AllFreeNovel
Share Us
5
Peggy
JUNE 1946
The next two weeks dragged by as we waited for Jimmy’s insulin treatments to end so we could visit him again. Every morning, Mrs. Barnett and I prayed that the treatments would help him. Work in the veterinary clinic slowed, with TB testing all finished and another spring birthing season over. June hadn’t ended yet, but summery weather arrived early, bringing long, sweltering days. I sat in Jimmy’s hot upstairs bedroom for a few minutes every afternoon, looking around at the mementos of his boyhood and slowly rereading all of his letters. When I compared his early letters, written when he was still in basic training, to the letters he wrote from the battlefield in Europe, I thought I detected a change. In the beginning, he talked about the friends he’d made and how the Army was forging them into a team. By the time their training ended, Jimmy and his fellow recruits had formed a brotherhood, able to work together for the common goal of defeating the enemy.
I fanned myself with my notebook in the stifling bedroom as Jimmy came alive again through the words of his letters. I felt like I was with him as he described life aboard a troop ship on the way to Great Britain. It was overcrowded, and they’d slept in bunks a foot apart from each other, wondering how many Nazi U-boats were shadowing them. He frequently mentioned two friends in particular, Mitch O’Hara and Frank Cishek. Mitch had been Jimmy’s college roommate, and Frank Cishek was also a medic.
His letters grew shorter and more somber as time went on and his company became engaged in the thick of battle. I had learned more about the D-Day invasion from reading the newspapers than from Jimmy’s letters. It was only when reinforcements relieved him and his men for a short RandR that he’d had time to write. Just to let you know I’m okay... Sorry I’ve been too busy to write... Thanks for your letters. Please keep them coming... I thought I’d found the letter he’d written after Joe Fiore and dozens of others from their company had been wounded in battle. Jimmy had stayed behind at the field hospital where the soldiers from his company had been taken, making sure their conditions had stabilized and arrangements had been made to ship them to a military hospital in England. But the war wasn’t over for him yet. I checked the date of his letter and knew that nearly a year of hard fighting remained before victory in Europe was declared.
That sense of belonging and camaraderie that Jimmy described was something I had never really experienced for myself until I’d worked in the IBM plant during the war. The factory job offered me a brand-new beginning in life. Nobody knew my past or that I was the “dog girl” with “cooties” who lived above her father’s garage. I had graduated from high school near the top of my class, and my school counselor had encouraged me to apply for a nursing scholarship. The demand for nurses was great during the war and he thought I would easily qualify. Mr. Barnett offered to write a letter of recommendation for me, but Pop was firmly against the idea because it would mean leaving home and living in the nurses’ dormitory in New York City during my training.
I still remember the night Pop and I stood talking about it in his garage, and he looked up at me from behind the engine he was repairing and said, “You don’t belong in that great big city, Peggy Ann. Especially during a war, with thousands of soldiers running around. You’re too naive. You’ve never even been away from home overnight.”
It was true. There had been no giggling pajama parties with friends, no trips to summer camp, no weeklong visits with doting grandparents. To be honest, I had been a little nervous about leaving home all alone for the first time, so I tore up the application to nursing school and took the job across the river as a Rosie the Riveter, instead. It was at the IBM plant that the exciting world of friendship opened up to me, like the friendships Jimmy had described with his pals during basic training. I was surprised and pleased when the other girls wanted to befriend me. When one of them said, “Golly, you’re pretty,” I actually looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to. As we ate our lunches together, worked side by side all day, and shared our aches and pains on the bus rides home after a long day, I was included as part of the group for the first time in my life. The work was boring and monotonous and exhausting, but I looked forward to going each day just to see my friends. They even invited me to go to dances with them on the weekends, but I was too shy.
The two years I worked there had flown by—and then the war ended. I was overjoyed, of course. But oh, how I missed my friends! We all promised to stay in touch and vowed to never forget each other. But all the other girls had boyfriends or husbands who were returning home from the war, and I didn’t. I had my job at the veterinary clinic, which I loved and had missed. And I had Pop to take care of. Donna lived with us by then, but she didn’t know how to cook or how to make sure Pop wasn’t drinking too much or how to pay his bills and order auto parts for him the way I did.
As I remembered how lonely I’d been those first weeks after my job ended, I wondered if part of Jimmy’s depression stemmed from missing his friends and from the loss of a shared mission. If I ever saw Joe Fiore again, I would ask if any of Jimmy’s closest friends, like Mitch O’Hara and Frank Cishek, had been killed. Jimmy might have suffered unbearable grief, not to mention guilt as a medic, if he’d been unable to save the buddies he’d lived with and served alongside for so long.
