Mare's War

by Tanita S. Davis

  “Masks!” Hundley holler louder, and I fight myself and make myself take it off. I stop my sobbing and drag in a breath and hold it … hold it … hold it…. My head is getting light. I can feel my heart beating.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil….

  “Masks on!”

  My fingers are fumbling. I get that mask sealed, but I blow too soon. I got no more air, but I keep that mask on my face and blow even though I got no air. Then I take in a big breath and start coughing. It is not so bad this time. The air is still stinging my eyes and nose, and I can’t see, but it is not as bad as last time. Pretty soon somebody will open the door.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life….

  “Fall out! Wipe your masks and fall in! We are going to do it again!” Lieutenant Hundley hollers out as she open the door. With our legs shaking, we march out.

  Much later, we march half-time back to camp. My eyes are swollen, my nose is snotting, my throat is sore, and I still got vomit on my shoes, but I went through my gas drill over and over and over, and I made it. When I pass her on my way to barracks, Hundley say, “Well done, Private,” and gives me a nod. I can barely open my eyes, but I know she means it.

  We got to do it again tomorrow.

  But I am not scared. I am not scared of nothin’ now. I got blisters on my heels, my hands is cut up, my shoulders are sore from marching with a pack, and I can’t never get enough sleep, but I wouldn’t trade nothin’ for this. Not a thing.

  Didn’t nobody ever tell me I was this tough. Didn’t no-body ever tell me no girl could work this hard, and nobody never said that work this hard could give you pride. My nails might not be nice enough for polite folk, and my face might not be clean, but I earned my place in this man’s army. I earned it.

  And ain’t nobody gonna make Marey Lee Boylen go home.

  13.

  then

  We finished up with basic and were awarded our first leave. Annie hears the news and grabs me and screams.

  “Third Platoon is steppin’ out on the town,” she sings. I put on my garrison cap with a tilt, and I step out with the others in our off-duty summer uniform, holding my clutch purse and wearing my white gloves.

  After a bumpy, jumpy ride on the trolley, we find a colored soda fountain, and Annie finally has herself a milk shake. When we find a dance joint, it’s just colored Women’s Army Corps there, and we’re all from Third Platoon. Do we dance anyway? Do we ever! Somebody puts on some Cab Calloway, and everybody get to actin’ crazy then. Annie say it ain’t—isn’t—so much fun without some handsome boys to walk us home. Still, it is nice to watch Peaches and them cut loose out there on the dance floor.

  “Marey Lee, get out here!” Peaches hollers to me, holding up her arms and doing some fast steps to the music.

  “I can’t dance,” I say, crossing my arms. “You look real good, though.”

  “Oh, go on.” Annie plants her hands on my back and gives me a shove. “Girl, if this music doesn’t make you want to move, I don’t know what’s wrong with you!”

  “But I don’t know how!” I whine, and try to sit back down.

  “Come here.” Peaches drags me by the hand. “Look. Just hold my hands and do the opposite of what I do, all right? Listen to the music. That beat goes one-two-three-four, right? So just step from one side to the other, left-right-left, one.” As she says “one,” she pauses on her right foot. “Now right-left-right, one,” she says, and pauses on the left.

  I try to copy her.

  “No, just little steps, Marey Lee. Now try again.”

  Clumsy and ashamed of it, I follow her movements, but it’s hard to be embarrassed for too long with everyone else stepping and shimmying around me and the music on nice and loud. Next to me, Annie does the same thing I’m doing, but she throws her hips into it and gets a real shuffle going on. I imagine what this dance might look like if we weren’t in our uniform skirts. Boy, we could really twirl!

  I get so good at my simple step I try to throw in a twist, too, but I do it too hard and almost land on my behind. Peaches just about falls on hers, laughing.

  “Not so hard,” she giggles. “Take it easy, hepcat!”

  We have so much fun that Annie says she almost didn’t miss walking home with some boy. I can hardly stop boogying all the way home, but Peach says I’d better stop.

  “Girl, you’re going to be beat in the morning!”

  I am, but I just don’t care.

