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

March On

51 March On Mired in the late processes of moving, my mother left trails of things everywhere: clothes strewn from dressers , condiments rolling by the refrigerator, stacks of books leading from shelves in ragged, precarious steps. I hadn’t realized these things were left: they’d been so well hidden in drawers, behind doors, in tight-lines of themselves; but now they were dragged out and dropped, abandoned as my mother flitted around, suddenly overwhelmed, suddenly needing help. “Clutter.” She fluttered her hands toward the boxes she’d sealed weeks ago. “It’s like that tricky triangle. People get lost.” She called a few moving companies, asked if they had any women movers, then ranted about discrimination and division of labor. They hung up, and she stared at the phone incredulously. She walked to something heavy and yelled for me to grab the camera. “Look at me!” she said, her arms struggling to embrace the microwave a foot above the counter. We took pictures of her lifting things, and then I guess she sent them to the moving companies with slews of hateful exclamations. “I don’t want any strange men,” she said. “I don’t deal well with strange men.” She stared at my skinny arms. “You could be the first woman mover in Chapel Hill.” She sighed and asked for Sid’s number, the high school dropout who’d hung around the house off and on since last summer. 52 IN THESE TIMES THE HOME IS A TIRED PLACE “Sid’s a strange man,” I said. “Emphasis on strange.” “He’s a boy,” she said. “That’s different.” The next morning, I got ready for school when a truck rumbled up to the house. The engine shuddered off and these insanely happy voices emerged: you could tell by the tones, the great inflections, though they said things like, “My limbs feel like rubber in the morning” and “Look at the dew on the grass, man! I never get to see that shit.” The front door opened and everyone yelled hello like they arrived at some rowdy party. Mom told them there was coffee in the kitchen. Convenient for her to think of Sid as a boy at eighteen, while she called me, at sixteen, a woman. Titles like that could be confusing. They implied a level of capability, a willingness to endure awkwardness for the “greatest good” of the family. “I’m going to say hi to Raimy,” Sid said, and I fumbled with the last buttons of my blouse. He bounded up the stairs. “Excuse me.” He panted. He wore a ribbed tank-top and huge jeans and his frizzy hair in a knot. “Would you like to purchase a trip to Madman Island?” “What’s playing this week?” He smiled at me, all dressed up. “The Banker and the Bum.” “I’ve seen it too many times.” “Except this time the bum has a job.” I backed him into the hallway. “It’s a prostitute situation. My mom paying you. You being here for money.” “I’m an innocent in all this.” “What’s your definition of that?” “You don’t understand how the world works,” he told me, going down the stairs. “You keep trying to get away, but here I am.” “The world wants me crazy,” I said. He shrugged and grinned. “Well, it’s fate.” k March On 53 Originally, Mom had this idea about fleeing, moving everything at once and never seeing our house again: just get it all out, get it over with. Only she hadn’t considered the effect of moving from one big mess to another, with stacks of boxes against new walls and old furniture angled oddly and everything in all the wrong rooms and strewn around the floor and in great troublesome piles. So she developed the philosophy of “one box at a time,” of creating an established, serene world to move into: close the door on this one and become a new woman, a relaxed woman, one comfortable again in her own home. “I can’t expect to change like that,” she told me and the dropout boys, snapping her fingers; I had coffee with them before school, all of us crowded around the counter since they’d already moved the table. Mom explained how she’d only need the boys in the mornings, but every morning for the next two or three weeks...