by Marge Piercy
Three days after Mama had opened the telegram, the bottle of cologne arrived, a birthday present from Duvey.
Ruthie felt confused in her grief. She had not been close to Duvey; she was not sure they could be said to have loved each other since she had turned twelve. She had had trouble seeing Duvey’s virtues because, first, Mama had always favored him, and second, he represented the choices that most frightened Ruthie. He had turned to male pals, the quick pleasures, the fast fuse, an edge that needed constant sharpening, toughness and street smarts, women who fell for a Cagney style.
Then too she had not forgiven him for tampering with Naomi. Her anger for that trespass remained like a splinter worked into her palm. She prayed, Let me mourn Duvey. Let me find in myself sorrow for my brother so that I may honestly grieve with Mama. Please, let me find it.
She prayed as she had not prayed since she had feared herself pregnant. She judged herself harshly because she could not achieve an honest mourning for her brother. She could imagine herself devastated by such dreadful news about Murray, and from that she pumped some hypocritical tears, imitation offerings to Mama. Ah, she condemned herself: Ruthie who cried when a stray cat was run over in the street had trouble mourning her own brother.
Morris came to her. “Your mother is keeping that room like a shrine. She goes in there and weeps. Sunday when she goes out to the market, we have to clear it out. For her own good. Give to the poor and clear it out. Three weeks, and every day she cries in there.”
“What will we do with an empty room?”
“Give it to Naomi,” Morris said. “Isn’t it time you had your own room? First you shared with Bubeh, now with Naomi. Don’t I see how hard you work? You fill in all the cracks, you always have.” He tousled her hair.
Sunday Sharon, Ruthie and Naomi cleaned out Duvey’s room. He did not possess a great wardrobe—none of them ever had much to spend on clothes. Here was his blue serge suit, for weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduations and funerals. A drawer full of well-worn shirts and mended underwear. Handling the darned socks released Ruthie’s tears. Duvey had large feet for his size and he was always forgetting to cut his toenails. She could see his big toe sticking through his socks.
Marbles, aggies, a penknife, bubble gum wrappers with comics on them, a couple of packages of Trojans, a scrip dollar in which the state had paid teachers during the Depression, a circus program shared a drawer with perhaps forty snapshots of women. Most were taken against somebody’s car or against a stoop or the wall of a house, squinting into the sun in a bathing suit on Belle Isle, posed with straw hat in hand in a little Detroit yard by some dusty-looking irises. Most of them were women Ruthie and Sharon had never seen. Some were colored women. The prettiest of all was a woman who had signed a studio portrait of herself in a fancy dress, Love to Duvey my heart of hearts from his Delora.
Sharon was squinting at the photo. Naomi looked over her shoulder. “I think maybe Naomi should leave the room,” Sharon said.
“If I do, you won’t get done before Aunt Rose comes home,” Naomi said.
“We need her help,” Ruthie said firmly. She was younger than Sharon, but Sharon always let her make decisions. Married women, Ruthie noticed, sometimes got into that habit until they couldn’t decide even minor things. Ruthie considered that Naomi had the right to learn what there was to be learned about Duvey.
“Well, is she a shvartzer? I can’t tell, this Delora.”
Ruthie took the photo. “I think she’s part Negro.”
“Ruthie! You can’t be part Negro.”
“Like you can’t be part Jewish. People want to know which you are so they can hate you right.” Ruthie sighed. “We’ll just throw these away.”
“Can I have the marbles?” Naomi asked.
“Do girls your age play marbles?” Sharon frowned, arms akimbo.
“Girls don’t play marbles at all. I just think they’re pretty. Like eyes.”
Ruthie grimaced, handing the marbles over as they dumped the rest of Duvey’s memorabilia in a box, saving pictures of Duvey with Ziggy, and one of Ziggy with a grinning blonde. Ziggy’s mother might want them. Naomi volunteered to burn the things in the trash can. She was careful burning, so it was often her job. Ruthie left Naomi standing in the shadows of the alley with a book of kitchen matches. The rats never bothered anybody when there was a fire going. She did not want to watch the photos burn.
