I closed the door behind me. The warm, quiet dimness of the room seemed to be standing still and listening, and I stood still for a minute too. I felt like I had shut out the clamor and chaos that had followed me all day, just as if I had cut off a clamor of sound by shutting a door. It had been a strange, tense day, with the consciousness of what was going on in the world lending a distracted edge to everything. Word of a naval battle was filling the news, in stark black headlines on the newsstands; in the tinny, stentorian voices of the war correspondents coming over the radio, with an undercurrent of tight excitement to every word that made you feel like you might hear the boom of the guns in the background at any moment.
I had read all about it in the newspaper at the counter of a drugstore at lunchtime, and then had gone on through my afternoon with a with a feeling of unreality in everything I did and looked at—as if this everyday life was only show, and the real thing outside had intruded on it and turned it hollow. It was a relief to be back in the quiet, comfortingly familiar embrace of my own room—I felt normal again, but still with a lingering, more acute sense of that world outside.
I went over to the desk and took out the letter that I had slid away there before supper, so I could come up and read it in peace and quiet afterwards. I slit the envelope and took out the sheets of paper, and walked over to the fireplace. There was just enough of a flicker coming from the coals that I could see the words on the paper, so I curled up into the comfortable corner of the big flowered armchair, tilted the letter toward the glow, and settled down to read. The letter was the same as always: brisk, practical, bantering; mixing incidents of service life with answers to what I had written. I read it through slowly, quietly enjoying it, a faint smile touching my face now and then.
When I finished, I put the sheets back in order, and my eye traveled up to the heading in the corner of the first one. The date on it stopped me. It was the day after the fleet had been in action, according to the newspaper. I fingered the letter slowly, my eyes drifting upward from it to look into space. It had been written after that battle, only hours after the action. And it was the same as always. I’d always known where the letters were written from, sensed the things they left out. But I’d never made the connection so strongly before to the things not said, as I did now with the black-headlined newspaper containing the account of the battle still lying on a table in the same room. The feeling of something dark and threatening loomed up at me out of the shadows beyond the firelight.
I sat very still and stared out from the depths of the armchair across the room, and in my mind I heard the guns thundering, growing louder till the echoes quivered in the dark corners around me. I saw the hot sun and the violently sparkling blue sea and the metal of the decks, shaken with impact and veiled in black smoke. Behind all the cheerful teasing and anecdotes traded back and forth in our letters, this was the reality; this was the danger that he had to live through. It was always there, though it only became real to me in brief moments of clarity, like this night.
Something broke gently in the fire. I looked at the letter, and then I folded it slowly, the paper crinkled where my sweaty fingers had left spots of dampness. I was about to get up, to put it back in the desk, but I stopped. I leaned my head against the back of the chair and stayed there, very still, the folded letter clasped beneath my hand.
Chatterbox: Three Crates of Pears
Pears? Honestly? I don’t even know if I like pears; I’m not sure I’ve ever tasted one in my life. I suspect I may have consumed them in pureed form as an infant, but my memory does not go back that far. And I was firmly convinced there wasn’t a shadow of a pear in any of my stories. If it had been onions, now—onions are a versatile vegetable, with many inherent dramatic properties. But pears?
Still, necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. If one must write about pears, one writes about pears. Somewhere a very small wheel started turning in my mind, and eventually kicked the others into gear. So here’s the result. Since Rachel, to my mind, decidedly bent the rules by assigning us a topic she’d already written about, I feel entitled to bend them a little further and write something in the first-person again.
I am not going to tell you what this is from—or more accurately, what this could end up being a part of one day—because I’ve refused to let myself write it until I’ve finished about three other things. It ought properly to be a deep dark secret between me and the notebook and the private Pinterest board. I still don’t know how I got hoodwinked into Chatterboxing it.
