Club Storyville (3 page)

I wondered if Ariel was losing her heart to him.

“You know, she’s nearly thirty, right?” I asked one day when Scott came in from talking to her on the porch, after Ariel had collected her hot tea with a smile and taken it back with her to Nan’s room.

She was staying with us by then, sleeping in one of the extra bedrooms in Nan’s big house, in case Nan needed her in a hurry. Even with that, though, her living under Nan’s roof like family, Ariel had hugged me only one time, on my twenty-second birthday in November, after I opened the dress I had once complimented of hers that she’d had altered for me by a tailor she knew in the city, and it instantly became the most fashionable thing I had ever owned.

“I’m sorry,” she said as I’d pulled it from the box. “I would have gotten you your own, but...”

“Fix it,” I repeated the slogan the government used to remind us not to waste a scrap of anything that could be reused. “I know. Thank you.”

“You know, in Great Britain, their slogan is ‘Make do and mend’,” she said, and of course I didn’t know that, but of course she did. She’d probably met all sorts of people in the North who never made it down our way. “I think I like that better, don’t you?”

“It is catchier,” I admitted, and she smiled brightly at me when I couldn’t stop looking at the dress she’d given up to give me a birthday gift.

It felt like I had a reason to hug her then, so I did, but Ariel embraced and released me so quickly it was barely a hug at all, glancing toward Daddy and Mama, who, I could tell, without a word, thought the dress was too short and too fashion-forward.

“So?” Scott replied in response to my question about Ariel’s age.

“You look silly going with a woman that age,” I told him. “What about the girls at your school?”

“What are you talking about?” Scott thought it a joke.

“I’m talking about you fawning over Ariel all day long,” I returned tersely, the cold air feeling colder on my hands as I robotically pulled a plate from the hot water to rinse it.

“Do you not want me around her?” he asked with sincere confusion. “Is there something wrong with her?”

“No,” I replied sharply. “There is nothing wrong with her.”

“Are you mad at me then?” Scott couldn’t miss my tone.

I was, I realized. I was mad. Though, not entirely sure myself, I couldn’t tell Scott why. “I’m just tired of seeing you talking to Ariel all the time while everyone else is working,” I declared.

“I do my share when I’m here,” he sounded truly wounded, but I was too frustrated to hear it, too hurt by how easy it was for him to come in and replace me, by how Ariel touched Scott like they were the best of friends.

“When you’re not showing off for Ariel,” I countered.

“She’s funny,” Scott said. “And she’s been all sorts of places. I like her stories.”

“Well, you still have school and all your friends,” I snapped. “Could you leave just one person for me?”

Whirling to rinse a plate, it slipped from my hands and the sound of the ceramic cracking as it hit the sink set me to crying instantly, because I knew we couldn’t waste things or replace them, and it gave me a good excuse.

Reaching for the pieces, I wondered if I could put them back together somehow, but Scott was there in a hurry to catch my hands.

“Don’t,” he said. “You’re going to cut yourself.” Before I could say anything, he took me to a chair at the kitchen table and looked at me with such concern, I felt bad for being angry at him when I had no reason to be angry, other than Ariel seemed to like him more than me. “Are you all right, Lizzie?” he questioned. “Are you sick or something?”

“No,” I shook my head, but I knew I needed a reason to feel the way I did, for why I wanted Ariel to myself. “I’m just tired. And it’s lonely out here. It will be different in the summer when you come home for good.”

I tried not to think it would be worse, that Ariel and Scott might like each other even more, and more all the time.

When Scott looked away, guilty, like he did when we were kids and he had snuck the last cookie or broken the arm off one of my dolls, I got that feeling in my stomach, the one that had become more and more frequent and I wished would be wrong more often.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said, his head shaking extra hard in an effort to sell the lie.

“Tell me,” I insisted, and Scott sighed a sigh far too heavy for just eighteen.

“I don’t want to tell you now,” he uttered.

“Tell me anyway,” I demanded, and he knew he would have to, or suffer the consequences. There were ways of making Scott talk, and in our eighteen years as brother and sister, I had learned every one of them.

