The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“It is what it is.”


“And what are you? I mean, I know who you are. I don’t know what you are.”

“You know what I am. I’m Mr. Boppit. And the other common ground that’s most common between you and me besides our feelings about shoes is Neave. I’m Neave’s protector, and now she’s in trouble. Your job here is to help me help her.”

“But we’re dead.”

“Where we are and where she is are much closer than you think. There are even places where they occupy the same spot. You have a lot of Neave in your head, and she has a lot of you in hers. Shared, common ground. Cherished ground. That’s why I’m here to collect you. Also, the kind of trouble that Neave’s in right now is trouble that you put her in. It’s your trouble, slid over onto her life.”

I knew what the dog meant. He meant Ricky.

“We’re going to put ourselves between her and him,” Boppit said.

“So … what do I do?”

“Well, while we’re here, why don’t we look at those silver strappy numbers by the first display table? Then we’re going to sit down and think about Neave.”

“Just think?”

“That’s usually the best start.”





LILLY

Arnold Strato’s War

Oddly, 1942 is much clearer to me from Where I Am Now than it was when I was in 1942 itself. Snyder reached his eighteenth birthday, reported for the draft, and was discovered to be almost entirely deaf in his left ear. Maybe Neave did it when she clobbered him. Or his hearing in that ear might always have been bad or absent, and he’d just gotten used to it. He was designated 4F, and Daddy was furious. Mommy told him that there was no one to blame. But he did blame. He blamed Snyder.

My brother joined the thousands of women and older men working in munitions factories, and in his free hours he disappeared inside his comic books. The entire population of his comic book world was fighting the war and the BLAM!BOP!BANG! on the pages Snyder read always meant victory for the Forces of Good. Just a little inconvenient resistance to make the ultimate victory meaningful and BLAM!BOP!BANG!

We’d sit in dark movie theaters and watch the newsreels, good-looking pilots with girls dangling from their elbows, beautiful uniforms and devil-may-care expressions, cigarettes dangling from their lips, hearty laughter. Very sexy.

War, the newsreels, the prospect of brave boys dying to defend our homes. Girls who the month before would slap a boy for slipping a hand under a waistband now allowed liberties to heroic young men facing death. Our parents’ idea of the future—the far-away place with a family gathered around a meat loaf and a good mortgage rate on the house—it just shrank away. There was more Now, less Later. Love (In These Times) got a lot of people between its teeth and shook them hard, and that’s how it got Arnold Strato.

I knew that Arnold had come to those first stupid Monsters in the Movies meetings because he was interested in me. I’d let him kiss me behind the gym one Friday afternoon after school just to test-drive the experience. Arnold was at a point in his life where girls took up lots of the room in his head, but he didn’t see them as people. He saw them as romantic objects, which is sweet but dumb. I brushed him off. After all, cute as he was, he’d still showed up at a Monsters in the Movies club meeting. Not sexy.

Then in his junior year Susie Brink caught his eye and he fell like a bird shot out of the sky: Susie Brink, who was as pretty and empty as a Christmas ornament. Having no personality of her own to speak of, she was perfectly happy being some boy’s standard factory-line romantic object. Arnold didn’t know that when she leaned over his desk in advanced algebra class to tell him she so much needed his help with problem number seven that she was making sure he had an uninterrupted view of her new brassiere’s lace details. Pitiful cliché move. Any boy smart enough to get my attention would have seen it for exactly what it was and been merely amused. But Arnold was pure and stupid. The girl poleaxed him.

When Pearl Harbor put all those boys in uniform, Susie B made it clear that boys in uniform truly deserved a girl’s respect and attention. Susie B couldn’t name more than three American presidents, and if you asked her where Oregon was she’d have trouble finding it on a map, but she knew how to brush by a boy in a way that left him a little breathless. Off she went to express her patriotism with several other young men, and Arnold couldn’t stand it. He convinced his mother to sign a paper that said he could enlist before his eighteenth birthday, and he got himself in uniform as fast as he could. He was just a few weeks short, he’d argued when his mother tried to slow him down. If local gossip was accurate, the uniform worked. Susie Brink awarded Arnold the final favors, or so whispers in the high school hallways reported. In the old world, the world before the war, that kind of whisper would make Susie Brink an outcast. In this new world, she was a patriotic and heartbroken young woman in love. She had given in to her feelings, which were understandable In These Times.

Neave had had a crush on Arnold since forever. She’d have denied it, but that would mostly be because she didn’t recognize what she had as a crush. My sister was as dopily romantic and inexperienced as Arnold Strato. In a heaven where looks and gawkiness don’t matter, Neave would have snagged Arnold Strato easily. But she wasn’t living in heaven and those things matter in life.

Then, war. Most of the guys who might have been interesting enough to date were enlisted. So when the USO had dances for the guys, we girls went to them as a kind of public service to the troops. At first it was fun. Then they started coming back from postings—overseas stuff as well as from training—and they were different. Rough. They didn’t pay attention to you when you told them to get their hand off your ass. They laughed, and put the other hand up your blouse. No class, no money, no manners, so as far as I was concerned, no reason to keep going to USO dances. I was not the kind of girl who thought a uniform gave you the right to keep your hand on my ass. The movies say that war turns raw material into noble men, but from the dance floor at the Charlestown navy station USO, it looked like it just turned a lot of them into pigs.

Sharon Pywell's books