The Green Glass Sea (7 page)

She lasted two meetings. There weren't going to be any field trips, because of security. And the first meeting, two whole hours, was Joyce's mother lecturing about rules and uniforms and requirements for badges. More rules? More green uniforms? Suze had enough of that with the army.

The next week, Joyce's mother's idea of “fun” turned out to be making plaques with the Girl Scout motto spelled out in macaroni letters—the kind that were supposed to become alphabet soup. And when Suze showed her mother the two-page typed list of "Girl Scout DOs and DON'Ts, ” even Mrs. Gordon made a face, and said that life was too short.

But Suze wondered sometimes if the other girls would ask her to play jacks or jump rope more if she'd stayed a Girl Scout. Finished her plaque, learned the pledge, wore a white blouse. Or would she just be in a uniform and still outside their special circle? Because it wasn't just Girl Scouts. It was movie magazines and paper dolls of Deanna Durbin in frothy pink dresses, and the lipstick Betty had gotten the last time she went to Santa Fe, the one that her mother could
never
find out about, but wasn't it a
dreamy
color?

Suze had gotten herself invited over to Judy's or Joyce's apartment a few times, and had tried to pretend she was interested in all that, but mostly she was bored. Did they really
like
that stuff? Suze just didn't get it.

She leaned against the stair railing and listened as Joyce and Barbara twirled the jump rope and chanted the rhyme for Betty:

Betty got all the way up to twenty-seven before she missed, which Suze thought was pretty good. Suze wasn't good at jump rope. Her feet got tangled too fast.

“I'm hot, ” said Betty, who was red in the face from jumping. “Let's take a break. ” The other girls nodded and went and sat down on the other stoop, fanning themselves.

“So, what're you doin'?” Suze asked a crewcut boy named Jack. He was leaning on the side of the stair rail, whittling pieces of wood into splinters with his pocketknife. She tried to sound casual, but it came out sounding like a line from a play.

“Waiting for my brother Charlie. We're going to go work on our fort, ” he said, throwing away the last bit of wood. He folded his knife and put it in his pocket. “No girls allowed. ”

Suze made a face. She tried to think of something snappy to say back, but came up blank. Then she got an idea. “
I'm
going to the PX for a Coke, ” she said in a loud voice, and looked across at the other stoop. “The Tech PX. ” She held her breath, waiting for someone to say what a swell idea that was, and maybe they'd come along. But they almost never did anything she said.

Joyce looked up at her for a long second, long enough to make Suze feel uncomfortable, as if she was being judged, or Joyce was trying to figure out if there would be a better offer.

“It is hot, ” Joyce said finally. “Barbara? Bets? You wanna get Cokes?” She made it sound like it was her idea, but Suze didn't say anything.

“A cold Coke sounds nifty-keen, ” said Betty, sounding like one of her movie magazines. “But the Tech PX is awfully far. ”

“We can stop at the Pond, ” said Suze, and just then she got another idea that was even better. “Besides, I know a shortcut. Lemme get my shoes. ” She turned and ran back up the stairs and grabbed her sneakers from where she'd dropped them on the porch the night before. Hardly any kids on the Hill wore shoes in the summer, unless a grown-up said they had to, but her plan wasn't a barefoot idea. She looped the laces together, strung her shoes around her neck, and clattered down the stairs, quick, so they wouldn't leave without her.

Joyce always wore shoes, and Betty had put hers on for jumping. “We have to stop so I can get mine, ” Barbara said. She lived in one of the houses over on Bathtub Row, because her father was a big shot. He was a captain, in the navy, not the army. Suze wasn't sure why he was here, since there wasn't any water for about a thousand miles.

The four girls walked down the middle of the road, with Betty and Joyce a little behind, giggling to each other. They headed south, the pine-studded canyon far over on their right. The road didn't have a name, none of them did. Suze thought this made it really hard to give anyone directions, but the army didn't want people knowing much about the Hill. Even if you lived there. She had learned to navigate by landmarks, like Fuller Lodge, or the tall wooden water tower to the west of it, which was visible from almost everywhere.

