A Woman's Place

by Lynn Austin

“Well … where should I start?” Betty glanced around again with a sniff of superiority. “I noticed that you’ve changed your laundry day to Saturday—”

  “So? Is that a crime?” Ginny asked as she resumed ironing.

  “And Tommy says you’re never home when your boys get home from school.”

  “How would he know that I’m never home?”

  “Your Allan told him. Tommy says that Allan says that you said he can’t go out to play until you get home.”

  “I’m always home by three-thirty or quarter to four.”

  “Home from where, Virginia?”

  Ginny Mitchell had never been rude in her life. Always unfailingly polite, she’d allowed bossy women like Betty Parker to bully her because she was too timid to tell them off. Ginny would be polite now, too. But she would show a little backbone for once. Like her friends Rosa and Helen and Jean.

  “I really don’t think my whereabouts are any of your business, Betty.” She spoke so quietly that it took Betty a moment to grasp what she had said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “If I decide to skip a Bridge game or stop attending Women’s Club, or start doing my laundry on Saturday, it’s really nobody’s business but mine, is it?”

  “Well … but … we’re concerned about you,” she sputtered. “If something is wrong, we’d like to help.”

  Sure you would. You’re just plain nosy. Ginny didn’t say the words out loud. Instead, she smiled sweetly and said, “That’s kind of you, Betty, but nothing is wrong. I don’t need any help—unless you’d like to wash my supper dishes for me while I finish ironing these shirts.” Betty edged toward the door. “This isn’t like, you, Virginia. I hope you know that my door is always open if you need to talk.”

  “Thanks. Good-bye, Betty.” The back door closed again as Betty scurried home to file her report on the Mitchell household.

  Ginny felt so good she laughed out loud. Why had she allowed that crowd to bully her all these years? She had tried hard to please them in order to feel like she belonged, but they’d always made her feel worse, not better. The nasty gossip and petty backbiting undermined the little bit of good the club did for charity. Enough! Virginia Mitchell wouldn’t let women like Betty Parker bully her anymore. Ginny had more important work to do. While the club members sat around playing Bridge tomorrow, she would be building ships to help win the war.

  She reached for her thesaurus and looked up the word bully. It led her to the word intimidate, which the dictionary defined as “to make timid, or inspire with fear.” Perfect! It would be her new word for the week. She would not let Sandra or Betty or any of the other members of the Stockton Women’s Club intimidate her anymore. She would no longer allow them to “make her feel timid” or “inspire her with fear.” She pulled her notebook from the kitchen drawer and wrote intimidate on the line below aloof. She was returning the book to the drawer when Allan came out to the kitchen, sniffing like a rabbit in a clover patch.

  “Are the cookies done yet?” Ginny marveled at how her son could eat an enormous dinner and a big slice of upside-down cake and feel hungry thirty minutes later. She knew that one of his favorite radio programs came on tonight—Captain Midnight or Superman or maybe it was Sky King. Yet the aroma of baking cookies had lured him away.

  “They need to cool,” she told him.

  “Then can I have some?”

  “Yes, but I have a job for you to do first.”

  “A job?” He stared at her in disbelief, as if she had pulled a gun out of her apron pocket and pointed it at him.

  “Yes. It’s high time you learn how to shine your own shoes.”

  “What?” He started backing away, just as Betty Parker had. “I guess I don’t want any cookies.”

  “Allan Michael Mitchell, get back in here.” She spoke firmly, not angrily. He gaped at her as if she had fired the gun. “You’ll find the shoe polish and brush in a box under the sink. Spread a piece of newspaper on the table first, and I’ll show you how to get started.”

  “Mo-om!”

  “If America is going to win this war, then everyone has to do his part. This is your part—starting tonight. You can practice on your shoes, then your father’s need to be polished, too.”

  He wore the same astonished expression on his face that she’d seen on Betty Parker’s. Ginny had to turn away to hide her amusement. The oven timer went off again and she bent to remove the next batch of cookies from the oven, proud of herself for not being intimidated.

