Rumors of Peace (25 page)

A
UG.
26:

Paris Liberated!

M
Y BLOOD
was roused by victory, and I thought of Peter marching through the old streets, hugged and kissed by the wildly cheering crowds whose necks had been crushed so long by the Nazi boot. It was a glorious scene to envision, but with my library experience behind me, I wondered if twenty years from this dazzling moment another war might be brewing or might already be under way with running blood and arms sticking up like iron from the snow. I wished bitterly that I had never opened the encyclopedia; I should have followed my deepest instinct, which was never to ask anything.

It was time for Mama to clip my hair, but I told her I thought I would let it keep growing. The idea had come to me during Karla's last visit, which was really her last visit because she was definitely moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles to work at the Walt Disney studios. If Peggy had been around, she would have been thrilled—Karla in Hollywood! I was thrilled myself, but I would have been happier if it weren't so far away. All through her visit I was filled with the realization of how pretty Karla was; not that I wanted to look like her, I wanted to look like me. Karla's nose was straight, her eyes blue, her hair gold;
my nose was snub, my eyes gray, my hair, when not green, the pale color of wheat, that's how I was and that's how I liked it; but one aspect of her beauty I did covet, and that was the loose, shiny length of her hair. It seemed to me that I could never be gathered into Egon's arms as long as my hair was cut as if along the lines of a T square. Mama said she thought it looked nice as it was; but she could understand if I didn't want a Dutch boy bob at thirteen, and she added that we had better go through my school clothes because everything would have to be let down.

Passing a restaurant window, I thought I glimpsed Eudene inside, and I went back and pressed my face against the dusty glass. It was a run-down truckers' café off Ferry Street, and it was definitely Eudene in a tight green waitress's uniform, her greasy sauerkraut hair stuck in a net. I flung open the door.

“Eudene!”

She was banging around the scarred counter, laughing her bellowing laugh with the customers, swinging her broad hips and chewing her gum with gusto. “Hi, kid!” she yelled. “Take the load off your feet, be with ya in a sec!” She seemed in wonderful spirits, and her belly was not at all enormous. Either I had imagined she was pregnant, or she had had it. I sat down on a stool and began counting the months since February, coming up with seven just as she sauntered over, holding out her hand with the fingers spread. On the fourth finger was a narrow gold band. It had a quiet, dignified appearance.

“You got married?”

She dug into the pocket of her uniform and brought out a wallet, from which she extracted a snapshot, the kind you take of yourself in a bus station. It was of a soldier with a shiny, beefy face. His cap was pulled down at a goofy angle almost to his eyes, and he was smiling with dark, snaggly teeth, but he had a cheerful look, and he had written across the bottom “To my sweatheart Eudene from Acie.”

“Acie?”

“He don't have a first name, just initials. A. C. Acie. They do that in Tennessee. Whaddya think of him?” The fry cook was yelling for her, but she paid no attention.

“He's good-looking.”

“You bet.” She took another picture from her wallet. “Here.”

I looked at a white blob in diapers lying in Eudene's lap.

“Whaddya think? You wanna come over some time and see him.”

Why would I want to see a baby? What was there to see? I told her the cook was yelling.

“Keep your shirt on!” she bellowed, stuffing the wallet and pictures back in her pocket and tramping off.

I wondered how long she would last as a waitress. I wondered how she could have had a baby in seven months, but apparently she had. I wondered if she was really married or if the ring was a fake. But none of it mattered. She was
partie avec le vent,
gone with the wind, a mother. During her next lull she would come back and bore me with details about her blob's appetite and disposition.

But she didn't. She told me instead about her wedding; not that it was much, just three minutes before a judge, but as if it were something she had to underline. “So it's Mrs. Acie Barnes now!” she concluded, snapping her gum, and only then did she launch into the baby's description, which was mercifully interrupted by a trucker's call from the cash register.

She had a lot of trouble, punching the wrong keys and worriedly screwing up her face, and when the drawer finally zipped out, it smashed her in the stomach, and then she counted the change wrong and had to start over again, dropping coins and yelling, “Hang on a sec!” until at last the trucker had his thirty-two cents safe in his palm and Eudene smashed the drawer back triumphantly.

