by Lila Perl
“Isabel, where are you going?” my mother wants to know. “Aren’t you even going to unpack?”
“My room is like an oven and you already took my electric fan and put it in the kitchen,” I announce. “So I’m going down to Sibby’s to see if she’s home.”
Sybil Simon, better known as Sibby, lives in the building and has been my friend since the start of sixth grade. If only she’s back from her beach vacation in the Rockaways, I’ll have some place to escape to during the continuing to-do at home over my brother’s enlistment.
The Simon’s apartment is 2D, at the opposite end of the building from ours, which is 4H, and, happily, Sybil herself answers the door. Her long, freckled face is reddened by the sun, and her tightly curled flaming hair is tinged with gold. She’s back from the beach all right, and she looks it.
“What are you doing here?” Her greeting is none too friendly, but that’s how she is.
“Who is it?” Sybil’s mother calls out from the recesses of the apartment. I like Mrs. Simon. She’s a little on the tough side, usually with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, but really friendly and not “motherish” at all.
We sit down at the kitchen table where Sybil and her mother are having lunch, and Mrs. Simon pours some Coca-Cola for me and offers me a sardine sandwich.
“Aren’t you back kind of early from your vacation at the hotel?” Sybil asks. “Everything okay?”
It’s no use trying to keep anything a family secret around here. “Arnold joined the Air Force,” I blurt out. “So my father thought we should come home. Uh, to see him off, you know.”
“Oh, good thinking,” Mrs. Simon remarks, reaching for a cigarette. “You can’t do much for the war effort when you’re being waited on at a hotel. When does he leave?”
“I don’t really know, but I guess it’s pretty soon. Um, how is Mr. Simon doing?”
Sybil’s father is in the Merchant Marine and he’s been ferrying supplies for England across the Atlantic for more than a year now, always at the risk of having his ship torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. Sybil and her mother don’t talk about his job much, but I usually hear the news when her father is expected home on leave.
“Okay, we hope,” Mrs. Simon replies, blowing smoke at the open window beside her, which might as well be shut tight for all the coolness it’s providing. “Say, why don’t you kids go out for a walk. It might be cooler over at the park.”
We skip down the two flights of stairs to the lobby. No use taking the elevator and meeting more neighbors to explain things to.
“Your mother seems a little sad,” I remark to Sybil once we’re out in the street. “Not her usual self.”
“Listen,” she advises, “don’t ask about my dad because we haven’t gotten a letter in a long time. There’ve been a lot of submarine attacks lately. Everything is hush-hush, so we can’t get any information. You know what they say…loose lips sink ships. Anyhow, my mom is pretty nervous about how badly things are going with the war. So she’s decided to get herself a defense job.”
“You’re kidding. She’s going to work? Who’s going to take care of you and…and the apartment?”
“Honestly, Isabel, you’re so behind the times. First of all I’m old enough to take care of myself. And the apartment…phooey. It’s not fancy with plush sofas and carved polished wood and mirrors all over the place.”
I know Sibby is talking about us in 4H but I let that go by. “So what kind of defense job is your mom going to do?”
“Work in the Navy Yard, probably. With most of the men on the front lines, more and more women will be doing stuff like that.”
“Your mom’s going to build ships?”
“Don’t laugh. She can learn to be a riveter or a welder just like any man. Wear goggles and a hard hat, get up on a ladder. Why not?”
I smother a giggle. “Your mom, maybe. Not mine.”
“Well, everybody’s different.” Sibby sighs and there’s a pause. “Meet anybody interesting up at that hotel?”
By now we’ve reached the park and are dangling our bare feet in the fountain filled with slimy green water. I think a minute and then decide why not. “Yes,” I tell Sibby, “a very cute sailor who just enlisted in the Navy and a kind of dreamy mysterious fourteen-year-old refugee girl from Germany. They met each other and they fell in love all in one day.”
“Oh,” Sybil gasps, kicking her feet rapidly up and down and splashing some of the green slime on both of us, “a love story. I just love a love story. Tell me everything.”
