WE WERE TIRED of borrowing Jane’s green dress, even though we told one another, It’s not the size of the wardrobe that counts, it’s the shape. We felt better about ourselves when we glanced at Ruby’s sagging hemline, when we considered Annie’s matron bulge.
WE CONSPIRED TO stop wearing decorative hats and delicate stockings because this was the new power; to have been here longer was to have more authority. And one way we had authority was by knowing the fashion of this place. We wore blue jeans and cackled over the new girls who wore heels. Did you see her get stuck in the mud outside the post office? Poor girl. She’ll never get those clean! Or we tried to avoid this kind of talk.
WE TOLD THE new arrivals—Pauline with the pink half-moon manicure that called attention to her stubby hands, Doris with the upswept victory roll, Betty with the calm voice—what was what in this town. Those are the bathtub houses, those are the four-family houses, those are the Quonset huts, and those are the trailers. We told the new girls, You are going to need a year’s supply of lotion for just one month here. We watched them notice the dryness and lick their lips. We thought of our own dry lips and hands when we first arrived and we thought, Silly thing, you are only making it worse.
WE RECOLECTED HOW we, too, were horrified when we first arrived to see women wearing blue jeans or ski suits. How we cussed at the runs in our stockings created by brushing against a table, a piñon branch, or who knows what. How we were down to one pair of silk stockings with no way to get more. The fashion magazine Glamour came to Shirley in the mail and she read aloud to us: There’s no substitute for a daily bath as the groundwork of glamour! And we all longed for a bath we could not take, and Esther said aloud what we all thought: Oh, be quiet. And she shut the magazine.
OUR ATTIRE TOOK on the drab camouflage of the surroundings; the beige and muted tones of the desert became our wardrobe—and we could see how this attire appeared to an outsider, to the newly arrived. There was the sunlight’s skill at color and though we were subtle, though we often blended into the background, we left our red lips on one another’s coffee cups and highball glasses.
DORIS LED THE charge of wearing broomstick skirts and Indian jewelry, perhaps thinking it would endear us to the Spanish Americans and Indians. We agreed that if you were in the soup it was best to swim.
SEPTEMBER CAME, AND inside our duplexes and apartments we heard the sounds of other families: thuds, bedsprings, a pattern of toy trucks being thumped on the floor, the rhythm of brooms, of vacuums, of steps, of typewriter keys. We heard timers, shower curtains, radios, faucets, the scrubbing of floors, our neighbors singing along. We heard the especially painful wails of children who were not our own.
ON OUR NEIGHBORS’ radios, which wafted into our living rooms, inescapable, we heard the weather interrupted to report, instead, that U.S. forces had landed in the Philippines. These were routine interruptions, almost as regular as Bob Hope ending every show with Bye-bye, and buy bonds.
IF WE JOINED the square dance group we made squaw costumes and wore heavy Indian jewelry. The colors of our husband’s badges were forgotten then, and we said it was the most inclusive place on the Hill, our square dance group, and we did not think about how those of us in this group were all Catholic. And no trailer mothers wanted or found time to lead the Cub Scouts, and so their boys were discouraged by some of us from joining the Cub Scouts. Nevertheless, Carol arranged for a sandbox and swing set to get their children out of the streets and a Quonset hut with a Ping-Pong table and a Victrola for the teenagers. We led the City Council and won the battle to keep our spare-room apartments as well as the fight not to expand the firing range.
PERHAPS THE WACs thought we were prima donnas. Cecilia said they resented being told they were going to an island but had to come here instead. When we asked for carpet in the bedroom they narrowed their eyes as if to say our lodging was already too luxurious. If you want it you’ll have to buy it and install it yourself.
WE DID NOT like taking orders from girls in khaki. We especially did not like WACs slamming their cash registers shut and shouting, You’ll have to get in another line. We were sure they did not want to be running the cash register at the commissary, but they had signed up for it, not us.
AND WE THOUGHT the WACs who assigned our homes and our maids picked favorites, and we said we were snubbed by the WACs when, upon giving birth to a second child, we were placed in a home next door to a single scientist who practiced his trumpet each night.
SOME OF US had the rare ability to project nonchalance, and some of us had the talent of spontaneity, and many of us knew how to give meaningful compliments. Some of us were said to be judgmental, and some us were called cynical by our husbands when we speculated about how the war would end. A few of us had the curse of truthfulness, which gave us little power.
NO MATTER HOW alone we felt there were things we could never do as individuals. A woman cannot conspire with herself. Alone, we were not a pack, a choir, or a brigade. But together, we were a mob of women armed with baby bottles and canned goods, demanding a larger commissary, and we got it. We were more than I, we were Us. We were Us despite our desire for singularity. We were the Us that organized the town council and nominated Starla to speak for the group. Katherine had wanted the role, we knew, and as much as we appreciated her entertaining stories, we realized, upon considering her for the role, we did not completely trust her.
AS THE ONE most capable of spreading rumors, Katherine was possibly the most indiscreet. And what if her ecstatic utterances did not just sing out to the ears of the town but were also muffled into thick sheets spread over pine needles, lost between the tangle of brush and branches? There was no one else as adroit as Katherine, no one else better at prying without it seeming so and at providing evidence of those suspected of playing Musical Beds. Her loud voice should have given rise to other suspicions, but when we were in her company, we thought more of what she told us and less of what to think about her own marriage. Which is to say, some of us now suspected we had been misled.
OUR CHILDHOODS WERE similar. Our childhoods were similar in the way that our parents were distant, or our childhoods were similar because our parents always thought we could do better, or our childhoods were similar because we wrote our mothers twice a week and we all wished we were back in Omaha. We were from a European country and we all did not understand why Americans announced, at dinner parties, that they were going to the bathroom.
THOUGH WE BECAME friends quickly, for the most part we still kept things from one another. We told Mary that we felt we were incapable mothers and we told Wendy about the ongoing flirtation with Donald which is of course nothing! because these two friends were both shy and never talked to the others. Or late one night we confessed to Susan, which we immediately regretted, and when we saw her at the Director’s party the next day we blushed because she knew something real about us that we were actually ashamed of, and could we trust her? We told no one that we hated the family we had left in Des Moines, that we never wrote them and hoped they thought us dead, or that we felt bad about the way we had treated them now that we were untraceable, in a town that was not on the map, with our real names stricken from the record, for all this time. Or we decided to write to our family. To apologize. Because the censors, our friends, would read our letters, instead of saying we were sorry, we told our family how much we missed them, how we looked forward to talking with them when we could come home, how we’d say more later.