by Julia Watts
“What did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them much cause there wasn’t much to tell. I said you said Mrs. Stevens was a real nice lady and that she paid you regular.”
I was crying hard by this time. I wiped my eyes with my fists like a little kid.
Daddy handed me the red bandana he always carried in his pocket. “What you crying for?”
“I’m scared.”
He covered my hand with his big, rough one. “There ain’t no need to be scared. You ain’t in trouble. You ain’t never been in trouble in your life, and you ain’t in trouble now. I think your buddy Mrs. Stevens might be in a speck of trouble, though.” He took his hand off mine. “This is what the army fellers told me to tell you: They don’t want you going over to the Stevenses’ house no more, and they don’t want you working for Mrs. Stevens no more. They want you to stay away from her. You understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I managed to say, though I was crying even harder now. How could I not cry when a force as powerful as the United States government, which was supposed to promote freedom and the pursuit of happiness, was telling me to stay away from the person I loved most in the world?
“She’s been paying you by the week, this summer, right?” Daddy finally took a sip of his coffee. “She owe you any money?”
“A little bit.”
“I’ll go over and collect it on Monday,” Daddy said. “But you’re never to set foot over there again. Them old boys made it real clear that if you did, then you, me, your ma, and your sisters would be put on the next bus to Kentucky.”
I wiped my eyes. “I’ve been going over there the past few days to work,” I said. “But nobody’s answered the door.”
“Something they said made it sound like Mrs. Stevens took sick and has been in the hospital, but that she’s coming back home. It’s all right peculiar.” He set down his coffee cup. “It got me to wondering…did anything queer ever happen when you was over there? Or did you ever see anything that made you think Mrs. Stevens might be a Jap spy? Did she eat a lot of rice or anything like that?”
“No. She just seemed…nice.”
Daddy stood up. “Well, you never can tell about people, I reckon. I’d better be getting back to work.”
“Daddy,” I said, my voice choked. “I’m sorry I caused you so much trouble.”
“Shoot,” Daddy said as he was halfway out the door, “you ain’t caused me a minute of trouble in your life. You’re the best girl I got.”
His words just made me cry harder, for him, for Iris, for me, for all the things about ourselves and other people that we can never understand.
July 9, 1945
“Did you see her?” I asked Daddy when he handed me the five-dollar bill. It was a dollar more than the Stevenses owed me, but under the circumstances, I figured it was best not to argue.
“No,” Daddy said, pouring himself some coffee from the pot on the stove. I never can understand why people drink coffee when the weather’s so hot. “I talked to him. Mr. Stevens.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much, to tell the truth. He said you was a good girl and that you’d been a big help around the place and that he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea on account of you not being allowed to come back. He said none of it was your fault.” Daddy sat down at the kitchen table. “What do you reckon he meant by that?”
I blinked hard and looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, and I plumb forgot. I put it in my dinner bucket so I wouldn’t lose it.” He got his dinner bucket from where he’d set it near the sink, opened it, and took out a book. “Mr. Stevens said his wife wanted to make sure this here book got returned to you.” He looked at it. “I ain’t never seen it in this house before. Is it yours?”
I took it from him. It was My Home Is Far Away, the Dawn Powell book Iris had recommended to me. “Yessir,” I said, because the book was mine now. “A teacher at school gave it to me. I’d loaned it to Iris.” It was the only time I’ve ever told a lie right to my daddy’s face.
Once I could get a minute alone, I flipped through the book. I opened it and held it upside down and shook it to see if Iris had left anything—a note or message of some kind—tucked between its pages. But she hadn’t, probably for the same reason I hadn’t written “love” on the note I’d left for her. It wasn’t safe.
If Iris had wanted me to have this book, maybe it was because there was something in it she wanted me to understand. Desperate to understand something, anything, I started to read.
July 15, 1945
If I wasn’t so sick with sadness, I’d be taking great pleasure in reading My Home Is Far Away. It’s every bit as good a book about being an imaginative, difficult child as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But all the sadness in the book deepens the sadness in my heart. When the little girls in the book lost their mother, I cried for them at first, but then I cried more for everybody I’ve lost. Miss Connor and Virgie, gone and far away, never to be seen again. And Iris, gone but nearby, which is even harder, and if I was to try to see her again, it would be a betrayal of my family and my country, too, because the U.S. government has forbidden me to see her. So I cry for my losses, but I know how little they are compared to so many people’s in this terrible war. But these losses are mine, so I have to cry.
I can see a lot of myself in Marcia, the little girl in My Home Is Far Away, and I’m sure Iris saw a lot of herself and a lot of me in her, too. When I got to chapter 23, I saw a passage Iris had underlined: “The biggest jolt in growing up was to discover that you didn’t like what others liked and they thought you were crazy to like what you liked.”
Had she underlined it for herself because it struck her as particularly true? Or had she underlined it for me?
July 24, 1945
I won’t write again till I see her because I’m so empty there is nothing left inside me and so nothing to say.
