Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part One)

Note: This is another component of the Compulsory Figures thematic series, written in 2019.

1.

The Cryptomeria Grove

It was dusk, tropical dusk. Mena Gentili, in shirtsleeves with work pants rolled up to her knees, stood in shallow Hawaiian water scrubbing the side of a small watercraft with a coarse, sopping rag, five feet away from her likewise-occupied friend Kara Wharton. Mena’s brow was almost as wet with sweat as the rag was with seawater and the work of the afternoon had burned the nape of her neck pretty seriously between her collar and her pulled-up hair. In neither Mena’s case nor Kara’s was scrubbing the side of the boat what they were “supposed” to be doing; Kara was being made to do it by way of punishment for some insubordination to the Marine Corps officer who had been giving orders to their little civvy outfit yesterday, and Mena was making herself do it by way of punishment for something a great deal graver.

            “Amazing that they have us scrub clean a boat that’s gonna be in much deeper water soon enough anyway,” said Mena.

            “You don’t want the boat to get covered with barnacles, or whatever it is it’ll get covered with in the South Seas, if we don’t clean it now,” Kara observed.

            “We’re in the South Seas right now, Kara.”

            “We’re above the Equator here. You ever crossed the Equator?”

            “Can’t say I have, even though I am an island girl,” said Mena. “You grow up here and you get told it’s some sort of paradise nobody who wasn’t a mental case would ever want to leave.”

            “You got told that? I didn’t get told that. Anyway you have been all over the country, so I was just wondering. I’ve never crossed the Equator either; apparently when you do for the first time there’s this whole ceremony they do that ends with you being dunked in a big tank of water aboard ship.”

            “Clothed, I hope.”

            “Probably clothed.”

            “Don’t they beat you with fire hoses and prod you with cattle prods when you do it?” Mena asked.

            “I wouldn’t put it past Navy boys,” said Kara. “Anyway it’s starting to get dark. We should get back into town.”

            Within a few minutes they were out of the water, dried off more or less, fully dressed up again, and sitting in Mena’s Lincoln on the way back along the coast to Honolulu, with Kara driving. They were driving away from the setting sun, with a few of the yellowish streaks from the west glancing off the thin silvery clouds massing in the eastern and southern corners of the sky. Straight before them there was a dark purple mass not of clouds but of evening; soon the darkness of evening would be overhead them, then covering the sky from horizon to horizon as night set in.

            Mena had the Lincoln because her family was from Oahu so there had been no need to transport it from the mainland for her use and because around the time she was born her parents had come into some money from a convenient inheritance that they had invested in the fruit companies and shipping companies. Her grandparents had washed ashore from Italy around the time of or perhaps slightly before the annexation and growing up her family had been the only Italians that she knew of at her school. She had aspired to be ladylike until relatively recently, as, in point of fact, had Kara, who was the illegitimate daughter of a Japanese man and a black woman and who had dodged internment because there was no official record of her father despite her obviously Asian features. She had by and large gotten Mena to stop saying Jap and Nip around her and she relished these rides in the Lincoln because she had never had a car of her own.

            “I missed you during the time you were away,” said Kara. “Good to have you back on this rock.”

            “I’d say I missed being here, but the truth is, I was thinking of too many other things to so much as remember our little Three Musketeers routine most of the time,” said Mena. (The third musketeer from their high school, Francine Nakagawa, had, along with her parents, been dragged back to Okinawa by her extended family in January of ’42.) “Don’t get me wrong, that’s a fact that bothered me in itself.”

            “I’m still not quite sure I understand why you ended up back here or what you were hoping you’d get out of coming back,” said Kara. “You got yourself a blue discharge, right?”
            “I didn’t ‘get myself’ a hill of beans,” said Mena; “the Army gave me an administrative discharge. ‘Blue discharge’ always seemed to me like it was the term they used when they gave it to someone for being too rambunctious after hours, making the service look bad, you know. I did know some guys who ended up with those; swell guys in their own way who you might’ve liked if you’d been there with me.”

