Willow Run, Page 3

  “All this was thrown up in about two minutes to house the workers,” Dad said. “It must have been beautiful before the war, green fields and trees, and once maybe a stream.”

  “It'll be lovely again,” Mom said. “Someday soon.”

  I knew she was thinking about Eddie coming home, wishing it were soon.

  Dad turned the corner and I could see an ice cream truck hugging the curb, SUNDAE, MONDAY, AND ALWAYS painted on the side. A boy about Eddie's age was leaning against the side, jingling the bells.

  Dad stopped the car. “Three sundaes, please.” He held out a bunch of change. “Strawberry, I guess.”

  I looked up over the paper I was working on, a contest for Renkens milk, and waved at the boy with my pencil, but he didn't smile. His hair fell over his face, almost hiding his eyes. He stuck his head inside the square opening of his truck and backed out to hand us our ice creams with wooden spoons on top.

  What a grouch.

  And he'd given us chocolate.

  As we drove away I looked back. I pulled my braid over my upper lip to make a tan Hitler mustache and raised my arm in a Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler,” I yelled.

  My friend Lily loved that face. “What?” Mom said. “Nothing,” I said back, watching as the ice cream boy began to laugh. His whole face changed; then he walked around the side of the truck where I couldn't see him.

  I turned around to watch the street as I licked the ice cream off the lid. Every single apartment was the same. Gray. Not a curtain on a window.

  “People come and go,” Dad said. “Some of them come for the war effort, and some to make money for the first time in their lives. Such good jobs.”

  He turned the key and the hum of the motor stopped. It was strange to hear the silence. “Anyway,” he said. “We're here for the duration.” He opened the door and wandered up the walk.

  A kindergarten kid could have drawn it: a long low box that stretched from one end of the paper to the other, no paint, no color. And if you divided the box into tiny sections, each family would have one to live in. Worst of all, there was no grass, nothing growing, only tree stumps near the curb, their tops pale and raw. I remembered what Grandpa had said once, shaking his head in anger. “To kill a tree!”

  I could see that Mom was as disappointed as I was. I handed the cats to her, one by one, then backed out of the car.

  Dad was already turning the key in the lock. Mom looked over her shoulder at me, her roly-poly face flushed. “It's just for the duration.”

  The duration again. Hadn't I heard that a hundred times! As if the war were going to end tomorrow.

  Mom went up the path with Judy, the mother cat, digging her front claws into her shoulder. The cats thought it was crazy we were here instead of home.

  I was beginning to think so, too, but I wasn't going to let anyone know that, especially the kids who were standing at the edge of the walk staring at us. And not only that, people were wandering around all over the place: two women circling around me swinging lunch pails; a girl slapping a jump rope on the cement—“Strawberry shortcake cream on top, tell me the name of your sweetheart”—a man at a window, his radio blaring war news.

  Someone was playing a song on a Victrola; it was scratchy and skipped a little: “We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when.” I'd heard that song over and over. I went around the side of the car, trying not to think about our house on the canal. Instead, I traced my name on the hood with one finger: Meggie Dillon. It stood out against the dust, the loopy M and the plump D towering above the other letters.

  Whap! A ball hit the roof of the car. Without thinking, I put up one hand as it bounced off. Too late. I turned to see two boys, one on each side of the street, playing catch over my head.

  They must have been brothers; one was older than the other, and taller, but they had the same face, and the same filthy shirts. I leaned forward to see what was pinned on the older one's shirt: a warty green pickle pin from the 1939 World's Fair. I had one at home, but I wouldn't wear it in a million years.

  “Heads up,” the pickle kid yelled, grabbing the ball; they darted away. At home I would have gone after them: See my pinkie, see my thumb, see my fist, you'd better run, but maybe eleven was too old for that here in Michigan.

  Besides, Mom was outside again, looking as dusty as the car. She smiled when she saw my name, and reached out to write hers on the hood—most of it anyway, Ingrid Dill—

  “After the war maybe they'll make bigger cars so I can fit my whole name.” She patted the hood, leaving her handprint. “This poor old car won't go much more on these tires.”

