“He likes me,” Nell said, an explanation Anna guessed she must employ—perhaps correctly—to account for much of what happened to her.
“Ours likes us to stay in,” Anna said, aware that she was playacting a little, invoking a version of Mr. Voss that was slightly outdated. Hanger-on seemed to be the part she was auditioning for, perhaps the only one available.
“Try lipstick,” Nell said. “Works wonders.”
“He isn’t that type.”
Nell’s face was all sunny curves; she looked perpetually on the verge of laughter. Yet her blue gaze was rife with calculation. “There’s no other,” she said.
At midday, when they met again, they were both wearing blue coveralls. Every last one of Nell’s curls was swaddled inside a bulging scarf, and she wore the steel-toed safety boots they were all encouraged to buy. Though the Shipworker often ran little stories about disasters averted by those boots, Anna hadn’t bought a pair. There seemed no point, when nothing she handled was larger than a quarter.
“You can leave it right here when you’re done,” Nell said, passing a beaten-looking black Schwinn to Anna. “I’ll pick it up coming back. There’s a lady just outside the Cumberland gate who sells swell egg salad sandwiches. Right out of her apartment—you’ll see the line on Flushing.”
“Thanks.”
“You can’t pack egg salad. Gets soggy.”
“I wish there were two bikes,” Anna said, feeling a rush of affection for this vain, generous girl.
“Not on your life. I’m all finished with that,” Nell said. She added, smiling, “Besides, we’d cause a riot.”
Anna had ridden bicycles before. You could rent them in Prospect Park for fifteen cents, and cycling there had been a popular weekend activity among boys and girls from Brooklyn College. This was different. It was a man’s Schwinn, first of all, with a bar inconveniently placed so that Anna had to pedal standing up to be sure she wouldn’t land on it. Maybe standing was what made the difference. Whatever it was, from the instant she pushed down on the pedals and the bike began to bump over the bricks, Anna felt as though lightning had touched her. Motion performed alchemy on her surroundings, transforming them from a disjointed array of scenes into a symphonic machine she could soar through invisibly as a seagull. She rode wildly, half laughing, the sooty wind filling her mouth. That first day she was too excited to eat, too worried about being late to take any chances on egg salad. She was back on her stool at 12:10 and starved the rest of the day, hands trembling as she held her micrometer, a strange electric joy swerving through her.
The next morning she worked furiously to make the time go faster, and had finished three quarters of her tray when the whistle blew. Nell was waiting with the bicycle. Anna rode that day in the direction of the building ways, cycling past their porous iron latticework several times and glimpsing, within shadowy vectors, a hull so vast it looked primordial. The USS Missouri. Having heard its name murmured since she’d arrived at the Yard, Anna found it uncanny, almost frightening, to actually see it. The thing itself.
Now that she was measuring more quickly, she began helping some of the slower girls to finish their trays when hers was done. One afternoon, Mr. Voss brought her a roll of blueprints and asked her to deliver them to the office of the captain of the Yard, in Building 77. Buoyed by the marrieds’ pantomimed stupefaction, Anna hurried south along Morris Avenue and then Sixth Street to the faceless new building, which had no windows except at the very top. She rode an elevator to the fifteenth floor and found herself surrounded by walls imprinted with maps. The windows showed only sky, but a chilly glance from a secretary in street clothes stymied Anna’s impulse to help herself to the view. The next afternoon, Mr. Voss sent her to the same office to retrieve a parcel. This ferrying of packages imbued Anna with a frisson of secrecy, even subterfuge, that she couldn’t fully account for. She felt like a spy.
Without exchanging more than salutations as they passed the bicycle back and forth, Anna and Nell became friends of a sort. It was nothing like Anna’s friendships with Stella Iovino or Lillian Feeney, girls from her building and block with whom she’d played paper dolls and jumped rope and helped to mind each other’s younger siblings. Nor was it like her college friendships with studious girls from Crown Heights and Bay Ridge. Nell was not a good girl. Her secrets weren’t for Anna to know, and this made her feel easy in Nell’s presence—released from a scaffolding of pretense she’d been unaware of having to maintain with other girls.
When Nell was late, Anna waited by Building 4, dodging the cranes that slid in and out of its barnlike doors with giant metal flats suspended on ropes from their serrated jaws. She liked to peer inside at the welders with their heavy gloves and flaming rods. Sometimes, when a welder pulled off a protective mask, Anna was astonished to find that it was a girl. These girl welders ate their lunches sitting on the floor against a wall, steel-toed boots jutting into the room. Watching them, Anna felt her own grating distance from something urgent, elemental. Even before Pearl Harbor, this feeling had dogged her. It was what had drawn her to the Naval Yard last summer, when word first went around that girls would be hired. Yet even here the war seemed maddeningly abstract, at too great a distance to be felt. Anna longed somehow to touch it, and sensed she wasn’t alone. Once she’d spotted Rose furtively scratching a nail file against a copper tube from her measuring tray. As they were changing back into street clothes in the locker room, Anna asked what she’d been doing. Rose flushed. “You sound like Mr. Voss.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Anna said. “I’m just curious.”
Rose confessed that she’d been scratching her baby son’s initials onto the tube, moved by the thought of his name out at sea, a tiny part of an Allied ship.