Rumors of Peace (12 page)

It didn't sound free. Having to live with someone like Mr. Tatanian because your body cried out to him. All that blushing and bumping into people. It was anything but free.

“You mean you want to live with Mr. Tatanian?”

“Oh, really,” she said, and there came the awful blush. “I haven't planned anything, you're always so literal.”

I thought she was annoyed, but she showed no desire to drop the subject. Glancing at the door, as though hoping Peggy would not return yet, she smoothed the skirt of her dress. “I've learned his first name. It's in the phone book. George . . .” she said, looking up.

As if the name were miraculous.

“That's interesting,” I said. I felt I had to say something.

She nodded. Her blush deepened. “He's different—don't you feel that? He's like an exotic plant in a desert.”

“I guess so,” I replied uneasily. “But I mean I've known him all my life.”

And I sensed that in her eyes I too was miraculous, for having been part of Mr. Tatanian's existence for so long. Her behavior was abnormal, murky. Peggy's footsteps could be heard coming back along the hall.

“Can't you get out of it?” I whispered.

“Of what?”

“Body chemistry.”

The green eyes flashed. “I wouldn't wish to!” And as Peggy entered with her enormous sandwich, her sister cried, “Welcome, stout sibling!” The conversation had put her in a wonderful mood.

But it had done nothing for me, except to strengthen my opinion that the wisest course was never to ask anything.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
the swimming instructor likened Peggy to a windmill, and she quit the program. Swimming was bad for your hair anyway, she said on the bus home.

“You could wear a cap.”

Caps were ugly. Look at the instructor's. And she was ugly enough without it, with her big horse teeth and muscles. When she took your arm to guide your stroke, she crushed all your bones. Peggy could live without that.

“And do what?”

She would find something, don't worry. There was more in life than swimming.

But she found nothing. The next time I came to her room she was lying on her back on the unmade bed, wearing her big gym shorts and a red halter, her hands clasped behind her head. Her sweaty legs were stuck to a litter of comic books and movie magazines. Rudy turned in circles for a cool position, his mouth drawn back in a panting grin.

“Let's go down to the wharf,” I said. “It's cool there.”

“I don't feel like it.” She yawned and sat up and began cutting pictures from a movie magazine with a pair of blunt-nosed children's scissors.

“We could play blackjack,” I said.

“It's too hot.”

Maybe she was feeling low because being thirteen hadn't smoothed everything out. Her hair was still fuzzy, and her body was still fat. I was glad, but I didn't say so. And after a while, because she didn't want to do anything, I wandered out.

J
ULY
25:

Mussolini

Imprisoned!

By August 14 the war might be well on its way to ending. With its dictator locked up by its own government, everything was over for the long purple leg on the map. As soon as the island at its toe collapsed, our troops would jump across to the purple mainland and swarm northward, up through yellow Switzerland and pink Austria, into the black heart of the Reich. Then, as soon as Berlin was kaput, the troops would be loaded onto ships and planes and rushed around the globe to the hundreds of stubborn, bloody islands in the Pacific, which would at once surrender to our superior numbers.

I spoke to only one person about this theory. “Wait a while,” I breathed down at the black eye sockets. “Wait till after Sicily, all you Japs will be a bunch of skulls.”

Everything in Peggy's room had changed. On the wall was a sign:

                   
I, Margaret Louisa Hatton, am on a diet.

                   
I will not bring food into this room.

Bread crusts and candy wrappers had vanished. On the dresser stood a framed movie magazine picture of Errol Flynn in a turban, and next to it gleamed a giant-size jar of Sta-Bak. Peggy's hair was unbraided and swamped flat with the pale green goo, which dripped down her freckled, slightly less plump shoulders.

“I've lost five pounds,” she said.

I became aware of a smooth lamentation in the background. “What's that?”

“A record. ‘In My Arms.' That's him singing, Frank Sinatra.”

“So that's him.” I stood listening. “He's not much.”

An exasperated tongue click, then briefly: “Do me a favor. I bought this, but it won't go around my back.” She was holding up a fancy pink brassiere, all lace and satin. After slipping it on over her red halter, she tugged behind her back at the two ends, trying to make them meet.

“No good,” I agreed with satisfaction, glancing at the price tag. “Two fifty out the window.”

“I want you to tie the ends together. Here.” She handed me some string.

