by Julia Watts
I’m glad I met Virgie so I won’t be alone all the time at school, but as I write this, I’m too restless to feel all the way happy. Mother and Daddy and my sisters are sleeping, and I’m sitting in front of the stove, wrapped in a blanket, writing by the light of a candle just like Samuel Pepys probably did. It’s late, and I should write the same thing Mr. Pepys did at the end of his diary entries: “And so to bed.” But I’ve already been to bed, and I couldn’t get to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the little frog I murdered, lifeless in its jar like Snow White in her glass coffin.
November 7, 1944
When I knocked on Iris’s door today, she hollered for me to come on in. She was sitting in the living room chair with Baby Sharon on her lap. Two other ladies were sitting on the couch with cups of coffee. Like Iris, they were wearing good dresses with high heels and hats. Visiting clothes, I reckon. A little blond-headed girl who looked to be about two was sitting on the floor, scribbling in a coloring book with a picture of a pumpkin in it.
“Ruby, come have a cup of coffee with us,” Iris said. “Milk, right?”
“Yes, please.” I watched as Iris poured a cup about a third full of coffee and two-thirds full of milk, the way I like it.
“Ruby,” Iris said. “These are my neighbors, Mrs. Hannah McGill and Mrs. Eva Lynch.”
Mrs. McGill looked like she might be around Iris’s age; she had a round face and mouse-brown hair and stopped just short of being chubby. Mrs. Lynch, though, was so rail-thin she made me think of how Daddy described skinny women: “a hank of hair and a bone.” Unlike Iris, who always had lipstick on her teeth or a spot on her blouse, Mrs. Lynch looked perfect. Her chic little hat—that’s how they always described them in ladies’ magazines—was perched perfectly on her perfectly arranged hair and also managed to perfectly match her peacock blue dress. “Nice to meet you’uns,” I said. The way they were looking, I felt like I should curtsy. But I didn’t.
“What was that she said?” Mrs. McGill turned to Mrs. Lynch. “You-uns?”
“You’uns.” Mrs. Lynch pronounced it slowly. “It’s a plural form of ‘you.’ Nonstandard English, of course. Local dialect.”
“Ruby’s from Kentucky,” Iris said. When neither Mrs. McGill nor Mrs. Lynch said anything, she added, “Ruby, after we finish our coffee, we’re going downtown to vote. We shouldn’t be gone long, if you wouldn’t mind looking after Sharon.”
“Of course she wouldn’t mind,” Mrs. Lynch said. “That’s what you pay her for, isn’t it?” She laughed.
“Doesn’t it feel strange,” Mrs. McGill said, “to be voting in the national election but not for any local government?”
“Well, in Oak Ridge, the national government is the local government,” Mrs. Lynch said.
“True,” Iris said. “For better or for worse.”
“Which makes it sound like a marriage,” Mrs. McGill said, laughing.
“It is a marriage,” Mrs. Lynch said, but her voice was serious. “Scientists, soldiers, laborers, wives—we’re all married to this town.” Then she looked at me. “Ruby”—I was startled since everybody had been talking like I wasn’t even in the room—“since we’ll be gone so briefly I think I may leave little Helen with you, too.” She nodded in the direction of the little blonde girl, who was engrossed in coloring a picture of a Thanksgiving turkey.
I said “all right” even though I was pretty sure I would’ve ended up with Helen even if I’d said a firm no.
When the ladies trooped out to do their patriotic duty, Iris was the last in line. She looked at me, smiled, and mouthed the word “sorry.”
The reason for Iris’s apology became clear soon enough. Once her mother was out of sight, little Helen started screaming—screaming the way you would if somebody was cutting one of your legs off with a rusty hacksaw. Her pretty face transformed into a red, twisted mask, and Baby Sharon—who probably figured that if a bigger kid was throwing a fit like that, then there must be something really bad going on—started crying, too. For sheer loudness, though, Baby Sharon couldn’t hold a candle to Helen. Nobody better tell Helen any of Oak Ridge’s secrets, I thought, or she’d scream them out so they could be heard clear to Japan.
