The Magic of Ordinary Days (22 page)

At Camp Amache, the same guard remembered me, welcomed me in, and sent for Lorelei and Rose. When they came walking forward to meet me, Lorelei smiled and embraced me as was typical, but Rose held herself back. Eventually, she greeted me with a hug. But in her eyes I saw tension I'd never seen before, even worse than what I'd seen at the gas station in Swink. She forced a smile. “We've only a few minutes to visit.”

I couldn't hide my disappointment. “I thought you two would come along and watch my lesson.”

“We're helping in the shop.”

Lorelei flicked her hair. “Making posters.”

“Ah,” I answered.

Camp Amache was home to a large silkscreen shop that produced hundreds of thousands of posters for the Navy. Since the beginning of the war, posters could be seen everywhere, most of them for recruitment and support of our troops, but others encouraging increased factory production and war jobs, even for women. Rosie the Riveter was mythical, but posters had made her famous nonetheless. I was reminded of a poster I'd seen at the train station in La Junta. It read, “Is Your Trip Necessary? Needless Travel Interferes with the War Effort.”

Lorelei took my arm. “Pay no attention to Rose. We're so happy to see you.” She steered me inside the camp. “At least we can walk you over and chat for a bit.”

Rose fell into step with us, but haltingly. “We should return, Lorelei.”

The skin on Lorelei's arm flinched. “Don't fret so much,” she snapped at her sister. She continued to walk down the dusty row between barracks. “We can take a walk, after all.”

Rose and Lorelei had always teased each other and disagreed, but this was different. These were bulleted words, the first truly angry words I'd ever heard from them, and Rose's face was twisted with worry.

I stopped walking. “What is it, Rose?”

Again, she tried to smile. “Nothing,” she said. “We should return, that's all.”

“You go back, then,” said Lorelei. “I'm going to walk with Livvy.”

Rose stopped, looked down at her shoes, then turned on a heel and left us.

Lorelei held tighter to my arm and kept us walking. “I warned you once about Rose. Always she must follow the rules.”

We passed a group of older men working together. I stopped to look at their handiwork—vases, boxes, and toys made of tiny stones, the same ones that covered miles of open desert beyond the camp. Again they had created works of art out of this empty desert land. It reminded me of fireweed overtaking areas of forest burns, transforming charred wastelands into swaying red seas.

Lorelei urged me onward. “This is a hobby for the Issei.” She glanced up at me with a sly smile and kept walking. “I have more important things to ponder.”

I squeezed her arm. “Do you have something to tell me?”

Lorelei put a hand on her chest in a dramatic gesture. “I wish I could.”

“Of course you can.”

Lorelei then slowed her pace. Finally, she stopped walking altogether. She turned to me with a movie star smile and seemed to search for words. As I waited for her to tell me, I noticed a tiny gold chain that hung around her neck, one I'd never seen her wear before. “What's this?” I asked.

Lorelei pulled her collar in tighter around the neck. She lowered her voice. “Rose and I are involved with some men.” After looking about, she fished the chain out from its hiding place inside her shirt. Hanging on the chain was a cameo pendant. “One of them gave it to me.”

“It's quite lovely.”

“It was his mother's.”

She tucked the pendant back into her blouse. We locked arms again and strolled behind one of the large barrack buildings. How I missed conversations like this one, chatting on the telephone with my sisters, going to the diner with my girlfriends. This was a bond men couldn't understand, this sharing between women.

“He gave you something that belonged to his mother? You must be very special to him.”

“I believe so.” She beamed. “He tells me I am.”

“Soldiers?” I asked her.

“Yes.” She hesitated. “We met them on one of the farms we worked, just after we left your place. They were guarding the German POWs also working there.”

I tried to picture their first meeting. Lorelei had probably flirted away shamelessly, while Rose had probably held herself back. Lorelei had most likely picked her man on the spot, whereas Rose had probably spent her time slowly getting to know hers. But even as I tried, I was having a hard time picturing it. The last time I'd passed through La Junta with Rose and Lorelei, they had acted as if the sight of soldiers was near to unbearable. The news of the kamikaze had even caused Lorelei to shy away. But perhaps something special had transpired between these two soldiers and the girls.

“How did you meet?”

Lorelei smiled. “I told you. On one of the farms.”

I sounded like a drill sergeant but couldn't stop myself. “Did you get to go out with them?”

Lorelei stopped walking. “Not exactly. But now they're writing little notes to us.”

“Love notes?”

“Sort of. But I really can't tell you anything else. It's a secret.”

“Why must it be kept a secret?”

She took a deep breath. “It's complicated.”

How foolish of me. Of course it would be.

“If I speak more about them, Rose will despise me. Please don't ask me another thing.” She hugged my arm and picked up the pace again. “Just know that we are both very happy.”

But Rose didn't seem happy.

“And don't worry for us.”

“Why should I worry?”

Lorelei laughed. “No more questions, remember?”

I longed to know more, but I wouldn't press her. “Then take me for my lesson.”

Before we moved on, Lorelei took me for a peek inside the silkscreen shop, but I didn't spot Rose among the workers. She dropped me off at their quarters before Lorelei said she, too, should return to the shop.

Itsu met me just inside the door. She led me in and began quietly talking as she pulled out two vases, some stems in a box, and an assortment of paper flowers for practicing.

“In
ikebana,
we do not use layer and layer of flowers as American florists do. Instead, we use only a few stems, leaves, and blooms, only as many as it takes to compose, along with the spaces in between, the perfect balance among them all.”

