The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  I blotched pink across my chest and throat.

  “I don’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “That’s Gordon Nyer,” I said.

  “He’s a wildebeest.”

  “I don’t have a love interest,” I confided.

  “About these things,” Dr. Hall said, “please remember that discretion is best.”

  “Secrecy,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  He opened his hand up for the pad of paper and I handed it over.

  He looked over my notes, made a sound of approval in his throat, and handed them back.

  “You have no problem dictating basic equations and chemical elements?”

  Joy blasted through me. I had impressed him.

  “My father was a science teacher,” I said. “I was forced to do well in school, to read widely, to pay attention.”

  “Well, it seems I’ve finally received an adequate employee. You’ll do Omak Secretarial proud, Miss Groves. Now where were we?”

  I wanted to sing and dance, but I only allowed my toes to wiggle happily in their cramped shelter.

  I’m here. A WAC at Hanford. I’ve done it.

  It was the proudest moment of my life. I tried not to let it go to my head, but I swelled with glory, nonetheless.

  ROUTINES AND DREAMS

  We fell into a rhythm, Bethesda Green and I, waking together, breakfasting together, parting in the mornings but rejoining in the early evening with glad hellos, dining together, falling asleep next to each other in our matching cots. My days were fuller than they’d ever been, and I shared them with Beth the way a devoted preacher shares the Bible, joyfully, euphorically. If I annoyed her, I had no knowledge of it. She seemed as cheerful and receptive as I was.

  Every evening after work we linked arms and traipsed to one of the eight big mess halls for supper, tripping over ourselves to summarize our days. Other girls followed us—Beth’s friendships were many and deep—but she showed no one the attention and affection she accorded me.

  We were served family style in the mess halls, from platters loaded with fresh baked bread, potatoes, baked or grilled meat, simple lettuce salads. The food was better than the food in Omak. At Hanford, there were no rations. For 67 cents a meal, they gave us whatever we wanted, heaping platters of it. They were desperate to keep us here, to stop the hemorrhaging turnover. I surprised myself by how much I ate. Mother hadn’t cooked in years, and I hated cooking, finding it grueling to prep a meal, cook it, eat it, clean up after it, and then begin the whole process again only a few hours later. Here, I felt pampered. Sometimes Beth and I shrieked at each other just to be heard. There were thousands of people in the mess halls at any given moment, and even more waiting for seats. We choked down our food as quickly as possible and barely had time to finish our coffee before we were shooed away from our benches to make room for others.

  “Isn’t this a gas?” Beth liked to say, adoring the crowds and the noise in a way that I found contagious.

  I agreed, smiling. The sight of all of those men guffawing and teasing one another both intimidated and impressed me. There were four times as many men at Hanford than there were women. For the last few years, Mother and Martha were my only acquaintances, interesting creatures in their own respects but not nearly as physical or impetuous as the men seemed. When there was a brawl, and there were many brawls, I found I couldn’t tear myself away. I wanted to watch the men beat at one another until one of them surrendered or passed out. Beth was the opposite: She couldn’t stand the violence. She said it was exactly what was wrong with the world.

  “These boys,” she’d say, rolling her eyes, but I felt that it was bigger than that, because these were full-grown men, and wasn’t it impressive the way they sprang to action rather than simpering and stewing over their troubles like I did? I admired it all. These are the men who will win this war, I thought. I was proud of them for their passion. But I did, briefly, wonder about my father, his shakiness and timidity. Here, he might have been bullied. It was a good thing, I told myself, that he was never allowed into the army. He’d been barred because of his eczema, which embarrassed him deeply.

  The men noticed us the moment we stepped too close. They raised their heads from their plates like mountain lions smelling a doe. When they turned and regarded me with their predatory grins, I awkwardly stumbled or hurried forward, reassuring myself that none of these men were as cruel as they seemed, surely they missed their mothers, their sisters, their wives. Some of them lived with their wives and children on the campus, and some were upstanding family men, I knew, Christian men who went to the campus church every Sunday. They were only fascinated by me, not hungry for me. And if a single one were hungry, so what? Couldn’t it be that beneath that tough, hard demeanor there was a gentle, doting husband, just waiting to be cracked? The men responded to my nervousness like it was a bleeding wound. Their eyes trailed after me, certain I would be an easy target.