            “Don’t you dodge this question,” said Kara. “You run off two years ago to go be a steadfast girl soldier, you’re away for a little more than a year, then you come back suddenly saying you want a civilian war industry job and we end up tending to boats together the way the watermen do in peacetime. Something’s missing here and you’ve spent months now stonewalling me when I try to get you to tell me what it is. Well, you’re not getting away from me now,” she said, and pulled the car off the road and up a dirt track leading into what seemed to be a grove of cryptomeria trees. The Lincoln bumped along uncomfortably for a couple hundred yards—Mena was just about to say that it really wasn’t made to handle dirt-road driving—and then Kara pulled it up over a little rise and down into a small hollow or dingle in which she brought it to a stop.

            “Okay,” Kara said. “We’re well and truly on an adventure together now, and you, Mena, are going to tell me all about how your time in the service actually went.”

            “Oh Lord,” said Mena. “Well, you know how and why I decided to join the service, obviously. Here’s where it all started going downhill.”

2.

The Night Veranda

Mena’s troubles had begun in the early spring of 1943, when her Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps company had been stationed in a small town in Southern California a ways up the coast from LA. The relaxed environment had infected even her CO, who on several evenings that spring had given her and some of her friends permission to go to parties hosted at the home of someone who was married to an aspiring actress who was a high school acquaintance of Mena’s older sister. The house was set back a little bit from the open sea but looked down on a brackish cove that had an unusually green, grassy bank sweeping up from the side of the water to a line of dense trees. Over the trees looked the back of the house, with a veranda that was more than warm enough even in March to be sat out on drinking and dancing to a portable record player. The parties had lots of illicit drugs but not much in the way of illicit sex, a combination of features that appealed to Mena even though she herself never had more than a few beers or a few cocktails. Mena’s friend Deborah Ripley sometimes came to these parties with her, but on this particular evening Debbie could not get away from her duties.

            About an hour into the party Mena found herself looking out over the water, the cove and the ocean into which the cove opened up, with an odd fogginess and cottoniness weighing on her mind. It was not the drinks alone—she had had two beers—and it was not the music, hot and loud, but some combination of drink, music, missing Debbie, and really not being sure that what she was doing in California, writing letters of condolences to the families of men fighting in North Africa, was contributing to victory or to her own spirit. She felt selfish and stupid and sad, and, since she had a bag with her that had among other things a towel in it, she elected to wander away from the party and go for a little swim in the cove before the grey-gold light hovering over the watery horizon completely left the sky.

            It took her maybe six or seven minutes to pick her way down the zigzagging path through the trees from the house to the shore of the cove. Stars were starting to come out and there was a stitch in her side for some reason at which she could not begin to guess. It was more than warm enough to swim, here, at this time of year, but somehow she felt as if it really should not be, even though she had lived in warm areas all her life. When she got to the grassy bank she stood staring into space for God only knew how long thinking about her uncle in London before finally coming back to herself, stripping to the skin, and throwing herself into the water in the hopes that she would be refreshed and come to.

            Mena had been in the water for what felt like about ten minutes, floating on her back gazing up at the stars where the branches buttressed them against the sky, when she became aware of another presence in this place, maybe not malign but definitely unwelcome. She gasped, plunged underwater, and let her head resurface; she was gazing straight at the grassy bank and straight at a man about her age who was sitting on her discarded clothing and lighting a cigarette. He was in uniform of some kind but nothing about his posture seemed military so she guessed that he was probably a draftee.

            “Oh, hello,” said the man in a friendly but not particularly seductive tone of voice.

            “Hello,” said Mena, too shocked to come up with anything else.

            “Are you AFC Philomena Gentili, WAAC?”

            “Yes I am,” said Mena. Then she gained enough presence and poise to think to add “Who the hell wants to know?”

            “I think you know or used to know my sister,” said the draftee, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “Debbie Ripley. She’s in the WAAC too, you know.”

            “She is; I know her quite well and knew her even better until a few months ago,” said Mena. “Are you Roland ‘Rake’ Ripley?”

            “Sure am,” said the draftee. “Private first class, same basic rank as you. Army Corps of Engineers, if that makes any difference to you. How are you this evening?”

