Machine Dreams Read Free

strangers in his house at night. One autumn we were burning trash on the hill. He picked up a pitchfork of blazing leaves and chased Mother around the fire. After that we had to have him put away. A couple of weeks later, a guard knocked him down and that was all. I was fourteen. My mother and I turned on every light in the house that evening and sat on the porch, looking at the street. October, aclean moisture in the air. We both felt such relief. We’d been ashamed to send him there, but we’d gotten afraid of him and had no money for anything better. I didn’t know until he was gone what a shadow he’d cast. Partly because we were free of him, the next few years were good. We took in roomers, students from the college. I had a part-time job and lots of friends; I was eager to know people. You may not like me to say so, but high school was the best time of my life.
    On Sundays in the spring, the kids in my crowd got all dressed up and walked downtown to the drugstore for sodas—that was our big thrill. But Tomblyn’s was beautiful then—as grand, everyone said, as any soda fountain in Washington or New York. The big mirror was beveled glass, and the fountains themselves were brass. The floor was marble tiles with a black border, and the deep booths, mahogany. Only the high carved ceiling and bar wall are left now, and the store is half as large as it was.
    We girls took pains and were high style, but really, all the young women then dressed like matrons—silk shoulder pads in our dresses and those big hats. We got the shoulder pads from our mothers, and silk lingerie at rummage sales; you couldn’t buy silk during the war. The war influenced everything. We were the Class of ’43, and all the boys worried the fighting would stop before they could get overseas. Rummage and church sales were War Benefits; all the women’s clubs rolled bandages and collected tin. High school girls wrote to boys who’d graduated five and six years before, boys who’d driven their cars past them as they stood on the sidewalk playing hopscotch. Three letters a week to Europe on blue onionskin stationery; letters to boys who’d been our heros, and boys who hadn’t. We tacked Kodak snapshots on our walls—small black and white pictures the size of six postage stamps. A soldier in a graveyard and on the back:
All these Germans are dead ones.
You’ve seen your father’s war album—airstrips, everyone in khaki; how it was. Easy to tell good from evil.
    There was one boy I went with off and on through high school. He wanted to go to medical school instead of to war, and be a doctor like his father and two of his older brothers. The Harwins: they were a family of four brothers and one sister, grewup in one of the fine old turn-of-the-century houses, and were well-off. But Dr. Harwin had died when Tom was fourteen, and his mother died two years later, both of heart attacks. Tom was the youngest and Peggy, the sister, was in her twenties and taught phys. ed. at the college. One of the brothers—the oldest, I believe—was a sort of ne’er-do-well; he had a traveling job and then joined the navy. The other two were studying at Duke. They sent what they could, but the mother’s death took the last of the family money. Tom and Peggy had to sell the house his senior year, and the college bought it, just as they’d bought several of the other old homes. Shinner Black was Tom’s best friend and Shinner’s mother ran a rooming house, so Tom moved in for the summer. He didn’t really want to, but Peggy said he’d spend half his time there with Shinner anyway, and they couldn’t take a chance on losing the offer. Peggy was very practical and steady. She used to go along as chaperone when the high school kids went on picnics out by the river. Yes, we had chaperones, can you believe it? But Peggy was like one of us. I remember her lying on the rocks at Sago, wearing a black one-piece with a pleated bodice, and smoking cigarettes.…
    Sago