Slap Your Sides

by M. E. Kerr

  How is Quinn doing? Are you giving him molasses treats? Is Luke Casper drinking around him? I hope not. Quinn hates that smell, or maybe he senses, when he smells it, that Luke might treat him roughly. And old Mahatma, how’s he? I know you all can get along without me just fine, so I guess I have to invent the notion that my critters miss me.

  I think I understand what Dad is going through. For one thing he was never a heart-felt Quaker, never that religious…but for another, unlike Mom, he has to go out into the community every day and mingle with men who have sons in the service and sit through those stupid Rotary lunches every Tuesday. Dad’s never had a defiant spirit, and anyway this should be my problem, not his! I hope there’s no more stuff going on with the store windows!

  I get letters from Lizzie, each one shorter than the last, until finally there’s no hello or good-bye, just something like “The Jews of France are all in concentration camps!”…“Kiss the Jews of Greece good-bye!”

  You both have to think hard about how much you can bear before you decide what position you’re going to take. We have some COs who’ve already chickened out and put in for 1AOs, and they’re in the army now. But more stick to their convictions, and I’ve never associated with finer men.

  Mom is still threatening to visit me for her birthday. I don’t want her to see this place, or visit any town near a CPS camp. I’m toying with the idea of taking a furlough in the spring, which might satisfy her. I’d meet her in New York City, since it would just embarrass Dad if I came home. She could see Lizzie then, too.

  I miss you all and I pray for you, and for peace.

  Love,

  Bud

  I had just finished the letter when I heard Quinn whinny out in the paddock.

  I came out of the barn to see Daria talking to him, all the while stroking his neck and giving him cubes of sugar.

  I went down there, and as I came toward her, she said, “Just talk to me in a natural voice now, Jubal, because this horse is stressed.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Both Luke and Danny Jr. taught me a lot about horses. While I was warming up with scales, I was watching this one from Mrs. Ochevsky’s window. He looks so unhappy.”

  “He is.”

  “He’s beautiful,” she said. She was patting him firmly on the neck and shoulders. She knew enough not to pat his nose. Most horses didn’t like it.

  “He’s Bud’s favorite,” I told her. “Bud says he’s extra intelligent.”

  “And sensitive,” Daria said. “Well, at least Bud’s right about something. What’s his name?”

  “Quinn.”

  “I got sugar from Mrs. Ochevsky. Do you think I could ride him?”

  “If he’ll let you.”

  “Just keep talking to me. Just say nice things to me.”

  “Did you notice we painted the walls of the store white?” I said.

  “Why would I notice that?”

  “Because you suggested it. Don’t you remember? You told me New Year’s Eve the yellow walls looked like puke.”

  “I’d never say that word,” she said. “I hate crass words.”

  I couldn’t believe the way Quinn was taking to her, putting his nose right down in her coat collar, his tail lifting.

  After a while we walked him back to the tack room in the barn.

  I had an idea Quinn was going to let her ride him.

  When we came back out with him saddled, Daria got on him easily. Quinn’s ears didn’t move, a good sign. He shook his head the way some horses do when spring comes, to shake out the winter kinks.

  Quinn was a goner from the time she sat on him. He pranced, snorted, danced, and I swear he grinned, too.

  I went across to the fence and opened it for them.

  ELEVEN

  Daria came to ride Quinn every Saturday after that. When we’d come back from Doylestown on the bus together, she always wanted to go to The Sweet Creek Diner. She said it was our hangout. Even though I didn’t like coffee very much, I always ordered a cup, as she did.

  “Italian is my favorite language” was the kind of pronouncement she would make, and sometimes, very quietly, she would sing something from an opera. “Non mi dir…” “O don fatale…” “D’amore al dolce impero.”

  I, who didn’t know bull about classical music, soon knew to request the song from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, from Verdi’s Don Carlo, from Rossini’s Armida.

  “I don’t really want to be an opera star,” Daria told me, “but Mrs. Ochevsky says it’s the best training for my instrument, and it’s also the way I learn Italian.”

  “What instrument do you play?” I asked her.

  “Oh, Jubal, you’re so young, aren’t you? My instrument is my voice.”

  “I see.”

  “Now your feelings are hurt,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jubal.”

  “You could just tell me your voice is your instrument without telling me I’m so young. I’m the same age you are, Daria!”

  “It’s not your fault. Boys don’t mature as quickly as girls do.”

  I was changing because of her. She was about an inch taller than I was, so I began measuring myself. Everywhere! I was looking in the mirror more. And I put a few drops of Tommy’s Vitalis on my hair. Sometimes I borrowed his clothes: a sweater, a scarf.

  Once he remarked that he had an idea I’d been helping myself for a while now, and when I swore it wasn’t true, he said his favorite socks were missing. The brown-and-white-checked ones. He knew they were somewhere in my drawers, but he wasn’t going to search them just to prove I was a liar.

  “I’m not!” I said.

  “There’s such a thing as lying by omission. For instance, you never told me you sent Aunt Lizzie the picture of me from The Sweet Creek Citizen. The other night on the phone she told Mom she was real proud of me being a basketball star!”

