by Riley LaShea
“So, Ariel, that is an interesting accent,” I got back in time to hear Nan say. “Have you lived in Richmond your whole life?”
“No, Ma’am,” Ariel said, pausing to thank me with a small smile as I handed her the tea. “I was born in Chicago.”
Grateful I was no longer holding Nan’s good china, I lost the napkin I’d grabbed to pick out a cookie for our guest as I glanced up at Nan.
Now, there wasn’t a person on Earth Nan hated. Anybody she didn’t like enough to hate wasn’t worth the time hatred took, she always said. While you could be anything in Nan’s presence, though, being from the North was about the worst thing you could be.
This was a woman who still called the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression,” and if you ever got her going about it, she would say, “You don’t just start killing people because you don’t agree with what they’re doing. If you can’t work out your disagreements, you work harder, and, if you still can’t, you go your separate ways until you find a way to meet without weapons.”
My second to last year of school, I had a teacher who said slavery never would have ended without the Civil War. He didn’t last long in Richmond, bringing up such sensitive subjects, as one might expect.
When I told Nan that, she said no war abolished slavery. One man did it with a single proclamation, and he should have done it sooner. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t have been those who rose to defend their self-proclaimed rights to turn people into property, she would go on, but, at least then, everybody would know the fighting was to save the union and not to end slavery, like Yankees got to claim, which somehow made their killing and raping and destroying of their own country more justified.
That was why Nan sang “Dixie,” I realized in that instant as I bent down to pick up the napkin I’d fumbled, because she grew up with people who remembered the South before it was trampled by a million northern boots, before Atlanta burned, and their homes and their friends’ homes were occupied by men who treated them like animals while behaving like animals themselves.
I thought Nan would be done with Ariel then, the second Ariel acknowledged the northern upbringing that gave her that crisp voice, that she would thank her for coming and send her on her way.
“What brought you to Richmond from Chicago?” Nan’s measured response surprised me, though I should have known she would carry through on her hospitality. I had seen Nan have a dozen conversations she didn’t want to have just to give someone time to finish a cup of tea before kicking him or her out the door.
“I didn’t come straight from Chicago,” Ariel responded. “I’ve lived several places in the North. I recently moved here from Boston because, while it does have its faults, I can’t help but love the South.”
It was about the most right thing she could have said.
“It has its faults, does it?” Nan questioned with a burgeoning smile, and, raising her cup to her lips in a dainty, overly-conscious way that assured everyone she had the breeding for polite society, Ariel looked across it at Nan.
“Well, no place is perfect,” she answered, and I saw the tiny trace of a grin flit across her face before she took a sip.
Nan continued with her questions after that, asking where Ariel went to school and about the places she’d worked as a nurse, giving Ariel time to get through her tea and enjoy the cookie I finally got to her.
Watching from his chair, Daddy listened to their exchange, but kept uncharacteristically silent, as if he knew he wasn’t invited into the conversation.
“Why’d they ask you to leave?” he finally felt the need to question when Ariel said she’d moved from Boston after she ended her contract with a veterans’ hospital there.
“They didn’t,” she responded. “I chose to leave.”
“That’s a good job. Work’s going to be plentiful for some time to come.” He sounded like he was accusing her of something as he glanced to the headline about the war on the front page of the paper. “Why would you choose to leave?”
“Because I have spent the past two years watching men too young to die dying of completely unnatural causes,” Ariel stared straight into Daddy’s eyes. “And I need to see something else.”
Leaning forward to slide her saucer onto the coffee table when Daddy looked away first, there was a crack in Ariel’s composure, and she took a deep breath, as if she might be the one to decide the job wasn’t right for her after all.
“So,” Nan seemed to worry about the possibility too, and I could tell Ariel had won the uphill battle for her respect. “I think I want to hire you. Would you like to stay for dinner?”
Glancing up with surprise, either at the offer of employment or at the invitation, Ariel didn’t seem to know how to respond. Then, eyes flicking briefly my way, she smiled.
Chapter Two
Scott had a crush. It was obvious from the first day, when he rushed in from playing football in the park with all the friends he’d already made in the country and cleaned up too much for dinner, putting on a tie he never wore and a jacket he only ever wore to church or school dances.
In the winter holiday, though, when he was around all the time, it became such a constant thing, I got tired of seeing it.
Until then, I’d had Ariel to myself.
No matter how frequently or vehemently Mama proclaimed her unnecessary, I was glad when Ariel started coming around each day. Back in school, I’d had all sorts of friends, like Scott, but, after we moved to the country, they had fallen away one by one until life became nothing but things to do and things to worry about.
Ariel was smarter, though, and funnier, and worldlier with her travels and moves to cities where she didn’t know anyone all on her own. She made me laugh harder than I had ever laughed. She made me smile just to see her. I liked her more than any person I had ever met.
Even stuck in that big house day after day, around Ariel, I felt alive like I had never felt alive. I felt smarter and funnier and prettier than any good marks or high school boys’ attention had ever made me feel, because, sometimes when she looked at me, it seemed as if Ariel saw things in me I knew weren’t really there.
