Slap Your Sides

by M. E. Kerr

  What I am sorry about is not so much what I did to the windows (honest, I was just trying to express my opinion) but the lying to you, Jubal. How could I lie to the one person I looked forward to being with and began to consider my best friend?

  I hope you will accept my apology.

  Oh, Jubal, I miss you a bundle! There is nothing I can do about the way my father and mother feel. Maybe someday, when the winter has passed (if you can forgive me), I can sneak by the Harts’ after my lesson. I miss Quinn, too. I miss us. But don’t take this as a sign to call me. Daddy can’t seem to forgive Bud. God only knows what he would say if he knew you feel the same way, or at least I assume you still do. I assume Dean’s death didn’t do anything to change your mind. That is the awful problem, Jubal. I miss you but not that part of you.

  Your

  friend,

  Daria

  P.S. HAPPY NEW YEAR, JUBAL!

  PART THREE

  If you know about K-rations,

  slap your sides,

  If you have a lot of patience,

  slap your sides,

  If you know the onion smell

  is to make our boys eat well,

  Slap your sides,

  Cheer for Wride’s,

  Slap your sides!

  Happy New Year, listeners!

  “Moonlight Becomes You,” Ensign Polliver, or so one of our Wride girls thinks. Her name’s Lorelei Lewis and she’s over at Wride Foods, on the first floor, winning the war. But I don’t have to tell you where she is, Roger Polliver, United States Navy, U.S. of A.!

  This song is dedicated to you from Lorelei.

  —Radio Dan broadcast, 1943

  TWENTY-ONE

  Happy New Year!” Rose Garten said. “This is the first time I’ve ever had real champagne.”

  “It’s just my second time,” I said. Tommy’d told me I could have only half a glass. He had to make the bottle last the whole night.

  We were sitting at the dining-room table waiting for Tommy to serve a dessert called bananas Foster. He had found the recipe in a rum advertisement in Esquire magazine. He had bought a pony of Bacardi rum when he’d bought the champagne.

  We had already finished a meat loaf, baked potatoes, and my mother’s canned green beans.

  My folks were still in Virginia with Bud.

  I’d talked on the phone with him. He said not to worry about him, he’d be okay. But pray for the Indian. He was getting the blame for something he didn’t do.

  Rose was trying to get her parents on the telephone to ask if she could spend the night. An unexpected winter storm was covering Bud’s old Ford with snow.

  Tommy kept saying things like “I hope they don’t think I’m going to risk our lives driving you back to Blooming Glen in this weather!”

  “They won’t like it that there’s no one here.”

  “You’re nineteen, Rose! You’re no kid!”

  “Tell them that.”

  “And my brother’s here, for Pete’s sake!” Tommy said.

  “I don’t think Jubal’s their idea of a chaperone.”

  “Then don’t tell them my parents aren’t here.”

  “I already told them they were down with Bud.”

  “Well that was dumb!” Tommy said.

  Tommy was at 85 on the graph. I knew he was counting on making 100 that night. He had already told me I was to announce that they had to disappear, right after they’d finished dessert, because I preferred to clear the table and do dishes by myself.

  “You prefer to do dishes by yourself listening to our radio,” Tommy coached me. “Don’t sound like a martyr, or she’ll jump up and say we’ll all pitch in.”

  “Okay.”

  “And make it clear that you’re going to be in bed at the stroke of midnight, that you like being in bed and listening to the excitement from Times Square on our radio.”

  “Why am I supposed to keep mentioning our radio?”

  “So she doesn’t think you expect to be listening to the Stromberg-Carlson with me and her.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re not going to take her up to the master bedroom, I hope?”

  “Jubal, I’m a little more suave than that!”

  “So where will you be?”

  “In the living room! On the davenport!”

  It was Tommy’s idea that the two of us wear jackets and ties. He had bought Rose a gardenia corsage. He’d found a pair of green candles and shaved their ends so they could fit Coke bottles. He’d stripped two pieces of tinfoil from the huge ball Dad kept down in the basement for the war effort and wrapped them around the bottles. He’d cut out place cards for us: an angel for Rose, a star for me, a quarter moon for himself.

