The Guineveres (39 page)

“You're not an adult,” Win said through a mouth full of toothpaste that foamed around her lips as if she were rabid.

“Well, I will be when I'm eighteen, and then nobody can tell me what to do,” Gwen replied. She splashed her face with water, and gently slapped her cheeks because she claimed this stimulated blood vessels and provided luster. Then we took out the butter we'd pocketed at dinner and unwrapped it from the napkin. I divided it into three, and we each took our share, applying it to our lips and our hands and the tips of our hair. “Though I'm sure he
wishes
something happened,” Gwen finally added.

“But you're devoted to Your Boy,” I said.

“Who'd be awfully disappointed to hear of your coquettish behavior,” Win said.

“Yes, I'm devoted to My Boy. My handsome soldier,” she said, sighing, cupping her breasts and hiking them up. Gwen slept in her bra because she claimed it aided perkiness. “We will make beautiful babies someday,” she said, then smiled at her reflection, satisfied with her nightly regimen. “
After
I'm eighteen.”

A week later, eight more soldiers arrived at the Sick Ward, and we knew something big had happened with the War. We learned of their impending arrival from none other than Reggie herself. She heard about it when she'd been sent to Sister Connie for a bandage after slicing her thumb while serving on kitchen duty. Despite her gauze-wrapped hitchhiker's thumb, we didn't believe her.

But then we saw them with our own eyes. They arrived on a school bus, the white one with red crosses. Uniformed men brought out the wounded on stretchers, just like last time, one at a time, like pallbearers carting the dead. The Guineveres watched from the courtyard. We'd pulled our socks down and rolled our sleeves up to afford our skin better access to the sun.

“Maybe they'll recognize Our Boys,” I said. “Maybe they fought together.” We agreed it was a possibility that these new soldiers could tell us who Our Boys were. Mail Distribution Days came and went. Still no word from the VA.

“Any cute ones?” Gwen asked, picking the petals off of a black-eyed Susan. Her fair skin was tinged red from the heat, especially across the bridge of her nose. It was early summer. The air smelled like honeysuckle.

“This is real life, you know. This is
their
lives,” Win said. She was braiding my hair in two plaits to hide the grease until Wash Day. She ran her fingers along my scalp, yanking a little too firmly. “Would
you
want to be in their places?” she asked.

“Would they want to be in ours?” Gwen said, and she stretched back in the grass.

“At least we have each other,” I said. Cicadas rattled, fading in and out in the distance. Nobody said a word until it was time to go inside.

We caught a glimpse of these soldiers a day later when we volunteered our Rec Time to read the Bible to the convalescing patients. The new soldiers were older than Our Boys, our fathers' ages, we guessed. They were all missing parts of themselves—hands, legs, arms, whole swaths of skin that were replaced with pink-hued lines and grooves. Those whose faces weren't bandaged had black eyes the size of baseballs; one soldier's head was shaved, and a line of stitches crisscrossed his skull like a zipper. Their skin looked dirty, but when we looked closer we could see it was just bruised. A soldier with red hair had small scabs we first mistook for measles. All of them slept in a way we recognized immediately. It was an interminable sleep. It was the sleep of Our Boys.

Though these soldiers were wounded fighting to protect us, we certainly didn't feel any safer. Our insular world only felt more dangerous. We observed firsthand the gashes and bruises and scabs and scars, the limblessness, whole sections of the body that should have been there but were gone. We smelled those wounds, like damp laundry that had been left too long, or like sulfur so sour it made our stomachs churn.

Sisters Connie and Magda set up cots in the Front Room of the Sick Ward, and Sisters Tabitha and Margaret were called in to help with the overflow.

We were afraid to go near them at first, afraid of their wounds and their smells and the blank spaces where their limbs should be. We could only wonder if they knew Our Boys, or if they'd ever seen them fighting in bunkers or hiding in foxholes, as we imagined. Did they have families? Wives? Children who missed the sound of their fathers' voices, the heavy footsteps of their boots on the stairs?

Sister Connie wouldn't tell us much, other than what we already knew: They were gravely injured. The War.

“How long will they be here?” we asked.

“Until they recover … or until…”

“Until what?” we asked. “Until what?” we demanded.