I liked being around her so much, I went out of my way to see her, to talk to her, to hear the interesting things she said. So, even if Mama didn’t think she was necessary, it didn’t take long at all before Ariel was necessary to me.
In the time we spent together those first weeks, I started to think Ariel and I were real friends, that we would have liked each other, and chosen each other, even if we hadn’t been pushed into the same place together. After Scott came home for break, though, I wasn’t as sure anymore, because, while Ariel did all those friend things with me, talked to me and teased me and winked like we had jokes only the two of us understood, she never touched me at all. She touched Nan free as day, but she didn’t touch the way my friends in school had touched. She never took my arm while we were walking or sat against my side the way my old girlfriends would to whisper stories or giggle about cute boys. She didn’t hug me or kiss my cheek.
I thought it was just the way she was, that she didn’t touch people unless she had good reason to touch them, and I wanted her to touch me more because of it. I wanted to give her a reason. It felt odd to me that she could be so friendly, but keep such distance at the same time.
Then, when Scott was home every minute of every day, I discovered I was wrong. Whenever he would come into Nan’s room with us, or would go find Ariel and ask her for a walk, or when they’d share a snack in the kitchen, I would often see Ariel slap Scott on the knee as she looked up at me with slightly surprised eyes, and I would know Scott had told her a joke that pushed the boundaries of good taste. Or he would say something that made her laugh, and Ariel would push him on the arm, and Scott’s face would turn a little red as he smiled that smile that made all the girls at his high school lose their heart to him in an instant.
I wondered if Ariel was losing her heart to him.
“You know, she’s nearly thi
rty, right?” I asked one day when Scott came in from talking to her on the porch, after Ariel had collected her hot tea with a smile and taken it back with her to Nan’s room.
She was staying with us by then, sleeping in one of the extra bedrooms in Nan’s big house, in case Nan needed her in a hurry. Even with that, though, her living under Nan’s roof like family, Ariel had hugged me only one time, on my twenty-second birthday in November, after I opened the dress I had once complimented of hers that she’d had altered for me by a tailor she knew in the city, and it instantly became the most fashionable thing I had ever owned.
“I’m sorry,” she said as I’d pulled it from the box. “I would have gotten you your own, but...”
“Fix it,” I repeated the slogan the government used to remind us not to waste a scrap of anything that could be reused. “I know. Thank you.”
“You know, in Great Britain, their slogan is ‘Make do and mend’,” she said, and of course I didn’t know that, but of course she did. She’d probably met all sorts of people in the North who never made it down our way. “I think I like that better, don’t you?”
“It is catchier,” I admitted, and she smiled brightly at me when I couldn’t stop looking at the dress she’d given up to give me a birthday gift.
It felt like I had a reason to hug her then, so I did, but Ariel embraced and released me so quickly it was barely a hug at all, glancing toward Daddy and Mama, who, I could tell, without a word, thought the dress was too short and too fashion-forward.
“So?” Scott replied in response to my question about Ariel’s age.
“You look silly going with a woman that age,” I told him. “What about the girls at your school?”
“What are you talking about?” Scott thought it a joke.
“I’m talking about you fawning over Ariel all day long,” I returned tersely, the cold air feeling colder on my hands as I robotically pulled a plate from the hot water to rinse it.
“Do you not want me around her?” he asked with sincere confusion. “Is there something wrong with her?”
“No,” I replied sharply. “There is nothing wrong with her.”
“Are you mad at me then?” Scott couldn’t miss my tone.
I was, I realized. I was mad. Though, not entirely sure myself, I couldn’t tell Scott why. “I’m just tired of seeing you talking to Ariel all the time while everyone else is working,” I declared.
“I do my share when I’m here,” he sounded truly wounded, but I was too frustrated to hear it, too hurt by how easy it was for him to come in and replace me, by how Ariel touched Scott like they were the best of friends.
“When you’re not showing off for Ariel,” I countered.
“She’s funny,” Scott said. “And she’s been all sorts of places. I like her stories.”
“Well, you still have school and all your friends,” I snapped. “Could you leave just one person for me?”
Whirling to rinse a plate, it slipped from my hands and the sound of the ceramic cracking as it hit the sink set me to crying instantly, because I knew we couldn’t waste things or replace them, and it gave me a good excuse.
Reaching for the pieces, I wondered if I could put them back together somehow, but Scott was there in a hurry to catch my hands.
“Don’t,” he said. “You’re going to cut yourself.” Before I could say anything, he took me to a chair at the kitchen table and looked at me with such concern, I felt bad for being angry at him when I had no reason to be angry, other than Ariel seemed to like him more than me. “Are you all right, Lizzie?” he questioned. “Are you sick or something?”
“No,” I shook my head, but I knew I needed a reason to feel the way I did, for why I wanted Ariel to myself. “I’m just tired. And it’s lonely out here. It will be different in the summer when you come home for good.”
I tried not to think it would be worse, that Ariel and Scott might like each other even more, and more all the time.