Even though I’ve got my electric fan back, I’m lying in a pool of perspiration in my bedroom in the apartment. It must be two or three in the morning at least, total blackness coming from the open window and the air outside warm and perfectly still.
“Hey, Iz!” It’s a hushed male voice and I know instantly that it isn’t Roy, the indifferent sailor who turned his back on me.
“Arnold,” I creak hoarsely, “what are you doing here? When did you get back?” From what I can see of my brother in the door, he is fully dressed in the same clothes he was wearing when he went dashing out of the kitchen at Moskin’s about fourteen hours ago.
“I could ask you the same question,” Arnold whispers slightly out of breath. “Except you guys seem to have beat me to it. I tried to hitch a ride back to the city and got stuck a couple of times. What’s going on with them?”
I clear my throat. “Um, our parents? Pop had a fit after you ran out. So we packed up fast and drove home. Mom’s upset that you left the apartment in a mess.”
Arnold shoves me over and sits down on the edge of my bed. He wipes his brow. “That’s what they’re having a fit about?”
“No, stupid. It’s the same thing as this morning. They want you to be a real patriot like Pop, but not be in the war…somehow. I’m not sure how. I guess you passed your physical already, huh?”
“Well, of course. I report for duty next week.”
Suddenly my ceiling light flashes on and Arnold and I are revealed as a pair of middle-of-the-night conspirators. My father is standing at the door in his striped pajamas and my mother is right behind him in her piqué negligee.
“Aha,” my father says in a somber voice, “the prodigal son returns.”
I don’t know what that means but it doesn’t sound good.
Meantime my mother has snaked her way around my father and rushed over to get a closer look at her son. “You look terrible, Arnold. Where have you been? How could you have run out on us like that? We went to look for you at the station in Harper’s Falls, but you weren’t there.”
“I got a lift out of town right away,” Arnold mumbles. “But the truck broke down. It’s a long story.”
“You took quite a chance, young man,” my father comments, “driving around the countryside with strangers.” By this time we’re all gathered in the kitchen and my mother is fixing some food for Arnold while he goes off to take a shower. I can’t see where hitchhiking is any more dangerous than flying a B-25 bomber, but I know better than to say anything.
We’re still sitting around the kitchen table when the first birds begin to twitter in the trees below our windows. My mother hasn’t said a word about Arnold leaving the kitchen messy or his bed unmade during the week we were at Shady Pines. My father is planning to drive Arnold to the assembly center next Thursday. That’s where his unit is scheduled to meet the bus that will take the inductees to a basic training camp…no one knows where.
I examine my brother’s face and notice with surprise that there are faint hollows in his cheeks and tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Of course, he’s had a rough trip home and was on the road for hours. But it’s more than that. He’s seventeen going on eighteen and he doesn’t have as much of a baby face as he did at the start of the summer.
I then realize with a pang that Arnold will be leaving us in less than a week. So I guess that, after all, we’re a family like lots of others these days. In the immortal words of my father
, we’re a family in trouble. And because of that, we’ve got to try harder than ever to stick together.
Seven
When Thursday comes, we all get up at the crack of dawn, even though it’s been agreed that my mother and I won’t be going along to see Arnold off at the assembly center. Actually, the meeting place is just one of the big public buildings on the Concourse that has a nearby subway stop for those who are arriving by train. And Arnold could easily get there by himself.
Arnold has a small suitcase packed with extra underwear and toiletries like shaving cream and toothpaste, hair gloss and toenail clippers. My mother is still adding things bit by bit even as he’s getting ready to walk out the door—Alka Seltzer and Kaopectate, corn plasters and Mercurochrome.
“I don’t see why you’re sending along all that stuff,” I tell her when Arnold and my father are out of hearing distance. “The other fellows are going to think he’s a terrible sissy. Besides, the Army will probably give him the same things for free.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” my mother remarks grimly. “How could they know better than a mother what a young man requires to maintain good health and comfort?”