  Then I confessed that Natalia had a crush on him, had the socks, and had been sent the photo. “She sent me a book called God’s Little Acre for the socks, and The Fountainhead for the picture.”

  “I wondered what’d happened to your reading tastes.”

  Daria complained about those books, too, when I told her about them. “I don’t have anything against sexy stuff,” she said. “I like sexy stuff, but you’re reading the whole book!”

  She said in a few years I would be an embarrassment to myself because I wasn’t worldly or sensitive.

  She said Danny Jr., even off somewhere in the jungle, could still find Browning, Conrad, Frost, Homer, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, just to name a few of the books he read.

  “You send them to him,” I said.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes he gets them from his buddies. They pool what they have. Of course, Danny Jr. gets his pick of the good books, because nobody else wants those. Most of the men like westerns or thrillers or even comic books.”

  “But not dear old Danny Jr.,” I said sarcastically.

  “No, not dear old Danny Jr., Jubal, and your whole face looks just awful when you smirk that way.”

  I think she knew I was jealous of Danny Jr., and she rubbed it in the way another girl might praise a boyfriend while some poor dope was trying to impress her.

  It wasn’t easy to impress Daria. When she’d asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I’d told her I’d probably go someplace Quaker like Swarthmore or Haverford, then after college return to work with Dad.

  “He says his dream is to have Shoemaker & Sons on the window someday,” I’d said.

  “Do you and your brothers want to run a department store?” She’d sounded as though she was asking me if we wanted to be garbagemen.

  “Why not?”

  “Even Bud?”

  “Maybe. What about Danny Jr.? What’s he going to do?”

  “He doesn’t want us to call him Junior anymore, either.”

  “What’ll Danny do?”

  “He’s going to be a famous writer,” Daria’d said.

  On this particular afternoon, there see
med to be more servicemen than ever in the diner. A lot of them were fellows home on leave or furlough, but some were stationed nearby. They came to Sweet Creek to see movies or to visit the Side Door Canteen, in the basement of City Hall.

  The songs playing on the jukebox were the usual: “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World,” on and on.

  Sometimes you can tell when someone’s thinking the very same thing you are. I wasn’t surprised when Daria looked across at me and said, “Does it make you uncomfortable that everything is about the war?”

  “Why should it?” But I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “Do you know what you’ll do if it’s still going on when you’re draft age?”

  “I know what I hope I have the courage to do.”

  “I suppose you’re going to try and tell me you need courage to be a coward.”

  “I’m not going to try and tell you anything.”

  “Good, because I don’t need to hear it.”

  She was silent for a while, and then she said, “Don’t you realize that the whole country can’t be wrong? Everyone is doing their bit. Even some Japanese Americans are, when they have every reason to hate us for putting their relatives in internment camps! I’m doing this paper for school,” she said. “It’s about this Japanese American unit training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.”

  “I read about them,” I said. Lizzie’d sent Mom an article from the New York Journal-American about Negroes who had their own unit, and Japs who did. She’d written across the top, Show this to Tommy and Jubal. Ask them if they’re content to let the colored and the Japs fight our war for them.

  Daria said, “Where did you read about them? I have just this little United Press release from The Citizen.”

  When I told her about the newspaper article my aunt had sent, Daria said she’d give anything to read it.

  “I’ll bring it over tonight,” I said. “Do you ever listen to ‘Your Hit Parade’?”

  “Couldn’t you just slip it in our mailbox?” she asked.

  “Sure, I could. But do you ever listen to ‘Your Hit Parade’? I listen to it sometimes.” I listened to it a lot less since the songs became all about the war.

  “I always listen to it,” Daria said, “but it’s not a good idea for you to come over tonight.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It just isn’t.”

  “You’re going to listen to it with someone?”

  “I’m going to listen to it with my mother.”

  She was putting her mackinaw on and flipping a red scarf over her shoulder.

  “Wouldn’t you rather listen to it with me?”

  “Maybe I would, Jubal,” she said, “but I can’t.” She was on her feet, and I was too. Behind her there was a poster of a dead paratrooper’s body settling to earth, his head hanging, eyes shut, his toes just starting to drag across the ground. There was blood on his jacket and his hand. Underneath the drawing of him were the words: CARELESS TALK GOT THERE FIRST.

  Daria waited until we got outside.

  “Jubal, don’t you ever wonder why I want to come here when we get back from Doylestown? We don’t live that far away from each other, and I make much better coffee.”

  “I just thought…I thought it was more private than right under your parents’ noses. I thought—”

  She cut me off, speaking very fast. “Daddy doesn’t think it’s good for me to be around you people too much,” she said.

  “You mean the Shoemakers? Is that what you mean?”

  “He likes your mom and your dad, and he’d probably like you and Tommy too, but Bud is another matter. Bud has changed things, Jubal. A lot of people don’t like what he’s done. It’s not just us!”

  “I know that!”

  “I even feel guilty about my Saturdays with you at the Harts’. Hope Hart is planning meals for conscientious objectors! And then there’s Abel. Abel is breaking the law”—she waved her hand like a wand—“just ignoring the draft!”

  “He’s a very orthodox Quaker, Daria.” I never thought I’d defend Abel.

