Lavender

by Susan Cameron

Well. The new story I'm working on refuses to cooperate, so in exasperation I dug into the file pile. Lo and behold, Kate in one of her earliest incarnations -- not fitting in with the recent Georgie, Emma, and Looie narrative at all (understatement of the century!), but I'm going to change her name here, and everybody else's, and let her stand alone and talk. Some day, maybe I can dissect this piece and use bits elsewhere.

* * * * *

We've written back and forth a long, long time, you and me. Still, I didn't expect the question in your last letter -- "What's your secret desire?"

I stayed awake all night wrestling with that question, then wrestling with one of my own: "Should I tell you the real answer?"

See, you might have been expecting a funny, trivial answer. You might have been expecting old Rita to write, "A night with that pretty Brad Pitt! Or Sean Connery, if he can keep up with me!" Or maybe, "I'd like my real red hair back so I can get Miss Clairol out of my life!" or "I've always wanted a chocolate factory in my back yard!" And you wouldn't be wrong to think that I'd say those things, because you know me. I should say, you know the me I've let you know.

But oddly enough, I'm about to throw you a curve ball by giving you a straight answer. Let's face it, I'm very old and probably don't have much time left, and if I'm not going to tell it straight now, when will I get the chance? So I'll tell you my deepest, most secret desire, but there are things you need to know first so you'll understand my answer. These things aren't pretty.

You already know the basics, of course. You know I joined the WACs back in World War II. You've seen my old photos, you've heard the old stories -- but you don't know this one.

Marilyn's brother Jimmy and I fell in love in the spring of 1941. I was a senior in high school, and so excited about graduating in June. I'd been working on the school newspaper since I was a freshman, taking photos and writing articles, and I was looking forward to graduating and getting a job on the Troy Hill Daily Dispatch. Never mind that they'd never had a female reporter before -- I was going to be their first. And from there -- the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, who could say? I was full of amorphous plans and fluffy dreams. I refuse, even now, to say I was full of shit, because I wasn't. I just didn't know how much I didn't know.

Anyhow, we girls would be on Marilyn's front porch after school, drinking lemonade her mother made for us and talking until dinnertime. One afternoon Marilyn's older brother Jimmy came out after work to join us. I had been smitten with him when I was a freshman, but he was a senior then and didn't notice me. He sat on the glider next to me and I felt my heart crack open.

I remember lifting the glass of lemonade and thinking, take a sip. Now swallow. Carefully. I couldn't make myself speak for the rest of the afternoon, distracted as I was by his thigh touching my thigh, but he was there on the glider with me the next afternoon, and the next. I loosened up -- and how! -- and Jimmy listened to me rattle on about becoming a real reporter. He looked into my eyes and said, "I know you can do it," and he smiled. I remember staring back into his eyes and thinking, ah, this is why they call it falling in love, you can't feel the solid earth any more, you just fall into somebody's blue eyes like a bird soaring into the blue sky, and earth's gravity loses its power over you.

Jimmy attended Marilyn's graduation, and therefore mine. He kissed me on the cheek in front of his parents, but at the party afterwards, he danced me out the door and really kissed me for the first time. Ah, Jimmy's kisses. To this day I can shut my eyes and recall those kisses in such perfect detail -- it's as if he's still here with his lips on mine. When you grow up in an era where good girls don't do anything but kiss, you get damn good at it, let me tell you! You turn kissing into an art form, a marathon event, a symphony, a three-act play.

Jimmy kissed away my tears when the Troy Hill Daily Dispatch refused to hire me as a reporter, but offered me a secretarial position -- he kissed me until I didn't give a damn anymore. He'd drop by my house every day after work to talk, and he took me out every Saturday night, every week up until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. All the young men of Troy Hill joined the Army, including my Jimmy. My Jimmy was going to war.

I walked into the recruiter's office and signed up too.

Jimmy got his orders and I got mine. He gave me my engagement ring and we made love the night before he shipped out. I got shipped off to England the following month, and I puked every morning and didn't even realize it was morning sickness. I can't believe I was ever that young.

So there I was, pregnant, in uniform, in a foreign country, unmarried. I wrote to Jimmy and told him the truth. He wrote back, delighted. He was going to be a daddy and he wanted to be a husband, and as soon as he could get leave, he'd come to me and we'd be married. I collapsed in my quarters weeping with happiness. But Jimmy never made it back to me. Marilyn was the one who had to send me the bad news. Jimmy had been killed in action.

I remember the notepaper smelled like lavender.

That letter was in my hand when I went into labor, and I crushed it in my fist as I screamed and cursed and pushed our daughter into a world that stunk of lye soap and lavender and blood. I hated the nurses with their starched white efficiency, and I hated the doctors with their pursed-lipped superiority and wedding bands, and I hated the Nazis for killing my Jimmy, and I hated my Jimmy for dying and leaving me behind, and I hated my baby when I realized she had Jimmy's face. He was gone, and had left me a baby with his face to wrench my guts out each and every day until I died. I still believed suicide was a mortal sin back then or I would have flung myself out the fourth floor window. I told the nurses to put the baby in an orphanage and turned myself away, so I couldn't see her blue, blue eyes.

How do I tell you what a bottomless pit of regret feels like? I could explain other things, certainly, things you've heard of -- post-partum depression, temporary insanity, things like that -- but how do I explain a regret so all-encompassing that it has no discernable boundaries capable of holding it?

I can tell you that once I was out of bed and on my feet again, I felt the rage and numbness seeping out of my brain, a tingling feeling like frozen fingers coming back to life in front of a fireplace after a long winter's walk. I can tell you that I set out on foot one day to the orphanage to beg for my baby back. I can tell you about the siren screaming out moments before the bombs fell. I cannot tell you how long I lay unconscious on the sidewalk.

I came to, rose up on my hands and knees, felt chunks of brick and concrete tumble from my back, puked bile into the rubble, and wiped the blood from my nose and ears. No wonder I didn't hear myself puke, I thought, looking at the blood. I walked on, picking my way through the broken pavement toward the orphanage. I couldn't hear my feet scrabbling through the detritus but I remember watching them move, and I thought they looked like they knew where they were going.

I tripped and stumbled through the blasted pavement, skirted the edge of a huge crater, tripped over pipes still attached to a bathtub that had been blown into the street. I couldn't hear anything, not even my own breath, just a high-pitched hum, like standing too close to power lines. My eyes burned from the dust and smoke from the fires, but I knew I was getting close to the orphanage. The wind shifted. I smelled charred meat. I stumbled on.

There was a pile of scorched animal cages -- no. Baby cribs. Half-burned sheets flapping in the dirty wind, white flags flying and nobody to surrender to, just me, bearing witness. The burned crib nearest me still held its tiny charred occupant, curled up on itself like a blackened prawn, and I couldn't even hear myself screaming.

Marilyn discovered a few years ago that my baby lived. It was too late for me.

You know what? All that writing I did in my long career, the newspaper reporting, the photojournalism -- all of it was other people's stories. But this? This is one of my stories, and I wanted (needed?) to tell it to you. I did it because of my deepest, most secret desire, an incredibly selfish desire, and I didn't even know I harbored it until you wrote and asked:

I wish that the people in my life could know what I know, see what I've seen, and really know who I am. I want to be understood.

Love always, and thanks for listening,

Rita

copyright 2011 Susan Cameron