  The Stromberg-Carlson was playing softly in the living room. Rose wore a red-velvet dress with a scoop neck and a strand of pearls to match her earrings. She had brown hair like Daria’s, only Daria’s was lighter, longer, softer.

  I wished Daria could have been there. I thought of her all through dinner. I was answering her letter in my mind. I told her that Bud hadn’t gotten hurt because he was a do-gooder. He’d gotten hurt because some locals went after him.

  Bud had taken Sky Hawk to a movie in town. Afterward they’d hitched a ride home with the wrong truckful of rowdies. These hoodlums had called Bud a conchie and poured beer over Sky Hawk’s jacket. The Indian had panicked and run, which was when they took turns holding and punching Bud. They’d told the police that liquor had made the Indian violent. The police had found Sky Hawk and booked him.

  The bananas Foster arrived with blue flames over it.

  Tommy let Rose blow them out, and we all dug in.

  “I suppose you still like to do the dishes all by yourself,” Tommy said to me.

  “Yes. I like to do them and listen to the radio.”

  “I never heard of a boy liking to do dishes,” said Rose.

  “We’ve got a new Zenith radio,” Tommy said.

  “I like to go to bed before the new year’s rung in and listen to reports from all over the world,” I said.

  “Don’t you listen to Radio Dan from right on Pilgrim Lane? He reads the list of last year’s war dead. This year his own son will be on it!”

  “Jubal likes to listen to all the stuff going on in Times Square,” Tommy said.

  “Speaking of being dead, my father’s going to kill me if I’m not home when I said I’d be,” Rose said. “Or he’s going to kill you, Tommy.”

  “Try calling them again,” Tommy said. “I’ll talk to him…. What kind of guy does he think I am?”

  “A regular guy.” Rose laughed.

  While I did the dishes, I heard Tommy calling her father “Mr. Garten, sir.” He told him that the three of us were going to make popcorn and listen to all the excitement from Times Square. He said we’d probably play a game of Monopoly, too. Rose, he said, can sleep in my parents’ room, sir. We boys will sleep downstairs.

  Then he crowed, “Yes, sir!…First thing in the morning, as soon as I shovel out!”

  The snow was already up to the back porch.

  I was finishing the dishes, toying with the idea of taking a chance and calling Daria, when the phone rang.

  “Guess who wants to wish you Happy New Year!” said Lizzie. She had gone back to New York from Virginia. Her Lincoln was in our garage, where she had decided it would stay all winter.

  “Happy New Year, Aunt Liz.”

  “Someone wants to wish you Happy New Year, Jubal. Presenting Yeoman Natalia Granger. Your cousin is a Wave!”

  Tommy was standing in his stocking feet at the edge of the living room. “I’m not here!” he whispered.

  “Natalia’s a Wave,” I whispered back with my hand over the mouthpiece.

  “I’m busy,” he hissed. “I’m not here.”

  “Tommy’s not here,” I said.

  “Hi, Jubal,” Natalia said. “I didn’t want my mother to tell you. I wanted to tell you myself. That was why I was dieting, too.”

  “Hi,
Natalia. Thanks for the books.”

  “You’re welcome. The Fitzgerald is the important one.” I figured that was code for the dirtiest.

  “Okay,” I said. “How do you like the Waves?”

  “She likes doing something for her country.” Lizzie was on the extension.

  “I love the Waves,” Natalia said. “I’m in boot camp.”

  “Where is boot camp?”

  “At Hunter College, here in New York…. Where’s your handsome brother?”

  “Tommy’s not here,” I said.

  “The radio said it’s snowing hard up there. Is the Lincoln in the garage?” Lizzie said.

  After Natalia got off the extension, Mike got on. He said that Bud had had a narrow escape, and that Tommy and I should tell him not to pursue it.

  “Not to pursue what?”

  “Let the police charge the Indian,” Mike said. “Otherwise Bud’s going to be in deep merde.”

