My Year of Meats (16 page)

Once the link between DES and human cancer was established, other effects were discovered as well. In addition to the cancer, DES-EXPOSED daughters were suffering from irregular menstrual cycles, difficult pregnancies, and structural mutations of the vagina, uterus, and cervix. DES sons developed congenital malformations including un-descended and atrophied testicles, abnormally undersize penises, defective sperm production, and low sperm count, all of which increased the risk of testicular cancer and infertility.

Of course, there was an immediate outcry to ban DES in cattle feed. But cheap meat is an inalienable right in the U.S.A., an integral component of the American dream, and the beef producers looked to cheap DES to provide it. So it took almost a decade of bitter political struggle to ban the drug, overcoming tremendous opposition launched by the drug companies and the meat industry, who argued that the doses of DES given to cattle were minuscule and harmless to humans and that the residues in the meat were far below the levels of danger. Finally, in 1979, the government banned DES for use in livestock production.

In 1980, however, half a million cattle from one hundred fifty-six feedlots in eighteen states were found with illegal DES implants. Three hundred eighteen cattlemen had decided that since they didn’t agree with the ban, they would simply ignore it. Frontier justice. You take the law into your own hands. They were given a reprimand. None were prosecuted.

Today, although DES is illegal, 95 percent of feedlot cattle in the U.S. still receive some form of growth-promoting hormone or pharmaceutical in feed supplements. The residues are present in the finished cuts of beef sold in the local supermarket or hanging off your plate.

In 1989, Europe banned the import of U.S. meat because of the use of hormones in production. BEEF-EX started looking for a new market.

In 1990, as a result of pressure by the U.S. government, the New Beef Agreement was signed with Japan, relaxing import quotas and increasing the American share of Japan’s red-meat market.

In 1991, we started production on
My American Wife!

This was my first glimpse of the larger picture. Of course, I didn’t put these pieces together all at once. I started reading about the meat industry, and little by little, over the course of the next few months, the chronology sort of dawned on me. Please keep this in mind.

Miss Helen stood in front of the church, shaking her head and saying the same thing over and over to her friends and the members of the congregation.

“Yes, today was supposed to be the day, but now she says she ain’t comin’ after all....”

Mr. Purcell added, “And after Miss Helen went and got the fixings all bought and set.”

And the friends and members of the congregation were saying, “It’s too bad, it surely is” and “It’s a pity for the children to get so excited” and “She didn’t give you no reason?”

And Miss Helen just kept shaking her head from side to side, saying, “I guess we just weren’t the right sort” and “What would all them people in Japan be interested in us for, anyway?”

Then Mr. Purcell tried to make things better with laughter by saying, “Well now, Miss Helen, maybe you shoulda just slowed down that pitch of yours a little and let that producer man get a few more hits, now.”

And the Preacher agreed and said, “Sure enough that pitch of yours could scare off anyone!”

And everyone laughed except Miss Helen, who just stood there saying, “It’s a pity, it surely is a pity,” and shaking her head, like she’d expected it to go wrong from the very beginning.

“Authenticity—two! You only gave it a two for Authenticity?” John put down Akiko’s questionnaire for the Becky Thayer Show and stared at her. “What were you thinking? What did you think was wrong with it?”

Akiko shook her head. “There wasn’t anything
wrong
....”

“Then why did you only give it a two?”

“I ... I don’t know. I gave it an eight for Wholesomeness, though. See? And a nine for Deliciousness of Meats ...”

“Now, what’s the point of Wholesomeness if it’s not Authentic? A two for Authenticity undermines a high mark for Wholesomeness. Why did you only give it a two? You must have had a reason.”

“Because ... I didn’t believe it.”

John slammed his hand down on the
kotatsu
and Akiko flinched.

“How could you not believe it?” he shouted. “It’s the truth. It’s a documentary program, isn’t it? What is there not to believe?”

“I don’t know,” Akiko whispered. She made a grab for the paper. “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll change it.”

John snatched it back. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is a questionnaire. You can’t just change your answers because something I say makes you change your mind. These are supposed to be your honest impressions of the show.”

He scowled at the paper again. “Okay. Now what, precisely, did you find hard to believe? Please,
try
to be specific if you can.”

Akiko hated these sessions. No matter what answers she put down, John always got angry and told her they were wrong. And then she had to defend them.

“I ... I don’t know. It seemed like they were making things up. Like it was artificial, just something they were doing for the program.”

“Who?”

“The Thayer family. They were so ... perfect, you know? I guess maybe they just didn’t feel like a real family to me....”

“Hmmph. What would you know about a real family?”

“No, of course. You’re right. I don’t know much about families at all....”

“You’re missing the whole point.” John sighed, exasperated. “You just don’t get it. The whole
point
is to show perfect families. We don’t
want
families with flaws. And anyway, you should have seen the other family....”

Akiko nodded her head. It always seemed to make sense when he explained it to her, so she couldn’t understand why she always got the answers wrong. But still, she supposed it was nice of him to try to teach her about the way television worked and talk to her about his job, so she did her best to listen. Many husbands wouldn’t share their work concerns with their wives at all.

“Of all the stupid ideas, she actually thought this black woman could be an American Wife!”

“Who?”

“Takagi, that American woman director I told you about. The one I had to go all the way to Memphis to help with the program.”

“What was wrong with the black woman?”

John rolled his eyes and snorted. “You should have seen her family. First of all, they were extremely poor. Their accents were so uneducated that even with my level of English I could barely make out what they were saying. And that was just the beginning. The husband had terrible dentistry, gold teeth everywhere, and the wife just looked, well, badly dressed. Their house was not beautiful at all, and the food she cooked! Pig intestines! Entirely inappropriate.”

