OUR MOTHERS WERE ill or our fathers had birthdays and we could not visit. But we learned—in a way that we never wanted to—that there was an exception. We packed our suitcases and took trains to Duluth, to Los Angeles, past the soda shop where our first loves kissed us, past the service flags and blue stars hanging in windows—we could see who had gone off to war while we were gone—and past windows where blue stars were replaced with gold. Back into our parents’ houses, back into our mothers’ arms, to the funeral parlors of our hometowns, where we stared into the faces of our own dead brothers.
A FEW OF us got an exception of a different nature. Our sisters announced their sweethearts were coming home and they were getting married. Though our husband’s request for both of us to travel to San Francisco for the wedding was denied, a wife was permitted to go, and we busied our summer with correspondence to our sister about color schemes, florists, and menus. It was the first time in a long time we’d thought about the outside world. Searching through boxes in the back of our closet for nice gloves and a presentable dress for the wedding brought back memories of home. We could smell the sea again. How were the neighbors we’d left behind? Was the pharmacist still frowning as he counted pills? How was the butcher? Had the weeds grown tall around our house and was someone else living there?
OUR PARENTS MET us at the train station while our sisters, weak from wedding preparations, were in bed with pneumonia. Their future husbands, who had arrived from the Pacific two days earlier, were lying in their own childhood beds across town. Our first thought about our parents was, They look tired, or, They look so much older, and they probably had the same thoughts about us, too.
ON THE DRIVE home we chatted but only half listened and recall little—something about the neighbors’ dog, something about the tree in the front yard—but on our minds instead was the cool sea air and the familiar, cleanly designed bridges that brought out a feeling of grandeur in us as we crossed them, as if the feat of their construction was somehow ours as well.
BACK IN OUR hometowns, past the doorman, the mailman, up the stairs, inhaling the bay, the bakery, the trash in the alley, the soft light, the sound of a foghorn. And up two flights or into the elevator we went. We closed the brass gate and looked above to see the white clouds of New York through the skylight, and we arrived at our door and rang the bell just because we could. We picked up the telephone to hear the operator ask us what number we would like to reach, and we dropped our suitcases in the entryway to our bedroom and remembered what this home offered that we had not been in for years: a shining porcelain bathtub. Our mothers kept our sons and daughters occupied while we soaked until our fingers and toes wrinkled.
WE FOUND OUR sisters tired from their illnesses but ecstatic. They asked us for advice. We warned them of dehydration caused by nerves—drink water constantly—and we told them to take nothing as a sign, unless it was a good sign. On the eve of our own wedding our husbands woke with their legs as tight as statues, their veins visible like a colt’s; they woke and stood and collapsed on the bed and if we thought, Is this a sign? we did not say it, and our husbands did not say it. Anyway, really, it was not a sign, we told our sisters, it was our anxiety, it was dehydration. Drink more water than you think possible.