Secret City

by Julia Watts

  Sometimes being friends with Virgie was like being pulled onto a fast-moving train. You had to forget you’re out of control and don’t know where you’re going and just enjoy the ride.

  On the bus we sat down with Aaron, who only looked up at us by way of greeting. “How you doing, Aaron?” I said.

  “Awright,” he mumbled, looking down at the lap of his overalls.

  I could never decide if it was a kindness to speak to him despite his intense shyness, or if it would’ve been more of a kindness not to speak to him at all.

  When the bus stopped, Virgie told the driver, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  “You better be,” he said. “I run on Uncle Sam’s time, not yours.”

  In less than three minutes, she was back on the bus, out of breath and carrying a paper sack. “Mama says I can go,” she panted.

  Once we got to my house, I asked Mama, who was hanging up the wash, if Virgie could stay all night.

  “I don’t see why not,” Mama said, smiling. “What difference would one more girl make?”

  I think Mama was pleased. Opal and Garnet brought over girlfriends all the time, but this was the first time I had.

  Even though Virgie and I are too old to jump rope, we spent an hour before supper turning the rope so Opal, Garnet, and Baby Pearl could jump all they wanted. The ground was frozen enough to jump on now. In the fall, it had been so muddy that when Opal tried jumping in it, she got mired up past her ankles.

  When we came in out of the cold, Mama had made hot chocolate to go with our supper. Hot chocolate and soup beans is a strange combination, but everything’s better with chocolate, in my opinion. Baby Pearl must think so, too, because she crumbled up her cornbread into her hot chocolate instead of her soup beans.

  “How’s that cornbread taste with that hot chocolate there, little bit?” Daddy said.

  “It’s dee-licious,” Baby Pearl said, and everybody laughed.

  Once we finished eating, Daddy said, “Well, ladies, I’m even more outnumbered than usual, and I know a hen party when I see one. I reckon I’ll go on out to the rec center and see if I can’t get up a card game.”

  After Daddy put on his coat and tipped his hat to us on the way out the door, Virgie put some hillbilly music on the radio, and we danced around the kitchen, helping Mama clear the table and wash and put away the dishes. I kept grabbing Mama’s hand and trying to get her to dance with me, but she play-slapped me away, saying, “You know I don’t dance. I was raised a Baptist.”

  “Shoot, we dance in my church,” Virgie said. “Except we don’t call it dancing. We call it getting happy.”

  When the last dish was put away, Mama said, “Any of you girls want pin curls in your hair?”

  Everybody but me shouted, “I do! I do!” I’ve never found having my hair messed with something to get excited about. But even Baby Pearl wanted pin curls, and her hair’s as curly as Shirley Temple’s in her heyday. Mama fixed our hair, and we listened to some funny programs on the radio, and Baby Pearl dozed off with her head in Mama’s lap and had to be carried off to bed.

  When Mama came back from tucking in Baby Pearl, she said, “Who wants to help me make some fudge?”

  “But what about having sugar for your coffee?” I asked. Since sugar’s rationed, Mama won’t usually throw a bunch of it away making something as sweet as fudge.

  “I’ll do without it,” Mama said. “I’d rather have fudge right now than sugar in my coffee later.”

  We all clambered into the kitchen, giggling and getting in Mama’s way and probably not being much help at all. Virgie took an apple from the bowl on the table. “You know,” she said, “if you twist the stem of an apple while you say your ABCs, the stem’ll pop off when you get to the first letter of the name of the man you’re gonna marry.”

  “Really?” Garnet said.

  “Sure,” said Virgie. “It’s scientific.”

  “Try it,” Opal said.

  Virgie twisted the stem and said her letters. The stem popped off at R. “Dang it,” she said. “It was supposed to hang on till I got to T so I can marry Tyrone Power.”

  “One time when I was around your age,” Mama said, grinning. “This girl I knew told me if I spread out some cornmeal on the back porch and set a snail on the edge of it, then by morning the snail would write the first letter of the name of the man I was gonna marry.”

