Most of them dove right in when they were assigned kitchen duty or had to clean the halls or bathrooms. But Pearl had clearly never done a lick of that kind of work in her life. And not only did she not know how, she didn’t like it. But to her credit, she didn’t give up.
Now, though, Lottie saw Pearl begin to move out of the corner of her eye. It seemed a reasonably safe time to do it, if you had to let off some steam, because the nearest drill sergeant had just stalked around their quadrant of the field with a clipboard and was now heading away, back up toward the front of the formation.
But Lottie had also seen Pearl faint before in formation, when they didn’t have to stand for nearly as long as they did today. And this was how it started. The tiniest tremor, then some shifting, and suddenly, she would be toppling over. Other times, the other women had caught her, to the point where it had become something of a joke. But now they’d have to step out of formation to do it and risk their own status in the final exercise—which was no joke at all.
But Lottie could also see another one coming, marching toward them from the back of the column. “Pearl,” she hissed. “Snap to.”
“I can’t do it,” Pearl said, her voice high with stress.
“Shh!” Lottie said, her eye on the drill sergeant striding down their line.
Then, to her surprise, she heard a familiar voice behind her. “Yes, you can,” Maggie shot back at Pearl. Her voice was forceful, but it had none of its usual sneer. She was dead serious. And she was risking her own parade standing, Lottie realized, to bark at Pearl not to lose hers.
“How much longer?” Pearl asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Maggie snapped. “Don’t you dare move.”
“Ladies,” a voice boomed. “Would you care to let us in on your conversation?”
Somehow, Pearl suddenly found it in herself to snap back to perfect attention.
Beside her, Lottie did the same, hoping that maybe the approaching sergeant, a heavyset woman with red hair and an even redder face, hadn’t really seen exactly who was talking.
But her heart sank when the woman came to a stop right in front of her. “Do we have conversations while we stand at attention?” the woman asked, her face inches away from Lottie’s own.
“No, ma’am,” Lottie said, staring straight ahead.
“But you were talking,” the sergeant said.
Lottie hesitated for a moment, then decided the only thing she could do was fess up. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You understand what that means?” the sergeant asked.
The tight knot that had been sitting in her stomach since the opening of the exercise felt as if it had just doubled in weight in that single moment. Was this it? After all she’d done to get here, was she about to wash out because of a stupid whispered comment?
But before Lottie could answer, the sergeant answered her own question. “It means your exercise is going to last longer than all the rest,” she said. “After we’re dismissed, I want to see you stand here at attention until final bell.
“You and your friend here,” the sergeant said, slapping Pearl on the shoulder so hard that Pearl lost her footing and had to come back to attention again.
Then the sergeant sauntered off, back up the line.
Lottie would never have believed that her heart could leap for joy at the prospect of standing at attention for another three hours. But it did.
Pure relief carried her through to the end of the exercise, when all the girls marched off the field and began to disperse back to the dining hall, where a special celebratory dinner was being served.
And it even carried her as the sun slipped behind the buildings and night fell.
But by the time the other WAVES trailed past to their dormitories, full of celebratory good cheer, Lottie felt dizzy and nauseous.
The sergeant returned, her face impassive. After a few more minutes, or perhaps several, the bell finally rang.
“I’m so sorry,” Pearl told her as they shuffled toward the dormitory. “You would have had a perfect final inspection if it weren’t for me.”
That was true, but Lottie didn’t care. Though it would have been nice to have the perfect marks Maggie no doubt had gotten.
Lottie’s stomach let out a rumble.
“I made you miss dinner,” Pearl groaned. “On top of everything else.”
Lottie’s stomach grumbled in agreement, but she shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We both made it through. That’s all that matters.”
Pearl glanced away from her, her expression guilty.
“Hey,” Lottie said, giving her a quick hug. “Please. Don’t worry.”
“I didn’t deserve it,” Pearl said quietly.
“You just get out there,” Lottie said, “and do everything you can to help our boys win.”
Pearl nodded, still looking down as she reached for the door to her room and slipped in.
Lottie opened the door to her own room. Maggie didn’t even look up from the book she had her nose buried in when Lottie entered, and Lottie didn’t dare to interrupt her with a greeting.
But when Lottie looked at her own bed, there was a small plate sitting on it, holding a drumstick and a small pile of green beans. And beside that, slightly smashed on a paper napkin, was a hefty slice of chocolate cake with thick chocolate frosting.
“What’s this?” she asked, her voice loud with surprise.
“Chicken,” Maggie said as if she were talking to a very small and very slow child. “Green beans. Cake.”
“But why?” Lottie said, turning around.
Maggie still didn’t look up from her book, but she raised her eyebrows in annoyance. “Did they feed you dinner out there on the track?” she asked.
“N-no,” Lottie stammered.
“Well,” Maggie said. “There’s your dinner.”
Suddenly, Lottie felt an unexpected rush of warm feeling for her roommate. Maggie had saved all this… for her?
