In an excerpt from Welcome to Shirley – a memoir from an atomic town, published by PublicAffairs books in April 2008, author Kelly McMasters recounts a magical and disquieting childhood in working-class Shirley, Long Island, New York, just miles from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a site for government nuclear research.

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 While I was growing up, the Brookhaven National Laboratory was a fixture of my imagination, as it was for the other kids in the neighborhood. Much like the proverbial monster in the basement, the lab obsessed us precisely because it was so close, and yet we had no access—we couldn’t see the buildings or the scientists who populated them. The majority of the scientists lived on the north shore, or west of the laboratory—not in Shirley. The neighborhood fathers, like Jerry and Andrew, who spent their days there refused to talk much about what their jobs actually entailed, or what kind of work went on at the lab. Years later, I realized that this was not the result of some secrecy pledge they swore to on their first day of work but more likely because they didn’t actually know what was going on in those clandestine reactor buildings any more than we did. They were support staff, not scientists. Andrew had gone to pharmacy school and worked in the computer support department, whereas Jerry, like most of our parents, had never gone to college at all and probably didn’t remember the mechanics of fission from his high school physics lessons.

Lacking any real knowledge, we created our own version of the Brookhaven Laboratory. In my mind, the lab’s buildings were made of a transparent igloo-like substance, and the rooms inside were full of metallic file cabinets, clinking glass test tubes, and notebooks full of secret codes. Men and women in crisp white lab coats and plastic goggles coaxed new species of frogs and lizards out of mottled purple eggs. Others hovered over milky glass globes of light, whose kinked antennae sparked blue shots of electricity into the dim, silent air. And the lab-coated scientists ate crayon-colored pills for lunch that tasted like chicken cutlets and chocolate cake. After Jerry’s cancer, my imaginary lab became a much darker place, a small, sinister pocket hiding in the pines.

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Jackie and my father took turns driving Jerry to chemotherapy. They would help him to the car, a young man turned old, his gait unrecognizable. His favorite shirt—red, with a bubblegum machine on the chest—swallowed his frame, billowing out like a sail on a boat. Hours later, the car would pull back into the driveway. We would stop our games on the street corner and watch as my father draped Jerry’s arm over his shoulder and guided him up the steps of the deck Jerry had built with his own hands, into the cool darkness of his home. My father is not a big man—the muscles in his arms and legs are long instead of bulky, and he has the shape of a runner rather than a bodybuilder—but he made Jerry look like a child on those afternoons.

I don’t remember what we talked about when Tina, Jenny, and I sat quietly in their living room, playing there instead of in the basement or Tina’s room. Jerry would fall asleep, or chew ice cubes, or try to join in on a game. The winter was cold and quiet; no one ever banged the screen door at Jerry’s house or rang the doorbell after dinner. As spring light started to peek through the blinds of the living room, however, there was a hopeful turn; the tumors in his brain were shrinking.

The neighborhood seemed to exhale in unison. We screamed louder during our games of softball on the corner, laughed more easily. My father was relieved, hopeful that his friend’s suffering would be over soon. My mother was more wary.

“He still has a long way to go,” she cautioned. But my father and I just figured we knew Jerry better than she did.

Everyone in the neighborhood wanted to believe that he was almost through. The women kept cooking, taking turns every week dropping off food or plates of cookies to help take some pressure off Jackie. Everyone looked forward to the time when Jerry would be back on his feet, and with summer and the Fourth of July getting closer, there seemed to be an unspoken deadline for his recovery.

But the day Jackie and Jerry returned from what was supposed to be an appointment to discuss the next steps of his recovery, my parents sensed something was not right as soon as the car pulled into the driveway across the street.

Over coffee in their kitchen later that day, Jackie explained that the doctor had deceived them. They had sat in their chairs, across from the oncologist, and heard him begin talking about the next round of treatment. When they said they didn’t understand, that they thought Jerry was cured, the doctor clarified.

“I’m not talking about the tumors in your brain,” he said. “I am talking about the tumors in your lungs.”

The brain cancer was in remission but had metastasized into his lungs through a complicated rope-ladder of knotty lymph nodes. There were tumors along the ridges of his spine. It is unclear whether the doctor knew about these other tumors before Jerry started his first round of chemotherapy for the cancer in his brain and kept the news secret in case his patient might not choose treatment if he knew the extent of his illness, or whether they simply never checked for more tumors. Jerry only found out about the other cancer the day he thought he was cured. Jerry’s house was quiet for a time after that appointment.

I didn’t go over to visit, and Tina and her sister stayed inside. My father still made his daily trips across the street, and I eavesdropped from the hallway on his late-night conversations with my mother at the dinner table. Since Jerry had left his job at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, his benefits were basic at best. And with Jerry too sick to work any of his construction jobs for months now, the family had hardly any money to pay the hospital bills. The thought of more bills for an endless course of chemotherapy was daunting.

The next day in school, I asked my fourth-grade homeroom teacher if I could speak with him after class. I explained that my best friend Jerry had cancer, and that his family was having difficulty paying the hospital bills. I asked for permission to collect some money in class for him, and the teacher said if I brought in a jar and talked to the class about my friend that it would be fine.

I found an old coffee can in the garage that night and pasted a piece of loose-leaf paper I had decorated with drawings of Jerry and me across its rippled side. The next day in class, as my teacher promised, I talked for a few minutes about my friend Jerry and passed the coffee can around. We had about two dozen kids in class, and they filled the can with their loose change and weathered dollar bills. I left the can on my teacher’s desk for a week, and then I took the coffee can home and handed it over to my parents, proud of my contribution. They helped me roll the coins after dinner and promised to give the money to Jerry.

The next day, my teacher called me up to his desk. He told me that he had spoken with my mother, who explained that my best friend with cancer was a forty-two-year-old man, not a child like me. And while he understood how difficult this was for me, I couldn’t ask for any more money from the class.

Jerry and his family decided to continue treatment at all costs. As he grew sicker and the drugs that the doctors gave him to ease his pain became less and less effective, my father focused on alternative therapies. The men spent hours working on meditation and visualization. They breathed in unison, deep breaths in and out, counting backward and forward, imagining a cloud of relaxation moving up their bodies from their feet to their skulls. My father took books and tapes out of the library, learning how to lead Jerry to an imagined beach or field of flowers. His dream house sat unfinished and already overgrown around the corner as my father coaxed Jerry deeper and deeper into various types of trances.

A few times, in the middle of their sessions, Jerry talked about how he thought he got cancer. He had smoked, of  course. But he was so young, and in these quiet moments, he confessed to my father that he suspected it was the work he did at the laboratory that had made him sick. He handled waste materials and had worried about some of the situations he had put himself in. He may have been the last one on the block to verbalize this idea—from what I could tell, the rest of the neighborhood already assumed the same. Everyone knew that Jerry’s favorite joke was that he could glow in the dark. No one made that joke any more.

Posted on May 27, 2008 at 10:00 AM
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