Enchanted Islands Read Free Page A

Susie grabs me at my armpits. She is surprisingly strong for a wood sprite, and she lowers me into the seat carefully.
    My fancy dress has ridden up, exposing the tops of my knee stockings and my old-lady thighs. Impossible to smooth it down. I place my jacket on top.
    I would like to see the look on Rosalie’s face when she realizes she’s sitting in the back with the compost. But I can’t turn around. After Susie greets her and gets her situated, I say, “You can have the front on the way home.”
    “Thank you, Frances,” she says, using my full name so I know she’s mad at me.
    The ceremony is to be held in the synagogue’s ballroom. When Rosalie and I enter, all the women stand to clap. I am handed a glass of wine, which I drink, and then another, which I also drink, not wanting to be rude, and then the afternoon becomes like a blanket of fog settling in a valley. I’m vaguely aware of Rosalie receiving a medal, of her posing for pictures.
    Susie sits down next to me and offers me a piece of cake. Why not? I take a huge forkful, much larger than my mouth, and laugh when it doesn’t fit.
    “What did you do during the war, Frances?” Susie asks. I want to tell her what I did, what Ainslie and I did, how I played my own small but significant role, but I have been sworn to secrecy. Still, I wonder, what would be the harm now, when so many are gone? How long until a secret is no longer a secret?
    “Oh, I was a secretary,” I say.
    “It must have been a fascinating time.” Susie helps herself to a piece of my cake, and instead of thinking she has bad manners, I enjoy the intimacy. Is this what having a daughter would have been like?
    “That’s one word for it.”
    Susie laughs. “You and Rosalie have obviously been friends for a long time. You share the same emanations.”
    I have no idea what this is. “Since we were eight years old.”
    Susie shakes her head in mock disbelief. “You must have some stories to tell.”
    “You have no idea,” I say.
    *
    Later, in bed, a slight headache from the wine, I think about Rosalie. How many nights have I done so, my own version of counting sheep? So we share the same emanations. How could we not, after all these years together? It’s always ever been me and Rosalie, so it should not surprise me that here at the end we are the two left standing, fighting our own biology. Spouse, sibling, these connections seem more tenuous than whatever emanation holds Rosalie and me together.
    Friendship between women is complicated. We can be kind to the world, but where other women are concerned, we often show our basest selves. We who have grown up in an age such as mine—where women start to wear trousers and leave off girdles, where we can have careers and be perfectly productive members of society without marrying or bearing children—have no excuse for our lack of sorority.
    As I lie here—I sleep very little—my thoughts turn to my stories. Rosalie’s have been told and live on through her children, her awards and deeds (because I will admit, now that I am being honest, now that I am being charitable, she has done some good with the enormous amount of money Clarence made). But I have no children, no visible contributions. I will tell my story, then, official secrecy act be damned, and then something I’ve done will live on, and I can move on from this world.

C HAPTER T WO

    I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, the second in a family of four girls and three boys. Non-farming families did not generally have so many children, but my parents were fertile. I suspect my mother got pregnant as a way of keeping my father at bay for eleven months out of the year. They hated each other. The marriage was semi-arranged in Poland; they had only met twice before their wedding. A hasty weekend and then Papa left for America. He was there a year before he saved enough to send for her and the baby, my brother Joe, the only one of us born in the old country.
    Mama took in sewing and