While Lottie’s mind worked, taking this in, Maggie went on. “And your shiny shoes. Of course you probably could have done those yourself. But you didn’t, did you?”
Lottie thought back to the woman who had arrived at her hotel room to take the uniform and shoes away for pressing and shining, and the man she had tipped when he returned them, the uniform wrapped in thin crinkling paper printed with the hotel’s emblem.
“No,” she said quietly.
“I didn’t think so,” Maggie said with satisfaction. “Sweet dreams, Your Highness.”
Suddenly, in the darkness, Lottie felt a deep longing for Eugene. No matter the differences between them, he’d always been absolutely on her side, even when they were kids, before anything between them had turned romantic. She felt so friendless and alone right now. She wanted to turn to the shelter she had known with him. But the thought of him caused an even deeper ache in her heart.
He was probably hurting, too, she realized. He’d never asked for any of this. All he’d tried to do was give her a good life—and his heart. He didn’t deserve to be stood up on the eve of his wedding. At the thought of it, tears sprang to her eyes. She blinked them back quickly, worried that Maggie would somehow realize she was crying.
A moment later though, she realized Maggie had already dropped into sleep, given away by the slightest of snores.
But Lottie stayed wide awake, trying to figure out how in the world she was going to survive the next six weeks. It wasn’t the training that worried her anymore.
It was her roommate.
Seven
LOTTIE TOOK A STEP inside the new classroom and looked around, trying to get a sense of who was there, and what was going on, before she sat down.
Her left arm, which cradled her notebook and pen, still throbbed from the typhoid shot they’d given her that morning. And it was just the first of a whole slate of inoculations they’d handed her, all marked out on a single sheet: different shots every day. As far as she could tell, basic training might just have been one big excuse to make sure all of the women were up-to-date on their vaccines, before shipping them out.
The classroom was small, and looked like it was used for science classes under normal circumstances. A plastic model of a human body, with the belly cut away so the plastic organs were exposed, stood in the front of the room, turned so that it seemed to be looking out the window, down into the leafy collegiate courtyard below. A large chart of various phyla and kingdoms hung in the back of the room, illustrated with beautiful colored drawings of leaves, snails, insects, and birds. In the glass cases that lined the side walls were smaller glass cases, each filled with specimens: feathers, branches, tiny creatures floating in formaldehyde.
It was a small classroom, not a lecture hall, and most of the thirty or so seats were already filled, but Lottie didn’t see an instructor yet in the front of the room. She also, to her relief, didn’t see Maggie.
After their conversation the night before, Lottie hadn’t even dared to ask Maggie about her class schedule. Instead, the two of them had gotten ready in stony silence. There was no reason to believe that Maggie would be in her class, with two thousand women all starting new schedules. Still, Lottie was glad to see that she’d be free of Maggie’s disapproving presence, at least for this hour of the day.
The room appeared to be filling up from the back, with the empty seats mostly in the front. Lottie normally would have chosen a spot in the middle of the class, but she gamely walked up and took one of the spots just behind the front row.
As she did, she heard the click of heels behind her. The head of every girl in the room swiveled as one, to see a tall woman, probably ten or fifteen years older than most of them, striding up to the front of the room. Her dark hair was tucked neatly under her cap, and her uniform was spotless and completely devoid of wrinkles.
But that wasn’t what captured Lottie’s attention the most. It was something about the way the woman carried herself. Lottie knew all kinds of powerful women. The ones in her mother’s circle could make or break a man’s career, just with the right invitation or the wrong comment behind closed doors.
Lottie couldn’t tell at first what was different about this woman. She just knew she’d never seen anything like it.
But as the officer dropped a stack of books on the desk at the front of the room and looked up to scan the class, something snapped into place in Lottie’s mind: It wasn’t that she was particularly this way or that. It was that this woman seemed to be completely herself, not putting on any kind of show for anyone else.
“Good morning, ladies,” the officer said. “I’m Lieutenant Brown.”
As the class murmured a greeting in return, the door at the back of the room creaked again. This time, the whole class and Lieutenant Brown turned to get a look at the unlucky student.
And with an unpleasant charge of recognition, Lottie saw her roommate standing in the doorway.
Lottie hadn’t seen this expression on Maggie’s face before. All her confidence was gone. It was replaced by embarrassment as she stood in the doorway, as if held there by the gazes of all the other women.
She didn’t stay there long. After a moment, she steeled herself. Her expression became smooth and impassive, and she hurried up to the front of the class, where she slipped into the seat beside Lottie.
Lottie glanced at her, ready to offer a smile of welcome, but Maggie was so busy staring straight ahead that she didn’t even recognize her.
“Glad to see you could make it,” Lieutenant Brown said with clear sarcasm.
Maggie just flipped open her notebook on the desk and took out her pen.
Lottie had to admire her coolness. “Hey,” she whispered in a sympathetic tone. “You have trouble finding the room?”
But when Maggie finally glanced over and realized whom she’d sat down beside, the disdainful curl of her lip drove away any sympathetic feelings Lottie might have felt toward her.
“I guess I had trouble finding a good seat,” she said with a snarl.
