Jimmy Weston had his Dad’s dog tags. He wore them around his neck on a steel chain and had this funny habit of rubbing them back and forth between his fingers. We’d be playing marbles or collecting tin for the war effort; we’d be jumping on cracks to break Hitler’s back or be waiting, just waiting, for the whole thing to end, and Jimmy would talk and rub those dog tags together, and I’d listen. That’s mostly how I remember those days: Jimmy and me sitting on the curb, tired of marbles, tired of tin, him with that sound of his father, and me with nothing of mine but his name.
My father enlisted when I was four. He was quiet about it, according to my mother, but she knew he was planning on signing up. Before the war, the men met after their day shifts for a beer or a game of ball or cards, but not after the war began. Then they started home when the whistle blew. Too sick of the brewery to think of beer, too distracted to finish a game, they peeled off from one another at each doorway with cat calls and jokes and day weary voices. But then the talk began.
The sky would go pitch, lights would fill window frames, and then the men would come over. Jimmy’s Dad and my uncles and others my mother does not name. She’d be standing at the sink, hands greasy and dripping and slick, and there would be a soft rap on the door, or the low groan of the wooden porch steps, or just the feeling, suddenly, that she was not alone, and she’d turn, and there was Uncle Joey, or Uncle Ray, or any of them.
“How many?” I once asked. I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, wanting to hear the details again, confident in my newly discovered remove.
She shrugged. “Five,” she said, “six, sometimes seven. All around that little kitchen table.”
“How come they came to our house?”
She shook her head. “We were the mid-point, half way down the block. I don’t know. Maybe I served the best coffee.” She smiled, but her smile quickly faded.
“They knew,” my mother said, “that they wouldn’t all come back. We all knew that.”
I nodded, but only as a reflex because we did not all know that. I didn’t. Jimmy didn’t. We were the littlest ones, the ones who learned slowly, much later than everyone else, what the absences meant. I remember catching on. I remember sitting on the curb late one afternoon in the middle of winter, wrapped in wool, listening to Jimmy rub those dog tags together. I remember thinking, as the sun went down and the chill set into me, that Jimmy’s father was up there somewhere, in bits and pieces.
Jimmy Weston and I got to be friends playing marbles. I was sitting on the sidewalk outside the house one day, placing my marbles along the cracks in the pavement in neat rows of blue and yellow and green. My favorite marble was a solid red, the only red one I had, and it was my shooter. The day was quiet, a Saturday, or maybe even a Sunday, and cool. I wore a plaid hand-me-down jacket from my cousin, Linda, and my cousin Larry’s old baseball cap. I was the youngest and got whatever old clothes fit.
I didn’t like Jimmy much. Jimmy had pale skin and freckles and a soft voice that was sometimes hard to hear. We were the same age, younger than most kids in the neighborhood, but we didn’t spend much time together then. Every time I asked him to play, he had a cold or the flu or a sore tooth or his left toe was throbbing. I stopped asking. I played by myself or with two boys down the street, Tommy Ocerly and John Swenson, but Tommy and John were best friends, and I was an awkward addition.
That day I sat on the curb and admired my marbles. I had twenty-one in swirling colors, and I loved to watch the colors as the marbles shot across the pavement. I was used to being alone, and I’d started talking to myself, using a voice like the ones I heard on the radio, talking in the same clipped manner. I started to describe my marbles, imagining the marble tournament of the world, imagining a final match between me and a nip maybe.
“You talking to yourself, Dolores?”
I looked up quickly, and coming across the street with a small cloth bag gripped in one hand was Jimmy Weston, limping. I shook my head at his limp, but he misunderstood.
“Then you must be talking to me,” he said, and stepping in a hop over the curb and up onto the sidewalk, he knelt down. He let his marbles out onto the pavement slowly, holding them in with his hand and forearm. He looked me in the eye. “I’ll play you for the red one,” he said.
All the men in my family went, first Dad in ‘42, then Uncle Ray, then Uncle Joey, and so on, until all five were away in Europe. They disappeared quickly, I guess, though one by one, and then the women pulled together. This is what they tell me, my mother and my aunts and my cousins: Grammy picked up the phone after the last man had gone and called my mother; and my mother called her sister, and that was that. Five women and their children moved into Grammy’s once spacious and echo-y house in Kansas City, and waited for their men to come home. For my mother and me, the move was minor, only one block down.
I knew the men in my family by photograph, but the only photograph I studied was my father’s. I’d sneak into the room my mother shared with my aunt, and I’d stare at the photograph of my Dad on her dresser. I’d look at the ridge in his nose, the little bump part way down, and I’d rub my nose, which was smooth and long. Yet the minute I closed my eyes and tried to remember his face, I saw nothing. On a good day, I remembered the smell of soap when he hugged me, the smell of cigarettes in his clothes and hair. On a good day, I remembered his voice saying my name.