She sat down on the bed and dug into the meal. It was lukewarm but more delicious than any meal she could remember having, no doubt thanks to all the stress of the afternoon.
After a few bites, something began to tug at her. “Did they have a lot left over?” she asked. Maybe someone had insisted she take it with her.
But Maggie just gave her head a little shake. “I had to sneak it out under my jacket,” she said.
For the first time, she looked up from the book and met Lottie’s eyes. “I saw what you did out there,” Lottie said. “Trying to help Pearl.”
Maggie snorted. “I just didn’t want to see her waste all of Uncle Sam’s money,” she said. “Like you rich girls waste your own.”
Somehow, because Lottie had thought Maggie might actually be trying to do something nice for her, the sting of this sharp comment was worse.
Quietly, she got up and dropped the remains of her dinner in the little trash can under their shared desk.
“Princess,” Maggie added.
Nine
“CALIFORNIA,” LIEUTENANT BROWN SAID.
Lottie was so surprised that she wasn’t sure for a moment whether Lieutenant Brown had actually said anything at all, or whether Lottie had just been so nervous that she’d imagined the craziest thing possible while she was waiting for Lieutenant Brown to tell her what her actual assignment was going to be.
The two of them were sitting in a small office that, by the looks of it, had belonged to a classics professor before the WAVES took over this quadrant of the campus. The shelves were stuffed with leather-bound books with Greek lettering in black or gold on their spines, and black-and-white postcards of Roman ruins were scattered haphazardly around the shelves.
Lieutenant Brown herself was seated behind a small desk, piled high with more leather-bound books and papers, where she’d managed to carve out a small space of her own, probably by piling the books that had been there even higher on either side.
On the desk beside her was a small replica of what appeared
to be the explosion of the volcano at Pompeii, complete with brightly painted red and yellow plaster spurting from the mouth of the volcano, in place of the ancient lava.
Lieutenant Brown raised her eyebrows. “I thought you’d have something to say about that, Palmer,” she said.
So she really had said California. Visions of palm trees and wide beaches and unfathomably blue skies began to unfold in her mind, but she still didn’t manage to come up with anything to say.
Lieutenant Brown looked down at her papers. “You’ll be in the airplane mechanical division,” she said.
For the second time in as many minutes, Lottie was sure she was hearing things. She knew how to fix a Bearcat engine, and she was pretty sure she could figure out a jeep. But Eugene had been right that she hadn’t really touched an airplane engine, just managed to find the broken fuel line on her family friend’s plane.
Besides that, she hadn’t known being an airplane mechanic was even a possibility. All the classes and aptitude tests they’d taken had been about shorthand, and typing, and accounting, with a bit of coding thrown in for good measure.
Happiness and confusion struggled on Lottie’s face. “But,” she said carefully, “I didn’t know they tested us for mechanics.”
Lieutenant Brown cracked a brief smile. “We test for everything,” she said, glancing down at Lottie’s papers. “And you scored quite high on mechanical aptitude.”
As Lottie sat there in wonder, Lieutenant Brown’s expression turned more severe. “You think you can do the job, Palmer?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Lottie said immediately. Her confidence came from her heart, but after a moment, Lieutenant Brown’s very first words in their first class came back to her: this was a war, and a matter of life and death. Lottie was confident she could do whatever was asked of her. But she didn’t want her overconfidence to lead to disaster for some American pilot.
“But I’ve never really worked on a plane engine before,” she confessed quietly.
Lieutenant Brown let out a bark of laughter. “I’ve never met a debutante who has,” she said. Then her expression softened by a fraction. “Don’t worry, Palmer,” she said. “They’ll teach you everything you need to know. Whether you like it or not.”
Lottie wouldn’t have believed that Lieutenant Brown’s face could get more serious, but when her brief smile vanished, her features turned even more severe than they had been. “This is a specialized post,” she said. “So you’ll have quite a bit more contact with the men than the other WAVES. I guess I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
Lottie nodded, her mind racing to catch up, although she had no idea what Lieutenant Brown thought that might mean.
“More opportunities to fraternize,” Lieutenant Brown said. “Which I’m sure you understand is grounds for discharge.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lottie answered promptly.
Lieutenant Brown pulled a page from Lottie’s file and held it out.
“It’s quite an assignment, Palmer,” she added. “You should be proud.”
Then she flipped Lottie’s file folder shut and jutted her chin toward the door. “Dismissed,” she said.
Lottie stood, took the paper, and walked out the door. Even in the hallway, reading the letters on the page in all caps for herself, she still couldn’t quite believe it: NORTH ISLAND. The naval air station in San Diego.
Her first thought was how surprised Eugene would be. For a full second or two, she wondered about where she could find the nearest phone, to call him and share the news. Then she came to her senses.
She hadn’t spoken a word to him since she’d walked out on their wedding. But the grooves their long relationship had worn in her heart were still deep. Until now, she’d managed to block out her memories of him almost completely. And something about the victory of actually finishing training must have set them free.