            “I was fine until a few minutes ago, but on the whole, I think I’d rather not be naked and separated from my clothes by a strange man asking me questions about his sister,” said Mena. She was racking her brains trying to remember what, if anything, Debbie had told her about her brother beyond the nickname, which did not do her heart good. “Especially one whose nickname is ‘Rake.’”

            “I’m not called ‘Rake’ because I’m a rake. I’m called ‘Rake’ because in basic training another draftee hit me in the face with a rake for making an off-color joke about dairy farmers.”

            “Remarkable,” said Mena. “Usually somebody nicknamed after an assault weapon is the person who did the assault, not the person who got assaulted.”

            “I know. It surprised me when people started calling me that. Would you like me to turn around so you can get out?” asked Rake.

            “Yes, please,” said Mena. “And if I catch so much as a flicker of your eye around the corner of your head before I say when then I’m going to dive right back in, even if I’ve already put everything back on except my cardigan.” Her natural instinct was to be more demure than this and there was even a downtrodden part of her (which spoke to her in her tragic aunt Tisha’s voice) that suggested offering to do whatever this man wanted in order to get out of this conversation, but six months of WAAC indoctrination and WAAC living had taught her nothing if not how to be braver than herself.

            “Duly noted,” said Rake, and got up and turned around.

            Mena pulled herself up onto the bank and toweled herself off as quickly as she could. She pulled on her slip first, without any of the shapewear or hosiery that went under it, so that she would have at least one layer of more or less decent clothing over her.

            “I wouldn’t have chosen to accost you here,” said Rake in a light, lyrical voice, “if I were capable of stirring for beautiful women.”

            “Don’t flatter me,” said Mena. “You mean to say you’re a queer?”

            “That’s neither here nor there,” said Rake. “You decent yet?”

            “Sure,” said Mena as she pulled her skirt on. Rake turned around as she was pulling her blouse onto her shoulders. “If you ever tell your buddies, or worse, mine, that you saw me make this much of a hash of getting dressed I’ll…I don’t know, I’ll kill you, or something. Or worse. I’ve known you five minutes and have five minutes’ worth of dirt on you.”

            “I won’t tell anybody,” said Rake. “You know, I’ve never so much as seen a woman naked excepting my sister?”

            “You’ve seen Debbie naked?” asked Mena; Rake nodded. “You and I have that in common,” said Mena.

            “Is my sister—?”

            “Don’t get your hopes up; we’ve showered together is all. There are plenty of queers in the WAAC but your sister isn’t one of them, nor am I for that matter.”

            “That’s all right,” said Rake. “Debbie and I have numbers of other points in common.”

            “Yes, such as the fact that you’ve accosted me naked,” said Mena.

            “Also, could you not say ‘queers’ please?” said Rake. “I don’t care for it. It reminds me of getting hit in the face with a rake.”

            What Mena wanted to ask was why this particular word made Rake think of getting hit in the face with a rake but the fact that his nickname was Rake seemed not to, but she was trying to treat him with more grace and latitude now that she knew that he had no designs on her virtue, so what she asked instead was, “What would you prefer?”

            “I’d prefer another topic of conversation, at this point,” said Rake, “such as what I’ve come to talk to you about. I don’t make a habit of following friends of Debbie’s away from parties, as I hope you can guess. Are you going to put your underwear back on?” he finished, pointing to the sub-slip components of Mena’s outfit where they still lay rumpled on the bank.

            Mena said a curse word, made Rake turn around again, hitched her skirt and slip up to her waist, and pulled on her panties and nylons. She cast a glance out to sea; it was completely dark now. She decided that they should talk as they went back to the party. She put on her shoes, threw her brassiere and girdle into her bag along with the wetted towel, savagely and painfully dragged some kinks out of her hair with a bakelite comb that she had on her, and started back up the zigzagging path with Rake, who turned out to be barely an inch taller than her, just barely keeping up.

