Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  He spoke now of his ex-wife, but not as men usually referred to their previous spouses. “Louise is very strong, very bright, very able. You shouldn’t judge her by those absurd stories she cranks out. She has a first-rate mind, and she’s not shy about using it. She’s very political, a progressive thinker.”

  If she had drunk less wine, and if she did not still feel a little off balance with him, still with the professor and student, the boss and assistant dynamic operating between them and therefore to be forcefully overcome, she might have been less forthright in her questioning. “If you admire your ex-wife as much as you say, why aren’t you still married?”

  “That’s hard to say. The divorce wasn’t my idea.” Oscar rubbed his nose again. “Actually I was living with somebody else for a while, but it was nothing to make an enormous fuss about.”

  Abra laughed. “I doubt if that was your wife’s point of view.”

  “It wasn’t.” Oscar sighed. “I don’t understand why women become so obsessed with minor adventures. I fully intended to come back.”

  Abra felt as if she ought to reassure him that she did not expect fidelity, but after all, nothing had happened between them yet. She satisfied herself by saying simply, “I think marriage and the home are far more important to many women than they are, for instance, to me. Many younger women have a more independent stance and less rigid expectations.”

  “I should have realized how important it was to Louise. She grew up without that security, and when it was threatened, she just wanted to cut me off.” Oscar shook his head. “I must see more of my daughter, Kay. I’ve been letting myself become overwhelmed. Especially if we are going off to Washington soon, that’s more reason to carve out time for her.”

  She definitely retained the feeling, as they ate their flan and drank a Spanish brandy, that they were moving in the direction of becoming more personal. Lovers or friends? She could not even tell if there were room in the crowded field of Oscar’s life for an affair with her. It would be convenient, it would have that going for it, she thought. She wondered if she was going to have to make the first move.

  What struck her was a sense that she was edging into a convoy, a mass, a herd of relationships. Unlike most of the men she met who had families only as background or possible interference, Oscar seemed to come trailing a host of people with whom he was still actively involved; and she had the uneasy feeling she could not see half of his life yet. Taking him for a lover looked not so much as if she were committing her usual solitary and private act but as if she were joining a tribe. His work might be clandestine, but his relationships appeared to be all out there in the full sunlight of mutual regard, jostling each other. His wife, his daughter, his mother, his sisters and brothers, his ex-lovers, his friends, they all seemed to be looking at her and waiting to see what was going to happen. Perhaps she was drunk, but she almost felt the hot regard of many dark eyes upon their conversation.

  NAOMI 3

  The Jaws Close

  Leib stayed in Naomi’s mind, making her feel a little guilty. Since she considered him far more attractive than Murray, she could not understand why Ruthie preferred Murray. She imagined that Trudi was killed in a sudden way without pain and Leib carried her off. She had no interest in the boys in her class, who sometimes picked on her and teased her and sang about how the girls of France wore tissue paper pants and other dirty nonsense. She was now the third tallest girl in class, the tallest white girl.

  She walked to school with Sandy Rosenthal, but her special secret friend was Clotilde. Black and white girls were not supposed to be friends, so they hid their secret from teachers and kids alike. What both of them watched for were moments when they could speak French together, when they could share how strange they found life here, the school, the city, the food, the weather. She saw Clotilde as beautiful, with her skin like wood and ashes at once, her grey-brown eyes enormous and luminous, her even brilliant teeth, her curly hair that was like black and red together. Clotilde was too gentle for Detroit, for the casual savageries of the school with its constant provocations, its dares, its fights in the schoolyard, its subculture of dirty jokes and gang wars and horror comics. Her father was in a submarine in the Pacific, which they agreed sounded extremely scary. He was made to be a kind of servant, but stood watches at night up in the conning tower because, Clotilde explained scornfully, the Navy thought Negroes could see better in the dark than whites.

  Sometimes Naomi felt as if she had walked into an intense generations-old family quarrel in Detroit between the colored and the whites, except that they could never even see each other clearly and the whites had all the power, like the Nazis in France. They had the police, the government, the schools, the hospitals, everything. She could figure out who was getting the short end without straining her powers of observation.

  When school ended for the summer, Naomi was more delighted than she ever had been before, because going to school was a test that never stopped. However, she speedily realized that her vacation wasn’t going to be one, because the nursery went on in summer as in winter. Besides, as time passed, Aunt Rose and Sharon were handling more children in the same space. Naomi took over the shopping, complicated with the red points and the blue points and what points were good that week, to be used before they expired.

  Sharon said that she was lucky to be learning so early all about babies, as she hadn’t known one end from the other when she had Marilyn. Now Naomi would make some man a very good wife, because she would start out knowing how to feed, bathe, hold and dress her own babies. Sharon said that was much more important than anything she learned in school, and Naomi was getting a real education.

  Naomi did not argue out loud, but she did not feel lucky. She felt stuck. In the early evenings she escaped to play kick the can or stickball on the corners. Both boys and girls played, as long as there was any light. One night Four Eyes Rosovsky tried to kiss her when they were all sitting on the stoop of the apartment house where Four Eyes lived, and she kicked him in the shins. Afterward she was sorry she hadn’t waited till after he kissed her to kick him, so she would have found out what it was like, but she wasn’t very sorry.

