“Janie!” Claire said, leaning over and smacking her hand. “What a thing to say. She’s been in a war. They probably didn’t even have good food to eat.”
“Sorry,” Janie said, her cheeks flushing pink.
Janie had always been shorter and rounder than Claire and me, something she’d bemoaned at least once a day every day during our time in high school. She’d slimmed some since I’d seen her last, which wasn’t a surprise since she’d been on and off some crazy diet since the day we’d met. Her mother, a glimmer of what mine was, was always bringing her articles she’d clipped to encourage anything from only eating grapefruit to taking Bile Beans, a pill she found advertised in a magazine while getting her hair done at the salon.
Claire, the tallest of us, looked the same as she always had, her raven hair rolled but a little messy, her clothes expensive but partially wrinkled, her makeup an afterthought, blush not all the way blended, lipstick on her front tooth, a smear of mascara beneath her eye. She hated all of it, but did it to make her mother, who was a well-known stage actress and purchased it all despite Claire’s protests, happy.
I looked down at my thin arms that only two months ago had been lean, strong, and browned from the sun. Now they were just thin. And pale.
“Food definitely wasn’t what it is here,” I said with a laugh. “And I haven’t had much of an appetite since returning stateside, thanks to the pain.”
“Well, you look beautiful,” Claire said. “And your hair has gotten so long!”
I ran a hand over it and then twirled a blond lock around my finger. For years I’d kept it just below shoulder length and perfectly styled, but on the island there was no time for that. I’d always had it pulled back, barely giving notice to how long it had gotten. It wasn’t until I got home and my aunt mentioned calling in a hairdresser to give it a trim that I gave it any thought.
“Hair care has been the last thing on my mind,” I said.
“Well, it suits you,” Claire said. “You look like a princess.”
“Secret princess,” Janie whispered and we all laughed.
It was first thing she’d said to me when we’d met nearly ten years ago. Apparently, she and Claire had been watching me for days, wondering who I was and where I’d come from, finally making up a story that I was really a princess in hiding. It was only when we tentatively became friends and they came to my house and met my aunt and uncle that they decided I was just a regular girl like them. I just sometimes pronounced words in a slightly funny way.
“What was that word she always used to say?” Claire asked, peering first at Janie, then at me. “It was as if you had an accent. I loved it.”
I pasted a smile on my face, the old worry I’d thought I could finally bury resurfacing in an instant.
“Oh yeah!” Janie said. “What was it again?”
“Measure,” I said, in a perfect American accent.
“Oh right,” Claire said, and then repeated the word how I’d done years before, giving it, unbeknownst to her, a slight German accent.
“Yes, well,” I said, sitting straighter and lifting my chin just so. “That’s what you get when you grow up with a mother who loved vacationing in Switzerland and got it in her head that one sounds more elegant and refined if you pronounce certain words in a particular way.”
They had no idea how true the statement was. How many hours I’d stood beside her vanity, straight-backed, head held high, while pronouncing words just so as she applied her makeup and had her hair done, smacking the backs of my hands with her glass emery board if I said something wrong or slouched.
“She sounds like she was a riot,” Janie said. “You must miss her so much.”
It was certainly the lie I told. My poor parents, dead in a car crash, leading me to move in with my aunt and uncle, the only family I had left.
In reality, I’d escaped a monster.
We ate in the dining room, a meal dreamed up by Angeline, our cook, who felt the occasion deserved “a bit of style,” the idea sending her and Aunt Victoria hurrying to the kitchen to plan a menu the day before. Creamy potato soup, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a bowl of fresh fruit, and for dessert, tea and individual cakes.
“Your aunt sure went all out,” Janie said.
In truth, it was a simple meal, rationing taking a toll on some of the finer ingredients that might have been chosen. But fresh herbs from the greenhouse we kept out back helped any meal taste better.
As we ate and talked, I found myself quieter than I might’ve normally been, listening, watching, comparing. Even though I’d been home for nearly two months now, I still felt out of place. The problems here were not the problems overseas. True, my friends worried for the lives of their husbands who were fighting in the war, and for good reason. But their own lives had barely changed. They talked about shopping and shows they’d seen, friends they’d lunched with, and the best way to get a pureed pea stain out of the carpet.
They had no idea what it was to bathe using water shared out of a helmet, find creatures in their beds, sweat through their clothing but keep wearing them because your supply of clean clothes was limited. They didn’t know how our hearts got ripped out every time we flew, the cries of the soldiers staying with us, echoing in our dreams at night long after we’d delivered them safely to the hospital.
And they definitely didn’t know what it was to be at that precarious preteen age and lose your best friend to an unspeakable evil. To turn up to school one morning and find her not in her seat. To rush from class and search the halls, the library, and every bathroom, and not find her. To hurry to the nurse’s office and claim sickness, because the nausea was building as worry coursed through your body. And then to lie so they’d let you get home on your own, but really you went by that friend’s house to find her and her mother packing their things in a hurry, fear and dread reflected in their eyes.
Ruthie.
I’d had no one to talk to. No one I could turn to or cry to. My aunt had left by then, my only other friends the ones approved by my parents, and thus not people I could trust with the truth of my ongoing friendship with sweet, funny, Jewish Ruthie.