  “Do I have to?” Allan asked.

  “Would you rather help out by washing the dishes?” She gestured to the cluttered sink, and his eyes grew even wider as he stared at the mound. His mouth hung open, but he couldn’t seem to reply. “I didn’t think so,” she said. “There’s the newspaper. Get going.”

  It took her son a moment to realize that she meant business, then a few more minutes to perform the usual childish hemming and hawing. When Allan finally got around to spreading newspaper on the table, one of the headlines jumped out at Ginny: “Millions of Women Must Be Shifted to War Work.” She quickly snatched up the page.

  “Not this paper,” she said. “Use a different one.” She tore out the article and put it in the drawer with her word notebook, thinking she might need it to convince Harold—although he read the newspaper from start to finish every night. He surely must have seen the article.

  Allan was still huffing and groaning and slamming cans of shoe polish around when Herbie walked into the kitchen.

  “Are the cookies ready yet?” he asked. Before Ginny could reply, Herbie noticed his brother smearing brown polish on a pair of shoes. “Hey! How come Allan gets to shine shoes and I don’t?”

  Ginny smiled. “I’m sure Allan would welcome your help.” In an instant, Allan’s attitude did a complete about-face, nudged along by sibling rivalry.

  “Get lost, Herbie. This is my job, not yours.”

  Once again, Ginny could barely stifle her laughter. “Okay, your job will be to feed Rex his dinner,” she told Herbie. “Scrape those table scraps into his dish and add a little dog food to it. He needs fresh water, too. And then you can strip all the labels from those tin cans and flatten them.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes. As I explained to Allan, we all have to do our part now that America is at war.”

  “But feeding Rex is your job, Mom.”

  Her job. In a moment of revelation, Ginny realized that she had always performed every household task herself in a misguided effort to feel needed. She had never demanded that her sons do any chores, as if afraid to allow them to grow up, afraid to discover that her home could run without her. But as the newspaper article had pointed out, Ginny was now needed for a much more important task.

  “Feeding Rex was my job—but now I could use some help. I know that change is hard to get used to sometimes, and nobody likes it. But if every person in America does his part to help fight the war, then it will end that much sooner.”

  “Tommy Parker says that the reason the bubble gum won’t make bubbles anymore is because of the war,” Allan said.

  “That’s probably true. There are going to be shortages of a lot of things. The ships that used to bring goods from other countries are needed to carry troops overseas now. And remember how your scout troop had that rubber drive a few months ago? It was because the Japanese have taken over all the places where rubber grows.”

  “Dad said I can’t get a new bike because we need the metal to make tanks and things.”

  “Right. But if we all pitch in, Allan, and do our part, we can win the war, and the factories can make bicycles again.”

  Ginny scraped cookies off the sheet with a spatula. What would she do once the war ended? As much as she longed for the war to be over and for the fighting and the dying and the destruction to end, she couldn’t imagine returning to the life she had always lived. For the first time since the boys were old enough to go to school, she had an important job to accomplish, a purpos
e in life. Anyone could cook and clean house, and it terrified her to think that she was just an anonymous “anyone.”

  She squirted soap into the sink and filled it with water, watching the bubbles rise in a fluffy white mountain. She still wasn’t certain who Ginny Mitchell really was, but she was determined to find out before the war ended, no matter what.

  CHAPTER 10

  November 1942

  “A joint U.S.—British fighting force under the direction of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower has begun landing at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers in North Africa.”

  * Rosa *

  Rosa squirmed in her seat, waiting for the ordeal to end. Every night after supper—and before she and Mrs. Voorhees could clear the table and wash the dishes—Rosa had to endure what Wolter Voorhees called “family devotions.” First he would read a boring passage from the Bible that used words like Thee and Thou a lot. Then they would all fold their hands while Mr. Voorhees prayed. He would ramble on and on about the war and about Dirk being in God’s hands, until Rosa could barely hold back her tears from worrying about him.

