Keep Smiling Through (2 page)

My sisters, Mary, who was sixteen, and Elizabeth, seventeen, knew they should do something, so they were scurrying around trying to get breakfast on the table. They both had early shifts at the arsenal, where they worked in the office. My father had to catch the 7:35 to New York. My brother Martin, who was fourteen, was putting wood in the kitchen stove. Tom, twelve, came in from outside with a fresh pail of milk from our one cow.

"Where is she?" my father asked about Queenie.

Nobody answered.

"Martin and Tom, get dressed for school," my father ordered. "Kay, go up and wake Queenie."

"She's gone," I said.

"Gone?" He looked at me as if the fault were mine. "Where?"

"I don't know," I lied. "But I heard a car outside last night and I looked out the window, and she drove away in the car."

"Why did she leave?" My father was bewildered. People left him all the time. Since my mother had died we'd had about ten housekeepers.

"I don't know, Daddy," Mary said, "but come and sit. I'll make your eggs, just the way you like them."

He sat at the dining-room table and Mary fussed around him. Elizabeth didn't. She ate her breakfast alone in the kitchen, then she started to make sandwiches for herself and the rest of us.

"Daddy," Mary said, "Beverly's father said Tony and Marie are looking for work." Beverly Vineland, who lived across the road, was Mary's best friend.

"Have Beverly send them over to see me
tonight, then. Girls, you'll have to do the dishes when you come home tonight. And see to supper. Kay, pile the dishes in the sink before you leave for school. Mary, keep some eggs warmed on the stove for your mother."

Amazing Grace was still sleeping. She was expecting a baby. Her first. And she needed lots of sleep, good food, and waiting on.

"Daddy, Kay doesn't have mittens and it's cold out," Mary told him.

He was finishing his breakfast. "Did you lose them again?" he asked sternly.

"I left them on the school bus," I said.

"Then ask everyone on the school bus if they found them."

There was no way I could do that. We rode five miles to St. Bridget's on the bus for the public-school kids. It was their bus, not ours, and they never let us forget it. And they didn't bother to speak to us.

"Kay's hands are red and chapped," Mary said. Only Mary could be so brave as to speak up like that. Elizabeth and my father barely spoke to one another. And when they did, it always went wrong.

Now, taking heart from Mary's bravery, Elizabeth came into the dining room.
"Daddy, everyone in our department at the arsenal is buying war bonds," she said.

"It isn't polite to interrupt, Elizabeth."

"Daddy, you know we never talk."

"If we don't, it's because you don't wish to, Elizabeth."

I saw tears in Elizabeth's eyes. But she kept on. "My supervisor called me in again yesterday and asked me why I wasn't having fifty cents a week taken out of my pay for war bonds. My supervisor said it was only patriotic."

"I can't afford patriotism," my father said.

"But, Daddy, Mary and I are the only ones not giving for war bonds. My supervisor thinks it's because I'm selfish."

"Let him think it, then." My father got up and went to the closet and took out his overcoat and fedora hat.

"
Her,
Daddy," Elizabeth said icily. "My supervisor is a woman."

My father waved his hand in disgust. "No wonder," he said. "Whenever women are in positions of authority they become troublemakers. I told you. I can't afford patriotism!" He yelled it.

"You can," I heard Elizabeth whisper as she went back into the kitchen. "Mary and
I turn in our whole paychecks every week."

If he heard her, my father ignored her. He turned to me instead. "If you can't ask for the mittens on the bus, you can go to school with chapped hands. It's March. Winter's almost over." And with that, he went out the door.

"What's all the noise? Can't a person sleep around here?" Amazing Grace came into the kitchen in her chenille bathrobe.

"Queenie's gone," Mary told her. "She ran off. Daddy's upset. But no reason for you to be upset, Mother. Here, sit down, we've got your breakfast all ready."

Amazing Grace took her place at the head of the table. Mary served her breakfast. Elizabeth stayed in the kitchen. She spoke to Amazing Grace even less than she spoke to my father.

"She never was any good," Amazing Grace said of Queenie. "It's best she's gone. She was sly and lazy. All coloreds are."