  The paymaster has been helping me send money home, but I still ain’t heard nothing from Mama. Sometimes, after lights out at 2100, I lay down still and think about that.

  I wish I knew what lies Toby done told Mama about me. I got a feeling that once Feen left for Philadelphia, Mama didn’t want to be nobody’s mother anymore. Maybe the next man that comes along she’ll tell she don’t have kids, and if she don’t let Feen come home, it will seem like it’s true.

  I wish Daddy hadn’t died and left us. I am afraid Mama wishes she hadn’t had Feen and me at all. She could be happy with her man Mr. Toby if it weren’t for Feen and me.

  I can’t think about that too long. If I start cryin’ about home, I might not stop.

  We still don’t have all of our uniforms yet, but finally, they send Third Platoon down to the warehouse for a clothing fit. Don’t nothing fit nobody—anybody—quite right. Skirts that fit across Peaches’s broad behind are too big for her tiny waist. I don’t have hips to speak of, so most things fit my hips just cut into my waist. Poor Dovey’s got such long arms that her jackets have to be taken out, and it’s getting too hot to wear her winter jacket anymore. Girdles are regulation, but mine bunches up when I sit. We all are a sorry sight and have a lot of work to do with the seam-stress to get things right.

  At least our summer fatigues fit. There just isn’t too much wrong you can do with seersucker, and the little hats we wear with them are not too bad. As usual, Annie has to wear hers tipped back on her head so she can be cute.

  All we hear about for weeks is Play Day. They say maybe Mrs. Roosevelt’s gonna come out to see all of us WACs, but I doubt it. Mrs. Roosevelt’s busy with them poor kids with polio, and anyway, colored girls in the middle of nowhere know better than to think the wife of the president of the United States is gonna come see them. Somebody’s always startin’ some kind of rumor around here. These army folks gossip worse than Sister Dials!

  Every Saturday, we got inspection, and every week, some new brass comes in on the train. We got folks from D.C. tryin’ to look at the Women’s Army, and everybody, coloreds and whites, got to march, drill, and post the colors for ’em. Some of them generals stare at us like they’ve never seen colored girls before. Some of them don’t look at us at all. Sometimes they got whole families at the reviewing stand—old generals and their wives, grandkids, the works—and the USO, the United Service Organization, which brings recreation for troop morale, gives dinner dances for the brass. They get up to some big doings, too, and there ain’t nothing like doing KP for a fancy dinner. It takes hours. We got to chop vegetables, peel eggs, and make ninety-nine platters of this and that. (Only the fancy dinners get real eggs—we got powdered ones for our breakfast most of the time.) Somebody got a song about it, too:

  Over sinks, over pails

  With the sergeant on our tails

  All the KPs are scrubbing away.

  Shining pots, shining pans,

  Cleaning out the garbage cans

  All the KPs are scrubbing away.

  We end up with greasy skillets, pots, and pans that look worse than Young’s on a Saturday night. The army don’t waste a thing, either, so we got to be draining grease, cutting up fat, and chopping up those vegetables mighty fine. We’ll be on our feet all day with it, a full eight hours, and after all that, we don’t want to do nothing but fall and fall down out when we get some “rest and recreation” time.

  Saturday afternoon, just after we get off, Lieu
tenant Hundley come by, her face lookin’ hard. She holler out, like we doing drill, “Peaches Carter!”

  “Ma’am!” Peaches says. Peach has been workin’ in one of the offices ’cause she went to commercial high school and took up shorthand typing. She says she doesn’t want to be no army grunt, but Lieutenant Hundley has always got another job for her.

  “Carter, front and center,” she say. “We had a request for you.”

  “A request, ma’am?” Peaches put her hands on her hips. Our company just got showered, and Peach is in her WAC-issue maroon bathrobe, getting ready to paint her toenails. “I’m off duty, ma’am.”

  “I am aware of that, Carter,” Lieutenant says, and she act like her face got frozen. Peaches straighten up fast. “Yes, ma’am,” she say. Hundley does not play around when she’s got that look.