“Helen,” I said, making my voice as sweet as syrup, “why don’t you show Baby Sharon and me how you color in your pretty coloring book?”
She snatched up a fist full of crayons and slung them across the room. “Mama!” she screamed. “Maaaaamaaaaaaa!”
“Your mama’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said. “I tell you what let’s do, Baby Sharon. Let’s see if Helen wants to dance with us.”
I put a record on the record player and bounced Baby Sharon up and down in time with the music. She cheered up right away. Helen, though, kept right on screaming. No matter how big Glen Miller’s band was, Helen’s screams were bigger.
Finally, I took the girls into the kitchen and gave them each a cookie, figuring that Helen couldn’t scream with her mouth full. But as soon as Helen started chewing, Iris came back with Mrs. Lynch, who took one look at Helen and said, “Oh, no, you’ve spoiled her dinner!”
“I wouldn’t worry, ma’am,” I said. “I think she worked up quite an appetite.”
“Is she sarcastic with you, too, Iris?” Mrs. Lynch said.
“Oh, that’s just Ruby’s sense of humor,” Iris said. “I like it.”
Mrs. Lynch didn’t like it, I guess, and she plunked down a nickel on the table in front of me, scooped up Helen, and left.
“That was a hard-earned nickel,” I said, when Iris came back from walking Mrs. Lynch to the door.
“I know it was,” Iris said. “Eva left Helen with Warren and me one Sunday afternoon. After an hour of her screaming, Warren said he found the first syllable of her name quite appropriate.” She laughed. “Would you mind feeding Sharon a jar of sweet potatoes while I get dinner started?”
“Of course I wouldn’t mind. That’s what you pay me for.”
Iris winced. “Ooh, she did say that, didn’t she? Well, you’ve got to understand Eva’s one of those rich girls who was raised with a whole household staff trained to do her bidding. Roughing it in Oak Ridge has been quite an adjustment for her.” She opened and drained a can of tuna. “But she means well. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.”
I didn’t feel like I ought to say anything else on the subject of Mrs. Lynch, so I spooned sweet potatoes into Sharon’s waiting mouth and asked, “You reckon Dewey’ll win the election like the newspapers want him to?”
“I don’t know.” Iris opened a soup can and dumped the gray, gloppy contents into a bowl with the tuna. “He didn’t get my vote.”
“Mother and Daddy like FDR, too,” I said. “Daddy don’t care for Mrs. Roosevelt much, though. He says a woman ain’t got no business doing some of the things she does, like going down in the coal mines. He also says she looks like a mule.”
Iris poured a little milk into the bowl of goo and gave it a stir. “And what do you think of Eleanor?”
“I like her. I think she’s smart. And she can’t help it that she looks like a mule.”
Iris laughed. “I like her, too. And I think that a lot of FDR’s good ideas are really her ideas.”
“I think so, too. I hope nobody told my daddy that, though, or he would’ve voted for Dewey.”
Iris smiled. “I like that there are women like Eleanor and like the ones working over at the plant—women who take an interest in what’s going on outside their houses.” She poured the tuna-soup glop into a baking dish and smeared it around. “I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing Hannah and Eva because they were really nice helping me get settled here, and we all take turns having each other over for coffee…” She crumbled up some saltine crackers and started sprinkling them over the tuna glop. It looked awful, and I was glad I wasn’t staying for supper. “But when I’m visiting them they don’t talk about anything but what their kids are saying and doing and what new recipes they’ve tried…sometimes I wa
nt to talk about something bigger than everyday life, you know?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I get to thinking about how my mama spends all her time looking after whatever little-bitty place we happen to be living in. My sisters say they’re gonna marry rich men and be housewives in mansions. But no matter whether my house was a shack or a mansion, I think I’d get bored staying in it all day.”
“You would.” Iris slid the baking dish into the oven. “Sometimes I think that when Sharon’s old enough for school—and who knows where we’ll be by then?—I might get a job. My degree’s in journalism, and some days I just picture myself sitting behind the desk in a newspaper office, checking the facts on some big story.”