So she pushed the thoughts of Eugene aside and called up images of California—the beaches, the sunshine, and the boats on the endless sea.
By the time she reached her room, the shock had started to wear off, replaced by a growing sense of excitement and a good dose of pride.
All her life, Lottie had been drawn to machines, especially engines. It was in her blood—after all, that was how her father and his father before him had made their fortunes.
But all her life, people had been looking askance at her for her interest in mechanics—sometimes even when it was their car she was in the midst of fixing. She was so tired of the world constantly underestimating her.
But now the US Navy would certify her as a bona fide mechanic. Or at least someone who had enough aptitude to be a mechanic. It was a totally different feeling than any she’d ever had before—a deep shift in the way she saw herself.
For all her confidence, which was famous back in Detroit, and her opinions, which were infamous, there had always been some part of her that wasn’t absolutely sure what she was worth. All her life, she’d been treated as if she were special, simply because of who she was.
Some of the people she’d grown up with seemed to think they mattered more than other people because they had the right clothes, the right address—or the right car. But Lottie felt none of that even mattered at all.
She knew how to do so many things. But how was she supposed to use her talents? What was it all for?
She might not have even been able to put any of this into words—until Lieutenant Brown put her orders in her hand. But as soon as Lieutenant Brown did, Lottie suddenly knew what she had been missing: purpose. A sense of what it was she was put here to do. A sense of how that might actually, ever, help anyone else.
The feeling of knowing her part in things, of having her own special assignment, was so unfamiliar, and so powerful, that it filled her with warmth that radiated toward everything, and everyone, she saw as she headed back to her dormitory.
The peeling paint on the walls looked no longer dingy but homey, and the press of women milling about, crowing about their own orders, or dragging their suitcases and uniforms out of their rooms, seemed like not a crowd but a community.
When Lottie caught sight of Pearl struggling through the door of her room with three pieces of her Louis Vuitton luggage dangling from her arms, she brightly waved and headed toward her.
“Pearl!” Lottie said, running up to give her a hug.
Pearl looked down, but Lottie just grinned. She could barely remember the day before, when they’d spent the extra hour together at the track. How could that matter, now that both of them were off to their new assignments?
“Did you already get your assignment?” Lottie asked. “What did they give you?”
“Virginia,” Pearl said. “Storekeeping.”
From their training, Lottie knew this meant accounting or bookkeeping, to keep track of supplies that were supporting their men at the front.
“That’s wonderful,” Lottie said. “You can do that in a heartbeat. You were always one of the first ones finished with those math tests, and I bet once—”
Pearl looked up and met Lottie’s eyes, and something about the look in them stopped Lottie midsentence.
“Lottie,” she said. “I’m not going.”
“Not going?” Lottie repeated. Her mind ground to a screeching halt, then started to cast around in shock. All that work, all those weeks, all those other women who had washed out—the risk Lottie had taken with her own hopes and dreams, trying to help Pearl reach hers. “Why not?”
Pearl looked down at the scuffed wood of the dormitory hall, shaking her head. “I’m not sure I can do it,” she said.
“Well, the Navy thinks you can,” Lottie insisted. “And they weren’t doing anyone any favors along the way. There were other women who never made it this far.”
“I know,” Pearl said quietly. “But I almost didn’t. I’m not sure I should have.”
“Of course you should,” Lottie said impatiently.
“But what if…” Pearl said, then trailed off.
“What if what?” Lottie said.
“What if I can’t do what I need to do?” Pearl said. “When it really matters? When someone’s life is on the line?”
It was a good question, even though Pearl would be stationed far from any battle. Any mistake any of them made along the way, now that they were really part of the war effort, could be a matter of life and death. But still, it seemed to Lottie like Pearl had chosen the wrong way to think about it.
“Think about all the things you know you can do,” Lottie said. “You know we need someone who can do them. What if we need you, but you don’t come? What happens then?”
Pearl couldn’t bring herself to look back up at Lottie.
“I can’t,” she mumbled. “I don’t think I can.”
For an instant, Lottie could feel the pull that Pearl was giving in to. It would be so easy just to go back to the life she’d known before, a life free of drill sergeants, and mockery, and angry roommates—and danger. A life with her parents, and Eugene. At the thought of him, her heart tugged, as it always did, both drawn back and pushed away by the pain she knew she must have caused him.
But even deeper was a feeling that had gotten her where she was right now: the sense that she had something to give, something to do. She grasped onto it now and pushed away her doubts. And she knew that if she could do that, Pearl could, too.
“Pearl,” Lottie pleaded.
“I’m sorry,” Pearl said, and started off down the hall.
As Lottie watched her go, frustration mounting, she caught sight of Maggie, watching her from their room across the hall.
It was hard not to feel any sense of companionship with someone who had been through everything they’d been through in the past weeks together. And she was still grateful for the kindness Maggie had shown her the night before—even if it had been followed by a nasty swipe.
For Love and Country Page 7