AT THE MAIL counter, where we stood asking if our mail had arrived, depositing new letters addressed to our mothers, there was a poster. What caught our eye was the word wanted! We looked closer. We saw a dark-haired, pale-faced woman, her hair in a victory roll, like ours. She appeared menacing with the dark background and the direct eye contact, except her face seemed gentle, too. Was there a killer in our midst? She looked like one of us, but no one we exactly recognized. We studied the poster more closely and saw the writing above her head: wanted! for murder. And below her neck: her careless talk costs lives.
SOME OF US shivered, some of us got paranoid about what we told Judy the day before, some of us laughed on the inside but not the outside, for we had made the mistake of laughing at this kind of thing in front of WACs before. It did not ingratiate ourselves to them, and we needed them to obtain passes to Santa Fe and to find out how our children were doing in gym class. So we looked back, kept quiet, took our mail, said, Thank you, and walked home.
The Commissary
BECAUSE WHAT WE were doing was important, our commissary stocked chocolate bars. Mr. Gonzalez tended the vegetables with his watering can, but there was nothing he could do to perk up the wilted lettuce, peppers, and cucumbers shriveled in wood crates. Wrinkled zucchini, molding tomatoes, old garlic sprouting green tails. There were gallons of mustard and mayonnaise without a crisp vegetable in view. Milk in a small chest next to the vegetable bins, growing sour, and never enough for all of us. These Army-issued perishables traveled from El Paso and were not made fresher by the 360-mile journey.
WE ARGUED THAT there were perfectly fresh vegetables growing in the valley, so why could we not eat those instead? It was senseless, and we never got a straight answer, which was how things functioned in Sha-La. We bought cans of unmarked food and were surprised by their contents—beans, stewed tomatoes—and that occasionally—or frequently, depending on the storyteller—the cans had worms in them.
IT WAS ALSO at the commissary that we found new sources of information. We could tell, by their dress and stockings, who had just arrived to town. We offered to show them around the Hill and we offered to watch their children and we hoped they would lend us that pink dress we admired and share with us the tea they brought with them from London, and we hoped they would invite us over to their place to listen to new records. We traded our extra linoleum and our second pair of blue jeans for sugar, nylons, and secrets.
WE BUDGETED RATION coupons and saved up for steak on our anniversary, on our husbands’ birthdays, and on the night we announced we were pregnant. Not all of us were good about rationing, and not all of us thought the rules should apply to us. We became tricksters out of perceived need, or because we wanted a bit more excitement. When our ration books were empty we wore red lipstick to the commissary; we leaned in to the butcher counter and said to the GI behind it, You wouldn’t let me starve, would you, John? And John could rarely say no to us, women asking sweetly for meat, and we reached our arms out to receive steaks wrapped in brown paper, and we slipped him something expensive, but easier to come by: a paper bag of whiskey.
Ants
IN JUNE, ON picnics, on hikes, our children saw columns of ants in the sky. Ants fly? they asked. We thought of when we were younger, when we were more romantic, when we learned about the behavior of ants. We knew a lot about the mating rituals of ants because we had written a thesis on them, because our mothers had, because we remembered things Mister Smith told us in Bio 101.
WE TOLD OUR children this was their nuptial flight. We told them it was how ants make children. We did not say starlings hover nearby, watching, waiting until the ants are too tired to fight, or too dizzy from the day, and all the starlings have to do is open their mouths to receive this humming column of food in the sky.
FROM AFAR IT looked like falling rain and we did not tell our children how the male ants beat their wings excitedly, mount, and drop in hundreds from the sky. How the queen flies away, tears off her own wings, digs a hole, forms a nest, and waits for her children to hatch.
WE LET THEM make an anthill from a Mason jar and keep it in their room. They fed the ants breadcrumbs and within a few days the ants died. While our children were away at school we dug up new ants and replaced the old ones, so for at least a little while our children would not know there are things they cannot save.
The Theater
SINCE THE DRAFT age had been extended in 1941 and our husbands were no longer working at the university, we worried they might have to leave us to fight in the war. But we were told there was no way our husbands would ever have to go to war since they were working on a war project. Sometimes the draft letter did come, and our husbands left for San Francisco, and we were certain they would be called to the Pacific theater, or we had a feeling it would all be okay.
IF OUR HUSBANDS were drafted, or our brothers, we hated the term theater to describe parts of a war. If we did not have anyone in battle, or if we had generations of men in our families who had been in battle, we loved the term theater, and we thought it conjured both the drama and the artifice.
WE HEARD NEWS that the U.S. invaded the Pacific islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, but thankfully, all of our husbands who were drafted returned, because they were working on a war project already, and they did not leave for the Pacific. But they were here, on the Hill, in the Tech Area, fighting anyway.
Our Children
HOW MUCH WAS parenting like warfare? Digging trenches, changing diapers, gunfire, or a child’s head hitting the corner of a coffee table—hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror. We felt we had been lied to about how lonely raising young children could be, about how for the first year we were not us, but them.
IN OUR SECOND pregnancy we birthed nine-pound children that others envied. We had lost our first and did not believe we were actually having a baby until it was on our chest, scooting down to find our breasts. We ate huge piles of mashed potatoes and meatloaf as soon as we delivered. We lost our baby weight while we rested for ten days at the hospital, or our stomach muscles never recovered and our party dresses no longer fit, but we could not afford or find the time to make another.
WHEN WE BROUGHT home the second child, our first child wanted to hold it, or our first child said, Put that back inside your belly.
OUR CHILDREN HAD squeaky voices, were dawdlers, kicked the chairs in front of them, would not make eye contact with strangers, or else they spoke rapidly, frequently, giggled, passed notes, started rumors. They were restless. They loved that there was not enough water to wash their faces or brush their teeth. They refused to put on their galoshes. They took off all their clothes in the street and blamed their stuffed animals for their mischief. In other words, they were just like us. Or they were like our husbands, or they were just like the black sheep of our families, our uncles, and we asked, How did this creature ever come out of me?
WE READ A book about the effects of war on children that said children, during wartime or not, bite and kick one another and steal toys without regard for the other children’s unhappiness. It said there was an ongoing war happening in the nursery. The outer world matches the real aggressiveness that rages inside every child. War is natural and therefore the effects of war on children were minimal. The authors said children arrive at shelters after their homes are destroyed and play merrily, and eat heartily, and this was proof that a 350-pound bomb does much less damage to a child than a divorce. And some of us agreed and felt better about the war and felt bad for Susan, whose husband was lost in the Pacific, and some of us felt angry at Myrtle for telling her husband she wanted to separate—Think of the children! we exclaimed to her, rattling the pages of the book in her face, but she would not listen.