by Julia Watts
When my family looked at me, I was sure they saw a thin-lipped middle-aged woman with weak eyes and thick glasses, a cameo brooch pinned in the center of her high collar—the spinster aunt to her sisters’ dozen dimpled babies.
I took the letter back, and now it’s in this journal for safekeeping. I know it is a ticket to a world that’s very different than my family’s, and this knowledge makes me happy and sad and scared all at the same time.
May 8, 1945
In the middle of biology, the principal’s voice came over the public address system: “A special assembly has been called. All students proceed to the auditorium in an orderly fashion.”
We were all at our lab stations about to cut into a cow’s eyeball, which wasn’t exactly something I’d been looking forward to. Our teacher seemed a little flustered by the interruption but said, “Well, you heard the man. Drop your instruments and form a line. We’re going to the auditorium.”
The line was orderly, but there was lots of whispering.
“I wonder what this is about.”
“They’ve never called a special assembly before.”
“I hope nothing bad’s happened overseas.”
Once we were in the auditorium the whispering turned into a buzz as everybody wondered out loud what was going on. You could feel the anxiety zinging through the air like currents along an electrical wire. Everybody knew something was going on and feared that whatever it was might not be good.
Principal Davis, a man in his mid-fifties, his hair cut in the super-short style of the former military man he was, strode across the stage and took his place behind the podium. “May I have your attention, please?” he said.
Usually, he had to ask at least a couple of times before he really got all the kids’ attention. This time, though, he had it.
“Thirty minutes ago,” Principal Davis said, “President Truman announced that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. We have achieved victory in Europe.”
A cheer rose from the auditorium in a giant wave. I was sitting between two girls who normally wouldn’t have given me the time of day, but we hugged each other like sisters.
Principal Davis let us carry on like that for a couple of minutes, but then he waved his hands to signal that it was time for the whooping and hollering to end. It took several minutes for that to happen, though.
Once it had quieted down some, a boy in the front row hollered, “So does this mean we can leave this godforsaken place now and go home?”
“Absolutely not,” Principal Davis said. “As our President said this morning, ‘our victory is only half-won.’ Germany has surrendered, but the war in the Pacific rages on. Only when the last Japanese division has surrendered will the war truly be over.” He leaned closer into the microphone. “And that is why, despite the gladness in our hearts, this will not be a day spent in parties and celebration. It will be a day spent working with increased fervor and dedication. As our president has said, the watchword for the months ahead of is ‘work, work, and more work.’
“So just as your parents are working even harder to end the war, you must work even harder in school to ensure that here on the homefront we have plenty of young people who are strong in mind and body. And in that spirit, I will ask you to stand and join me in singing the National Anthem, after which you will return in an orderly fashion to your classrooms.”
Usually the National Anthem is just something I move my lips along to without thinking about it, in part because I can’t hit the notes and in part because the words are kind of hard to understand. But today I sang it and really thought about it, and I got kind of choked up when I got to the part about “the land of the free and the home of the brave” because I thought about all the brave people, some living and some dead, who were brave so that people could be free.
On the way back to class, I heard two country boys talking.
“Well, whatever they’re making here it’s got to do with whipping the Japs instead of the Krauts.”
“I think it’s a boat—a boat they’ll send to Japan full of soldiers to whup ’em.”
A blonde girl in a sweater and skirt walked right between the two boys and said, “You know, you’re not even supposed to try to guess what’s being made here. It’s unpatriotic.”
I don’t think the boys meant to be unpatriotic, though. They were just curious, which everybody here is whether they admit it or not.
Iris admits it. When I came over to watch Baby Sharon, Iris’s eyes shone as she sat down with me on the couch. “Isn’t it exciting about the Germans surrendering?” she said. “I mean, I know we’re not supposed to be dancing in the streets yet, but I certainly feel like it.” She hugged her knees to her chest, looking like a little girl. “Also, this is interesting because it implies that whatever they’re working on here must be about Japan rather than Germany.”
“I heard somebody else talking about that today, just not so intelligently.”
“It feels like a piece of the puzzle, you know? Not that Warren or anybody else is going to show me any of the other pieces. It’s strange being here just as a wife…here, but I’m not a part of things.”
“It’s the same being here as a kid.”
“I would think so. Since your dad’s in construction, though, he probably doesn’t know much more about what’s going on here than you do. But Warren has to know a lot. He has this whole other life completely separate from me—a life I don’t know the least thing about.” She took out a cigarette and lit it. “Of course, this is probably nothing new. I guess wives and children have always been kept in the dark during times of war.” She blew out a cloud of smoke. “I suppose our job right now is just to smile and be happy the war’s half-won.”
May 12, 1945
Yesterday Iris asked me if I could come over after school and stay late enough to put Baby Sharon to bed so she and Warren could celebrate their four-year wedding anniversary. She had a special dinner planned for the two of them and wanted me to look after Sharon while she got everything ready. She answered the door wearing a pink chenille bathrobe that matched the pink curlers in her hair. Her face was covered in some kind of white goo.
“Did somebody give you the old pie in the face?” I said.