Grudgingly, I did as she asked and watched her turn this way and that before the mirror. The cups were empty and crumpled, but she didn't seem to mind. “It's gorgeous, isn't it?”

“Better than Eudene's anyway.”

She looked suddenly annoyed. “Suse, I want to tell you something. You're going to have to do something about your appearance.”

“Why?”

“Because. You don't look human.”

A knife stab, deep to the heart. “I don't?”

“I mean maybe I'm overweight, I admit that, but you're a complete skeleton. You need a gaining diet. And bleach that chlorine out of your hair. Get rid of it. You can't go around that way.”

“I think I look all right,” I murmured, fighting down an urge to turn to her mirror.

“Well, I'm sorry, you don't. I'm not criticizing, I'm just trying to help.”

I looked at the wrinkled shelf of her brassiere, at the mired hair which was drying and sticking out in clumps.

“
You
need help.”

“Oh, I'm just experimenting,” she smiled. “Wait till you see me when I'm done.”

I went down the hall to Helen Maria's.

“She is wrapped up in her cocoon,” said the genius, standing before an electric fan that blew tepid air across the room. “Soon she will emerge and offer herself. She'll go simpering about like a sugar plum, begging to be nibbled.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, running a finger over the bony knob of my wrist.

“I mean she's found her métier. And what a waste, because Peggy has intelligence. But what has her goal turned out to be? To have her sojourn on earth justified by the opposite sex.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean she wishes to be admired by men.”

“Well . . . what about you and Mr. Tatanian?”

“You jest, I hope, in drawing a parallel. I like
him
, not the entire sex indiscriminately. And I don't look to him to authenticate my existence. It's ignoble. It's pathetic. She's going to turn into my aunt.”

“The one in Mexico City?”

“Yes, Aunt Dorothy. Who, incidentally, plans to descend on us this fall with her latest attachment. One has a headache already.”

We were into August now, but Sicily did not fall. And an unbelievable thing was happening here: Japs were being released from the detention camps, filtering back.

“Can you beat that?” I told Peggy. “They're letting them out!”

She didn't answer. She had taken up exercises, vigorous knee bends accompanied by loud grunts of
one,
two, three, and
four,
five, six, until she had done twenty and staggered back to mop her face with a gray sock, fingernails flashing red, hair in a scarf wound punishingly tight. Then she would put on a new record, of which she had many more now: Ginny Simms, Dick Haymes, more Sinatra. She had new pictures around Errol Flynn: Tyrone Power, Victor Mature, Sinatra again. She was always looking in the mirror, sometimes sucking in her cheeks and raising an eyebrow, smolderingly, like Marlene Dietrich. She wanted to discuss movie stars and singers and was not happy with my poor reception, preoccupied as I was with the Japs. The irritated tongue click. Her back suddenly facing me as she touched up her toenails.

Into the oven stillness of my backyard I would take
War and Peace,
a book Helen Maria had recommended. The ground lay cracked and purplish in the white glare. Under the walnut tree the air was clammy with pinpricks of oil dropping from the leaves. The shade lay pale and hot on the dry grass. I would sit down and try to concentrate. But who were they, all these people with their unpronounceable names, who
never stopped talking about dispatches, coronations, executions, fetes? In all their pages of conversation, only one remark leaped out clear and sensible: “Tell me what this wretched war is for?” I kept coming back to that, but the speaker didn't pause for an answer, which was not offered in any case. And as I sat there, I would see the print blur in the heat waves, as if it were under smoked glass, and I would plod back into the house and lie on the dining-room couch, the book heavy and shut on my stomach.

This was how I spent my days when I wasn't swimming. Sometimes I would rouse myself to do errands for Mama or go marketing with her downtown, and in the late afternoon we would work together in the cooling green of the vegetable patch. Sometimes, when she had friends in, I would join them for cake and iced tea, being of an age now to be invited as long as I changed from my shorts into a dress and used good manners.

They talked about food prices and rationing, about the heat, and about the heat of Sicily, where one had a son fighting; they talked about young so-and-so, who brawled with the soldiers, and pretty such-and-such, who had eloped with a sailor, and they talked about Sheriff O'Toole's high blood pressure and his unsightly sandbags, and sometimes they leaned across the table to whisper, laughing in warm, ladylike gusts, pressing a nearby arm or hand in their pleasure. They were nice to me, asked about my swimming lessons, and said I was growing tall, which I wasn't, and when I finished the cake and iced tea, I took my leave feeling good because Mama had friends she could talk with and wasn't lonely.

