but now there’s nothing worth growing up for,” she said. “Just all this fighting, fighting, fighting, and working, working, working. It makes a person weary.”
“It’ll all end soon enough,” I said—although I was not sure of that fact myself.
She took another deep drag off the cigarette and said in a very different tone, “All my relatives in Europe are in big trouble, you know. Hitler won’t rest till he’s gotten rid of every last one of them. Mama doesn’t even know where her sisters are anymore, or their kids. My father’s on the phone with embassies all day, trying to get his family over here. I have to translate for him a lot of the time. It doesn’t look like there’s any way for them to get through, though.”
“Oh, Marjorie. I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”
I didn’t know what else to say. This seemed like too serious a situation for a high school student to be facing. I wanted to hug her, but she wasn’t the sort of person who cared for hugs.
“I’m disappointed in everybody,” she said after a long silence.
“In who, exactly?” I was thinking she would say the Nazis.
“The adults,” she said. “All of them. How did they let the world get so out of control?”
“I don’t know, honey. But I’m not sure anybody out there really knows what they’re doing.”
“Apparently not,” she pronounced with theatrical disdain, flicking the spent cigarette into the alley. “And this is why I’m so eager to grow up, you see. So I won’t be at the mercy anymore of people who have no idea what they’re doing. I figure the sooner I can get full control of things, the better my life will be.”
“That sounds like an excellent plan, Marjorie,” I said. “Of course, I’ve never had a plan for my own life, so I wouldn’t know. But it sounds as though you’ve got it all sorted out.”
“You’ve never had a plan?” Marjorie looked up at me in horror. “How do you get by?”
“Gosh, Marjorie—you sound just like my mother!”
“Well, if you can’t make a plan for your own life, Vivian, then somebody needs to be your mother!”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Stop lecturing me, kid. I’m old enough to be your babysitter.”
“Ha! My parents would never leave me with somebody as irresponsible as you.”
“Well, your parents would probably be right about that.”
“I’m just teasing you,” she said. “You know that, right? You know that I’ve always liked you.”
“Really? You’ve always liked me, have you? Since you were what—in eighth grade?”
“Hey, give me another cigarette, would you?” she asked. “For later?”
“I shouldn’t,” I said, but I handed her a few of them, anyhow. “Just don’t let your mother know I’m supplying you.”
“Since when do my parents need to know what I’m up to?” asked this strange little teenager. She hid the cigarettes in the folds of her enormous fur coat, and gave me a wink. “Now tell me what kind of costumes you came in for today, Vivian, and I’ll set you up with whatever you need.”
New York was a different place now than it had been my first time around.
Frivolity was dead—unless it was useful and patriotic frivolity, like dancing with soldiers and sailors at the Stage Door Canteen. The city was weighted with seriousness. At every moment, we were expecting to be attacked or invaded—certain that the Germans would bomb us into dust, just as they’d done to London. There were mandatory blackouts. There were a few nights when the authorities even turned off all the lights in Times Square, and the Great White Way became a dark clot—shining rich and black in the night, like pooled mercury. Everyone was in uniform, or ready to serve. Our own Mr. Herbert volunteered as an air-raid warden, wandering around our neighborhood in the evenings with his official city-issued white helmet and red armband. (As he headed out the door, Peg would say, “Dear Mr. Hitler: Please don’t bomb us until Mr. Herbert has finished alerting all the neighbors. Sincerely, Pegsy Buell.”)
What I most remember about the war years was an overriding sense of coarseness. We didn’t suffer in New York City like so many people across the world were suffering, but nothing was fine anymore—no butter, no pricey cuts of meat, no quality makeup, no fashions from Europe. Nothing was soft. Nothing was a delicacy. The war was a vast, starving colossus that needed everything from us—not just our time and labor, but also our cooking oil, our rubber, our metals, our