Gone to Soldiers (44 page)

Having him sexually was fully as satisfying as she had fantasized, and now at last she was out of that limbo of shadow fucking. She worried briefly about the next day. He had assumed they would spend the night together. That was already something, for she knew well that urge to clear the other out, as she knew the urge to move on out herself. His body was on her side. She had faith that once the barriers were lowered, they would stay down. If the first time had been like a dam breaking, the second had been far more conscious. He did not tend to ask if something pleased, but to watch, to feel for reactions. He had been exploring her. She was astonished that she could not sleep. Something had hooked her and hooked her hard.

NAOMI 4

Home Is the Sailor

“It's a rotten time to get born and grow up,” Four Eyes Rosovsky said meaningfully, drawing on a fag he rolled from discards in his parents' ashtrays. He could roll cigarettes with one hand.

Naomi agreed, sighing. “It's not fair.” Lately she had been feeling that her family, her own real family, had thrown her away in sending her off. She never got letters from them any longer, and she could not even feel as if they cared about her. Maman had always preferred Rivka, now she was sure of that. Why hadn't they insisted Jacqueline go? Naomi no longer really belonged to anybody. The only one in the world who adored her was Boston Blackie and he was just a cat.

It was their senior year and her friends swaggered around the halls of the grade school. There were paper drives or scrap drives every couple of weeks, when they got to escape classes to collect flattened tin cans, bundles of newspapers and magazines, old machinery and pans from basements and garages all over the neighborhood. There was always time to sneak a smoke with the gang and hang out watching the freights or if anybody had the money, to go arm and arm into the drugstore and have a milk shake or a double chocolate soda. That was the best part of senior year. But what Sandy had warned her was true, they had to make their own graduation dresses.

“Don't fret, little one,” Rose said, although Naomi was now three centimeters taller than her aunt. “If your dress doesn't come out good, you bring it home and I'll fix it for you.”

To Sandy, Naomi announced, “When I grow up, I will live in a tent in the summer and in a hotel in the winter. I will never sweep from the floor every day the dirt of that day and I will never stand and scrub diapers stinky with baby shit.”

“We'll be in the movies together. I'll be like Lana Turner or Betty Grable, and you'll be like Hedy Lamarr or Dorothy Lamour. They always have a blond actress and a brunette. We'll have mansions with lots of servants, and they'll do all the things our mothers make us do. I mean my mother and your aunt,” Sandy corrected herself condescendingly.

“I have a real mother too.” She did not think Sandy believed her. Naomi and Sandy acted parts from movies they had seen. They put on Ruthie's dress that was too frayed in the seams to repair. They dressed in old lace curtains that had belonged to Sandy's mother. They did sexy dances in Sandy's bedroom and watched themselves in the mirror, swinging their hips and giggling. They practiced jitterbugging and doing the rumba and the samba to the radio. Mostly Naomi was the boy and led, because Sandy did not like to be the boy, although she knew the dances better. One time when they had Sandy's flat to themselves, when her mother took little Roy to the doctor for his adenoids, they played Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Naomi made up a tap dance on Mrs. Rosenthal's dining room table.

But those dress-up games were only for the days when Sandy did not have to drag Roy with her. Fortunately he was finally beginning to hang out with other kids his age and could not spy on them all the time. “I'm never going to have babies. I hate babies,” Naomi said. “If I was ever that loud and that dirty, I don't want to know it.”

“I intend to have four children, two boys and two girls,” Sandy said. “Blond like me and darling, in little suits and pretty little dresses. But I'll be rich, so I'll have a nursemaid for them.” Sandy extended her head on its long neck, as if she were practicing to be a giraffe. “If they do it in their pants, it will be
her
problem.”

Sandy insisted that Naomi had to have a movie star to be in love with, so she picked Errol Flynn. She did think he was handsome and he seemed as if he could save you, if you needed that. Then Errol Flynn in real life was all over the papers because he was accused of statutory rape. Sandy and Naomi spent a whole afternoon in the branch library with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
trying to figure out what was statutory rape. It made Naomi nervous. She switched her affection to John Garfield. At least he was Jewish, while seeming to be someone who could fight if he had to.