  She didn't have to say the rest of what she was thinking. There wouldn't be any rubber for new ones until after the war. Rubber came from the Pacific, where some of our soldiers were fighting.

  Mom went around the trunk to lift out a mess of clothes, last-minute things that hadn't fit into boxes. “How about some help?” she asked.

  I trudged around to the back and pulled out the largest carton, in case those two idiot boys were watching. Let them see what they were up against. Back bent, I went up the walk with it.

  Mom was bent over next to the front step, running her toe over a pile of dirt that could be a flower patch, except that there wasn't a lick of green.

  What had I done with Grandpa's salad envelope?

  Mom wiped her forehead. “It's as if someone strung a bunch of boxes together.”

  “Like those rabbit hutches we saw in upstate New York.” I tried to smile. “And now we're the rabbits, I guess.”

  I spotted the boys again and made the worst face I could: nose up, lips pulled back over my teeth, tongue out—even better than the tan-mustache face.

  I'd practiced it in the car's rearview mirror and even tried it out on Judy and Jiggs as they glared out from under the seat. The boys laughed, and I grinned back at them, an uneasy grin. Grandpa, coffee cup to his mouth: “If your face freezes like that, Margaret …”

  I pushed the door of the rabbit hutch with one elbow and let myself in. I told myself I could hold on to the carton for one more second, long enough to slide it onto the scratched table that squatted on the linoleum floor. I wondered what was in it, heavy as lead. Jars of strawberry jam, probably; home-canned beans from last summer, green tomatoes and corn, and Grandpa's sweet pickles.

  Enough was in that box to supply food for every single worker at that airplane factory, never mind just the three of us, Mom, Dad, and me.

  Dad was rooting around somewhere in back. I craned my neck to see where he was…

  … and the box slid out of my arms.

  The noise was spectacular, an explosion of sound. Someone in one of the apartments must have thought so, too, from the way she screamed. Judy and Jiggs dived through the doorway into the back room to hide, and Mom, hands on her hips, stared down at the great shards of glass that were mixed in with the soupy mess of yellow and red. Her throat was moving. Was she going to cry?

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm really sorry.”

  Dad stood in the doorway. “This is supper?” He glanced at Mom to see if she'd smile, but she was already pushing at the mess with a piece of shirt cardboard. She held up an unbroken jar. “Pickles!”

  Grandpa's kitchen, the heat of it on a summer day, kettles bubbling on the stove, jars on the counters, the smell of vinegar, the air steamy. Eddie and I washed the cucumbers, and when we walked from the sink to the table, grains of sugar stuck to our feet.

  Grandpa's pickles. Eddie loved them. “I can clean up this mess,” I told Mom.

  She shook her head. “It's all right, baby. There's not room for both of us.”

  I tried to figure out what to do. “I'll get more boxes from the car.” I stopped at the doorway as Dad leaned over and scooped Mom up by the elbows, dancing her around and singing: “You get no bread with one meatball.”

  Mom began to laugh, her bandana slipping so her ears showed. She reached up with one tomato-stained hand to touch his arm. “No gravy,�
�� she said, “no vegetables, no pickles.”

  Outside I sang under my breath, while across the street the boy with the pickle on his shirt made faces worse than mine.

  Chapter Six

  Late that afternoon I sat on the edge of the pullout couch in the living room. Stuffing was coming out of the arm, and it smelled a little like Grandpa's cellar. I was glad I didn't have to sleep on it.

  I pulled out my entry forms from the Hot-O Soup Company. A can of tomato rice soup was drawn on top of each one. The soup that keeps our servicemen going! it said.

  I looked out the window. I hoped Eddie had something better than tomato soup with lumps of rice to keep him going.

  But I could win a hundred dollars here. I just had to write about something I'd do when the war was over. And the best part, I could send in as many entries as I wanted. Tons of them.

  I knew what the soup people were dying to hear.

  I picked up the pencil with the sharpest point and wrote: As soon as the war is over, I'm going to heat up a cup of tomato rice soup. Delicious!

  Grandpa would say that was a big lie.

