MARIGOLD: No, the seventeen girls were cut off from us, we had no visual, no audio. The FDA people had a phone hookup, but the girls had stopped answering. It was like they were hostages in there, but nobody was holding them. They could have walked out any time they wanted. We didn’t know they had a camcorder.

MRS. MAY: It was incredibly hot that night. In the upper nineties, wasn’t it?

MARIGOLD: Yes.

MRS. MAY: That’s partly what I meant by pressure, when I asked if you didn’t find yourself under pressure, alone with a fellow worker—you realize I mean Tooey—

MARIGOLD: It was hot, yes, muggy, and the frogs were squawking and the bugs were screaming. Big patches of dark, the fields were like vast dark craters, and then other places with glaring lights, TV crews, a couple of food service trucks—throbbing generators—exhaust off the generators—and a sweet smell—some kind of blossom…

MRS. MAY: Throbbing generators.

Pause.

MARIGOLD: Sitting in the car, sweating. If we cracked the window for air, the skeeters swarmed in. Keep the skeeters out, it was like a steam cooker in there. The Senate hearings were two thousand miles away. Texas all around us. Louisiana over there about sixty miles. Over in that direction you could feel the continent turning to mush. To swamp. You could feel ghosts with malaria wandering around. Old spells, brown bones, voodoo curses. Like we were sitting on a little saucer of earth that had been cut away underneath us, and here we are, floating in all of this red darkness that was completely real, but the issue, the goals, the plan, the strategy, the Department of Agriculture—that was…a comic book, a dream. Somebody made it up. I’m holding this jar of Kernwood Farms jam and it could’ve been full of secret voodoo fetuses. I mean it was scary and ridiculous—a jar full of Looziana madness, we’d opened it and it was all over us…

MRS. MAY: And you couldn’t respond to that sense of unreality, you couldn’t pay homage to that absurdity and that fear simply by saying, “Everything seems so crazy!” Holding this ridiculous jar of jam. Those seventeen girls in there trapped for the third day, a simple inspection turned into a movie, into the Alamo—you picked up this jar of jam in the dark and said—

MARIGOLD: Exactly! I said, hey, Alan, you wanna throw this on my tits and lick it off?

MRS. MAY: It was a poem!

MARIGOLD: It was.

MRS. MAY: (singing softly, clearly, with feeling): “Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming?”

Pause.

Weeping silently, MARIGOLD lifts the pen and signs one of the forms. Pause: both women quite still except that MARIGOLD shudders slightly, sobbing without sound. She signs a second copy.

She positions the third copy before her.

Phone rings. Both women motionless. Once, twice.

MRS. MAY picks up phone, cutting off third ring.

MRS. MAY: Bruce. (Closes her eyes and takes the phone away from her head. Pause, Puts the phone back to her ear. Opens her eyes.) What is the meaning of this. (Pause. She grows alert.) All right. (Pause.) George…(Long pause.) Georgina! Is this—? (Pause.) Well, obviously! But is it your nonsense, is it April Fool’s—she asked respectfully. (Pause.) No. Thank you. Once was fine. (Pause.) Yes, I’d better, of course—Georgina, I think you’ve addled me! (Peers at fax machine.) Eight-eight-eight, two hundred, twelve hundred. (Pause.) First thing after lunch. (Pause.) Oh, Georgina! Each time a citizen writes a letter do we have to jump onto planes and float miles in the air and go into rooms to say things we could say on the phone? (Pause. Laughs desperately.) Let’s—after lunch, and we’ll decide. All right? Please? Respectfully. Please. (Pause.) Fine. It’s right here beside me…Bye, George.