July 19, 1945
I won’t go to her house because I promised Daddy I wouldn’t, and I don’t want to cost him—well, cost all of us, really—his job. But I figure it wouldn’t be disobedient if I just happened to run into Iris, at the park playing with Sharon or at the A and P waiting in line for rations or at the library returning a book. And so I walk up and down the wooden sidewalks, guessing where she might be, all the while trying to look like I’m just out running an errand in case I’m being watched.
When we first moved to Oak Ridge I always read the signs: the three monkeys, the housewife who killed somebody just by talking, the loose lips that sank ships. But after a while I stopped seeing them just like you don’t notice the furniture that’s in your own house. Now, though, I see them again, and this time they scare me. As I walked the streets today, I froze in front of one sign: an index finger positioned over a pair of lips with the caption Keep Our Secrets.
I knew the sign was about the war, but it made me think about the secret life Warren hid from Iris—another wife, a terrible accident in a car he was driving, and his years of saying nothing, of a silence that was the same thing as a lie. But Iris had her secrets, too. She never told Warren about Miriam, never told him how she kissed me and held me, about the secret life we led while he was working on his secret project. Her secrets seem smaller than his somehow, but maybe they aren’t.
And now that Iris and I are separated, I feel like my whole life, my whole self, is a secret that’s been locked up where I can’t find it. And maybe I should do the opposite of what Pandora did in that old story and not go snooping around where I’m told not to. But I don’t think secrets always keep us safe. Secrets stop us from understanding. And I want to understand. Like Pandora, I won’t rest till I rip the lid of that box open even though I know that when I do, I probably won’t like what I see.
August 3, 1945
I knew she wouldn’t be able to stay away from the library, so after a while I stopped wandering the streets and started going to the library right after breakfast and staying till it was time to go hom
e for supper. The librarian said she wished she could give me a special award for summer reading.
Iris came in today around two o’clock. She looked a little thinner than when I last saw her, and she was pale, but that might have been because she was missing her usual red lipstick. She was still beautiful, though. I can’t imagine her not being beautiful. Our eyes met, and then we both looked away, making sure nobody was watching. She looked at me again, nodded ever so slightly, and then disappeared into the fiction stacks.
I counted to twenty in my head, then got up and followed her.
She was in the third row of fiction, crying silently.
“I want to hug you so bad,” I whispered.
“You can’t.”
“I know. But I still want to.” My eyes were full of tears. “Could we talk for a minute?”
“We’re not supposed to.”
“I know. But we already are.” I could almost see the shadow of a smile.
“I’ll tell you what,” she whispered. “Meet me in the woods behind the park where we used to take Sharon. But if you see anybody who might see us, keep walking. Go home, and forget about me.”
“I can go home, but I can’t forget about you.”
“Oh, Ruby.” A tear spilled down her cheek, and she wiped it away like it was evidence of a crime. “Wait fifteen minutes, then come find me.”
She walked away, and I watched the clock.
I found her in the woods, leaned against a tree, smoking a cigarette. I opened my arms to hug her, and she said, “No. Someone might see.”
“Who? The birds or the squirrels?”
“Or a spy. You never know in this place.”
It was strange to see her without Sharon, and Sharon’s absence worried me suddenly. “I wish I could see Sharon, too. Where is she?”
“She’s with my mother in Evanston. Warren sent her there when everything happened. Mom’s coming down here to bring her back tomorrow, though, and she’s going to stay a couple of weeks to help me and keep an eye on things.” She laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. “Which means keep an eye on me.”
“You said when everything happened, but I don’t really know what ‘everything’ is.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t know. Ruby, you’re so young. Part of me really wants to keep you innocent of all this sordidness.”
“Being innocent is the same thing as being ignorant.” My firmness surprised me. “And I don’t want to be ignorant. I want to know.”
“All right.” She sighed. “Maybe we should sit.”
We sat on the soft, mossy ground. “The day you last saw me—when Eva barged in on us—God, Ruby, I didn’t know days could be that bad. When Warren got home from work, I handed him the newspaper clipping, and he turned white as a sheet, but he didn’t say anything, so I asked him why…why he hadn’t told me.” Iris lit a cigarette and didn’t bother to wipe the tear that slid down her cheek. “He told me that Lucille’s death still haunted him, that he still had nightmares, that he had been drinking at the party and had always thought he could’ve prevented the accident if he’d been sober. I told him I understood why he might not want to talk about her death, but why hadn’t he told me he’d had a life with someone else before me?” She paused and sucked in a big gasp of air. “It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him really angry. He didn’t raise a hand to me, but he did raise his voice. He said that some people were determined to live in the past, but he wasn’t one of them. He lived in the present, and I was welcome to join him there, but in the meantime, he was going to be staying at his friend Bill’s apartment. And he stomped out and slammed the door behind him.”
“Oh, Iris, I’m so sorry.” Without thinking, I reached out to touch her hand. She pulled it away.
“You have nothing to be sorry for. Why is it that some people say they’re sorry even when they haven’t done anything, and other people won’t apologize no matter what they do?”