She laughed. “It’s a beauty treatment that Eva recommended. It’s got egg white and cucumber in it, and it allegedly will give me a glowing complexion. Unfortunately, the sight of Mommy with stuff all over her face terrifies Sharon. She’s hiding from me in her room.”
“Well, I reckon I can go play with her while you get gussied up.”
“Bee!” Baby Sharon said a soon as she saw me. She was putting her alphabet blocks one by one very carefully into their wooden box. I knew that once she’d filled the box, she’d dump all the blocks back on the floor and laugh hysterically. She can entertain herself playing “Fill and Spill” for hours.
“Bee help,” she said, pressing a block into my hand.
I put a block into the box, and so did she. Her face was as serious as a little undertaker’s. That was how the game always worked. She’d be all solemn as she filled the box, treating it like a Very Important Job, but when spilling time came, she’d collapse into giggles.
A few minutes later, Iris stood in the bedroom doorway, still in curlers but with the baby-scaring goo washed off her face. “Are we okay in here?” she asked.
“Yep, just filling and spilling,” I said.
“Well, I guess I’ll go start dinner then. I saved up enough ration cards for meat to make beef stroganoff. It’s Warren’s favorite—probably because it’s one of the few things I can make competently.”
By 5:30, when I put Sharon in her high chair to eat her peas and carrots and zwieback, Iris announced that all the stroganoff needed to do was simmer, so she figured she’d go change and fix her hair and face.
After Sharon ate her peas and carrots and then some rice pudding, a lot of which she smeared on her face to look like her mommy’s beauty treatment, I put her in the tub
and let her splash around until she started yawning. By seven she was asleep in her crib, cuddling her teddy bear.
When I walked out into the living room, Iris was sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette. Her honey-colored hair fell in soft curls around her face, and her lips were very red. She had on a black dress, high heels and stockings, and her string of real pearls. She looked beautiful, and I told her so before I thought to stop myself.
“Thanks,” she said, rolling her eyes like she didn’t believe me for a minute. She patted the spot on the couch beside her. “Why don’t you sit down and keep me company till Warren gets home?”
“Okay.” When I sat beside her, I could smell her flowery perfume.
“I wasn’t expecting him till at least seven.” Her legs were crossed, and she was shaking her foot. “His days at work just get longer and longer. I worry that Sharon will forget she has a daddy. Sometimes I feel like the U.S. government is the Other Woman in Warren’s and my marriage, though I don’t suppose that’s a very patriotic thought.”
“Any wife would feel the same way.”
We changed the subject to what we’d been reading. She had just finished The Human Comedy and liked it even though it was a little sentimental for her taste. I’d been reading Pride and Prejudice because I was writing my term paper on Jane Austen.
“Mr. Darcy,” Iris said. “What is it about those silent, taciturn types? We fall in love with them, and then we get all frustrated because they won’t talk to us. Aaron was like that, wasn’t he? A Mr. Darcy type?”
It was such a ridiculous comparison I had to laugh. “Mr. Darcy in overalls.”
After we’d been talking half an hour or so, the phone rang. Iris excused herself to answer it in the kitchen, and I heard her say “I understand” and “No, no, it’s all right” and “I love you, too.”
When she came back into the living room, she was rubbing her fingers under her eyes. “Warren,” she said, with a break in her voice. “Apparently something terribly important’s happening at the lab. He couldn’t say what, of course, but he won’t be able to get away any earlier than nine.”
“Oh, Iris, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s to be expected.” She sank back down on the couch and slipped her feet out of her dressy shoes. “He was nice about it. He said he’ll make it up to me, and I know he’ll try to.” She wiped her eyes. “I know what he’s doing is much more important than a silly little anniversary dinner.”
I took her hand. “It’s not silly to want to be with your husband on your anniversary.”
We sat there for a couple of minutes, holding hands, until Iris said, “Ruby, will you stay and have dinner with me? There’ll be plenty left for Warren when he gets home.”
“Well, I did tell Mother and Daddy I’d be here till late, so I reckon it’s all right.”
She dried her eyes. “Good. I really don’t want to be alone tonight. But please don’t think I’m just using you as a fall-back plan because Warren’s not here. I really do love your company.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes, but I muttered, “I love your company, too.”
“Well, then,” Iris said. “Let’s eat.”
She kept the lights off in the dining room but lit the two long white candles she’d arranged on the table. “I figure we might as well make this a celebration,” she said. “I mean, friendship’s worth celebrating, right?”
I nodded.
“And I’ve got two bottles of champagne in the refrigerator thanks to placing a special order with the local bootlegger. Maybe we’ll open one bottle now, and I’ll save the other one for when Warren comes home.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never drunk before.”
“Oh, you can have just one glass. It won’t be enough to make you tipsy.”
She took a beautiful green bottle trimmed with gold foil out of the refrigerator and then handed me two long-stemmed goblets. “Now you hold these while I open the bottle.”
When the cork popped, I screamed. “Was that supposed to happen?” I asked, once I’d caught my breath.
