She glanced at Brady in the driver’s seat, bare arm hanging out the open window. They were both in shirt-sleeves and skirts, hastily shed summer uniform jackets and ties in the back seat along with their barracks bags. Brady’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, her blonde curls swept up off her forehead like Rita Hayworth. She truly was beautiful.
“What?” Brady asked, glancing at her quizzically. “Do I have egg on my face?”
“Of course not. I was wondering… You haven’t said much about your first trip to White Sands.”
“It was last spring right after we arrived.”
“Did you go with Janice?”
“Among others.”
“Oh.” CJ tried to keep her tone disinterested.
“You know, she’s all right when you get to know her.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Brady frowned. “I thought you were trying to get along better.”
“We are. I’m just being a brat. Ignore me, okay?”
Brady lifted her hand from the wheel and captured CJ’s, giving it a squeeze. At the same time, she flashed one of her mercurial smiles. “I could never ignore you.” Then she let go of CJ’s hand and turned her attention back to the road, humming with the music as she guided the car along the southwest edge of the Franklin Mountains.
“Anyway,” CJ said, trying to pretend Brady’s words didn’t affect her, “are you still up for brunch in Las Cruces?”
As they followed the two-lane highway along the Rio Grande past ranches and historic adobe settlements, they discussed the plan for their New Mexican getaway: brunch and shopping in Las Cruces, hiking in White Sands National Monument, an overnight stay in Cloudcroft and a hike in the Sacramento Mountains before hitting the road back to Bliss. Another time they would visit Carlsbad Caverns, they agreed.
“Too bad we’re not camping,” Brady said. “I could go for s’mores.”
“Were you a Girl Scout?”
“Naturally. Wasn’t it a prerequisite for joining the Wackos?”
CJ would have bet Molly, her childhood horse, that Janice had never seen the inside of a Girl Scout uniform. But she kept the churlish thought to herself.
Twenty-five miles in, they crossed the border into New Mexico. By the time they reached Las Cruces forty-five minutes later, they were ready for their first stop: hot cakes and hash browns at the least mess hall-like restaurant they could find.
Main Street was dusty and wide, with a view of the nearby mountains and the occasional hitching post for those who preferred a more traditional mode of travel. With automobile companies contracted out to the government to build war materials and “new” cars from the 1942 government stockpile only available to specially designated “essential drivers,” cars were increasingly difficult to come by. Gasoline and tires were rationed, and the national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour was intended to preserve both—though CJ was pretty sure Brady had reached nearly double that limit during the drive from El Paso.
“It looks like a movie set,” CJ said, looking up the long street with its brick and sandstone buildings standing shoulder to shoulder, awnings brightly colored, paint on the windows fresh.
Brady parked the car on an angle between an ancient Ford truck and a shiny recent model Chrysler.
“You know,” she said as she shut off the engine, “cold s’mores are pretty good too. Do you think they have marshmallows at Woolworth’s?”
“I doubt it. But fortunately, it turns out the PX really does have almost everything.”
Brady lifted her, eyes wide. “You brought marshmallows?”
“And graham crackers and Hershey’s bars. You know the Girl Scout motto: Always—”
“Be prepared.” Brady reached across the front seat and hugged her. “I knew I brought you along for a reason.”
Eyes closed, CJ inhaled the scent of strawberries and lavender that seemed to follow Brady. If she’d known all it would take was a few marshmallows to get Brady to hug her… Wait. Where had that come from?
“And here I thought it was for my conversational skills,” she said, slipping from Brady’s grasp.
The café they settled on had wide windows open to the sun and sky. A grandmotherly waitress took their order, insisting on giving them the serviceman’s discount.
“You girls are in uniform,” she said, patting CJ’s shoulder. “You deserve it. Thank you for what you’re doing to bring our boys home sooner.”
“You’re welcome,” CJ and Brady said together, exchanging a look.
The men at Bliss more often than not gave them grief for daring to “impersonate” soldiers, while many El Paso residents seemed tired of soldiers in general, possibly because GIs had the unappealing habit of drinking too much at downtown bars and getting sick in bushes and trash cans. But the people of Las Cruces didn’t appear to be fed up with soldiers. Far from it. Everywhere CJ and Brady went, men and women and even children smiled and thanked them for their service.
Shortly before noon, they headed back to the car, weighed down by gifts for their families and far-flung friends: pottery from a local artist for their mothers, a Mexican blanket for CJ’s father and postcards for college friends. Brady, CJ noted, hadn’t picked out anything for her fiancé.
“Apparently the good people of Las Cruces haven’t heard the rumor about two hundred Wacs being sent home from Tunisia pregnant with illegitimate children,” Brady commented.
“Or the story about Wacs in Des Moines buying up all the diapers in town before shipping out,” CJ added.
“Even I haven’t heard that one.”
“Sadly, it happened—the women were told there wouldn’t be any sanitary supplies where they were going overseas, so…”
“Well done, US Army. I can imagine the genius who came up with that helpful tip.”
