Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  Every day, she looked at the calendar and pretended that Doug wasn’t leaving, that her life might go on and on just like this. Now she understood why every day at five, before her father came home, her mother would spritz perfume on her pulse points. She’d dress up and rush to the door, waiting. Love made you crazy. “You be careful,” Iris’s mother said when Iris told her she was in love, but to Iris, love was like a flame, and she wanted to burn. Every time Iris passed another storefront with an American flag in the window, she felt both a pulse of patriotism and a rage because the war was taking Doug from her. She stopped reading the newspapers because the war was growing more terrifying. The only other Jewish girl at the shipyard kept finding terrible things in her locker: a dead rat, a chicken bone. She slammed into the break room holding the bone in her hand, flinging it at their feet. “I don’t have to take this. I quit,” she said.

  That night at dinner, as Doug was pointing out the dessert selections to her, Iris burst into tears. “Oh my God,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “I’m so sorry—I’m such a big dummy.”

  “What’s going on?” he said. He put down the menu and scooted his chair closer to hers.

  “It’s just that I’m going to miss you so much.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Who says you’re not going to see me again? Did I say that?”

  She shrugged, wrapping her arms tightly around her body. “I’m so stupid.” She waited for the lecture she knew was coming. We hardly know each other. Things can change. If it’s love, it will keep until I get back.

  He reached for her hand, but she tugged it away and wiped her damp eyes.

  “Well,” he said finally, “then I guess there’s nothing to do about this but get hitched.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, Iris stood in a new white dress beside Doug, the girls from the shipyard around her, her mother beaming at her side. It was such short notice that Doug’s parents couldn’t make it, but they called, promising to visit.

  “I hope this works out,” Iris’s mother said, and Iris hugged her and then became Mrs. Douglas Gold.

  THAT NIGHT, THE honeymoon was a placeholder, too, a night at a nice hotel. “We’ll go to Bali. To Hawaii. Or Paris,” Doug told her. “You wait and see.” While Doug went into the bathroom, Iris left the lights blazing. She peeled off her clothing, sliding out of her chemise, letting it pool on the floor. She took off her new white hat and set it on the dresser and then stood in the middle of the room, pale and naked, like a beam of moonlight. She wasn’t afraid. She didn’t believe the stories her mother had insisted on telling her. How sex was terrible but you had to do it when you got married. It could hurt and humiliate you in ways you couldn’t imagine. How it turned rational men, God’s finest creations, into mindless animals. “Sex is only for procreation,” her mother told her. A decent woman could think of something else. “It’s meant to be mortifying,” her mother had whispered to Iris. “Otherwise, why would it be in the same place where you go to the bathroom?” She told Iris all kinds of facts that she knew for certain. Without pubic hair, couples would electrocute each other during sex. That you could keep from getting pregnant by having sex on the first night of the full moon. “Always keep a towel nearby,” she told Iris. “Tamp it tightly to you. And immediately go to your own bed. If too much of the vital fluids leak out, you could get sick and die.” Yet Iris couldn’t bring herself to believe her.

  “Fine. Laugh. See what happens,” her mother said. “I think I know better than you about these things.”

  Doug came out with a towel wrapped around his waist. When he saw her naked in front of him, he started. “Cover yourself,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “What for?” Iris moved to him, her bare feet against the cool floor.

  “It’s sexier,” he insisted.

  “I’ll cover you, instead.” She draped herself around him, kissing him, pulling him down onto the floor right there.

  “The lights,” Doug whispered, but Iris tugged him closer to her. “I want to see everything,” she whispered back.

  Doug kissed her. “Is this all right?” he said. “You just tell me no and I’ll stop.” And at that, Iris kissed him, her mouth deep and soft against his. She pulled back. His eyes were wide open, filling up with her. “Good. You’re looking at me,” she said.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said, and Iris felt him shivering.

  “Afraid? I’ve been waiting for this forever,” she told him.

