a roll. Presents could go both ways, though: Kewpie dolls and snap-
shots and locks of hair and things brought back from Hawaii or claimed
to have been. Though that stuff wasn’t what the BBs meant when they
306 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
said a present. It’s okay, you’d say when some other girl marveled at
how far you’d gone, the chance you’d taken, true story or not— It’s
okay, I bought him a you know, a present. That foil-wrapped packet
you could get for a quarter from the machine in the men’s toilet while
another BB kept watch for you ( get one for me too, well heck just in
case) or buy from a pharmacy unless the guy behind the counter was a
fuddy-duddy and wouldn’t sell them to a female, even one with a gold
ring on. All the servicemen got issued their hygiene packets, but most
didn’t bring one along. So it was hard, but they were really scared of
the clap, and even more scared of a good-bye baby, and the boys some-
times didn’t remember or didn’t care, and most of the girls didn’t
believe that the vinegar douche would work (or the one with Coke that
the tougher girls claimed to use, all six ounces, warm, capped with a
thumb while shaken, inserted), and anyway who was going to jump
out of bed and into the john just at that moment, that precious moment,
if you were even somewhere that had a john, or a bed.
All theoretical to Diane, whose greatest fear was negotiating her
absences from the house on the Heights just to get to be on the BB
periphery, where she remained for a long time: till she proved to have
something not all of them had, not even the wised-up ones, the slick
chicks; a thing that some learned to envy and some to despise in her—
it took Diane a long time herself to know it. Come summer she con-
vinced her family to let her go with other students from her school to
work weekends at Van Damme Aero outside the city, maybe a night
shift sometimes if it was really called for, and then during the week too
when school was over. To do her part. Her mother weeping in some
nameless mix of shame and pride to see her in her overalls and ban-
danna. If sometimes the hours she said she worked didn’t match the
money in her pay envelope, well they didn’t need to count it, she was
like a soldier now she said (clapping her lunch pail closed), and they
had to trust her. Watchful as he was, her father always slept as deeply
and lifelessly as his truck with the ignition off, the more soundly the
later it grew (years afterward, alone in that house, he was going to die
in a fire, awaking too late), and so he didn’t know what time she came
in. What her mother heard she didn’t say.
Out with the BBs she wore the same sloppy socks and big sweaters
they did, sweaters that slipped almost from your shoulder, so that you
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 307
had to tug it back in place slowly now and then as if not thinking about
it, as if wholly absorbed in the flyboy’s face that you were holding with
your eyes, except that his eyes didn’t stay with your eyes, but stayed
with you yes. It was flyboys that were the prized ones. They got just as
crazy as the other boys, who were crazy enough; but they seemed to
like girls who weren’t silly and who didn’t talk all the time, who could
just let a moment like that (eyes, sweater, silence) come and stay. That
was what Diane learned to do (by accident, sort of, at first just tongue-
tied and keeping erect and still out of shy fear) and got good at: and
when she did it and knew it worked she felt a dark sweet sensation that
spread like a stain from its starting point, that point below, and spread
all through her, and that he seemed to share. Just being seen and look-
ing back, unblinking like women in the movies, like Rita Hayworth.
The BBs wore thin silk scarves at their throats, and only they knew
what the colors meant, what achievements or conquests—pink, white,
blue, orange—but there was no color for causing that: it was unname-
able, unclaimable, and the only one she counted. The BBs saw her do it
without showing that they were watching her.
Fliers, because fliers could die. Of course any of them in uniform
could die, except the clerks and the janitors and the orderlies, but the
flyboys seemed closer to it, and more liable to die. As though surviving
or fighting or marching or other things were the jobs of others, and
dying, or taking that chance on dying, was theirs. It melted your heart:
she’d always heard people say that, and now she knew that it was a real
feeling you could have. But you heard of women, not V-girls and way
on past girls who asked for money, who married fliers because of the
government life insurance, $10,000 they said; and the flier was the one
to go for, because you had the best chance of collecting quickly. Diane
decided there was no truth to that.
Danny was a flyboy, but only in a way. He was back from his stint
at Pearl now and training pilots at the Naval Air Station, going up with
the student pilots in an old Bull fighter plane that he seemed to both
cherish and hold in contempt, like a feckless older brother. So nobody
was going to shoot Danny down, and he got a lot of leave, and pretty
soon he was the only one Diane went with to the Duck and other
places. He didn’t realize she’d chosen him and forgone all others, and
she didn’t tell him; and because she thought the BBs might reveal it—
308 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
she knew which ones, and why they would, that cruelty that shot
through their solidarity, it could catch you like a pin left in a satin
dress—she started to draw him away from the places that that crowd
went to and toward others. And maybe it was because they were alone
together away from the BBs and the soldiers they followed, but their
feelings, hers and Danny’s, intensified in ways that surprised Diane,
she hadn’t expected it, becoming something not so much like a game
anymore, and when he talked again about those rooms you could get
she asked him whether he was pretending, just to tease her, or whether
there really were such places and what they were like, nice or nasty. He
told her, and he told the truth, and he never insisted; he pretended
along with her that they were just considering a funny thing that existed
in the world, places that others, people who weren’t he and she, might
use or go to. But once they were actually there in one of them (not nice,
exactly, not nasty but bare and cheerless certainly, she made him leave
the light off so as not to see, the only light falling on them then the red
glow of the neon hotel sign that ran up the building’s front), he
refused the present she had brought, which one of the BBs had given
her long before as a joke or a tease. I want to feel you baby not a
sheep’s gut. She felt his fluid absorbed not just into those parts but
seeping, staining, proceeding—what was the word in chemistry for
how it happened, it sounded like the thing it meant—into the whole of
her, her heart and breast and throat. Rather than draining away like
any other flooding would, the feeling went on increasing, and in not
too long a time she knew why. She told him as they sat at dawn on their
bench in the park. He held her a long time very gently and she said she
felt a little icky-sicky now at morning. And without letting her go he