by Marge Piercy
In his last letter, Jeff had written that he might not be in touch for a while, but that she was not to worry. He too was going to do what he most wanted. She knew he could not explain, but he sounded glad. His letter was scrawled in an uncharacteristic hurry, some words unclear.
Back at Romulus, rumors were flying in the mess. Helen learned that women from the class just after theirs were working at Camp Davis, on the edge of the Dismal Swamp, towing targets for gunnery practice—towing a muslin sleeve behind the plane so that artillery students could practice with live ammunition, or diving at the students as if to strafe or bomb them. Helen had also heard the women were having a hard time of it, lots of trouble from base personnel and planes that threatened to disintegrate.
“What it means,” Bernice said, “is that Cochran is pushing on the Army for us. That we’re going to get to do more interesting things than deliver trainers. Not that I’m complaining about what we’re doing, but maybe they’re going to let us take over more noncombat functions. There’s no limit to what we could do even if they won’t let us fly overseas.”
“I met a woman,” Flo said, “who said she’d flown for the British, ferrying planes around England, long before they let us start here. I don’t see why they won’t let us deliver the planes overseas. They won’t even let us take them up to Alaska. It’s silly.”
“Hey, girls, you got your picture in Collier’s.” One of their mechanics tossed a magazine on the table.
“Let me see!” Flo grabbed it and flipped the pages.
Helen said, “I wish she’d given us some warning. My hair looks as if I’d combed it with a propeller.”
Bernice had never seen many pictures of herself. She was the tallest of the women and the broadest shouldered. The picture seemed to center around her and the plane behind them, a Douglas Dauntless that happened to be sitting there. “It’s too bad you’re not a man, Bernice,” Lorraine said, tossing her pert head. “You’d be so good-looking.”
“Like my brother,” Bernice said, but she felt herself turning red. She kept thinking of South Carolina.
“Lorraine, has anybody ever told you you’re an asshole?” Flo said loudly. “Bernice looks fine. Some like them big and some like them small, but I don’t know nobody who likes them as mean as you.”
The others were giggling that night as she was trying to go to sleep about something called The Mile High Club, which consisted of women who had screwed while aloft in a plane. You couldn’t do it in the small planes of course. That such a rumor was going around meant to Bernice just one interesting thing: Somewhere women were being allowed to fly bombers, where they probably had male navigators. If women were flying big planes, she wanted to be one of them.
One Friday she returned from a trip, hitched a ride to the camp and found a message waiting for her, along with several copies of Collier’s that had come in her absence. The message said that Major Zachary Taylor was in town, staying at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, and would like her to call as soon as she arrived.
It was actually the next morning before they managed to get on the phone together. “Zach! I thought you were in England. Is Jeff with you?”
“Not this time, Bernie. He’s wandered off on his own, the ungrateful little tramp. I’ll give you all the news over supper. Have you something you can wear here? Or will you arrive in your overalls, and we can have room service?”
“I have a dress. It isn’t too fancy.…”
“I’m indifferent. We simply want to glide by the management. I’ll pick you up from the sticks at six.”
“How?” she asked bluntly. “Surely you don’t have a car?”
“They hire out, even in such frontier outposts. You see them on the streets painted yellow or green with little lights.”
Until she told Flo and Helen about her evening plans, she forgot that she had made use of Zach to give her a man in her past.
“Zachary Barrington Taylor. Where does his family live?” Helen asked.
“Chicago.”
“In the city?”
“No, north. On the lake.”
“What town?”
“Lake Forest.”
“That’s all right. Their money is from …?”
“How do I know? Zach worked in insurance for a while. My goodness, Helen, he can pay for the cab even if it would be a small fortune to me, don’t worry about it. He’s not living off his military pay.”
“Is he commissioned?”
“The note says major.”
“Better and better. He hasn’t been able to forget you …”
“Helen, he’s in a strange town and bored. I’m one of the few people he knows around here. If he knew you, he’d call you up.”
