by Brit Mandelo
“Tell me what you want,” he orders in the dark, but you can’t even tell yourself the truth, how can you tell him? You want lace underwear that rides against your thighs, and a garter belt snug around your waist, and a bra to fill with breasts you’ll never have. You want cherry red lipstick and tiny bottles of perfume to spritz on your neck. You can see Williams home after the war, calling his wife “Baby pie” as he nails her into a new white mattress in a four-poster bed. She will look like Robbie’s girlfriend Nancy. She will swell with a new baby, a satisfied gleam in her eyes. You will eat your mother’s meatloaf and listen to the radio with your father and go to bed with a pistol under your pillow, dreaming of the day you can shoot yourself in the head.
You lie and tell Williams that you want more whiskey. Any warm glow is a good one.
∞
For three days, your ship is part of a task force attacking Japanese airfields. A dozen cruisers, battleships, carriers and destroyers assail Luzon. Their pilots dive out of the sky, trying to smash your decks and turrets. You can’t even count how much metal is screeching across the sky. Your sense of the future starts to fail. Maybe the war will never end. It will simply stretch on forever, reeking of gunpowder and deafening with its monstrous noise, the sea tossing you up and down in with angry swells.
There’s a reason they don’t let women out here, you think. To witness destruction is to take it in, like inhaling poison, and once inside you it can never be expelled. Your strictly imaginary womb aches for the babies who will never be born because their fathers have been wiped away from the planet by steel and fire. But eventually this battle does end, and you crawl into Robbie’s rack because you’re too tired to climb into your own. He finds you there a half hour later, roughly shakes your shoulder.
“It’s not big enough for two,” he says, even though men are double-racked all around you. Some are weeping with relief and being comforted, with small words and soft gestures, by their buddies. They have seen too much.
“Let me sleep,” you plead.
Annoyed, he hauls you out. You land on your knees on the deck.
“Sleep alone,” he says.
You go find Williams. He’s upright, exhausted, his face dark with stubble, a cigarette burning unnoticed in his hand. He’s talking to one of The Two Fruits. When he sees you, his face gets all tight. You think he doesn’t want to be seen with you. But then he pushes you into his rack and crawls in right after you, an impossibly tight fit, his body crushing yours. You want to be crushed. You want to be held immobile and safe, a woman safe in the arms of her man.
“Close your eyes, baby-pie,” he says roughly.
The next morning, the seas are so rough that cooking is limited on the mess deck. You don’t mind, because just looking at food exacerbates your growing seasickness. As you sip bad coffee you hear the latest ship’s scandal. One of the officers found pornography and women’s underwear in the boatswains’ locker and there’s going to be hell to pay. It’s not regular pornography but “perverted” stuff—men posed in women’s lingerie, men with fake breasts, men in long slinky dresses. Your face burns because you want to see it.
“The captain threw it all overboard,” you hear Robbie say. “Rotten filth.”
That afternoon a typhoon blasts through the task force, an unannounced guest at an already terrible party. Planes slide off carriers or smash into bulkheads. Three destroyers capsize and sink to the bottom of the Pacific. Your ship rolls so dangerously to starboard and port and starboard and port that men scream for fear you’re about to go right down alongside the destroyers. This is what terror really is: knowing in your heart that you will drown entombed in metal, seawater rushing in to flood and trap and smother you. It will hurt. You will scream, but that will just let more water invade you. You will convulse and choke and scrabble for help that never comes. Then your body will hang suspended in dark cold water forever, a grave from which no one is ever rescued.
∞
Eight hundred men die in the storm, every death frantic and painful.
You live. You’re safe, you don’t drown, you emerge onto the deck to a gray windy sky with the typhoon extinguished. The captain orders a shipwide muster and head count. Three sailors are missing and presumed to have washed overboard in the confusion of the night. The youngest is BM3 Robert Allen Soward, of San Diego, California.
You don’t believe it—not when your chief tells you, not when the captain confirms it, not when everyone in your corner of berthing slaps your shoulder and tells you they’re sorry. The sea is too big, the waves too choppy, the ship is almost out of fuel. There is no chance of recovery.
“But I’ve seen him,” you tell them. “He dies as an old man, surrounded by his kids. I can see it right now. He’s in a bed, and they’re surrounding him.”
∞
Eventually the ship’s doctor gives you some little white pills, makes you sleep twelve hours in the infirmary, and sends you back to work.
Grief is a sword. It splits your spinal cord from head to toe, making you unsteady on your feet. You walk into bulkheads and trip over hatches. Grief is also a knife. It slices through your brain and makes you forget he’s dead. You think you see him in the mess, in the showers, on deck when the sun breaks through. It’s a finely honed razor that leaves a million tiny cuts on your hands and face. They sting when you touch his locker or turn your face into the pillow you stole from his rack.
When did your vision fail? What can you trust, if not the inner sight that points you to the inevitable future?
You decide that he’s still out there in the water, swimming his way back to Nancy and sunny California. He will be rescued by a passing a ship, swaddled in blankets, reunited with his one true love. He will die old and beloved, not cold and abandoned to the ocean.
This fantasy helps in only the smallest possible way.