  She tried not to slouch in her chair and roll her eyes as Mr. Voorhees pulled his worn Bible from the kitchen drawer and cleared his throat. “Tonight our reading is from Proverbs, chapter thirty-one, the virtuous wife,” he began.

  Rosa braced herself. When she’d first arrived two months ago, the nightly readings had seemed to come in sequence, one chapter following another. But lately she’d noticed that Mr. Voorhees had been skipping around, reading verses that were probably meant just for her. She’d had to endure several references to wives obeying their husbands, then a long warning about lying and drunkenness and “debauchery”—whatever that was. Now it looked like Mr. Voorhees was going to harp about wives again. Well, maybe he could force her to sit here, but he couldn’t force her to pay attention.

  “‘Who can find a virtuous woman?”’ he read in his stiff accent. “‘For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil … .”’

  There was more, but Rosa stopped listening. Her father-in-law had a lot of nerve! Dirk’s heart was safe with her. Dirk did trust her. She loved him and he loved her. And what was that stupid word doth supposed to mean? There was no such word. She let her mind wander, trying to decide what she would wear later tonight when she sneaked down to the Hoot Owl. The red dress had been Dirk’s favorite. He always told her how beautiful she looked in it.

  “‘Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain:”’ Mr. Voorhees said, catching her attention again, “‘but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.”’

  His words made her spitting mad. Was he calling her “vain” just because she was beautiful? Well, Dirk certainly praised her beauty, even if his father didn’t! According to what Mr. Voorhees had just read, Dirk would rather have some mousy, cowering woman who sat around “fearing God,” like those old cows down at the church, instead of a woman who was beautiful and enjoyed life. What a bunch of baloney!

  Being good like the people in the Bible was no fun at all. Yet Rosa didn’t kid herself about what she was really like deep down inside. She felt like a phony whenever she went to church because she liked to have a good time. She was nothing like those people.

  She gave an enormous sigh when Mr. Voorhees finished praying. She hadn’t meant to, it had just slipped out. “Sorry,” she said when he frowned at her.

  When the dishes were washed and the kitchen cleaned, Rosa followed her mother-in-law into the living room, bracing herself for another long, boring evening with the newspaper and the knitting needles and the radio. Even the programs they listened to were boring. What she wouldn’t give for some decent music and a cold beer!

  At last, Tena put her knitting away, and Wolter turned off the radio. As soon as the last light went out, Rosa climbed out of her bedroom window and walked down to the Hoot Owl. She could hear the music of Glenn Miller’s band blaring from the bar’s jukebox half a block away, and it put a skip in her step. How she loved to dance! She hung up her coat and was barely seated at the bar when one of the regulars offered to buy her a drink.

  “No, thanks,” she told him—as she did every time. He never got the hint. The man reminded her of her mother’s last boyfriend, Bob, the one who had tried to get fresh with her. At least this guy gave up and went back to his barstool.

  As time passed and Rosa sat at the bar, listening to the music and sipping her drink, she began feeling lonelier and lonelier. She was starting to regret sending the first guy away when Doug, one of the welders from work, finished the game of pool he’d been playing in the back room and sat down on the barstool beside her. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he liked what he saw—unlike Mr. Voorhees, who kept throwing Bible verses at her all the time, trying to get her to change.

  “Wanna dance?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” She let him take her into his arms, imagining that she was back in her favorite dance hall in Brooklyn. If she drank enough, if her vision blurred enough, she could almost pretend that she was back in Dirk’s arms again. But as she swayed dreamily to the song “I’ll Never Smile Again,” Rosa noticed that Doug was holding her a little too closely. When he bent to kiss her neck, she pushed him away.

  “Hey, knock it off!”

  “Don’t be a tease, Rosa. You know you’re as lonely as I am.”

  “I’m a married woman.”

  “So? You let me pay for your drink, didn’t you?”

  Rosa squirmed out of his embrace as her temper flared. “I’ll give you back your stupid money, if that’s how you feel. I can buy my own drinks.”

