Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (6 page)

“I played with dolls still when I was fifteen. I read
The Girl Scout’s Guide to the Stars
,” said Meadoe. “I know it sounds silly, but I thought of myself as a little girl. Holding hands was the extent of it. Maybe carving our names in a tree.”

She’d thought she should sigh when he squeezed her hand, but she didn’t. Her neck muscles bunched; blood pounded behind her eyes. Now that they were
there
, she longed to leave. Her lips snapped as they parted. “I want to go now,” she tried to say. Nothing came out. Chris slid closer. Her left hand was trapped in his; her shoulder pressed against the door, and he leaned to kiss her. There was no place to go, so she let his cheek push her head back to kiss her. It seemed bizarre. No passion within her. If he’d stop, she could ask him if it felt weird to him too. Kissing her hand would be as romantic as this. Rubbing a washcloth over her lips would feel no different. His breath heated her neck, and her shoulder ached where the door pushed into it.

Chris leaned against her harder, turned toward her and wrapped his left leg over hers, forcing her knees apart, pinning her to the seat. He kept kissing her mouth, then the side of her face, breathing hard. “Meadoe,” he gasped. His hand worked its way into her blouse. Meadoe tried to twist away from the door, but she had no strength; it was as if her spinal cord had been cut—total paralysis. In her head she chanted “I want to go home now,” in a Dorthyesque way, as if tapping her ruby slippers together would take her from the car.

Joan said, “So when do you think your emotional self caught up with your physical self?”

Meadoe shook her head, her eyes still closed. Chris pulled his hand from her blouse, popping a button. He tugged her belt with one hand and pushed her hand against him. “Meadoe,” he said again, his breath full of after-dinner mint. Finally, she found her voice. “I want to go home now,” she said. “I want to go home!”

“This is home,” said Joan.

Meadoe opened her eyes, fingers digging into the chair. “Did I say that out loud?”

Joan looked at her thoughtfully. “I think we’ve covered enough ground for today. But I’ll tell you what, when we meet again I’ll want to know what you are
really
afraid of.” Joan closed the notebook and put it in her briefcase. She put on her jacket. As Meadoe opened the front door for her, Joan said, “Meadoe, there’s two kinds of people who say they don’t think about sex—the ones who do and lie about it, and the ones who do but repress it.”

August 1, Saturday Afternoon: The Wallpaper

Standing on the porch, her arms filled with contact paper to line the kitchen drawers, Medoe fumbled with the lock. The new deadbolt resisted turning at first, then suddenly released. Meadoe imagined for a second someone on the other side had twisted it for her. The radio played the oldies station where the announcer said, “And now Glenn Miller and his band playing ‘Boulder Buff,’ featuring Billy May on trumpet.” Uneasy, she looked around the room. It wasn’t like her to leave the radio on. Nothing in the living room was out of place, the back door was securely locked, and the windows were latched.

She sat on the edge of her bed to kick off her shoes. For fourteen years she’d lived in the apartment two blocks from the library. In this new setting, her own furniture looked changed, as if someone had stolen her belongings and replaced them with clever counterfeits. Even the air felt alien and smelled strange.

The bed felt good though, so she flopped back. A dozen chores waited. More unpacking, setting up the telescope, but her motivation was shot. Is it true, she thought, that I’m thinking about sex all the time and don’t know it?

Through the uncurtained window, the afternoon sun cast a square of warm light on her legs. She was trying to make patterns from the swirls and texture in the ceiling plaster when she noticed the wallpaper in one corner had peeled away from the wall. Changing the wallpaper topped her project’s list, so she levered herself out of bed, slid a stool under the corner and pulled off the first layer. Several sheets stuck to it. The room’s history unpeeled in wallpaper. Under a pale yellow, a horrible brown and white geometric; under that, a green marble pattern; under that, a solid pink. The base wasn’t wallpaper however. After clearing several feet—the paper fell away easily—she stood back. A movie poster:
The Outlaw
, starring Jane Russell and Jack Beutel. No date, but old, and the paper was laminated to the wall. Licking her finger, she rubbed at a spot, cleaning it. A varnish, she guessed.