            It seemed that the Ripleys, Deborah and Roland’s parents, who were from one of the more upper-crust parts of Pennsylvania, had gotten involved in some sort of racist intrigue with a group of black ships’ stewards who served on ships out of the Port of Philadelphia. Another friend of Debbie’s who was in the WAVES and whom Mena hadn’t heard of before had been deputized to transport some sort of hush money or weregild to a Negro League ballplayer whose Navy brother a Ripley family retainer had beaten up, in order to avoid scandal. Unfortunately this woman had abruptly been redeployed to Texas where the Ripleys did not know anybody. The ballplayer knew that this courier was in the service but not which branch she was, and Mena apparently bore some physical resemblance to her (according to Debbie), so what the Ripleys seemed to be hoping was that Debbie and Rake could take some pictures of themselves with Mena in classic California settings to imply that the money would be forthcoming as soon as it could be wired from the West Coast. Rake did not know whether this implication would actually be true or not.

            “What the Christ is wrong,” Mena asked Rake as they got back to the veranda and reentered the party, “with this family of yours?”

            At this point there were several wolf-whistles and somebody standing by the record player with a separate martini glass in each hand shouted “Hey Rake! Who’s the gal?”
            “He made passionate love to me down by the water!” Mena called back at this guy.

            “Bullshit he did,” somebody else said. “Be much more of an accomplishment than you think for a girl to get herself fucked by Rake Ripley.”

            “Fuck off, Burkhalter,” Rake shouted.

            “I am going to ram that Zippo you’re holding so far up your ass you’ll be puking it up with tomorrow’s lunch,” Mena said to Rake.

            “Duly noted,” said Rake, “but can I ask you a question? Answer me this and I’ll answer you what’s the matter with my parents.”

            “Go ahead.”

            “Were you always like this? Are all WAACs like this?”

            “Like what?”

            “Threatening me. Swearing.”

            Mena shook her head. “We’re actually supposed to stay ladylike and maintain a certain standard of femininity,” she said, taking her third beer can of the night from a tray that people were passing around. She sat down in a squashy chair at a far and for the most part unpeopled end of the veranda and motioned for Rake to come sit down in a rocking chair facing her. “I did start out that way; I was actually a real Sunday-school good Catholic girl type until quite recently. What happened, if you really want to know, was this.”

3.

The Three Musketeers Get Scattered to the Winds

When Pearl Harbor happened—that was how Mena always thought of it; not “the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor” but “Pearl Harbor happened,” as if the place itself was abbreviated into the event—she was nearing the end of fall semester in her senior year of high school. The Three Musketeers—Mena, Kara, and Francine—were all within a month of each other in age, but Francine was the oldest and her birthday fell in late August, which meant that she had been a year ahead of them through all their time in school and had sometimes been poked fun at by the other girls in her own class for spending all her time with underclassmen. Francine had been in the Glee Club and an informal group of Shin Buddhist students that met at a nearby temple whose priest was rumored to be related to Kara’s so-called father; Mena was in the Glee Club too and Kara was in the Future Farmers of America because she dreamed of running her own orange plantation to compete with the big Dole ones.

            Francine’s best friend in her own year was a girl called Maxine Dole who was not related to the Doles of the oranges, the Doles who had overthrown the Kingdom and still bossed the Asians and Natives who worked for them in ways that would have brought color to Ebenezer Scrooge’s cheeks. People did assume that Maxine Dole was related to those Doles and she did not tell them otherwise because it meant that people buttered her up. Mena and Kara used Francine’s protection as not to have to butter Maxine up. When Francine and Maxine both graduated in the summer of ’41 Mena and Kara were sad to see Francine go but relieved not to need the protection anymore.

            Pearl Harbor happened on a Sunday morning, the second of Advent, but Mena had skipped Mass to go to the beach with Kara and Francine to celebrate Francine’s first steno job. There they sat on their blankets gazing out to sea through heavy sunglasses, making a game of counting the boys who glanced at each of them. (Mena usually won this game and sometimes got almost proud enough of it to reconsider the promise they’d made to each other to steer clear of anything past necking till they were married, a conversation at which the Gentilis’ priest Father Grady had been present but not participating.) Pearl Harbor was to the west of downtown Honolulu and the Three Musketeers’ homes, school, and favorite beach were all to the east, so at first they were not aware of what was going on that morning elsewhere on Oahu. Soon enough they began to be aware of an increasing military presence on the beach, and eventually some soldiers came and crowded them off it and they ended up bicycling to a saimin bar a mile or two inland. There they sat listening slack-jawed with currents of freezing cold writhing in their stomachs to a radio that was playing frantic minute-by-minute reports of the attack.

