On the Edge in L.A. : This Year We’re Thankful for Our Health, Our Home, and the Survival Kit in Our Closet

Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared. Be prepared.

--Tom Lehrer

LAST SPRING, MY husband and I went to a meeting conducted by the Earthquake Preparedness Soci ety. The purpose of the talk was to terrify us: into believing that a major earthquake will happen here soon; into getting prepared.

Listening to the lecture made me so panicked that many of the details are a blur. I remember that the speakers, two firemen, proved historically and scientifically that a catastrophic shock was overdue. They showed us a map of Los Angeles so riddled with fault lines that it looked like the face of a 180-year-old man. They passed around pictures of houses that looked absolutely normal after they had been jolted by a shock of 8.0 magnitude and then of the same houses flattened, mere piles of sticks, after a less violent aftershock. They mentioned that one nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, happens to be built directly on a fault, and another, San Onofre, is built right next to one. They also said that UCLA science laboratories are filled with dangerous, unsecured chemicals and that if, after the quake, we see coming toward us a blue (or did they say green?) cloud, the toxic waste of a chemical fire, we should move cross-wind to the cloud.

My husband and I responded to the lecture by buying everything they were selling (not for profit, of course): four fire extinguishers; a 50-gallon vat for water; four cases of Sparkletts water in handy half-gallon amounts so that even the kids can easily carry one when we have to walk to an evacuation center; special wrenches to turn off the gas; an earthquake kit containing flashlights, dehydrated food, a good first-aid kit. We drew the line at having the windows in our home replaced with quake-proof plastic.

When the earthquake came, I was asleep. My husband says that I jerked up and said, “OH, oh, oh, it’s here, it’s here.” I have absolutely no memory of this, but I do remember that I realized very quickly that “it” was not here. This was not the big one, at least for us. We don’t live in Whittier. (In fact, one of the strangest things about living in Los Angeles is that the city is so spread out that part of it can collapse or burn, and the rest of us can go about our business as though the catastrophe were in Jakarta.) At our house in Beverlywood, not even a glass fell off a shelf. We were calm. After all, we had the comforting illusion that we were prepared.

Two days later, however, I felt different. The heat wave hit and managed to do to me what the quake had not: freak me out. It was so suffocating, so inappropriately hot for October, that I felt as though I were living at the edge of the world. My stepson and I went to the movies to escape the heat, and this escape to watch a fantasy was also an escape from my own fantasies.

We sat down in the theater and I asked for some of Adam’s M&Ms.; He poured a few into my hand and said, “Oh, you didn’t get any red ones.” It’s just as well, he added, because there’s supposed to be a poison dye in the red ones. “Red Dye 2?” I asked. “I think so,” said Adam. Afterward, on the way out of the parking lot, Adam said, “You know, the reason we have this heat is because of Chernobyl.” “Chernobyl! I don’t think so,” I said, figuring that Adam is as bad as I am at keeping the facts straight on things that terrify him. I told him that I was under the impression that Chernobyl blew east, and we are west of it.

Then we stopped at the market, where, in the meat department, a man was barbecuing snacks of what he described as “finally a beef as healthy as chicken.” I took this dubious honor to mean that they have force-fed an amazing combination of food and hormones to a poor steer so he can produce low-cholesterol meat. “What’s wrong with regular beef?” asked Adam, who for the past two days had been wearing his clothes to bed just in case the big one comes when he’s asleep. And I thought, there’s poison in his candy, radiation in his air. He goes to the supermarket and finds out that steak, which he loves, is bad for him. And the ground, literally, may disappear under his feet. I felt almost embarrassed for all the conversations I have had with his father about the insecurity that his parents’ divorce may have caused him. How depressing that, at this moment, his parents’ divorce seems like “the little one.”

Three days after Black Monday, I was watching Dr. Sonya Friedman on CNN’s “Sonya Live.” On this day, the Dow had dropped only 77.4 points--what one broadcaster described as a mere tremor after “the big one.” Friedman was interviewing James Baker, secretary of the Treasury. He was urging us to stay calm. I would have been calmer if, two weeks earlier, I had not persuaded my husband to buy stocks. Persuaded is not exactly the right word. Hounded, I think, is more accurate. I had been confident that this was the right thing to do. No trepidation--I was worried that my house might collapse, not the market.

It occurred to me, as Friedman began interviewing a psychologist on “how to deal with uncertainty,” that only one thing is certain about “the big one”: If you are looking to the left, it is coming from the right.

My stepdaughter is 15 years old. She is a human fault line, producing small, unpredictable tremors every weekend. What will it be this time, we wonder? A 3.3? A 4.4? We are peacefully having morning coffee and boom, hysteria over a boyfriend, a curfew. The house shakes a little. I open the drawer to put away her socks and find Virginia Slims. A 5.2.

We are waiting for the big one. Will it be a car accident? Drugs? Anorexia? Pregnancy? Depression? Suicide? We’re told it’s coming--by newspapers, television movies, Oprah, Donahue. They function as a teen-age preparedness society, warning us of trouble, panicking us, and then compounding the panic by being unable to say when or in what form the trouble will come. At 15, Julie’s not overdue, but she’s ripe. We might get lucky, of course; Julie might never hit us with anything greater than a little one. But you never know. The Whittier fault was thought to be inactive.

I have noticed that, since I turned 40, I spend more time worrying about my health (“more” because this was never my most relaxed area). Having reached the second half of life, I am obsessed with its finiteness. Instead of trying to live each day in some ideal get-the-most-out-of-it manner, I try to make each day guarantee me another. Since there are not many ways I can give myself the illusion of prolonging my life, I have settled on food.

Deciding what to eat has become a two-step procedure. First I think about what I want to eat. Then I think about what I should eat. Then I either eat what I should; or I eat what I want and feel guilty; or I make a deal between the two. A little good, a little bad. This last is a way of saying that I want to live a long time, but I’ll take a day less if it means I can enjoy lunch. Death feels so close that I think about it before every meal and delude myself into believing that if I choose Raisin Bran over scrambled eggs, I will live longer.

It is no more healthy to think of food as combinations of fat and poison than to eat the food. And I am absolutely sure it is not healthy to worry constantly about what I eat--perceiving the succumbing to delicious desires as a mini-suicide. But, for me, doing so is a consequence of reading New York Times health writer Jane Brody.

I always imagine that Jane Brody is a serene, unconflicted type who made a decision once to change her eating habits and never strayed from the straight and healthy. But maybe she’s just better than me at keeping the facts in order: at understanding how to increase her calcium and simultaneously lower her fat; at seeing how eating an apple (fiber) will cut her chances of getting cancer when the apple has been sprayed with pesticides.

For me, the effect of reading health columns is the same as listening to the earthquake preparedness society: panic and confusion. I am left with the overwhelming need to protect myself all the while knowing that the preparation may be in vain. Not simply because eating well and storing water will not prevent me from dying next week in a traffic accident, but because the measures I take will inevitably be inadequate to fend off the big one, whether it be cancer or an earthquake.

In this November, 1987, we are getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. To give thanks for the roof over our heads and the health of ourselves and our children. But we know that the ground under us is shaky. We live in Los Angeles. We are over 40. We own stock. We have a teen-ager who will have a driver’s license next year, and a younger son who worries that the air he breathes is radiated and his candy is poison. But we have a two-week supply of water in our closet, four fire extinguishers, two flashlights and a first-aid kit. We are prepared.