A half hour later, all the wallpaper lay crumpled on the floor, and an entire collage was visible: from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, posters, magazine covers, newspapers and pin-ups, carefully arranged, varnish protected, in beautiful condition. Hand drawn scenes: girls in bathing suits and war planes: whoever assembled the display was an artist.
Life
magazine pictures of models on beaches: July 9, 1945, a dark-haired woman wearing a striped two-piece suit, her hand to her brow as if looking into the ocean; April 17, 1944, Esther Williams standing in front of a giant sea shell; Rita Hayworth sitting on a towel, August 11, 1941. The magazines cost a dime. Other Rita Hayworth images, mostly from movie magazines including a
Time Magazine
painting of her, one hand over her head, her other behind her as if the artist had caught her in a twirl, her dress billowing, showing a lot of leg. Ingrid Bergman looked doey-eyed on a
Casablanca
poster, but most of the women she didn’t recognize: Martha Raye, Betty Grable, and Maureen O’Hara. Unfamiliar movies:
Four Jills in a Jeep, Destination Tokyo
and
Haunted Honeymoon
. In the background, the radio announcer talked about “our boys in the Pacific.” Meadoe cocked her head to listen, but a song started, “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled.

To one side, surrounded by war news, a striking drawing of a Japanese woman pursing her lips at a microphone, a rising sun flag behind her. Bare shoulders, half turned, the flag snapping in a wind. Underneath, the card read, “Tokyo Rose.” Meadoe touched her own face whose high cheekbones and slanted eyes were mirrored in the drawing. Of all the drawings, this was the best. More life—a sensuousness in the mouth, in the twist in the neck.

“He did a lot of work here,” she said to herself. Clearly this was the effort of a young boy. Pin-up girls and war photos. She looked for dates. Nothing past July, 1945. Everything was vivid, though. No fading. The display must not have been up long before being covered. Why?

The setting sun touched her neighbor’s roof; she glanced at her watch. There was time to set up the telescope for a little early evening viewing. Tomorrow she could tackle the collage’s mystery.

Once the sun set in the back yard, the air cooled quickly and mosquitoes buzzed. Meadoe slapped at her bare leg as she tightened the viewfinder bracket that held the equatorial mount. The counterweight nearly slipped from her hands when she maneuvered it onto the shaft, but soon she was making the fine adjustments to the viewfinder and the clock drive.

A breeze rustled the lilac. Meadoe rubbed her arms. In the moon’s sterile light, the neighborhood metamorphed into a black and white photograph. Shadows too black to peer into. Trees without color. She thought again about the pictures on her bedroom wall, and turned to look at the house. Gray, moonlit shrubbery rustled. Moon reflected off the back door. The pale green siding now looked white. Meadoe rested her hand on the telescope, at ease for the first time in several weeks. Moving’s stress had taken more from her than she thought. It would be a relief to return to work.

She brushed her fingers over the telescope’s thin metal, an old friend. They’d spent hours untangling the universe’s many twined lights. As long as she had the telescope and the night sky, she’d never be truly unhappy, regardless of whatever Joan said about unacknowledged desires. She chuckled in relief.

Then, a movement caught her eye. She stayed her hand on the telescope. Had something behind her bedroom window shifted?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving now. Standing stone still, she studied the window. Was that a reflection off wavy glass? Or was it a face looking out? Her eyes froze open; she couldn’t take them off the image. Had she locked the front door? She knew she had, or at least she was pretty sure she had. She
always
locked the door when she came in. Of course, she always turned off the radio when she left, but hadn’t it been on when she came home?

Keeping her head steady, her eyes focused on the window, she took a step to the left, away from the telescope. The face disappeared.

She stepped back. Moonlight did reflect from the window; the glass was wavy, but it didn’t look like a face now, only like shimmery glass. There’s no way I could mistake that for a face, she thought. There’s no way. She moved again, tried to see a forehead in the reflection, a cheek’s curve, the dark shadow under a nose. Maybe it was there, but the moon had advanced in the sky a tiny bit. Maybe the image required an exact alignment of light and viewer. Maybe there was no image at all, only nervousness about a new house.

