Gwendy's Button Box

19

There are big changes in Gwendy’s life during the fall and winter of 1978, most of them good ones.

She finally gets her driver’s license in late September, and a month later on her seventeenth birthday, her parents surprise her with a gently used Ford Fiesta from the dealership where her mom works. The car is bright orange and the radio only works when it wants to, but none of that matters to Gwendy. She loves this car and plasters its meager back deck with big daisy decals and a NO NUKES bumper sticker left over from the sixties.

She also gets her first real job (she’s earned money in the past babysitting and raking leaves, but she doesn’t count those), working at the drive-in snack bar three nights a week. It surprises no one that she proves especially adept at her duties and earns a promotion by her third month of employment.

She is also named captain of the varsity outdoor track team.

Gwendy still wonders about Mr. Farris and she still worries about the button box, but not nearly with the same nervous intensity as she once did. She also still locks her bedroom door and slides the box out from inside her closet and pulls the lever for a chocolate treat, but not as often as she once did. Maybe twice a week now, tops.

In fact, she’s finally relaxed to the point where she actually finds herself wondering one afternoon: Do you think you might eventually just forget about it?

But then she stumbles upon a newspaper article about the accidental release of anthrax spores at a Soviet bioweapons facility that killed hundreds of people and threatened the countryside, and she knows that she will never forget about the box and its red button and the responsibility she has taken on. Exactly what responsibility is that? She’s not sure, but thinks it might be to just keep things from, well, getting out of hand. It sounds crazy, but feels just about right.

Near the end of her junior year, in March 1979, Gwendy watches television coverage of the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. She becomes obsessed, combing over all the coverage she can find, mainly to determine how much of a danger the accident poses to surrounding communities and cities and states. The idea worries her.

She tells herself she will press the red button again if she has to and make Three Mile go away. Only Jonestown weighs heavy on her mind. Was that crazy religious fuck going to do it anyway, or did she somehow push him into it? Were the nurses going to poison those babies anyway, or did Gwendy Peterson somehow give them the extra crazy they needed to do it? What if the button box is like the monkey’s paw in that story? What if it makes things worse instead of better? What if she makes things worse?

With Jonestown, I didn’t understand. Now I do. And isn’t that why Mr. Farris trusted me with the box in the first place? To do the right thing when the time came?

When the situation at Three Mile Island is finally contained and subsequent studies prove there is no further danger, Gwendy is overjoyed—and relieved. She feels like she’s dodged a bullet.