Mare's War (12 page)

Peaches is about to say something. She grab on to my
hand before I go out the door, but she doesn’t say it. Instead, she looks at me; looks at me, then lets me go. I think about the look on her face all the way out the door, to the jeep that takes me to town.

They’ve got trees in this town, tall, tall trees like they’ve been there forever. The yards have got those nice white fences, and they’ve got flowers behind those fences, fat pink roses and big white daisies that the colored boy keep weeded and nice after he cuts the grass. Some of these houses have got those gold stars in the windows on that red, white, and blue background. They’ve got someone in the service at these houses.

These houses look like my house. Mine and Feen’s. That redbrick house we’re gonna have, someday, looks just like this.

There’s colored folk everywhere, walking home now that day’s done, walking home from the big houses where they work all day while the white ladies work in the USO, making sure the white officers got someone to give them parties. I go in the back door of one of those houses, a big brick house with white trim, a wide sitting porch wrapped around it, and long white drapes in the window.

I think of the look on Peaches’s face when I walk into that place, past the kitchen with that fine electric icebox, down the hall with the fine paper on the walls and those fine paintings. I think of that look when I see the nursery with the big rocking horse, and the electric lights above the diaper
table, and those big jars of pins and cotton balls, and stacks of pure bleached cotton diapers, all as sanitary and neat as a Woolworth’s counter. I think of that look as I see the little babies lying there, like little pink puppies all curled up. They are just babies, and they sure don’t owe the world no explanation. But I look down at them for a long, long time.

“Keep prices down,” they tell us. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” is what all those war posters say, but when I look at the newness all over this house, I know that only some of us have to make do. Our soldiers are fighting to make the world better for these babies. WACs are workin’ to free a man to fight for freedom. But sometimes it seems like these babies, helpless as they are, is more free than I am. When are Peaches and me gonna be as free as them?

It’s only an hour after our last break, but when Mare pulls off the interstate in search of a gas station, I’m just as glad for an-other stop and a break from the story. I get out of the car and stretch, yawning as Mare heads briskly for the restroom.

“You girls, go and look around in the store. See if you can find a keepsake,” my grandmother calls over her shoulder.

“You don’t need your lighter to go to the restroom,” Tali calls after her pointedly. I shrug and yawn again as Tali quickly digs into her bag for her headset.

Mare decided that we should buy something from every single place we stop, so we have one of those little bobbing birds from the hotel where we stayed last night, a cornhusk doll from Bartlett’s Fruit Stand, where we stopped an hour ago and bought plums, and this gas station has a little gift shop, too. I can’t see why we need to look at another piece of junk just because we need to use the bathrooms, but Mare seems to have an insatiable need to shop.

Before I can pry my reluctant body away from the car, my phone rings.

“Hi, honey! Haven’t heard from you girls for a while, so I wanted to check in. I got your postcard.” Mom’s voice on my cell sounds tinny and too cheerful. “Where are you?”

“We’re at a gas station. Everything’s fine.” I know better than to say anything different. “I tried calling you this morning, but I couldn’t get reception.” It’s kind of a lie—I did open my phone and think about calling my mother, but it was too early to make that kind of effort.

“So, are you having fun?” my mother presses. “And is Mare … Is everything going all right?”

“Mare’s fine,” I repeat, raising my voice over the crackle of static. “We’re just stopping at a gas station for a little, um … to get some snacks.”

I don’t want to worry my mother, but Mare’s stomach hasn’t been right since last night. She says it’s nothing, and she took the keys from Tali this morning as usual, but she’s been really quiet. I’m afraid she doesn’t feel well enough to finish her story.

“Tell your mama you’re at a gas station because her mother-in-law ate a bag of plums for breakfast and nothing else,” Mare says loudly, emerging from the bathroom in a cloud of perfume and breath spray. “Tell the truth and shame the devil, Octavia.”

Tali quickly pulls out her earphones. “Nobody wants to know
that
kind of truth,” she objects. “’Tavia, ask Mom if I got a catalog in the mail from Cal-Berkeley yet. And tell her not to throw away my magazines!”

I hold out the phone. “Did you want to maybe talk to her instead of screaming in my ear?”

Tali complains about her a lot, but she and Mom are just alike. They even laugh alike, and listening to Tali while she tells our mother about our day so far makes me miss her a little. Not that I’m homesick or anything like that; it’s just that I wish Mom were here. If nothing else, she’d at least be kind of an ally … someone on my side. Now that Mare and Tali aren’t spending as much time on each other’s nerves, they’re ganging up and getting on mine. I feel kind of outnumbered.

The more time we spend with Mare, the more ways I see how Tali and Mare are alike, too. They both get into their little moods, they both like confrontation, and they both like to have the last word. Dad’s like that, too, and I always thought Tali got her attitude from him.

Now I find that Tali’s like Mom, Dad,
and
Mare.

I can’t figure out how I got born into this family.

I think Mare likes Tali better than me, and it’s not fair. It’s not my fault I’m not like anyone else in this family. And shouldn’t Mare understand? She wasn’t like her mother or her sister.

Sometimes I feel so different from Tali it feels like I was adopted.

And sometimes I wish I really were.

“Okay, Mom,” Tali says. “Right. Bye.”

“Wait!” I shriek as she hangs up. “Tali! I wasn’t done.”

“Sorry.” Tali hands me the phone, unconcerned. “Mom’s at work, you know.”

