Alice At The Home Front Read online

  Alice

  at the Home Front

  Mardiyah A. Tarantino

  iUniverse, Inc.

  Bloomington

  Alice at the Home Front

  Copyright © 2011 by Mardiyah A. Tarantino

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  ISBN: 978-1-4620-6800-5 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4620-6802-9 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4620-6801-2 (e)

  Cover drawing by the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  iUniverse rev. date: 12/13/2011

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Alice’s Complaint

  Chapter Two

  Bandages

  Chapter Three

  Sandbags

  Chapter Four

  Silk Stockings

  Chapter Five

  Dancing School

  Chapter Six

  Jimmy Brownell

  Chapter Seven

  A Pinpoint of Light

  Chapter Eight

  A Taste of Fear

  Chapter Nine

  The Bracelet

  Chapter Ten

  At the Corner Drugstore

  Chapter Eleven

  When the Nor’easter Blows

  Chapter Twelve

  Lens Grinding

  Chapter Thirteen

  Icy Waters

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spar Island

  Chapter Fifteen

  Victory Gardens

  Chapter Sixteen

  Summer Song

  Acknowledgments

  My warm thanks to Dr. Helen Bailie,

  To my Palm Springs Writer's Guild critique group,

  and to Son Richard Tarantino whose technical

  assistance was more than “swell”, it was

  invaluable.

  Chapter One

  Alice’s Complaint

  Alice tore off her jacket, dumped it on the bed with her books, and snatched up her binoculars. She checked to make sure the door was closed tightly behind her, wedging a notebook underneath it in case Mother tried to come in. She gave it a little kick and raced to the window. She struggled, lifting the handles evenly so the swollen wood wouldn’t get stuck halfway. If it did, she would have to close it and start over and there wasn’t any time for that. Bracing her feet against the wall, she pushed the window up and got slapped hard by the freezing nor’easter against her face.

  “Shoot!” she yelled when the cold hit her, but she didn’t care. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, squinted, and adjusted the heavy binoculars as closely as she could to her eyes. She leaned way out the window and peered in all directions, scanning the puffy gray sky.

  She swore she’d heard a Lockheed cruising somewhere up there, but she had to be certain. By now she’d memorized all the plane silhouettes on her cards and didn’t need to check. Sound was a different matter. You could recognize planes by the sound, but that took more practice. “I’m going to be an expert spotter, by gummy,” she told everyone who would listen. “I’m going to identify every plane that flies overhead whenever I get the chance.”

  In only minutes, Alice’s fingers were stiff as twigs in a blizzard and her face felt like an ice mask, but she didn’t give in. It had to be up there. Suppose she was wrong? Could it be a Messerschmitt and not a Lockheed? An enemy plane, and she hadn’t caught it!

  “A-lice!” Mother called from below. Alice could tell that kind of urgent call, like a mother cat calling her scattered kittens—not a good sign. She went to the door and opened it a crack. Mother had climbed the stairs and was standing in front of it. One touch of Alice’s cold face and she would guess what Alice had been up to. Then Mother saw the open window.

  “This has got to stop, Alice. You’ll freeze at the window and risk falling out. And for what? There are adult spotters who have the proper clothing and equipment and who are authorized to do that job. It’s not your job, so let’s put an end to it once and for all. Give me those binoculars.”

  Alice slouched and reluctantly handed them over. She couldn’t help it, but her eyes filled with angry tears.

  “All right, then. Let the enemy come,” she shouted back. “Haven’t you heard there’s a war on? Suppose they tried to bomb all the houses in Providence? But they won’t get past us. The enemy planes won’t get past the spotters, because we’ll report them to the Civil Air Patrol, and they’ll blow those rotten bums out of the sky.”

  Alice gnawed at her bottom lip. Mother had gone downstairs and hadn’t heard a word she’d said. She had no idea how badly Alice wanted to help the war effort. No idea what it meant for her to become a spotter. She walked back to the window, stood in the cold wind, letting it cool off her anger for a minute, and slammed it shut.

  Then Alice remembered something. Reaching under her mattress, she pulled out a crumpled bag and shook out half a dozen chocolate chip cookies from last Thanksgiving. So what if they were stale? Nibbling away at the cookie parts, she carefully made a pile of the chocolate chips on her bedspread. Then, grinning to herself, she popped them all into her mouth at once. Mmmm. They were delicious.

  * * *

  The following day in the winter of 1942, Alice, late to school for the fifth time that month, hurried along the brick sidewalks. She was in a black mood after her spat with Mother and hoped she wouldn’t meet anyone she knew along the way. She brushed impatiently by the box hedges and the forged-iron gates of the colonial-style houses where, every so often, she saw a small flag with a gold star on it in the window. It hung there in memory of someone’s son or brother who had lived in that house and been recently killed in the war. Alice learned that for Americans, the Second World War had begun the year before when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Adolph Hitler invaded every country he could find on the map.