∞
It’s the beginning of 1945. The Japanese are not yet exhausted enough or horrified enough to surrender. You still have Williams, but he still has a wife and he has secrets, too. He gets packages in the mail but opens them in private. He barters tobacco and chewing gum and candy but won’t show you all of the bounty he earns in return. Every morning when you wake you see your bleak, gray future unfolding in Iowa City. You think, sometimes, that it would be easier to drop off the side of the ship and sink into darkness, let the whales and sharks and fish finish you off. Cortez explored the sea and so will you, your every cell scattered by tide and swell.
But then the ship puts in for repairs at Ulithi, an atoll with crystal clear lagoons and gorgeous long beaches and sunsets like blood oranges. There are beer parties and midnight movies and a lot of men sneaking off into the jungle for some private R & R. Williams takes you to a cove where the ocean washes in and out just a few feet away. He spreads a blanket on the sand and crawls all over you and takes you apart inch by inch. You participate as required, thinking of Robbie adrift on currents and calling for your help. His hands and voice grow rougher.
“I don’t know what you want,” he says.
You don’t know, either.
More ships pull into port. The Seabees finish up a big a rec center on Mogmog Island and there’s a rumor that Bob Hope will be flying in next month with a USO army of singers and dancers. In the meantime, the Morale Committee is organizing a musical revue. Every ship will provide volunteers to do skits and numbers. The Two Fruits are first to sign up. They ask you to perform as well.
“Why me?” you ask.
DeRosa says, “Gets your mind off things.”
“I can’t sing.”
Easton says, “It’s a chorus. You can just mouth the words and let the stronger singers carry it.”
You ask Williams if you should do it, but he has no opinion on the matter. Maybe he’s losing interest in you. You saw him talking to his old buddy Lee the other day, Lee with the thick blond hair and bright blue eyes. You’re disposable. Maybe you deserve to be disposed of. You tell Easton and DeRosa that you’ll vol
unteer but when you get to practice you realize they left out the crucial detail that the entire show is in drag—grass skirts, coconut shell breasts, wigs, makeup.
“Absolutely not,” you say, and try to flee.
The Two Fruits grab your arms and turn you back. “It’s just for fun. No one cares.”
The other chorus members from your ship are a laundryman, a barber, a corpsman, a chaplain’s assistant, a radarman and three yeomen. They know how to put on makeup. They argue about the costumes. Too late you realize that every single one is homosexual and you’re probably going to be branded as one, too, but what does it matter? The world is ending in fire and Robbie is floating in the Pacific and Williams wants to put his hand down someone else’s pants. This might be the only time in your life that you will get to dance on stage for hundreds of drunk and cheering men. You certainly won’t get cheered back in Iowa City.
“I want the blond wig,” you tell them. “I want pink lipstick and a seashell necklace.”
The night of the revue brings high winds that rock the Chinese lanterns strung outside. The lagoon is full of ships riding the high tide. Somewhere out there, the admiral and his captains are eating dinner in a wardroom full of brandy and cigars. In the auditorium, rowdy sailors drink beer and hooch, cheering for each act. The “Andrews Sisters” are three Seabees with pretty good voices. “Marlene Dietrich” has to retreat from an ardent fan who storms the stage. You’re in the chorus for “Carmen Miranda” but she’s late for her entrance. You and the others swing your four-foot-long wooden bananas and do the best you can, given that you’re a little drunk and a lot worried that Williams will see you from the audience and walk away in disgust.
Robbie would have walked away. You know that.
But for these few glorious minutes you can forget Robbie. You can pretend you are the woman denied to you by biology. You are radiant and alluring and the men are cheering. They shine desire on you, they lust after your lithe legs and firm breasts, they are on their feet clapping—
Then you realize they’re clapping for Carmen, who arrives like a Hollywood movie star. She’s glorious. Six feet tall, black skirt, black top, bare midriff, bananas and oranges on her head, singing about how happy and gay she feels. She hasn’t been to rehearsal all week long so you don’t know who she really is. All you know is that you feel inadequate and small. Reduced to a sham, a weak imitation, while she struts and sings, and what kind of imposter are you?
Then she turns, and you see the anchor tattoos on her forearms.
The roar of the crowd becomes a sea of blood draining out of your head. Your vision dims to shadows. You make the fastest exit in the history of South Pacific musical theatre and a stage hand puts you on a chair before you faint entirely.
Ten minutes later, Williams exits to thunderous applause. He kicks off his shoes and tutti-frutti hat and stands before you as if waiting for you to strike him. You pull him outside, down a path, away from every prying eye. The full moon slips out from behind a cloud and bathes you both in white light.
“You’re insane,” you tell him.
“I’m crazy,” he agrees.
This time you’re the one who drives him backward, you’re the one who pins him against a tree trunk. He wriggles against you gladly. You suck on his lips and neck and leave your lipstick on his bare skin.
“Carmen got appendicitis,” he mutters. “I owed Lee a favor.”
Which is a good story if you believe it. In the moonlight of a tropical island, you’re not too worried about the details. You’re kissing him and he’s pushing you to the ground and your costumes are coming off, your grass skirt a bed to lie down on.