  It was all fast, all elbows and knees bumping, and when she tried to look at his face, he turned away from her. She felt as if she were somehow outside her body, watching herself slide and tumble, and then after a while she stopped thinking altogether. She could have used her clothing for the vital fluids, just in case, but instead she kicked her dress far away from her. If she was going to die, it’d be in Doug’s arms, not separated from him with a bolt of cloth held between her thighs. He skimmed her body with his.

  “My God,” Doug said when they were finished. “How did you know how to do that?”

  “Do what?” Iris edged herself up along his body. She bit his shoulder. “You taste like potato,” she said. She licked his ear. “You taste like apples.” She touched the damp hair growing up toward his belly. “I like this hair,” she told him.

  “Okay, settle down and rest,” he told her. He pulled the bedspread off the bed and covered them.

  “We weren’t electrocuted,” she told him.

  “Electrocuted?” said Doug. “What are you talking about?”

  She rolled closer toward him. “Oh, nothing,” she said.

  He hugged her tightly. Her long hair fanned around her shoulders. “My funny wife,” he said.

  THE NEXT DAY, they pretended everything was normal, but Iris knew it wasn’t. In two hours, Doug was leaving for the base and then for Europe, leaving her behind. The room was in ruins, but rather than clean it, Doug left the maid a huge tip, five dollars smoothed out and held in place by a glass. They dressed in their rumpled clothes and went to Teddy’s Inn down the block and ordered pancakes drenched in butter and syrup, though neither one of them ate more than a bite. Iris pinched her thighs under the table to keep from grabbing his hand and begging him not to go. She imagined all sorts of things. They could get on a train and flee to Mexico and be free in a hot, sweaty little town. They could go to Canada, where moose could wander in their backyard. She glanced out the flyspecked window. There was a car in the lot, the motor still humming. It would take less than ten steps to get to the door, to rap on the window and ask the driver where he was headed, to make up a story and persuade him to take them both. She bet the car was comfortable. She bet it was fast.

  “Doug,” Iris said, and he looked at her and then at his watch.

  “I have to go now.”

  Iris walked Doug to the bus stop. They held hands, and she could hear his breathing, deep and stretched out. Don’t die, she wanted to plead, but she kept her lips buttoned. “Pretend it’s an ordinary day,” he told her. “Tonight at six I’ll come home to our house and you’ll have supper ready.” She nodded, not daring to cry.

  “We have red curtains in the dining room and tonight we’re having my favorite meal.”

  She hesitated. “Steak and green beans,” she guessed.

  “Veal chops. Mashed potatoes with gravy.”

  “And afterward we’ll go to a picture.”

  Iris couldn’t stand it. Her eyes pooled with tears. She felt her body shaking.

  “We’ll go roller skating,” he said. “We’ll—”

  She stopped his mouth. She kissed him hard.

  He pulled away, his face suddenly drawn. “Until tonight, baby girl.”

  There were other people gathering around the bus, watching her. Fathers and mothers, kids, and girls with sweethearts. She wrapped her arms tightly around him.

  He got on the bus, stopping as he got to the top step. “See ya tonight, honey,” he said. She watched him taking a seat, by the window, where he rapped on the glass and wa
ved.

  “Don’t go,” she said, but she knew he couldn’t hear her. He looked straight ahead. His image was clouded by the smeary glass. “Don’t go,” said Iris, louder. Her voice cracked with tears.

  “Don’t make him feel worse than he already does,” a woman standing beside Iris murmured, and Iris swallowed, pasting a big, stupid grin on her face. She kept waving until the bus pulled away from the curb.

  She stood watching the bus leave, and even after it had disappeared, she couldn’t move. The other people left, in pairs, in groups, talking. The woman who had chastised her was gone, too. Iris kept standing there, alone, and anyone who passed by might just have thought, Now, there’s a pretty girl waiting. Iris wrapped her arms around herself. She turned and started walking away from the bus stop.