I grinned. “Like Brenda Starr.”
“It wouldn’t have to be that glamorous to satisfy me. I’d even like writing up run-of-the-mill stuff like wedding announcements and obituaries. I worked three out of my four college years on the school newspaper, and those are some of my happiest memories—staying up late to make deadline, the camaraderie with the rest of the staff. I’d like to have something like that in my life again once Sharon’s older. I haven’t talked to Warren about it, though. I guess I’m afraid he’ll say no, and then I won’t have my little daydream to entertain me anymore.”
I wiped Baby Sharon’s sweet potatoey face. “He shouldn’t mind, if you wait till Sharon’s bigger. Maybe you could find a part-time job and just work the hours she’s in school. You should talk to him about it.”
Iris took off her apron and sighed. “There’s a lot Warren and I haven’t talked about since we moved here. With him working six twelve-hour shifts per week, there’s not much time for conversation. And then when he is home, I can’t very well ask him ‘what did you do at work today?’ because he’s not allowed to tell me. So I make pleasant conversation about the baby and the house and anything interesting or comical that I can think of, and I don’t bother him with my worries or problems because I know he’s working a lot harder than I am. Then he compliments me on the dinner I’ve prepared—most of the time I don’t deserve it—and makes chit-chat about the new Oak Ridge Symphony he’s been asked to join or an upcoming dinner party or social event. Warren and I don’t get to spend enough time together, and the time that we do have, we’ve fallen into this pattern of being extraordinarily polite to one another.” She lifted Baby Sharon from her high chair. “But apparently my politeness doesn’t extend to you. I’ve spent far too much time talking to you about myself. It’s just…there’s something about you I trust. That’s why I chose you to look after Sharon.”
“That means a lot to me. Thank you.”
“But just because I trust you doesn’t mean I should unburden myself to you at every possible opportunity. I really am interested in what’s going on in your life. What are you reading right now?”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Again. I finished it and then turned right back to the first page and started it again. I had to renew it at the library. For some reason I can’t let it go yet.”
“I can only imagine how much I would have loved that book if it had been around when I was your age.”
I grinned. “‘When I was your age’…that makes you sound old enough to be my granny.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Iris laughed. “But Ruby, I did want to say, I appreciate your listening to me, and if you ever want me to listen to you…if you ever have anything you want to talk about—maybe some girl things it’s too awkward to talk to your mother about—well, you know where to find me.”
I felt my face heat up at the sound of “girl things.” I didn’t know what kind of things she meant, exactly, but I did know that whatever they were, they embarrassed me. I was even more embarrassed when I looked into Iris’s clear blue eyes and saw and felt the trust she had mentioned. It was like being handed a nice present. I felt grateful and lucky but also awkward and unworthy. I did manage to say thank you, though. And then I slipped home to supper, also grateful that I didn’t have to eat Iris’s tuna casserole.
November 10, 1944
Well, whether you’re reading this in 1944 or 1984, you already know that FDR beat Dewey, so I reckon we should be glad that in this country what the people want matters more than what the papers want.
“Unprecedented,” Miss Connor said in literature class on Wednesday when she held up the newspaper announcing Roosevelt’s victory. “It is unprecedented for a U.S. president to win a fourth term of office. I don’t know what you students are learning in history, but as citizens of the United States right now—and as citizens of Oak Ridge, Tennessee—you are living history, and don’t you forget it. You boys and girls will have no shortage of stories to tell your grandchildren.”
That afternoon I went with Virgie to the Red Cross to roll bandages. Aaron went with us as far as the door but then wandered off without a word. “He’ll be back in an hour,” Virgie said. “Rolling bandages is women’s work. I guess men’s work is getting shot up so they need bandages.”
We sat at a big table, rolling up strips of white gauze. “You know,” Virgie said, “sometimes I think I might leave a note in one of these bandages and maybe the soldier who uses it will come back and find me after the war. He’ll be real handsome, of course, and he’ll have been dreaming of me the whole time he was getting shot at. And he’ll take me out dancing, and we’ll have a whirlwind romance and elope to Niagara Falls.” She crinkled her freckled nose and grinned. “Is that the foolishest thing you ever heard?”