This is wartime, this is the best and worst thing that has ever happened to you, these are his hands on your hips, this is the body you must live in, and in the morning you realize you can’t see the future anymore. Your gift is gone, if it ever was a gift at all.
All you see before you is shimmering blue, the unexplored Sea of Cortez.
∞
Eye of the Storm
Kelley Eskridge
I am a child of war. It’s a poor way to start. My village was always ready to defend, or to placate, or to burn again. Eventually the fighting stopped, and left dozens of native graves and foreign babies. We war bastards banded together by instinct; most of us had the straw hair and flat faces of westerners, and we were easy marks. Native kids would find one or two of us alone and build their adrenaline with shouts of Your father killed my father until someone took the first step in with a raised arm or a stick. These encounters always ended in blood and cries—until the year I was fifteen, when a gang of village young played the daily round of kill-the-bastard and finally got it right: when Ad Homrun’s older brother pulled her from under a pile of screaming boys and girls, and Ad’s neck was broken and her right eye had burst. The others vanished like corn spirits and left us alone in a circle of trampled grass, Ad lying in Tom’s arms, me trying to hold her head up at the right angle so that she would breathe again. It was my first grief.
It was no wonder our kind were always disappearing in the night. “You’ll go too,” my mother said for the first time when I was only seven. She would often make pronouncements as she cooked. I learned her opinions on everything from marjoram (“Dry it in bundles of six sticks and keep it away from dogs”) to marriage (“Some cows feel safest in the butcher’s barn”) while she kneaded bread or stripped slugs off fresh-picked greens.
It shocked me to hear her talk about my leaving as if it were already done. Ad was still alive in her family’s cottage a quarter mile from ours, and I believed that my world was settled; not perfect, but understandable, everything fast in its place. I peered from my corner by the fire while my mother pounded corn into meal, jabbing the pestle in my direction like a finger to make her point. “You’ll go,” she repeated. “Off to soldier, no doubt. Born to it, that’s why. No one can escape what they’re born to.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“You’ll go and be glad to.”
“I won’t! I want to stay with you.”
“Hmph,” she replied, but at supper she gave me an extra corncake with a dab of honey. Food was love as well as livelihood for her. She never punished me for being got upon her while her man screamed himself dead in the next room; but she never touched me or anyone else unless she had to. I grew up with food instead of kisses. I ate pastries and hot bread and sausage pies like a little goat, and used them as fuel to help me run faster than my tormentors.
One of the childhood games Ad and I played was to wrap up in sheepskin and swan up and down the grass between her cottage and the lane, pretending to be princes in disguise. We were both tall, after all, and looked noble in our woolly cloaks. What more did one need? To be the first child of a king, Tom Homrun said, and our king already had one. There could only be one prince, only one heir. The rest were just nobles, and there were more of them than anyone bothered to count. What’s the good of being a royal if you’re as common as ticks on a dog? my mother would say, with a cackle for her own wit. But I had heard too many stories about the prince. My aunt’s third husband went to court for a meeting of royal regional accountants and told us in his letters that the prince was fair and strong and already had the air of a leader. And puts me in mind of your Mars, he wrote my mother; something about the eyes. My mother paused after she’d read that part aloud, and looked at me with a still face. It thrilled me to be likened to the prince, and Ad was rigid with envy until Tom carved her a special stick to use as a scepter in our games, with a promise that he would never make me one no matter how hard I pleaded. I could not care about her stick, about her silence and hurt feelings, even though she was my only friend. My head was full of daydreams of walking through the streets of Lemon City, of being seen by the prince’s retainers and taken up into the citadel, marveled over, embraced, offered…what? My imagination failed me there, so I would start from the beginning and see it all again. I began giving the pigs orders, and deliverin
g speeches of state to the group of alder trees near Nor Tellit’s farm.
They were different speeches after Ad died. At first they were simply incoherent weepings delivered from a throat so thick with snot that I barely recognized my own voice. It sounded adult and terrible, and filled me with a furious energy that I didn’t know how to use; until one afternoon when I had run dry of tears and instead picked up a fist-sized stone. I beat the alders until the rock was speckled with my blood. I washed my swollen hand in the village well and hoped that my rage would poison them all. Then I found Tom Homrun and asked him to teach me how to fight.
From the first I was like a pig at a slop pile, gulping down whatever he put in front of me, always rooting single-mindedly for more. He taught me to use my hands and elbows and knees, to judge distance, and to watch someone’s body rather than their eyes. It was hard at first to trust him and his teaching: I’d always thought of him as a native, as a danger, in spite of his fondness for his yellow-haired bastard sister. And it hadn’t occurred to me that he would have to touch me. Apart from Ad, I’d only touched my mother by accident, and the village kids in desperate defense: but this was new and electric. The first feel of his muscle against mine was so shocking that the hair on my arms and legs stood up. I was desperately uneasy to think that I might be moved by Tom after what I’d begun to feel for his sister, as if it were some kind of betrayal of Ad. But I was fascinated by the strength and the power of his body, the way it turned when he wished, held its balance, reached out and so easily made me vulnerable.