  That night, she roamed around town. She ended up back at Teddy’s. She wasn’t hungry, but she sat in a booth and ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, because she thought that was what a new bride should have. It took the waitress only ten minutes to bring her lobster, mashed potatoes in a well of brown gravy, and green peas so overcooked they had turned dingy gray. She pushed them around her plate and ordered chocolate pie, and by the time the pie came, she was in tears. Everyone politely ignored her except for the waitress, who quietly crumpled the bill. “On the house,” she whispered.

  SHE WAS A WIFE without a husband. At work, they all knew that she was married, that she would quit as soon as Doug got home, so they treated her differently. With a kind of respect, in fact. They didn’t invite her to join them in the break room or to go out after work, and Friday nights she couldn’t go to the dances anymore, because what was the point? She was spoken for. So she stayed home reading magazines and novels, waiting for Doug to come home. The magazines urged girls not to make their men unhappy. Make him proud that he’s fighting for you. Make him glad to be a soldier. Don’t think of yourself or your problems, because they’re nothing compared to what he’s going through. Write him letters. Send him gifts. Work for the war effort.

  Iris wrote a mad flurry of letters to Doug, pouring out how much she missed him, retelling him the story of how they met, and once deliberately dropping a pinch of water on a word so it would smear and he would think she had been crying, which nine times out of ten wasn’t so far from the truth. She never told him how difficult it was at work now, how skimpy the rations had become. How terrified she was by the war. When he didn’t write back, she told herself her letters must have gotten lost.

  The whole time Doug was gone, Iris saved money, going without lunches, eating cornflakes for dinner, and darning all her stockings. She began to grow her hair even longer, and when it was long enough, she braided it in a ring around her head. When she had enough money for a month’s rent, she began to search for a house that she and Doug could afford. Boston was too expensive, but she could manage in Waltham, which was just a half hour away on the bus line. She found a small house to rent in a wooded neighborhood on Warwick Avenue, and when she told them her husband was at war, they didn’t ask for a male cosigner. “You thank your husband for us for the job he’s doing for our country,” the real estate agent said. Although Iris didn’t own a thing except a bed, she moved in. By the time Doug came back, it would be a home.

  NEWS OF THE WAR’S end reached Iris a year later, in November 1918, when she was delivering a batch of invoices to the shipyard. The women all whooped and hugged, but Iris felt a clutch of fear. The jobs would be ending, the men would be coming home, and though she was thrilled the war was over, thinking about Doug made her uneasy. “You can stay until your husband gets home,” her boss told her. She wouldn’t be the only one who had to leave. All the women would be replaced by men.

  That night, she cleaned her little rented house. She was used to living alone, she could do what she wanted. She had almost mastered the welding tool and she liked going to work. What was she supposed to do all day? She shut her eyes and tried to imagine Doug’s face, but the outlines stayed blurry.

  Two days later, Iris was asleep on the couch after work when she heard the door knocker. She jumped up, her dress rumpled, and went to the door. It was probably the neighbor’s boy, a rangy kid with a face like a rat, wanting to do chores in exchange for money she didn’t have. She never said yes to him, and maybe today she’d even scold him. She was in that kind of mood.

  Instead a skinny man in an army uniform stood there, smiling at her, a duffle bag looped over his shoulder. An angry red scar mapped his face. “Hey,” he said, and then she burst into tears and flung herself at him, kissing his mouth, warm as a bowlful of honey.

  She pulled him inside, not wanting to take her hands off him. He didn’t talk much, but she told herself that was all right, she wasn’t really talking either. He looked around the house and then yawned. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m tired.”

  “Me, too,” she lied, though every cell was switched on.

  They went into the bedroom, and Doug immediately flopped onto one of the twin beds. She didn’t know what to do, so she undressed, naked, and slipped under the covers next to him. “Doug,” she said, and then he moved to her, and if the sex was too quick for Iris, too hurried, she told herself, well, it had been a long time. Her mother had told her that men had needs that had to be satisfied or else they could get sick. She curled up against him and he got up. “Bed’s so small,” he said, and he moved to the other bed. She stretched out her arm to touch him, but he was already turned the other way, his back to her. Well, she told herself. He’s used to sleeping alone. That’s all it is.