  “What happened?” Virgie said.

  “Well, her and me decided we’d both try it. I found me a snail and laid out the cornmeal, and the next morning when I got up, there was a long, straight line going right through the middle of the cornmeal. So I said, it’s an I! I’m gonna marry a man whose name starts with I! When I saw my friend who’d done it, too, she told me she was gonna marry somebody whose name started with an I. And every girl that tried the snail and cornmeal thing, it came out the exact same way. The trouble was there was only one boy in the whole school whose name started with an I—Isaac Dockins. He was real popular there for a couple of weeks.”

  Mama laughed and stirred the fudge, and I saw something in her I’d never seen before. In this house full of just girls, she didn’t seem like the grown woman who was always hanging out wash or cooking supper or mopping mud off the floor. She seemed like a girl, too. And for a minute, I could see what she’d been like before there was a me—before she knew Daddy, even, before she had to spend all day taking care of other people. I liked seeing that part of her. Mama may not understand me as well as she could, but maybe there’s a lot about her I don’t understand either.

  January 20, 1945

  “We shall strive for perfection. We shall not achieve it immediately—but we still shall strive. We may make mistakes—but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.” That’s what FDR said in his inauguration speech on the radio today. For such a short speech, he said a lot. He talked about how his favorite teacher used to say that sometimes life will take a downhill turn but that in the big picture things are always moving upward.

  Mama and my sisters and I were sitting around the radio, and I was trying to write down everything important the President said—maybe because I was remembering what my own favorite teacher had said—that FDR being elected for a fourth term was “unprecedented.” But then FDR said something that threw my sisters into a state of confusion: “We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger.”

  “How can a man be an ostrich?” Garnet asked.

  “Ostriches stick their heads in the sand when they’re in danger,” I said. “He’s saying we shouldn’t be cowards.”

  “What about the dogs in the manger?” Garnet asked.

  “They put Baby Jesus in a manger,” Baby Pearl said.

  By the time everybody got finished talking about ostriches and dogs and Baby Jesus, FDR’s speech was over, and I hadn’t written down another word of it.

  But at least I got to hear FDR say that even if things are going downhill, it’s only temporary. I’ve been feeling a little downhill myself lately. I miss Miss Connor something awful. I didn’t realize until she was gone how much of my enjoyment of school was because of her and the way she taught English literature. Now, with Mr. Masters, we still read great stuff. Our class is in the middle of A Tale of Two Cities (I finished reading it a week ago). But the way he teaches, he just sucks all the juice out of whatever we’re discussing until it’s like the hollowed-out husk of an orange with the delicious parts all gone and nothing left but the pips.

  Also, there’s something else that’s been bothering me since Christmas, but I would never say it anywhere but here. I really want the war to end. I want both victory and peace, like FDR was saying in his speech. But—and this is a big “but”—there’s another part of me—the selfish part, I guess—that worries about what’s going to happen to our family after the war is over. If Oak Ridge was just built because of the war, then after the war, the city will have no reason to
exist. And the people who came here will have no reason to stay.

  So my family will pack up our few belongings, get on the bus, and head back home, with a little more money in our pockets so Daddy can build on to our little house. And everybody will be happy except for me. Because I can’t even imagine going back home and living like I did before, now that I know how different life can be. I’m not the same girl I used to be. My eyes have been opened up to the whole, big world, and if I could barely stand the long, dull days of country life before, I know I couldn’t stand them at all now. I do want the war to end. It’s just that I know that when it does, the sacrifice I’ll have to make will be far greater than giving up a little meat and sugar for war rationing.

  I’ve been reading Forever Amber—slurping it down like ice cream—every chance I get when I’m sitting for Baby Sharon, but since finishing A Tale of Two Cities, I’ve been out of something respectable to read at home. After the radio broadcast, I wandered down to the library, already feeling sad because when we move back to Kentucky, there won’t be a library in walking distance. Is it possible to feel nostalgic for something you haven’t even lost yet?