“I joined the Army,” Scott spared himself, looking up at me with his big brown eyes for reaction, and, for a second, I felt numb, as if his words had poison in them that rendered me paralyzed.

Then, I felt everything but numb. There had been a lot of fear and pain and anger I had felt over the past years, but there had been a lot of those things I hadn’t let myself feel too, and all that was left came crashing in at once.

“Scott,” was all I could say, but, in my mind, I was cursing all those damned war ads in every paper, plastered on the screen before films, and posted at his high school for making him feel responsible and chosen and patriotic.

“Well, what else should I do?” he reasonably asked, as if he would have liked a real answer, and I cursed myself too when I didn’t have one to give him. “Just sit around and wait for them to draft me? They’re going to get to me eventually. I would rather it be my choice.”

It wasn’t Scott’s choice, though. I could see it in his eyes. He was scared and he was trapped. He wasn’t a soldier.

“But Uncle Rodney and Edward...” I reminded him we had another brother once, the other half of me, born a minute and a half before, Edward, who was first in line to enlist the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes, when we were young, Edward and I left Scott out, because we were twins and nearly four years older than him. He was the annoying little brother who followed us around, trying to be like us, with no chance he’d ever be as much like us as we were like each other. Until, one day Edward and I finally realized Scott didn’t want to be us, he just wanted to be with us.

“I’m not going to end up like them,” Scott made me a promise there was only a fifty-fifty chance, at best, he could keep. “I’m going to go in there and end this war single-handedly.”

He thought he would make me laugh, but watching him be brave, not because he was that kind of brave, but because he had no choice but to find bravery he shouldn’t need, only made me cry harder. I would rather him spend all his time with Ariel, I realized then, making her laugh and getting all her touches, than for him to be anywhere else, and my tears were less selfish as I hugged Scott around his neck, until Mama came in and caught us like that.

“Elizabeth, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“She broke a dish,” Scott said, and, pulling back, I blinked at him. It wasn’t like Scott to lie, and especially not so well. You could always see it in him when he tried, but even I would have believed him if I hadn’t been there the instant before.

“It’s just one dish,” Mama turned softer. Strict as she could be, she always let up when one of us cried, as if she knew a heavy hand could do real damage. “We have enough. I’ll clean this up. Scott, take your sister in to dry her face and listen to the radio for a while. She’s been doing too much. No news, now. Listen to something nice.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Scott said, and we did as Mama told us, settling in the living room, where Scott put me down in a chair with a handkerchief and turned the dial on the radio until he tuned out of Daddy’s news program and found music we both knew wouldn’t fit Mama’s definition of ‘nice,’ but that she’d forgive us listening to under the circumstances.

“Don’t tell Mama or Nan, okay?” Scott returned to my knees to make me swear. “They don’t know yet.”

Trying to be as brave as Scott was being, I felt nothing close to bravery, but I still nodded in agreement. “Are you leaving as soon as you graduate?” I asked him, feeling like the younger sibling asking for reassurance, and when Scott’s gaze dropped to the floor, I knew we didn’t have that long.

“I leave for Basic on the fifth,” he said.

“Oh, Scott,” I started crying again in protest. “You’re not even going to finish school?”

“I’ll finish when I get back,” he replied, because he would never say what he meant. As well as Scott did with his lessons, he sure hated doing them, and he wasn’t going to spend his last days taking exams before he shipped off to stare death in the face. “I’ll be all right, Lizzie,” he tried to assure both of us, and I didn’t know which of us was least convinced. “Do you believe me?”

“I believe you,” I whispered, but, though I wished I could, I didn’t.

T
hat night, after dinner, during which Scott and Daddy and I shared a secret we couldn’t tell Mama, I sat for a long time on the porch. So long Mama came out twice to tell me to come in before I froze, and that Scott came and went after he said he was turning to ice and the Army wouldn’t take him if his trigger finger fell off.

Although I could see my breath, and I knew it was as cold as everyone kept telling me, I didn’t feel the cold. I felt only the pain, and I knew it was pain I deserved. All day long, I had wanted Scott to go away, to leave Ariel alone. Then, he told me he was going, and I couldn’t help but think I had some power I didn’t know about, that I couldn’t control, to wish my loved ones away.

