I accepted it when it came to breaking codes for the US Navy in a war to save lives and to win and to stop another genocide. “It is better to save lives and be quiet than to never save lives at all.”
I stood up, I walked over to the officer who had all of my college work in the folder in front him with his annotations and notes and underlines on the pages, which made me feel even more necessary to the cause, and I shook his hand.
“Yes, yes, I can,” I said. “And thank you for this opportunity, sir.”
A WEEK LATER, I STOOD outside of Arlington Hall, waiting to be ushered inside. It felt like once I stepped into the halls of the old building that I would lose a part of me and gain another, and, God’s honest truth, I didn’t know which one I wanted more.
Helen had gotten the same orders, passed the same test, and left the next day after her interview.
“I have to get to DC early,” she said. “I’ll find you, Della. I’ll see you at registration. I have to go see about some things.” Then she was gone, gone to DC to do whatever the hell Helen wanted to do without giving me even the tiniest glimpse into what it was. Just like she said she had to buy something for her outfit and turned up with a quart of pharmaceuticals running through her bloodstream to not look sick during the test, “I have to go see about some things,” could mean anything really, so I took care of my own stuff and headed to DC on the train.
The old building, a former dormitory, had been converted into a government operations building. Men in uniform walked in and out of the front door. Men with automatic weapons stood guard at every entrance, their hands wrapped firmly around the guns held at the waist and pointed toward the sky. Grey and white clouds drifted overhead, catching the jet stream toward the ocean just a few miles from where I stood.
I couldn’t imagine what waited for me on the other side of those doors, and the officer who picked me up at the train station gave me no real time to ponder it either. He was cute with a firm jaw and strong shoulders, but he was way too honkie for my taste, a term I picked up one afternoon on my way from Trinidad to Massachusetts. One I liked to say, one I felt appropriate for people with too little pigment in their skin to like spicy foods or too much stick up their ass when they walked and talked. He was too damned honkie for me.
The man escorted me through the front doors. It was early morning, and I had yet to drop off my bags, so I had to carry them with me.
He led me to a check-in desk set up for people just like me, homeless young women who had no damned idea what they were doing. A man behind the desk handed me a clipboard to fill in all of my “necessary” information, which included more than I had ever been asked about myself in the past. But this didn’t bother me—much. I knew one thing: I was there on the military’s dime, and I expected them to want to know all about me.
I sat, I wrote, and then I handed the form back to the man behind the desk.
He scanned my form, checking the boxes with a pen.
And then his brow furrowed.
“You didn’t fill out a local residence,” he said. “This will need to be filled out before you can start work.”
“Excuse me?” I said and then looked down at my luggage that sat next to my legs and then back at the man behind the desk. I wanted to say something like, “Umm, do you not see that I just got off the train, honkie?” Instead, I said, “I just got interviewed last week. They put me on a train this morning. I’m not sure how this whole thing works.”
The man shook his head as if I had answered incorrectly; I would find out later that he was just a dick and didn’t want to deal with another recruit who he would have to place in the makeshift dormitory for women about a mile from Arlington Hall, a place where hundreds of young women had been staying and would be staying until the end of their service, where three to four women shared a room and ten to twelve women shared a bathroom and showers. He was just a dick, and I was glad I held my tongue.
“We’ll have to put you up in Arlington Fields,” he said. He sighed and pulled out another set of forms that outlined how much I would have to pay, what the government would pay, and another form that said even though I would be living with other recruits, I could not discuss my work with any of them outside of Arlington Hall, even if we were working on the same project. I had signed form after form after form the day before that stated if I spoke to anyone outside of the US military about the work I would be doing, even though I didn’t know what it would be, I could be tried for treason. I understood. And I loved the idea of it. Loved it.
“I won’t tell a soul,” I said out loud when I signed the paper. The dick behind the desk sighed as if I had disturbed his precious air.
Right before I signed the lease for my bed at the dormitory, which would cut deep into the pay the military would give me, a soft hand pulled the pen from my hand.
“She’ll be staying with me and my cousin at our apartment downtown. She got recruited out of Virginia. She’s nice—enough,” Helen said. She asked the soldier if she could borrow my original form. He handed it to Helen, and she filled out the address.
“Is that okay with you…Della, isn’t it?” Helen said, dipping her head down to pretend to read my name. “What is that name? Some kind of western name or something like that? Are you from the west, dear Della?”
I could have slugged Helen and hugged her at the same time.
I nodded my head instead and suppressed laughter that sergeant dickhead would have not approved of.
“You’ll love the place, Della,” Helen said. “It’s small, and you’ll have to sleep on the couch, but with the three of us there, the rent will be cheap, and we can save money, and we can avoid the dormitory.”
The man at the desk nodded. He didn’t give two shits what we did as long as it didn’t add to his workday. He’d already become sick of our short banter.