  “He’d never let them blame the Indian if the Indian didn’t do it,” I said.

  “The Indian’s in for it anyway,” said Mike. “He tried to run away. Bud will just make things worse if he goes after the locals.”

  “They went after him,” I said.

  Lizzie said, “I don’t agree with Mike, Jubal.”

  “When did you ever agree with me?” Mike said.

  When I hung up, I saw that I’d forgotten the dessert dishes.

  I tried to walk quietly. I could hear the radio playing softly in the living room.

  After I pushed Mahatma out into the storm to do his business and come right back in, I went upstairs.

  I turned on the radio and opened Tender Is the Night, ready to read the good parts. Instead, Natalia had marked a speech made by the hero, a psychiatrist called Dick Diver. He was visiting an old World War I battlefield with friends. He was describing war as a “love battle”—not love of country, but love of a way of life, intense enough to cause men to risk their lives for it.

  In a handwriting that looked exactly like Lizzie’s, Natalia had written in a margin, “Jubal, don’t you feel this yet? I do.”

  I thought of asking her what kind of love battle destroyed major cities like Cologne, Stalingrad, and London. Did it make sense risking your life to kill innocent civilians?

  But nothing I said would change Natalia’s mind, particularly now that she was Yeoman Granger.

  I had myself to change, too. I wasn’t as strong as I’d need to be if the war was still going on in three years. I remembered Christmas night, the tears behind my eyes when the soldiers were singing “Over There,” at the same time I knew Hollywood was doing its best to make war look manly and moral and patriotic. I’d ask myself questions like When you witness, do you cheer your country’s military victories in battles you refused to be a part of? You could lie to yourself that you were only cheering what could lead to the end of the war. But how could you root for our side? When it came to killing civilians, we were as guilty as they were.

  I knew I wasn’t the only one going to sleep nights asking myself things like that. There were rumors that even among Lancaster Mennonites, men took the 1AO classification without the church expelling them now. At SCFS we’d stopped a lot of our classroom discussion about witnessing. There were too many kids with relatives who were choosing to be 1A, not even 1AO. My friend Marty Allen now wanted to join up.

  “Don’t be mad, Jubal,” he’d said. “It’s something I have to do!”

  He had to wait until he was seventeen.

  “I won’t be mad,” I told him. “For certain Quakers I think it takes more guts to be 1A.”

  “How about you, Jubal?” Marty said. “You must have thought about it.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “You want some advice?”

  “That depends.”

  He gave me some anyway. “Stop trying to be Bud.”

  “Do you think that’s all there is to it, Marty?”

  “I know there’s more. But I know you’re not a fanatic. No one can be 4E in this kind of war who isn’t a fanatic!”

  I didn’t tell Marty about my last phone conversation with Bud. He still had broken bones from being beat up, and he was looking into volunteering for some kind of starvation research. He was still gung ho.

  At Friends even the teachers weren’t talking a lot, anymore, about registering 4E. The focus had switched to what Friends would do after the war, how we would help the victims heal, help them find their way back to their cities, and help rebuild their homes. We’d done that after World War I, and we’d do it again.

  I didn’t wait to hear the New Year being rung in on the radio that night. I’d even forgotten to tune in to Radio Dan. Or maybe I forgot to remember on purpose. I didn’t want to hear names of Sweet Creekers who wouldn’t be around anymore, boys a few grades ahead of me, who’d been in Scouts with Bud.

  I also forgot to say my prayers, and I fell asleep with all my clothes on. But I dreamed I was naked and I was downtown on Pilgrim Lane, my hands covering me in front, people pointing at me and laughing.

  When I woke up, the sun was streaming into the room, and I could hear Fast Tom trying to get the Ford started.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Some afternoons I timed Mahatma’s walks so my chances of seeing Daria were better. The Daniels went into their dining room every afternoon at five sharp, since Radio Dan had to be at WBEA at six thirty. Between four forty-five and five I would often be able to see Daria at the piano or the desk in the living room, waiting for her mother to put dinner on the table.