  “Captain Jennings is in need of a sitter for General Craig’s twins tonight. Their regular housekeeper is ill. He knows your work and considers you conscientious and feels you would like to earn the pocket money.”

  Peaches looks like her jaw just broke. Her mouth hangs open, and every girl in our company looks like she’s just been slapped. Now we know why Hundley looks like she’s about to spit. Nobody in their right mind is gonna ask any of the white girls to watch after some general’s babies after eight hours on their feet, but they’re after the colored girls all the time to fetch and carry and “help out.”

  “Get a load of that,” Annie Brown mutters under her breath. I shake my head. Peaches works hard in that kitchen, harder than anybody, and since she doesn’t like to cook nohow, she’s got to try twice as hard. She says Cook hollered at her all day and she about cut her fingers off, with all the chopping she did. She’s tired like we all are.

  Peaches lets out her breath like a popped tire. She looks like someone kicked her in the stomach. Her shoulders slump, and she puts down her polish and picks up her shoes.

  “I’ll go, Lieutenant Hundley,” I say. I can’t stand Peaches’s broken-down look.

  Peaches cuts her eyes at me, and I ignore her. “Peaches hurt herself doing KP I’ll go see to those twins.”

  Hundley looks at me like she’s trying to drill nails in my head. “They are babies, Boylen. Children. Do you know any-thing about children?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I helped to raise my sister. I will take good care of them. Ma’am.”

  “Boylen …”

  “I like children, Lieutenant Hundley,” I say, standing tall, daring her to shut my mouth for speaking up. “Peach is whipped; we all see that. I’ll go.”

  Peaches mutters, “They asked for me, Boylen,” but we both know it don’t make no never mind who goes to see to those twins. The brass aren’t be too picky when they’re asking for a colored girl to work in the house.

  “I got it, Peaches,” is all I say.

  Hundley stares at me for a moment, then looks around the barracks. We all stand there in complete silence. There is something in her face that says she’s got a lot to say, but she doesn’t say it to us. I roll my stockings up over my knees and lace up my shoes while she watches me. Annie hands me my jacket.

  “This isn’t right,” Lieutenant Hundley says finally, and her voice is quiet. “You girls … You women are in the army. Someone will hear about this….” Hundley looks at the floor, clears her throat. She straightens her shoulders and nods to me. “Let’s go, Boylen.”

  Peaches is about to say something. She grab on to my hand before I go out the door, but she doesn’t say it. Instead, she looks at me; looks at me, then lets me go. I think about the look on her face all the way out the door, to the jeep that takes me to town.

  They’ve got trees in this town, tall, tall trees like they’ve been there forever. The yards have got those nice white fences, and they’ve got flowers behind those fences, fat pink roses and big white daisies that the colored boy keep weeded and nice after he cuts the grass. Some of these houses have got those gold stars in the windows on that red, white, and blue background. They’ve got someone in the service at these houses.

  These houses look like my house. Mine and Feen’s. That redbrick house we’re gonna have, someday, looks just like this.

  There’s colored folk everywhere, walking home now that day’s done, walking home from the big houses where they work all day while the white ladies work in the USO, making sure the white officers got someone to give them parties. I go in the back door of one of those houses, a big brick house with white trim, a wide sitting porch wrapped around it, and long white drapes in the window.

  I think of the look on Peaches’s face when I walk into that place, past the kitchen with that fine electric icebox, down the hall with the fine paper on the walls and those fine paintings. I think of that look when I see the nursery with the big rocking horse, and the electric lights above the diaper table, and those big jars of pins and cotton balls, and stacks of pure bleached cotton diapers, all as sanitary and neat as a Woolworth’s counter. I think of that look as I see the little babies lying there, like little pink puppies all curled up. They are just babies, and they sure don’t owe the world no explanation. But I look down at them for a long, long time.

  “Keep prices down,” they tell us. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” is what all those war posters say, but when I look at the newness all over this house, I know that only some of us have to make do. Our soldiers are fighting to make the world better for these babies. WACs are workin’ to free a man to fight for freedom. But sometimes it seems like these babies, helpless as they are, is more free than I am. When are Peaches and me gonna be as free as them?