By now, Lieutenant Brown had come around from behind the desk and leaned back on it, getting closer so that she could address them more directly.
“Name,” she said, looking at Lottie.
At first Lottie looked up at her blankly.
“You have a name, don’t you?” Lieutenant Brown demanded.
“Charlotte,” Lottie stammered. “Charlotte Palmer.”
Lieutenant Brown looked at Maggie, who said, “Maggie Duckworthy,” with a smirk.
Then Lieutenant Brown continued around the room, taking in the names of all the other girls.
“Don’t expect me to remember all this,” Lieutenant Brown said. “If you want me to know your names, I expect you to make your name worth remembering.”
She looked around the room, pausing to search the face of each woman.
“I’m going to be initiating you into the finer points of military discipline and etiquette,” Lieutenant Brown said. “Which I suspect wasn’t a big topic of interest at whatever nurseries or finishing schools you came from.”
The way Lieutenant Brown said finishing schools made Lottie’s pulse lurch. Had she been talking about her? In any case, Maggie clearly gave Lottie a sidelong glance in response.
Lottie’s blood started to boil. She didn’t judge Maggie for where she came from. So why did Maggie feel she had the right to judge her? A person can’t help where they’re born. But Maggie’s attitude made her even more bound and determined to prove she’d earned a spot in the WAVES, fair and square.
“But before we get into the details of military discipline,” Lieutenant Brown said, “I want to talk with you about war. Because this isn’t just another topic for you to bone up on, like history or geology, where it doesn’t matter much if you get a question wrong. War is life and death. That’s the whole point of it. You may not be in the line of fire yourself—we hope,” she added in a way that sent a shiver down Lottie’s spine. “But the things you do, and how
well you do them, can be a matter of life and death for someone else.”
She’d joined the WAVES because she wanted to do something that mattered. And getting all the way to New York already felt like it had split her life apart. But she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to be part of the noise and confusion and danger she saw on the newsreels about the war. And suddenly she realized how naive she’d been to think that she could really be sure that same violence would never touch her. War was unpredictable. That was what made it so terrible.
“For the men in the field, in our planes and on our ships: every message you send, every figure you calculate, everything you do, it has to be right. And it has to be done without dramatics. If you’ve got nerves, or worries, or tears, this isn’t the place for them. It’s time to give all that up and leave all that behind.”
Lieutenant Brown glanced around the room. “You girls have what it takes?” she said.
Lottie, thinking back on everything she had given up to be here, gave a vigorous nod.
To her surprise, Lieutenant Brown’s steely gaze fastened on her with a curl of the lip that looked all too much like Maggie’s.
“You understand all that?” Lieutenant Brown said. “Leaving it all behind?”
Lottie looked up at her hesitantly, waiting for Lieutenant Brown to say something else or ask another question.
But Lieutenant Brown just stared at her. The blood began to pound in Lottie’s ears, and in the silence of the classroom she could hear the other girls begin to shift in their seats.
“I do,” Lottie said quietly. “I gave up my wedding to come here.”
The smile that spread over Lieutenant Brown’s face surprised Lottie. It was so twisted it looked more like a grimace. “Oh, princess,” Lieutenant Brown said with evident sarcasm. “That’s a lot to give up.”
Lottie felt a pang at the mockery. For a second, she longed fiercely to be back with Eugene, where everything was familiar and safe, and nothing she did was ever wrong. And in the next second, she hoped passionately that nobody else in the class had noticed what the instructor had called her, that nobody would remember it, and that she’d never have to hear it said again.
Now Lieutenant Brown looked out over the class, glancing over the faces of the other girls. Lottie didn’t dare look back at them over her shoulder to see their expressions. She didn’t even want to try to imagine what they might be thinking.
“Did anyone else in this class give up anything to be here?” Lieutenant Brown said.
By now, the other girls had wised up. None of them were going to be foolish enough to fall into Lieutenant Brown’s trap.
So Lieutenant Brown began to point. “You,” she said, jabbing her finger over Lottie’s head, toward one of the women seated behind her. “What did you give up to be here?”
“I just got into law school,” the woman said. “But I wanted to help fight this war. I don’t know if they’ll let me in again when I get back,” she added more quietly.
Lieutenant Brown pointed to someone else. This time the voice had a Southern accent, like Maggie’s. “My mom’s real sick,” she said. “I don’t know if she’ll still be there when I get home.”
Lieutenant Brown pointed to someone in the back. “You,” she ordered.
“My brother’s at the front,” Lottie heard the woman say over her shoulder. “So I’m Daddy’s only help on the farm. But if we don’t win this war, it won’t matter whether we can keep the farm or not.”
Something strange was happening to Lieutenant Brown as each woman spoke. Lottie had expected her to get steelier. But instead, her eyes were softening. With each new story, Lottie felt like a new layer was peeled back, revealing the woman behind the reserve that Lieutenant Brown maintained in order to teach the women what they needed to do to survive in the military.
Finally, Lieutenant Brown looked down at Maggie, still seated in one of the front seats. By now, her expression was almost tender.
“You,” she said. “What did you give up?”
Maggie looked up at Lieutenant Brown with none of the challenge that Lottie was used to seeing in Maggie’s eyes.
