“I remember you telling me about getting a permanent in France, the shop windows blown out, and you’re sitting there practically in the street, with that machine like snakes coming out of your head. All the MPs stopping to talk to you. That was very vivid.”
Oh, she was right. That was what happened. Later I saw one of those MPs and he asked how my hair turned out. I had to take off my helmet to show him, and he said he’d been skeptical when he saw me looking like Medusa under that machine but clearly he was wrong, and we talked in a slightly wistful way about the importance of optimism. I can feel that moment. It’s still there. “I didn’t know I told you that. I didn’t know I’d told you anything about the war.”
“You’ve told me several things.”
“Why?”
“I asked!”
“But do you care?”
“Of course,” she said.
I could feel her exasperation through the phone. I’m sorry, Lucy, but I have to ask. I have trouble believing you, you see, even though I’d very much like to. Perhaps because of how much I’d like to. “You could come see me without the children.”
“I’d love to,” she said. “Let me try to figure that out.” She said she’d call me soon, and I said all right and let her go. I resisted the urge to say that she better make it snappy because I might die soon. I hope she gives me credit for resisting, though maybe, being so much younger, she doesn’t understand how hard it is not to spend all your time thinking about how soon it will end.
Before Jennifer came I moved the scrapbook from my bedroom to the coffee table in the living room. I left it open to a page with a picture of Kay.
When I emerged from the guest room after the massage, Jennifer was standing by the coffee table, tilting her head to look at the pictures. I admit I was pleased to see the success of my little stratagem. She glanced up and flashed a quick smile. “I was just looking at this,” she said, as though that weren’t perfectly obvious.
“By all means,” I said. I made my way over and settled on the couch, patting the cushion beside me so that she came around the table and obediently sat. I pointed at Kay. “This is the one you remind me of.” I watched her face intently as she leaned in for a closer look. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping to see. She studied the photos closely, like she was memorizing them, and then she asked, “Can we go back to the beginning?”
I was startled by the question. “The beginning of what?”
“The scrapbook. Do you mind if I look at the whole thing?”
“Oh! Not at all.” Of course, I was pleased that she wanted to.
The book is held together by a large piece of leather twine, looped through holes and tied in a knot at the front. At the top the twine has broken, leaving a dangling end. There were once hinges on the cover, but two are broken, one missing completely. The book is in danger of complete collapse. The first page is brown—from age? Or was it always brown? I no longer remember—and water-stained and marked at the top right corner $2.75 in some long-dead clerk’s neat handwriting. “Two seventy-five!” Jennifer said, touching the number with her fingertip like it was a sacred relic. Then she turned the creaking page.
The next two pages have photos, laid out neatly, held in place with photo corners, labeled underneath in my handwriting—what it used to look like before it took on the shaky, old-lady quality it has now. Six photos to a page. Below the first it says Probie. September 1938. “Probie?” she asked.
“That’s what you were called in your first year of nursing school. For probationary.”
“So that’s you?”
“That’s me,” I said. It is me, rendered the size of my thumbnail and dressed like a doll in a long white skirt, my hair slicked to the side, long black stockings and black shoes. All the photos on this page are of me or me and my friends—a row of identically dressed dolls, sitting on the stone steps between the white columns out front of the school.
“You look happy in this one,” she said, pointing to the last one on the page, me alone, standing just to the side of one of the columns. I picked up the magnifying glass from the coffee table and my smile swam into view. Why was I smiling? We passed on through pages of doctors and nurses—Dr. Ted Pollack, Ruth Bratton, Miss Jones (Isolation)—until a loose envelope appeared, and she picked it up, glancing at me to see if it was okay, and pulled out a card that read The Graduating Class of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing request the pleasure of your company at a DANCE Saturday evening, May sixteenth, eight thirty o’clock, Young Christian Women’s Association.
“Did you go to this?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, though truthfully I have no memory of that particular occasion. Now that she was interested I was willing to fabricate to keep her that way.
Next she stopped on a picture of me standing atop a tank, smiling, wearing men’s coveralls and a pair of giant goggles on my head.