  It was Beth, of course, who protected me, who scolded them when the teasing and flirting grew irksome.

  “Leave us be,” she told the men. “We’re not in the slightest bit interested.”

  Because she was beautiful and strong and mean to them, the men respected her. They put up their large, work-torn hands in mock surrender and even apologized.

  When she and I were alone, I told Beth about my job, about Dr. Hall and the sterile, hard beauty of Unit B, and she told me about the clinic, about the horrible accidents that happened almost daily at Hanford. She excitedly detailed the ugliest cases: a terrible burn from a mysterious chemical, broken ribs from a bad fall, a foot crushed in a rotating gear, a rattlesnake bite that led to a foot amputation. She tended to a man who had inhaled something poisonous; his entire throat was as black as charcoal, and when he spoke he issued not words but smoke.

  “His wife will be notified,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing, if he survives. I don’t think he’ll ever speak properly again.”

  We were well into our third week of work. We sat at one of the mess hall’s enormous tables, the length of a Viking ship. Kathy sat with us, which I tolerated but didn’t enjoy, and two other girls from our barracks: Alma—daughter of a Hungarian man and a Mexican woman—who worked the earliest food-service shift, rising long before dawn to bake breads and muffins and cakes; and Susan, from Nevada, who worked in the laundry and smelled always of bleach and lye. Susan worked with a Chinese woman and a Jewish woman. “Melting pot of the world,” she said irritably, but I liked that we heard so many different languages and saw so many different sorts of people. I’d never seen anything like it while living in Omak. I found Alma beautiful, with her coppery skin and her hair as black and shiny as a beetle’s back. She was nicer to me than Kathy, but then, really, anyone was.

  I asked Beth about the poor patient. “What did he inhale?”

  She shook her head. “You know they don’t tell us those things, Milly. It’s all a big secret.”

  I thought of the three words that Dr. Hall made me repeat every morning. Loyalty. Secrecy. Safety. I told her that I was working on a new safety campaign with Dr. Hall and the general manager of the Hanford site, to minimize workplace accidents.

  “Dr. Hall believes we can greatly improve conditions,” I said. “His goal is to make it through an entire year without a single injury.”

  “Then I’ll be out of a job,” Beth laughed. “You must hear interesting details in your job, Milly. Has anyone told you what we’re making?”

  No one had told me much of anything, but I knew from Dr. Hall’s dictation that it was a chemical element needed for the war effort. He called it the product. I almost told her this, but Dr. Hall’s voice spoke to me over the sounds of the mess hall.

  Loyalty. Secrecy. Safety.

  I told her I really didn’t know, and I wasn’t even lying.

  “Well, whatever it is,” she said, “it’ll be great at killing Hitler. It’s maiming men already and we’re not even operational yet.”

  It wa
s then that I noticed Tom Cat, sitting on the opposite side of the table from us a few paces down. He waved at me timidly and I waved exuberantly back. Gordon Nyer was there, too. He returned my gesture with only a crude smile and wink.

  “Don’t encourage Gordon, Milly,” Beth said to me crossly. “He’s got a dirty mind.”

  “He’s full of himself,” I admitted, “but the man next to him is very nice.”

  Kathy laughed. “Good thing, because he’s ugly as sin.”

  “He’s very nice,” I repeated, tensely.

  “He looks like a turtle without his shell,” Kathy said.

  Beth pushed her plate away and stood. “I’m finished. I’m going to go meet the nice man you’re berating, Kathy, and I’m going to go tell the other one to stop staring at us.”

  “Please, don’t,” I begged. “He’ll get cross with me.”

  “Oh, he won’t, Milly, I’ll make sure he’s only cross with me.”

  She set off toward them, and I paled and dropped my eyes to my dinner, staring sadly at my large bowl of canned peaches.

  “You know why she likes you so much, don’t you?” Kathy said, leaning forward onto her sharp elbows. “She’s insecure, and it makes her feel much better about herself to be with someone like you.”

  Alma and Susan stiffened.

  “Don’t tease her, Kathy,” Alma said.

