Little Red Lies (2 page)

He does for a moment, when he turns suddenly and catches me staring. I bite my lip, trying to look innocent. “Pow!” he says with a pretend punch to my jaw. The real Jamie’s there, lurking just below the surface.

“The best thing about Jamie being home,” I say, “is that now we can go right back to where we left off before he went away.”

“That would certainly be nice,” Dad says.

“It’s so good to have you back!” Mother repeats at least three times, twisting around to make sure he’s still there.

Dad keeps saying, “Quite a change in the weather, yes siree. It’s what we expect in early March, though, isn’t it?”

A little chorus of agreement rises from the backseat, as if we are all strangers.

“They’re calling for snow this evening,” Dad says.

“Gosh,” Jamie says. “What next?” Briefly, he eyes the ceiling.

“By the way, Jamie,” Dad says, “I saved some newspaper clippings about the Invasion of Normandy and about our troops in Belgium and Holland. Maps, too. I’ll give them to you.”

“Oh, swell.” Jamie is kind of slumping now.

“Oh, Howard, I would think he’d want to forget the war,” Mother says.

“Not at all. Am I right, son? Sometime down the road, you might want to talk about …”

“You never know. Hey, any word about Coop?” His best friend Coop’s plane was shot down over Germany three months before the war ended.

“Nothing,” Mother says. “His parents were told to contact the International Red Cross, but they haven’t heard anything.”

“He’ll turn up,” I say. “He has to.” Jamie looks at me as if he isn’t all that sure. “You know Coop,” I say, “usually late, but he always shows up in the end.”

He grins. “The teachers used to call him the late Mr. Cooper. I’ll go visit his family. They might know something by now.”

Granny arrives just before we sit down to dinner. “You’re all out of breath,” I tell her.

“You would be, too, if you’d driven that blasted truck as fast as I did all the way in from the farm. Where’s my boy? Let me get my hands on him.” She gives Jamie a good hard Granny-hug and says, “You’re not so big that we can’t still make you mind.” She holds on to his shoulders and blesses him with her fierce loving gaze until he has to look away.

“Jeez, Granny,” he says.

“I’d have got here sooner,” she says, “if it hadn’t been for that new vet, who takes off early on Friday as if nobody’s cattle get the bloat on a Friday. I had to hunt him down at home.”

We’re standing around the kitchen leaning against things, watching Mother take the roast out of the oven, watching her make gravy.

“That’s what the world’s come to,” Granny says. “Nobody wants to work. That’s what a war does for you.”

Granny’s eyes are on my lips.
Here it comes
, I think. A war paint crack, or raspberry jam, or here’s a hankie, wipe it off. But, no. She grins at me and winks.

Mary Foley has been asked to stay for dinner. “Sit down, please,” Mother says, bustling us ahead of her into the dining room, “before everything gets cold.”

We bow our heads while Dad, from his end of the table, disposes of the blessing: “GraciousHeavenlyFather-grantusthyblessingonthesemerciesforChrist’ssakeamen.”

I keep my eyes open to see if Mary will cross herself. She does. In this town, almost half the people are Catholic and the rest are Protestant. A lot of petty rivalries go on because of it. Not much here in the way of any more exotic religions, though.

As Dad carves the roast in thin slices, the way Mother likes it, plates are passed down to her for helpings of roast
potatoes, carrots, and canned peas from the matching china serving dishes. “Now, Mary,” she says, “I know your religion dictates fish on Friday. I’m sorry you won’t be able to enjoy roast beef with the rest of us, but I’ve made you a little tuna casserole.”

“Ugh!” I say. “Poor Mary. She’s probably missing out on good old macaroni and cheese at home.” Mary turns red and scowls at me.

Mother plops a beige dollop, the consistency of porridge, onto her plate. “May I give you carrots and peas with your casserole, Mary?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. McLaren.” She has good manners and says thank you a second time. Again her cheeks turn pink.

I can tell by the dainty bites she takes that she hates tuna casserole. Jamie frowns down at
his
plate. “I’d like some of that, too, Mother, if there’s enough. I’ve gone off roast beef a bit.”

“Now, don’t be silly, Jamie. Just eat what’s put before you. It’s the first decent roast we’ve had since the war, and it’s always been your favorite. We’re having it especially.”