My face burned in shame. Not for what my stepmother said about Queenie, but because I didn't have the courage to defend her. Instead, I bent my head over my Wheatena, making myself invisible, as I always tried to do when Amazing Grace appeared.

I wanted to be like The Shadow on the radio. The Shadow could make himself invisible. "What evil lurks in the hearts of men?" the announcer always asked. "Only The Shadow knows."

Is it possible The Shadow is wrong?
I asked myself.
I know that evil lurks in the hearts of women as well as men. Amazing Grace has evil in her heart. But The Shadow is one of my radio heroes. How can he be wrong?

I brushed the thought aside. But I didn't defend Queenie. I just ate my cereal as quietly as I could. Because making myself invisible was becoming my best talent. All I had to do was sit very still and quiet and before I knew it, grown-ups forgot I even existed.

I watched Amazing Grace eat her eggs and bacon. The bacon smelled like all the things in the world I couldn't have. We weren't allowed bacon. Or chocolate Bosco to flavor our milk. Amazing Grace needed these things to make her strong for the baby. Even though she was plump and round already.

I was so skinny I could see my ribs through my skin, but nobody cared. Nazis
were killing people in Europe. Why would anybody care about a little girl in New Jersey whose ribs showed and who had chapped hands?

My brothers came back downstairs, dressed for school, and took their places at the table.

"Martin, you're to go to the butcher shop after school," Amazing Grace said. "Kay, you're to go for eggs. To Mrs. Leudloff."

I stopped being invisible then and looked up. Mrs.
Leudloff?
We all stared at Amazing Grace. Even Elizabeth came in from the kitchen, though she didn't say anything.

"What's the matter?" Amazing Grace asked.

For once it wasn't Mary who spoke up. It was Martin. "Mrs. Leudloff is a German spy. She keeps a shortwave radio in her house."

Amazing Grace scowled. "Do you think that just because she's German, she's a spy?"

It was a trap. Amazing Grace often set traps for us. Her father was German, which made her half-German. Her mother was Austrian. Martin said Hitler was Austrian, too.

But Martin didn't flinch. "Everybody
knows
she has a shortwave radio. People have heard it."

"Who?" Amazing Grace demanded.

Martin played with his spoon in his cereal. "Mr. Schoenfeld, where we're supposed to go for eggs," he said.

"Mr. Schoenfeld is Jewish," Amazing Grace said. "So he hates all Germans. Mr. Schoenfeld is stupid. The reason Kay can't go there for eggs is because he got lime in his eye and is in the hospital. So today Kay goes to Mrs. Leudloff."

She had spoken. The matter was finished.

Before they left the house, my sisters gave me advice about Mrs. Leudloff.

"Be polite," Mary said. "And don't tell her anything that goes on in this house. Don't dare mention that your sisters work in the arsenal!"

I promised I wouldn't. Mary had told me, on more than one occasion, that loose lips sink ships, that Nazis burn people in ovens, and that I am lucky to be a little girl living in America, rather than a little girl starving in Europe.

"Don't linger," was all Elizabeth said. Then she put her arm around me. And her arm around me was better than anything she could tell me.

On the long walk to get the school bus,
Martin had his own advice. "Going for eggs is better than going to the butcher shop. Sometimes I have to wait an hour in line. And all day, in school, I worry that I'll lose the coupons for meat. And sometimes I have to lug along that ball of fat to turn in. I hate it."

Turning in a ball of fat was part of the war effort. I don't know what they did with the fat. None of us did. We figured it was a military secret.

"Be careful of Rex, her Nazi dog," Tom said. "He'd just as soon bite your leg off as look at you. And listen for her shortwave radio. The FBI will want to know if you hear it."

I jingled the egg money that was wrapped in a handkerchief in my pocket. Usually I was nervous enough, carrying egg money around with me all day. Amazing Grace would kill me if I lost it. Now I had to worry about old German spy Mrs. Leudloff all day, too.

By the time I got on the bus my hands were freezing. But chapped hands could be hidden in my pockets, once I set my books and lunch box down. There was nowhere I
could hide from the cold looks of the public-high-school girls.

I scrunched down into my seat. I knew I looked a sight in my blue serge uniform, my navy blue pea jacket, my cotton stockings held up with garters, and my clumsy brown laced-up oxford shoes.