Every day they walked to school together; every afternoon they came home together. It was not like walking with Rivka, who shared all thoughts, reactions and wishes; who fed on hers and built on them and turned them about so that they gleamed with polish; but it was better than being alone. People who had had a twin knew what love was and everybody else made do, she decided. They were best friends, Sandy said, and Naomi quickly agreed, because Sandy was popular and protected her in her spiky strangeness that still remained, no matter how she tried to keep her elbows in and appear like everybody else.

When she had a chance to talk with Clotilde at school, they spoke often of their favorite fantasies, When I go back to Martinique, When I go home to my family in Paris. Lately she did not want to talk about that fantasy, because instead of making her feel better, she felt more abandoned. Instead she asked Clotilde about Martinique, about her grandma, who remembered a volcano erupting, and her big family back there on the beautiful island. Clotilde came from Trois-Îlets, “comme la belle Joséphine, l'empresse.” Twice Naomi dreamed she was on a tropical island with Clotilde. Each time it was peaceful and then something terrifying would happen. Once it was a blue jellyfish that exploded, stinging them. Another night it was a mob of people chasing them down the beach, armed with clubs and torches.

She loved Ruthie, but Ruthie hung out with Trudi when she had time off or with Vivian from the factory. Naomi knew now that Ruthie did not always tell her the truth. Ruthie had a period that came two weeks late. Naomi knew because her period always came the same day as Ruthie's. It had become that way slowly and now they were synchronized. When Ruthie's period was two weeks late, so was Naomi's. When she mentioned that to Ruthie, Ruthie became agitated and pretended that she had already had her period. Naomi did not say anything to Sandy or Aunt Rose, but she decided that Ruthie had done it with Murray and was going to have a baby.

Finally both their periods did start and Ruthie was cheerful and sang “I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” in the bathroom. That had been five months ago, but Naomi did not forget. She was becoming sly and secretive. She had always told everything to Rivka, whatever she thought and felt. Now she was twisting round inside like a corkscrew.

Trudi and Ruthie shared secrets. Naomi felt jealous, but sometimes Ruthie took her over to Trudi's. Then she felt as if she had leaped over her awkward sticky painful growing and emerged into adulthood. Trudi was living in her parents' house, but at least she had a room all to herself, a big sunny room that faced the backyard. Trudi's mother threw stale bread, leftover noodles and oatmeal out on the snow for the birds. Naomi had not realized how many birds lived in Detroit. Looking at them made her feel good. At first she wished she could have a bird, but then she looked at the canary Alvin's mother had, and it did not make her feel nearly as glad. A cage was a cage. It made her remember the bad dreams she had been having, about Maman and Rivka. Better to go over to Trudi's and ask her mother if she could help feed the birds. Trudi had learned to knit and was teaching Ruthie and Naomi.

As the winter deepened, sometimes Naomi went over to Trudi's alone. She brought with her the mittens she was knitting. Then she tried a scarf. She did not take Sandy. If she took Sandy, she would feel like two little girls hanging around an adult. No, she went over as a friend visiting a friend. She could go to Trudi's oftener than Ruthie, because Ruthie could only go on weekends. When only Naomi was there with her, Trudi would put sad romantic ballads on the phonograph, like “As Time Goes By,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “I'll Never Smile Again.”

Trudi worked four evenings a week at a local clinic, as a receptionist; but then she quit. Naomi thought it was funny for an adult not to work unless he or she were going to school; then she finally noticed what was happening to Trudi. She was getting fat in the middle.

“Trudi's going to have a baby in May,” Ruthie said.

“Does she want to?”

Ruthie nodded. “I think she hopes it will tie Leib to her more firmly. Me, I don't say anything. It's too late to say anything. She knows him better than I do. Maybe she's right.” Ruthie shrugged.