“You can use my Arpège,” Flo said. “And I’ll do your hair. I’ll paint your nails too. Now what are you going to wear?”
“He said I had to wear a dress, so we can eat in the restaurant.”
“Well, of course you’ll wear a dress! We’re not all crazy.” Flo gave her behind a swat.
“I prefer the tan gabardine pants and a white shirt.”
“Not on a date, silly!” Flo seized her by the arm. “We’ll get started right now.”
That was the day’s activity: fixing up Bernice. She was so sorry she had told anybody she was seeing Zach that she could have kicked herself twice around the field. She had not spent a more uncomfortable day since she had graduated from the hotbox where they learned instrument flying at Avenger. She felt entrapped in her own lies about the nature of her relationship with Zach. He would find her gussied-up appearance peculiar and might even think she was interested in him. She had never been sure she had managed to conceal her long crush. If only she had kept her mouth shut and simply vanished at six o’clock!
Oh well, it would shut Lorraine up. In all the primping and fussing, she almost forgot to anticipate actually seeing her old friend. She would have news of Jeff. Zach would tell her whether or not he was supposed to, she was sure of that.
The thing that made her really unhappy as she waited for him, already half an hour late, was that she could not meet him on the field in her flying gear. What she longed to do was take him up and show him how she handled a plane now. She wanted to show off to him. Instead here she was stuffed into her only good dress, which was fortunately simple and lacking even one flounce or ruffle or sequin—an absence mourned all afternoon by Flo—with her hair distributed unnaturally about her head, drenched in Arpège and wearing Helen’s pearls and Flo’s earrings, tripping along on wedgies with bows borrowed from the only other woman on the base with close to her size feet. She had no silk stockings, and while nobody would go quite far enough to lend her any, Flo had carefully painted Bernice’s legs.
It was close to seven when Zach arrived in a checker cab to fetch her. Flo and Helen managed to be on hand, so she had to introduce them. Zach was polite but perfunctory, hurrying her into the cab. She had remembered his height but not his breadth. As he gave her a quick buss hello, he surrounded her. His ash blond hair was worn long for the military.
He had seen the Collier’s piece. “I come back and find you famous. I bet The Professor is furious.”
“He won’t even write me.”
“I’ve seen his letters to Jeff. You’re better off without.”
“Why are you wearing that black armband?”
“Oh, let me remove it.” He did, examining it as if to read something from it, before he opened the cab window and tossed it out into the brisk September evening air. “That’s why I’m back in the States. My father and my older brother were hit by a train at a grade crossing in Kansas where they were off inspecting a plant we own.”
“That’s horrible, Zach. They were killed outright?”
“Immediately. In fact there wasn’t much intact, if you see what I mean. They gave me compassionate leave.”
“What a shock, losing your brother and your father at once.”
“Come on, Bernie, you know bloody well I detes
ted my father, and he had nothing but contempt for me. I’m the black sheep. My brother was the good son and I was the bad son, and now I’m the whole show. The one I feel sorry for is Mother. She’s collapsed and under sedation. She’s going to have a hard time, because whether she actually loved the old man or was just used to having him squatting on her head, she feels lost. I’ve done what I can, stuck my thumb in the business, but it should run itself just fine.”
“I know your history with your father, but those things can get you. I never thought I’d feel guilty leaving home after being a live-in servant for years, but I did.”
“Ah, but you’re softhearted, while mine has been hardened by the slings and arrows of this world, till it resembles a granite monolith.”
“It’ll probably hit you after the war.… How is Jeff?”
“And where is he? I’ll tell you later.” He gestured toward the cabbie who was obviously listening.
He waited to resume the conversation about Jeff until they were seated at a table in the Hawaiian Room, with paper leis around their necks and tall fruity drinks sprouting parasols before them, eating a sweet pork dish. “He’s in France. Gone off on his lonesome and become a spy.”