“Well, she called on
my
phone,” I snap, furious.

“You’re the one who gave it to me!” Tali exclaims. “What’s your problem?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” I slam the door and stalk across the parking lot toward the shop.

“Find a keepsake,” Mare says. Keepsake, nothing. I don’t want to remember any of this.

Last night while Tali was driving, Mare mentioned to her that she would have let me drive last night.

Tali said, “Why? She doesn’t even have her permit yet. She doesn’t even
want
her permit.”

My sister thinks she knows everything, but as usual, she’s wrong.

I want my permit. I want to stand in line, fill out the papers, walk up to that high counter, and take the test, filling in the squares with the right letter of the multiple choice.

What Tali doesn’t know is that I already took my permit test. And flunked. Big-time.

I looked at the paper and those lines of answers. Which one was right? Which one was half right? There were too many ways to choose, and I just … froze. I couldn’t mark anything. Mom waited and waited for me, and when the DMV was ready to close, I crumpled up my paper and walked away.

The lady was really nice. She said I could come back and try again. I was crying too hard to answer.

I made Mom promise not to tell Tali. Or Dad. Or
anyone
.

Everyone knows that only freshmen ride the bus. It’s bad enough that Tali might get a car. If I can’t even get my permit, she’ll think I’m an even bigger loser than she already does.

The bell jingling in the doorway of the gift shop isn’t the only thing ringing. There are something like seven different kinds of wind chimes for sale, all cheap aluminum and clattering pottery. The lady behind the counter looks up as I walk in and frowns as Tali comes in behind me.

“What can I do for you girls?” she asks suspiciously.

Tali, hands in her pockets, gives the saleslady a bored look behind her sunglasses. “Do you have visors?”

“That’s your keepsake?”

Tali rolls her eyes. “Might as well be,” she answers me. “It’s not like I want anything else from here.”

The woman frowns, obviously offended. “I’ve got caps, not visors. Top shelf in the back on the left.”

Tali shrugs and moves away from the counter. I wander along behind her.

I’d say this gas station in Yuma, Arizona, was a tourist trap, except there’s nothing here any tourist in her right mind would want. I mean, fake turquoise on leather key chains, little kachina dolls, and all that stuff would be fine, except most of it even
says
it’s made in China.

I hear the little bell on the door jingle again, and the air sets all the wind chimes clattering.

“Tali. Can I have the keys?” Mare’s voice is too loud for the tiny air-conditioned trailer where we’re browsing.

“Yeah, all right.” Tali slouches from around a corner and hands them over, then sniffs. “Did you have a nice smoke?”

“Girl, don’t you start with me,” Mare warns her.

“Actually, you’re doing pretty good.” Tali grins. “I’ll bet
I can get you to quit by the time we get back home. You’ll live longer, Mare. You’ll thank me.”

Mare huffs and turns to riffle through the postcards at the front of the store while Tali twirls the sunglasses display next to her.

“Have you girls sent your mama another postcard?”

“We’ve only been gone for three days!”

“Folks should write more letters. Pick out something any-way,” Mare insists.

“Octavia,” Tali bleats. “Come help.”

I put down an orange Somebody in Yuma, AZ, Loves Me T-shirt and shuffle up to the front of the store.

“Oh, look at that one. That’s cute,” Tali says, waving a postcard with a smiling sun under Mare’s nose. “I’m sending this to Suzanne.”

“Your girls look so much alike,” the saleslady says, beaming at Mare. “Are these your daughters?”

I roll my eyes. Tali is tall, and I am short. Tali’s hair is wild and dyed and cool. Mine is, at the moment, shoved into a frizzy ponytail. This saleslady really wants us to buy something.

“Mare, I’m bored,” I interrupt. “I’m going back to the car.”

“Give me your keepsake first,” Mare says.

I point to a random postcard. “That one.”

“Yuma’s Tiny Church?” Tali gives me a look. “Okay, that’s random even for you.”

I look at the postcard I pointed to and see a picture of, as she said, a tiny church. Flipping over the stiff rectangle, I
read that the church is only seven feet by twelve feet and is built “just north of the Swinging Bridge to Nowhere.”

I don’t want anything to be funny right now, but this is. My smile stretches across my face and eases the tightness I’ve been feeling around my chest. The Swinging Bridge to Nowhere. It totally sounds like our trip.

“I want two of these,” I tell Mare, grinning.

“That’s a nice church,” she says absently. “Did you want to drive out that direction?”

“No, thanks. I think we’re close enough to the Bridge to Nowhere already.” Smirking, I head back toward the car.

It is nothing but time passing, but I can’t hardly remember what Bay Slough looks like. I have been here at the training center in Fort Des Moines for eight months, and it’s up at the reveille horn, then listen for the whistle, fall in, march, fall out, work, mess hall, lights-out, taps. My feet get tired of these boots, which we got to wear all day now that we marching in the mud, but I am used to them. We have got physical training every day, even if the weather is bad, and I don’t get worn out running no more. “We are making soldiers out of you civilians!” Hundley hollers at us like she is possessed. She runs us in close order drill, and rumor is going around about something big they are making us train so hard for, but nobody knows what for sure.

There’s a snap in the air now that it’s November, and we wake up in the dark, and we shower in the dark; it is dark at breakfast and dark at dinner. The army keeps us running all day long! No day with Miss Ida ever wore me out like this.