Gone to Soldiers (35 page)

Ruthie started out at thirty-eight a week, twice what she'd been making a year ago. She could go to school on that and save for later on and still help her family, who needed the help less than ever because Morris was working overtime and so was Arty, and Mama and Sharon were bringing in money from the nursery. For the first time in Ruthie's life, everything they owned was paid off. Her parents were actually saving in a bank account, although Rose always kept cash in an old teapot up in the cupboard, in case the bank failed. Also hidden in the teapot were Rose's amber necklace that had been Bubeh's, a gold bracelet that had been Morris's engagement present to her, and eleven silver dollars.

“If we ever have a fire, if a bomb falls, that's what you should grab first,” Rose told Ruthie.

She would grab Naomi first and Boston Blackie, she thought to herself. Then she'd worry about the teapot. They had buckets of sand and buckets of water in the attic and the basement. Everybody was supposed to do that, but only they did, because Morris was the block air raid warden. Morris liked being air raid warden, for it gave him an excuse to go around to shmooz with the neighbors, and he liked reading through the official notices that came to him. He felt a part of the war effort and a genuine citizen.

Rose also took the various campaigns seriously, eager to be American and patriotic. She washed empty cans and once a week, Naomi and Ruthie stomped them flat. Rose saved fat and newspapers. Ruthie heard her explaining to Naomi what milkweed looked like, so Naomi could collect pods. The kids insisted that the milkweed silk was used to manufacture parachutes. Even Naomi believed that.

Ruthie knew better, because her shop steward had told her. Up in Petoskey, a plant was making flight jackets lined with milkweed silk instead of kapok, whose supply had been cut off by the Japanese. He had a brother employed there. He was a big burly Finn and not half so bad as most of the men she worked with. If it wasn't for the combination of the money and the time to go to school, she would have quit after the first day. She was pinched, she was handled, she was stared at until she felt as if she were a mass of raw bloody tissue. She still could not cross the floor without forty men making lowing noises like besotted cattle or whistling. Some men were always trying to sabotage the women's work. They seemed terrified women would take jobs permanently.

“They really know they've got a good thing going,” Ruthie said to Vivian on the way to work. “Before the war we worked at those crummy jobs that pay half as much. Of course they don't want us coming into the factories, because we work harder than they do. We don't jack off.”

“I'm just working till my husband comes home,” Mary Lou said, but Vivian said she liked getting out of the house and she sure liked the money.

“Not that there's much to buy with it nowadays. But for the first time in my life, I can go buy myself a dress without asking Can I? Honey, can I?” Short and broad-shouldered, Vivian wore the first slacks Ruthie had seen on a woman, except in the movies. Now she herself was wearing overalls. At first they felt odd, stiff fabric rubbing against the inside of her thighs, but the pockets were great. Best of all she liked the way she could run along the catwalks without guys looking up her skirt.

People on the street were still touchy about women wearing slacks and often called out insults or obscenities. Just last week, Joyce had been sent home for wearing red slacks, as if the men were bulls and would charge her. The foreman called her red slacks indecent, provocative. The women all agreed it was a hoot, but Joyce lost a day's pay and had that put on her record. They had not even been tight slacks, but loose and pleated.

Ruthie got off the Woodward streetcar and slowly walked toward her house. It had been a wet summer and now, two weeks after Labor Day, it was hot, as if to make up for the rainy August. She was exhausted, for she had worked eight hours, then spent nine to two at school.

She noticed a bunch of the local kids in the alley entrance as she crossed to her own block, two of the guys with fags hanging out of the corner of their mouths and the girls smoking too. Some of the younger girls had started wearing slacks, probably their brother's pants, with oversized men's shirts pulled down to cover the fly. She was dismayed to realize that one of the girls leaning on the side of the building flirting with the scuzzy-looking boys was Naomi. With a hand on her outflung hip and an expression of smiling disdain, her lips daubed with bright pink grease probably borrowed from the other girls, she looked mean and cheap.