“Jeff?” She stared into the plate before her, trying to imagine what it must feel like to be alone in enemy territory. “They shoot spies, don’t they? If they catch them?”
“Hitler’s orders. Special operations, guerrillas, partisans, parachutists, all of us are shot. But it was a damned fool thing to do. Our branch is just getting into high gear. He’s too impatient.”
“I wish he hadn’t done that, Zach. It frightens me.”
“As well it should. It frightens me.” He took her hand for a moment and squeezed hard. “Buck up. You had better believe that I tried every argument and every trick in the book to get him to change his stubborn, foolish, arrogant little mind. And I failed.”
“He didn’t write anything about it to me. Only that he was going to do something he really wanted to. But why?”
“I don’t know.” Zach frowned. “But I feel we owe it to him to figure it out together.”
“I know he was upset about the English girl who died.”
“Oh, her.” He waved off the memory of Mary Llewellyn like a pesky fly. “The only reason he made such a fuss was because she talked up his painting and because she did die, which made her unique, you see. He didn’t leave her. She left him, and irrevocably. Like your mother.”
Drinking the tall pineapply drink he had ordered she shuddered. “I’m sorry. I feel as if we’re in this garish place surrounded by death.”
“Drink up and we’ll go. I’ve had enough of this fruit salad decor and those whining musicians. I have some nice scotch, and we can talk where it’s quieter.”
“What was in those drinks?” she asked as they rode up in the elevator. “I thought they were like Shirley Temples, at first.”
“Rum, by gum. But you always could hold your liquor like a little trouper.”
“Little?” she laughed. “Who else on earth would call me little?”
“All things are relative.” He loomed over her, taking her arm. “Come along, this way. I have the corner suite.”
There were two rooms. The living room had a sofa that faced the windows on the corner of the building. He turned out the light and opened the draperies. Detroit was dimmed out, but not as dark as the coastal cities, and the moon was bright. He sat beside her on the couch pouring scotch into two tumblers. “You’ve turned out nicely, don’t you think?”
“Me?”
“I wasn’t speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“I am proud of myself. You were the one who taught me to fly, and for years, I wasn’t sure you’d done me a favor. I felt I’d been given a door into freedom and then denied entrance.”
“Why didn’t you leave home years ago? Look at Amelia Earhart. Wasn’t she a heroine of yours?”
“I had to take care of my father. I worked part time and I spent what I made on lessons. It took me years to get my commercial license—eight of them.”
“Oh, if it was money, you should have asked me.”
“Zach, how could I have done that?”
“By phone I would suppose, by letter, by cable at last resort.”
“Zach, come on! Both Jeff and I have been on the short end of things for years. He wanted to go to art school abroad. The last thing he wanted was to spend years of his life harvesting wheat and building roads and planting trees.”
“Oh, I rather think he liked being on the road.” Zach sniffed at his scotch appreciatively. “He liked loving them and leaving them. He liked walking or hitching away from whatever messes he created or blundered into. Freedom can be an addiction, potent as any other.”
“Perhaps. But I’d guess he was making the best of second best.”
“He’s always been a hero to you, hasn’t he?”
“Not at all. I’m just close to him. We were all each other had after our mother died. I see his faults, Zach, how could I not? I got stuck and he could walk out. But that doesn’t mean I don’t also understand his disappointments and frustrations.”
“Closer than to anyone else. I suspect that’s always been true, au fond.”
“Of course.” Surreptitiously she kicked off the borrowed shoes, wriggling her numb toes.
“Siblings don’t automatically adore each other. I was never close to my older brother. I found him a pompous and nasty bore, who tried, unsuccessfully once I caught up to him in size, to bully me. Your closeness was unusual and fascinating. It seemed at times to border on incest. But you never did consummate it, did you?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“You think those things never happen?”
“Not with Jeff! How can you even imagine that?” She felt as if Zach might have seen some flaw in her she had overlooked.
