of greedy trance, I broke every crisp stem and made a bouquet. The tulips were pink and fragrant and I remember deliberately turning my back to him while I smelled them, then turning to face him. He was standing on the steps of the apartment building, and he looked down at me. He said, “You are a little capitalist, that you must have every one and leave nothing for the others?” Then he spit contemptuously into the areaway that led under the building to the trash cans. I didn’t dare throw down the flowers, though they embarrassed me now, or depreciate them in any way. Without him telling me, I knew that his trip to the flower shop,
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