Iris laughed. “Isn’t that how it happens in the movies?” The foaming liquid spilled into the two glasses.
“It’s not that loud in the movies.”
She grabbed a dishtowel and dabbed where the sticky foam had slopped onto my hands. “It’s not this messy in the movies either.” She took one of the glasses and clinked it against the one in my hand. “Well…cheers. Happy anniversary to me.”
She drank, but I stopped lifting my glass when it was halfway to my lips. “I probably ought not to drink this. I’m just sixteen.”
Iris rolled her eyes. “Americans have such Puritanical ideas about alcohol. If you were European, you would’ve been given a small glass of wine on holidays when you were just a child. In America we make booze into something that’s secret and forbidden until adulthood. No wonder so many Americans drink too much. If something’s forbidden and secret, that just makes it more tempting.” She patted my arm. “Ruby, you don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to. But one glass of champagne isn’t going to get you drunk.”
“Well, I reckon I might as well try it.” It was fizzier than Coke with a taste that was sweet and fruity and rotten at the same time, like preserves that were just about to turn. “Not bad,” I said. “Kind of queer, but not bad.”
Iris smiled. “Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll serve the stroganoff.”
We sat across from each other at the candlelit table. “This is real good,” I said after my first forkful.
“Our family cook showed me how to make it when I was a girl. That’s probably why it’s one of the few things I can cook properly.”
She said “our family cook” so casually, like everybody had one. “You were talking about Europe a minute ago,” I said. “Have you ever been there?”
She sipped her champagne. “After my second year of college, I took a wild hair and decided I was going to spend a year in Paris. My parents told me they’d pay for me to get there, but after that I was on my own. I got a student work permit, and because my French was pretty good, I got a job waiting tables in a seedy café. When I wasn’t working, I just walked through the city, looking, looking, looking at everything that interested me. And everything did interest me, really. I lived in a filthy, one-room apartment with two other girls. It was on the fourth floor of a dilapidated building, and the stairs were rickety. But it didn’t matter. We only went there to sleep, and none of us did much sleeping in those days.” She refilled her glass. “In a lot of ways, that was the happiest year of my life. I was so completely and utterly free.” She reached across the table and touched my arm. “I hope you’ll have an opportunity like that, Ruby—to have a stretch of time when the only person you have to please is yourself.”
“I can’t imagine what that would be like,” I said. “I don’t think anybody in my family’s ever been free like that. I guess we’ve always been too poor to be free.”
“It’s not fair, is it? I was just lucky to be born into a family with some money. But I do feel guilty about all the advantages I’ve had.”
“Shoot, that’s nothing to feel guilty about. You didn’t get to pick what family you were born into. And even if you did, nobody would blame you for picking a rich one over a poor one.”
“I guess you’re right.” Iris pushed her plate away. She seemed more interested in the champagne than the food. “After my year in Europe, once I started back to school, I felt like I was so much more sophisticated than all the college kids around me. And that’s why I set my cap for Warren.”
“You got him.”
“And he got me,” she said, but her tone wasn’t all the way happy. “I bought a cake at a bakery in Knoxville. Would you like a slice?”
“Maybe you’d better wait to cut it till Warren gets home.”
“He won’t care. He has no sense of ceremony.” She refilled her champagne glass before she got up from the table. “Why don’t we have dessert in the
living room? I like to eat cake with my feet up.”
Once we were in the living room, Iris set her cake plate on the coffee table and walked over to the record player. “Let’s have some music,” she said. “Something soft that won’t wake the baby.”
The song was soft and swoony with lots of strings. We didn’t say much for a while, just sat on the couch, enjoying the cake and the music.
After a while, she said, “Do you remember when I taught you how to dance?”
“Of course.”
She drank the rest of the champagne in her glass in a few quick swallows. “Will you dance with me?”
I felt a little shiver. “Okay.”
She stood up and opened her arms to me. I put one arm around her shoulder and took her hand. “Box step,” she said.
I stepped with her, but somehow it felt different than when she was teaching me. This time, I wasn’t thinking about the steps. I was feeling the music, and the movement came naturally. I was feeling her nearness, too. In her stocking feet, she wasn’t much taller than me. Her hand was pressed against the small of my back, and she was so close that sometimes her breasts brushed against mine. She took a baby step closer, so we were in a sort of loose hug, and pressed her cheek against mine. Her skin was soft, her perfume sweet. Heaven.
“This reminds me of boarding school,” she whispered, her cheek still against mine. “We’d have dances where we girls would dance together. Once a semester there’d be a mixer where the boys from another school would be invited, and most of the girls really looked forward to that. But I liked the all-girls dances best. Girls dance better than boys.”
“You dance better than Aaron.”
“This one girl, Miriam, was always my favorite dance partner. We were very close. She was a lot like you. Wise beyond her years. And of course, she was the age then that you are now.”
“What happened to her?”
She sighed. I could feel her breath in my ear. “I don’t know. We lose so many people in our lives. All we can do is hold on to who we have as best we can.” She slipped out of my arms and looked right into my eyes. “I’m glad I have you, Ruby.”