War and Millie McGonigle

by Karen Cushman

  “Girdles,” Pete giggled, swiveling his hips.

  “Stop wiggling, I said.”

  “What does the government need girdles for?”

  “They’ll turn them into things the army needs.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Tank tires.”

  “Tanks don’t have tires.”

  “Forget it, Pete. Let the government figure out what to do with them. We’ll just collect rubber things that people don’t need anymore and turn them in. We’ll need a wagon,” I told him. “Do you think Ralphie will come with us so we can use his?” I hoped it had been well scrubbed since the dead-dog episode.

  “Ralphie has chicken pops.”

  “Pox. Obviously then he won’t be using the wagon. Let’s go see if his mom will let us take it.”

  Pete jumped off my lap and we made our way across the back alley to Ralphie’s house. Mrs. Rigoletto had a sign on their door.

  “What’s that say?” Pete asked.

  “Official Fat-Collecting Station.”

  “Well, she hasn’t collected much ’cuz she’s the skinniest person I know.”

  I loved Pete! “I don’t think she’s collecting it on her body.”

  Mrs. Rigoletto opened the door. The whole house smelled like bacon. “We saw your sign,” I told her. “What kind of fat do you collect and what’s it for?”

  Mrs. Rigoletto put her hands on her hips. “Hello, Mrs. Rigoletto.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Rigoletto,” Pete and I chanted together.

  “Hello, Millie, hello, Pete,” said Mrs. Rigoletto.

  “So what do you do with it?” Pete asked her.

  “Cooking fats like bacon fat and meat drippings are used to make glycerin, and glycerin is used to make bombs.”

  “Bombs, wow!” said Pete. “Out of bacon fat. How do they do that?”

  Mrs. Rigoletto shrugged. “I don’t know. I just do my part by collecting it.”

  “That’s what we want to do, too,” I said. “Collect stuff to help with the war. I know Ralphie’s sick, but can we maybe borrow his wagon?”

  “Ralphie,” his mother shouted. “Okay for Millie and Pete to use your wagon?”

  “What for?” came Ralphie’s shout back.

  “War work,” I hollered.

  “Okay, but no dead dogs.”

  “Thanks, Ralphie. Hope you’re better soon.”

  “The wagon’s out in the carport,” Mrs. Rigoletto said. “Be sure to come and tell Ralphie all about your day when he’s not so contagious.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Rigoletto,” I said.

  “Her house sure smells good,” Pete said as we located the wagon. “Couldn’t we maybe collect bacon rather than rubber?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  We trundled the wagon up Bayside Walk. There was a blue star in the front window at the Fribbles’. So Icky was right. Dwayne had gone to war. Who would give the dreadful Dwayne a gun? Probably his fellow soldiers were in more danger from him than the enemy was.

  I knocked and called for Rosie. I was hoping she’d want to help collect, but no one answered, so we started without her.

  I trudged up to each door along Bayside Walk while Pete stood by the wagon. No one was home at the first three we tried.

  “Jeepers, Millie,” said Pete, flopping into the empty wagon, “this is no fun. I want to go home.”

  “Just wait. Someone’s bound to be in and we’ll get a wagonload of stuff to take to the collection center, and you’ll be proud that you did your part to win the war.”

  At the very next place lived a lady so crotchety that I’d never even bothered to learn her name. I just called her the Great Grump. “Ahh, Grum—err, ma’am,” I said when she answered the door, “we’re collecting rubber for the war effort. Might you have any used rubber goods, such as hot-water bottles, bathing caps, or girdles, that you can donate?”

  The lady snorted. “Girlie, if I had any of those things, I’d be using ’em myself. Now get off my property.” And the door slammed. As I turned to go, I noticed the sign in the window: Room for rent. No dogs, Jews, or Japs.

  Well, Gram, I thought, the hate’s the same as in your day. Just the names have changed.

  There were empty lots next and then Mr. Brundage’s house. I went into my speech again, this time skipping talk of girdles and hot-water bottles, and asked instead, “…a rubber hose?”

  “Hose? Look around you. Sand and mud. What use have I for a hose?”

