Chapter 9
“It’s just a police action,” my father said. “And Korea’s a little country. They don’t have anything to match our army. Trust me, sweetheart. He’ll be back in Japan in a week.”
I soon received a letter from Leonard, posted from Japan two days before the invasion.
He’d written it when he was as oblivious to what lay ahead for him as he was to the content of my last letter, which of course hadn’t yet reached him.
He wanted to know how I’d done on a chemistry test I’d been studying for, and he told me that he’d joined a baseball team.
All the Japanese teams wanted to play against Americans, he wrote, so there was a game to play, or at least attend, whenever he was free.
He’d been studying the Japanese language in a little book he read on the ship over, and when he tried to use it before a game with a Japanese team, the Japanese players had laughed at how bad he sounded.
But one of them, the pitcher, did try to converse with him a bit, correcting his pronunciations.
Later, this same Japanese pitcher struck him out.
I’ve been here just six weeks, he wrote. And it feels like years. I try not to think about it, how long it will be until I see you.
Mae said of course my letters would still reach him, even in Korea. Everybody knew soldiers liked mail, and the army would make sure he got it. It just might take more time, she said. And of course he might not be able to write back right away, even if he was perfectly fine.
In early July, the radio reported that the first American casualty was from Skin Fork, West Virginia, and nineteen years old.
Mae said if I really wanted to stop worrying, I should just call Leonard’s parents, as the army would let them know first if something happened. She was sure that they would appreciate my concern.
I was sure they wouldn’t. Instead, I called Dale, or I tried to.
His mother answered and said he was spending the summer in Europe before he started at Dartmouth in the fall.
She sounded surprised—maybe because I didn’t already know Dale was in Europe, or maybe because any girl was calling her son at all.
“May I ask who’s calling?” she asked, not unpleasantly. But I was afraid, unsure if she was close with Mrs. Lifton. Without giving my name, I apologized and hung up.
Just before school started, the bodies of forty-one American soldiers were discovered near a hill in Waegwan, Korea.
They’d been shot and left in a ditch, their hands still tied behind their backs with communications wire.
I read this at our kitchen table, sitting by myself.
Mae was doing dishes. I didn’t see her turn around.
“Stop looking at that.” She snatched the paper away from me, folded it, and put it on the other side of the table. “It’s not doing you any good.”
I told her I wasn’t done reading it. When I reached for it, she picked up the whole paper, carried it to the sink, and pushed it down into the dishwater.
“Just call his parents for Pete’s sake.” She wrung out the whole mess, letting it drop into the garbage with a thud.
“I can’t take one more minute of you acting like this. It’s too hot.”
I shook my head. I could see from her face this wouldn’t be the end of it, but I did not expect what she would do next, which was to rush over to my chair, grab my arm, and pull me to my feet.
“You need some air,” she said. She got one strong arm behind my waist and steered me to the back door.
I was wearing just my nightgown, so I crossed my forearms in front of the small but firm mound of my belly.
She opened the screen door and pushed me outside.
Before I could turn around, I heard the click of the lock.
I cupped my hands against the screen and watched her lift the telephone’s receiver.
“Mae?” I pounded on the hot siding. There was no shade where I stood. The bottom of my feet burned. “Mae! What are you doing?”
When I tried to push out the window screen, she slammed the glass window down. I pounded on that, helpless as I watched her yank open the drawer where we kept the directory.
“How about that?” Her voice was muffled through the glass. “Maybe I myself want to make sure he’s fine. Maybe I’ve got some sense of how to do that.”
I kicked at the door with the ball of my foot, but she walked to the other side of the kitchen, stretching the receiver’s cord.
I felt my panic, my head going light in the scorching heat.
She had her back to me, but I could hear her speaking, her voice softer and more pleasant than before.
I would know soon. At least I would know.
A bee hovered near my shoulder, and still I did not move.
Please, I thought. I will never lie again.
This time I mean it. Just please let him be alive.
I was praying to God, praying to my mother, praying to any entity who could help.
Even as I made this promise, I understood that if Leonard was already dead, neither God nor my mother could change that.
And even if they could, neither God nor my mother nor anyone who’d been watching would still believe any promise from me.
But I pressed my palms together, picturing Leonard that first day in the courtyard, sitting in front of the bougainvillea.
Only when Mae turned back to the window and gave me the thumbs-up, her smile full of I-told-you-so, did my hands rise and clutch the back of my sweating neck. Thank you thank you thank you, I thought, though already, a feeling of falling, a new dread, swallowed my relief.
She unlocked the screen door and swung it open.
“Well, guess what? He’s just fine. They got a letter from him yesterday, in fact.
He’s back on base in Japan, just like your daddy said.
He was in Korea for just the first couple weeks, but when things got serious they didn’t want the rookies there. So they sent his group back.”
I needed to sit, to get out of the sun. I moved past her and sank back into my chair. I leaned forward, my nose to my knees.
“Was he injured?”
“Didn’t sound like it.” She went back to the sink, running water. “They said he was just moving boxes in a warehouse all day. So still helping, but not in danger.” She glanced at me over her shoulder. Whatever she saw in my face made her shut off the water and turn around.
“Oh honey,” she said.