“All privacy agreements must be upheld at your place of residence,” he said. He handed me a different form to fill out to ensure that I understood that even though I would work with the two women I lived with, the three of us could not talk about work outside of Arlington Hall. At the bottom of the form, there were six words that were strictly prohibited to be spoken at risk of treason: data, cipher, cryptanalysis, codes, cyber, and security.
Just seeing these words made me anxious and excited to get started. I wanted to drop my bags right there and find out what lay behind the security checkpoint.
The soldier made both of us take an oath of secrecy, even though Helen had already done it earlier that morning, and then he shooed us away, instructing us to report back to Arlington Hall at 7:00 a.m. the next day for “duty.”
We took a bus downtown, the heat of summer in DC nearly unbearable; the sweat built up along the tops of our foreheads and leaked out through our blouses. It was palpable, grimy, and salty. At our stop, Helen helped me with my bags, swinging one of them over the top of her thin, sinewy muscled shoulders. We climbed the communal stairs of the townhouse, walked through the partially propped open door—a woman’s shoe stuck between door and frame—and found Helen’s cousin sitting in front of a fan, its blades spinning as fast as they could and still not able to beat off the humid blanket that fell over the room.
“I’m Debra,” Helen’s cousin said, reaching out her hand.
“I’m Della,” I replied and shook Debra’s hand.
The three of us shed our blouses, not caring about being modest, and stood around the fan.
Helen walked to the kitchen and came back with three cold vodka sodas that had been placed in the refrigerator before she left to fetch me, which she said had been her plan all along.
I preferred silence to talking for most of my adult life, succeeding in keeping a single-bed dormitory throughout my time at Mount Holyoke, not letting anyone else break into my space or my routine or my insurmountable need to read at all hours of the day and night.
“I think we’re going to be breaking codes. You know Japanese codes and German codes. Since you know Japanes
e, I think you’ll be jumping right into translating codes, dear Della,” she said.
“You just broke the goddamned law, dear Helen,” I said.
“Nope, nope, I did not,” she said, “we don’t know what we’re doing yet. We don’t know what they don’t want us to talk about yet, so we are just guessing—conjecture—so we aren’t breaking any laws.”
This was true.
There, that night on the floor, our legs crossed, we laughed and we smiled and we conjectured like crazy. We were doing something together that was bigger than school, than study, than living on a campus, than even a teaching job. We, somehow, had been asked to do something special, and we got to do it together. That changed something, made our friendship deeper—immediately.
By the time we finished our drinks, Helen and I had begun a long, continually growing joke about the Navy officer who had checked us in earlier that morning, flashing our best impressions of his dull and annoyed facial expressions back and forth at each other and mimicking his flat, dumb voice, “Okay, sign here then,” and, “Though you might work with some of your roommates—TREASON!” We laughed and touched each other’s knees—and left Debra feeling like a third wheel.
It was one of those moments, one of those rare, rare moments when two people connect, when they fall into a line that seems to be placed there by the universe, and they are tugged by a string and pulled together to ride that line across the world. Those moments between people so rarely happen, but when they do, they are so profoundly recognizable that everyone else around can see them happening and feel as if they are the most alone person in the cosmos.
I think that’s how Debra felt, at least.
She excused herself, leaving us to finish off the vodka and fall asleep next to each other on the floor in front of the fan that night.
This tightened grip on each other would stick with us over the next few grueling summer months. We spent our first days training alongside each other. We spent our nights drinking and then getting ready to go out into DC. That week when we still had no responsibility, before they let us into the war rooms, it was the best week of my life.
Chapter Forty-Four
John
1943
I STOOD UP AND FACED THE CAPTAIN. I PUT A BAG OF THE chiles in my left hand and saluted him immediately.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
With hand still placed firmly on my forehead, I ran the smile off my face.
“Have you been given permission to go through my boxes?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “The head cook gave me permission to use any available item for our supper, sir.”
He ran his fingers across his chin, thinking.
“Even these?” he asked.
His voice came out sternly with unmasked skepticism.
“I believe so, sir,” I said. “I asked if I could use all available items, and he said I could, sir.”
“I don’t believe he was thinking of these boxes when he said yes, Cordova,” the captain said.
He continued to run his hand along the scruff on his chin. It made a scratching noise that filled the small hallway at the edge of his quarters.
“I can put them back, sir. My mistake, sir,” I said.
He didn’t respond for a long, long minute.
“What do you plan to do with those, Cordova,” he asked.
I took a welcome breath.
“I’m going to cook with them, sir, for me and Noakes and the head cook, sir,” I said.
His hand went back to his chin and the scratching continued.
“What would you cook with chiles and chocolate?” he asked. His forehead scrunched, his brows went inward, and his lips seemed to meld together, all in a genuine expression of confusion.
“Sir, I plan to make a molé, sir,” I said.
“A mole, Cordova?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I will get the water back into the peppers. Then I will grind them into a paste. Then I will cook the peppers with the chocolate until the sauce becomes creamy. Then I will stew some potatoes and chicken in it, sir. Noakes is cooking something too, sir.”
His eyebrows lifted, and a slight smile drew across his lips.