When they reached the car, Brady unlocked the passenger door and held it open with a slight bow.
“Thanks,” CJ said, smiling at her as she climbed in. When Sean had held doors for her, it seemed patronizing. With Brady, the gesture simply felt friendly.
They drove in silence for a little while, the mostly empty highway taking them east toward the northern tip of the Organ Mountains, whose rocky spires rose high above the desert floor. In mid-November, the landscape was a nearly uniform dull brown and yet a tad less barren than West Texas. Another state, CJ thought, counting them up in her head. So far she had visited twenty-nine. She hoped someday to make it to all forty-eight.
“Did you know that New Mexico and Arizona were the last states admitted to the Union?” she asked.
“In nineteen twelve, right?”
“Right.” CJ paused. “Why do you know that?”
“Because I’m from California,” Brady said, as if she were stating the obvious.
They rode on in silence again, CJ trying to gauge Brady’s mood. At brunch she had seemed happy to be away from base, tackling her stack of hot cakes with gusto and trying on hats afterward at Woolworth’s: ladies’ sailor caps, shakos, pillboxes, feathered homburgs and CJ’s favorite, an ostrich feather-veil combination of the sort that Brady claimed several of her classmates’ mothers had worn to graduation. But somewhere between the shops and the car she had gone all quiet, and CJ wasn’t sure now how to cajole her back into her former good mood.
Soon the road began the ascent to a pass between the Organ Range and the San Andres Mountains. After climbing more than fifteen hundred feet, they neared a sign that read, “San Augustin Pass, Elev. 5719 feet.”
“Look behind us,” Brady said, nodding at the rearview mirror.
CJ turned, her eyes widening—to the west lay the Rio Grande Valley with Las Cruces in the foreground and layers of mountains receding into the distance.
“I still can’t get used to seeing mountains,” she said.
“You mean there aren’t any in Kalamazoo? What a surprise.”
“The closest range is in the Upper Peninsula. What about you?”
“L.A. is
surrounded by mountains. So is Smith. Every autumn the Smith president gives the college the day off for Mountain Day. We usually went hiking on Mount Tom or Mount Holyoke. They’re small, maybe a couple of thousand feet high, but they’re beautiful, especially in the fall when the leaves turn.”
“You sound like you miss it.”
“I do. It’s funny, but when I was there I missed California. Then after college I went home, and I missed western Massachusetts. It’s as if my heart is permanently divided between two places that feel like home.”
CJ couldn’t imagine what having more than one home would feel like. Despite her grandmother’s influence, she had never seriously considered leaving Michigan for higher education. Not many of her high school friends had even gone on to college, mostly boys who had ended up in Ann Arbor, at State in East Lansing or at Kalamazoo College. No one she knew from home had gone away to the East Coast. At Michigan, however, several of her classmates had hailed from New York and Massachusetts. Even after a few years in the Midwest, her Eastern friends got Missouri, Mississippi and Minnesota confused. “Those darned M states,” they would say, shrugging helplessly.
How different might her life have been if she had gone to Wellesley, after all, or even Smith? Would she and Brady have met in Massachusetts? Would they have become instant friends like they had at Bliss, or had Brady cleaved to a different crowd there, one that could never accept a girl who liked cars and slave narratives and vegetable gardens? Fortunately, or perhaps not, there was no redoing the past.
A verse from a Robert Frost poem that had experienced a recent resurgence crept into her mind:
…The same
Grim giving to do over for them both.
She dared no more than ask him with her eyes
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.
She closed her eyes. The poem was from the first war, the so-called Great War, but the sentiment was as apt now as it had been then.
“Okay?” Brady asked, interrupting her bleak musing.
“Of course. Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” she added, even though the odds of finding a station this far from civilization seemed slim.
“Of course not,” Brady said, smiling at her across the gap between them. The expression seemed tentative somehow.
Without thinking, CJ covered her hand on the steering wheel. “Are you okay driving? I wouldn’t mind taking over if you’re tired.”
“I’m fine right now, but maybe after the next stop.” She hesitated and then focused on the road again. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“So am I.”
CJ felt warmth seeping through her, chasing away the melancholy induced by Frost’s poem. Reluctantly, she let go of Brady’s hand and reached for the radio dial, stumbling eventually across a faint Alamogordo station playing popular big band tunes.
On the east side of the pass, the road curved to reveal a long, smooth valley that stretched as far as she could see. In the distance, low on the horizon, there was snow. No, sand. White Sands. Soon they would get a closer look at the unusual geological formation that Hoover had set aside as a national monument during the last days of his presidency.
The dunes came closer and closer, sometimes in sight and sometimes not, sometimes drifting right up to the edge of the highway only to recede again. Then, all at once it seemed, they reached the signed turnoff to the park. Brady almost drove past it and hit the brakes, laughing.
“Some navigator you are,” she said, turning the car onto the park road.
“I can’t help it if you like to speed.”
“Are you saying you don’t?”
She had a point.
The visitor center, a low, brown adobe building that blended into the desert landscape, sat just inside the park’s entrance.