The public-high-school girls wore neat pleated skirts, saddle shoes, and the whitest bobby socks. The white on their saddle shoes was buffed to a shine. The socks were rolled over twice. Under their coats they wore soft cashmere sweaters. Did one of them have my mittens? Why would they want them? They wore fashionable woolen or leather gloves.

I stared out the window. I hated traveling five miles on this bus every day to school. But my little country school had been closed down the Monday after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, a little over two years ago now. If I had no other reason to hate the Japs, that was enough.

I'd gone to school on Monday morning, the eighth of December, to find the doors locked. I'd stood crying in the schoolyard.

How could they close our school?

We had walked there every day, Martin, Tom, and I, past brooks and fields. It was not far from home.

I remember running around the schoolyard that day looking for Martin. Mary and Elizabeth, of course, had been in high school. But Martin would know what was going on.

He did. "They're taking us away."

"Away? Where?" I asked. I knew a war had started. I knew the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor the day before. I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor
was.
At first I thought it was on the river on the way to Waterville.

Is this what happens when a war starts? Immediately, they take the little kids away?

They loaded us onto yellow buses that day and took us on a two-mile ride to a strange school. Later on I found out they closed our school because it was across the street from the arsenal.

When we got to the new school, I knew there was a war on, all right. The kids there were lined up, waiting for us, in their schoolyard.

They all looked as mean as weasels. And they acted worse. They pushed, pinched,
and shoved us, and said such terrible things that I began to wonder if the war hadn't really started a few miles away on the river.

Martin and Tom told my father, of course. And within weeks he took us out of that new school and put us in St. Bridget's.

I never did find out why those kids were so mean. I have discovered, since, that some people don't need a reason to be mean. That in itself is very scary.

"You'll have to wear a uniform now, Kay," my brothers told me when I started St. Bridget's.

I was glad for that. I pictured the uniform as being smart and sassy. I'd wear trousers with a stripe down the side. And a hat with a brim, like kids do in military school.

But my uniform is not smart and sassy. All it ended up being was dull and drab. A navy blue serge jumper and a white blouse. I hate it.

The kids in St. Bridget's are better, all except for the girls in the Golden Band. Whereas the kids in the last school were weasels, the girls in the Golden Band are only prigs.

I got through two years. I'm in fifth grade now. And Sister Brigitta runs the fifth grade like Hitler runs Germany.

***

In school Jennifer Bellows is my best friend.

At home there are no girls in the neighborhood to play with. I play with my brothers. I'm a fair hand at Cowboys and Indians. I can shoot marbles. I know to bump a player off the track and win an extra shot, and how to guard my puries in a marble game. And I'm right there helping Martin and Tom dam up the brook in summer.

At home I'd give my pea shooter for a girl best friend. So Jennifer is important to me.

We both have dark hair in a school that seems to be full of blond, blue-eyed girls who wear Mary Jane shoes and have lisps.

Jennifer is kind of a tomboy, too. We both wear brown oxfords, have older brothers, and bring lunch from home. All the other girls buy their lunches in the cafeteria, heaping plates of mashed potatoes with puddles of brown gravy, roast beef, and peas for ten cents a day. Chocolate milk is three cents.

My lunch is a peanut-butter sandwich in winter and tomatoes on soggy bread in spring and fall. To save money, the sandwich is wrapped in paper from Wonder bread.

I don't care that the other girls buy chocolate milk. Or that afterward they have
money left to buy a Dixie cup. And they sit in front of me and lick ice cream off the photo of Judy Garland or Deanna Durbin inside the lid. But I'd give anything to have my sandwiches wrapped in real wax paper. Everybody stares at my Wonder-bread wrapping. And I feel poor.

Jennifer has sandwiches, too. Cream cheese. I think we became friends because neither of us is worthy enough to belong to the Golden Band.

They're the townie girls. They
walk
to school on tree-shaded streets. They live in identical two-story houses with wide porches. They listen to the same music, go to the same movies, and all wear their hair the same way: short and curled, with a little wave on top. They go to the same parties on weekends and wear Mary Janes.

My house is bigger than any of theirs, if you want to talk about houses. But that isn't the point. My house is five miles away, out in the country.