Another Wac approached the counter, and they waited in strained silence while she poured a cup of tea.
Then Brady looked CJ in the eye again. “Is there nothing you want to say to me?”
Was she joking? There were a thousand things CJ wanted to say. But she wasn’t the one with a fiancé.
Brady bit her lip. “I guess that’s it, then. See you around, CJ,” she said, her voice husky, and turned to go.
CJ knew she should let her go. Brady wasn’t likely to come after her again. In fact, she would probably never even look at her again, let alone talk to her. They would pass as strangers in the WAC compound, in the theaters and service clubs around the post, each possibly wishing the other didn’t exist.
She gripped her Army-issue coffee cup tightly. And then, because she couldn’t bear to let Brady walk away, she said it: “Wait.”
Brady paused and glanced back. “Why?”
“Because I miss you.” She sighed a little, knowing she shouldn’t have admitted this fact.
“I miss you.” Brady came closer again. “But you already know that too.”
CJ closed her eyes briefly. “What do you want me to say? You’re engaged to be married.”
“I told you, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You told him you would marry him. That does mean something, at least to me. And to him too, I would imagine.”
Brady exhaled, her shoulders falling. “You’re right. I’m still trying to figure it out.” She hesitated. “What if I weren’t engaged?”
CJ stared into Brady’s eyes with their mismatched colors, at her hair pinned up beneath her garrison cap, at her flushed cheeks. God, she was beautiful. And yet…“I don’t know. I haven’t done any of this before.”
“It’s not like I have.”
“You haven’t?” she asked, trying not to sound thrilled by the news.
“No, CJ, I haven’t.”
Another Wac interrupted to pour a cup of coffee, smiling curiously at them. Brady offered what CJ thought of as her Public Relations Office smile and added powdered milk to her cup, stirring ever so slowly.
“What now?” Brady asked when the other woman was out of earshot.
“I don’t know.” The refrain was beginning to feel familiar. “I guess we keep avoiding each other, or we try to go back to being friends.”
“Friends, then?” Brady asked, flashing one of her disarming smiles. But her eyes held a hint of vulnerability, as if she was afraid CJ might choose otherwise.
As she should. Brady had kissed her, and even though Brady probably didn’t remember, CJ had kissed her too, in the middle of the night in Cloudcroft. They had both crossed that line willingly, and CJ wasn’t sure she could go back.
But what other choice did they have? Avoiding each other made her want Brady more—“the Romeo and Juliet effect,” as her English lit professor had called it.
“Friends,” she said finally, holding out her hand.
Brady took it, and instantly CJ realized her mistake. As long as she didn’t touch Brady, she might be able to pretend they were merely buddies, good old-fashioned Army pals. But with Brady’s warm palm pressed to hers, her long, slim fingers holding CJ’s, the charade fizzled.
“So, friend, do you feel like shooting some baskets this afternoon?” Brady asked, releasing her hand. “Assuming you’re fully recovered.”
“Can I invite Reggie and Sarah?” With friends as buffers, they were less likely to get into trouble.
“Of course. The more D-lites for me to beat, the better.”
“Dream on, Buchanan.”
Maybe this would work. But as she smiled into Brady’s eyes, her stomach lurched.
“See you later?” Brady asked, looking away first.
“Absolutely.”
She ignored the ever-present urge to watch Brady walk away. Everything would be fine, she told herself, heading back to her own table. They were grown women. They could do this.
“You two kiss and make up?” Reggie murmured as CJ slipped into her seat.
CJ shot her a baleful look as Reggie, who had spoken so softly that no one else heard, smiled and bit into a cinnamon roll.
Making up hadn’t been difficult. But not kissing Brady when she knew her feelings were entirely mutual? That would be the hard part.
Chapter Eleven
As Thanksgiving neared, CJ settled back into the pattern she had fallen into before New Mexico. Weekdays were busy with drill, PT, work in the Transient Hangar and occasional dull orientation lectures or extra details, such as scrubbing the walkway outside the barracks. On weekends, she relaxed with her usual group of friends, but now Brady was back with them, sharing drinks at the USO club in El Paso, shooting pool at the EW club, swapping cigarettes on long walks around base and getting tipsy as enlisted women’s bands played big band music late into the Texas night. She and Brady weren’t quite as close as they had been before, but CJ made do with Brady’s continued presence, reminding herself of the other option. Besides, it was self-indulgent to fixate on her romantic life, or lack thereof, with war raging across the globe.
Half a world away in Cairo, President Roosevelt was meeting with England’s Winston Churchill and China’s General Chiang Kai-shek to chart a course for the war in the Pacific. After that he was headed to the Middle East to meet with Churchill and Russia’s Joseph Stalin to discuss strategy for the war in Europe. By the end of the month, it looked like the “Big Three” would have agreed on strategies for defeating the Axis powers on both fronts.
Meanwhile, American and Japanese troops were fighting gruesomely bloody battles in the Gilbert Islands. Every mention CJ caught of the fighting there chilled her because she knew Joe’s division, which had successfully taken Guadalcanal in the Solomons earlier in the year, was either already in the area or on its way. Brady confirmed the week before Thanksgiving that Joe’s division had moved into the Gilberts while Alec’s unit had been mustered into the new Fifteenth Air Force, currently in the process of establishing its headquarters in Italy.