  Next door was the Grayson house. Nobody home. The wagon was still empty. Didn’t people in Mission Beach want to win the war? Pete and I went home for lunch and had egg-salad sandwiches with Lily that Mama had made before she left for work.

  “I don’t like knocking on doors and asking people for their old hot-water bottles and girdles,” I said as we ate.

  “Girdles,” Pete giggled.

  “Be serious. Let’s see what else we could collect.” I pulled the Civilian Defense pamphlet from my pocket. “How about tin cans? See here: Collect, wash, and flatten. Prepare your cans for war!”

  “What will the army do with tin cans?” Lily asked.

  “Tin’s metal, isn’t it, and they use metal for airplanes and tanks and stuff.”

  “Do you think Mama will make an airplane from the tin cans we find?”

  “Could be.”

  Lily grinned. “Then I want to do it, too, collect cans.”

  “Think you can walk all the way? The wagon will be full of cans and there’ll be no room for you.”

  “I’ve been wheezing less, and look, I got roses in my cheeks.”

  Her sunburn was long gone and she was pale but less pale than usual. “Okay, but no whining.”

  We hit the ocean side of Mission Beach, where there were more houses. And collecting cans proved much easier than scouting for girdles and hoses. Everyone had an empty can or two.

  At Aldus Topper’s filling station, Mr. Topper stuck his thumbs behind the bib of his overalls and said, “You kiddos are in luck. I been saving cans to take to the dump, but I never got round to it. Now you can have them.”

  We followed Mr. Topper behind the station. Slowly. Very slowly. Snails moved faster than Mr. Topper, I thought. Heck, rocks moved faster than Mr. Topper. Finally we reached a small mountain of motor-oil cans and even more beer cans. Mr. Topper gave us a big cardboard carton, which we filled with cans and loaded into the wagon. “Wait a minute, kiddos,” he said, and he finished the beer he had been drinking and chucked that can, too, into the wagon, and I dragged it home.

  The beer and motor-oil cans had no labels and were easily flattened, but the soup and tuna and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee cans had to be stripped of their labels and washed out first. “We’ll need help,” I told Lily and Pete.

  “I’m too tired to do any more,” Lily said, and she sat down on the walk.

  “I’ll get Artie and Archie and MeToo,” Pete yelled as he tore off to find them.

  The twins came to help but Artie said, “MeToo won’t come. He’s busy knitting and it’s your fault, Millie.”

  “Hic,” Archie added.

  They began ripping off labels, but Artie cut himself on the jagged edge of a tomato-soup can and ran off for home, leaving a trail of drops on the ground that might have been blood or maybe tomato soup.

  “I wanna see if he gets stitches,” said Pete, and he, too, ran off, with Archie and Lily behind.

  Christopher Columbus! The entire job fell to me. Finally the labels were off, and the cans were washed and flattened. I smelled like soup and beer and motor oil and had small cuts on my fingers. My arms hurt from pulling the wagon and my hands hurt from pulling labels and my feet hurt from stepping on cans. Trying to win the war was hard work.

  After dinner, I pulled out a booklet I’d gotten from Riley Lenske at school: Know Your War Planes. It only cost me two cents because it was s
econdhand and had mustard stains on the cover. I’d been studying it for days and even failed a test at school on Friday because I was so busy learning planes that I forgot to study. Who cared about state capitals anyway in a war?

  Enough junk collecting, I thought. I’ll be a plane spotter. Just sit comfortably and watch the sky. No more trudging around the beach with a wagon and junk for the war effort. No more beer and bean cans. Just looking at the sky.

  I lay on the sofa with my feet over the arm and drilled myself on Japanese planes until I could tell the Mitsubishi 97 “Sally” medium bomber from the Mitsubishi 01 “Betty” medium bomber. I learned the distinctive shapes of the Sasabo “Pete” seaplane and the Aichi 99 “Val” dive-bomber. Would German and Italian planes actually come as far as San Diego? Probably not, so I studied instead U.S. Army and Navy bombers: the Boeing B-17, the Douglas SBD, the Consolidated B-24, which Mama worked on, and so many, many more. It was, after all, a real war.