I shrugged. “Human nature, I guess.”
“Different humans have different natures.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “Would you believe that what I’ve told you isn’t even the bad part?”
“No,” I said, not because I didn’t believe her, but because I didn’t want to.
“Two days later a pair of soldiers came to the door and told me I had been called in for questioning. I had to leave Sharon with Hannah, and they escorted me to this…this chamber where I expected Torquemada to show up any minute. It was a panel of soldiers—not privates, but colonels and generals—not exactly the kind of people you want to pour your heart out to…”
“They questioned my daddy, too.”
“About me?”
“Yes.”
She nodded grimly. “I’m not surprised. They asked me if I’d ever been a homosexual or had ever been involved in homosexual activity.”
“Why do they even care? What business is it of theirs?”
“They care because they think homosexuals are a security risk. They’re easy to blackmail, so they might be willing to divulge government secrets to protect themselves.”
I swallowed hard. “What did you tell them?”
“I told them that when I was a teenager in boarding school, there had been a flirtation with another girl, but that it was just silly, schoolgirl stuff, something I left behind once I grew up.” She looked at me, her eyes misty. “And then they asked me if I was having a homosexual relationship with you. I denied it, of course.”
It wasn’t the knowledge that my privacy had been invaded that scared me. It was the knowledge that here, there is no such thing as privacy. “How…how could they know?”
“Oh, I think you know as well as I do how they know. There are spies planted all over this town—people who may seem like nice neighbors or harmless coworkers, but they’re on the lookout for information all the time. And when they see someone who behaves in any way out of the ordinary, they write a letter and send it to this post office box, and before you can turn around, that person gets called in for questioning. And if the answers aren’t satisfactory, he’s on the next bus out of Oak Ridge.”
“Do you think Mrs. Lynch is…”
“I’d be willing to bet a significant sum of money on it. The way she was always coming in unannounced, always snooping, always judging. But of course, I didn’t think a thing about it because I’ve known ladies like her all my life.” She sighed. “And probably every one of them would’ve done the same thing Eva did. Warren got called in for questioning, too, of course. Ironically, that’s what got the two of us talking again, so we could ‘circle our wagons.’” She stared down at the glowing coal of her cigarette. “What ‘circling our wagons’ meant was following the orders the government had placed in regard to me which would allow Warren to keep his job and stay in town.” She recited the next items coldly, as if they applied to somebody other than herself: “Sharon was to be temporarily removed from my care. I was to be hospitalized and observed for a week by a psychiatrist and various doctors and nurses. My official diagnosis, by the way, was a ‘nervous breakdown.’ After being released from the hospital, I was to begin psychoanalysis once a week.”
“Psychoanalysis for what?”
She laughed, but somehow it was without humor. “My history of lesbian tendencies. It’s not the first time I’ve had my head shrunk for the same reason. One time, the dorm mother caught me kissing Miriam. My parents pulled me out of school and put me in psychoanalysis with this gruff old German woman. She asked me about my mother and my father and my dreams, and I talked and talked until I ran out of things to say, at which time I was declared cured. My last session, though, the shrink took me to visit the state mental hospital so I could see where I might end up if I regressed to my old ways.” She shook her head. “They took me to this ward filled with young women, and Ruby, it was awful. Awful. Their hair had been clipped as short as soldier boys’, but messier, choppier-looking, like whoever was cutting it hadn’t been paying any attention to the way it looked, and they were all
wearing those awful hospital gowns. One girl who was at least your age was carrying around a rag doll and talking to it like it was a person. Another girl sat in the corner, rocking back and forth and yanking out her eyelashes. Then there was the girl who screamed and screamed the way you’d scream if somebody was stabbing you over and over.” Iris ran a finger under her eyes. “The worst part, though, Ruby, was the way the nurses talked about the girls—like they were funny or like they somehow deserved to be in that condition. It was as if the girls were prisoners instead of patients. If the shrink showed me that scene to scare me into sanity, it worked. At least for a while.”
“But you were sane to start with.”
“By my definition, yes. But not by society’s.”
“I was just thinking about that passage you marked in My Home Is Far Away.”
“Yes. It’s true, isn’t it? And then there’s that Emily Dickinson poem, ‘Much madness is divinest sense/To the discerning eye/Much sense, the starkest madness/’Tis the majority in this, as in all things, prevail.’”
It was one of my favorite poems, too. “Assent and you are sane/Demur, you’re straightaway dangerous/And handled with a chain,” I finished.
“I love you, Ruby,” Iris said, looking so deep into my eyes it felt like she was touching me. “I’m sorry we can’t see each other anymore.”
“I love, you, too,” I said, my voice so clogged with tears it didn’t even sound like my own. “I wish it could be some other way.”
“It can’t.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “I need to live my life in such a way that I can be a good mother to Sharon. And you”—she smiled through her tears—“you have to finish school and go off to college and travel and write and have adventures and be very, very happy. Will you do that for me, Ruby?”