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

In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place

66 In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place PA R T O N E 1. Only one dream the mother remembered: driving, dead bodies on the road, the word PAPER large and black on a billboard . Sometimes she made up different dreams when she woke panicked in the gray morning, imagining an airport chase, a lake drowning—but they weren’t really hers, only dreams she believed she should have instead of always the one: driving through death and the urge to pull over. 2. The girl spent a Saturday morning cutting snowflakes from a pile of paper she’d found on her mother’s desk. The snowflakes were peppered with sliced negotiations, diamond-pierced words like child and property and alimony, and when the girl finished she strung the flakes together and hung them from her window so they trailed to the berry bush and flapped in the stirred summer wind. 3. Screamed in the kitchen one night. Too many cooks in the saucepan. Too little wine. Granite counters crusted with crushed tomato, sea salt, sausage casing, but no food besides the steaming meal bleeding over the bin. The girl sent to her room—Now. In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place 67 The father’s recipes stacked and chopped to pieces and confettied across the tile. Division always makes less unless one was a fraction to begin with. “Divide by me,” the father said. “Then we both come out ahead.” 4. Over summer break, the girl wanted projects similar to school but better. The babysitter gave cartoon-spelling tests and driveway geology lessons, brought Dickens and Shakespeare from her Sophomore Advanced English. They read aloud, and with special gaits and one arm thrown theatrically, they trailed one another through the long grass, and the babysitter didn’t mind the books this time because words weren’t meant to be studied, they were meant to be screamed. 5. The mother missed something every night. In the grocery line stretched back to frozen foods, her customer-in-training pushed a full-sized cart in which lay a package of egg noodles. The mother craned her neck come on come on. Girl steadied, observing tabloid banners. Mother slipped a five into the girl’s rhinestoned purse, said, “Why don’t you pay this time Little Miss Grown Woman?” 6. Gray stripes on the walls at the Hampton Inn Extended Stay seemed appropriate to the father. A wallpapered prison for the middle-aged no worse than the previous wallpapered prison (the mother’s pick—expansive blue and black flowers). A whole world of prisons! The father turned animal, twice filled his ice bucket and dumped the contents on the concrete balcony, jumped up and down to hear the crack crack crack. A man got into a car. The father’s wife and daughter in the parking lot, and time to be human again. 7. “A sad situation,” the babysitter told friends lounging at night on her parents’ screened-in porch. She planned years from now to marry the boy holding her hand, though he’d 68 IN THESE TIMES THE HOME IS A TIRED PLACE quit his job and all summer hung around his mother’s pool smoking cigarettes with his mother. Dark ahead; behind them bright inside with television and bills, an electric piano and screwed-together models from kits. The babysitter said, “Stay together for the child,” and one friend said, “Yes,” and another said, “No,” and another said, “Life is life,” and the boyfriend said nothing. 8. A man with a bare face—no moustache. The twitch of his sharp muscles made the girl nervous, the view of his top lip, the shape of words meant for her mother. Long candles glowed in the center of the table, a bowl of fruit tasted waxy—the girl had tried them earlier after her mother said “You can’t.” An extra fork had appeared beside the girl’s plate. She took one in each hand and learned to eat quickly. 9. A newspaper—“The Home Times.” The babysitter helped with the layout, even wrote an article about the disappearance of a gray tabby beneath the porch. The girl’s headlines: Magic Money Appears Where Needed, Shakespeare Beats Dickens in Death Match, Snowflakes from June Still Breathing. The girl shoved her mother’s copy beneath her bedroom door. “Impossibilities,” the girl’s mother said over blueberry...