His ties, his ties. There were the worn silk and woolen conservative pindots and solid colors Mama bought at rummage sales, never worn by Duvey or worn perhaps once, and then the wide rayon ties with hula dancers and desert sunsets he bought himself. Handling the seedy remnants of her brother moved her more than her three weeks of yanking on her own conscience had done. A woven sweetgrass basket from Sault Ste. Marie stood on the night table. He had probably bought it for Mama, but ended up emptying his pockets into it at night. It still held a handful of pennies, some Canadian. Ruthie worked with tears running down her face, until Sharon exploded at her: “Now you’re carrying on like Rose. It’s not good for the children, all this weeping and moaning.”
There was a hip flask with a high-kicking chorus girl embossed on the pewter. The glass liner was broken. She discarded it. Old shoes were molding in the closet with a baseball bat. Sharon said, “I’ll save it for Clark.” Something from the uncle he would never remember. At last the room was stripped of Duvey.
On the job, Ruthie did not know if she would ever become accustomed to the noise, the roar of machinery, the staccato machine-gun din of riveting, the throb of the metal presses that she could feel in her thighs, in her spine, even as she walked out of the plant. A full quarter of the work force in the Briggs plant were women now. The men could still be ugly but it wasn’t full uproar when she had to cross the floor, and she wasn’t dependent on any of them to break her in. The first of April she was transferred to the swing shift. She was making $44.52 spot-welding on airplane subassemblies.
Now her days made more sense. She got up just in time to grab breakfast on the run and race to Wayne. After her last class she went home to change fast, and then Vivian, who had been moved to the swing shift with her, picked her up at two-thirty. That meant she had to take all her classes in the morning. She would finish out the term with her afternoon class by buying the notes from a fellow student and missing work the day of the final. By eleven-thirty P.M., she was home. She got to bed by one and slept six hours, then caught up on the weekend. At least she could go to bed in the room now hers alone, when everyone else slept. It was easier to study in her room on weekends, about the only opportunity except for time on the trolley. She could read standing in a dense pack of people; she had become expert at turning pages with the slightest pressure of her finger to avoid poking anyone.
When Mama was not running the nursery, she was off pursuing scarce food or clothing around Detroit. Morris dug a patch in a vacant lot where eight families were staking out little victory gardens. Morris loved being out there. He tried to get Arty interested, without success. With Tata on the day shift and Arty and Ruthie on the swing shift, the house settled into a better routine. Ruthie felt less like a vampire, a weird creature of the night on a schedule against the grain of her body and her family. She was always, always tired, but she was getting used to that, and it kept her from brooding incessantly about Murray.
He had been in a New Zealand hospital with a fever. Now he was released, although he still felt weak in the late afternoon. Maybe if he stayed just a little sick, they wouldn’t send him back into combat. Her prayer was that he keep on having something just debilitating enough to keep him safe.
Sundays she tried to spend time with Naomi and Trudi. She felt close to Trudi, who was pregnant while Leib was overseas. Trudi kept drawing plans of houses. She knew exactly where she wanted the baby’s room and where she wanted a screened porch. Ruthie would bring Naomi over to Trudi’s, encouraging Trudi to take an interest in Naomi to keep her from that gang of street urchins. Naomi took to Trudi an
d was learning to knit. Ruthie only wished she could persuade Naomi to take more of an interest in books and school.
Now they knitted for their men, Trudi for her husband and her approaching baby, Ruthie for her lover. She had confessed to Trudi, for the comfort of telling somebody when she had been frightened. Sometimes she wished she had married Murray; it would feel less tenuous and fragile. Trudi asked her, “Aren’t you scared he’ll marry some girl in New Zealand? I bet they’re all over the marines.”
She worried that she had no official claim, if he were wounded. Only their bank account proclaimed their involvement in a mutual future. She wrote him about its progress. He answered that he regretted nothing except that they had been too sensible to marry when they had a chance.