“Does he like pancakes?” I asked one morning as I watched my mother flip a pancake in the griddle.
“Yes,” she said, “he does.”
“Does he like sausage?”
“That’s his favorite.”
“Does he like milk?”
“No, he likes beer,” Larry said. Larry, who had both arms on the table, which I was not allowed to do. Larry, whose hair was white, not blond or flaxen, but white. The high school girls loved his hair. They loved his face. I was small, and even I knew this. I loved his hair. I loved his face.
My mother turned and scowled at Larry. Her hair was auburn then, and her cheeks that morning were flushed red. “He also likes milk, Lawrence.”
“Lawrence!” I cooed.
She turned back to the griddle, and Larry tapped me on the arm. He rolled his eyes. He stuck his fork into one of my pancakes and lifted it off my plate.
My mother tells me about what her days were like, about the long wait for the mail in the mornings, when whatever women had the day off clustered around the kitchen table, sipped coffee, waited. Just bills today. Just a circular. They bought seeds and planted a victory garden, over which Grammy presided in khaki pants and a straw sun hat, and which my mother weeded regularly. They grew carrots and lettuce and tomatoes. They used their ration books and bemoaned the day cheese went on the point system. They tore up old curtains and sewed play outfits for me, made dish rags from the rest. And they waited, dreading the appearance of the uniformed telegram company man, watching as he walked down the street, praying to themselves that he’d pass the house.
My mother tells me these things in bits and pieces. She’s old now, and the older she grows, the more romanticized the war era becomes. “All of us in that one house, making do,” she’ll say. “Not like today.” No, not like today, when I live across the city with my husband and she still occupies Grammy’s cavernous old house by herself.
“You know,” my mother tells me, over and over, “your dad always wanted to be a pilot.”
“Yes,” I reply, uncertain what I am affirming, that yes, he wanted to fly, or yes, she’s told me. The repetition is oddly comforting. It is the unexpected reminder that upsets the delicate balance, allows grief an entry, gives life to a sadness long laid to rest. I don’t want any more of those boxes arriving long after his death, full of our letters and photos, his odds and ends.
Jimmy did not win my red marble. I was, after all, the marble champion of the world. I won his green swirly marble, and several yellow ones. After our game, we sat on the curb. The afternoon had grown colder.
“You got my favorite,” Jimmy said.
“Which one is that?”
“The green one.”
I looked at him, then at the marble, which was a glorious green.
“I want that marble.” Jimmy’s voice was not soft and hushed. His voice was hard sounding, and cold.
In the middle of the game for Jimmy’s green marble, just before his shot, Jimmy said, “My Dad is in the Army.”
I looked up. “My Dad flies.”
“They knew each other,” Jimmy said, shooting. His shot went wide. “My Dad is in Africa. Where’s yours?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought he was in England, but we hadn’t heard from him in a while. I rolled my shooter between my palms, the warmth of it, its smoothness, soothing me.
“How come you don’t know?” Jimmy asked. He was picking at a weed in the pavement, and he looked bony, with one round knee stuck up under his chin and his thin fingers reaching for that weed.
“I heard something. You want to hear it?” I asked.
Jimmy nodded. He pulled up the weed.
“I heard that in Maine there are German bodies washing up on shore. It’s true,” I said. “Men shot down over the sea.”
Jimmy looked at me then, weed in hand, and I stared back, suddenly uncomfortable. The neighborhood seemed silent, or maybe that’s memory faltering. I do remember that I stopped the game and handed Jimmy his green marble. I don’t know what made me decide to hand the marble back. Maybe the idea of having a friend appealed, or of doing a good deed. Maybe the idea of falling planes made me superstitious as well as charitable. If I give the marble back, then...
“What’s your dad do in those planes?” Jimmy asked.
“He navigates,” I said.
The war I remember is the war for the bathroom, for breakfast, for company. I waited for the bathroom in the mornings while the older girls styled their hair and brushed on rouge. I squeezed into my seat at the breakfast table, but I was never done as fast as the others, who were out the door, down the street, before I’d managed to get on my coat.
At 16, Larry was one of the oldest boys I knew. He stashed packs of Camels and Lucky Strikes in the springs under his bed and in the baseball trophy cups on his book shelf. I watched him hide the packs, standing look out by the door, and admired his ingenuity. He never asked me not to tell. He called me “sport”.