 ❦ 

Within a month of Pearl Harbor it had been established that the Nakagawa family was going to go back to Okinawa.

            “I feel awful for Fran,” Kara said to Mena one day in a drugstore where they sat drinking egg creams after Mena got out of Glee Club. “I can’t imagine going back to somewhere I haven’t ever been before like that.”

            “I think she really is going back there, isn’t she?” asked Mena. “If you want to be formal about it she is an issei, right? She told me once or twice her family came over right before the Immigration Act shut everything down, and that would have been when she was a baby.”

            “I thought you’d have said something about her mom coming over while she was, er, expecting Fran,” said Kara.

            “I suppose that’s possible too. But in that case she wouldn’t have seen Okinawa.”

            “Anyway what do you have planned for this war? Personally I’m hoping to go to work at one of the harbors after we graduate even if they might get bombed again. I saw this picture in the paper of girl firefighters aiming this huge hose at a burning ship or plane and that seems like my kind of thing to do. Did I tell you I did apply to UH in Manoa?” Mena nodded; Kara had told her this four times now and she was almost, but only almost, sick of being excited about it. “Had to fudge some of my personal details for…the usual reasons, so the war might make that more difficult for the time being. Be interesting to have some war stories to tell my kids when I have them. It’s not just for the boys this time, you know!”

            “I almost wish it weren’t at all for the boys,” said Mena. Thousands and thousands of young men were descending upon Oahu in the past month and making her feel alarmed and accosted. A few days ago she had gotten invited to the first dance that she had been to that was not run by her school or her church, and while she had been there she had danced with four or five men she did not know. She had liked doing her makeup and her hair for it and putting on a nice artificial silk dress splashed with bird-of-paradise patterns, but the actual dance exhausted her and made her feel overwhelmed and overborne.

            “What about you? Any great plans for yourself?”

            “I’m still holding out for what’ll really make me feel good about what I’m doing,” said Mena. “Right now I’m going to concentrate on finishing up high school, and we’ll see what comes after that. Who knows? Maybe I can go overseas as a nurse or something along those lines.”

            “They’re trying to make it so that there are things for women to do in this war other than being nurses. In the military, I mean,” said Mena.

            “In the military. Really?”

            “Oh, yes. I heard it on the radio, this lady Congresswoman from somewhere in the Northeast called Edith Rogers. She’s trying to get a bill for a women’s corps through Congress. The announcer I was listening to said she introduced it some time ago but it’s been encountering opposition and surviving challenges.”

            “Congresswoman Rogers herself I assume is encountering opposition and surviving challenges.”

            “Well, yes, so I would assume, especially since she’s a Republican. It’s something I’m excited about, even so. I suppose we’ll see if anything comes of it.”

            “And would you want to join a women’s corps in the Army, if there were one?”
            “That’s my sister’s kinda thing,” interjected a man a little older than them from the next aisle in the drugstore.

            “Your sister and I have that in common,” said Mena.

            “You a bit of a tomboy, then?” the man asked. He did not seem to mean anything bad by this question but Mena still found it vaguely affronting for reasons that she would have had a hard time exactly putting her finger upon.

            “I really don’t think I am,” said Mena. “I put on mascara to come to the drugstore.” And this was true enough—she had, and she was proud of herself that (at a glance in a mirror at the end of the aisle) it seemed to still be in place even though she had flicked some sleep out of her eyes a few minutes ago.

            “Do you want to leave Oahu?” Kara asked her once the unfamiliar man wandered off.

            “Honestly,” said Mena after a few moments’ thought, “I think that yes, I do.”