“Continue on, Cordova, but since this is my food, since this is my chocolate and chiles, I want to have a plate of this mole chicken,” he pronounced mole like describing the rodent, “as soon as it is ready. Understand, Cordova.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. A bead of sweat ran from my back and into my underwear.
“What are you standing there for, Cordova? Don’t you need to be cooking?” he asked, a hint of sarcasm on his voice.
“Yes, sir, but…” I began.
“But what, Cordova,” he said. He was no longer smiling. I had already taken up five minutes of his time. His scrunched brow, his downturned lips, and his quiet glare returned before I had the chance to finish my question. I had lingered too long.
“I’ll need another bag of each, sir,” I said. I could hear the crack in my voice, nerves filling me from my feet to my larynx.
“Take what you need, Cordova, but don’t waste an ounce. We can’t restock until we hit the other side of the Pacific Ocean,” he said. “Dismissed.”
He walked past me. I saluted him again and ran to the kitchen.
Noakes stood above two small side burners that the other cooks had no use for in their prep. They didn’t know how to cook in a delicate enough way that they would ever need a small burner. I filled Noakes in on what had happened with the captain. He nodded and ran out of the kitchen, coming back with more ingredients.
“If you get to cook for the captain, I’m going to cook for him too,” he said. He smiled. He dropped a pile of ingredients on the one-foot-by-one-foot chopping block that I had managed to steal away from the cooks on duty. We both began cooking.
Our pits sweating and our brows warm from moving in the small kitchen, the head cook called us to attention. We turned to find him holding two seared steaks and two potatoes, each buddying up to each other on separate plates, the smell of the steak hanging in the moist, submarine air like he had spritzed the whole damn area with steak spray. A bit of drool ran to the corner of my mouth, but I swiped at it with my forearm before anyone noticed.
“I have a spot left on these plates for you two to fill with whatever you promised the captain. I expect these spots to be filled within the next minute, so his food gets to him warm like it should be, not cold like your lives will be if it doesn’t.” He said this with no hint of laughter or sarcasm.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
My mole could have used another twenty minutes to stew, but I didn’t have the time. I dug my finger into it and took a lick. It wasn’t perfect, the swapping out of the rich anejos for the dull anaheims and pimientos left it a bit flat, but it tasted better than anything I’d eaten in the Navy so far. That sizzling steak, however, its juices beginning to run across the plate to the potato, would not be a disappointment to the captain, so the bar had been raised high.
“Sir,” I said, dropping my head down toward the small bowl of mole I had filled. “I can carry this to the captain. Noakes can put his food in those spots.”
I grabbed a couple slices of bread. We didn’t have time to make tortillas or rellenos. The bread would have to do.
“He can put the mole on the bread, sir. Or his potato too,” I said.
The head chef nodded. His lips started to purse with his growing impatience.
“Here you go, sir,” Noakes said.
He walked toward the head cook with a big spoonful of shrimp and sausage and tomatoes and placed them in the open spots on the plates next to the steak and potatoes.
“Follow me,” the head cook said.
I followed him with my bowl of mole.
Noakes stood still.
“You too, Noakes,” he said. “If your food is bad, it’s on your head, not mine.”
We followed the cook through the narrow passageway toward the captain’s quarters, up and over
pipes and through the small oval doorways, until we stood outside of his door.
The head cooked knocked, rapping his knuckles exactly twice on the thin, fake mahogany door.
“Yes, come in,” the captain said.
The head cook nudged the door open with his knee.
Inside, the captain sat with his XO, both of them already positioned on each end of the small, green table that sat in the center of the very small room. Hell, for some reason, I expected the door to open to a huge suite, maybe to another universe where all the creature comforts lay, but, no, it was a basic room lined with procedural books above the bed, a table, and a shitter. That was it. For some reason, the captain’s room made me respect him more. Sure, he had more than we did with his own privacy and shitter and table, but not much more. He was down there in the barrel of the submarine just like the rest of us.
There wasn’t enough room for all three of us to enter the room at the same time, so the head cook dropped his head down through the top of the door frame and walked over the bottom of it, not spilling an ounce of food from the plate. It was circus-like how he did it. He set the plates on the table in front of the men and then walked back out, grabbed my mole, and then repeated his movement back into the room with the same, genteel care.
“Is this the mole?” the Captain asked, again, saying it like he was talking about the rodent. Mole.
The head cook nodded to me to answer.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And what’s this,” he said. He pointed to Noakes’ dish that smelled just as good as mine but so completely different at the same time.
“That’s shrimp and sausage like we make at home, sir,” Noakes said.
The captain nodded and asked. “Noakes, now how is it that you came to cook for me as well?”
“Sir, Cordova and I, we do everything together. And, if I can be frank, sir, if he was going to get to cook for you, I was too, sir.”
The captain let go of the slightest smile before grabbing his fork and first digging into Noakes’ shrimp and sausage and tomatoes. The XO, on the other hand, dipped his bread into my mole.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 21