  I browsed through the fiction shelves, hungry for something good but not quite sure what that something might be. Mrs. Harris, the librarian, came by with an armload of books. “Are you out of reading material, Ruby?” she asked. She’d stamped my books so many times it would have been impossible for her not to have known my name.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Got any recommendations?”

  She set down her stack of books on a table. “Well, what kind of story are you in the mood for? Suspenseful? Sad? Funny?”

  “Maybe funny. I could use a laugh.”

  “Got the winter drearies, too, eh? Hmm…” She scanned the shelves and pulled out a book. “You might like this one.”

  I took it from her and looked at the cover: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

  “It’s about a young woman not much older than you,” Mrs. Harris said. “She’s very clever and urbane, and she goes to stay with her relatives in the country who are quite the opposite of urbane. It’s a sort of comedy of manners. I laughed a lot when I read it.”

  “Well, I guess I’d better take it, then. Thank you. There’s one more thing I need to do, though, before I check it out.”

  One way I try to learn is by building my vocabulary, so when somebody says a word I don’t know, I always write it down so I can look it up in the dictionary when I’m in the library. Mrs. Harris had just used two terms I wasn’t familiar with, and I figured since I was already in the library, I’d proceed straight to the dictionary.

  First I looked up comedy of manners: comedy that satirically portrays the manners and fashions of a particular class or set. Then I looked up urbane: notably polite or finished in manner.

  It was strange, though. The page on which the word “urbane” appeared had been worn so thin it was shiny and almost transparent. The letter “U” on the guide tab of the dictionary had been fingered so much the gold of the lettering was faded and dull. It seemed odd that the letter “U” would generate such interest. Compared to other letters, there aren’t very many words that start with it.

  I took Cold Comfort Farm home and spent the rest of the day reading it and laughing. Apparently country people in England aren’t that different from country people in Kentucky. Mama said she felt like she was living with a crazy person. Who else would spend a whole evening sitting alone in a corner, laughing to herself about things that nobody else could understand?

  January 25, 1945

  When I went over to keep Baby Sharon this afternoon, Iris wasn’t even dressed. She had on blue pajamas that looked like they might be an old pair of Warren’s with a pink bathrobe over them. Her hair was uncombed, and she was sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette, while Baby Sharon played on a blanket on the floor.

  “Hey,” I said, noticing Iris’s red nose and puffy eyes, “you feeling under the weather?”

  “I’m feeling,” she said, her voice tight, “like I’m under a ton of concrete blocks. But I’m not sick or anything. I’m just having a bad day.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sitting beside her.

  “Oh, no need for you to feel sorry for me, too. I’m doing a more than adequate job of feeling sorry for myself.” She half laughed, but there were tears in her eyes. “It’s hard sometimes. Being here.”

  “I reckon so.” To me, Oak Ridge feels like a big city full of excitement, but to Iris, it must feel like the rear end of nowhere.

  “When Warren and I moved here, it felt like such an adventure. I was sure it would bring us closer together, but”—she stopped to blow her nose—“he can’t talk to me about what he does all day. And why would he care about what I’ve been doing here all day?” She swept out her arm to indicate the house. “Why would anybody care? Hell, except for making sure Sharon’s all right, I don’t even care.”

  “What you do at home’s important, though.” I was trying to make her feel better, even though I knew staying home all day would drive me as crazy as it was driving her.

  “I know,” she said. “But it’s repetitive and boring and lonely. And it doesn’t exactly make for any lively topics of conversation. Though you couldn’t prove that by women like Eva and Hannah. When we get together for coffee, they can talk for ages about stain removal and floor waxing and meatloaf.” She looked at me like she was searching for something. “Ruby, sometimes I feel so different from other women I wonder if I’m even a member of the same species.”