When the door opened again, I knew it had to be late, and as I watched Ariel come through it, I realized she was the last person I expected to see, and the person I wanted to see most.

“Scott said you’ve been out here for hours,” she said.

“Scott exaggerates,” I returned, amazed she had come to find me on her own. It was rare that Ariel and I were alone. Stuck in that house all day, we were together a lot, but always under the watchful eye of others.

Smiling an uncertain smile, as if she wasn’t sure which of her contradictory sources to believe, me or Scott, Ariel laid the blanket she’d brought across my lap and sat down on the swing next to me, closer than usual, giving it a little push by accident that sent us swaying back and forth.

“Are you all right?” she softly questioned, and, suddenly aware of the cold on my face as the rest of me thawed beneath the warm fabric of the blanket, I didn’t know what the words meant any more. There was the ‘all right’ that used to be, the one before the war, when we never went without, but things were bleak for so many people around us. Then, there was the ‘all right’ after the war started when we all realized the ‘all right’ we knew before was more ‘all right’ than we could have ever imagined, because no one in our family had been shipped across the ocean to die yet.

Glancing to the door, I wondered if Scott had already told her, if he and Ariel shared such secrets with each other, like they shared their touches without hesitation.

“He’s going to war,” I said, and Ariel didn’t need to ask who. Though, Daddy had registered too when it became law for men his age, they had no need for a man with one bad eye and half-good knees on the field of battle.

“Oh,” Ariel replied, and I could tell she didn’t know. Watching her stare into the night, I could see her thinking of all those soldiers she had seen, the ones around Scott’s age, dying, as she said, of unnatural things.

Maybe because of that, Ariel didn’t lie to me like most people would have lied, like Scott had lied. She didn’t tell me he would be fine, that he would come back as the same Scott. She didn’t tell me he would come back at all. She just sat next to me in silence, letting me be smart enough to have my own opinions.

“You know our brother Edward died in the war?” I asked her, and, glancing to me, Ariel gave a small nod of confirmation.

Edward had a ghost’s presence in Nan’s house. We still talked about him, but like he was still right there, as if he was just off in the woods gathering firewood all the time, and, at some point, Nan must have told Ariel why he never came around.

“When we were kids,” I quietly remembered, “Edward and I had to share everything. After the market crashed, sometimes it felt like we were sharing shoelaces.” I smiled at that, because it did often feel that way, and I never could have imagined it then, but those things Edward and I fought each other so hard over had become some of my fondest memories. “I used to say all the time I didn’t want to be a twin,” I went on as the wind died down around us, making the night less cold and more sympathetic. “Every stick of gum Nan broke in two, I didn’t want to be twin. Every bed we had to share when we stayed with relatives, I didn’t want to be a twin. Then...” My eyes seeking the darkness off the porch, it blurred with the memories of Edward’s smiling face. ‘I’ll be home soon,’ he’d said the day he left, and he had honestly believed it. “One day I just wasn’t anymore, and all I wanted in the world was to be a twin again.”

It wasn’t the reason I wanted Ariel to hug me, because I quit pretending I could stand what was happening and I was a mess of tears and felt like my world was falling apart, but at least she didn’t hesitate. Her arms wrapping around me, they held on with all their might, and, when I could finally take a deep breath again, I could smell Ariel’s hair and the soap on her skin, and, for the briefest of seconds, somewhere in the midst of all the sadness and worry, I realized I was happy.

O
ne can feel hope dying. It’s not something anyone notices as it happens, because hope is like a star. It takes a long time to fade completely, and it looks bright, even while it’s burning out. When I stopped in the days after Scott left, though, to look for hope, I could actually feel it dimming inside of me.

Winter wore relentlessly on, and nothing changed for the better. Scott was training to fight a war that felt like it would never end, Nan was growing sicker, Ariel went back to the distance she liked to keep, friendly, but not overly affectionate, and the chores were the same, day after day, week after week.

There was life happening all around me, but no one was living. It felt as if we were all just biding our time, and for what, I wondered. Until Scott shipped off to war? Until Nan died? Until the war ended and ‘all right’ changed again? In those days, it felt as if hope was something that belonged in storybooks, not in the real world.