“Hi, Sergeant Walter, ” Barbara said to the military policeman who stood guard outside her house. He wore a black armband with the white letters MP. Barbara pointed to the pass safety-pinned to her blouse. “I'm just going in to get my shoes. ”

The MP glanced at the pass. “Your mother's having a tea party. Mrs. Oppie and some of the other ladies, ” he said. “You might want to go in the back way. ”

Barbara nodded. “Thanks. I could get stuck in there all afternoon. ” She made a face. “You have to wait here, ” she said to the other girls. “I'll be right back. ”

Betty and Joyce sat down under a pine tree. Suze stood in the shade. They watched Sgt. Walter on his patrol, walking up to Oppie's house, then back again. These five houses were sturdy, built of logs and stone, remnants of the old boys' school that used to be on the Hill, before the army. The most important people on the Hill lived here. Sgt. Walter walked up and back, up and back. He didn't pay any attention to them.

“I'm glad my dad's not a big shot, ” said Suze, sucking on a pine needle. It tasted faintly like turpentine. “What a pain to have to show your pass just to go
home
. ” Hers was in the top drawer of her dresser. She didn't need it unless she left the Hill, to go down to Santa Fe, and that had only happened three times since they'd moved here.

“Oh, but it would be so nice to live in a real house. With a bathtub, ” Joyce said, sighing. “But the guards are a little creepy. I guess it's okay my daddy's just a fizzler. ” Her father was a physicist, but no one was supposed to talk about that, so people called them “fizzlers. ” Chemists were “stinkers. ” Suze's mother was a stinker.

It was cooler under the tree, and they stayed there for a little while, even after Barbara came out of her house wearing her loafers. They watched Sgt. Walter make three trips up and down Bathtub Row.

“I'm thirsty, ” said Betty, standing up after the MP had turned to go back up the road again. “And if we wait too long, the PX will be full of soldiers and they'll ditch us out of line. ”

They continued down the road.

DEWEY TOOK A FINAL
bite of her apple and, without taking her eyes off her book, put the core into the brown paper sack on the ground next to her. She was reading a biography, the life of Faraday, and she was just coming to the exciting part where he figured out about electricity and magnetism. She leaned contentedly against Papa's shoulder and turned the page.

Today they had chosen to sit against the west wall of the Commissary for their picnic lunch. It offered a little bit of shade, they could look out at the Pond, and it was three minutes from Papa's office, which meant they could spend almost the whole hour reading together.

“Dews?” Papa said a few minutes later. “Remember the other night when we were talking about how much math and music are related?”

Dewey nodded.

“Well, there was a quote I couldn't quite recall, and I just found it. Listen. ” He began to read, very slowly. “‘Music is the hidden arithmetic of the soul, which does not know that it deals with numbers. Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. ' That's
exactly
what I was talking about. ”

“Who said it?” Dewey asked.

“Leibniz. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He was an interesting guy, a mathematician and a philosopher and a musician to boot. You'd like him. ”

“Can I borrow that book when you're done?”

“I don't think you'd get far, ” he laughed. He turned and showed her his book, bound in very old brown leather that was flaking off in places. The page it was open to was covered in an odd, heavy black type.

“It's in German, ” Dewey said, surprised. That explained why he had read so slowly. He'd been translating. “So is Leibniz a Nazi?”

“Hardly. He died more than two hundred years ago, long before there were any Nazis. ” He shook his head. “Don't make the mistake of throwing out a whole culture just because some madmen speak the same language. Remember, Beethoven was German. And Bach, and—”

The rest of his sentence was interrupted by the shrill siren from the Tech Area. He sighed. “Time to go back to my own numbers. ” He closed his book, then leaned over and kissed Dewey on the top of her head. “What're you up to this afternoon?” He stood up, brushed the crumbs from his sandwich off his lap into the dirt, then brushed the dirt itself off the back of his pants.

