Charms for the Easy Life (20 page)

I had to ask several girls to move down the row to open up a seat by my grandmother. Sitting there in the middle of them, she looked like a chaperone at a wayward girls’ school outing. When I sat down, she leaned over and said to me, “Look at this bunch. They’re wound up like nymphs at carnival time.” They were. They were all patting their feet to the music, snapping their fingers, waxing that horrible clove chewing gum that I had thought to be rationed. They seemed to have found a bottomless supply. As I sat there by them, I wondered how many of their fathers knew their daughters were out of the house. I had read accounts of parents in port towns locking their daughters inside when troop ships came in and then finding their daughters gone anyway, having pried open windows and shimmied down drain pipes. The girl beside me was sixteen going on twenty-two, all dolled up in an ill-fitting dress and that cheap makeup that grows orange with time. Her nails were chewed so low that her fingertips looked inflamed, and she kept trying secretly to smooth her makeup down onto her neck. I wondered whether she had pried nails out of her bedroom window, held her purse in her teeth, and let herself down the side of her house.

My grandmother was due to say something directly to the girls. She was due to tell the one beside her to go to the bathroom and wash that brown mess off her legs. She didn’t. I asked her how she felt about all this, all these wound-up girls trotting on and off the floor like dime-dancers. She told me it was no different from the First War. “Everybody’s morals went to hell,” she said. “You couldn’t go to a Grange party without seeing a girl doing a shake-down dance, showing her linen. And then two years later, orphanages were stacked to the roof.” She looked around the room and pointed out several couples who she said should’ve proceeded directly to the parking lot. “They could skip all the dancing and go climb in the car. For the duration of the war, sex is here to stay.”

Dr. Nutter came over and asked if he could get us anything. My grandmother said he could not, but he could tell her why he allowed entry to all these strumpets. She said, “It compromises the dignity of this hospital.” He said he knew but he couldn’t help it. The party was open to the public, and no harm was being done. She begged to differ, and then they entered a lengthy discussion on wartime morale and morals. My grandmother glanced at me, noticed my distracted state, and told me not to worry. She said, “He’ll be here.” So I sat there and waited, looking at the girls all around me, trying as best as I could not to make eye contact. Not only were they fast, they were tough, the kind of girls who might form a pack, follow me to the bathroom, and ask point-blank, “So, prissy, what do you think you’re looking at?”

I was busy looking at the girl with the chewed nails out of the corner of my eye, pretending to listen to my grandmother and Dr. Nutter, when a voice said, “Boy, you sure look bored.”

It was Tom, standing in front of my chair. He looked different, even better, upright and fully clothed. I told him hello, and no, I wasn’t bored, just a little tired. He told me he would have come sooner if he’d not had to wait forever for his uniform to get back from the laundry.

He said, “Just a minute,” and then spoke to the girl next to me. She was biting one of her nails so furiously that she seemed intent on chewing off her hand to the wrist. He asked her to move so he could sit down.

She obeyed him and slid over, still chewing. She didn’t stare at him the way I had the first time I met him. She didn’t try to make him. For all the loosening of morals going on that night, this girl was not loosening the social rule that forbade a poor southside girl with orange makeup and mangled, gloveless hands to flirt with somebody her mother might wait on at City Grill or her father might mop up after at a fraternity house.

When Tom sat down, Dr. Nutter greeted him and said he looked in fine shape. My grandmother said, “Yes, you give somebody a little of what they’re begging for, and they might start to come around. You can’t treat these boys all the same.” Dr. Nutter could feel an embarrassing lecture on varying pain thresholds coming his way, so he excused himself. My grandmother told us she’d rather talk to us anyway. She settled herself in for our conversation.

Tom told her how much better his back felt, and then stared off as if he didn’t know what else to say. He squinted, trying to think of something.

My grandmother saw what was happening to him and offered to help. “Why don’t you ask her to dance?” she said.

His ears turned red, and then he asked me. I told him I’d like nothing better. I hoped his lead was strong enough for me to follow without giving away the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. My grandmother told me to leave my scarf on my chair and my gloves on his, lest a couple of strumpets decided to steal our seats when she wasn’t looking.

He danced with assurance, and the slightly rigid manner with which he held his back gave his movements an air of dignity one didn’t usually see on a wartime dance floor. I figured he must have been given an extra dose of codeine that evening, the way he danced without grimacing the way he’d done when he propped himself up on his elbows. He even carried me through on a couple of sane jitterbugs, touching the small of my back and steering me out of the way of partners throwing each other around with such violent force that I wondered that their arms weren’t being yanked out of the sockets. Jitterbugging had just been outlawed on the Duke campus, not so much for moral reasons as because of the numbers of students landing in the infirmary with dislocated shoulders. The floor was so packed that when one couple moved, we all moved. Half of the young men had on uniforms, and the other half had on pajamas and green hospital robes. One hung on a pair of crutches, like a scarecrow, while his partner shook everything she had in front of him, reaching out to grab his hand every now and then to whip herself around. She appeared to be double-jointed.