“I see things other people may be too banal to imagine. And I act on them. I taught you to fly. That gives me a kind of permanent interest in what you do with it, and I’m very pleased right now.”
“If I could take you up! I’d love that.”
“It can be arranged.”
“Oh, you can’t guess the number of regulations that hem us in …”
“I have a few friends and more than a few acquaintances. I have certain powers.” His arm that lay along the back of the couch fell hard on her shoulder and he turned her to face him. “I have one theory about Jeff’s flight into spydom. That he was getting away from me. He found me too demanding.”
“Jeff finds everybody too demanding.”
“Except you.”
She shrugged under his hand. “What do I demand?”
“That’s it, exactly. Did you ever happen to guess, when the three of us were playing musketeers together, that Jeff and I were lovers?”
“No.”
“You never guessed. Yet you don’t seem shocked. You should be fainting.”
“I don’t know how to say this, but perhaps I don’t know enough about the subject to be shocked by what other people do. I knew you had some special kind of intimacy, but probably I wouldn’t have put the label lovers on two men.”
He smiled wryly, his hand still heavy on her shoulder. “I seduced him, of course. Now it’s your turn.”
She heard her breath exhale. I am drunk and this is not happening. She said that aloud. “I am drunk. This is not real.”
“You are not drunk. You shouldn’t tell yourself such nonsense. You have a pleasantly relaxed buzz and nothing more. I would under no circumstances get you drunk before laying you. And what in hell else do you suppose I came to Detroit to do? I have a nice official cover, but that’s my aim.”
“This is insane! Are you playing an elaborate joke?”
“I’d like you better in your flying gear, as you like yourself better, but I couldn’t think how to arrange things that way tonight. Come.” He pulled her to her feet. “You always did want to do this. It’s time.” With the one hand still grip
ping her shoulder, he zipped her dress down.
She stood there in her slip, with her dress around her bare feet, and could not move. She felt as if all her gears had locked, her rudder unresponsive. She was frozen with fear and she simply did not believe what was happening. “Zach, this is a bad mistake! It’s ridiculous. What do you want with me? Yes, I had a crush on you. I always hoped you hadn’t noticed. But that was when I was a kid!”
“Then you were green, and now you are ripe.” He kissed her, his hand sliding down to her buttocks. When he stopped, he gripped her, saying, “I don’t believe it, but you’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
“Do you see, it’s ridiculous! A virgin at my age. I don’t even know what to do. You could find a million women who would know exactly how to do it and how to please you.”
“Bernice, little buttercup, I can please myself very well, thank you. Now come along: I’ll teach you a different way to fly. Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Of what?”
“Wanting what other women want. Wanting what I’m not fit for. Settling for what other women settle for.”
“But I am nothing to be settled for, I’m the caviar of lovers, Bernice. I made you what you are today, and I am very very well satisfied. Come along.” Vigorously he pulled her toward the bedroom. “You owe me a little return, and your virginity while admirable is about to meet its just desserts.”
Reluctantly she dragged along but as she saw the bed, she dug in her heels and grasped the lintel. “No. This isn’t what I want.”
“Bernie, it is, you simply don’t know yet.” He stroked her back as if she were a large cat. “The kingdom of touch awaits us. Isn’t it time? Besides, I’m done arguing. You’re a great big strong woman, but I am stronger than you and I know lots of nasty tricks. It’d be very undignified to flop about on the floor making ugly noises, and end up the same way with bruises that will need explaining.”
She let go of the lintel and stood dumbly, flat-footed. Zach laughed and picked her up in a fireman’s carry, dropping her gently on the bed, and then undressed methodically, placing his clothes over a chair. It felt unreal, lying in a hotel bed waiting for him. Then she thought, maybe he was right. Maybe this was the best way for her if she was ever to know what sex was. No awkward dating, no making lame conversation, no trying to act feminine as if it were a duty to make a fool of herself. No. She was Bernice and he knew her and he wanted her and she would try to see what it was all about.