Our confessions that month came easily. During the service, as Sister Lucrecia's organ bleated like an injured goat, The Guineveres slouched in our pew, kicking the kneelers with the backs of our heels, thinking of those wounded men in the Sick Ward. We watched Lottie confess to the priest beneath the stained-glass window. She closed her eyes when she spoke and tensed her bony body. Most girls, when they confessed, just bowed their heads and spoke quietly, avoiding any eye contact that would make them feel uncomfortable. Reggie, on the other hand, gestured with her hands as she confessed; it looked like she was telling a tall tale as opposed to unburdening her soul. Only later in life did I learn that Reggie's dad really was a general in the War, though he didn't come back for her like she believed. I felt badly for thinking her a liar. Even worse that her father never returned.

After a while, Win excused herself from the pew and selected the priest who stood with the help of a walker. She crossed her arms in front of her to hide her breasts, notably larger than ours, though Gwen liked to claim her own breasts were the perfect handful. “I close my eyes when I walk past the soldiers in the Sick Ward,” Win said to the priest. “I pretend I can't see them, and even though their eyes are closed, it makes me feel bad. I try to force myself to look at them, because I know they've done good things. But I can't.”

And then my turn. “I know God has a larger plan,” I confessed. I selected a younger priest who looked like the statue of Saint Francis minus the animals. “But I don't understand why He'd let that happen to those soldiers. If they're on the side of good—if they're fighting against evil—then it seems to me that God is just mean.” My voice grew shaky with anger, and I was aware that other girls were watching me, so I stood straight and tried not to bring attention to myself.

Gwen confessed to Father James. We watched her across the church. Her hands covered her face, and her shoulders shook. She stood beneath the shadow of the giant crucifix, but we could still see she was crying. Real tears, not the fake kind she could sometimes produce on command. Father James reached out and touched her arm, even though that's not what's supposed to happen during confession.

“What'd you confess?” we asked her over our meal of peas and rice after mass.

“I told him I wish they'd never arrived,” she said, and she poked at the peas on her plate, rolling the tiny balls with the prongs of her fork. When she looked up we could see the red rims of her lids, which only made her eyes look more blue.

*   *   *

The Guineveres sank into the rhythm of our own routines. We were nothing if not girls of habit. At Breakfast Prayer, we'd squeeze our eyes shut and plead for Our Boys to wake to us. During Morning Instruction, while we pretended to write down the day's lesson, we drafted letters to the VA again, begging them for help. Then during Rec Time we'd head to the Sick Ward to volunteer. Sister Connie kept us to the Back Room mainly, away from the new soldiers and their limbless, bruised bodies, assigning us instead to tend to the old men and women who waited in their beds, lying on their backs like open-eyed fish. We'd feed Mrs. Martin sips of water while glancing over at Our Boys. She'd grown shriveled in the face, and her chest rattled when she breathed, as if she were sucking water through a straw.

When news came that one of the soldiers in the Front Room had died, Sister Connie asked us to allow time for Consolation Visits. “Human connection is important, especially in times like these.” We agreed. We were to sit by the beds of the old men and women and let them talk if they wanted, vent their problems and their worries. Most had no clue about the War, or about the dead soldier from the Front Room. Instead, they prattled on about the weather or talked of the people they used to know in their past lives. Sometimes they'd tell us that we looked like their grandchildren, and if that was the case, we wondered, where were their grandchildren? Why didn't they visit? Why didn't anybody ever visit?

Then, after Lights Out, on our designated days, we saw Our Boys during their Consolation Visits when we snuck back into the Sick Ward. Like we did during our daytime visits with the old folks, we'd let them know we were there, that they could talk to us if they wanted. Gwen would crawl beneath the covers with Her Boy and curve her back against him. We could hear the sound of her legs moving beneath the sheets. Win would sit at the edge of Her Boy's bed, leaning over him, rapt in conversation. In the dark, her thick hair formed a halo of shadow around her head. I'd kiss the rough cheeks of My Boy in certain moments, but other times, we'd just be still together, not asking anything of each other except to stay there like that.

I've since heard it said that a big part of war is waiting, and I can understand why. The nights without Our Boys lasted an eternity. And eternity, as Sister Fran reminded us, has no end. Those nights, I would lie awake in the Bunk Room long after Lights Out, restless, listening to the squeaks and pops as the other girls turned in their sleep. Sometimes, I'd reach beneath my mattress for My Boy's Book of Psalms, thumbing through it for clues, but found nothing, not even one dog-eared page. Other times, I'd rely on my notebook to occupy these lonely hours, rewriting the lives of the saints as I remembered them. Still other times, I'd gaze upon each girl in the Bunk Room—this usually required propping up on my elbows—and I'd try to recall her Revival Story, how she came to live at the convent. I don't know why I wrote these stories down in my notebook, other than consolation.