            “Mind if I ask why that is? I think it’s just lovely here.”

            “There’s also, well…how should I put this? There aren’t many more of my kind around here?”

            Kara scoffed. “Not more white folk? Not more Catholics? Not more Glee Club people?”

            This cut Mena to the quick more readily than she would have liked to own up to. She had hoped that Kara would know what she meant by instinct, mostly because she herself did not know; it would be ridiculous if she meant only more Italians, but apart from that she had a hard time figuring out what her kind in fact was. She saw in front of her several large bottles of aspirin arrayed on a shelf; she was here to stock up on gauze bandages for an injury that one of her brothers had sustained in a boat and aspiring was in the same part of the drugstore. The bottles, clear glass with yellow labels (German labels), seemed like the sort that might hold her soul and decant it for delectation, if she wanted for it to be held and decanted.

            “I don’t know what my kind is,” said Mena. She had to choke down the words but I know you’re not it. She knew better than to say that. She knew better even if she did not know how she knew better.

 ❦ 

In the last few months of Mena and Kara’s time in high school, tens of thousands of fighting men streamed through Hawaii, which was now under martial law with constant blackouts and curfews; the Japanese advanced southward towards Australia; the Germans, in Europe, battled the Soviets week after week and month after month; and Francine’s letters slowed and finally stopped entirely. The abortion of history (as Kara predicted and Mena conceded that it would turn out to be) called Japanese internment got underway, and Kara narrowly escaped it; recruitment posters for the Army Nurse Corps started going up in the mainland, probably all over the United States, but women from Hawaii were not, at this stage, allowed to enlist. Maxine Dole enlisted the week after the hospital bombings in the Philippines at the end of March by flying to the mainland and claiming residency with relatives in San Francisco. Posters for the Navy Nurse Corps went up on the mainland; Lydia Flick followed Maxine’s example on the day of the surrender on Corregidor—and was immediately sent to Liverpool. Girls who could not pull this trick off went to work in salvage or at hospitals or in factories.

            Senior prom came and went; Mena’s date was Tim Carpenter but she danced mostly with her cousin Jack Cipriani. She got home maybe five minutes before curfew feeling exhausted and wanting only to live as she chose.

            Mena’s first job out of high school, which she started a week after graduation towards the end of June, had nothing to do with the war effort at all. On the day of graduation she had tried to get a job like the kind Kara was looking for but she was hot and tired and having her time of the month and so she spoke somewhat unkindly to the person she telephoned about it and was too embarrassed to call again the next day. She decided to bide her time for a few months and take up an offer of a summer job at a dress shop called Aloha Kate’s. All through high school she had excelled in home economics and the way she saw it she might as well make use of her sewing skills now while they were still fresh in her memory rather than relying on the sewing and darning of her naturally more talented little sister until whenever it was that she would get married and move out. Tim Carpenter came around to the dress shop and flirted with Mena several times in July and shipped out to a naval base in Oregon or Washington at the beginning of August. Later in August Mena started going on dates with Jack Cipriani’s baseball-playing friend Tom Lori.

            “They say there’s no West Coast baseball but they just mean that the big leagues they have in the East that play the so-called ‘World’ Series don’t have any teams out there,” Tom said to her over noodles after Mass one late-summer Sunday. “They have the Pacific Coast League. Not quite a big league but they play really well.”

            “The one time I went to the mainland with my parents,” said Mena, referring here to a vacation that they had gone on to Seattle the summer before her freshman year in high school on the mistaken impression that Washington State had redwoods, “we saw the Seattle Rainiers play the San Francisco Seals. The Seals didn’t still have Di Maggio at that point; he’d already gone to New York. It was quite something, though, I’ll tell you that. I enjoyed it; I’d go see it again.”

            “I’ve been having talks with a scout from the San Diego Padres,” said Tom. “I guess that’s probably as close as I’m gonna get to being able to stay in Hawaii in terms of weather if I want to make it big in the ballgame. You don’t really like the hot weather all the time, do you, Mena?” he asked.