“Want to visit the museum?” CJ asked.
“Of course,” Brady said, peering at her as if she suspected CJ had perhaps gotten too much sun. “We’ll need a map too.”
A stop at the visitor center wasn’t necessarily a given, CJ thought as they exited the car. Toby and Reggie, if they were along, would probably want to drive out into the middle of the dunes and pelt each other with handfuls of sand crystals. Not that there was anything wrong with that. If they had been along, she would have joined them. Still, it was nice to be with someone whose approach matched hers.
Inside, the building was surprisingly cool, its thick walls ably blocking the sun. An older woman greeted them, her gray hair pulled back in a neat bun.
“Welcome,” she said, smiling at them from behind a nearby counter. “Are you gals up from Texas?”
“Yes, we are.” Brady returned her smile.
“We do see a lot of you up here,” the woman said. “But you two picked the perfect time of year, not too hot and not too busy.”
The attendant—Marge, according to her nametag—gave them a quick rundown. The entry fee was waived for active military, given they were government employees, and maps were free to all visitors. The museum cases in the other room focused on three topics: the origins of the dunes, the ecology of White Sands and the ethnology of the Mescalero Apache and Spanish explorers.
At the first case they stood shoulder to shoulder reading about the history and ecology of the Tularosa Basin, home to the 275-square-mile sand dune field—the largest in the world.
“Listen to this,” Brady said. “‘During the last ice age of the Pleistocene era, a large lake known as Lake Otero covered the basin. When the lake dried out, it left behind large gypsum deposits in the San Andres and Sacramento Mountains.’ Amazing to think this area was covered by a freshwater lake, isn’t it?”
“I know.” CJ skipped ahead. “‘Unlike quartz-based sand crystals, gypsum does not easily convert the sun’s energy into heat. This means that the dunes at White Sands can be walked on safely with bare feet even in the hottest summer months.’ That’s right. I remember learning that in my geology course in college.”
“You took geo?”
“I may have been a tad obsessed. My friends called me RH for a while—you know, for rock hound?”
Brady laughed. “That’s nothing. My friends started a ‘rock jar’—every time I tried to share what I found to be a fascinating geological fact about the Holyoke Range or the impact of the ice age on the Connecticut River Valley, I had to add a nickel.”
Laughing too, CJ moved on to the next display case. Though she’d already known of Brady’s cerebral tendencies, she couldn’t help but enjoy digging deeper into Brady’s intellectual interests, especially when the passion was something they shared. Back in Michigan, she had loved the duality of her life as a laborer on her family’s farm, getting her hands dirty and watching the literal fruits of her labor bloom and ripen, balanced against the work of a student, losing herself in the letters and diary entries of those who had come before. She missed that duality now, but less somehow when she was with Brady.
As she leaned over the display dedicated to area flora and fauna, she felt Brady’s gaze on her.
“What?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you.”
CJ narrowed her eyes teasingly. “Which, of course, you mean in a good way.”
“I mean it in the best possible way,” Brady said, her words accompanied by a penetrating look.
“I haven’t met anyone like you either,” she admitted. Then, aware of Marge’s presence in the next room, she turned her attention back to the hearty shrubs, grasses, birds and other critters that called White Sands home.
After a moment, Brady came and stood close to her again, peering through the glass. Soon they were giggling over the strange names of the many different varieties of lizard in the park, from the little striped whiptail and common side-botched to the greater earless and bleached earless.
“Did you read this part?” Brady asked, pointing.
“How brown
lizards evolved into white lizards in order to blend into their environment?”
“Isn’t that incredible? I love biology,” Brady said, her eyes glowing as she peered into the case where rodent skeletons, molted snake skins and insect cadavers shared the shelves.
“You do?”
“I minored in it. I’d like to become a science writer someday, if anyone would hire me.”
“Why someday?” she asked. “Why not now?”
“Well, there’s this little thing called the Army.”
“You know what I mean.”
Brady shrugged and looked down at her hand, spinning her engagement ring around. “I haven’t figured it all out yet.”
Usually CJ could forget about Nate and the domestic future awaiting Brady at war’s end, assuming Nate made it home safely. There was no reason to expect otherwise—Brady had told her that he was an officer in the AFHQ Signal Section, where he was tasked with trouble-shooting communications switchboards first in North Africa and now in Italy. In both places he’d been stationed well behind the front lines and had yet to come under fire. Mostly he wrote to her about parties at the officers’ club and meetings with members of the British communications command, who’d reminded him of Harvard men, he said: supercilious and full of themselves.
CJ didn’t want to think about him, didn’t want to picture Brady playing house with a bright Yale alumnus she had known nearly all her life. She couldn’t see this Brady, her Brady, settling into such a life.
“Fortunately,” she said, reminding herself as well as Brady, “you have plenty of time to figure out what you want.”
Brady stopped fidgeting. “You’re right. Speaking of time, I’m hungry again. What do you say to a picnic on the dunes?”
“I say lead away.”
In the Company of Women Page 8