In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place: World War II in the Central Pacific

You Are a Good Girl I Love You

1 You Are a Good Girl I Love You A note posted on my fourteen-year-old sister’s door, a warning: Our house has walls and doors like any other house and inside each house are rooms and inside the rooms are beds with covers and no matter how much you kick the sheets mom shrinkwrapped to the mattress the covers are heavy on a chest. My sister’s explanation for why she now slept on her bare mattress naked. p.s. if this is a problem i will gladly sleep clothesless in the backyard. My father pounding on the door yelling Beatrice If I’m Late and Beatrice You Think I’m Impressed You Are A Child. He dropped us at school since my sister ditched from the bus stop every day for a week, so I took my time getting ready: putting on makeup and blotting it off. My father wanted order and my sister systematically disordered. It was a home theater Mom and I gossiped about in the driveway and stairwell: who had said, who had shifted, who had asked us to communicate something. Dad found me finished in the bathroom and said, “Please deal with your sister.” It wasn’t really a show. A sister naked first thing in the morning became daily—her flat on her back, sprawled human-sacrifice style; her frightening ribs, her raised stomach—it wasn’t healthy. Most mornings she sat up slumped, head down and moaning, and I pulled a T-shirt over her head. 2 IN THESE TIMES THE HOME IS A TIRED PLACE Today her deadheaded boyfriend in boxers—Thank God— and knee-high gray socks. He lay passed out on the floor with a three-foot extravagantly dirty bong inches from his fist. The window open and the smell of coal made the room cold and stuffy; it was snowing. My sister already dressed on the bed laughed at my face. “Let’s make Dad later than late,” she said. “You’ve gotten lazy,” I said. “Every morning the same franticity and all the cars are bitches.” Beneath us the front door slammed and the boyfriend’s foot twitched. We waited and heard the door open again and my Dad: “Gertrude! Drag her down by the greased strings she calls hair!” Bea held my hand; I sat beside her on the bed. “I think it helps his productivity at the office,” she said. I hoped the result would be a car for my eighteenth birthday— for taxiing purposes. k I was dragged into it. I was allowed to do what I wanted; Bea wasn’t allowed out until her dirt-creased boyfriend showed some respect, like Please Sir and Thank You Very Much This Is Delicious—it had come to this. “I want my house a Victorian sanctuary,” Dad said, overheard in the entryway when I was just back from work. Beside me Bea’s boyfriend against the wall with his hands in his pockets and his eyelids lowered sleepily. He resembled somewhat a dream-teen actor, the one skinny and long-haired and shuffling. Bea’s boyfriend was eager to drop out of school and move to California, where he could pose for pictures on Hollywood Boulevard with Superdog and Mr. Impossible and The Hulks. Mom watched me from the piano bench like Move Slowly, and soundlessly I slipped off my boots. “I want everyone who enters mannered and buttoned-up,” Dad said. You Are a Good Girl I Love You 3 Bea shouted, “You don’t make Gertrude’s boyfriend present cows or wear frock coats or bow in doorways.” “Gert’s boyfriend doesn’t come in the house with cigarettes. He doesn’t make comments about her legs licking his lips.” “Repression screws people up psychologically,” Bea said. I jumped, feeling the boyfriend’s hands on my shoulders. He helped me out of my coat. He hung it on top of other coats; the whole wall was puffed with suede and down and faux fur. “Thank your dude for me.” I’d seen this idiot at my boyfriend Pete’s locker; they shook hands and Pete gave me a look like This Is Crazy I’ll Tell You Later. But Pete was SAT-determined and afternoons his parents concealed his phone and closed the wood shutters of the bedroom window I usually snuck in. We didn’t mind sneaking around. Mostly...