  Finally I was ready to tackle Pop. He was home and in the kitchen, making school lunches for Monday. He had mastered bologna sandwiches, but his peanut butter and jelly still needed work.

  “Pop,” I said, scooping a fingerful of Skippy from the jar, “now that you have a job, can I have seven dollars?”

  “Not likely. What do you need money for?”

  “Binoculars. I want to be a plane spotter, so I’ll need a telephone, binoculars, a pad of flash message forms, and an official identification book. I thought I’d start with the binoculars. The Sears catalog has good ones for seven dollars.”

  “Think again.”

  “But I’ve learned all about planes. Here, test me.” I rattled off names and shapes until Pop called for mercy.

  “Well, guess we should repay the five dollars you spent for Lily’s doctor,” he said. “I think I can find binoculars for five dollars at the Navy Exchange.”

  I hugged him quickly. “Thanks, Pop, and here’s a tip for you: put the Skippy on the bread before the jelly. It’ll spread better.”

  “You sure read a lot,” Rosie said as we walked to the library. “Do you want to be a teacher?”

  I shook my head.

  “A librarian?”

  I shook my head again.

  “I myself want to marry an explorer,” she said, “and see some of those foreign places we hear about on the radio: Shanghai, Singapore, Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Hong Kong. They sound so exotic and mysterious. The war should be over when my time comes. How about you? What do you want to be?”

  “Alive.”

  “Millie!”

  “Really. I want to survive this war and have a normal life, right here on the bay. I’ll have a bait barge in the summers for the fishermen and maybe repair fishing nets like Captain Charlie. I’m sure he’ll show me how.”

  Rosie snorted. “I hope you’re better at tying nets than knitting blanket squares for soldiers.”

  “Har-har, Rosie.”

  Rosie got herself a library card and I went to talk to Mrs. Pennyfeather.

  She was behind the checkout counter. “Mrs. P, remember the last time I was here and I asked for sad and tragic books?”

  Mrs. Pennyfeather raised one eyebrow. “I remember.”

  “Well, I don’t seem to be in the mood today for depressing books about death. What do you have that’s a little less sad? Not too happy but not tragic. Maybe even kind of fun. A little bit.”

  “You’re in luck, Millie,” she said. She pulled a book from a bookcase behind the desk. “I don’t keep this out on the shelf because it is a little intense and violent at times for younger readers, but it should be just right for you.”

  The book jacket read The Hobbit. The Hobbit? What was a hobbit?

  Mrs. Pennyfeather checked the book out and handed it to me. “Dwarves and elves, sorcerers and dragons, a quest and a battle. Some sadness, some death. Good against evil, much like today. I bet you’ll like it.”

  Yowza! Dwarves and elves, sorcerers and dragons, a quest and a battle! I wished I could run right home to read, but I didn’t want to desert Rosie. I should have, though. Everything else that happened that day was entirely her fault.

  “Let’s do it,” Rosie said as we walked home. “Let’s go to the USO dance tonight.”

  A group called the United Service Organizations, she told me, had places where sailors and soldiers could play games, eat cookies, and dance. Several of Dwayne Fribble’s female friends said they were going to volunteer there. “We can make cookies and take them over and maybe have a dance or two. It must be so romantic, all those young men heading overseas to war, not knowing what their fate might be, and we’d be the last girls ever to dance with them.” She gave a long, shuddering sigh.

  Sometimes Rosie seemed much older than fourteen. Maybe girls grow up faster in big cities. Still, she was a friend, and I thought making cookies for sailors might comfort them and help the war effort. She could dance with them, and I could hear their stories about dead comrades and such.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll have to bake at my house. Mama and Pop are going to visit Gram’s grave, and Edna is out with Albert, so I have to stay home with the juveniles.”

  We entered the house as Mama and Pop left. “Mama and I used to make cookies together,” I told Rosie. “We’ll need flour, butter, and sugar. And eggs. But I don’t think we have most of those things.”

  “Aunt Bertha keeps a supply of lard and molasses. Those should do. No eggs at the moment, but there’s flour and…what else?”