On summer nights he slipped out his second story window to the soft earth below and crept across the lawn. I never slept until I knew he’d hit the ground safely, made his escape. I heard a soft thud, a laugh and a low whistle, and I’d think, he’s gone now.
In the morning, he’d be the first one up. He’d wink at me, and I’d smile and shake my head and wonder how he got back up the bare white shingles. I’d watch him comb his hair with the part on the side, and I’d try to keep up with him when he took the stairs two by two, but I never could.
Thank God for Jimmy, who waited for me at his house, two houses down, diagonal from ours. He’d watch out the window, and when he saw me emerge, he’d open his front door and meet me on the sidewalk. We traded lunches as we walked to school. We talked about the war. If I was there, this war would be over. If I were there, we’d be in Berlin right now. If. We sat in school and drew pictures in our notebooks and waited to be old.
Jimmy’s mother got a job, so my mother agreed to feed Jimmy dinner, look in on him when he was sick, walk him home at nine when his mother finally pulled in their drive.
Usually, I’d come home from school with Jimmy in tow. Tommy Ocerly would come over later with John Swenson, and all of us would be together for the afternoons, afternoons that seemed to stretch forever. We played Hide Behind Enemy Lines and Be a Spy and Capture a German flag. Later, Tommy and John would fade into the dusk, and we would sit, Jimmy and I, and wait to be called inside, not wanting to go, wanting to sit in the coming dark.
Larry came home after practice, when the sky was getting dark. He played football and baseball, and Jimmy and I would watch him stroll up the sidewalk, books under one arm, his walk long and easy. We’d wait until Larry got about a block away and then call out to him.
“How was practice?”
“Practice was fine. How was school?”
And school was never exciting. We hadn’t learned anything, we would tell him, and we were tired of going. Our conversation never varied. We’d wait for him to reach us, and then we would walk inside together, to a kitchen crowded with women and light.
After dinner we’d gather in the living room. We would hear Edward R. Murrow introduce himself from London, hear the funny sounding names of battle grounds and try to remember the pronunciation. We’d hear the names of generals, men like Montgomery and DeGaulle, hear the names so often that we took possession of them, spoke as if we knew them. We would say things like, That Montgomery is a good man. Or, good luck to you, DeGaulle. Or, get him, MacArthur.
I knew these men better than my father.
The day Jimmy did not meet me to walk to school, I walked alone. His mother’s car was in the driveway. I knocked on the front door, but no one answered. Nothing stirred. That afternoon I told my mother that Jimmy had missed school and that his mother’s car was in the drive, and she bit her lip. I went outside, out of habit. Tommy floated across his yard, John trailing behind him, and we waited for Jimmy.
“Wonder where he is,” John said.
“Isn’t he sick today?” Tommy asked.
We knew his wasn’t an absence due to sickness. My mother looked in on him when he was sick. There was a new silence in our world then.
“Want to play Capture the Flag?” John asked.
I shook my head no, and Tommy agreed.
Then Tommy said, “I guess we better go.”
I sat by myself, watching Jimmy’s house. I was silent later as Larry turned up our road, walked toward me. He stopped when he saw me.
“Where’s Jimmy?” he asked.
I shrugged and licked my lips.
Larry looked over at Jimmy’s house. Then he said, “Come on, Dolores.”
But I wouldn’t move.
“Come on, Dolores.”
I shook my head.
And so Larry sat with me. We sat as the sky deepened into a dark blue, then black; sat as the shades slipped down windows along the street. We watched the stars come out. My mother opened the door and called to us, but neither of us answered, and I heard the door close, and still we sat.
Finally Larry said, “We’ll go talk to him tomorrow. Let’s go inside, okay, sport? We’ll make sure he’s okay tomorrow.”
Larry took me by the hand. He walked me inside the house. He said, “You’re a good friend, Dolores.”
The next day Jimmy reappeared, ashen and smaller looking, and said his Dad wasn’t coming home. He met us on the way to school, me and Tommy and John, all of us walking together for a change. Jimmy had his hands in his pockets, and we all stood on the curb. I looked at the sky, and I think Tommy and John looked at the ground, and Jimmy was so quiet that for a moment I forgot he was there, forgot why I was watching the clouds. The beginning of a thought nagged at me, and I shook my head, shook away the thought.
“Did he get shot?” John asked.
Jimmy spoke clearly. “He got shot a bunch of times.”
Larry left on a cold winter day in January. A heavy snow had fallen throughout the night, but he was up and out the door despite the weather. He did not say good-bye. He did not write a note. I woke to a quiet morning and trudged downstairs, heavy with sleep. I ate my oatmeal and listened to Grammy call him.
“He’s probably in the bathroom,” I mumbled.
But Linda was the one in the bathroom.