  Tommy was wise to me and asked me if I didn’t think I’d become pathetic. If I was pathetic, and I probably was, he’d been obnoxious ever since New Year’s Eve. He had finally hit 100 on his graph. It was the finishing touch to what Tommy viewed as “manhood.” He dressed almost always in a suit and tie, except when he was at the Harts’ helping with the horses. Even there he sported a new pair of black jodhpurs and black riding boots. He cooked wearing a white apron and white chef ’s hat, and he often served the kinds of desserts that came from the kitchen aflame. My father would simply sit there shaking his head, wincing. I could remember when Dad had liked a little drama, some fun. There was the day, when I was very young, that Bud and his buddies put a cow in the meetinghouse. As people arrived, it was standing there, regarding them. Dad had tried to stop laughing long enough to bawl Bud out, once he discovered Bud was part of it.

  Ever since Dad had come back from Virginia, he’d been crabby and suspicious. He even believed what the local police down there believed: that Bud was beaten up by the Indian…. They claimed Bud was this bleeding heart who’d misjudged the Indian’s killer nature and taken him out of a locked ward to a movie in town! According to them, Bud was lucky the other customers hadn’t been hurt.

  Although Tommy’s relationship with Rose was off and on (off nights she did not want the same thing he did), they were considered a couple in Sweet Creek. For the Valentine’s ball held at Wride Them Cowboy she had been voted Queen of Hearts by the employees of Wride Foods, and Tommy had reigned beside her as the King.

  That March a lot of the kids at SCFS were angry because 800 Flying Fortresses had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin. Then we’d dropped 3,500 on Monte Casino. Somehow it was always worse when America was part of the mass destruction, never mind what was done to us or what the Russians did. How about when 100,000 Germans surrendered at Sevastopol, and were killed by our sweet allies? I’d done a paper about it, earning this comment from my teacher, Mrs. Kruppenberger: “Jubal, war is a lot like nose picking. Nobody does it in an acceptable way. It’s better not to do it at all.”

  March seemed more like April, warmer, and becoming green. I took Tyke up on the trails near Chester Park. I was beginning to think of him as my only buddy.

  Mr. Hart had Quinn out. He was saying his good-bye to him, as all of us were, one way or the other. I’d groom him the next day. His owner was taking him home.

  Tyke had grown fon
d of Quinn, just as I had grown fond of Tyke. I rode Tyke about forty minutes every day, and I told him everything on my mind. I remember that particular March day very well, because I was telling Tyke I wished I could see Daria. Then, in the unbelievable way things happen sometimes, she was right at the bottom of the hill.

  I whispered, “Hey! Tyke! There she is!”

  She had stopped on the path that wound down from the Ochevskys’ and led to the bus stop. She was watching me ride toward her.

  I’d never seen the coat before. It was a brown shade matching her hair. A bright-yellow scarf around her neck. Brown boots with fur tops. I took it all in, the way you try to hang on to your dream when you first wake up because it slips away so fast. But she stood there, and she began waving. There was a grin across her face when we got to her.

  I swung down off Tyke.

  We said these fast hello-how-are-yous, and she asked me almost immediately how Bud was doing. I told her he’d been transferred to Welfare Island, New York. He was entering an experimental medical program there, sponsored by the CPS.

  “Is he well enough after that Indian attacked him?” Daria asked.

  “He’s not in top shape, but neither are a lot of people when they have to go without food. It’s an experiment that has to do with how long starving victims can go without eating.”

  “Bud’s very brave, isn’t he…in his own way.”

  I said, “He’s very brave no matter how you look at it.”

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  I told her the Indian hadn’t attacked Bud, but no one chose to believe that down there. Sky Hawk was charged with the beating despite Bud’s sworn statements to the contrary. But I didn’t tell her Hope’s theory: that Bud had volunteered for a study of starvation because he felt guilty about Sky Hawk. I didn’t tell her that the beating had cost Bud most of the hearing in one ear…. All that sort of thing seemed irrelevant since Dean had been killed.

  “And I hear your mother’s working in the store now,” said Daria.