Purity War
Page 22
My hands shoved deep in my pockets, I barely noticed the party around me as I stewed. It wasn’t that I was upset the war was over, of course not. The end of the war meant our boys would come home. The shortages would be over, there would be plenty of food and supplies for everyone, and America could get back to the business of making babies, which we hadn’t been doing for a while. Most of the girls I went to school with were still unmarried, by no choice of their own. If it weren’t for the war, by twenty-five they’d have settled down with several children to chase around, and a husband to welcome home with a kiss every night. The war had disrupted our rhythm, and no one was more frustrated by it than twenty-something women. They had picked up wrenches and headed to factories, determined to keep the home front running until the men came back from war. But the majority couldn’t wait for the day they quit their jobs, married a GI, and plopped down in a cute little clapboard house to make babies.
I was not most girls.
I was happy there would be no more bloodshed, no more bombing and death. The only problem was the end of the war meant the death of my dream, and that was what I mourned tonight.
For as long as I could remember, growing up with three older brothers, I always balked at being told something was ‘boys only.’ My brothers used that phrase on me often to exclude their kid sister from their games. I was skinny and tall for my age, and far more interested in what my brothers were up to in the woods behind our house than playing with dolls and keeping my dresses neat. Dresses were impossible to play in; they inevitably got destroyed and resulted in a lecture about how money didn’t grow on trees.
I was far too concerned about not getting left out to care about looking pretty. My red curls were always a snarl, despite my mother’s best efforts to braid or otherwise control them. I had scabby knees from falling and climbing and generally behaving more like a boy than a girl. Eventually, my mother gave up on trying to make me a lady and settled for a fourth son, so long as I dressed up on significant occasions like church.
It was a bargain I was happy to accept, and from then on I had a pair of pants of my very own. My brothers still tried to leave me behind. They excluded me for being the youngest and for being a girl, which seemed to be the dirtiest word they knew. It quickly became a dirty word to me, too, as I wished fervently to be just like my brothers.
When my brothers joined the military at the outset of the war, I fought and swore when I found out I couldn’t join them in the role I wanted. The only jobs offered to women in the military were as nurses, and I was hell-bent on being a fighter pilot.
If I had to choose a favorite brother, it was the eldest Tommy. He flew P-38 Lightnings until they shot him down over Germany. That was tough for the whole family, and my parents were grateful that my other two brothers, Jimmy and Don Jr., had joined the Navy. We received a letter from Jimmy recently, but we haven’t heard from Don Jr. in a while. My folks hope the end of the war will mean they get a letter from him soon.
All three of my brothers laughed when I said I wanted to be a fighter pilot like Tommy. Naturally, I had to prove them wrong, and that started with earning my pilots license. At first, the local flyboys thought it was a joke. They teased me, told me to go home and put on a dress. But they weren’t in a place to turn away money and eventually agreed to train me. Flying was everything I hoped it would be—the freedom, the exhilaration, the pure joy of soaring through the sky. I had never felt so in control, so comfortable in my own skin, as I did in the air.
But flying was also costly. It took me weeks to save for a few hours of flying time, and I knew I’d never make a certification in time to go to war. It would be years before I could afford to pay for all the lessons I needed to get my license. I had no idea how I would earn more money, but I had to get more flying time, quickly. I started hustling work at the airfield in exchange for flying time. It helped, but it was still too slow.
One day I turned up for my meager one-hour lesson to discover a mystery benefactor had paid for all of my training. This person wanted to support me for some unknown reason. I never discovered who it was, but I swore I would find out one day and thank them in person. As kind as my parents were, I had never experienced the feeling of absolute support in my dreams from anyone, let alone a complete stranger. I burned through my lessons and finished my training in record time.
License in hand, I joined the Women’s Air Service Pilots, or WASPs. We weren’t fighters, technically, but sometimes we played the role of the enemy in practice dogfights or pulled targets behind our aircraft for our pilots to practice shooting. The next eighteen months were amazing; I lived and worked with other women as passionate about flight as I was, and we flew every day. With the rate they needed to replace pilots, I was sure the WASPs would see actual combat soon. We were far better pilots than the green boys they were sending us to train; surely they would realize that.
Unfortunately, they disbanded the WASPs eight months ago, last December. It was a shock to us all—one day we were gainfully employed, and the next they sent us packing without so much as a farewell. I had nowhere else to go, so I returned home to my parents' house in upstate New York. The war was still on and now I was back to being a regular girl.
Eventually, I got a job in nearby Bethpage, working for Grumman and building the F6F Hellcats. It didn’t pay much, but it was still in the industry. I did my best to string together flying work but there wasn’t much aside from the occasional crop dusting. I took any flying assignment I could get just to keep my skills honed and keep amassing flying hours. An opportunity would present itself, and I wanted to be ready.
However, now the odds didn’t seem to be stacked in my favor. With the end of the war, men would come home in droves. The U.S. military wouldn’t be as desperate for bodies to fly planes, and it looked like my dream of being a fighter pilot was officially dead.
And so it was that amid the high-spirited revelry that swirled around me late into the night, I found myself in a sad, silent little bubble. Everyone was too caught up in their own happiness to be concerned about one melancholy woman in trousers. I gave up on trying to join in the fun and settled for just observing the joy of those around me.
That is when I noticed a still, dark figure with luminous blue eyes observing me from a shadowy corner of the street.
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