This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

by Jon Mooallem

Genie was not in the theater that night—not as far as Mooallem could tell, at least. There was no mention of Our Town in any of the documents Mooallem found in her daughter’s basement. The only item bearing that day’s date was a stray typewritten page—a kind of diary entry, it seemed, written after Genie had returned from Juneau with the governor and finally taken her first full day off since the quake. For nine days, she had pushed the stress and brutal imagery of the previous weekend out of her mind: that piece of a woman in the snow; the people downtown in every conceivable variety of shock: screaming or wailing, or staring absently forward in silence. But climbing into bed at the end of her day off, the hurt overtook her. She burst out weeping and cried uncontrollably into her pillow for hours, she wrote—breaking down, just like her mother had predicted she would. Then, just as suddenly, she stopped. “I slept like a lamb,” Genie explained in a subsequent letter, “and have been a new person ever since.”