  What would I really do?

  I closed my eyes: I'd be out on the roof, and I'd see Eddie walking along the gravel path. He'd look up and we'd both yell, and then I'd be flying through the house, calling Mom, calling Dad. …

  In back of me the radio blasted the news, something about spies in California. I shivered thinking about it. I was glad California was so far away.

  I looked down at what I had written and changed part of it: When the war is over and the soldiers come home, welcome them with a hot bowl of tomato rice soup. Delicious!

  Not a lie that way. Maybe some people liked tomato rice soup.

  I pounded a stamp on front, leaving a smear of peanut butter across the edge. I was turning into Grandpa.

  What next? I still had to tackle the last carton that held all my treasures. I went into the kitchen and slid it onto the table, watching the street outside through the window.

  The two boys were there again, one of them trying to climb a telephone pole. He'd probably be electrocuted by the time the war was over.

  Dad was humming “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree” under his breath while he fiddled around at the sink with a row of nails in his mouth.

  “Nothing works,” Mom said.

  “Never mind,” he said around the nails. “We're here. We're doing something for the war effort.” He twisted a knob under the sink and rusty water spurted out of the faucet, hitting everything nearby: the red linoleum, a green cabinet, the leg of the scarred table.

  “Good grief,” a muffled voice yelled from the next apartment. “This place is going to be flooded again.”

  “Oh, oh,” Mom said.

  “Not our fault—at least, I don't think so.” Dad leaned forward to turn off the faucet with a wrenching sound. “And listen, the papers say that General Eisenhower is pushing his way past Normandy across France.”

  Wrong thing to say, I thought, seeing Mom's face. Thousands of soldiers had been sent to France to land in Normandy, wave after wave of them, many shot by Germans as they came out of the water. June sixth, a warm sunny day, when I swam in the Atlantic for the first time this year!

  Was it possible that Eddie was on the other side of that water in Normandy, zigzagging up that beach, carrying a rifle, pounding across the sand in heavy boots?

  In Rockaway, Lily and I always kicked our shoes off on the boardwalk so the sand wouldn't clump into them and weigh us down.

  And carrying a rifle? How could he have managed that? Eddie was skinny. He'd be out of breath. He'd…

  Don't think about that, I told myself. Still, I wondered what it was like in France. Sand like ours that looked like sugar? Green fields and lakes like the ones I had seen on the way to Willow Run?

  Outside the window a thin stream of smoke from the factory rose up against a hazy yellow sky. Maybe France was like that, smoke from guns and tanks drifting toward the sky?

  No, not like that. Eddie was having an adventure, too. “Maybe I'm going to see Europe, Meg, the Rhine River and the Alps Mountains. You can sit at my place at the table. It's the best spot to see Rockaway.”

  But now Rockaway seemed a million miles away, and Mom's eyes looked like Grandpa's the day we left.

  Eddie's fault. All Eddie's fault.

  He had come home that day last year, throwing his hat on the couch, telling me first.

  “Just joined up, Meggie.”

  Mom glanced up from the white school socks she was knitting. “Joined up what?”

  “The army, the infantry.”

  Mom's hand went to her cheeks, leaving finger marks.

  “You're joking.”

  Eddie had lifted me in the air. “Going to win the war for you, Meg.”

  Mom dropped her needles onto her lap. “You're just eighteen.”

  “You're just doing that so Virginia Tooey will fall in love with your uniform,” I told him.

  “How did you guess?” he said, laughing.

  Mom's eyes were closed. She spoke so low we could hardly hear her: “What have you done? How could you do that?”

  Someone was pounding on the rabbit hutch door now. She didn't wait to be let in. “Ronnelle,” she said. She was holding a toddler in rompers by the hand. “And little Lulu.” She grinned. “After the comic strip Lulu. My husband, Michael, loves that.”

  I was sorry to see she had even more freckles than I did. Dad had always said mine would go away when I was grown.

  Mom pushed out one of the rickety chairs for her to sit on, and I reached out with both arms for my treasure box and dumped it on the floor out of her way. Lulu was under the table now trying to grab Jiggs’ tail.

