CHAPTER 15
Maggie
The summer recess from school has been long, hot, and boring. We’ve lived in Philadelphia eight months, and I still feel like I’m the new girl. Going home to Quakertown for two weeks wasn’t as much fun as I thought it was going to be, either. My old friends somehow filled in the gap of my leaving and are just fine without me. I suppose that’s how it is when a friend moves away and you stay right where you are; you figure out how to live without that friend. We really don’t have anything in common anymore, my old friends and I. They’ve stayed exactly the same, but I feel different after nearly a year in the city.
Before we left for our visit to Quakertown, a school chum named Sally invited me to her house along with her friend Ruby. She was probably just being nice to me, because she and Ruby are best pals, but I had fun with them. Sally is not someone I can tell all my secrets to yet, and I don’t know if she ever will be. Still, it was nice to be included, and it will make returning to classes a little easier. The person I spend most of my time with these days is Charlie. He’s a bit like Willa in the wayhe thinks, but he’s kinder than Willa and only wants to make people happy. Willa just wants to make Willa happy.
Today was better than most days have been. I got a letter from Jamie Sutcliff. I’ve written to him five times already, but this is the first I’ve heard back from him. It was dated the twelfth of July and here it is mid-August and I got it today. In his letter he wrote that he had just arrived in France. He sailed to Europe on a troop ship called theAmerica, and he couldn’t say much about it except that they had to take turns sleeping on the cots because there were too many soldiers for the number of beds. He also said that he had to turn in his flashlight and matches when he got on board because no one was allowed to shine a light or strike a match on deck after dark. The voyage took nine days. It was strange walking on land again, he said, but he was very glad to get off that ship. He didn’t say more, but I remember Charlie saying Jamie didn’t care for ships, only trains. Then he wrote something that surprised me. France isn’t all that different than Pennsylvania, he said. They have schoolhouses and vegetable gardens and birthday parties just like we do. They hang their laundry out to dry under the same sun. They kiss those they love and put diapers on their little ones and hold memorial services for their dead, just like we do. Germany is probably just the same, he said. Just the same. Not even the language in France seems that strange. It isn’t until the marching starts that Europe seems like a different place.
In one of my letters to Jamie, I told him how hard it has been making close friends and that the summer has been especially boring. He wrote to me that sometimes people can be slow to give new things a try. He told me to be patient. The right friend will come along in due time. He said not to go sour on people just because they haven’t given me a chance yet.
Reading those words that he wrote special to me made me feel light as a feather. There were only two people I could think of who would be as happy as I was at that moment to have heard from Jamie.
•••
I open the front door and take off across the street to show Mrs. Sutcliff and Charlie my letter. Mrs. Sutcliff comes to her door with a polishing cloth in her hand. She invites me inside, and I can see that she’d been polishing a silver tea service set atop newspaper pages on her dining room table.
“Is Charlie home?” I say as I close the door behind me, a bit out of breath from running across the street and up the stairs to their apartment.
“I’m afraid you’ve just missed him,” Mrs. Sutcliff says, stuffing her polishing cloth into her apron pocket. “He’s gone to the mechanic’s with Mr. Sutcliff. The car needed servicing.”
I am only momentarily disappointed. “I’ve a letter from Jamie!” I say, showing her the envelope, and suddenly realizing I am quite likely offering to let Dora Sutcliff read it. Why else have I brought it?
“Do you, now?” she says brightly. “We received one today, too.”
She turns to a little writing table behind her on which a little stack of mail is resting, along with a tin of peppermints, an electric lamp with an emerald green shade, and a brass dish with a handful of coins in it. Mrs. Sutcliff reaches for an envelope and turns back around. The outside of her letter looks exactly like mine.
“Shall we trade for a moment?” Mrs. Sutcliff says happily.
“Sure.” I hand over my precious letter and she gives me hers.
When I take her letter out of its envelope, I’m surprised and pleased that my letter is twice as long as the one Jamie wrote to his parents and Charlie. But I say nothing about that, of course. Mrs. Sutcliff takes mine out and easily sees it for herself. She looks surprised, too.
Jamie wrote to his parents about the voyage on the troop ship, just like he wrote to me. He wrote about the weather in France and the army food they were eating and how much he missed home-cooked meals. He also said there had been reports of influenza spreading fromcamp to camp, but that his mother needn’t worry. It wasn’t showing up in his regiment. He said nothing about how strangely the same we all are no matter where we live. That was something special he wrote just to me, as well as the advice about making friends at school.
“What a very nice letter,” Mrs. Sutcliff says as she folds mine into thirds and slips it back inside its envelope, but her voice has a funny little lift to it, like she is saying one thing and thinking another.
“Yours is, too,” I reply.
We exchange envelopes and I’m glad to have mine back.
“I’m glad you’re writing to him, Maggie,” Mrs. Sutcliff tells me, and this time I can tell she means what she says.
I stay for a bit longer, hoping Charlie will arrive home. But he doesn’t and I need to get back myself.
Mrs. Sutcliff thanks me for coming over to show her my letter and offers to send Charlie over when he returns if I want. I tell her I do.
When I am back inside my house, my feet head to the funeral parlor without my thinking about it. Mama is in the embalming room applying flesh-colored paste to the cheeks of an older woman whose white hair looks as soft and fluffy as candy floss.
She smiles up at me. “Did you see your letter?”
I smile back. I cannot help it. “Want me to read it to you?”
“Certainly.”
I read Mama the letter, and Jamie’s words sound even nicer said out loud. When I get to the part where he wrote that people aren’t so very different from one another no matter where they live, I look down at the dead woman Mama is caring for, and I can’t help thinking that somewhere in France, somewhere in Germany, somewhere in all the places in the world, people like Mama are doing the same thing for loved ones who’ve just died and are being made ready for their last moments above the ground.