  Naomi’s hair was as kinky as ever. She talked Ruthie into cutting it short for the summer. Aunt Rose had a fit when she saw what they had done, but Naomi liked her new haircut. Aunt Rose said she looked like a poodle. Naomi said that poodles were French, and so was she. Aunt Rose said she was getting as sassy and bad-mouthed as American girls, and where was the sweet little girl who had come to them?

  Naomi’s breasts were growing. The nipples itched. She felt irritable and hot and bored. Sandy wanted a powder blue suit and a taffeta dress, as soon as the war was over. Sharon wanted an electric refrigerator. Naomi wanted to be twenty-one, educated already and somewhere else. When she thought how long it would be before she grew up enough to do anything on her own, she felt exhausted in advance. It would just take too long to grow up, it was hardly worth the wait. The biggest thing to look forward to were days the iceman came by with his horse-drawn cart and she could beg a piece of ice to suck. It was so hot, Boston Blackie just wanted to sleep all day under the blue hydrangea in the yard.

  Maybe she would be a secretary like Ruthie. Ruthie no longer worked at a department store, but instead she had a job with the government, at the Detroit Housing Commission. She worked shorter hours for more money. Rose said that being a secretary was just as good as being a social worker, but Ruthie did not think so and still went to Wayne four nights a week.

  Ruthie explained she was not really a secretary but in a typing pool. It was a lucky job for a Jew to find, working in an office, but not what she really wanted and she would not settle for it forever, she confided to Naomi. She only said that once to her mother, as Rose lost her temper. Rose grew frightened if she thought any of her children wanted what they could not have, but Ruthie said that Rose was willing to settle for too little because she did not understand how the world was changing. Things would get
a lot worse, or they would get better for people like them.

  Lately Naomi thought a great deal about money. When she was a little girl, she took it for granted that her parents worked. They were not rich, they were working people, like everyone in their quarter, but they ate good meals that Maman prepared after work, the girls all helped, and Sundays they would go to the cinema or the country or the Jardin des Plantes or the Musée de l’Homme. Every year they took a real vacation in August, leaving Paris for two weeks.

  After Papa went to war, her family was poorer. Here since the war started, they were better off. Aunt Rose and Sharon were earning money, Ruthie had a better job, Arty was on the line at Fisher Body, and Uncle Morris worked a lot of overtime. The car was finally paid off. Their rent had gone up twice, but now with rent control, it was stabilized.

  They were saving money in war bonds. Ruthie gave Naomi a quarter a week so that she could buy defense stamps at school, but Naomi often did not. She knew how the paper money the government puts out turns into just paper overnight, and she could not waste the quarters on those stamps you could not even use to mail a letter. She felt her American relatives simply did not understand how you had to hold on to metal money. She had a hiding place where one section of the baseboard was rotten in the bedroom she shared with Ruthie. There she hid the quarters till she would find out if the government was going to fall. Governments often did that.

  When she heard people talk about how bad hoarders were, she felt her own hoard of Ruthie’s quarters weighing her down. But if all the money Aunt Rose and Uncle Morris and Ruthie were turning into paper bonds went bad, then she would save them. Silver and gold were real. Aunt Batya had left Poland with a little gold sewn into the lining of her coat, but with that, the Balabans had been able to come to France and begin again.

  At least Ruthie had more time to spend with her, for she had stopped going out with men. Sometimes Naomi went to the movies with Trudi and sometimes she went with her whole family or with Sharon (Arty worked the swing shift, so they couldn’t go together) and sometimes with Ruthie alone. Small restaurants and businesses were shutting down, but the movie houses were open twenty-four hours and always crowded. They saw Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire, Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver, Bob Hope in My Favorite Blonde. They sat through Across the Pacific, Saboteur, This Above All, every few days another double or triple feature.

  Every night they listened to the radio and read the newspapers, even Naomi whose English had improved so that she could read the papers just as good as Uncle Morris. Her favorite subject was geography, part of social studies. She loved to find the names from the radio and the newspaper on the map and to follow the movements of the armies in Egypt, in New Guinea, in the Soviet Union, even though it was a matter of the Axis always advancing. More of the map had to be colored black.

  Aunt Rose encouraged her to go barefoot in the house and the yard all summer, because shoes were rationed. Her soles became so hard she boasted to Four Eyes and Sandy that she could walk on glass without cutting herself, so they broke a soda bottle. She did not want to, but she put her foot on the broken glass and hobbled across and she was right, her foot did not bleed. She won a dime from Sandy and a dime from Four Eyes, but then they made her buy them icecream cones with half the money.

  Alvin opened a hydrant and they all ran through the water and splashed in the gutters until the cops came. Trudi said they could come to her house and run under the hose. Trudi’s family lived downstairs in a two-flat house and her father liked to water the lawn. Naomi had a new bathing suit Ruthie had bought her, bright green with a halter top and a cute little skirt. She tried to decide if she looked sexy in it. Sandy was always talking about what was sexy and what wasn’t. Her other word was dreamy. Sandy talked about boys too much, but because she lived so close, Naomi could play with her even when she was taking care of the nursery brats.