Ruthie was embarrassed as she called to Naomi, not wanting Naomi to think she was spying, but truly dismayed. Naomi looked completely assimilated, one of the street kids, tough, scrawny, flip. Ruthie herself had never belonged to a gang or even the sort of protogang she could see forming there. Why not? Ruthie walked on more slowly. She had duties at home. She had always felt a strong identification with her mother, her mother's troubles, the difficulty of making things stretch for the family.

Then too she had feared the seductions of that street world, had feared being stuck here, married too young, pregnant too young, forever poor and just one step off the dole. Arty and Duvey were not going anyplace. She had always been the best at school. She had not thrown in her lot with the tougher kids but with those who meant to go to college, whose families pushed them successfully to excel, to study, who saw in classes and exams and grades a personal salvation, who found books a passport to elsewhere.

Rose was more harried with Naomi than she had been with Ruthie, and Bubeh had also overseen her, taught her, comforted her for the small and bigger abrasions of life as a poor Jewish girl. Naomi was not Rose's child, but they owed her more care and attention. Yet Ruthie herself had little enough time. She was always tired, always rushed. Between the noise and confusion and harrying, almost intolerable pace of the line, and the world of lectures and library, exams and the imaginary case studies of school, there seemed no overlap. Sometimes she felt crazy, as if she belonged in neither place and ought always to be in the place where she was not.

Here she was studying to be a social worker, and there was her own charge, her cousin, hanging out with a gang of scruffy kids smoking butts they must steal someplace and who knew what else they were getting into? She sighed as she plodded along the driveway past the Rosenthals' house to their own. Washing hung in the yard, sheets drooping in the humid heat. The last coals of summer, she thought, feeling the air stain her with its weight of sulphur and smoke until her skin had the smell of river bottom mud. Rose met her at the door, hefting a squalling baby on one hip.

“Your young man is coming, Ruthie mine. Your young man is coming this Saturday to see his mother and father and you. Pick up your head and give me a smile, you look so tired, tsatskeleh.”

“Murray? He's coming? How do you know, Mama? Who told you?”

Rose smoothed a telegram out of her apron pocket and handed it to Ruthie. “This came for you. I was so scared, I thought something happened with our Duvey. For once it's good news, we should always be glad when it happens and it should happen more often.”

The telegram, addressed to her, said simply that Murray had forty-eight hours' leave and he would call her as soon as he got in Saturday.

She had to take off work. She had never yet been absent, but she would call in sick on Saturday. Sunday she had off anyhow. She kept reading the telegram again and again, hoping for more information. Love, Murray. Love. She would see him Saturday. She could not speak. She could not eat the soup steaming for her. She chewed a piece of rye bread she could scarcely choke down and then went upstairs. Because of the noise from the children, Ruthie, like Arty, slept upstairs.

Arty was snoring in the bedroom, but when Ruthie lay down on the couch that Rose had already made up for her, she could not sleep. She was parched for sleep, but she could not quiet the excitement that rattled and tore in her like a fan with sharpened blades. They would have such a short time. She had to share him with his own family. She could already feel past this brief respite in her longing for him how desolate it was going to be when he was gone again.

Why did they give them so little time? It wasn't right, it wasn't right. She understood why Trudi had traveled down to Tennessee to stay in a dismal town where she was overcharged and treated like an outcast, just to be near Leib all of August. Now Trudi was back, perhaps pregnant, and Leib was somewhere in Scotland.

When she woke, Sharon was asleep and Arty was in the bathroom. She went downstairs to bathe and dress. On the table, the candles from supper had burnt out but the old Sabbath candleholder from Poland was still in the center of the table with the layers of colored wax dripped down its tarnished silver sides. A year ago, it would have been freshly polished every week, but Rose was too overworked. Ruthie decided she preferred it dimmed and festooned with multicolored wax. What she didn't like was missing Sabbath dinner.

Rose was waiting for her at the table, with her supper heating. “I wish you wouldn't wait up, Mama. Your day starts too early.”

