The Future Homemakers of America. Laurie Graham

Чтение книги онлайн.

       1

      We were down at the commissary, just for something to do, me and Lois, pushing Sandie in her stroller. Breath puffing out like smoke every time we laughed and just hanging there in the air. The cold hadn’t killed the scent of the beet harvest, though. All my born days, I never knowed such a sickly smell.

      ‘I swear,’ she said, loud as you please, ‘this place is colder than a gravedigger’s ass.’ Lois always did have a mouth on her.

      ‘Uh-oh,’ she said, ‘here comes the Pie-Crust Queen.’

      And sure enough, there was Betty running after us, flagging us to wait till she could catch her breath and tell us the big story.

      ‘Peggy!’ she said, gasping and wheezing and hanging on to my arm. ‘Have you heard the terrible news?’

      When your husband flies F-84s, sitting up there on 3,000 gallons of jet fuel, cruising – now there’s a word – cruising at 510mph, hoping to get his tail waxed by some Russki so he can be Jock-of-the-Week back at the base, there’s only one kind of Terrible News, but we both knew, me and Lois, that it wasn’t that.

      That kinda news comes quiet, on flannel feet. The base chaplain brings it to your door, and the CO’s wife follows through with a few brisk words about courage and dignity. After that, you better hope you got some friends. Some squadron wives to take turns answering your phone and feeding your kids and keeping you from falling into a thousand pieces.

      When Terrible News comes to married quarters, there’s no pulling down of blinds. Military don’t hold with closing the drapes. Word gets round, but you’d never know, looking in from outside, that anything was happening, because heck, if air force wives went around yelling ‘Have you heard?’ the whole thing could run out of control. Next thing you know, every girl on the base’d be out there screaming, ‘His poor wife! His poor orphaned children! It’s so tragic. It’s unbearable. But I’m okay. I’m okay. It’s not me. Not this time!’ And that would never do.

      Still, I guess we both missed a beat. Terrible news?

      ‘His Majesty King George of England,’ she said, ‘died in his sleep at Sandring Ham Palace.’

      Betty always had a thing about royalty, clipping photos, pasting them in her albums, specially anything about that Princess Margaret, or the royal babies.

      ‘Princess Margaret had tea with General and Mrs Eisenhower,’ she told us one time. ‘She was fifteen minutes late, but it wasn’t her fault. They had angel-food cake and dainty little sandwiches, but the princess probably didn’t do cake, watching her lovely figure an’ all. She wore a yellow shirt and the cutest black dirndl skirt.’

      ‘Well, I’ll be dirndled.’ Lois was always taking the rise out of Betty, but she took it in good part. When you’re in a hole you gotta stick together and USAF Drampton was a hole, no two ways.

      I knew Betty from way back, at Topperwein High, Class of ’42. I was captain of the softball team and she was president of Future Homemakers, stuffing toy bears for needy children and selling lunch-boxes for Healthful Living Week. We really didn’t run with the same crowd. But then she married Ed Gillis and I married Vern Dewey which made us both 96^th Bomber Wing wives. By the time we were posted from Travis, Texas, to some frozen salt-marsh, East Anglia, next stop Siberia, we were blood-sisters, near enough. Never would have thought I’d be so glad of Betty’s everlasting cheerfulness. That’s homesickness for you.

      ‘He was found by a servant,’ she said. ‘That’d be a footman or a pageboy, taking him his coffee. Imagine. He’d put down the tray, all beautiful silver and jewels, and say, “Good morning, sire” and baboom, the king’s dead.’

      Gayle Jackson was parked, waiting for us.

      ‘Y’all wanna come back to my place?’ she said. ‘Get a coffee or something?’ Time hung heavy for Gayle, СКАЧАТЬ