One afternoon, sitting under the walnut tree with my book, I saw the back porch door open, and Peggy came out.

“Want to take a walk?” she asked, crossing the glare of the yard.

I dropped the book and scrambled to my feet. “Maybe. I don't care.”

“How do you think I look? Your mother said I looked terrific.”

“My mother doesn't say terrific.”

“Well, she said
nice.
”

She did look nice. She must have lost another five or six pounds by now, and though she wasn't slim, she wasn't a big fat girl anymore.
She wore a crisp chalky blue full skirt and a crisp white peasant blouse and spotless white Wedgies matched by a dainty white purse. The most outstanding thing was her hair, which hung to her shoulders all of a piece like a big catcher's mitt, a dense complex of fiery glints and gleams.

She touched it. “Rosemary oil, I just discovered it. It works wonders.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Oh, just around.” She started down the driveway with small, new, dainty steps. “I really like your mother, I always have. She's so nice. And she's so attractive. And she has such a cute accent.”

“She doesn't have an accent.”

“Of course she does. They both do. It's so cute.”

“Cute? They're not cute.”

“I didn't say
they
were cute, their
accent's
cute.”

“But they don't have one.”

“You just don't notice it, you're always around them. When's Karla coming home?”

“I don't know.” How could they have an accent? I would have heard it. You couldn't live with somebody for twelve years and not notice something like that. What was all this small talk about family anyway, as if she had suddenly become one of the iced-tea ladies? That tiny purse. That mincing walk.

Except that she was going faster now, and from the tiny purse she grabbed a stick of gum, unwrapped it, and slapped it into her mouth. All at once she was her old corky self, chewing openmouthed as we hastened along, scratching an itch on her behind, even banging out a belch from times gone by.

But it was all nerves, I realized later, for on Main Street the gum flew to the pavement and she pushed open the door to Buster Brown's, saying over her shoulder, “Don't you want to say hello to Peter?”

He was trying shoes on a customer. We waited at the counter. I saw that Peggy's face had become a mask of apprehension, as if earwigs were crawling up her leg. When Peter came behind the counter to make out the sales slip, she kept shifting from foot to foot and staring over his head at different places on the wall. The cash register rang. The shoes were wrapped. She began clearing her throat in a low, testing
way; beads of sweat stood out on her upper lip. The customer departed. Peter stuck his pencil behind his ear.

“Say, who's this? Don't tell me it's Peggy?”

“Hello, Peter,” she said in soft, sliding tones, breathlessly, and took hold of my hand. “We were just going by and we thought, why not drop in for a minute? So here we are . . . it's certainly a hot day, isn't it? And how's the shoe business these days?”

She was twisting my hand painfully as she got through all this, but above the tortured activity her face wore the calm, round-eyed expression she used on parents and teachers, only the smallest blush hinting at her inner turmoil. Finally I yanked my fingers free and held them up, blowing on them, but this had no effect on Peggy. Her eyes were filled with Peter.

He was saying business wasn't bad, and it was hot all right, 104 degrees, and as he spoke, I saw with horror that she was very slowly sucking in her cheeks and that the left eyebrow was rising high, high, in Dietrich's sultry arch.

Coupled with the still-round eyes, this expression gave her an effect of weird astonishment. Peter glanced away, rearranging some pads and pencils, and I saw a hint of a smile on his lowered face. But when he looked up, he was serious.

“Well, I'm glad you dropped by. You look very nice today, Peggy. Nice hairdo.”

She had to release her cheeks to reply. “Thank you, Peter,” she drawled in a low, husky voice, “I'm so glad you think so.” Then, as the eyebrow came slowly down, she turned gracefully away, saying that we had to be going, and gave him a last look over her shoulder, drawling once more in the low, husky voice, “‘Bye, Peter . . . see you later.”

Outside, she walked to the next building and leaned against it, heaving a deep sigh.

“You acted like a nut. Peter thought you were a nut.”

“He did not.”

“You were making insane faces.”

“I was not.”

Just then our ears were assailed by a piercing whistle as a soldier
passed by. Looking back over his shoulder, he winked hard at Peggy, screwing up his face in a virile knot.

“He winked!” she whispered, clutching my arm.

“So what, they'll wink at anything.”

But she was already walking on, her eyes bright and darting, the world her oyster.