Naomi liked the way Ruthie shrugged; it was a fast motion, as if she were flipping something away into limbo. She practiced it, but when she tried it out, Sandy asked if she were itchy and offered to scratch her back.

Children were running all over the frozen rutted soil of the yard. It was a dismal yard, the buildings around it unfinished but jammed full of people who were yelling and lamenting. Looking down from a window without glass, Rivka could see what was going on, if she clung to the sash. She was locked into the building with the other adults and the big kids. The little children were crying loudly. They were being called by name, but most of them didn't know their names. They knew what their Mamans called them, but they were too little to have learned their last names or their formal first names. Many were called a Hebrew name at home, not the French names on their papers
.

Finally the officials just numbered them. They had to have a thousand children. Little ones were running all about and some officials began to beat them. But that did not help. The children would just lie down and weep. They did not march in neat lines the way the guards wanted them to, into the buses to take them to the train station where the cars were waiting
.
French policemen were lined up along the way to make sure they did not escape. Children would run up to guards and beg them to take them to the bathroom so they would not wet themselves, ask them to tie their shoes
.

Rivka was watching from above, locked in with the adults. She was watching so that she would remember and tell. The little ones were being shipped east. The French officials had decided the Jewish children must go. What else could they do, they asked, with all those little Jewish children? Someday there would be a chance to remember and tell how the little children had been beaten and marched to buses to go to the railway cars and then the buses were shut up and went off with the hands still reaching out to wave, little fluttering hands still trying to please, to entreat, all she could see as the children were taken away
.

In late January Duvey arrived on two weeks' leave. He liked to lie late in bed. One day he wasn't even awake when Naomi came home from school. Rose said he was run down and needed building up again.

Then Naomi was home on break between semesters, when she would go from 8B to 8A and finally graduate. The American system was confusing, but she had learned not to comment on how differently things were done in France. Nobody here cared and they would just make fun of her. She grew used to silently commenting on the absurdities she saw about her, as if to the twin from whom she had been taken.

Duvey gave her a nickel every morning, if when he woke up around eleven, she would bring him a big cup of café au lait made the right way, the French way, with the milk heated. They had little coffee, but everybody agreed that Duvey should have his big morning cup. He would lie in bed and wait for her to bring it to him on a tray. Then he would tell her to hand him his pants and he would give her a nickel and a big kiss. She did not like being kissed that way, but she liked making the coffee—it was one thing she knew how to do right—and she liked being given the nickels.

By the fifth day, he began putting his tongue in her mouth, the way Alvin tried to do. She told Duvey she didn't like that. He said she would like it soon, and gave her a dime instead. She felt funny about what went on in Duvey's room, because every day he held her a little tighter. He told her to shut the door, but she wouldn't. On the other hand, Rose beamed at her and told her she was a good girl to take care of Duvey's breakfast.

Saturday morning they were going through their daily push and shove when Ruthie said, “What do you think you're doing, Duvey?” She stood in the doorway in her old plaid bathrobe, holding the doorjamb in one hand.

Naomi jumped off the bed's edge and went to stand by Ruthie. She did not know if she should be ashamed. It was confusing, because uncles had a right to kiss her, even if she did not want to, but not with the tongue the way Alvin and Four Eyes tried to. They called it French kissing but nobody in Paris had kissed her that way.

“Aw, go on, Ruthie. What are you doing up? I was just fooling around with her.”

“You're damned right you were.” Ruthie was vibrating with anger. Her fists clenched and unclenched.

“I wasn't doing anything. I just kissed her.”

“She's a little girl, you pig!”

“She is not. She's pretty now. She's growing up. She knows what she's doing. She's a little flirt.”

“Duvey, you're crazy.” Ruthie put her hand on Naomi's shoulder and propelled her out of the room. “I'll see you in a moment.”

“Are you going to drive Mama wild with this nonsense?” Duvey said, sitting up in bed.

“You leave Naomi alone and I won't tell Mama. But I mean what I'm saying: Leave Naomi alone. She'll tell me if I ask her, Duvey.” Ruthie shut the door.