  She stopped working the next day, but already half the women had left the shipyard. “Keep in touch!” everyone said, but Iris knew they wouldn’t. She packed up her things, left her welding tools, and came home to her husband.

  DOUG GOT A job working in the shipping department of a metal manufacturer in Watertown. He would leave at six in the morning and come home at seven at night. “I wish I could talk to you during the day,” she told him. “I miss you.”

  “There’s nothing going on,” he said. “What am I supposed to tell you? That I shipped ten boxes to Minnesota?” He came home so tired all he wanted was to eat dinner and then go to sleep. Iris always felt him staring at her as if he didn’t know who she was, and when she turned toward him, he would quickly look away.

  “Tell me about what you did. Tell me about what it was like for you. What you thought. What you felt,” she asked.

  Doug looked alarmed. “I don’t ever want to talk about it,” he said.

  “I know what went on over there,” she said. “I read the papers. Maybe if you talk—”

  “I said no.” His voice was like the snap on her clip purse.

  She could hear the kitchen clock ticking. “Tell me about how you feel now. What you think about. What you want in life.”

  “Honeybunch, I’m tired,” he said. “I just want to relax.” For Doug, relaxing meant sitting in his chair and reading a book, though he usually fell asleep after a few chapters, snoring, and even though she was right beside him, sprawled on the couch, Iris had never felt more alone.

  She tried. You got married, you had kids, and maybe that was what was missing for them. At least with a child she’d be busy, she’d have someone who would crave her company. But nothing took for them. The doctor she went to shrugged and said he couldn’t find anything wrong, as if he blamed her. When Iris suggested adoption, Doug looked at her as if she had six heads. “I don’t want a child who isn’t mine,” he told her. “I’d just feel funny about it.”

  She tried to enliven their social life, arranging dinner parties, going to films with couples she knew, but Doug just talked to the men and ignored the women, which embarrassed Iris. When she called her mother, crying, her mother sighed. “He doesn’t cheat. He doesn’t drink. You’re lucky he’s not chatting up the women,” her mother said. “You just need to get used to it. You have more than some people do and you should be thankful.” Iris knew what her mother meant: You have
more than I ever had.

  Did Iris ever get used to it? Maybe she didn’t have to, because she and her husband led such separate lives. During the day she played cards with some of the neighborhood girls and shopped and took herself out for lunch. All the other women mocked their husbands. This one tried to make roasted chicken for dinner and forgot to defrost the bird. Another did the dishes without using soap. They were fools and dolts. No one had it better than she did. Dorothy’s husband gambled. Eliza’s husband had a temper and smashed things. At least Doug was steady.

  She bobbed her hair, sitting astonished in the chair in the beauty parlor, the hair a carpet by her feet. Her head looked so big now, her features so tiny. “You look smashing,” the hairdresser said, but Iris wasn’t so sure. She came home and Doug touched her cap of hair. “It’s wonderful, honey,” he said, and she felt a little better, until that night, when he still didn’t reach for her.

  One day, an accountant named Rick moved in next door. He was a little younger than Doug, with a thatch of black hair that kept falling in his eyes. He was long and lanky and he seemed pleasant enough, but to Iris’s surprise, Doug really liked him and spent hours in Rick’s backyard playing badminton. Iris heard the thwack of the rackets. She could see the men running back and forth across the grassy lawns, laughing, Doug with his head thrown back, Rick lithe as a greyhound, both of them soaked with sweat. They played for hours and then sat out on wicker chairs in Rick’s backyard, talking, but when Iris appeared with glasses of lemonade for them, they grew quiet, or they made small talk with Iris, not picking up their conversation until she walked away. “What do you talk about with Rick?” Iris asked, jealous, but Doug just shrugged. “This and that,” he said. Evenings, when it was too dark to play badminton, Doug began to go over to Rick’s to play poker and have a few beers, not coming back until Iris was already in bed.

  Iris was getting tired of it. “Maybe I could learn to play poker,” she said.