Rumors of Peace by Ella Leffland Page A

their backyards and planted victory gardens.
    We planted beans, potatoes, and spinach. I liked working with the black pungent clods, pressing the seeds down. I envisioned the first frail shoots and then the sudden springing forth of foliage, surely a miracle. And I wondered if it was just spring that made everything seem better or if it was the fact that despite our disastrous chain of military defeats we had not yet been bombed.
    It would not do to feel too sure. What the enemy banked on was our becoming relaxed, careless, as we had been before Pearl Harbor.

    One day I looked at Peter and felt a shock. All at once he was tall, and he had taken to combing his hair back from his forehead with brilliantine. His nose and cheekbones had sprung into prominence; his jawline was sharper; he had a gaunt, chiseled, mysterious look.
    â€œYou don’t practice anymore,” I told him.
    â€œPractice what?”
    â€œYour drum. ”
    â€œOh, that.” All he talked about now was becoming an architect. He got a job on Saturdays selling shoes at Buster Brown’s, and he put on a tweed suit and a yellow knit tie and sauntered off, pausing at the corner to light a Fleetwood. It was only too easy to picture him in uniform now; he could be one of those tall, gangling soldiers downtown on a last leave from Camp Stoneman, which was a few miles up the bay. It was where the troops were loaded onto gray carriers that plowed through the Golden Gate toward the screams and crossfire and jungle quicksand of the islands.
    But Peter wouldn’t be eighteen for another year, and the war might end by then. Sometimes I felt my mind leaping recklessly past the war, to all the years beyond, life streaming on and on, in sunlight, like a river. But I always pulled back. To want that, to pinpoint it, was to hang it with a bull’s-eye for demolition. You had to use camouflage, even in the privacy of your own mind.

    I was studying my mason jar, which was filled with mildewed oranges from which I hoped to grow penicillin.
    â€œI really wish you’d put that out of sight,” Karla murmured, doing her homework.
    â€œI have to check it. Anyway, what about your jar?”
    She had her nylons stuffed in a jar.
    â€œThat’s to keep them from rotting.”
    â€œWell, these oranges have to rot.”
    â€œOh well,” she shrugged, and gave me a smile. “It doesn’t matter.” She didn’t care about my side of the room anymore because she wouldbe leaving soon. She would be graduating from high school in June and had won a scholarship to the Art Institute in San Francisco. In the fall she would move there.

    I received a postcard from Ezio, in his huge scrawling handwriting that had to bunch up at the edge. He rode his uncle’s plow horse, Mario had a big boil on his seat, so long for now. If only I could take Ezio with me into junior high school, that red-tiled palace where the girls shrieked and the boys slouched and, in spite of this mutual unattractiveness, walked with their arms around each other. My hated but familiar grammar school life was rapidly drawing to an end.
    There was something I should do before leaving. During air raid drills Miss Bonder no longer pulled down the Venetian blinds against the possibility of flying glass. When I pointed this out to her, she had replied, “Thank you, Suse, but I think I know what’s necessary and what’s not.” I felt it my duty to report her to Sheriff O’Toole, but it seemed underhanded. Anyway, the rules all seemed to be letting up. The school drills were not as frequent as they had been, and the nighttime alarms came only every ten days or so. I was beginning to feel the passing of a crisis, as if I had suffered a violent cold that had passed from its sneeze-exploding crest to a dry, chronic chest pain, a kind of natural condition, manageable.

    On the last day of school the sixth-grade classes had an orangeade party in the town park.