She said we would begin with
rikka,
or standing flowers, appropriate for arrangement in bowl-shaped vases. She explained that it took years to perfect any of the styles, and that I would best learn by watching for the first of our lessons. I observed her select one of the vases, then begin to arrange the stems in exact positions using clippers to cut them and crosspieces to secure them. She used a
kenzan,
a holder with many sharp points about a half inch high, to firmly hold the flowers in their places.

As she continued to work, I heard the door open. Lorelei came back into the apartment. Itsu looked up briefly, then continued with our lesson. I looked at Lorelei and shot her a question with my eyes, What
are you
doing? Lorelei quickly got my meaning, but just shrugged, sat down beside me, and pretended to watch her mother. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see her gazing out the window and picking at her nails. Occasionally she would get up from the chair beside me, pace the floor back and forth once, then sit down again.

Now I was having a hard time concentrating, too. What trouble was coming between her and Rose? Why was Rose so tense? And why was Lorelei, who longed for a boyfriend so badly, being so secretive about the one she now had?

When I drove away, it was almost dusk. I looked back at the camp in my rearview mirror until the dust cloud behind the truck obscured my sight. On the long drive back, once I thought I heard their laughter, in unison, coming from out of the seat cushion beside me. And although the season was long over, once I thought I saw a butterfly floating along the road. As I drew nearer, however, I could see it was only a bit of newspaper picked up by a breeze.

I stopped at the telephone booth in Wilson to call Abby. I wanted to hear her voice, and the question of restricted travel over the holidays was needling me. I wanted to visit my family for the holidays, but I was a patriot, after all. Perhaps Abby could help. As the telephone began to ring, I silently prayed for her to answer. Even before I had left Denver, she had been taking over Mother's charitable projects and could easily have been away, working somewhere in the city. When she picked up, I found myself almost speechless again, just as had happened before with Bea. Abby, my closest sister in age, was also the one whose mood often matched mine.

“Livvy. It's been so long. How are you?” she asked softly.

I put a hand on the spot where the baby had been kicking. I was five months along, over halfway there. “Huge.”

She paused. “You couldn't be huge already. You must be exaggerating.”

“Somewhat, I suppose.”

I could hear Abby let out a low laugh. “I'm trying to picture you.”

“Don't.”

She laughed again. Then after a moment, she said, “Bea told you about Kent. He leaves next week. He'll be stationed at a military hospital somewhere in France.”

“Abby, I'm so sorry.”

“He'll be fine.” I could feel her change faces right through the receiver. “I know he'll come back to me. Listen,” she said. “This could work out well for us.”

I had to laugh. “How can anything work out well from this?”

“What's happened? Is something wrong?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Has someone mistreated you?”

“No, Abby I'm just having a tough time of it these days.”

“Listen up, Livvy. When Kent leaves, I'll be living in our house all alone. You could come for the holidays, then simply remain for the rest of your term. It makes perfect sense that you would want to deliver in the city, near your own family.”

We were so good at plausible explanations. “I don't know.”

“Why?” she asked. “You can't stay out there forever.”

I gazed out at the emptiness around me, and for a minute, I remembered the city. Memories of so many things—eating movie house popcorn in paper bags alongside Dot at the theater, being served by white-clad waiters in steak house restaurants, riding the streetcars full of people rushing about on business. I remembered running with my girlfriends, late for class, across parks of grass laid out like green wrapping paper rolled on the floor. And spending hours in the library studying up on all the places full of history that someday I would see in person. Then I looked down at my bulging abdomen. For me, it could never come back to that.

“Have you made many friends?” Abby was asking.

“Not many,” I answered, thinking only of Rose and Lorelei. “But Ray and his family. They're so kind to me, Abby. I don't know if I can do it.”

“Do what?” Abby sounded pained. “You don't mean you could stay out there, do you? Look ...” She stopped. “You're having a spell of trouble, bad luck, really bad luck, but you don't have to ruin your entire life because of it. I have another idea. After the baby comes, if you want to go back to school, I'll baby-sit for you.

When I didn't respond, she went on. “You were so close to finishing your education. You must complete that master's degree. Then after that, you can do anything you want.” She paused. “Well, maybe not the travel, but certainly you could teach. Listen to me. No one deserves to stay married to someone they don't love. Especially not you.”

I gazed at Ray's truck sitting just a few feet beyond the telephone booth. How confusing it had all turned out to be. Now all our lives were linked and twisted together like that brush I had found caught in the bend of the creekbed. In one telephone conversation, I could never explain it to anyone, not even to Abby. That Ray was a simple and good man, that he had married out of loneliness, but now he loved. That he had married, as most people did, for life.

“How is Father?”

“He's fine. Pouring himself into church work so he doesn't miss Mother so much.”

“And you?”

“I'm not so different from him, I suppose. I've been filling in for her. It makes me feel as if I'm doing something to carry on her legacy.”

I summoned up some courage. “Does Father ever ask about me?”

She hesitated before answering. “Yes. He asks about you often.”

But I could tell by something in her voice. She was lying.

Twenty-two

On the morning that Edward first called me, Father was already away from the house. Sleeping in late was a bad habit I had formed from idleness in the weeks since Mother's death. When I heard the telephone, I bounced out of bed, raced down the steps, nearly tripping over my nightgown in the process. When I reached the telephone, I grabbed the receiver and gasped “Hello” into it.