I had a feeling that being married made everything triumphant for her. Even if she lost her job tomorrow, and I was sure she would, she wouldn't be dented. Never again would she snivel and groan over the righteous wrath of God. Even if a thousand men had slithered their hands over her flesh in cheap hotel rooms, she would never have to think about it and get confused and make up stories. And even if she'd never met this Acie till she was big as a balloon, the wedding ring was on her finger, and with her kind of mind and her kind of math it could have been put there a year ago. She was in a way blessed.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked when she had mopped
up a cup of coffee she had capsized and sauntered back to my side.

“Two days. Acie's overseas—”

“Where?”

“Iceland.”

“You don't have anything to worry about.”

“And he's saving his pay, and I'm working, so when we get enough we're buying a house—”

That was a dreary thing to do with money, instead of buying a horse or a yacht. But she seemed to think it was exciting. Her smoky gray eyes were filled with plans and pleasure and with new worldliness. “So what's new with you, kid? Not much, I guess.”

“I wouldn't exactly say that, Eudene.” For one thing I was almost as tall as she, and fifty pounds slimmer, but I wouldn't bring that up. “I've been down to the University of California, visiting my friends, who are postgraduate students. And I'm going into College Prep algebra in the fall. And we did have the Port Chicago explosion, in case you didn't hear.”

“Ya, Acie's sister told me about it. I'm living with her, she's got a trailer. She works night shift at the cannery, so she takes care of Bobby while I'm here. He don't mind, but he likes me better. You wanna come around and see him?”

I would rather look at a hole in the ground. I would rather look at a Ferry Street wino. I told her the cook was yelling again.

“Stuff it, buster, I'm coming!” She went off swinging her hips, pausing to refill a coffee cup with such haphazard aim that the liquid splashed high before the trucker's face. Grizzled men in sweat-stained shirts, cigarettes stuck behind sunburned ears, they looked on with patience and even enjoyment, no doubt feeling secure in the knowledge that she'd be gone by the next day.

But help was hard to come by, with everyone at shipyards and airplane factories, and Eudene remained. She never did become very efficient; but at least she learned how to count change, and she stopped splashing coffee in the customers' faces, and after a while there grew a family feeling in the place, she called the men by their first names, and they asked about Bobby, whose picture she had thumbtacked next to the flyspecked “Drink Coca-Cola” sign.

The Sunday after I found Eudene again I thought I might as well get it over with and took myself to see Bobby. The trailer was across the tracks near the cannery, nicely situated by the marsh. It was a cramped, stifling little trailer, so small that the sister-in-law had to get out for me to get in. She said something like “Thaz awlraght, ah dowen mahnd,” and sat down with a movie magazine on the step, beefy and snaggletoothed, like Acie with a pompadour. I hadn't seen Eudene out of her waitress's uniform, and she looked pretty good, in her old gym shorts and an army shirt with the sleeves cut off. She looked like someone who might go exploring in the marsh, but of course she lifted up Bobby instead, who was exactly as I had foreseen, a boring, bald-headed mass of screams.

“Whaddya think!” she yelled over the noise, arranging him in her arms so I would have a good view.

“He's very nice,” I said, concealing my pity.

“You oughta seen him at first!” she yelled. “He was way aheada time, he was so skinny you couldn't hardly see him! But he's all filled out now!”

“Yes, he's very nice-looking.”

I stayed a polite length of time, making a few more hypocritical remarks, and then with explosive relief I was walking back along the bank of the marsh. Here was something that could stir you, this hard, burning path covered with spidery-cracked dry silt. These caked brown reeds on one side, standing in pools of gold foil, and these brambles growing on the other, lacy and complex, powdered with fine dust, and this hot, still air droning with insects, pungent with tule reek and the cannery fumes of peaches. Did Eudene find something stirring in those midget fists that caught and grabbed in her hair? Was it stirring to save paychecks to move into some housing project with Acie and his bad teeth? You could only feel pity for someone in Eudene's position. Still, after the wrath of God and being kicked out her own door, it must be a happy ending for her.

But suddenly it occurred to me that there were no endings in life. How odd that until this moment I never thought of that. In a movie, Eudene's ending could have been when she reached for the basin to
vomit in, a grainy close-up sealing her forever into misery and despair. Or it could be now, this minute, as she bounced the baby in the trailer, her grinning pleasure preserved for eternity. But neither scene was final. She just kept going on.