  “Cookies made of flour and lard don’t sound very yummy.” I searched through the cabinets in the kitchen. “Very old, very hard raisins? And Rice Krispies? At least they’d add some crunch.”

  “Sounds a little weird to me, but probably the sailors won’t care,” said Rosie.

  I agreed.

  “Great. I’ll gather the molasses, flour, and lard from home and be right back.” And she took off.

  “We want to bake, too,” said Lily, who peeped into the kitchen.

  I gathered spoons and measuring cups, soap and water, some modeling clay, and a bowl of Rice Krispies and gave them to her. “Here. See what you guys can make out of that.” Soon there were sounds of splashing and clattering from the bathroom.

  When Rosie got back, we started mixing. Between the molasses and the Rice Krispies, the batter was a strange color and pretty lumpy. It didn’t look anything like food, but I stirred it once more and dropped it by spoonfuls onto a baking sheet.

  “How long should we bake them?” Rosie asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess we’ll just leave them in the oven until they crisp up.”

  Mama and Pop came home while we were still up to our elbows in splatters and spills and dirty dishes. “What’s that awful smell?” Pop asked.

  “We’re baking cookies for servicemen,” Rosie said. “I hope they taste better than they smell.”

  “Well,” said Pop, wrinkling his nose, “I guess they’d have to.”

  Pop went out fishing on Mr. Conklin’s new boat, and Mama closed herself in her bedroom to finish today’s jingles. “It’s hard to get inspired writing about drain cleaner and Northern Tissue splinter-free toilet paper. Still, a dollar is a dollar.” She was working now, but I guess old money worries still stuck around.

  I took the cookie sheet out of the oven. The cookies—or rather cookie, for all the batter had run together to make one giant cookie—were definitely crispy. Even hard. And burned.

  I tried cutting it into neat squares, but no knife could cut through, so we just broke it into bits. They’d taste just as good that way. Or that was what I imagined, because I wasn’t about to taste any of the odd-looking things.

  Lily and Pete popped up. “Can we have some?”

  “Okay. Here’s one for you, Pete.” He grabbed it and stuffed it in his mouth and tried to chew. “And you, Lily.”

  After a few attempts to eat the coo
kies, they spit them out in the sink. I should have known better than to slip a kid a bad cookie. They stared at me with such a look of betrayal, as if I had killed some soft fuzzy animal or something. Good gravy. Let the sailors have the awful things.

  I emptied out my school bag and put the cookies in. “The USO is all the way downtown, Rosie. We don’t have bus fare, and it’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”

  “Oh, Millie, grow up. I have plenty of nickels for the fare, and we’ll be back long before it’s dark.”

  “Well, Mama’s here now, so she can take over kiddie duty. They’re her kids.” I called, “Mama, Rosie and I are taking the cookies to the USO.” But not very loud in case she said no.

  “Millie, you can’t go downtown in torn shorts and bare feet,” Rosie said. “We have to look like young ladies appropriate for cheering up the troops.” I pulled on a skirt and my school shoes. Wearing shoes on a Saturday. How awful. I hoped it would be worth it.

  The bus dropped us off on Broadway. I’d never seen downtown so congested. The streets were jammed with buses and trolleys, and the sidewalks were a sea of blue capped with little white hats. We passed bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors, and pool halls so packed with people they were spilling out onto the street. There was a busy bowling alley, a penny arcade, and shops crowded with all sorts of dumb souvenirs, like fringed U.S. Navy pillows, San Diego Mission tablecloths, and men’s shirts with bright green palm trees. The movie theater was playing Sergeant York with Gary Cooper. You couldn’t even get away from the war at the movies.

  The USO was on the second floor of a building near Dr. Cowan, Credit Dentist. “I don’t hear any dancing,” Rosie said as we walked up the stairs. But someone was playing a piano and plenty of people were talking and laughing.

  A tall woman in a flowered dress and tightly curled hair met us at the door at the top. She seemed friendly enough until you looked into her eyes. Smart and sharp. There’d be no getting around her. “Can I help you, girls?”

  “Not at all,” said Rosie. “We’ve come to help you. We brought cookies we baked to cheer up our brave fighting men, and we thought we might stay for a dance or two—”