Between numbers Tom pointed to the orchestra, a thrown-together group of 4-F musicians from the North Carolina Symphony, and told me the pianist was his sister. She had finished her exams early, and the minute she was home she was recruited to play with this group. He waved at her, and she gave him an okay sign with her fingers. I wondered what she had heard about me. I wondered whether he’d told her I was swell. Next we danced to the song my grandmother most despised. When I heard the opening strains of “White Christmas,” I looked at her to say, “Yes, I know you hate it, but I’m going to stay put. If you want me off the dance floor, you’ll have to drag me.” She made a face to show me how revolted she was, and then got up to start her shift at the punch bowl. Tom held me so close that I could separate all the odors on his skin, his soap and shaving cream and after-shave and his own scent, that sort of man’s scent that was foreign to me.

When the song was over, and he asked whether I’d like to keep going or sit down, I said, “Keep going. By all means.” Before the next song started, he pulled me over to the edge of the stage and whistled his sister over to us. She smiled very sweetly at me and leaned down so he could whisper in her ear. Then she walked away and spoke to the orchestra leader. The next two songs were “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “You Made Me Love You.” He told me they were the only slow numbers he could think of. He had noticed how self-conscious I was fast-dancing, and had wanted me to feel more at ease. I thought, If it keeps on like this, how did I ever rate to be so lucky?

While we were dancing, he asked about my life. I gave him a slim history, and when he asked why I wasn’t in college, I told him the truth: I hadn’t been able to leave home. He said, “Everybody’s got to do it sometime,” and then pressed his fingers, I could feel all five, into my back and changed the subject to symbols in The Magic Mountain. A young woman has never learned so much on a dance floor.

We danced until my grandmother’s shift was over. She looked ready to leave, and she busied herself with her coat and gloves to give me time to say good night. It must have taken everything she had for her not to rush up and ask him when, exactly, he planned to see me again. I told him how grand a time I’d had. I wanted to ask him whether he realized by now how thoroughly inevitable we were, but I asked him instead when he thought he’d be discharged from the hospital. He said he had two more days there. His medical evaluation had come through that morning, and because some shrapnel was lodged too close to his spine, he wasn’t being sent back into active duty. He was going to spend the next three weeks in Asheville, at the Grove Park Inn, where some German prisoners, all officers, had just been taken. He would be replacing the translator, who was taking a long holiday leave. He said, “The dogfaces have Christmas leave canceled, and this guy takes off more than Mr. Roosevelt.” I asked how he’d become so proficient in German, and he told me he had studied languages at Washington and Lee. After Christmas, he would come back to Raleigh and work in the recruitment center. I was still trying to process the part about his studying languages, when he asked what my plans were. I told him the truth. I was going to sit around the house and read, plot troop movements, write hospital letters, and hope somebody broke a leg or something so my grandmother and I would have something exciting to do.

This is what he said to me: “You left out writing me.”

Wasn’t that something for him to say?

T
HE NEXT DAY during breakfast, a courier brought a letter to me:

I read the letter through several times and then asked my grandmother if she wanted to read it. She did, and as she folded it back into the envelope, she said, “This is good. Go to everything. Do something about your hair. Practice dancing with the doorknob. Have a letter waiting for him when he gets to Asheville.”

I asked her if she’d go to the recital and his parents’ party. She said she would, and then she told me to put the letter away and say nothing of it to my mother, as she was still suffering a prolonged period of acute worry and did not need the added distraction. I knew my mother couldn’t talk me out of this, but my grandmother seemed unwilling to listen to her try. Once again, my loyalties were divided, and I followed my grandmother’s advice because of her lifelong winning streak. She said, “Sophia’s wearing her leg out putting her best foot forward for Richard. I’ve never seen her want something so badly.”

I suggested that one of us talk to Mr. Baines. Maybe he could go ahead and ask her to marry him. My grandmother said we could not. He had his idea of what would be perfect, and down the road he might start to resent my mother’s inability to wait. My grandmother said, “When a marriage goes sour, two things start to happen. You can’t look at the other person chew and so you stare at your plate all through dinner, and you can’t sleep at night for harboring thoughts of how the one lying beside you spoiled something you wanted. Things go downhill fast when you can’t eat and sleep together, which are what married people are supposed to enjoy doing the most. Look at how that very thing ate at Sophia. How many times has she cried over the yellow shoes and raw-onion odor?” She concluded that Mr. Baines had shown he knew what was best for my mother, and if he wanted to propose on Christmas or New Year’s, my mother would have to bear the strain of waiting. I didn’t remind my grandmother of her own inability to wait, all the times she had squirmed and huffed through the cartoons before the feature presentation, all the times she had stood in ration lines with me and shouted, “What’s the holdup?”