  “Think about it, Mildred,” Kathy said, and I didn’t want to think about it but there it was, an unwanted injection. Her voice was saccharine, thorn-laced. “Well, I’ll see you all later.”

  She rose, leaving her tray with us, and blew us a mean little kiss good-bye.

  When she was out of earshot, Susan leaned forward and said, “She’s just jealous of Bethesda, Milly. Don’t you listen to a word of it.”

  “She’s the one,” Alma said, but their voices were low and unconvincing, and I sensed how they seemed to enjoy Kathy’s cruelty—entertaining if unjust—and I felt alone with the notion that it really did explain so much.

  But I remind Beth of her sister, I thought. Her sad, dead sister.

  I automatically searched for Beth and found her standing beside the shoulders of Gordon Nyer, looking down at his face, and to my dismay she wasn’t reprimanding him at all but laughing with one hand at her throat.

  This underscored Kathy’s point. What was she doing, laughing with the man she disliked? I hurried over to Beth’s side to see what was happening.

  Gordon gave me a huge, friendly smile. “Mildred,” he said. “A sight for sore eyes. Your friend was just telling me what a terrible brute I am.”

  When Beth turned and looked at me, I saw that, yes, she had been laughing, but it was not flirty laughter or kind laughter, it was triumphant laughter, the laughter of someone who understood her own power.

  “I’m sorry if I haven’t been a gentleman,” Gordon said. “I told Beth here I would apologize to you. Despite what she might think, Gordon Nyer is a man of his word.”

  He whipped his long legs over the bench and slipped to the floor in one athletic movement, kneeling on the linoleum before me with his hands folded in prayer. His good eye stared at my face earnestly while the glass eye pointed at my torso.

  “Please forgive me, Mildred,” he said. “It’s only that I like you, you see, and this makes me wrongly attentive.”

  For a moment I wondered if this was the man I’d marry, if this was the beginning of an abrupt and passionate wedding proposal, but then Tom Cat stepped forward and said to me, interrupting, “Hiya, Mildred,” and I knew that I would wind up with someone more like Tom Cat than Gordon Nyer. This didn’t upset me in the least, it was just a firm understanding, like realizing your home will never be a mansion on a hill but a quiet little farmhouse in the valley. I was fine with it, it felt comfortable to me, and I told Tom Cat hello in return.

  Tom Cat moved toward me. “I’m sorry for Gordon’s behavior, too. He has no manners.”

  Gordon rose to his feet and punched Tom Cat lightly on the shoulder. “I’m a man’s man,” he said, but then he bowed to me. I couldn’t tell if the bow was sincere or mocking.

  Another man stood up from his empty plate, his movements rough and loud and meant to grab attention. I recognized him from the Unit B cattle car, a short but powerful-looking man that I’d overheard another guy call “chrome-dome” because of his bald head.

  “Get a load of this,” Chrome-dome said, thumbing at Gordon. “These broads are turning our men into queers.”

  Gordon’s theatrical expression of apology shifted. His face pulled in on itself as though the light in it had been shuttered. He pivoted slowly and addressed his heckler.

  “I don’t think I heard you correctly. Care to repeat that?”

  Chrome-dome dismissed this comment with a smirk and said to Beth, “You rationed, sugar? I ain’t seen a girl like you since San Francisco.”

  Beth soured, taking my arm. “Let’s go, Milly. Nothing but morons today. I don’t care if they kill themselves for our attention.”

  I let her guide me outside. Behind us we heard a bit of noise, some shouting and a scuffle, but Beth didn’t turn around and I didn’t, either, despite the urge to rush back and greedily witness the bludgeoning. Later we heard from Alma that Gordon and Chrome-dome fought, and that the fight was a good one: bloody, vicious, impossible to stop until finally Chrome-dome lay groaning, spitting out teeth, at Gordon’s feet. I was sad I’d missed it.

  Beth was combing my hair on the bed when Alma told us, and she paused for a moment before saying, “Gordon infuriates me. What is it with men? Why can’t they let a silly thing go?”

  “Hard to let it go,” Kathy said, “being called a name like that.”