  “Can't stay,” Ronnelle said. “Lulu will have your place destroyed in two minutes. She's like one of the B-24s I rivet together.” She leaned forward to Dad and Mom. “Listen. When you turn the water on too fast, I get water, too.”

  Dad looked at her, shocked. “What kind of a thing is that?”

  “Don't be sorry—the same thing happens to you when I turn on mine.”

  They talked about water and pipes for a while, all of them agreeing that they could hold out, it was a much easier time than the soldiers were having, and only for the duration anyway.

  “My hair used to dip way down in front like the actress Veronica Lake,” Ronnelle was saying. “But she doesn't wear it that way now. She said it was dangerous for the factory workers. So I don't either. All for the war effort.” She bit her lip. “My husband, Michael, loved that peekaboo look.”

  I wondered if her husband loved her face with all those freckles.

  I was sick of the war effort. I went over to lean against the screen.

  “Michael's stationed at Peterborough Airport in England,” she said, “flying thirty-five bombing missions before he comes home.”

  I looked over my shoulder to see Mom clicking her tongue against her teeth. “Thirty-five.”

  Ronnelle shook her head. “At first the casualty rate was eighty percent. Now it's a little better.”

  I tried to think of what she meant, but before I did, she went on. “Eight out of ten were killed on the missions.”

  I didn't want to think about that. From the window I watched the tough boy with the World's Fair pickle pinned to his shirt. He was hanging on to one of the telephone pole spikes; he probably thought he was King Kong. In one second he lost his grip and fell off. He bent over, staring at his knee, and dabbed at it with a yanked-up weed.

  Disgusting.

  “Six more missions to go,” Ronelle said. “He hasn't even seen Lulu yet.”

  I heard a warning hiss from under the table: Jiggs the cat.

  “I told you,” Ronnelle said as I crawled underneath. By the time I pulled Lulu out she had a fistful of my hair clutched in her hand.

  I took her with me, sliding the treasure box across the gritty floor and into the bedroom. I had written KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS U! all over the t
op and tied it with washline rope. It had enough knots to keep a Nazi spy busy for a couple of hours.

  “Ho-nie-ko-doke!” I could hardly open it myself.

  I loved that word, that almost word, ho-nie-ko-doke, from the Uncle Don Radio Show. “Honie-ko-doke with an alaka-zon.”

  “Honey-doke,” Lulu said, as if it were my name.

  I had won a contest with Uncle Don: a bank with his picture. It didn't count, though. Everyone could win. All you had to do was send in a bunch of money. I wondered what I had done with that bank and the eleven cents I had tucked inside.

  “Time to go,” Ronnelle called.

  “Bye, Honey,” Lulu said, and toddled off. A few minutes later, I found a knife in the kitchen, then hacked at the rope and the tape holding the top of the box until it snapped open.

  The first treasure I saw was my old doll Rosemary Marjorie Anne. Some treasure. Rosemary was missing an arm and all the toes on one foot, and Judy, the mother cat, had been sick on her dress once, so she wasn't even wearing much in the way of clothes.

  Underneath was the envelope Eddie had given me before he left, sealed up with Scotch tape. “We're going to open this together when I come home,” he had said, top teeth on his lower lip, looking a little embarrassed.

  “What is it?” I had asked.

  “Well …” And then he had gone outside, not answering, probably on his way to Virginia Tooey's.

  I held up the envelope, wondering how terrible it would be to open it and reseal it, but instead I tucked it far under my mattress and went back to my other treasures: shells and an abandoned duck's egg I had found at the beach. I had wrapped them in wads of toilet paper for safekeeping, but they were smashed to smithereens, with a bit of the yellow from the egg splotched across the edges.

  I felt a lump in my throat thinking of Grandpa turning over a shell with his wide fingers. “Do you know how old this must be, Margaret? Hundreds of years, sliding back and forth in the surf?”

  And now I had ruined them.

  I stood up. From the bedroom I could see into the kitchen, and beyond that, the window. The tough kid had recovered from his fall. He marched up the street singing at the top of his lungs: “Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk. …”