  “I’ve felt that way as long as I can remember,” I said. When I looked at her, it felt like I was looking at myself. Then I felt embarrassed, almost like we were seeing each other naked, so I put on a cheery voice and said, “You know, you don’t need to be cooped up in the house for so long on such a cold, gray day. Why don’t you go out to the show?”

  She ground out her cigarette. “I don’t feel like going anywhere by myself.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  Her eyes looked a little more lively all of a sudden. “What about Sharon?”

  “We’ll take her, too. It’ll be a girls’ afternoon on the town. And if we go to the four o’clock show, you’ll still get home before Warren.”

  Iris went to dress, and I took Baby Sharon into the kitchen and looked around for something I could fix ahead for Warren’s supper. I found a can of tuna, mixed it with some mayonnaise and pickle relish and salt and pepper and set it in the icebox. Warren would probably be expecting a hot meal when he got home, but I figured it wouldn’t kill him to eat a tuna fish sandwich just this once.

  We bundled up Baby Sharon in her snowsuit, which made her arms and legs stick out as stiff as a gingerbread man’s. The theatre was empty except for the three of us. For a while, Baby Sharon entertained herself by pulling herself up to standing on the armrests of the theatre seats. But then she settled on her mama’s lap and watched the movie, too, looking up wide-eyed at the giant faces on the screen. Iris turned to look at me as I was watching Baby Sharon and leaned toward me with a little smile. “Thank you for getting me out of the house,” she whispered.

  January 30, 1945

  Mama’s sick. On Sunday after dinner, she took to her bed with a headache, and there’s only two reasons I’ve ever seen Mama get near a bed in the daytime: to strip the bedclothes or to have a baby. Sunday evening she said she still felt pretty poorly and asked me to bake a pone of cornbread and just give everybody bread and milk for supper.

  Yesterday morning she got up to fix breakfast, but she was hollow-eyed, and her color wasn’t good. By the time I got home from school, she was burning up with fever. I opened a can of Spam and fried it and some eggs for supper, but because I was worried I didn’t eat much. Neither did Daddy.

  Before he left for work this morning, Daddy said, “Ruby, I want you to stay home and look after your mama. Watch Baby Pearl, too, and make sure she lets your mama get some rest. I’m gonna stop in town a
nd see if I can get a doctor to come take a look at her.”

  The doctor came in the early afternoon. He was a serious-looking gray-headed fellow and not a bit friendly. He didn’t pay a bit of attention to Baby Pearl, not even when she asked him what he was carrying in his black bag. You can tell a lot about a person from how he acts around children and animals.

  He took his black bag into Mama’s room and stayed in there with her for around ten minutes. When he came out, he looked at me and said, “Are you the oldest girl?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, I need you to listen to me carefully. Your mother has influenza. It’s been going around the trailer camps and the hutments and all the less hygienic areas.”

  I didn’t like the way he curled his lip and said “less hygienic.” Mama keeps our little house so clean you’d never know it was sitting in a giant mud puddle. But I knew my job was to say nothing but “yessir,” and even if I didn’t like the fellow, if he was going to tell me how to take care of Mama, I was going to listen.

  “Except for taking care of her bathroom needs,” the doctor said, “your mother should not get out of bed until Saturday at the earliest. She should be given juice and clear fluids and aspirin for her aches and fever. Do you understand?” He said every word slowly and carefully, as if he was talking to a two-year-old.

  “Yessir.”

  “It is also vitally important,” he said, “that you keep your mother isolated from your siblings and especially from your father. Influenza is highly contagious, and we certainly don’t want an epidemic among our war workers.”

  He was already headed for the door when I said, “Sir? I have a question.”

  He looked at me in puzzlement, as if he was amazed that a person like me in a place like this could possess enough intelligence to ask a doctor a question. “Yes?”

  “If Mama can’t get out of bed till Saturday, that means I’ll have to miss the rest of the week at school to take care of her. I don’t mind doing it, of course, but I was wondering…could you write me a note I could show to my teachers explaining why I’m missing so much? Maybe that way they’ll let me make up my work.”