“Tell us all about the war, Jamie,” I say. “It must have been so exciting being right in the thick of it, firing guns and everything.”

“Exciting?”

“You know. Kill or be killed.”

Jamie doesn’t answer right away. He stares at his plate as if he’s trying to figure out what’s on it. “Some of my friends were killed,” he says.

“Now for dessert,” Mother interrupts, “we have two kinds of pie.”

Dad says very quickly, “My-oh-my, two kinds of pie.”

I can’t look at Jamie. Instead I stare down at my ragged fingernails and wish I’d never said a word. His
Dear Family
letters never mentioned friends getting killed.

“Jamie!” Mother taps the table beside him. “You’ve eaten almost nothing. There’ll be no pie for you, young man, until I see a good portion of that plate cleared.”

“Sorry, it’s delicious. Too excited to eat, I guess.”

Mother fetches the pies, apple and pumpkin, and places them in front of Dad to serve while I clear the table. Mary helps me, even though she’s a guest, and is rewarded with a large slice of each of the pies to make up for the disappointing casserole. Jamie asks for a small piece of pumpkin and eats most of it.

I can tell Granny’s getting agitated about something. She always sits very straight and wiggles her shoulders when she’s about to make a pronouncement. Her probing eyes are on Jamie. “You’ve got too thin, my boy. Look at the neck on him, scrawny inside that shirt collar.”

“Army-issue. They always go big on the shirts. Anybody mind if Mary and I go for a walk?”

Of course we mind, but before Mother can discourage
it, Dad says, “Go ahead, son. You two need a chance to catch up.” Mother sighs audibly, but it’s too late. They’re already standing and pushing in their chairs.

“Can I come, too?” I know the answer will be a loud and blunt
no
and steel myself for it.

Jamie pokes his head back into the dining room. “Not this time, Rache,” he says gently.

I think my mouth is hanging open like a character in a cartoon. He wasn’t normally this kind before the war. My formerly vicious lips, now merely a pinkish smudge, turn up in an almost smile. War sure changes people.

“Thanks again for dinner, Mrs. McLaren,” Mary calls. We hear the hangers jangle as she gets her coat from the hall closet.

When the door shuts behind them, I ask to be excused and go to the living room window. Our street, Wakefield, is like a stage subtly lit to resemble evening. I know a thing or two about stages because I’m in the school drama club. My dream is to act.

Jamie’s arm is around Mary’s shoulders. Hers should be around his waist, but it isn’t. They spend a long time looking into each other’s eyes before Mary looks away. I direct them to walk toward the streetlight, where they will be bathed in its golden glow, and they do.

“Snow,” I whisper. As if on cue, snow feathers lightly from on high. This must be what it’s like to write a play or direct one.
Stage direction: as they move closer to the
streetlight, he bends down and she raises her face. They kiss
.

And they do. They kiss while snow falls on their heads and shoulders, and I let them until … until a little pang of longing says that’s enough.
Move along
, I direct. And they do. The power of the director! What’s wrong with the scene is the casting. Mary isn’t the right girl.

It isn’t until the next morning that I have a chance to get Jamie all to myself. I knock on his bedroom door, and he says, “Come in.” He squints at my hair. “Quite a bird’s nest you’ve got there, kiddo.”

I have such thick, curly dark hair that it takes me about half an hour to get a brush through it. So, mostly I don’t, until Mother shrieks at me,
I’m taking that head of yours, and I’m going to shave it bald if you don’t … blah, blah, blah
.

I’m still in my pajamas, draping myself across the foot of Jamie’s bed. I have lots of questions for him.

We can hear Mother rattling around downstairs, getting breakfast. Dad’s bringing in the paper from the front veranda. We hear him call to our neighbor Mrs. Hall that Jamie’s home, and Mrs. Hall burbles something back.

Jamie’s chest is bare, and he draws his knees up, keeping the covers tight across his waist. He still looks like the boy who went away in spite of the dark hair sprouting on his chest. It wasn’t there before, or if it was, I didn’t notice.

I wonder if he wore his shorts to bed or if he’s completely
naked. Mother put his ironed and folded pajamas on the bureau, and they’re still there. If I tried that, Mother would know the instant my naked body slipped between the sheets, and she’d storm into my room with a lecture about personal decency. Every so often, I have the urge to be personally indecent. I’m developing a bosom now, and sometimes I take off all my clothes in front of my mirror just to admire it.