  “He’s a traitor, Jubal! One of the finest things I ever did in my entire life was to mark your store windows! For once I was doing something about the war! I wasn’t being careful or being discreet because of Daddy! I should have kept right on!”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. It’s my father you were hurting, not Bud.”

  “Now Daddy says it isn’t good business for me to fraternize with you. He thinks I run into you on the bus and we talk. He would hate it that I meet you at the Harts’, that we go for coffee after!”

  I don’t remember what we talked about the rest of the way home. She was good at babbling. She was also liable to burst into a few bars of song, and I remember that day it was “As Time Goes By,” which was from the movie Casablanca. Tommy and I had gone to it together, and afterward Tommy kept imitating Humphrey Bogart saying, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid!”

  I was quiet, letting it slowly sink in that in Radio Dan’s view, our hanging out together wasn’t very different from certain French people “fraternizing” with the Germans. I’d first heard that word watching a “March of Time” newsreel. They’d shown villagers someplace outside Paris shaving a woman’s head because she’d been with a Nazi.

  When we got to Daria’s house, I noticed for the first time that she gave a quick wave and a “’Bye,” and hurried down the driveway. It was dark out by then. The Daniels’ porch lights were on, but she always went in the side door. I decided that was so she could sneak in, and so they wouldn’t look out the windows and see me walking away from the house.

  TWELVE

  I was still mulling over the idea of Daria “fraternizing” with me when I got home.

  Mom looked happier than I’d seen her look in months.

  “Guess what, Jubal! Tommy and you and I are going to New York City in April. Tommy will have time off for Easter vacation, and Friends will be on spring recess. We can stay with Lizzie.”

  “Great!” I said. “Was it Lizzie’s idea?”

  “Bud thought of it. He’s taking a furlough to work with Dorothy Day for two weeks.”

  “Who’s Dorothy Day?”

  “She’s a Catholic pacifist who runs soup kitchens for the poor in lower Manhattan. Bud doesn’t want to stay with Lizzie.”

  My father opened the door from the basement, walked across to the staircase, and went up without a word.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him anymore, Jubal,” said Mom.

  “Sure you do, Mom. Start with the yellow Y that appears on the windows from time to time, and the customers who don’t come in anymore.”

  “Are you sure about customers not coming in anymore?”

  “Well, a few aren’t.” I tried to soften it. I’d forgotten how Dad always kept bad news to himself.

  I gave Mom a kiss and got Mahatma’s leash from the closet. When he saw me with it, he began walking around, wagging his tail and rattling his dog tags.

  I went upstairs and got the Journal-American article from my desk, put it in an envelope, and scrawled Daria’s name across it. When I went down to the bathroom, Dad was sitting on the side of the tub, waiting for it to fill.

  “Take your coat off and stay awhile,” he said.

  “I’m taking Mahatma for a walk.”

  “What has your mother got to say about me?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I bet,” he said.

  After I zipped up, I got a look at dad naked. I hadn’t seen him without clothes since summer. He was getting a paunch. Flab under his arms, too. I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine that he didn’t still work out at the Y. Then wasn’t the time to ask him.

  I took a flashlight and walked down to the Daniels’ with Mahatma.

  Their mailbox was all the way up on their porch. The front hall window had the flag with two blue stars on it, one for Dean and one for Danny. I
stuck the article inside and sneaked a look through the living-room curtains. Mrs. Daniel was playing the piano, and Daria was standing facing her, singing. I couldn’t make out the song.

  “She’s got an instrument,” I told Mahatma as we headed back down the street.

  Later that night she called me. She told me, “What I said doesn’t mean we can’t be together, Quinn.”

  “Did you hear what you just called me?” I asked her.

  “I did it on purpose.”

  “I don’t believe you, Daria.”

  “Why? Can’t you believe I’d miss you?”

  She hung up before I could answer.

  THIRTEEN

  Our first day in New York, Bud invited Tommy and me to lunch: “just us three,” and he gave us subway directions to the lower east side.

  There were some bums sleeping it off in front of the building that housed the soup kitchen. There were more inside who smelled of booze, weren’t shaved, looked like they’d worn the clothes they had on for a year.

  I could tell Tommy was as uneasy as I was. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. In Sweet Creek we had one town drunk who slept outside the railroad station. People left old coats and gloves for him.

  “There’re even some women here,” Tommy said. He was all dressed up in his best glen plaid double-breasted suit, shoes shined, clean white shirt, black knit tie.

  Bud was coming toward us in shirtsleeves, all grins. “Where are you two going, to a dance?”

  I wasn’t that dressed up, but I did have on a suit and tie.

  “Follow me,” said Bud, leading us down a staircase to the basement.

  There were long tables in rows. There was a low roar of voices, and the sounds of chairs being pushed on the bare floors. I’d never seen or smelled people like that.

  “Let’s grab some plates,” Bud said.

  “We’re eating here?” I said.

  “We’re in luck, because it’s a chili day.”

  We followed him down to the food line while he told us he was sorry we couldn’t meet Dorothy Day, the Catholic pacifist who’d founded the shelter. She was off at a CPS camp.