Dear Leo,
Please excuse the horrible handwriting in the latest installment of this thrilling serial. My pen is still leaking, and I’m too exhausted to write legibly tonight. The smudges could serve a purpose, I suppose; if you’ve got any fingerprint experts on board they can compare the prints with my last letter (similarly smudged) and confirm that it’s not a forgery and really from me.Please excuse incoherence as well. I am writing this sitting at my desk with my aching feet up on the arm of an armchair. If you’ve a reasonably clear mind at present, which I don’t, perhaps you can help me solve a conundrum: how does one dispose of three crates of nearly-overripe pears? If the answer may be construed in any way as helping the war effort, so much the better.I should explain. I spent most of today helping to set up a hall for a Red Cross charity supper which is, hopefully, taking place at this minute. I’d spent several hours running back and forth answering frantic calls for chairs, silverware, string, scissors, and someone to tame a wild tablecloth, when I was summoned to a back door to confront a totally original problem. It seems that a Leading Citizen whose name I never did find out (and it’s lucky for him I didn’t) had decided to do his part by donating three large crates of pears.“Well, that’s nice,” I said, “but what are we going to do with them?”Nobody knew. They weren’t exactly on the menu for dinner, and there didn’t seem to be any gap in the program that could suitably be filled by three crates of pears. My fellow-laborer, a short and ingenuous person named Mandy, suggested that we make pear preserves and send them to the troops.“I wouldn’t wish that on the troops,” I said. “Anyway, it’s got to be something more immediate than that, because judging by their fragrance, these have about reached the peak of their usefulness. Well, let’s put them in the kitchen.”Mandy and I took a heavy crate and shuffled into the kitchen with it, but were thundered at by a volunteer cook that there wasn’t an inch of space left anywhere. We shuffled back out into the hall, set down the crate, and looked around. “There’s just too many,” said Mandy despairingly. “Even if we put one at every place we’ll have tons left over. Should we put them around in baskets?”“We are not putting a pear at every place,” I said firmly. “Not everyone likes pears. If they find the place lined wall to wall with them they might never contribute to the Red Cross again. We’ve got to be more unobtrusive. How do you hide a thousand pears in plain sight?”I was looking at a table, and had my great inspiration. The flowers hadn’t come yet, and there was an empty space in the middle of the table. “I know what I’ll do,” I said, seizing a pear in either hand. “A fruit centerpiece always looks elegant—and it’ll look as though it were planned. The flowers can go somewhere else.”I was never trained in fruit-arranging, but I think I did all right. In ten minutes I’d built a pyramid about a foot high. I was very carefully balancing the best-looking pear I could find on top, when Mandy came by again and looked at it admiringly. “That really does look nice,” she said.At that moment the entire pyramid collapsed, sending a chinook-flow of pears onto the floor and annihilating a couple of place-settings (I’m afraid the china was loaned for the occasion). Mandy was too horrified even to speak. I sat down matter-of-factly in the wreckage and thought about staying there, supper or no supper.“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with them,” I said. And we did.We loaded all the pears back in the crates and lugged the crates up to the front of the platform where the band and speakers were to sit. We swathed them in red-white-and-blue bunting, and plopped a large pot of flowers (also highly fragrant) on top of each. The result, we thought, was quite artistic, but it’s going to be very aromatic in the region of the platform when the room gets warm tonight. I hope the musicians are not too sensitive to smells; it would be rather awful to have horn players punctuating the national anthem with sneezes.I don’t intend to be on hand when the pears are discovered tomorrow, and I hope Mandy isn’t, because I suspect she’s the kind who squeals. In that case, if you receive a suspiciously squashy and sweet-smelling parcel at next mail call, you have my full permission to toss it over the starboard rail (or the larboard; whichever’s closest). The Japanese are welcome to them.
Your exhausted and affectionate cousin,
Jody
Read previous Chatterboxes here.
Chatterbox: The Snapshot
The theme for this month’s Chatterbox is resurrection. And as with a number of recent Chatterboxes, I have the feeling one could write a hundred scenes spinning off this topic and still come up with something different every time. And I must say that until I began participating in this feature, I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed writing prompts. Even when they don’t get me any “forrader” on my works-in-progress, I think it’s a good exercise—it keeps the creative side of my mind in training, especially helpful when I’ve been doing nothing but fine-tuning editing for a long time.
This scene has no relation to any of my current or planned projects. I have a feeling certain relations of mine are going to be mad at me for once again giving them a taste rather than a meal (come to think of it, they’d probably be upset if I did that at suppertime too)…I had a rather hard time with it, and I don’t know how good it is, but it was one of those ideas that gets hold of your mind and won’t let go until you’ve at least tried writing it.
So far I’ve tried to stick to the original intent of Chatterbox, a scene focusing on dialogue, but this one bends that premise a little bit. This idea seemed to need something more, and Rachel told me to go ahead and do it anyway, so I did. You can call the first half internal dialogue, if you like.
It was strangely ironic that on the second day I stayed with the girls Joanie hauled out the family album again for some reason. She left it on the ottoman in the living-room when she was done with it, where I was sharply aware of its presence every time I went through the room, though I couldn’t bring myself to go near it or pick it up.
That snapshot haunted me; it stayed in my mind no matter what part of the house I was in. I knew it by heart, even though I’d only seen it once; even to the shape of the trees behind us and the double power line draped across one corner of the sky in the background. Mike in the foreground, looking like—well, just Mike, as I’d known him so well; and a little behind him, me, with an uncertain expression that seemed to say that I wasn’t sure about being there, and perhaps wasn’t sure about anything at all, but really just meant that the camera had caught me when I wasn’t expecting it.