“It’s one of them,” I said. “You probably go to the show too much.”
“Well, you read too much,” Virgie said. “It makes you stand-offish.”
“Am I stand-offish because I read too much, or do I read too much because I’m stand-offish?”
Virgie laughed. “Shoot, I don’t know, Ruby. You’re the smart one. You tell me.”
When we’d finished rolling our bandages, Aaron was waiting for us at the front door. Some babysitting money was jingling in my skirt pocket, and I had an idea. “You’uns wanna stop at the drugstore for a Coke?”
“Ain’t got no money,” Virgie said, like somebody who was used to having no money and wasn’t ashamed of it.
“I’ll buy,” I said.
Aaron ran a hand through his orange cowlick. “Girls don’t buy boys no Cokes.” It was maybe the second thing I ever heard him say.
“Sure they do,” I said, “if they’re friends, and one friend just happens to have some babysitting money in her pocket.”
Aaron squinted up his eyes, like he was thinking hard. “Well, I reckon it’d be all right just this once.”
The soda fountain was full of kids our age, playing Perry Como on the jukebox and talking and laughing. I thought of the day I’d come in with Miss Connor, with no money and no friends. But now I had fifteen cents for Cokes and two kids my age to sit at a table and drink them with me. Nothing like this would’ve ever happened back home. I sipped my Coke and patted my foot in time with the jukebox. “Did you’uns have a soda fountain back where you came from?” I asked.
“Shoot, no.” Virgie laughed. “We lived in a coal camp. There was a school and the company store and a rec hall, and that was about it. They showed movies in the rec hall every once in a while, but they was always old ones. Here I get to see a new picture every week. I’m getting plumb spoiled.”
“So you like it better here than you like it back home?” I said. “I sure do.”
“I like some things better, mostly the movies,” Virgie said, draining the last of her Coke. “But I miss home, and Aaron misses home real bad, don’t you, Aaron?”
He nodded, but he looked a little embarrassed.
“In a lot of ways it’s real different here than it was in the coal camp,” Virgie said. “But some ways it’s just the same. Everybody’s here on accounta the same job, so it’s a company town.”
“It is,” I said, “but the government’s the company.” I was beginning to notice that Virgie was a lot smarter than she thought she was. She�
��s not book-smart like me. She does just enough in school to get by. But she can see things about the real world that I miss sometimes.
A fast song came on the jukebox, and that blonde girl from biology class dragged a boy to the floor and started dancing. I couldn’t imagine dancing out in the open like that with everybody watching me, but then again, I didn’t know any of the dances these rich city kids knew. The girl’s shiny saddle shoes didn’t miss a step. She’d probably had dancing lessons from the time she learned how to walk. Back home, lots of people thought dancing was a sin, and the ones that did dance clogged to fiddle music instead of jitterbugging to a jukebox. I liked this new music and the new dancing, though, even if I didn’t know how to do it. I tapped my feet and sipped my soda. Virgie’s and Aaron’s glasses were already empty, but I wanted to make mine last.
Once the song was over, the blonde and her boyfriend walked toward the door hand in hand. When they passed our table, I said, “You’uns dance real good.”
The blonde girl looked at us like we were the mud she scraped off her saddle shoe. She looked over at her boyfriend, spat “hillbillies,” and they both laughed. I don’t think she recognized Virgie and me from her biology class. I don’t think she could even see people like Virgie and me.
Virgie was up on her feet. I’d never seen her mad before, and her light blue eyes were as cold as ice. “Danged right we’re hillbillies,” she said, loud enough that people turned their heads to look. “But you’re here in the hills now, too, so that means you ain’t no better than us.”
The blonde girl raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Excuse me, do I know you?”
“You ought to know me,” Virgie said. “You’ve been in third-period biology class with me since the start of school. You don’t know my name, but I know your name’s Susie Thompson. And you know what else I know? I know my friend Ruby here paid you a compliment, and you insulted her.”