I sigh and walk over to the window. The weather has changed overnight. There’s a fall tang in the air and the clinging dampness of the long summer seems to have vanished.
“Anyhow,” I add, “how far away do you think he’s going? Probably only to New Jersey. He can buy anything he needs in the PX or in the nearby town on his day off.”
“Since when have you become such an expert on the Army?” my father, who has just entered the room, wants to know. He turns to my mother, not waiting for an answer. “I think we should leave in five minutes, Sally. A Thursday morning on the Concourse, there could be traffic. I don’t want my boy to be late. This is the Army.”
Arnold emerges from the bathroom. He looks pale and there’s a film of perspiration on his forehead. I can’t help wondering if he’s been throwing up. He refused the scrambled eggs our mother offered him for breakfast, and ate only buttered toast. But still…
We all go down in the elevator together, and even at this early hour there are people in the lobby, most of them setting off for work. Quincy is there, too. “Mos’ every day now,” he tells us, “they is somebody in the buildin’ takin’ off for the service.”
In the few minutes that we’re standing on the sidewalk waiting for my father to pull the car in front, a larger knot of people gather. Some, I swear, are just passersby who’ve spotted Arnold with his suitcase. I wish we’d said our final goodbyes upstairs.
My mother is red-eyed, although I can’t see any tears on her cheeks. My father is stern-faced, his jaw set, as he comes toward us to collect my brother. As my mother reluctantly lets go, Arnold turns to me and gives me the tightest hug I’ve ever received. “Be good, Iz,” he whispers, “and hold down the fort. I’m depending on you.” I now know from the faintest yet sourish whiff of his breath that my brother has been sick in the bathroom. But I kiss him ferociously somewhere in the vicinity of his ear, and the next moment, I erupt into a fountain of tears.
Even before school begins, you can tell that the entire country is in a wartime frame of mind. The 1942 fall fashions in the shop windows that Sibby and I examine on our leisurely early September afternoons are full of “victory” clothes. The new suit trousers for men have no cuffs, and the lapels on the jackets are much narrower. All this, of course, is to save woolen and cotton cloth for Army uniforms and blankets.
“And the skirts!” Sibby exclaims. “Short and getting shorter…above the knee. What are girls with fat legs like Sue Ellen Porter going to look like?”
“No pleats,” I notice. “And no ruffles. Skirts and even dresses look like two hankies sewn together, same thing front and back. Girdles! We’ll soon have to start wearing rubber girdles like Harriette Frankfurter and my mother. Mrs. F., you remember, the aunt of that girl Helga.”
“Uh-uh,” Sibby cautions. “Positively no girdles. Remember the rubber drive that started back in June? It’s still on, you know.”
I glance at Sibby’s carrot-colored freckles, which probably won’t fade until the late snows of winter—and then not much. “You’re right.”
Back in June, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt got on the radio and said to the American people, “I want to talk to you about rubber.” Seems that right after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over important Pacific islands where rubber trees grow, so the U.S. started making long-term plans to manufacture fake—well, artificial—rubber. Meantime, the country needed scrap rubber and there was this huge drive—old tires and garden hoses, rubber raincoats and galoshes, rubber gloves and bathing caps. You could take the stuff to the local gas station and get a penny a pound for it.
Kids all around the country started collecting rubber bands and looping them tightly over one another to make rubber balls, as big and heavy as possible. Sibby and I were working on one, too, but had run out of rubber bands. We were also making balls out of tinfoil from chewing gum wrappers. They were supposed to help with the scrap metal drive. I could see melting down old aluminum pots and pans, everything from double boilers to turkey roasters to help build an airplane for Arnold to fly for the Air Force. But tinfoil…really.
After a while, Sibby and I get tired of window-shopping and climb up one hilly street and down another toward home. The war might mean shorter skirts and even the possibility of two-piece bathing suits come next summer, but it’s not really a bright side.
My parents and I still haven’t heard from Arnold. He seems to have vanished into thin air. Sibby and her mother still haven’t had a letter from her father in the Merchant Marine. And even the post cards I’ve sent to Ruthie and Helga up at Shady Pines, apologizing for our sudden departure, haven’t earned a reply.