“I didn’t have anything to give up,” Maggie said simply.
Eight
“RIGHT!” THE DRILL SERGEANT called through the bullhorn. “Left! Right, left, right!”
On the large Hunter College ball field that served as the parade grounds for the WAVES, Lottie stepped and turned with the hundreds of other women who had made it through the last six weeks of training and were hoping to pass their final unit test today.
As they listened intently for the commands, ready to turn at a moment’s notice, Lottie’s lips curled in amusement as she thought back to the most memorable drill of their training.
She and a few hundred other women had been mustering in the Hunter gymnasium, because a heavy New York rain was falling outside. But their instructor had gotten distracted in the middle of the drill and failed to tell them to turn.
But that didn’t stop the WAVES. They just kept marching, straight toward the wall, with the first few of them even climbing jokingly up some of the sporting equipment piled at that end of the gym when they got there, to indicate that they were unstoppable. When their drill leader looked up and finally realized what was going on, the whole drill had dissolved into laughter.
On the field today, the sunshine was bright—an unseasonably warm late-spring day. Although it was only early afternoon, Lottie was already hot in her dress-blue uniform. And she wasn’t the only one. All around her, she could see the other women shifting and perspiring as they tried to keep their movements crisp and their eyes straight ahead.
Then the instructor called a halt, and the true test really began. One hour at attention, in the afternoon sun, for their final formal inspection.
In the weeks before, they’d done practice drills, but never anything this long. And even in the practice drills, women had been forced to drop out. For some of them, it was just too much to stand that long. And some of them actually passed out while trying.
“If you see someone fall,” the drill sergeants had instructed the women, “catch her. Then lay her down on the ground and stand back at attention. And don’t lock your knees.”
As Lottie snapped to attention and took her first deep breaths, trying to stay calm and cool, she felt a knot of nervousness in her stomach. After all they’d been through in the past six weeks—the classes, the drills, the vaccines, the instructors who encouraged and hassled and shouted at them to learn more, stand up straighter, get it right this time, it could all come down to the next few hours.
Lottie had been determined to get through the training itself, and she had. All along the way, other women had dropped out, unable to do the work, or stand the homesickness, or master the fear of what would come next if they actually were sent into active duty.
But she was still here.
She knew that some of the women who had washed out already had been just as determined as her. She’d seen other women stand at attention, their eyes as steady and their jaws just as set as hers—right until the moment when they crumpled to the ground and washed out of the program, despite all the dreaming and planning and hard work they’d done to get there.
The first few minutes weren’t so bad. They’d all stood at attention for long periods before, and Lottie had developed a strategy for it: she just picked one thing and concentrated, very hard, on it.
But she’d found that she had to be careful what she picked to concentrate on. One day it had been a cloud, which moved imperceptibly across the sky while she watched, and drew her gaze imperceptibly with it, until the bark of a drill leader had snapped her back to looking straight ahead.
But as the hour wore on, she didn’t have to choose what to concentrate on, because so many things began to hurt at once. Her eyes stung from the sun, which managed to slip in under the brim of her cap. Her hamstrings felt tight and her back had a dull ache, while her fingers and toes itched for a
ny kind of action. And she was exhausted, wishing again and again that she could relax, even just for a moment.
But it was as the sun began to slide down the sky toward evening that the real fight began. Most of her various aches and pains had faded and transformed into a strange sense of numbness.
But the real battle wasn’t physical. It was in her mind. Without any new information at all, stuck in one place for so long, her mind had gotten tired of casting around for memories or hopes and was now demanding something, anything, to amuse itself.
And when Lottie continued to stand at attention, her mind began to come up with all kinds of unhelpful thoughts. She began to worry over how strained her parents’ voices had sounded the last time she talked to them on the phone. Was something wrong back home? Something they were keeping from her? Or did all that pain come from the choice she’d made? Then her mind turned to the fact that she hadn’t talked to Eugene at all. He hadn’t been angry, her mother had said: “He was just—quiet.”
But Lottie knew what that meant. The more Eugene was feeling, the quieter he got. She just wished she knew if he’d forgiven her. The thought that he might hate her made her tremble—although, she deserved it if he did. She’d never wanted to leave him. It was just that she couldn’t go where she felt she had to without leaving him behind. And now that she was out in the big world, she couldn’t believe how often her mind returned to him, wondering what he would think about the things that were going on around her.
Part of what kept her in line, at sharp attention, was the fact that Maggie was still standing directly behind her. Their relationship hadn’t warmed any in the last six weeks. They were polite enough to each other in the room, but even after all this time, they still treated each other like strangers, as if they’d just met that day.
And that was on the good days. On the bad ones, Maggie had made it clear that it would give her great pleasure to see Lottie wash out—or Pearl, who stood just to Lottie’s left on the parade field.
It was a surprise to Lottie that Pearl had made it this far. All along the way, Pearl had struggled with the basic secretarial tasks and almost always seemed to come in last or close to last in the athletic events, struggling to complete the ordered number of calisthenics or laps around the track. And she seemed to struggle with things the other girls didn’t even give a second thought.
For Love and Country Page 6