I came to the tracks and began walking along the oil-blackened ties. If a train ran me down now, that would be an ending. But if I stepped over the rail instead, which I did, and crunched along the weedy gravel, that would just be another scene, which would merge into a scene of me coming out on the road, which would merge into a scene of me walking home, and so on forever until I died.

Nothing ever came to a conclusion. Probably I had known it since that day at the library.

S
EPT.
4:

Brussels Liberated!

W
E HAD CROSSED
a border at last, even if it wasn't the German border. We were getting somewhere. It made up for much, even for the fact that if Helen Maria had come home for a visit, she hadn't gotten in touch.

But the next morning at about eleven o'clock, as I was watering the bushes in the front yard, I looked up with a start. Peggy stood before me.

“Hi,” she said politely. “Helen Maria said to tell you she's home and she wants you to come over.”

I was so startled to see Peggy in the flesh that I dropped my eyes and stared at the stream of water. “Tell her okay.”

“Well, you should come now. They're leaving this afternoon.”

“Who's they?”

“She brought her boyfriend.”

I dropped the hose and twisted the faucet shut. “I'd better change. I'll be back in a sec.”

“You don't have to dress up!” she called after me—she, of course, decked out in a nice summer dress and white sandals. I ran inside and
told Mama I'd been invited to the Hattons, then barged into my room. When I emerged a few minutes later, Mama and Peggy were conversing out front. Mama had always liked Peggy, and she was sorry when we stopped being friends. She looked happy to see her now, and she looked happy to see me coming down the steps in one of my new school dresses, with my hair carefully brushed. Waving good-bye, as if we were regular friends, Peggy and I went down the walk together.

I was about two inches taller than she; that was startling and made me feel good. It was also a good feeling to have my dress fit, and it was a nice dress, pale blue with white piping. I looked very good, even if my hair was not grown out and was still green.

But it was an uncomfortable feeling to hear only the sound of our footsteps. I could not speak because I did not wish to be the one to make an overture.

At last Peggy spoke. “I guess you're still taking swimming lessons.”

“Obviously.”

“I guess you're pretty good by now.”

“Very.”

“That's great.”

But I knew very well what she thought of people who splashed around to the blasts of a whistle, especially when their crowning glories were defiled in the process. “There are a lot of other things in my life besides swimming. And don't worry too much about the green, it always fades.”

“I'm not worrying.”

“I certainly hope not. Also, I'm letting it grow out.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It will be shoulder-length.”

“That's great.”

“I don't consider it very great. I don't think hairstyles are important.”

And so there were more blocks of silence. And I was growing nervous now, thinking of the moment when I would actually see Egon. I almost wished I hadn't come. I would stammer or blush or trip in the doorway, or all three. I took a deep breath to quiet the flutterings in my stomach. The unbroken sound of our footsteps was beginning to feel ominous, like the Bataan death march.

“What do you think of Egon?” I asked abruptly, blotting my palms on my dress.

“So-so.”

I glanced at her with amazement, then gave an inner smile of scorn. She really was a fool.

“Better than Mr. Tatanian anyway,” she added. “Her taste's improving.”

The fluttering in my stomach was joined by a charge of affront. “I happen to know Egon, and—”

“You do?” she asked, her eyes swinging to mine with interest.

“Certainly. I know him very well. Did you think I didn't know him? I know him from Berkeley.”

“Oh that's right,” she nodded, unimpressed. “I heard you went down there. Estelle said you didn't look like you had a very good time.”

“Estelle's nuts.”

“Don't call my mother nuts.”

“I apologize,” I said, looking down the street. I had to have smoothness and serenity these last few blocks. No arguments, no confusion. But the closer we got to the house, the weaker my legs felt, the more my stomach fluttered; and my mind was blank, I couldn't think of what words to use in my greeting. Our marching footsteps echoed in my ears. And now we were turning up the pink walk; now I was following Peggy up the stairs. The march stopped. She swung open the massive door.

They were in the Dungeon. Rudy dashed barking through the gloom, flinging himself at my weak legs. Trying to remain footed, to breathe and smile and get my voice in order, I made my way through the room. Beneath the scowling matador they sat, on the chesterfield where I had sunk indecently into Mr. Hatton's cushion. A furnace blast of memory enveloped my face, and as Peggy hushed Rudy and an abrupt silence fell, I suffered an even worse clap of heat, remembering how I had stood before Egon sun-dazed and shameless in my low-slung underpants. Helen Maria got up and came forward.