I closed my notebook and put the letters back into the shoebox for the day. The temperature was probably close to ninety degrees, much too hot to sit in a closed-up bedroom. I walked back across the street to Pop’s office, which wasn’t much cooler, and switched on the little desk fan, quickly grabbing all the loose papers as they began to flutter all over the desktop. I had just gotten everything anchored down when Pop came in. Donna was with him.
“Got a minute to talk?” he asked.
“Sure.”
They sank down on the daybed and I swiveled my wooden desk chair around to face them. Donna wore a determined expression, her shoulders squared and her chin raised as if she were about to enter a boxing ring. Pop looked as though he’d rather be any place else but here. They made me uneasy. Something was coming, but I couldn’t guess what. Donna nudged Pop as if prompting him to begin, and he gave a nervous cough. “Um... the Crow Bar is cutting Donna’s hours,” he said.
I waited, but when he didn’t continue, I said, “That’s surprising. With all the local GIs returning home and coming to the bar to play pool and drink with their friends, I would think business would be good. Joe Fiore said it was packed the night he went there with you.”
“Yeah, well...” Pop coughed again.
“They want a younger barmaid,” Donna blurted out in her cigarette-raspy voice. “After all the years I worked at that dump, you’d think they’d show a little more gratitude instead of insulting me! I told them I quit!” She was spitting mad and her eyes were watery.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her. And I meant it. “That was cruel of them.” Donna was on the wrong side of forty years old, and her years of heavy smoking and hard drinking had taken their toll. I could see how her orange-red dyed hair, low-cut blouses, and sagging bosom would no longer be attractive to a younger generation of bar patrons.
“Good riddance to that firetrap,” she spat.
Pop cleared his throat and wiped his palms on his coveralls. “I... um... that is, Donna and me wondered if... well... if you could show her how to do the books for me. She wants to take over.”
The air suddenly felt very close. “You want my job?” I asked.
Donna nodded. She didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to face me. “Don’t you think it’s time you moved on?” she asked. “Instead of hanging around here and mooning over that poor, godforsaken boy from across the street? He didn’t want you before the war and he ain’t in any shape to want you now. You’re a smart girl. You gotta see that.”
I couldn’t reply. I had seen wounded animals in the clinic lash out at anyone who came close, so I sort of understood Donna’s reaction. But I still was left speechless. Pop reached across the narrow space and rested his hand on my knee as if trying to soften the blow. “You don’t really want to hang around here forever, do you, Peggy Ann? Stuck in this one-horse town all your life? You could do anything.”
My heart began to race. “Are you going to kick me out of my home, too?”
“No one is kicking you out,” Pop said. “You done a good job taking care of me, Peggy Ann, cooking for me and things all these years. But Donna wants to take over now that she’s not working until all hours of the night. We’re thinking about making it legal—her and me.”
It was what Donna had long wanted. I would hear them fighting about it sometimes when they’d been drinking too much. “It’s just a piece of paper,” Pop would say. “What do we need that for?” Donna had been married once before and divorced. She wanted the security that a husband would provide. Pop’s garage and our apartment would be hers once they married. I longed to ask if she was going to continue sleeping until noon every day, and if she even knew how to cook, but it would be wrong to spew my hurt feelings all over her. This had been Pop’s decision, too.
I struggled to pull myself together. As calmly as I could, I asked, “Move on to what? Where am I supposed to go?”
“Like your pop said, you could do anything you wanted,” Donna replied. “You’re a pretty girl and you did real good in school, as I recall. I never did finish, you know.” In all the years Donna had lived with us, she’d never once told me I was pretty or encouraged me in school. I had the bitter thought that she was only being nice to me now because she wanted to get rid of me.
“You’re right,” I said, standing. “Why don’t you start showing Donna around the office and the garage, Pop. I can answer her questions when I get back. I need to run across the street and tend to one of the horses and I’m already late.” It wasn’t true. I was running away to hide my tears from them. I was unwanted. I didn’t belong here. I felt like the “dog girl” all over again. I hurried into the barn where a new horse named Pedro was being boarded, and busied myself by giving his coat a good brushing. My tears fell as my thoughts swirled like dirty dishwater down a drain. Since when had Pop ever cared about my education or my future? The only people who had taken an interest in me had been Jimmy and his parents—not Pop and certainly not Donna. I wouldn’t have gone to high school at all if it hadn’t been for Jimmy.