  Alice always felt a little guilty walking by the flags and would turn her head the other way. Instead of being sent to the front, her uncle David had caught a cold and missed the boat. So they taught him Arabic and sent him to Cairo, Egypt. Still alive, she hoped he would stay that way—alive and happy to see her again.

  Everything was different now with the war on. Everybody had to cut down on things for the war effort. All the families had ration books—you had just so many ration stamps to tear out and hand over for meat or gas or chocolate, and if you used too many and ran out, you just had to do without! There were the blackouts,
when all of a sudden a siren would go off, making you deaf it screamed so loudly, and you had to run around pulling all the shades down and turning off all the lights in the house and then hide under a table in the basement until the “all clear” sounded. Sometimes it felt like it took forever.

  Alice’s father had been killed in a boating accident when she was just a baby, she had been told, which left Mother a widow. Since her uncle David had left home for the war, Alice had been living in a house full of women. She didn’t count Gramp, whom she called an “old folk.” Then Ella, the cook, took off to the shipyards. Alice couldn’t see why they’d need a cook in a shipyard. Gramp usually took her side, luckily, because she quarreled constantly. She quarreled with Mother over which dress to wear, why she couldn’t read by flashlight during the blackouts, or for buying icky beef liver with the ration cards instead of something yummy like a steak. (Mother said she bought liver because the iron in it was good for you. Alice thought if that were true, it would rust in your stomach when you drank a glass of water.)

  She quarreled with her cousin Suzie as well, who played with dolls instead of learning to recognize airplanes from a deck of cards, like she did. Alice wished she could be a pilot and shoot down enemy Messerschmitts or Zeros, like Van Johnson in the movies. At least she knew how to spot planes with her binoculars—the Lockheeds and the Boeings, of course, even the Messerschmitts, which hadn’t invaded the country yet but might any day now. If they did, she would call in the sighting to the Ground Patrol, and they would give her a medal.

  It was boring not having anybody around but girls and women. And now she couldn’t even use her great talent as a spotter, no thanks to Mother. Every day—well, almost every day—she wrote to Uncle David, saying how much she missed him. Sometimes she fell asleep brushing away a tear.

  Arriving in the front yard of the school, Alice stopped and looked around. Nobody was on the walkway to the main gate that read “Miss Whittaker’s School for Girls.” Girls, thought Alice, as if they weren’t just people. “School for Dumbbells,” why not? She kept chalk in the blue pencil case she carried with her to school. Crouching, she selected a stick of chalk from the case and began writing in the largest letters she could manage, stretching out her right arm and balancing herself with the left one. She drew the curve of the G down as far as her feet and followed it with a capital R. Her arm tired from the strain, so her U, N, and T were much smaller, with the Y being smallest of all. She shuffled up a little farther to where the path met the grass and began again with a very large GR until she had completed the word. The size of the letters looked better this time. She let an ant crawl over the Y and onto the grass without squashing it.

  Alice stood up and worked the stiffness first from her right leg, then the left, and shook the chalk off the skirt of her dark blue uniform. Then she put the chalk away and walked to her classroom without looking back.

  Someone must have seen her, because after class she was called into the principal’s office. Miss Prichard told her to sit. The room was large and elegant with velvet curtains and a shiny desk carved smooth so you wouldn’t hurt yourself if you bumped into a corner of it. The upholstered chair she sat on felt hard and much too high. As always, her legs dangled several inches above the floor. She sat in the silent room, trying unsuccessfully to touch the carpet with her toes.

  Miss Prichard looked at Alice through tiny eyes and thick glasses, her expression sad and disapproving. Two wisps of colorless hair sprang out from her bun.

  “Alice, why did you write those words on the walkway?” she asked in a soft voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Grunty. That’s a dirty word, isn’t it?” Miss Prichard peered over her glasses.

  “Yes.”

  “Do your classmates or the other girls in sixth grade write dirty words on the sidewalk?”

  “No.”

  “Do they ever write in chalk on the school grounds?”

  “No.” Alice wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  Miss Prichard sighed and slouched for a second in her wing-back chair with the tiny daisies on it and then sat up straight again. She looked worried.

  “You’ve never acted like this before, Alice. Can you tell me why? Is it that you don’t like our school?”

  “Not really.” Looking around the room, Alice caught sight of Miss Whittaker’s portrait by the door. The gold label read as follows: Portrait of Abigail Whittaker, Founder of Miss Whittaker’s School for Girls. Miss Whittaker looked back at her sternly.