“Je souffre,” I tell Sibby as I follow her into the darkened lobby of our building, “d’un grand malaise.”
She whirls around and stares at me. “Malaise, malaise. What’s that supposed to mean? Honestly, Izzie, you are so dramatic. Do you always have to suffer in French? Can’t you just say what you feel in English?”
I scowl back at my closest friend (for the time being). “There is no word in English for malaise. It’s sadder than sad and yet, as Miss Le Vigne says, it’s very vague, like an ‘enveloping mist’.”
Sibby turns her head and starts up the stairs to her apartment on the second floor. “Forget about Miss Le Vigne. Sixth grade is over, remember? I’ll see you in junior high next Monday. If you can come down from your high horse by then, Mademoiselle.”
It’s scary, but a huge relief to be setting off for our first day at Samuel S. Singleton Junior High School in the Bronx on a rainy September morning. Sybil is over her “mad” at me for being what she calls “a French-speaking snob” and I’m being careful to keep my lip zipped when it comes to using la langue.
Besides, there’s so much else to think about. Kids who already go to Singleton make fun of it by calling it “Simpleton.” But it’s still a big step up from elementary school and a lot more complicated. Even though each class will have a homeroom teacher, we’ll march off to different classrooms for all our subjects. Sibby and I may see each other only a few times during the day. We may not even have the same lunch hour. I’ll have to make new friends and get used to five or six new teachers.
The first thing that happens is that we find out our homeroom teacher is a man, Mr. Jeffers. He’s tall and skinny with poppy eyes and pale skin, a little strange, but he seems harmless. Sybil and I have never had a male teacher, so this is quite a shock. “What,” she whispers to me, across our desks, “if we have a sanitary-napkin problem?”
I know she’s referring to Miss Haverford in sixth grade, who kept sanitary materials in her supply closet, especially for girls who got their first period while they were in school. No embarrassing trips to the school nurse while the whole class was watching.
“How old do you think he is?” I ponder softly. “If he�
��s between eighteen and thirty-five he’s draft age. So what’s he doing here?”
“4-F? He’s pretty pasty-faced.”
“Young ladies,” Mr. Jeffers calls out with surprising authority. Sybil and I button up and we stay that way.
Sure enough, it turns out we don’t have the same lunch hour. Who knows why schools do those things? Sibby’s is early. Mine is late. Maybe it’s because of my French class. The first person I see when I enter the cafeteria is Sue Ellen Porter, so I sit down with her and a few other familiars from elementary school. Where are all those new faces from other schools, and those thirteen-and fourteen-year-old eighth and ninth graders I’ve been hoping for?
Sue Ellen, although she has a pretty face with perfect baby-doll features, has gotten even more blubbery over the summer. So I don’t think it’s a good idea to open the conversation by asking her what she thinks of the new short “victory” skirts and the prospect of two-piece bathing suits.
I slip my tray down next to hers and blurt out rather abruptly, “My brother just went into the Air Force.”
“Oh,” says Sue Ellen, her china-blue eyes misting over, “mine is in the Marines. How long do you think this awful war will last?”
It’s been a confusing day—so many teachers that I can hardly keep them apart except for Mr. Jeffers with his library-paste complexion and black panda eyes. And I haven’t even had my intermediate French class yet because it only meets twice a week.
“Isabel, I’m on the phone,” my mother calls out in a warning voice as she hears the door into the foyer click shut.
Automatically, I tiptoe past the hall table where my mother is seated and head for my room, dump my new school books on the bed, curl over onto my side, and vigorously bicycle my knees into the air in an attempt to push away the past six hours.
“Terrible, oh terrible,” I hear my mother muttering into the phone. “When did the pain begin? You must have been beside yourself. Do you really trust this doctor to do the surgery? Six to eight weeks of recovery time. You poor thing. You know, of course, that I’ll do anything I can to help…”