Sometimes when she was feeling sorry for herself, CJ would reread one of Joe’s letters about the shelling his unit had withstood at Lunga Point on Guadalcanal or one of Alec’s missives about the dangers of desert flying in Tunisia. She had joined the Army to help bring boys like them home faster. But while she worked hard six days a week, sometimes so hard that she could barely stay awake after evening mess long enough to complete a single letter, it still seemed as if the government had sent her to a summer camp of sorts where she got to monkey around with airplane engines and, in her spare time, play softball, sunbathe, go to movies and listen to music with friends.
Strange to think that the Army was giving her the space and time she needed to discover who she was—and to meet other people like her. Only childless women or those whose children were no longer dependent were eligible to join up, which made the WAC especially attractive to women whose lives were built around other women. It was ironic, really, that Uncle Sam was paving the way for homosexuals to find one another.
Now that she had named her difference, at least to herself, she went about her Army life with it near the forefront of her mind. At first she tried to tell herself that it was Brady she was attracted to, not women in general, despite her childhood crushes on other girls. She spent a couple of evenings paying extra attention to Jack’s friends Mac and Sam, faithful dance partners to her and the others. But they didn’t make her heart pound or her stomach lurch, and in truth, no man ever had, not even Sean. It would be so much easier if she could feel that way about a man. But while Mac and Sam and thousands of other boys at Bliss were nice, attractive even, they didn’t move her the way Brady did.
Armed with her new insight, CJ watched women dancing at the EW club together, wondering if they were involved. She watched women in the mess hall, trying to figure out which ones were gay from the way they looked and how they interacted with other women. She didn’t know many Wacs who matched the stereotype she’d heard b
andied about in college: mannish women who formed unnatural relationships with other women because they longed to be men. But there were others who looked like Toby and Reggie: not particularly feminine and not overtly masculine. They were somewhere in between—just like she’d always been.
Her little sister, Rebecca, had been a typical girl right from the start—she liked to play with dolls, wore dresses and had little interest in learning about or operating assorted farm equipment. She would rather make a pie crust from scratch than help cultivate a wheat field. CJ, on the other hand, had always been a bit of a tomboy. Early on, her tomboy tendencies hadn’t seemed unusual. But in high school, as girls in her class started to experiment with clothing, makeup and boys, she began to notice her own difference more and more.
One summer night while shelling peas on the back porch, she asked her mother, “Do you and Dad ever wish I was more of a, I don’t know, regular girl? Like Rebecca, I mean.”
Beside her, her mother stopped shelling. “Why would we want you to be someone you’re not?”
Their belief in honoring the individual was what had led her parents to join the First Baptist Church of Kalamazoo, a progressive American Baptist congregation that preached that everyone has the right to have a relationship with God and that no one should tell someone else what to believe. FBCK supported each individual’s right to believe as they saw fit, and refrained from baptizing members into the faith until they were of age to understand the commitment they were making.
Both of CJ’s older brothers had chosen to be baptized, but she hadn’t. By the time she came of age, she had already discovered a latent skepticism that wouldn’t allow her to accept the church’s contention that the Bible was the divinely inspired word of God or that it should serve as the final authority on Christian life.
The war had led her farther from the First Baptist path of peace and social justice. Pacifism was not always the righteous choice. The war had also made her question a notion she had once believed implicitly: that God is deeply and passionately involved in human history. What kind of devoted god could let Japanese soldiers bayonet Chinese infants? Or allow SS soldiers to wipe out entire European villages? Or look on silently as both sides bombed civilian center after civilian center? It seemed more likely that rather than determine the course of life on earth, God now wept for humankind.
Her church would have disagreed with this conclusion, but CJ had made her peace with that aspect of her difference years ago. Now she wondered what the faithful members of the congregation like Mrs. Anderson, her religious education teacher for most of her life, would say if she revealed the yearning in her heart. FBCK members believed everyone was a child of God; would her parents’ closest friends, the Graafs, still treat her with tolerance, kindness, acceptance if she chose to follow the path of homosexuality? Though it wasn’t as if she had a choice. Surely a compassionate God would not create people who loved members of their own sex and then banish them to hell for falling in love. But she knew what Pastor Ben would say to that: “Love the sinner, not the sin.”
As much as she loved her parents and their church, she could not accept that what she felt for Brady was a sin, not when it felt like the only rational thing in this currently fouled-up world.
* * *
CJ’s Thanksgiving KP assignment was fast approaching. The only good thing about having to spend the day in the mess kitchen was that she was going to appreciate Thanksgiving weekend that much more. Non-essential post personnel had both Saturday and Sunday off in recognition of the holiday, and Kate had secured two-day passes for the D-lites. Their destination: downtown El Paso, close and inexpensive, with ready access to Mexico via the international streetcar lines.
It was Toby’s idea to go to the Juarez race track. Her father had loved horse racing, and she had spent her formative summers at Belmont with him, betting on the races and cheering on their picks. Her father always chose horses with unlikely names, she said, like Starstruck Omelet, Son of an Owl or Whistle Pixie.
