SEEING MY EFFECT ON HIM, I DELIVERED MY MOST GLANCING, CASUAL smile. Then I scanned the room like I was looking for somebody else. I held my head so he’d see the better side of my face, and meanwhile, in a great stroke of luck, my new boyfriend chose just the right moment to help me out of my raincoat.
There I stood, unmoving, while the coat slid off my bare shoulders.
I even let my hand rest on my new boyfriend’s arm like it was the banister of a grand marble staircase, and I was in an evening gown about to descend it.
It was a good moment, it really was, until my new boyfriend leaned in to see what I wanted. “What’s that?” he said. “Please, Grace, you have to speak up.”
He had tinnitus from all the explosions. It was something I found hard to handle, and I almost said something impatient, but then I remembered the bruise. It helped me regain my composure. I remembered how, earlier in the evening, I’d inspected it while I took out my curlers and discovered that, though its outer ring was yellow and sickly, the center was black as the night.
It was a powerful bruise, it really was. I felt it deeply. In some ways, I felt I’d gone to that party not with my new boyfriend but with that magnificent bruise, so even when my new boyfriend leaned in and annoyed me, I was able to remember it and smile up at him sweetly, then hand him my purse, and excuse myself to go to the bathroom.
I COULD FEEL HIM WATCHING ME AS I WENT. NOT MY NEW BOYFRIEND, but Jack. It was Jack whose eyes I could feel, so warm and almost wet on the back of my head that for a second I wondered if I’d started bleeding. It was all I could do not to reach my hand up to check, but instead I kept my composure all the way to the bathroom, and only once I’d closed the door did I allow myself to feel nervous and overexcited, and sit there on the lid of the toilet counting from one to ten Mississippi, hoping my heart would stop uncontrollably racing.
I HADN’T BEEN SURE HE’D BE AT THAT PARTY. THERE WERE MOMENTS, of course, when I suspected he might be. But I’d also heard rumors that he was out scouting locations.
So I’d curled my hair and worn the red lipstick he once told me he liked, but I hadn’t prepared myself absolutely, and I definitely wasn’t prepared for him to be standing there when I walked in through the door, as if he’d positioned himself by the entrance to greet me.
Even so, my bruise and I had impressed him. He’d watched me all the way down the hallway, and by the time I was sitting there on the toilet, I knew that it was possible that he was waiting for me in the darkness outside, and that soon, perhaps, if I gave up my hiding place, we’d be standing together alone, as we’d once been alone in other dark places.
Knowing that, it was hard to calm down. When I got up to wash my hands, my fingertips were trembling. But then I looked at the bruise in the mirror and the very sight of it calmed me. My face with that bruise: It was young and alluring. It wasn’t at all the haggard old visage that sometimes showed up in my mirror in the WAC dorm.
There, again, set off by the bruise, was the good line of my nose, and there was the delicate bow of my lip. Then I smiled to myself in the mirror, as I planned to smile at Jack, because by then, of course, I knew he’d be out there. I knew he’d be waiting for me in the hallway, and that as soon as I stepped out he’d reach forward and touch me.
“PLEASE, GRACE,” HE SAID, WHEN HE DID. HE HAD HIS THUMB UNDER my chin, tilting it up, so he could look down sadly upon me.
“Please what?” I said.
“Please,” he said. “I can’t sit back and watch this.”
“Watch what?” I said. And I smiled my jauntiest debutante smile, and gave him one last look at the bruise, then threw my shoulders back and sailed into the party.
IT WAS A TRIUMPH, IT REALLY WAS, ESPECIALLY AFTER THAT OTHER occasion.
Of course, by the time I showed up to that other party, I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours. We’d all gone to June Steenberger’s house because Germany had surrendered, and she had a projector in her big green McKee house, which she got because her husband was in the theoretical group.
So we all sat around, drinking colas and watching the newsreel, and June was ostentatiously pregnant. She was wedged on the couch, knitting a little pink blanket, and smiling like a dumb cow through the whole program as if Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender and the opening of those camps were all nothing more than the background of her own personal nativity set.
At every new development they reported about General Eisenhower and the unconditional terms of surrender, she picked up her knitting again and murmured some sweet wifely comment, like “I guess we can go home now,” or “What a relief it will be to have my own stove back.”
There I sat on the floor, surrounded by wives with stoves to go home to, and in my state of despair I kept my eyes on the next newsreel and the horrible shadows that kept sliding over the screen, those skeletons emerging out of the camps, blinking vulnerably in the new sunlight.
And then I remembered how thin my mother got in the last weeks, when she was dying, and I slept in the big bed alongside her.
I thought of the bones in her shoulders, and meanwhile June kept knitting that blanket and talking about going home with her husband, and in order to survive how vindictive I felt, I had to take a deep breath and have pity because once, when we went to the lake, June wore a bathing suit and her thighs were pure cottage cheese.
And later, when I went off by myself to pick berries, I felt her husband watching me, with my nice legs and my tan and the little white shorts I was wearing that summer.
And usually that scene would have calmed me, but as soon as I remembered them—the berries that grew near the lake, and the thorns that grabbed at my hair when I lay down among them—the pity I felt was for myself. It was rising up to my throat, rising so high I was sure it would drown me. Because then I remembered the edge of the lake, licking the sand with its silver tongue, and that rock that jutted out into the water, parting it, causing it to subside, because of course that was the rock where Jack taught me to swim, back when the two of us were a couple.
There I was again, up on that rock, shivering wet in my little suit, trying to get the nerve to jump in.
And there was the sunlight, braided into the ripples, and Jack down below, his hand over his eyes when he grinned up and laughed, urging me to jump into the water.
And meanwhile, at June’s house, the newsreel kept trumpeting on about Victory and a Great War, and June and Charlotte and Kay were conspiring about what they’d cook first when they’d gone home to Princeton, and it was miserable, but I wouldn’t leave.
Out of stubbornness, I stayed a long time, celebrating the end of the war while I drowned in my own personal sorrow, and it wasn’t until two or three in the morning that I finally got back to the WAC dorm.
When I opened the door, the lamp wasn’t on, so it was dark when I saw my cot, and the GI chair in the corner, and the stack of big books I kept on my nightstand in case Jack happened to stop by and see them. Then I forced myself to look back at the GI chair, and confronted the nest of young rats that had somehow ended up there.
They were wriggling and squirming, blindly nestling in toward their mother, and I had to blink at them for a while before I realized they were actually socks. I’d knotted them up after doing my laundry, but there hadn’t been time to put them away before I headed to June’s house.
So there they were, a nest of baby rats, and by the time I’d figured it out, my heart was racing, so then I got into my cot to calm down.
But of course the harder I tried to lie still, the harder my heart insisted on beating, so there I lay in a panic until at some point the next day Charlotte and Freddy stopped by the dorm and invited me along to that other party.