Three things happen in 1995

 

Three things happen in 1995. Amy is thirteen and turns fourteen in October. Zoe has been ten since March.

The first thing that happens happens on the morning of April 19. The girls are setting up a house with their dad’s old Lincoln Logs. The Lincoln Log is a kind of precursor to the Lego, just logs with a little groove at either end that lets them stay together. The set, which the girls discovered on a recent tornado warning in the hall closet at their grandparents’, is in perfect condition, almost as though it has never been used. The only problem is that the dog keeps nosing around the base they’ve made, and Zoe doesn’t want to put it outside.

Although not due home from work till lunchtime, their mother comes storming in at ten. Saying nothing, face flushed, she turns on the TV.

What remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Building looks like a body after a severed limb. Wires hang loose like snapped arteries in exposed organs, all the walls ripped off. Amy’s hand hovers over the box she was reaching into for more materials when the image appeared. Their father comes in from his study. Their mother turns to him in a flurry of savage, desperate gesticulations. Her eyes are shining.

More than six years before September 11, the Oklahoma City bombing shocks the nation and utterly cripples the girls. Fourteen adults and six children are confirmed dead by afternoon. A photograph of a fireman carrying an infant with a blood-covered head is shown and reshown on every channel, printed and reprinted in every paper. The infant dies. Zoe won’t stop crying. Amy’s stomach churns. No one has even the slightest comprehension of what has happened. They spend the evening at their grandparents’. Someone is always on the phone with the cousins in Oklahoma City or the other ones in Texas and Missouri who also need to know. No one they know has been directly affected. But somehow that doesn’t seem to matter: it might as well have happened in their backyard. For the first time ever, they all four spend the night at their grandparents’ house.

The second thing that happens is the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. For this the nation is prepared. Domino’s Pizza reports that in the hour before the verdict it receives the most orders ever in its whole history, but not a single pizza is ordered in the entire United States of America in the minutes between 12:00 and 12:05, central time.

Amy and Zoe watch the verdict at the Junior College, on a big TV screen in the middle of the Main Commons, where hundreds of students and some teachers have gathered and are sitting or standing or squatting waiting for the time. Amy and Zoe stand alone at a balcony on the second floor, outside the office where their dad is in a meeting, scanning the crowd in search of Sasha. A woman says we the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant Orenthal James Simpson not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187(a), a felony upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being, and the door behind Amy and Zoe opens up, and their dad comes out and sees he’s missed it and says let’s go, even though they haven’t found Sasha yet, and they wanted to wave to him from the balcony.

Between the Oklahoma City bombing and the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial there is a summer of hummingbirds in the Roses of Sharon at their grandparents’, of watermelons and watermelon fights into which Amy is dragged by Zoe against her better judgment, and of a perfect performance by Yekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov set to Ella Fitzgerald singing a song called The Man I Love. This performance, and this song, will serve Amy for many years as the sole definition of love. The way she awaits him as he skates towards her, the way her face lights up when he gets close. Her immaculate beauty. How she can land smoothly on a single blade every time he tosses her into the air no matter how many times she spins around or how fast she is going.

How many times would they have fallen first to get everything so perfect? Or was it always perfect? They started skating together when he was fourteen and she ten. Did they always know they were in love?

Amy is certain that someday she and Sasha will be just like that. That if there is a period of initial falling, that that is the period that they are in now. But soon they’ll get in sync together, and everything will be perfect.

But on November 20, 1995, the third thing happens. Amy finds out from their grandma, who finds out from the news and calls the house. It is so unthinkable that Amy cannot bear to think about it. To Zoe’s absolute outrage, Amy throws away all the tapes they have of figure skating. She bans the topic from all conversation and will not tolerate even the slightest allusion to anything involving sports; ice; love; happiness; or beauty. Let alone direct invocations of Sergei Grinkov, who has died at the age of twenty-eight of a heart attack, leaving Yekaterina Gordeeva inexplicably alone.

Since Oklahoma City Zoe has clung onto Amy in her sleep. Her limbs grow heavier and heavier until by the end of the year Amy flings them off her in the middle of the night and threatens to make her sleep out in the hallway on a cot made of stuffed animals.

She turns away from her sister and holds her purple octopus in her arms. She remembers the boy at the hospital with leukemia who first accused Amy of cheating and who must be dead by now. She sleeps little. She hates nightmares, especially when they’re true.