“The trolley will pick us up in downtown El Paso, take us across the border to the race track and bring us back to the Hilton. What do you say?” she asked, looking around the mess hall table.
“I’m in,” Sarah said.
“Me too,” Reggie said.
“Me three,” Brady added.
CJ glanced at her, startled. Brady was coming with them? Even with half a dozen buffers along, she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to spend forty-eight hours together away from Fort Bliss.
A little while later, when Brady excused herself to take her coffee cup to the window, CJ followed.
“Hold on,” she said, catching up.
“What?” Brady’s smile was innocent.
“Shouldn’t we talk about this weekend?”
“Oh, that.” Brady continued on to the KP window and dropped off her cup, then tugged CJ toward the door. “I wanted to talk to you anyway.”
“You did?”
The thought of a serious discussion with Brady made her sweat, despite the coolness of the late fall evening. Had Brady changed her mind? Did she think they were better off avoiding each other, after all? But if she did, she wouldn’t be making plans to come to El Paso with them, so that couldn’t be it.
Hope began to rise in CJ. For what, she knew exactly, but she didn’t want to jinx it. She stopped the smile threatening to split her face and followed Brady out of the mess hall.
On the porch behind the officers’ quarters, Brady sat down on the top step and offered her a cigarette.
She accepted it, took a puff, but didn’t sit down. Instead she stood, facing her. “What? Tell me.”
Brady looked out across the softball field. The post lights didn’t reach very far inside the fence, which left much of the field dark.
“I wrote to Nate,” Brady said. “I broke off the engagement.”
CJ nearly choked on her cigarette. “You did? When?”
“Last night.”
“And you mailed it?”
“I did.”
Brady had done it. She had actually done it. “Oh my God.”
“I’m not sure God has much to do with this.”
“It wasn’t because of me, was it?” CJ asked, suddenly feeling awful for the Army lieutenant about to receive a Dear John letter post-stamped—ironically—Fort Bliss.
“No,” Brady said, gazing up at her. “Or, well, maybe. I mean, it was mostly because of me. But you figured significantly in the timing.”
“Brady…” She turned away. “I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right.”
Brady came down the stairs toward her. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“It was. It is.”
“Is it?”
She looked at her feet. “It’s all I’ve wanted, ever since I found out he existed.”
“CJ.” Brady reached out and took her chin. “Look at me.”
She did and froze at the look in Brady’s eyes. For a second she thought Brady was going to kiss her right there, but instead she took CJ’s cigarette and stubbed it out.
Suddenly Brady smiled. “You’re it!” And she sprinted out onto the softball field.
Laughing, CJ forgot about Nate. She forgot about heavy bombers and amphibious landings, prisoner of war camps and death marches as she followed Brady into the dark outfield.
“Where are you?”
“Here,” Brady said, materializing in front of her.
They were in the shadows now, but moonlight shone off Brady’s blonde hair and her collar insignia, a bust of Pallas Athene, the WAC’s patron saint.
CJ stopped a few feet away. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You’re free.”
“I am.” Brady paused. Then, in a lower voice, “Come here.”
Hesitantly, CJ stepped forward. The Articles of War, her family, Nate even flashed through her mind. But then she realized that none of those things truly mattered, not at that instant. Life was too fr
ighteningly brief to risk passing up the kind of happiness she felt when she was with Brady. Hadn’t the war proven that you couldn’t take your own continued survival for granted, not for an instant?
Brady met her halfway, and then they were in each other’s arms, CJ’s hands at Brady’s waist, Brady’s hands tangling in her hair. CJ wasn’t sure who started the kiss, but that didn’t matter either. They had both been waiting for this moment. Their lips were soft at first and then firmer as they tried to get closer still. CJ felt Brady’s lips part hers, their tongues touch. She opened her eyes in shock at the sensation. She hadn’t known kissing could feel like this, hadn’t realized her body was capable of such feeling. Then she slid her leg between Brady’s and tackled her to the ground, catching her as they both fell.
“Hey,” Brady said, laughing up at her.
“Is for horses,” CJ said, and then she leaned down and kissed her again.
Beneath her, Brady tugged her closer until CJ’s body pressed against hers, breast to breast, hip to hip. CJ kissed Brady harder, her breathing increasingly ragged. She needed to feel Brady’s skin. She reached for Brady’s tie and tugged it off, dropping it in the short grass. Brady tugged hers off in return, clearly in favor of the plan. CJ had just undone Brady’s top button when she froze. Were those voices?
She lifted her head. The basketball court, bathed in lights from the officers’ quarters, was no longer empty. Reggie, Toby and a few other Maintenance Wacs were out there now, bouncing a basketball as they settled on a game.
“They can’t see us, can they?” she asked, suddenly panicked.
Brady sighed. “No. I promise.”
CJ rolled off and lay on her back, looking up at the wide night sky as her breathing evened out. She couldn’t believe she’d flung caution so far to the wind like that, but it felt good. Better than good. She had kissed Brady, finally, after weeks of dreaming about it.
“Are you okay?” she asked, glancing over at Brady.
In the Company of Women Page 14