Trudi welcomed her to the ranks of the fallen, for she had slept with Leib before marriage, but being wedded, she was now safe, cashed in, and Ruthie who had been so good and so sensible was still in doubt. It enabled Trudi to patronize her, but Ruthie did not mind for the companionship and because she would rather be Murray’s lover than Leib’s wife.
Before Pesach, she called Murray’s mother and asked her if they would like to come to her family for the holiday, either the first or second nights. “Oh, no,” his mother said. “We wouldn’t be comfortable with strangers. It’s a family holiday.” They had never invited her over.
The letters on pale blue onionskin went out regularly and came in bunches, often hacked up by the censor. Sometimes Ruthie awoke frightened, wondering if she had not made him up, wondering if their connection could hold across thousands of miles through the fragile censored letters.
In the car that Monday afternoon, Mary Lou was rhapsodizing over her preacher at the Temple Baptist Church. This time she mentioned his name, Reverend J. Frank Norris. Ruthie froze. She had heard him on the radio, denouncing promiscuous racial mixing in factories, trains and housing in one rant and the international godless Jewish conspiracy in the next. Father Coughlin had finally been forced to stop raging over the radio last year, but dozens had sprung up to sell the same anger, linking rationing, always unpopular, and shortages to Jews and colored, stirring up the discontent that seemed endemic to the streets.
The buses and trolleys were overloaded with people jammed into each other, after waiting half an hour or longer. The whites said the colored belonged to bump clubs and sought opportunities to jostle whites. Mary Lou swore that was true. Somebody’s maid was supposed to have confessed it, as if any woman in the factory ever had a maid. There had been hate strikes in several of the plants, when Negroes were hired or when they were let into any positions but the lowest. Just recently a few colored women had been hired at Briggs, and some of the white women wanted to walk off in protest. They said all colored women had syphilis.
Vivian was saying, “Listen, honey, you got your religion and I got mine. But you leave the Reverend Norris out of this car, or you get to work on your own trotters, understand?”
“He’s a man of God,” Mary Lou said indignantly. “He comes back and forth from Texas to Detroit just to be saving our souls every week.”
“Look, honey, we’re Jews, Ruthie and me, and proud of it, so you keep him to yourself or you walk.”
Ruthie wished she had thought of something to say like that, but it was Vivian’s car, not hers. There was a long silence. Joyce was still on the graveyard shift, probably because of the episode of the infamous red slacks, and now they were riding with an older woman Joann who never said anything but hello and thank you kindly.
Finally Mary Lou said, “Well, how was I supposed to know? You all don’t look Jewish.”
That broke Vivian up and Ruthie joined in, but Ruthie was never comfortable with Mary Lou again. In two weeks Mary Lou began riding with a man who lived near her. As soon as Mary Lou was no longer riding with them, Joann opened up. “I can’t stand them hillbillies,” she said. “They never have a good word for anybody, but they’re dirty as bedbugs. They talk down the colored all the time, but the colored around me, they keep up their houses fine. They aren’t like the colored down in Paradise Valley. They own their houses and they keep their yards nice. They were all born up here and they belong. But those hillbillies, they never saw an inside toilet before. They throw their slops out in the yard to stink.”
Everybody hates somebody, Ruthie thought. You’d think that during a war, people could be satisfied hating the enemy, but no, the enemy is too far away. You want someone to hate right on the next block. Joann was unusual in her targets. Anti-Semitism was as common as general bitching in the factories, and everybody took for granted you despised colored and had a right to do so at full volume. It turned out Joann knew one of the colored women who had just been hired, and after a lot of preliminary twittering, asked Vivian if Rena could ride with them. Ruthie felt sorry for Rena, because she was the only colored woman in the whole plant on the swing shift. Ruthie and Vivian conferred and said okay.
Rena turned out to be in her late twenties, both children in grade school and her husband in the Army in England. He was a skilled draftsman, but the Army made him a mess boy. She was about the color of Delora in Duvey’s photo but wore her hair severely back. She was Joann’s next-door neighbor, shy with them the first few weeks as they were with her. Ruthie had never had a colored friend. Rena was getting a lot of trouble on the line. She had it worse than Ruthie when she first hired on, with the women giving her as hard a time as the men.
