Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg Page A

an unimaginative daughter. Now, listen, girls. Write for another fifteen minutes, and then it’s lights-out. I’m going to need some help housecleaning tomorrow. I can’t go to Red Cross meetings twice a week and keep up with all the housework I used to do.” Louise and Tish sped up their writing. Kitty sighed and rubbed at the back of her neck. She wrote,
Ma’s busy with her Red Cross training. Last week, they laid someone out on the table to pretend she was wounded and suffering from shock, and Ma asked the other women what should be done next. One of them said, “Offer him a book.” I swear it’s true!
Kitty read over what she’d written, then wondered if it was wise to be talking about being wounded. Maybe it would frighten Julian. Maybe it was bad luck. She thought of what she might say to counteract what she’d written. Nothing came to her. Nothing. And look at the white space still at the bottom of her page. Kitty grabbed Tish’s lipstick, smeared some on her mouth, and made two big kiss marks on her letter.
“My
lipstick,” Tish said, but she didn’t look up.
    Oh, the kiss marks were a wonderful idea. They took up at least four lines.
With all my heart,
Kitty wrote next and signed off. In the blank space below, she drew a large heart. Surrounded by lace. Punctured by a large arrow. That took up six lines, and it brought her to the end of the page. Done.
    Happily, she folded her page and put them into the envelope. She addressed the envelope with the strange Army address, licked the stamp, affixed it, and pounded it with her fist so that it wouldn’t fall off. Wouldn’t that just be the topper?
             
    AFTER HER SISTERS FELL ASLEEP, Kitty lay thinking of Hank, the man she’d danced with. It wasn’t until they were sleeping that she’d felt safe thinking of him—she didn’t want things to come popping out of her mouth and set her sisters off asking ten thousand questions. She didn’t know quite what to make of him. He’d told her such odd things, things very much out of keeping with what everyone else was saying about the war; but it was all so compelling and completely sensible. He’d told her about a young man who’d booed an image of FDR on a newsreel at the movies. The man had been beaten up by the other men around him and fined two hundred dollars in court. But wasn’t freedom of speech one of the things we were fighting for? And the Japanese Americans—should such a violation of their rights be occurring here in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
    A few months after Pearl Harbor, Hank had seen a crowd of Japanese Americans waiting to board a train that would take them to internment camps. One of them had been a little girl, no more than four years of age, who sat on top of a suitcase tightly clutching a child’s purse. Huge, overstuffed duffel bags full of her family’s belongings surrounded her. She had an apple in her hand, but she wasn’t eating it; instead, she stared into space, looking frightened and sorrowful. He’d not been able to get the image out of his mind. “Know what I kept thinking?” he’d said to Kitty. “I kept wondering, what had she saved to carry in that little purse?”
    On the newsreels, they made it seem as though the Japanese American evacuation was a vacation. But when Kitty told Hank that, he had said, “Some vacation. The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Americans had their funds frozen and banks refused to cash their checks. Mailmen wouldn’t deliver their mail and the milkmen and grocers wouldn’t serve them, either. Insurance companies canceled their policies. They lost their jobs. And after Walter Lippmann’s column—you know about that column, don’t you?”
    Kitty didn’t. She’d made a sound that could have been interpreted as a yes and promised herself to read the paper cover to cover from now on.
    Hank had gone on. “Well, after that column, 110,000 people, the entire Japanese community of the West, were