            “I’m curious to see what it’s like to be somewhere that isn’t that way,” said Mena. “Call it idle curiosity if you will. I think it’s a bit more than just idle.”

            “Maybe if I end up in San Francisco or Seattle I can send for you,” said Tom.

            “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Mena. “We’re not even going steady yet, or at least to my mind we’re not.”

            “Would you like to be?” asked Tom.

            “In the middle of a war, who wouldn’t?” asked Mena, but Tom did not take that as a yes.

            It was two days after this date that Mena learned about the WAAC, which had been established by Act of Congress the previous month. She had known about it as a possibility before, but the reality had escaped her till now. Kara told her about it, excitedly, Kara who sure enough was now working as a civilian in one of the Navy yards. Four days after the date Mena caught a flight to Los Angeles and started living in a shady boarding house near the UCLA campus. Two weeks after the date she enlisted. Three weeks after the date she was shipped off to some fort in Georgia for basic training, which was called “indoctrination.”

 ❦ 

“You look like you could use a friend,” a woman looking to be maybe three years older than her said to her in the shower on her fourth or fifth day in Georgia.

            Mena—her hair cut into an unfashionable bob because it would not stay in a roll, her face still drawn and pale from weeks of almost nonstop travel and novelty of experience, water streaming down her back and sides—turned and examined the woman speaking to her. She was a little shorter than Mena and had curly blonde hair that, even when wet, stuck up in a cowlick right above the middle of her forehead in a way that made her look childlike despite seeming to be above twenty. She had a few freckles—only, oddly, on one cheek.

            “I think everybody here could use some friends,” said Mena. “Military life isn’t exactly something that’s traditional where I’m from.”

            “For women or for anybody? Where are you from?”

            “I arrived from Los Angeles less than a week ago. Before that I lived in Hawaii. I’m speaking for women. Where are you from?”

            “Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Interesting to meet someone who’s lived in a Territory.” The woman stuck out her right hand. “Deborah Ripley. Nice to meet you.”
            “You too, Debbie—may I call you Debbie?” asked Mena.

            “My guess would be they want us on last-name basis in public, but between you and me, Debbie will be just fine. And you are…?”

            “Gentili, Philomena Gentili. You can call me Mena.”

            “Very well, then, Mena,” said Debbie. “I don’t mean to be a pill, but could you make sure I’ve rinsed some hair clippings off my back?”

 ❦ 

“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Debbie?” Mena asked while sitting across from her in the mess a few evenings later (boiled beef and peas for the third dinner in the row; there was talk of replacing the nutritionist). “You say you’re from Pennsylvania but your accent seems Southern to me. Why is that?”

            “Honestly?” said Debbie. “Affectation.” She laughed at her own admission. “I was actually in Virginia for school, believe it or not, before a few months ago. There are some good women’s colleges there and my parents wanted me to at least go for an MRS degree, maybe something a little more academic too; I was studying English literature and trying not to let Jim Crow get me down. It’s a real shock when you go off-base, isn’t it?”

            Mena nodded, and decided not to bring up the fact that Jim Crow existed on-base too because, as they had found out very suddenly and very rudely, the Army and its auxiliaries were all segregated.

            “What are your parents like?” Mena asked.

            “My brother Roland’s okay,” Debbie said without answering Mena’s question. “He’s just about your age. Just graduated high school, just went into the Army himself. We have another brother named Charles but he’s 4F because of a lazy eye so he works for our father in…whatever our father’s doing with himself these days. Something very respectable, I’m sure.”

            “Do you not see yourself as respectable?”

            “I do. Do you?”

            Mena shrugged and was about to say something pithy but kind. Then somebody a few spots down the table from them—Mena never found out who—said something along the lines of “Interesting thing to ask a wop sitting across from Deb Ripley.”

            Debbie went paler than usual, and clammy and quiet. She tapped her fork against her plate a few times, agitated, presumably on Mena’s behalf. Mena was not entirely shocked that somebody would say this—indeed, it was not the first time somebody had said it in the past week—but something about its having been said within her new friend’s earshot and not merely her own rankled her severely. She decided to be less rather than more respectable and pliant, from now on.