I’ve never been good at holding back tears, and I certainly couldn’t do it then. But I hated her pitying expression, what she thought she understood.
“Don’t write to him again,” she said. “If he’s forgotten you, you forget him. You’re too lovely to chase after anyone. Okay? Promise me?”
She meant well. I knew that, even then. But a few minutes earlier, when I was locked outside and bargaining for Leonard’s life, I swore that if he were alive, I’d never lie again.
I didn’t know who or what might have heard me, but a deal was a deal.
So I had to tell Mae the truth, which was that I couldn’t forget Leonard, and would promise her no such thing.
—
Most girls I knew wore girdles to school, though in the warmer months, I was one of many who opted for a lighter option, what we called a roll-on.
But the day after I turned eighteen, I went down to Maas Brothers and spent twelve of the fifteen dollars I’d gotten for my birthday on two Playtex de Luxe Lightweight Girdles, advertised as having extra hold-in power.
When I first took one out of its package and tried enclosing it around my hips, I regretted wasting the money, as I did not think I could bear it.
But with desperation comes fortitude, and eventually, the considerable sweat of my body made it easier to yank the girdle up and over the mound.
Once that girdle was on, I could take only shallow breaths.
I learned to endure it. Every few nights, I would wash one girdle in the tub while I was taking a bath, and then I would wring it out, tuck it under my robe, and hang it way back in my half of the closet.
I smuggled in a bowl to catch the drips, and while Janet slept, I heard the dripping through the night.
I was in French class, writing out conjugations, when I felt the first flutter inside me. I kept on as if nothing were happening. No one watching me would have known. I’d grown so used to pretending what was happening to my body wasn’t happening, and feigning calm when I wanted to scream.
The next time I felt something, I was alone, so I put my hand to my belly, and this will sound strange, but what came to me was the image of a baby porcupine.
I’d seen a picture of one, so small it could easily fit in someone’s palm, barely able to open its eyes but already covered in quills.
So it could hurt you without meaning to, and likely would.
But it also looked so fragile, in need of care and warmth.
I whispered, “It’ll be okay,” and I felt myself understood.
I realized, too late, that I had no way of knowing if this was true. I didn’t know what would happen to either one of us. My reassurance, well meant, might be a lie.
—
I didn’t know where Dartmouth College was, but when I told the head librarian I hoped to send a letter to someone there, she found the address in New Hampshire and said if I just wrote the recipient’s name and student on the envelope, they’d probably get it to him.
“A Dartmouth boy.” She smiled at me. “Pretty impressive. I bet he’ll be glad to get a letter from you.”
I doubted it. I wrote and rewrote that letter to Dale, but there seemed no way to ask if he’d heard from Leonard without sounding pathetic.
Even after I’d done the best I could, I wasn’t sure I’d hear back.
Dale owed me nothing. In high school, he’d more or less lost his best friend because of me.
And now he was far away, doing something impressive, and I was the one Leonard had no time for.
A week later, I received a letter from New Hampshire.
Dale apologized for the brevity of his response, and for his handwriting.
He said he didn’t have much time because his classes were keeping him busy, but he wanted to let me know right away that Leonard was fine.
Dale had been in Rome when he heard about the invasion.
He’d been worried, too, and he’d written to his mother, who’d called Leonard’s mother to see if he was okay.
She said he was, and that he’d only been in Korea the first few weeks of fighting.
He was now back in Japan, unharmed and out of danger.
Dale hoped that I would be as relieved as he’d been, and that I was doing well.
—
October afternoons were still warm and sticky, but I started wearing Leonard’s green jacket whenever I needed a break from the girdles.
I would zip the jacket up over my belly before I even got out of bed, and I wouldn’t unzip it until I was back under the covers at night.
My sweating father opined that I couldn’t be comfortable, and I maintained that the ceiling fans made me cold.
Mae disapproved of my wearing the jacket, as she knew it had belonged to Leonard.
But she said nothing, only showing her disapproval with her eyes.
On the first cool night of the season, my father kept us at the dinner table and announced he had big news.
“Our family is about to get a little bigger.” He smiled bashfully across the table at Mae. “There’ll be a new baby here in February.”
I worked to compose myself, grateful for the general commotion: Janet got up and said “Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!,” then went over and hugged Mae, who looked as happy as I’d ever seen her. Bobby even seemed pleased with the news, though he said it better be a boy.
“Or what?” my father asked, laughing.
Bobby thought for a bit and said he guessed he would keep having his own room, and we all laughed at that.
Part of me really did feel joyful—this was the part of me that had gotten so practiced at pretending.
But under the table, I gripped my knees so tightly one of my nails pierced the skin.
I’d already calculated that nine months from April was January, but I didn’t know if I should be counting from April or May.
My stepmother had a curvy, ample figure, and it was hard to compare her profile to mine.
Still, when I was alone in the bathroom, I’d look in the mirror, astounded that no one had guessed.
I was six months pregnant. The girdles and the green jacket were no longer hiding it.
I think the reason no one guessed was a matter of expectation, no pun intended.
What I mean is, it’s hard to see what you think is impossible.
You get one version of a person in your head, and you don’t see anything to the contrary. You just can’t.
At least that’s how it’s often been for me: in being seen, and in my seeing of others, too.