  14.

  now

  It’s only an hour after our last break, but when Mare pulls off the interstate in search of a gas station, I’m just as glad for an-other stop and a break from the story. I get out of the car and stretch, yawning as Mare heads briskly for the restroom.

  “You girls, go and look around in the store. See if you can find a keepsake,” my grandmother calls over her shoulder.

  “You don’t need your lighter to go to the restroom,” Tali calls after her pointedly. I shrug and yawn again as Tali quickly digs into her bag for her headset.

  Mare decided that we should buy something from every single place we stop, so we have one of those little bobbing birds from the hotel where we stayed last night, a cornhusk doll from Bartlett’s Fruit Stand, where we stopped an hour ago and bought plums, and this gas station has a little gift shop, too. I can’t see why we need to look at another piece of junk just because we need to use the bathrooms, but Mare seems to have an insatiable need to shop.

  Before I can pry my reluctant body away from the car, my phone rings.

  “Hi, honey! Haven’t heard from you girls for a while, so I wanted to check in. I got your postcard.” Mom’s voice on my cell sounds tinny and too cheerful. “Where are you?”

  “We’re at a gas station. Everything’s fine.” I know better than to say anything different. “I tried calling you this morning, but I couldn’t get reception.” It’s kind of a lie—I did open my phone and think about calling my mother, but it was too early to make that kind of effort.

  “So, are you having fun?” my mother presses. “And is Mare … Is everything going all right?”

  “Mare’s fine,” I repeat, raising my voice over the crackle of static. “We’re just stopping at a gas station for a little, um … to get some snacks.”

  I don’t want to worry my mother, but Mare’s stomach hasn’t been right since last night. She says it’s nothing, and she took the keys from Tali this morning as usual, but she’s been really quiet. I’m afraid she doesn’t feel well enough to finish her story.

  “Tell your mama you’re at a gas station because her mother-in-law ate a bag of plums for breakfast and nothing else,” Mare says loudly, emerging from the bathroom in a cloud of perfume and breath spray. “Tell the truth and shame the devil, Octavia.”

  Tali quickly pulls out her earphones. “Nobody wants to know tha
t kind of truth,” she objects. “’Tavia, ask Mom if I got a catalog in the mail from Cal-Berkeley yet. And tell her not to throw away my magazines!”

  I hold out the phone. “Did you want to maybe talk to her instead of screaming in my ear?”

  Tali complains about her a lot, but she and Mom are just alike. They even laugh alike, and listening to Tali while she tells our mother about our day so far makes me miss her a little. Not that I’m homesick or anything like that; it’s just that I wish Mom were here. If nothing else, she’d at least be kind of an ally … someone on my side. Now that Mare and Tali aren’t spending as much time on each other’s nerves, they’re ganging up and getting on mine. I feel kind of outnumbered.

  The more time we spend with Mare, the more ways I see how Tali and Mare are alike, too. They both get into their little moods, they both like confrontation, and they both like to have the last word. Dad’s like that, too, and I always thought Tali got her attitude from him.

  Now I find that Tali’s like Mom, Dad, and Mare.

  I can’t figure out how I got born into this family.

  I think Mare likes Tali better than me, and it’s not fair. It’s not my fault I’m not like anyone else in this family. And shouldn’t Mare understand? She wasn’t like her mother or her sister.

  Sometimes I feel so different from Tali it feels like I was adopted.

  And sometimes I wish I really were.

  “Okay, Mom,” Tali says. “Right. Bye.”

  “Wait!” I shriek as she hangs up. “Tali! I wasn’t done.”

  “Sorry.” Tali hands me the phone, unconcerned. “Mom’s at work, you know.”

  “Well, she called on my phone,” I snap, furious.

  “You’re the one who gave it to me!” Tali exclaims. “What’s your problem?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” I slam the door and stalk across the parking lot toward the shop.

  “Find a keepsake,” Mare says. Keepsake, nothing. I don’t want to remember any of this.