When Scott looked away, guilty, like he did when we were kids and he had snuck the last cookie or broken the arm off one of my dolls, I got that feeling in my stomach, the one that had become more and more frequent and I wished would be wrong more often.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said, his head shaking extra hard in an effort to sell the lie.
“Tell me,” I insisted, and Scott sighed a sigh far too heavy for just eighteen.
“I don’t want to tell you now,” he uttered.
“Tell me anyway,” I demanded, and he knew he would have to, or suffer the consequences. There were ways of making Scott talk, and in our eighteen years as brother and sister, I had learned every one of them.
“I joined the Army,” Scott spared himself, looking up at me with his big brown eyes for reaction, and, for a second, I felt numb, as if his words had poison in them that rendered me paralyzed.
Then, I felt everything but numb. There had been a lot of fear and pain and anger I had felt over the past years, but there had been a lot of those things I hadn’t let myself feel too, and all that was left came crashing in at once.
“Scott,” was all I could say, but, in my mind, I was cursing all those damned war ads in every paper, plastered on the screen before films, and posted at his high school for making him feel responsible and chosen and patriotic.
“Well, what else should I do?” he reasonably asked, as if he would have liked a real answer, and I cursed myself too when I didn’t have one to give him. “Just sit around and wait for them to draft me? They’re going to get to me eventually. I would rather it be my choice.”
It wasn’t Scott’s choice, though. I could see it in his eyes. He was scared and he was trapped. He wasn’t a soldier.
“But Uncle Rodney and Edward...” I reminded him we had another brother once, the other half of me, born a minute and a half before, Edward, who was first in line to enlist the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Sometimes, when we were young, Edward and I left Scott out, because we were twins and nearly four years older than him. He was the annoying little brother who followed us around, trying to be like us, with no chance he’d ever be as much like us as we were like each other. Until, one day Edward and I finally realized Scott didn’t want to be us, he just wanted to be with us.
“I’m not going to end up like them,” Scott made me a promise there was only a fifty-fifty chance, at best, he could keep. “I’m going to go in there and end this war single-handedly.”
He thought he would make me laugh, but watching him be brave, not because he was that kind of brave, but because he had no choice but to find bravery he shouldn’t need, only made me cry harder. I would rather him spend all his time with Ariel, I realized then, making her laugh and getting all her touches, than for him to be anywhere else, and my tears were less selfish as I hugged Scott around his neck, until Mama came in and caught us like that.
“Elizabeth, what’s the matter?” she asked.
“She broke a dish,” Scott said, and, pulling back, I blinked at him. It wasn’t like Scott to lie, and especially not so well. You could always see it in him when he tried, but even I would have believed him if I hadn’t been there the instant before.
“It’s just one dish,” Mama turned softer. Strict as she could be, she always let up when one of us cried, as if she knew a heavy hand could do real damage. “We have enough. I’ll clean this up. Scott, take your sister in to dry her face and listen to the radio for a while. She’s been doing too much. No news, now. Listen to something nice.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Scott said, and we did as Mama told us, settling in the living room, where Scott put me down in a chair with a handkerchief and turned the dial on the radio until he tuned out of Daddy’s news program and found music we both knew wouldn’t fit Mama’s definition of ‘nice,’ but that she’d forgive us listening to under the circumstances.
“Don’t tell Mama or Nan, okay?” Scott returned to my knees to make me swear. “They don’t know yet
.”
Trying to be as brave as Scott was being, I felt nothing close to bravery, but I still nodded in agreement. “Are you leaving as soon as you graduate?” I asked him, feeling like the younger sibling asking for reassurance, and when Scott’s gaze dropped to the floor, I knew we didn’t have that long.
“I leave for Basic on the fifth,” he said.
“Oh, Scott,” I started crying again in protest. “You’re not even going to finish school?”
“I’ll finish when I get back,” he replied, because he would never say what he meant. As well as Scott did with his lessons, he sure hated doing them, and he wasn’t going to spend his last days taking exams before he shipped off to stare death in the face. “I’ll be all right, Lizzie,” he tried to assure both of us, and I didn’t know which of us was least convinced. “Do you believe me?”
“I believe you,” I whispered, but, though I wished I could, I didn’t.
That night, after dinner, during which Scott and Daddy and I shared a secret we couldn’t tell Mama, I sat for a long time on the porch. So long Mama came out twice to tell me to come in before I froze, and that Scott came and went after he said he was turning to ice and the Army wouldn’t take him if his trigger finger fell off.
Although I could see my breath, and I knew it was as cold as everyone kept telling me, I didn’t feel the cold. I felt only the pain, and I knew it was pain I deserved. All day long, I had wanted Scott to go away, to leave Ariel alone. Then, he told me he was going, and I couldn’t help but think I had some power I didn’t know about, that I couldn’t control, to wish my loved ones away.
When the door opened again, I knew it had to be late, and as I watched Ariel come through it, I realized she was the last person I expected to see, and the person I wanted to see most.
“Scott said you’ve been out here for hours,” she said.
“Scott exaggerates,” I returned, amazed she had come to find me on her own. It was rare that Ariel and I were alone. Stuck in that house all day, we were together a lot, but always under the watchful eye of others.