Morris said, “Some of the management are backing those hate preachers because they not only denounce Jews and Negroes, but they attack the union too. It’s divide and conquer. The union may not be great always—I don’t go along with this wage freeze and no-strike pledge—but they let everybody in and that’s right.”
“It makes me sick to hear, all the insults about Jews, Tata. I don’t know if I should keep arguing with them or keep quiet.”
“You can always say something, but say it softly, and maybe be heard better. Don’t let it eat at you, Ruthie. Half those loudmouths ranting about Jews, they don’t know they’re working next to one. They think we got tails.”
Now that the war was going better, she did not think as she sometimes had that maybe the Nazis would conquer. But sometimes she wondered if what made Nazis out of Germans wasn’t something she felt and saw around her here. There were days when it seemed to her every other piece of paper around the factory was a hate tract from some preacher or priest or secular maniac or little Ku Klux Klan grouping, the Silver Shirts, the Dixie Voters for Southern Society, the Mothers of America, the Committee of a Million. She felt weary before it all and sore.
She longed for Murray to talk to, but he had enough to worry about without having shipped to him homefront squabbles. People would grow used to each other as they worked together, perhaps. Her policy was to identify herself always as a Jew when she heard one of those nasty remarks, but to try to avoid a fight. She did not know if her policy was brave or cowardly, but gradually the women and men around her stopped making the remarks so often, at least in her hearing. She supposed that was some kind of improvement. Each occasion left her raw with silent anger. She was not as friendly as she had been.
BERNICE 4
Up, Up and Away
Bernice was living in The Yellow Rose of Texas tourist court, sharing a room with Helen and Flo. Every morning an Army truck hauled them to the field, where they had calisthenics in the mud. After breakfast in the mess hall she marched with the rest of them to the flight line. Houston Municipal Airport was enormous and consisted of several different fields. Well away from the women, Ellington Field trained combat pilots. The women used a hangar and shed complex near the commercial airlines.
That very week, she had passed her flight check, avoiding the dreaded pink slip that could wash a trainee out of the program. Pink seemed somehow appropriate. Strip off your flying gear and slink back to kitchen and parlor duties. In a PT-19 trainer, she had gone up with a military check pilot—not her regular instructor—and performed a
ll the fancy maneuvers he commanded, the rolls, the stalls, the spins and dives. Now instead of the PT-19, she was flying a BT-13 basic trainer, a great improvement. Instead of the open cockpit, it had a canopy. It even had a radio. Above all, the BT-13 had a 450-horsepower motor, vastly more powerful than anything she had flown. It was hard to handle in a dive and it shook like an old Model T bumping over a corduroy road, but she did not care, she did not care at all.
In the afternoon they had classes in aerodynamics, engine operation and maintenance, mathematics, navigation and meteorology. Then they marched out for more calisthenics, supper in the mess hall and return by Army semi to The Yellow Rose of Texas for studying and gossiping until ten o’clock lights out and an early beginning the next morning.
Bernice had never been as happy in her life. She discovered she was not a person who needed to be alone as much as she had thought, which was lucky, because in fact she was never alone except when she was ordered to solo in a plane. She liked these women far better than she had liked the few friends she had had at home. Home? She was far more at home here than she had ever felt in The Professor’s house, after Viola died.
She no longer felt oversized. They all looked enormous in their gear, the bulky fleece-lined leather jackets, the high-waisted, fleece-lined leather pants which zipped along the leg and needed suspenders to stay up, worn over woolly long johns. They were less ridiculous on Bernice than on smaller boned women. That was their winter gear.
The things that mattered here she was good at. They were actually paying her a hundred fifty dollars a month to learn the most exciting job she could imagine. She might have been living a fantasy, but her aching body told her otherwise. After she had stalled and spun her trainer, the bones of her neck felt wrenched out of place. Their physical program was designed to keep their sexuality in check, or so the women speculated; it certainly wore them out.