“My God. You've grown.”

Flaming, rigid, unable to smile, I put out my hand. “Greetings,” I
managed to say, sounding idiotic, and turned stiffly to Egon, coming over now, white-shirted and smiling, my Egon in the flesh. “Greetings,” again, sounding weaker, demoralized, and my hand was clammy and trembling visibly; if he spoke, I didn't hear; I was even insensible to his clasp. All I wanted to do was get away and kill myself.

I sat down instead. It was a deep leather chair, and I felt less exposed. But this odd behavior—the others were still standing—sent a new blast of heat into my face, and I stared furiously before me.

“Well,” said Helen Maria after a moment, “well, I'm glad you were home.”

“Yes, we just came yesterday,” Egon said as they reseated themselves. “And we must leave already this afternoon.”

“I know.” It came out loud and sour. It helped me bear my hideous entrance.

“We took a walk yesterday,” he went on pleasantly. “It is a nice little town you have here.”

“Oh yes,” Helen Maria smiled over at me, “Egon thinks it's smashing.”

“Oh,
Egon!
” Peggy, who had graced herself on the arm of the chesterfield, laughed, and threw her head back so that her throat looked like a white column.

“It is amusing?” he asked.

“She's easily amused,” Helen Maria commented, curling her feet under her, wearing the same print dress she had worn in Berkeley and the same old loafers without socks. Unlike Peggy, she used no lipstick; even so, she was pretty—beautiful really, like Gene Tierney, as Peter had once said—and I was bitterly aware of having chosen my seat unwisely, for it stood by a lamp that poured its cruel glow all over the green of my T square hair. It was like a war movie, being tortured by the Gestapo under blinding lights.

“So, have you had a nice summer holiday?” Egon asked me.

I knew how I looked; I hated his kindly attention. I answered with a sullen shrug, staring past him at the wall.

Then everyone ignored me.

They talked among themselves. They talked mostly about the heat. Rudy yawned. A fly buzzed. No wonder they were leaving, they were bored to death. They should leave now, I wouldn't miss them.

“We could go out in back,” Peggy suggested.

“We'd roast,” said Helen Maria. “Well, we could eat, I suppose. It's lunchtime.”

A horror gripped me that I would be excluded. But Helen Maria motioned me along, and I responded with a put-upon sigh, walking behind them at a reproachful distance.

Coming from the gloom into the sunlit kitchen, with the prospect of food before me, I felt a little better. But no one noticed this, and I was asked politely by Helen Maria if I would kindly move because I was standing in front of the refrigerator, and then, again politely, by Peggy, if I would please let her get into the cupboard. I should probably have smiled and offered to help; but I could not bring myself to do this, and I sat down on a stool and folded my arms.

Egon wasn't doing anything either, but he didn't talk with me. He stood leaning against the sink, black-haired, blue-eyed, tan-faced, his sinewy hands resting on either side of him on the white tile, my beloved and longed-for Egon, to whom I had been so rude that his eyes, though not avoiding me and even pleasant, were bereft of their kindled attention and moved on, elsewhere, like a stranger's.

My nervousness had drained away, and my anger too; I just felt bitter. That hot-faced, bug-eyed entrance—he would remember it always, and so would the others, and so would I. That stain would always be there, and now a great melancholy filled me, a hopelessness, which spread through me so heavily that it brought the whole world with it, the endless wars, the senselessness of history, the never-getting-there, the no-happy-endings, life so dark and futile that I felt my chin trembling.

How cloudless and cheerful they all were, while I sat here with my trembling chin. And now Egon had gone over to help, and the three of them, talking pleasantly together, were filled with smooth, practical purpose, as if they had no inkling that life was a black tunnel. Egon at least should know, but he was twisting off the lid of a mayonnaise jar without a care in the world, a man who had been through Crystal Night. And then I had an uncomfortable feeling, whose nature I could not place, a kind of shamed twinge that made me set my jaw hard against the tremor.

He put the jar on the table. Helen Maria checked the water boiling
for coffee. Peggy was getting napkins from a drawer. The toe of my shoe made slow designs on the sunlit floor. Even if life was a black tunnel with no happy endings, there were bright moments here and there. And you had to take them. You had to take them or you would have nothing at all at the end. I got up, and with set lips and averted eyes, yanked the napkins from Peggy's hand.