HR
*
Fridays at the Yacht Club were a lot less fun with the boys gone.
It took some mettle for Ruby to get herself all gussied and glammed. If you were togged to the bricks and no one was around to see, then what? She didn’t even have Hattie around, offering her review. All that and her duds didn’t fit exactly as they should. Ruby was “in the club,” as they said. In other words, she was pregnant.
Not that she was complaining. Ruby was thrilled to be officially on stork watch, despite the strained buttons on the blouse and the stretched fabric across her backside. At least she wasn’t in E-Z-On maternity frocks just yet. But Lord did Ruby find herself constantly beat, and how. Beat and green-gilled and forever itching to take a snoozer under the buffet table. Plus, her hooves were awfully swollen for someone still able to (somewhat) squeeze into her same clothes. All that and gin tasted weird—less ginny somehow. It took most of Ruby’s gumption to polish off a single glass. But she had to. How else was she to sleep?
Pregnant. Three months gone. All Ruby ever wanted was to be a mother. But a day late and all that, at least regarding the draft board. She’d been hoping for class 3-B: men with dependents engaged in war work, and therefore exempt from service. With Daddy’s gas mask production Sam had the work box ticked, but their love bug was not a dependent quite yet. And so Sam joined the service.
At that very moment Sam was still Stateside, training for whatever calamitous situation Uncle Sam would throw him into. After a month or two—the timing was aggravatingly vague—Ruby’s dear husband would step aboard a ship bound for a strange land and with God knows what munitions strapped to his body and stashed in his trunk. He was the kindest, most generous man to grace the mortal world and Ruby could not square with the fact that he was training to stare another human dead in the eyes and shoot.
“I’m learning to work a boat,” he swore. “That’s all.”
It was a very Sam Packard type of lie, gentleman that he was.
And Topper, well, Topper had to top them all. He’d taken up as a nose gunner in the AAF, flying B-24 Liberators—which were built for tall pilots, he did not fail to add. The boy had always been proud of his stature. Ruby was surprised he didn’t claim Liberator pilots had to likewise be certified as officially debonair. Ruby pictured the commotion he must’ve made with the ladies when he visited the local canteen in his uniform and sheepskin jacket.
Like Sam, Topper was neck-deep in training, which sounded preferable to war, except when her baby brother got too frank with the details. Things like unreliable fuel gauges and engines that fell plumb away. And the Krauts weren’t even shooting at them yet.
“Don’t worry, Ruby Red,” he wrote. “The planes have four engines.”
Yes, four engines. Until they had three. It was the first time Ruby realized a soldier could die before he began to fight. Thank God Sam was on a ship, which seemed safer somehow, Pearl Harbor notwithstanding. He wouldn’t last two minutes with plane parts dropping off.
“Madame,” said one of the Yacht Club waiters, and set a plate before Ruby. It had on it a thin slice of cake, or a facsimile of cake anyway. “Your dessert.”
“Thanks,” Ruby said, though she didn’t have the stomach for it.
As the waitstaff bustled about, Ruby poked and clicked at her plate, scoping the room and its guests. They weren’t all women. There were plenty of old fellows and at least a dozen servicemen now that the Yacht Club was open to all in uniform. Or as Mary griped the night before: “It’s become a real mixed bag.”
But although the dining room was chockablock with Nantucketers and off-islanders alike, there wasn’t a one Ruby cared to kibitz with. She was awfully lonely in such a crowded room.
“Hello there,” called a voice.
As if summoned for duty, Mary scissored up, looking ever more gray and haggard. Rationing had begun on their gilded shores, and Mary herself was like a rationed version of a normal dame. No sugar, lard, or gas with that one. The woman’s new, war-friendly, rubberless girdle didn’t help.
“Not that an old stick rule like Mary has anything to suck in,” Ruby could very nearly hear Hattie say.
Sakes alive, Ruby missed her friend. She missed their bull sessions, likewise their tennis matches and rounds of golf. To speak nothing of all the parties and tea dances they double-starred on their calendars, all summer long. Once again, Hattie’s voice clattered through Ruby’s ears.
“What’s with all the waltzing?” she said. “If we’re going to dance, we should dance. How about the rumba? I could teach ya. I learned it myself during one sen-saysh summer in Cuba.”
With Hattie gone, who would rumba then? It was rubber girdles and waltzes for the duration.
“How are you doing?” Mary asked, and lowered herself onto the chair beside Ruby.
“I’m okay,” Ruby said, still pushing her cake around the plate. “A tad fagged out.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t like the dessert?”
Ruby made a face and shrugged.
“Papier-maché is best left for homecoming floats,” she said.
“Well, sugar is under ration. Even our tongues must make sacrifices!”
Mary seemed almost giddy at the prospect of suffering all the way down to her taste buds. The woman was born to ration. Someone needed to clue her in that conserving personality and spunk wasn’t going to help the war effort.
“Talk about dim-out rules,” Hattie might’ve said.
A smirk found Ruby’s lips and she covered her mouth with a napkin.
“Something funny?” Mary asked in a slight huff.
“No, not at all.” Ruby cleared her throat and set her napkin back in her lap. “The rationing doesn’t bother me that much.”
“Then why are you sitting in a corner by yourself when there’s a party going on?”
“Some party,” Ruby mumbled. “Listen, Mare, it’s hard to explain. It’s nothing and everything at once. I’m just ‘off’ I suppose. Good grief, I really need to stop the bellyaching. Mother would have my head.”
Not that Sarah Young was a ball of sparkle herself lately. In fact, these days Sarah Young took the sourpuss prize, hands down.
“It must be hard,” Mary said, to Ruby’s vast surprise. “To face this pregnancy with Sam away, when it’s your first child and Mother Young…”
Mary wavered, plainly debating whether to release a potshot sitting at the tip of her tongue. Commiseration was dandy but you couldn’t go around biting the hand that fed you.
“She’s been a real crab lately, hasn’t she?” Ruby said with a laugh, knowing exactly where her sister-in-law was headed.