I sit up. “I’m thinking of writing a play.”

“That’s nice. About what?”

“The war. Kind of a romance.”

“A romance about war?”

“It’s going to be about a soldier who has to kill the enemy but at the last minute doesn’t, and so he gets shot. But he doesn’t die, and this nurse in a hospital looks after him, and, um …”

“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, let me guess—they fall in love.”

“Yes, actually.” I look down and chew on my thumbnail. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
Of course it is
. “It sounds stupid!”

“No, it sounds good. I hope it has a happy ending. After all the bombs and killing and destruction over there, I bet people want happy endings.” That is the most grown-up, sensitive thing he’s ever said to me.

“What was it like, Jamie? I don’t know very much about war.” I hug my knees and scrunch up his top blanket with
my bare toes. “What was it like knowing there were boys and men out there who wanted to kill you?”

“You know, you’ve got eyes just like Granny’s, the way they bore right into a person. If the two of you ever put your joint intensity together, you could tip the world right off its axis.”

“Tell me,” I say. “I don’t know the first thing about war.”

“What do you know about love?”

“I can imagine being in love. War is a different country. I can’t imagine living there.”

“Sooner or later, I’ll tell you war stories. Right now, I want to shove the war right off the edge of the world.”

“Jamie, come on …”

“In a war, it’s like thinking about bullies. You could let yourself be bullied, or you could fight back.”

“And what else?”

“I can’t remember what else.”

“But, how could you forget something like that so soon?”

He moves down under the covers, pulling them up to his chin. “If you squint your eyes half shut, you don’t see as much. And you don’t remember as much, either. It’s as if everything is only half true.” He draws his brows together. “I suppose you’ll put that in your play.”

“Maybe.” I probably will, after I have more time to study my brother under my personal microscope of human behavior.

“Did many soldiers fall in love?”

“No one I knew. A lot of soldiers died.”

“When people get shot, is it—not really, but sort of—like a balloon deflating?”

“No, of course not. I think you’re trying to rewrite my memories.”

“I’m not.” I scowl at him.

“I had this friend, Herman Visser.”

“Was he shot?”

“Yes. A scrawny guy. Unhappy. Kind of a deflated balloon while he was alive. His family was Dutch, but he had an unfortunate nickname—Herman-the-German.”

“Did he have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t think so. He had a mother.”

A week later, I turn fourteen, for all the good it does me. I’m still too tall, still too skinny, still scratching my arms raw, and still not allowed to wear lipstick to school.

The day after my birthday, I have an appointment with the doctor to have my arms examined. We’re hoping that some new ointment has been discovered that will cure me.

Doctor Melvin’s waiting room walls are plastered with large Dingbat calendars from the Charles E. Frosst drug company. Never mind leafing through boring, outdated
LIFE
magazines while you wait for the doctor. You can stay amused for hours looking at the cartoon scenes of curious buglike creatures, with antennae coming out of their heads. Some of the Dingbats are dressed as wartime Red Cross doctors and nurses; some carry injured soldier-bugs
on stretchers; some wind endless rolls of bandage around the spindly arms and legs of the injured; some lie on cots and get blood transfusions from something that looks like a gas pump. There are also scenes of peacetime hospitals, where Dingbat nurses inject sick Dingbats with giant hypos or spoon medicine down their throats, and Dingbat doctors put casts on broken legs or hover over Dingbat patients on operating tables. And there are Dingbat pharmacists with their pills and medicines, and dentists with their lethal-looking drills. In Dingbat Land, all the little Dingbats get looked after, and I’m pretty sure they all get better.

There is no new miracle ointment (there would have been in Dingbat Land), so I have to use the same old smelly stuff that doesn’t work very well.

“One of these days,” Doctor Melvin says, “you’ll outgrow this rash. You’ll see.”

Besides continuing to scratch my arms, I work a bit on the play I want to write, even though I don’t know the first thing about writing one. I’m starting with the scene under the streetlight with the snow falling. But I bog down trying to write dialogue. And where should I set it? And how do I get the soldier into the war? Writing a play isn’t as easy as it looks.