  “Rosa, wait,” he said, catching her by her wrist. “Don’t get sore. Friday night only comes once a week. We were having fun, weren’t we?” They had been, and she didn’t want to go back to her lonely barstool.

  “Oh, all right. But behave yourself.”

  She drank some more and danced some more, imagining that she was holding Dirk in her arms. She began to feel tipsy. “I need to sit down,” she said when the music stopped. Doug led her to a shadowy booth in the corner and ordered another round of drinks. Rosa watched as he pulled out his wallet to pay the waitress and saw a snapshot fall out along with his money. Rosa yanked the photo across the table to look at it. A woman sat on a beach blanket with three small children, smiling and waving at the camera.

  “You’re married?” Her words came out louder than she had planned.

  “So what?” he said with a shrug. “So are you.”

  “It isn’t the same—”

  She stopped. It was exactly the same. What if, at this very moment, Dirk was sitting in a bar with another woman, buying drinks for her, dancing with her? And what if Doug’s wife was sitting home at this very moment like poor Ginny Mitchell, crying her eyes out because her no-good bum of a husband was messing around with another woman? Rosa recalled the words that Wolter Voorhees had read from the Bible, “her husband safely trusts in her,” and all the booze she had drunk sloshed sickeningly in her stomach. She shoved the photo across the table to Doug and climbed out of the booth.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Rosa, wait. Don’t be sore at me.”

  “Go home to your wife, Doug.”

  She glanced at the clock above the bar and saw that it was only eleven-thirty—several hours earlier than she usually went home—but she put on her coat and headed home, her high heels tapping loudly in the quiet streets. She glanced over her shoulder every now and then, worried that Doug or someone else might follow her. But this wasn’t Brooklyn, she reminded herself. There was no need to feel threatened in boring Stockton. She made it home and hurried across the grass to her bedroom window on the south side of the house.

  The window was closed.

  Rosa stared at it dumbly for a long moment. She was certain she had left it open. Had it slid shut on its own? She stood on tiptoes and gripped the sash, trying to push it open. It wouldn’t budge. Rosa
braced her hands against the sill and jumped up to look inside. The latch was locked! The curtains were drawn, too, and she knew for certain that she’d left the curtains open.

  Rosa leaned against the house. Booze swirled around in her stomach like a load of rags in a washing machine. Dirk’s parents knew! They had caught her sneaking out and had locked her window!

  There was nothing she could do except go around to the back door. She would probably find Mr. Voorhees sitting at the kitchen table like he was judge of the world, waiting to condemn her to hell. But when Rosa tried the back door it was locked, too. Her knees went weak. The Voorheeses hardly ever locked their doors. When she’d first moved to Michigan and saw how safe Stockton was compared to New York, she could hardly believe it. But Mr. Voorhees had deliberately locked her out tonight.

  She walked around to the front door, certain that it would be locked, too—and it was. The house was dark and very quiet, her in-laws fast asleep. Rosa sank down on the front step in a daze. She didn’t know what to do. November in Michigan was much colder than November in Brooklyn, and she didn’t want to freeze to death on the doorstep. But she didn’t want to knock on the door and be forced to face her father-in-law, either. What if he refused to let her in?

  Maybe she should go to Jean’s house. It couldn’t be far because Jean and Mr. Seaborn had walked her home that one night. But Rosa had been too drunk to remember which house it was. She snorted in frustration and gripped the railing to pull herself to her feet. The front yard whirled like a carnival ride, but Rosa decided to walk back to the Hoot Owl to see if maybe Mr. Seaborn had come there again, like he had that other night.

  She quietly slipped inside the bar and looked all around for him, peering into all the booths and even into the dingy pool hall in the rear. Mr. Seaborn wasn’t there. She would have to come up with another plan.

  “Do you know where Jean Erickson lives?” she asked the bartender.

  “Nope, sorry. Never heard of her.”

  “How about Earl Seaborn who works at the shipyard?” The bartender shook his head.