Little Red Lies

I am grateful to Kathy Lowinger for coming out of retirement to edit my manuscript and to offer her unfailing support and spot-on comments. I also want to thank Kathryn Cole, who, early on, gave me invaluable advice and encouragement. Many thanks, also, to Sue Tate for her fine-tooth copyediting and for her inestimable help and insightful suggestions. Also, I am indebted to Doctor Arthur Turner for his medical advice concerning the treatment of leukemia in the late 1940s. As always, a heartfelt thank-you to my writing sisterhood for their advice, encouragement, comfort and cheer, and to my family, close and extended, for their much-appreciated support.

“Rachel! Come along.”

“In a sec.”

“The train will be here any minute.”

“Coming!”

Nag, nag!
My parents dash away, my mother clutching my father’s arm, his coattails flapping.

I take a bright shiny lipstick from my pocket. Don’t want to rush this job of sophisticating myself, but the train wails in the distance, distracting me. I wrench the rearview mirror around for a closer look. Where my mouth should be, there’s an uneven gash, the color of fresh blood. I do look older, though. I leer happily into the mirror. Slamming the car door behind me, I race to the station platform.

My parents are near the front of the crowd with,
oh rats
, Mary Foley. I inch my way through and say hi to
her with my hand over my mouth. She’s eyeing my plaid skirt and the baggy knees of my stockings.

Folding my lips in, I slouch and plunge my hands deep into my pockets to make my coat longer. The pockets rip a little bit, but who cares? It’s all part of turning into a classy woman of the world.

The steam engine wails. The line of dark red coaches snaking behind it sways as it rounds the long curve before the station. For a brief second, I have an eerie feeling that the train is taking Jamie far away instead of bringing him home. The bell clangs, the moment passes, and I have goose bumps up and down my arms.

Aha!
The good old days are on their way back. Can’t wait—sunshine, fishing with Jamie at Granny’s farm, cloudless nights in our backyard searching out the Dippers and Orion and Betelgeuse. He has a map of the night skies, both northern and southern constellations. Once he said,
We are just tiny specks!

I’m not
, I said. I remember being soaked from the dew, from lying in the grass looking up.
I’m huge
. I meant
tall
. I was only about eight at the time, so what would you expect? Not only that, I was the tallest, skinniest person in my class. Still am, pretty much.

As my mother eyes my Hollywood lips, her jaw drops in surprise. Actually, it’s more like horror. Like a peevish hen, she makes a clucking sound and rummages through her handbag for a handkerchief to wipe them off. The
engine steams to a halt before she finds one. Forgetting me, she peers through the crowd, watching for Jamie to emerge through the billowing steam. I tower over her by almost an inch and a half, winner of the first round of the Lipstick Battle. I’m practicing my knock-’em-dead smile.

The war has been over for ten months, but, like many over there, Jamie’s just returning, now. A boy of eighteen when he left, he’s finally coming home a man, a soldier, a conqueror.

And what have I conquered? I curl my fingers around the lipstick. Childhood. Gone. Finished. The lipstick shade is
Little Red Lies
.

The coach doors open. I can’t stop trying to scratch the insides of my elbows through my coat. I have eczema, which gets worse when I’m excited. So here I am, bouncing up and down, trying to see, scratching like mad, and worried that I won’t recognize Jamie.

Taking time out from her own excitement, my mother frowns at me. “Do you have to go to the bathroom, Rachel?”

“I’m just trying to see!” Up on my toes, back on my heels. She puts a heavy hand on my shoulder, but I squirm out from under it and skirt behind her to wait beside my glowing father. Everyone around me is eager, too, including the passengers, as they step down to the platform and search the crowd for a familiar face.

“The two biggest disappointments of my life,” Dad says, removing his hat and smoothing back his thinning
hair. “Too young for the First World War and too old for the Second.” He says this a lot, so I can ignore him. I just hope he won’t find it necessary to salute anyone. He puts his hat back on, stares at my glorious lips, then looks away quickly. He’s not one to make comments of a personal nature. I scratch my arms.

Jamie wrote to us while he was overseas, but I could count the letters directed to me on two hands with all my fingers sawed off. They all started
Dear Family
and ended
Yours truly, James H. McLaren
, as if he were president of a large corporation. I always checked the back of the last page to see if there was a
Hi, Rachel, I miss you
. But there never was. Not even a
Hi, Rachel, I sometimes think about you
. Too sentimental, too personal for my brother.
Hi there, old Rache
. Would that have been too much for him? I wrote scads of letters to him, but did he write back to share a single thought? Not once.

I watch the soldiers closely. Some who have farther to go wave through the train’s open windows, yelling garbled toasts and nonsense advice to their buddies getting off. One of the smart alecks snatches the cap from the head of a handsome young guy with a slight limp, but he jumps for it and gets it back with a wince of pain.

“It’s Jamie!”

It really is. His hair’s shorter, he’s favoring one leg, but he hasn’t changed all that much. Edging through the crowd, Mother gets to him first, grabbing him amid
a fluster of tears and yelps. “Oh, my boy!” she shrieks. “You’re limping. You didn’t write home about a limp. My poor darling! What happened? Show me where it hurts.”

“All over,” he says, laughing at her.

She leans away from him to take a good look, then grabs him again, nearly squeezing the breath out of him. She looks young and pretty in her wild enthusiasm, even with a few strands of gray in her dark hair.

Jamie shrugs and cocks an eyebrow over her shoulder at our beaming father, who has removed his fedora again. His high forehead glows like a sunrise.

“Careful, Dora,” he says. “You’ll break his ribs with those bear hugs.”

I keep bobbing beside him, trying to get a piece of him, and at last he grins at me. But then his eyes move to Mary and his smile broadens. He grabs Mary Foley by her coat lapels and plants a great smacking kiss right on her lips, a decorous pink, I can’t help noticing. I am shocked.

At last, it’s my turn. His khaki uniform is rough against my cheek and smells of sweat and grown-up boy and the world. He peels me away from him, finally, and says, “So how’s the old skinny-minny?”

I hang on to his wrists, not ready to release him until I can give him full benefit of the debonair look I’ve been rehearsing. I stretch my Joan-Crawford lips, sling out my jaw, and bat my eyelashes for all I’m worth, but he just laughs.

“Yikes!” He tries to shake free. “Get her away! What’s that red stuff on your mouth? War paint?”

“It’s called
Little Red Lies
.”

“Are you sure it isn’t called
Big Red Lips
?”

I let him go. How embarrassing! I’m such an overboard person!

No, I’m not.

I’m Pathetic with a capital P.

No. Magnificent. Capital M!

By the time I finish arguing with myself, Jamie and Dad are shaking hands and giving each other hearty pats on the back.

Jamie keeps glancing at each of us in turn, looking a little dazed. “Instead of only three years, I feel as if I’ve been away for ten!”

In the car, squashed between Mary Foley and me, Jamie tries to hold Mary’s hand, but she glances shyly at the backs of our parents’ heads and tucks her hands between her knees.

“What’s the best thing about being home, son?” Dad asks.

“No one’s in uniform,” he says. “I can’t wait to shed mine.”

On the short drive home, no one can think of anything momentous to say. Jamie was the one off firing guns and throwing grenades. All we did was cope with ration tickets and a shortage of gasoline.

I sneak a sideways glance at Jamie while he looks out the window for changes on the streets of Middleborough.
Is this really Jamie?
I have a vague sense that the boy I grew up with isn’t the one who got off the train. I keep taking peeks to catch him off guard, hoping the authentic Jamie will show up.