I remembered thinking when I had first looked at it, sitting on the edge of Alice’s bed with the album in my lap, how it would have become just an awkward footnote to the family history if Mike had lived through the war, after he’d met some other girl and married her—maybe even removed from the album eventually to make room for more relevant pictures. I’d have been something hard to categorize, a piece of a puzzle that had been cut out but didn’t end up fitting anywhere after all.
All that had changed, of course, when Mike was shot down over Germany. The snapshot wasn’t part of an ongoing story anymore; it came from a closed chapter. Like all the family pictures in the album from before Mrs. Ryland died, which before had been just common everyday do-you-remember snapshots, but were now precious relics haloed with all the happy memories her husband and children had of her. That picture of us would mellow with years and memories, all its associations softened and forgotten until the girl in the picture didn’t really matter anymore. To Alice and Joanie’s children she would merely be an unknown face beside the strangely young-looking uncle they had never known.
But now—what was it now? What would it mean now?
I didn’t know what anything meant now; I didn’t know where I fit or what I would be now. I wanted to get away—a little panicky feeling came over me sometimes when I stepped into the hall alone, in this house where I’d learned to belong and yet couldn’t really belong now.
It was Friday night when the girls were helping me set the table that we heard the front door open and shut. I knew it was Robert, and so did they—both of them dropped what they were doing and rushed into the hall to meet him. I put down the silverware, the knives sliding with a cold little chinking from my hand onto the tablecloth; listening to their muffled squeals and laughter. I followed them slowly, approached the doorway and stopped there, inside, watching. I was only a babysitter, a sometime housekeeper, a sympathetic neighbor. I wasn’t a part of this family, no matter how close to them I’d become.
The girls were each under one of their father’s arms, wrinkling his coat and crushing the bows in their hair, little Joanie half hidden by the raincoat draped over his left arm. I didn’t hear what they said at first; my hearing seemed to have gone blank for that first moment while I was coming from the table.
“But where did you go, anyway, Daddy?” said Alice, trying to straighten her hair-ribbon without letting go of him. “You never told us.”
“Well,” said Robert, “I’ll tell you. I’ve been in Washington.”
He was still in the hall—hadn’t even put his raincoat down yet. I had thought he might wait to tell them a little later, sat them down in the living-room perhaps, in the methodical way he usually did things. But I saw now he wouldn’t. He couldn’t wait with something like this.
“That call I had at the office last week,” he said, “was from the War Department, and that’s what I had to go to Washington about.”
Alice pulled back, the color blanched from her face and her eyes large. “Daddy, you’re not going in the army?”
“No! No, no,” he said. “It’s something entirely different. It’s—”
He paused a minute, searching for the words. And I suddenly had a small, funny ache in my throat, that grew tighter as I tried to fight it. I didn’t have any reason to cry, but the ache came anyway.
“It doesn’t always happen this way,” said Robert. “It—hardly ever happens at all. But it turns out, we were some of the lucky ones.” He smiled, a strange, bright-eyed smile that looked like something he had forgotten how to do.
“What doesn’t happen?” said Alice. She still looked half fearful; Joanie only looked puzzled.
“That a soldier reported missing in action turns out to be alive after all.”
He looked from one of them to the other. “Your brother Mike is alive, and he’s coming home.”
I turned my head and looked down at the dining-room carpet. Somehow I felt I couldn’t look at any of their faces just then; the joy of that moment was too precious for an outsider to see. Or maybe I felt it would hurt me somehow, the way the girls’ first incoherent chorus of cries and exclamations did.
“Dad, are you—sure?” said Alice with a little hysterical sound in her voice. “Absolutely sure? I mean—”
“Absolutely. I saw him in the hospital in Washington, and talked to him—he said to tell you two he loves you and can’t wait to see you again.”
“Why is he in the hospital?” Joanie’s small round face was uncertain, as if her first excitement had received a chill.
“Well, he was hurt, Joanie, when his plane crashed. He—he won’t be able to walk without crutches…probably for a long time. But he’s getting better.”
“When will he be home? Can we see him?” Alice’s words flashed rapidly.
“Not for a few weeks still, but you can write to him, and we can telephone long-distance the day after tomorrow.”
Over the clamor of their next hundred questions, Robert looked over at me for the first time, and smiled; that happy, slightly strained smile—a younger smile than any he had used in the past six months, but it marked more strongly how much older he had grown since the last time he had cause to use it. And I had to smile, too, no matter how lost and strange and knotted-up I felt inside.
“Supper will be ready in a few minutes,” I said.
Read previous Chatterboxes here.