Molly McCloskey's "A Nuclear Adam and Eve"

[a work in progress]

In this short story set in the States, first-person Jane met Nina when they were about 10. They were neighbours and became close. Jane's do-gooder mother invited "sad cases" to Sunday parties. Nina sought sad cases for her but had teenage problems of her own - there was a campaign of graffiti about her - dates, lipstick colour, private nicknames - though she was never named. Jimmy saved her when the delayed effect of the graffiti hit her at university. When he (by then Nina's fiancé) was in alcohol rehab, Jane offered to be part of his supportive social network. Perhaps they got too close. Jane moved to another continent.

I like the lyrical style, the analysis of feeling, the wealth of little details, the theories about time. Here I want to focus on the frequent flash-forward hints, the way the sections aren't in time order.

• 2 pages - Mostly linear, comparing their two families when the girls were young
  • "I fell in love with Nina when she was ten and I was nine"
  • "Later, when I was old enough to think about such things, I wondered how they'd all emerged from such unpromising beginnings"
  • "she did something I still find startling ... She took my hand"
• 4 pages - More about Jane's family and her mother, about Nina joining in
  • "I realised later that something in her meant it"
  • "The Unabomber hadn't happened yet, or the anthrax scare"
  • "Later, when our high school history teacher informed us of the 'invention' of adolescence in the mid-twentieth century, we felt undermined"
  • "Nina lost her balance"
• 5 pages - Jane begins by musing about airports, then recalls visiting the rehab centre with Nina so that Nina and Jimmy could talk
  • "And then I think of Nina, in a clapboard house with a dog and a love seat under low skies thousands of miles from here and a husband"
  • "We visited him in rehab, Nina and I. Before they were married and before I moved away"
• 1 page - about Nina, boys, charm, promiscuity
  • "I see her on a blanket, this is years ago, on the golf course"
• 5 pages - a dialogue between Jane and Jimmy, then memories
  • "Jimmy doesn't talk to her much about the booze"
  • "I used to look at grown-ups when I was a kid and think ... that there was a logic to the romantic lives of adults"
  • "I wondered what it was like, hearing all those stories. I wondered was it like being a kid again. I imagined them all in a church basement, a clutch of ex-drunks sitting crosslegged on the floor, their eyes wide, their neck craned. Childish astonishmen."
  • "The night of their wedding, I drove back from the coast to my hotel"
  • "The world is larger now"
  • "The next day, at 30,000 feet, in a trust so ignorant, an ignorance so complete, it can only recall childhood"
  • "When we were young we bought Navajo dream catchers ... tell each other stories, about ourselves or things we hoped would happen ... Now, I think of everything we didn't know and the future, from the vantage point of then, appears instead an impossibly empty space"
• 3 pages - The Graffiti Wars. Mostly linear
  • "It was a kind of paradise, that day"
  • "Our time together was winding down"
• 7 pages - historal versus personal time, then 2 pages about her mother currently, then 2 pages about evolution and Ices Ages at school
  • "Before we acquired a consciousness of ourselves in historical time ... we harboured the illusion that the world had been ticking over. more or less the same, back into some formless past that stretched roughly to the invention of the automobile"
  • "In our own lives, of course, there were increments, points of demarcation on either side of which the befores and afters of our childhood resided. The man in the woods might've been the first such point. We were eleven"
  • "Years later, when they arrested Mr Heath ... he confessed ... to having been 'the man in the woods' ... My mother had moved away by then. After my father died, she went north"
  • "If we were incapable of imagining a past that didn't include us, neither did it occur to us that there was a future that didn't include us"
  • "In science class, we were confronted with a timeline on which a space the size of our thumbnails equalled 60 million years"
  • "We had our own ices ages, which arrived with an annual precision"
• 5 pages - back to the Graffiti Wars, then Jane finally tries to connect back to that first moment.
  • "In one case, there was simply a date: 3 November 1979"
  • "She left early for college, mid-July ... She cracked in October"
  • "He used to make up scenes when they were courting ... He said imagine there's been a catastrophic fallout and we're the last non-toxic humans left alive. It's all down to us, baby, we're a nuclear Adam and Eve"
  • "I see ads for lost schoolmates on my interest home page ... Nina is alive and well and living in the north-west corner of America. But when I think about her it's as though she's posthumous"
  • "One summer, when we were both home from college ... we were sitting in the dark on the docks and I was thinking about her parents, about that weird formality of theirs, which in a way I'd always liked ... a long time ago, the worlds we knew were limited to one ... I wanted her to take my hand the way she once had, to be the centre of a world I knew she wasn't any more"

We find out little about Jane. Maybe she's happily, conventionally married. It's unclear where she is while narrating these various tales. Did she have to distance herself from Nina? Was it unrequited love or a significant friendship? She shuttles forwards and backwards in time as if that set of memories is complete, the later events explaining earlier ones as much as being consequences of them. I presume the title alludes to Nina and Jimmy being the people who shaped Jane's world.