Dewey squinted up at him. “I think I'll sit here and read for a while. A couple more chapters anyway. Then I'm going to the dump. Some of the labs are moving into the Gamma Building, now that it's done, and people always throw out good stuff when they move. ”

He smiled. “Looking for anything in particular?”

“I don't know yet. I need some bigger gears and some knobs and dials. And some ball bearings, ” she added after a short pause. “I'll show you at dinner if I find anything really special. ”

“Deal. We're just analyzing data this afternoon, so I may actually get out at five thirty. If you get home before me, put the casserole in the oven and we can eat around seven. ” He tucked his book under his arm.

“Okay. ” Dewey watched him walk around the corner of the building, then turned back to her book.

Twenty minutes later she came to the end of a chapter, and was tired of sitting on the hard-packed ground. She stood up and stretched, put her book into the red wagon parked a few feet away, and picked up its wooden handle.

She had found the wagon at the dump at the beginning of the summer, a rusted former toy that was missing one wheel. Their neighbor, Mr. Sandoval, was a machinist, and had made her a replacement. It was the right size, but metal instead of rubber, and now the wagon rolled along with an odd, lopsided syncopation on the rutted dirt roads. Still, it meant that she could bring home heavier things, and carry them all in one trip.

She walked down to the road that bordered the Tech Area, pulling the wagon behind her, leaving parallel trails in the dust. It was hot, and the wagon made walking a little awkward, but she was looking forward to seeing what might be in the dump. You never knew. Sometimes it was just lumber and wire-studded chunks of concrete—construction stuff. But other times there were machines with lots of wonderful tiny parts, or tools like the drill she'd found whose wooden handle was cracked a little, but worked just fine.

Dewey whistled under her breath. She still marveled at the freedom she had on the Hill. In St. Louis, Nana had only allowed her to walk to school and back—four blocks—and no dawdling, because Nana knew just how long it took, so there was no chance for Dewey to go off exploring by herself. It wasn't safe, Nana said. But it was safe here. There were guards, so inside the fence, she could go anywhere she wanted, anytime. Even at night. She and Papa knew just about everyone who lived here, and no strangers could get in from outside.

Her favorite thing was that no one ever told her she asked too many questions. In the nine months that she'd lived here, Dewey had explored almost every inch of the project, except for the parts that were secret and had extra guards. And everywhere she went, there were men just as smart as Papa—or just as clever—who would help her figure out how to fix a busted clock or radio or motor, take it apart, and explain how it worked.

It was wrong to think, but sometimes she hoped the war would go on and on and on, so she and Papa could stay here forever.

As she rounded the corner of the fence near the dump, she heard voices and stopped. The dump wasn't guarded. Anyone could come and take whatever they wanted. But she just wanted to rummage, and didn't want to talk to anyone official.

She peered around the corner of the fence and saw that it was just her friend Charlie and his little brother Jack. She'd been in Charlie's algebra class all spring, even though he was thirteen. Her fifth-grade class had been doing fractions, and she'd been bored. She was used to that. But this time, the teacher had noticed, and after giving Dewey a little test to see what she knew, had asked her if she'd like to take math with the eighth grade, because it would be more of a challenge. So she knew Charlie.

Both brothers had reddish blond crewcuts and freckles. Charlie was half a head taller, and was wearing dungarees that ended two inches above his black high-tops. Jack wore cutoffs ragged at the knees. Both boys had T-shirts that had started out white. They carried a long piece of lumber, dropping it onto a pile by their bikes with a loud crack. As they turned to go back for another, Dewey pushed her wagon forward and waved.

“Hey, Dewey, ” said Charlie. He pulled a bandana from his back pocket and mopped his reddening forehead.

“Hey, ” said Dewey. “More wood for your tree house?” The boys had been building a secret fortress somewhere in the woods all summer. Everyone knew about it, all the kids at least, but Dewey had never seen it.