  “Is there a teacher you don’t like?” Miss Prichard continued.

  “N-o-o,” said Alice, “but where’s Mr. Anderson, the science teacher?”

  “I’m afraid he went off to war. Of course, we all miss him.”

  Alice shrugged and bit her lip. Off to war. And I get left with a mother who won’t even let me spot planes.

  Miss Pritchard leaned forward. “Sometimes, when we do things like write words on the sidewalk, it’s because we want to look important or cleverer than someone else.”

  “Not me,” said Alice.

  “Or maybe we need some attention.”

  Now that’s really stupid, thought Alice. She leaned over and tried to dig a little hole in the rug with the toe of her shoe.

  “Would you like to have a talk with Miss Cutter about this little matter?”

  “Who’s Miss Cutter? What little matter?”

  Alice knew Miss Cutter, the school psychologist. Uh oh, maybe she’d be sent to the loony bin or maybe even to jail! She’d hate the stripes on that scratchy convict uniform and the watery cabbage broth they served you, with bugs in it. She’d stage a strike; that’s what she’d do. She’d tap Morse code on the bars and call all the convicts together for a meeting in the yard. Then they’d line up—

  “You know, Alice,” Miss Prichard interrupted her thoughts. “What we were saying about your writing on the—”

  “I won’t do it again,” said Alice.

  “Oh, well, in that case … maybe we can just put all this aside. That is, if you promise, Alice.” She gave her a look from under her glasses.

  “I promise.”

  “When you’re angry,” Miss Prichard said carefully, “you know you can always make a drawing about it in art class instead of—”

  “I promise,” said Alice firmly.

  Miss Prichard got up from her chair. Alice did the same. She shook Alice’s hand. Hers, Alice noticed, felt as dry as a piece of salt cod. For a moment, Alice was sorry she had disappointed this nice lady. How come I’m the only one who does things like that? she wondered, echoing Miss Prichard’s question.

  Miss Prichard stood at the entryway. “You can go back to class now,” she said and turned away.

  Alice reached over behind her back to a blue vase on the table. She tweaked a wisteria bud from its branch in the vase. Then she flicked it purposely at the portrait of Miss Whittaker’s tight, prim smile and slipped out the door.

  Chapter Two

  Bandages

  Alice looked out on the newly fallen snow that lay like a pressed, white sheet over the land and stepped out the door. She felt completely different from the way she had the week before. She’d heard that Jimmy Brownell was moving back to town. He’d been an exchange student out West. Swell! She skipped happily down to the corner. Jimmy was her favorite. Maybe she even had a crush on him. He always made her laugh. Even now, she was laughing remembering how he’d stand up on a sled and whisk down Suicide Hill backward. Everybody on the slope screaming when they saw him coming and scrambling to get out of his way. Jimmy, with his brown, curly hair springing up like corkscrews around the rim of his cap and his cracked front tooth. She felt warm all over just thinking about him. When would she get to see him? She’d heard he was going to do something special for the war effort and that he was very patriotic. Alice thought hard and d
ecided she’d better contribute something as well. Then she could tell him all about it.

  Today after school, instead of walking home to her big, messy room that she shared with no one, being an only child, she changed directions. There was something much more important to do at the Red Cross. She turned the corner and down the narrow path people had made with their shoes through the snow, toward Thayer Street and past Anthony’s, where she used to buy deluxe chocolates after school (until Mother put a stop to it, that is). There were no more chocolates at Anthony’s now, or anywhere else. Well, except for the other store farther up the road. That store was behind a door with a “closed” sign on it. It wasn’t closed at all, of course. It was where the laundry people sold black-market candy to naughty children—candy that was supposed to go to the troops. She’d caught Prudy Wainright coming out of there one day and scolded her.

  “Don’t you know chocolate’s supposed to go to the boys fighting at the front?” Alice had asked. “You’d better save up your allowance to buy war stamps like the rest of us, dummy.”

  Prudy had blushed red like a tomato, to Alice’s satisfaction. If Alice couldn’t buy black-market chocolate, why should Prudy? Besides, buying war stamps was a good way to donate to the war effort. When the book was filled, you got a war bond, and later, when the war was over, you could cash that in and get back your twenty or fifty dollars plus a little more. Alice knew most all the kids saved up their allowances for war stamps.

  Alice walked on past the “closed” door, feeling proud that she wasn’t tempted to go in. Not that she would. Not alone, anyway. She hurried along, singing the latest song on the radio from “Your Hit Parade”:

  Milkman, keep those bottles quiet

  Can’t have that jive on my milk diet