Grammy called again and again, and I remember her voice like an echo through the house, not fading as she climbed the stairs but growing louder with each call, with each thick silence that followed.
I put my spoon down and listened to her call his name. I looked out the window at the soft snow, and I thought, he’s gone. He would soon be with them, in those funny sounding places, and I envied him.
From then on, it was just Jimmy and me. We still sat on the curb, and we still lingered in the cool night air after we were called inside. We still played with Tommy and John, but the games were suddenly urgent. We tackled each other to defend our flag. We shot whoever played the Germans again and again and again, standing over each other, sometimes placing a foot down on a shoulder, pressing. We died for our country a hundred times.
Jimmy’s Dad’s dog tags came on a day when the snow had fallen and my boots were wet on the inside and the sky was gray like ash. I asked Jimmy what they were.
“This is what my Dad wore to identify himself. This is how they knew it was him lying there.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but Jimmy started crying, and so I sat beside him and was quiet. The afternoon was cold, and in between his sobs, Jimmy shivered, his body trembling.
My father seemed vague and shadowy to me already. I didn’t think I could lose him any more than I had, but I saw those tags, and touched them, and they were hard and smooth and warm from Jimmy’s constant agitation of them, and I knew this: that I could lose my father completely, and so when my mother came to me one day, and pulled me down to her side, and told me in a choked voice that his plane had not come back, I was not surprised. He was shot down over the North Sea, she said. I didn’t know where that was, but that didn’t matter. I imagined, as she kept talking, that my father was deep inside the sea, in his plane, and that he was silent there. I sat and held her hand. I didn’t cry, but I know that at that moment my father’s absence became a part of me, a defining feature, like an extra finger or toe.
My father’s dog tags never came. After what seemed like a long time, I asked my mother why. She was washing dishes after dinner. Grammy was at the table with her sewing kit, patching pants, and Linda was doing her math, and Jimmy was staring at the tablecloth, and I asked.
“When am I going to get Dad’s dog tags?”
Jimmy looked up, suddenly interested. My mother stared out the window above the kitchen sink. She had bags under her eyes.
“Dolly,” she said, “you won’t ever get his dog tags.”
Nothing else was said, but as everyone filtered into the living room, Jimmy and I sat at the table, each of us staring into our laps. We said nothing. Jimmy did not express sympathy, nor did I ask for it, but he didn’t rub his tags as we sat at the kitchen table. We were just together there, listening to the murmur of Edward R. Murrow.
A new image came to me. I saw a cascading fireball, doused by salt water. I saw my father, all of him, whoever he was, those tags, descending hot and red and splintered into the cool relief of the sea.
In the end, most of the men did come home, Joey and Ray and Larry and the others my mother doesn’t name. When Uncle Ray stepped out of the car, I didn’t know who he was. Later I looked at the photographs and decided he didn’t look a thing like himself. I noticed the red on his cheeks, the way his hair looked lighter, and I knew somebody had touched up the photograph.
Jimmy and I stood apart from everybody and watched Linda reach for Uncle Ray’s hand, and glad as we were to see Ray, we would have traded him in a minute. We waved the little American flags Grammy handed us. We cheered when Ray climbed out of the car and stood, blinking, at the welcome home sign we had hung from the second story windows. Then Jimmy drifted slowly backwards, still waving his flag, and I drifted with him. Nobody noticed. We walked into the backyard and over the fence and on and on. I started to run, and I ran as fast and as far as I could, with Jimmy at my heels.
Grammy’s household split back up into smaller ones. My mother and I stayed with Grammy. We were the ones who were still incomplete, missing a part that should have been there, and so we kept together.
It wasn’t long after Grammy’s house split up that Jimmy’s mother decided to move back home to Missouri. I watched Jimmy and his mother drive away. I was eight years old. I sat down on the curb and waved as the back end of their DeSoto turned the corner. Jimmy did not wave back. Maybe he was rubbing those tags. Maybe he was crying. I didn’t cry, not then. The front door opened and Uncle Ray, whose voice was low and rumbly like an engine, called to me.
He said, “Dolores.”
His voice rose at the end, like I was a question.
I wonder now if Jimmy’s tags still exist, or if he has rubbed them completely away. I am sitting on the curb at dusk, as we used to do, and I’m holding a letter in my hand. A childhood friend, a girl from school, is visiting England, and she sent me a note. I usually hear from her at Christmas, a card, or sometimes a phone call if she’s back in Kansas. On her trip, she visited Cambridge, where there is a memorial chapel for all those who died in the war and were never found. In scanning the list of names in the stone, she found my father’s. Anthony Jason Jones. She sent me a rubbing.