“It's my pleasure,” Rose said, sweeping crumbs from the table with the side of her hand. “I sleep better knowing you had a good meal.”

It was odd to eat supper upon waking, in the middle of the night, but nothing was normal. Rose brought her a plate on which was set out slices of roast chicken, stuffing, applesauce, potatoes and salad from their victory garden. Across the table from her Rose sat nibbling a slice of challah to keep her company, trying to hide her yawns as she played with the bread.

“Tomorrow I'm going to stay out of work, Mama,” Ruthie said.

Rose looked down, her face puckering with worry. “You had such a hard time getting this job, shainele. You need to take such chances with it?”

“I haven't even been late once yet. Everybody misses sometimes and I'll go in Monday. I can't help it, Mama, we have almost no time.”

“After the war, you'll have lots of time.”

“When will that be, Mama? When I'm fifty? That's assuming Murray will come back to me.”

Rose spat into her hand. “Kine-ahora, don't say such a thing, don't even think such a thing to yourself.”

“Murray's a marine, Mama, he's not just on a ship. He's going to be fighting. I'm convinced that they're sending him overseas, and that's why he has this leave. That's what happened with Leib and every guy we know, Mama. They give them a little leave and then they go.”

“He'll go and then he'll come back. Then you can talk about all the time you need and be serious. The radio sings all day about love, love, love, no wonder young people go crazy.”

“Mama, I'm worried about Naomi. She's hanging around street corners with some tough-looking kids—”

“Naomi's a good girl. She doesn't help me as willingly as you used to, but she does as good as she can in a strange country away from her own mama. She tries. So she speaks like the other kids and of course she tries to look like them too. When you go into another country, it's so hard, Ruthenyu, I remember, everything is hard. They all look like zhlobs nowadays, it doesn't mean they're no good. It's the times.”

When she got home from work Ruthie went straight to bed. She was always short on sleep by the weekend, ready to fall into it and let it wash through her. Only women with six-day-a-week factory jobs left their kids with Rose and Sharon on Saturday. Ruthie could sleep in her own bed and wake in her own room. That was better for her, better for Naomi, who seemed to miss her presence. That was one of the few days she woke feeling as if she had sunk all the way down into sleep and been rebuilt.

Today she would have supper with her family and then Murray would call. If he could not see her tonight, she could always go in anyhow. She had till ten to make up her mind, and now it was daylight when she woke up, a luxury she loved, and only five-thirty. Boston Blackie lay against her purring softly. He missed her too, but he had taken to sleeping with Naomi. That seemed to comfort both of them.

Lying in her bunk peaceful with the rare feeling of being rested and refreshed and trying to keep her mind off Murray, hearing the sounds of cooking and the clatter of dishes from the kitchen, work which she ought to go and help with but did not, she wondered if she were doing the wrong thing by working in a factory. Going to school four evenings a week, taking two classes, she had in a year finished the equivalent of one semester. At the rate at which she had been able to take classes, she would have needed eight years to get her degree, eight years of deferring marriage, family, personal joy, to arrive finally in her profession handicapped by her late start.

Now going to school days, she would be done in two and a half years. When Murray came home, she would be able to offer him more than labor for an aging bride, as Jacob had waited for Rachel, who then had all that trouble with child-bearing, probably from being overage. Perhaps she would be almost finished or even have her degree and be working. Instead of liabilities and the promise of joy deferred, she could help Murray, and they could begin a life together.

With that hope she finally got herself out of bed.

At eight Murray called. Ruthie had intentionally not been answering the phone, because she could not stand to answer it and have it be someone else. Knowing that Ruthie was waiting for that call, Naomi came running. “The chassen is on the phone,” she said wryly, coming to a halt.

Ruthie rushed to the phone through air thick as honey. After the brief conversation it seemed to her she had not spoken at all and had scarcely been able to listen. He was on his way over. He had his father's very old but still functional Dodge.

She ran to dress. She could think of nothing to put on except the pink chiffon Rose had bought at a rummage sale. “Are you going to a fancy party?” Rose said to her, tsking her tongue.