  Sandy had honey blond hair, unusual among the Jews of their neighborhood. Her face had a rawboned look, the nose hawklike, the jaw a little jutting, but Sandy was vain about her hair and acted as if she were pretty, and so did everyone else. Sandy had to take care of her snotty little brother Roy, another bond between them.

  Sandy pretended the yard between the two houses was special. Her dad had brought home a big wooden spool on which cables had been wrapped, that they used for a table, with wooden crates from the grocer’s for chairs. Sometimes Sandy or she had money for a soda, but mostly they didn’t. Since both their families were always short on sugar, they made do with cold water with a slice of lemon pretending it was cocktails, while Sandy taught her the words to “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “Blues in the Night” and “Jingle Jangle Jingle.” Being what Sandy called a teenager seemed a great deal of work. She was supposed to know about the Red Wings, who played hockey, and the Tigers, who played baseball, and to know the names of the players, even the players who had been drafted, although she had never seen a baseball or a hockey game.

  That night after it got too dark to play, they sat on the stoop of the apartment building on the corner and Alvin passed around a cigarette. He was always swiping Chesterfields from his mother’s purse. Naomi could draw on it without coughing. It made her dizzy but she did not let on. One way summer was better than winter was that outside school the kids were accepting her better. The kids she was hanging around with were Jews her age from these four blocks. It was as if everything didn’t count so much in the summer and everybody was easier. She was learning too. When they passed her a butt or made dirty jokes, she did not act shocked any longer and she never said Aunt Rose would not let her do something. She just went along and did it and kept her mouth shut.

  “This will be our senior year,” Sandy said in the same voice she used when she talked about boys being dreamy.

  “So?” Naomi said.

  “We get to have a senior trip and go to Bob Lo. We have a party and we sign each other’s autograph books. We have a dance.”

  Four Eyes laughed. “And the girls have to make their own graduation dresses, ha-ha, and boy do you look stupid.”

  “Ugh,” Naomi said. “They ought to make you sew your suits. I bet you’d look funny too. Me, I think I’ll graduate in a paper bag. I’ll paint it red.”

  “Frenchy, you’d look cute in a paper bag,” Alvin said.

  “The guys around here, they’re always trying out a line these days,” Sandy said with a sour grimace. “They think they’re regular Casanovas.”

  Then five minutes later they were chasing each other around the big elm with their eyes shut, playing blind tag. It was fun stumbling around in the dark, but Four Eyes pinched her hard on the behind. When she cried out, he pretended he didn’t know what he had done. “I had my eyes closed,” he said smugly. “How do I know what I did?” Her buttock still hurt and it felt dirty to think he had touched her there.

  The next day Alvin and Four Eyes went by with five guys to play ball, and they wouldn’t even say hello. They pretended they didn’t see Sandy and Naomi. I wonder if there really is a G-d, Naomi thought, because even though it’s a sin to think that and everything counts now that I’m a woman, still I would think life could be better arranged, besides wars and Nazis even. If I were setting things up, I wouldn’t make kids go through all this growing up. I’d just have people born all grown and skip this waiting and fussing and always doing and saying the wrong thing.

  She wondered if it would be as hard if she were home with her family. Here she was in exile and untwinned. She would not sulk and brood and kick at things if she had Rivka always there knowing what she knew and seeing what she saw and completing her. She would not be so miserable if she were with Rivka, the way things were supposed to be.

  The night was close and hot. Detroit felt like a vast low-ceilinged poorly ventilated closet full of machinery. She had a bruise on her behind. What a nasty thing to do, and why? Boys were mysterious and no good but trying to hang around with them was what girls did, and so
she had to.

  Whenever she asked Ruthie about boys, Ruthie talked about love, love, love. Naomi could not see what love had to do with boys. She loved Ruthie, she loved Rivka and Maman and Papa. She even loved Jacqueline. But to think of loving Four Eyes or Alvin was an unfunny joke, like falling for a large truck. Girls talked about being in love with Tyrone Power or Alan Ladd. Sandy could not decide between Harry James and Frank Sinatra. At least Jacqueline had never gushed that way. Perhaps she had not sufficiently appreciated her older sister. She looked at the years immediately ahead of her when, as Sandy kept saying, they would enter high school and go on real dates, with wary disgust at the prospect.

  Finally she slept, in her bed that felt wrinkled with the heat and her own sweat. Although the guards called the building the Vélodrome of winter, it was not winter but summer and hot. She was burning up with thirst. Her throat was parched, her tongue, blistered. She wondered how the babies crying could manage it. This morning one had died, the little girl with the big grey eyes. The young mother was still holding the baby, like a dirty limp rag doll, the head lolling.

  Rivka kept thinking she would throw up because everybody smelled filthy and shitty. Even the adults smelled like babies that had dirtied themselves. There were thousands and thousands of them packed in the arena, up on the stands or crammed onto the track in the middle under the blue glass ceiling like a mockery of sky, compressing the heat and stench downward. The guards, French like themselves but nasty now, kept screaming at them. It was as if they were at school and some cruel principal was punishing them all, but the adults were punished just like the children.