“It sounds ... different.”

“It certainly was. We even went to their church service. Remember I told you? The day I was so sick with the flu I kept having to throw up? That was an experience. They all went into trances and fell down on the floor.”

“Did they sing authentic gospel music? I like authentic gospel music very much....”

“I guess that’s what you call it.” He scowled at her enthusiasm. “But the
point
is, the family was wrong. How could a Japanese housewife relate to a poor black family with nine children? That Takagi keeps choosing the wrong kind of families. Sometimes I think she is doing it on purpose.”

“Yes, I see exactly what you mean, I think.... Do you mean like the Beaudroux family? Was that her choice too? They weren’t at all perfect, because most of the kids were adopted and were Korean, and the real daughter was having an illegitimate baby, and the other girl had a pierced eyebrow....”

John nodded approvingly. “The Beaudroux family was a terrible choice,” he concurred.

“I gave them a very low mark in Wholesomeness....”

“Yes, but you gave them a nine in Authenticity.”

Akiko hung her head.

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t ... I mean, as a family ...”

“Tell me!” He leaned across the table and gripped her wrist.

“I liked them,” she whispered.

He released her, sat back, and crossed his arms. “Finally. The truth. And the Thayers? What did you think about them?”

“I didn’t like them at all.” Akiko’s voice was now barely audible. “I thought they were phony.”

“So what you are saying is that your evaluation has nothing to do with true Authenticity. It’s just an arbitrary number based on your own questionable and subjective tastes. Is that right?”

“Yes. But I thought ...”

“Good.” John crumpled up the questionnaire and shot it across the room toward the wastebasket. “I’m glad you told me. I guess we won’t have to waste time with these anymore, then. If that’s all it is, if I can’t trust you to give me accurate and reliable impressions, then it’s simply a waste of time.”

Akiko let out her breath slowly.

“Does that mean ... ?”

“Yes, I no longer trust you to fill out the questionnaire. Just try to make the recipes as accurately as you can, please. That’s the least you can do.”

“Yes. Of course.” Akiko picked up her tray. Carefully she placed the coffee cups and saucers on it and brought them to the kitchen. She put them in the soapy water left over from the dinner dishes, then stepped down the hall, into the bathroom. She leaned against the sink and closed her eyes, resting her forehead against the mirror of the medicine cabinet. No more weekly questionnaires. She rolled her head from side to side, enjoying the cool feeling of the glass against her hot forehead. Suddenly she heard a footstep just outside. The door slammed open with a crash. Akiko gasped and jumped away.

“I told you
never
to close this door,” John screamed. “Do you understand? You are
never
to be in the bathroom after meals with the door
closed!
”

“I’m sorry,” Akiko whimpered. “I wasn’t going to ... I forgot.”

Here is what happened: The girl, Christina Bukowsky, was riding her bicycle down the frontage road that bordered the interstate and was run over by a delivery truck making a right-hand turn into the Wal-Mart parking lot. Her legs and spine were crushed by the monstrous wheels, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. The doctors said she would never walk or even sit up unassisted again. But worse even than that, when she was knocked off her bicycle she hit her head on a stretch of concrete curbing, and the force of the blow fractured the back of her skull. The trauma to the left temporal lobe rendered her more or less a vegetable, uncomprehending, incapable of speech.

Mrs. Eleanor Bukowsky and her husband, Dale, refused to believe this diagnosis. When Christina’s condition had stabilized somewhat, they took their daughter out of the hospital and brought her home. By this time, Christina was conscious and she could open one eye, but she still was not moving her limbs, nor was she responding to external stimuli.

Eleanor Bukowsky asked for time off work so she could rehabilitate her daughter. She was an associate at Wal-Mart, a job that she needed because Dale had been laid off at the mine. He had been doing some part-time contracting, but work was increasingly hard to find. There wasn’t a lot of building going on in the town of Quarry, Indiana.

When Mrs. Bukowsky asked for time off, however, her boss turned her down. He was a nice guy, a local guy, but he was being pressured by management, who felt that since the Bukowskys were suing Wal-Mart, granting her request would be admitting liability for the accident. Discouraged, Mrs. Bukowsky asked her boss to fire her so at least she could collect unemployment, but again he refused, since it would be bad publicity for Wal-Mart first to crush the daughter, then to fire the mom. So she quit without severance, and she and Dale set up a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch over the girl.

They installed their still-life daughter in the living room, outfitting it with a hospital bed. They read books, they consulted with specialists, and they developed a method of treatment that involved the entire underemployed population of the town. Eleanor posted sign-up sheets with visiting times on the bulletin boards at the schools, at the beauty salon, and even at Wal-Mart, and soon they had a steady stream of visitors coming over to their living room to sit with Christina.

“Thank you for coming, Albert,” Eleanor would say, ushering in a sitter. “Right this way. Here she is, in the living room. You know. The Room for Living.”

“That’s very nice, Mrs. Bukowsky. That’s absolutely right.”

The way she figured it, each sitter would bring the girl something different. If there was any small spark of consciousness left inside her vegetable mind, and if enough people came, then someone would be able to rekindle it. It might be the most unlikely person, Eleanor figured, but the more people came, the greater the odds. In addition, each sitter was asked to bring a small contribution of food. It was close to begging, but the fact was, the Bukowsky family was broke. Wal-Mart was contesting its responsibility, and since Mr. Bukowsky had lost his job, the family of course had no health insurance.