I was scribbling these stories when I couldn't sleep one night, awakened by the bright moon that slid through the window slats. I didn't want to lie in bed thinking, tempted by thoughts of the Flesh that only made me feel guilty. Instead, I watched Lottie snore. Her parents had recently sent her another letter from overseas, but not the same place Our Boys had been, and she delivered its contents in the Bunk Room like a great orator. Irene slept with a leg hanging over her bunk. Her parents both worked in the coal mines and couldn't afford to keep her. Judy had thrown the blankets over her head. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father drank himself to death. And then my eyes rested upon Gwen's bed. It was empty. I could see the corner of the pillow poking out of her covers like a tongue.

After Morning Roll, we confronted her in the Wash Room. “Where were you last night?” The Guineveres asked. “Did you visit them? Without us?” We'd grown agitated. Eternity has this effect. The War unsettled us. The waiting, too. There were rules to consider. Nothing felt safe.

“I was in the bathroom,” Gwen said, annoyed, shooting us glances that landed like darts on our skin. “What are you, the patron saint of my bowels?” she asked, then lined up for the single-file march to the cafeteria.

We didn't think much of it—didn't have the time to, really. That evening, over a supper of mushroom casserole, Sister Fran called Win to her office. Win hadn't even taken two bites when she set down her spoon. She shrugged her uncertainty and followed Sister Fran. We watched as she strolled through the cafeteria; she nervously smoothed her hair, kinky as we neared Wash Day. Gwen and I took reluctant spoonfuls of the tepid liquid, each bite bitter as it hit the backs of our throats.

Together, we listed all the possible reasons Win could have been called into Sister Fran's office: transgressions, broken rules, ungodly behavior, uniform violations. She hadn't even bothered Shirley with so much as a single spit wad lately. In fact, we couldn't come up with anything that didn't also involve us somehow. And if that was the case, why were we still here eating our dinners?

The truth was, out of all of us, Win had been the most sensible one, the most stable, too. She may have been viewed as tough by the other girls, and, yes, she was angry in her own way. We all were. But more than anyone else, she understood that time would be her way out, and she practiced patience like a saint. She did not get her hopes up when we sent off letters to the VA. She did not cry easily over the bed of Her Boy, like the rest of us. But she was deeply sensitive and awfully wise, and so we had no idea why she could have been called to Sister Fran's office without us.

After our dinner, as we silently single-filed from the cafeteria, we realized what our hearts had never even dared to imagine. There Win stood, in the doorframe of Sister Fran's office, next to a women who looked like an older version of herself, a woman with Win's same aquiline nose and olive skin and dark, frizzy hair. The woman was crying, thick mascara running down her face in streaks. She hugged Win, but Win stood there stiffly, no elbows or knees. Even though we only glimpsed this scene for a moment, we knew this was her mother. We knew this by the way the woman looked at Win with an apologetic, contorted face. We knew this by the way Win fell into the embrace of the woman, rigidly, but not without tenderness. Win didn't see us as we filed past the office. She'd be gone by later that night.

Gwen and I sat on Win's bunk that evening during Rec Time. Her bed had been stripped down to the bare mattress. I don't know why the Sisters insisted on clearing her bunk so quickly; maybe it was the same reason why we learned it's better to rip a bandage off instead of peeling it away slowly. It hurts either way, but one is faster. The Sisters hadn't yet removed the decorations Win hung above her bed. Nothing ornate—that wasn't her style. Just a couple of clip-outs from an old
National Geographic.
One was an aerial shot of an island sitting in the middle of the ocean. The water was so clear around it you could see the reefs beneath, and way out in the distance, up in the corner of the photo, was a tip of land lined by trees. I couldn't help thinking that's how Win saw us here, that she knew some secret. That, yes, we were stuck on that island, isolated from the rest of the world, but the world
is
out there, after all. We'd eventually make our way back to it. There's no such thing as eternity, not like Sister Fran said. Everything comes to an end, even waiting. Even back then, Win had the wisdom that could lend her that kind of perspective.