  I agreed with Kathy, it impressed me that Gordon could stand up for himself, although I would never publicly disagree with Beth so I said, instead, “Gordon’s apology seemed sincere, at least.”

  Beth was silent on that matter. She combed my hair harder so that I winced.

  Kathy said, “I heard Gordon is on probation for a week. If he gets in another fight before Friday, he’ll be gone.”

  Beth’s comb tore through my hair. “Good,” she muttered, but I heard a small catch in her voice, a hesitation. “He’s a troublemaker.”

  “He sure is cute,” Kathy said.

  “He looks an awful lot like Richard Quine,” I agreed.

  Kathy scrunched up her mean face. “Who is that?”

  Beth laughed. “Milly obsesses about that Spokane-born actress, Susan Peters. Richard Quine is her husband.”

  “Richard is very handsome,” I added. “And Susan Peters is wonderful, just wonderful, in Random Harvest. I saw it last year in Spokane and she was there for the showing. I almost met her. She was very pretty and so very nice. I’m saving up for the exact same pair of shoes I saw her wear. I’ve seen them in the Sears Roebuck catalog. They’ll be much more comfortable than my own shoes, which really aren’t my own shoes at all, but my mother’s—”

  “Mildred’s in love with Gordon,” Kathy sang.

  It took me a moment to register her lyrics. It struck me in the skull like a mallet and its aftershock ran haywire through my bones.

  “That’s not true,” I told her. My hands shook as badly as when I fought with Mother. I took a deep breath. “Take it back.”

  She sang it again, in a higher pitch this time, flapping her hands with girlish innocence. Her face was Martha’s face, then Mother’s face, then again, even worse, Kathy’s. I kicked my chair back and approached her with my fists clenched, wanting badly to strike her.

  “Milly,” Beth said calmly behind me. “Milly, she’s only teasing you.” To Kathy she said, firmly, wrathfully, “Stop it right this instant, you hear?”

  When Kathy sang it a third time, I flattened my palms over my ears and shut my eyes and shrieked at the top of my lungs. I’d never shrieked so loudly in my entire life. The size and power of the sound blistered me. I heard the footsteps of a dozen women racing into our corner of the barrac
ks. Kathy backed away from me, hands up, saying, Okay, okay, I’ll stop!

  I was mid-shriek when I blacked out.

  * * *

  Mother and I stood at the river, arguing. Take the bouquet, Mother, I said, Please take it, and I’ll pick up the glass as best as I can, and Mother cried, Leave me alone, Mildred. You are my biggest disappointment. Even those flowers are pathetic.

  A portrait of my father and his glasses lay shattered on the rocks near the riverbank—my fault, of course, but why had she forced me to carry them, when we both knew how clumsy I was?

  The burial was the week before, busy with people from Omak Presbyterian and my father’s schoolroom, but today was supposed to be our own quiet celebration of him, just Mother, Martha, and me. This was Mother’s idea: Bring his portrait to his favorite place on the Okanogan River, bury his glasses on the bank, say a few good words each about his impact on us. I was surprised—stirred, even—by Mother’s desire for such a spiritual ceremony. Her imagination had always before struck me as limited and barren, a dispirited purgatory emptied of all affection, but this intention came from a lovely garden in her I hadn’t known existed. She’d loved him, after all. I’d been content about all of this until three minutes before, when I’d tripped and cried out in horror as all of the breakable objects flew from my arms and crashed onto the stones.

  When I looked up, Mother glared down at me. Her black hair and strong shoulders blocked out the sun.

  I smelled her moss-laden disappointment, rich and deep, and the pain of the impact rang in my palms and wrists and knees.

  Martha wasn’t there yet, busy parking the car in the dirt lot half a mile away, but when she descended she’d pour her rancor into Mother’s rancor and I’d drink the contents down, choking. The shards of glass winked grimly on the uneven terrain, scattered across stone and sand. I looked down at the flowers in my right hand, pretty purple echinacea, coneflowers that Mother called a sad excuse for daisies—didn’t she remember they were Father’s favorites?—and my fist gripped the stems so tensely that my knuckles whitened. Mother reprimanded me for letting her down, for ruining everything, for destroying even this small celebration of my father’s life.