Never looking away, she unscrewed the counterweight and slid it off the shaft; its bulk filled her hand reassuringly. The porch door creaked. Meadoe reached around the corner to turn on the light. Shadows fled, and within seconds moths fluttered against the screens. She repeated the move on the back door; the back of her hand and wrist screaming their vulnerability when she stuck them in the dark to find the switch.

Light flooded the empty room, and the rest of the house was just as empty. In her bedroom, feeling foolish, she put the counterweight on her dresser.

The posters on the wall almost glowed. Meadoe sat on her bed again, as she had in the afternoon, and studied them. Ingrid Bergman looked wistfully into the distance. Fred Astaire danced across a ballroom floor. The wolf man glared straight into the camera. Planes diving. Battleships sailing. VICTORY IN EUROPE trumpeted a headline. It’s practically a museum, she thought. A moment in time captured on the wall. She thought of her own photographs taken through the telescope, also snapshots in time. The scale was different; some of her subjects were millions of years away, but the principle was the same. Captured time.

She squinted at the wall. There was a pattern in the design, an order. Not straight lines, but lines nonetheless. The
Life
covers formed three curves; the hand drawings two more; the movie poster swept in their own arc. News articles and war photos filled the gaps but created a sight line too. It took her a while to decipher the underlying purpose, but as she lay on the bed, letting her eyes roam from image to image, it became clear. All lines led to Tokyo Rose. No matter where one started, the natural flow was to the Japanese beauty.

Later, she read with all the lights on, then decided that was silly. She checked the doors and windows again, flicked the living room and kitchen lights off. With only her reading light on, she closed the book and rested it on her chest. She listened with half an ear to a radio drama about someone named the Great Gildersleeve. Some of it was pretty funny, and it took her mind off sounds she couldn’t identify: a metallic rattle that might be a pipe expanding, a thump and buzz that might be the refrigerator cycling, a dog barking. There wasn’t enough light to see the posters now, and the window was a gray square leaking moonlight. She worried that someone might look in, and she laughed. No matter what side of the window I’m on, I’m scared of the other! Tomorrow she would hang curtains.

She turned off the radio and the light and slipped into a dream. It seemed she’d slept for a long time, and she knew she was dreaming. In the dream she rested on a white beach, like one of the models on the cover of
Life
, like Rita Hayworth, and the sun beat down hot, oppressively hot. Overhead a plane rumbled across the sky, too far to identify, but clearly military, a B-29 maybe. She rolled. In the dream she shifted away from the sun, but she felt blankets on her shoulders and knew she rolled in bed too. It was so hot. I should find some shade, she thought. I need sunscreen. Waves hissed in the dream. Heat shimmered off the sand blurring the horizon.

Someone stood beside her. It was too hot on the beach, and it robbed her strength, but she could feel him standing there. For a long time he said nothing, and she thought, if only he would set up an umbrella.

Then, he touched her back. His hand was smooth, and the overheated skin felt instant relief. She closed her eyes against the brightness, could feel sand beneath her cheek. The hand moved. It stroked to her shoulder blades and down to the base of her spine spreading coolness the whole way. Meadoe moved into the stroke. Then softly, a voice in her ear.

“Do you trust me?”

She woke, screaming, and the bed was sweat-soaked again. She had to flip the mattress before putting on dry sheets.

In the morning, her linen drawers were open and once folded clothes piled messily within.

August 2, Research: Sunday Morning

The library didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so Meadoe disarmed the alarm system before entering. The lights were off. Flyers from different publishing houses touting their newest releases covered her desk, and she moved them aside to give herself room to work. The Real Estate/Assessor’s Office didn’t have a web page but the City and County Records Office and Building Permits did. She punched in her address. After a few seconds search, a list of names and dates scrolled onto her screen with her name at the bottom. From 1928 until 1945 the house had two owners: the Belascoes who owned it until 1940, and the Shirleys who owned it until September of 1945. Since then the house had changed hands seventeen times. The realtor said young couples bought the house, and then moved out when they had children. Meadoe tapped her fingernail against the keyboard. She typed in her neighbor’s address to the north, a house that looked very much like hers from the street. Three owners since ’45. The house to the south of her, four owners in the same time period. Across the street, two owners. She checked another dozen addresses in the neighborhood. None had more than four owners since the end of World War II.