Misfit Read Free Page B

alone, but at least we’re alone together. Most of the time we’re all
thinking the same things, and carrying the same worries, and while at times it can feel good to say them out loud as some kind of verification or reminder that you’re not alone with these feelings, the truth is that most of the time giving voice to any of your thoughts usually makes you feel more alone. Like you wish you’d never said anything. There are a lot of us girls in here, but it still feels hollow and distant, maybe on account of us being in a hangar, where the ceiling lifts high above us and the metal beams are crisscrossed, exposed, and the reminder of the room’s true function only makes you feel smaller, and lesser, and fewer.
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    She always sits in the same places, be it her workstation or the same chair in the break room for lunch, and it’s hard to tell if it’s out of habit, insolence, or indifference. She would blend with all the others if it weren’t for her seeming dedication to not being noticed and heard. The rest of us girls are always carrying on, fighting for attention with our stories, and worries, and gossip. She carries herself best with the older women, the ones whose husbands left career jobs to go fight, who seem as though they’ve seen it all before and have lost the energy to fight to establish any presence. But a sadness coats her face as a kind of dull foundation. She can’t be more than nineteen; her face looks like it’s still forming, her shoulders slim and fragile, her body only recently burst, and when she talks it’s easy to forget what she’s saying; instead you study her face, trying
to see what she’ll look like when she’s old, and the funny thing is that it’s impossible to tell, like trying to imagine the finish cracking on smooth porcelain. She gives off the feeling of someone who’s lived this life before. Knows what it’s like to be in a world of displaced women. And how it’s navigated. It’s the mechanical-ness of the work that soothes her, she says. And sometimes we can catch a glimpse of her, staring straight across the hangar, her hands stretching and tightening a parachute’s fabric before she glances down to inspect it, and we can see what she’s envisioning: a room all cozy and yellow-lighted from a setting sun; she sits on a dark brown couch in front of a fireplace, a book on her lap, and a nerve up her back so calm and at ease that she wouldn’t even flinch if the book dropped off her lap and slammed on the floor.
    She’ll answer questions, but she doesn’t say much about herself. Her husband of a couple years left his job at Lockheed a year ago, driven by his calling for the uniform. He enlisted as a merchant marine, first working as a physical fitness instructor and then deployed to the South Pacific by ship when the war began. His being a merchant marine initially gave her some sense of ease. After all, their role is just to transport troops and supplies. And she says that so naively, as though he’s not actually moving through a war zone in the South Pacific. “Isn’t it basically the navy?” a gal to the left says to her, but she shakes her head and repeats, “It’s the merchant marines,” and she doesn’t say it
with any sense of pride, just as a matter of fact. We never intend to be cruel in here, just practical, because it seems that a practical outlook will make whatever might happen easier to bear. We’ve seen it before. We know how it works. A girl on her right says, “Wouldn’t the Japs go after his ship just the same as they would any other?” “Especially,” another interjects, “if it’s carrying supplies. They’d want to cut it off. I imagine it would be the first target. It’s what they do with lifelines.” Again, we’re not trying to be cruel. Only being practical. But she’s not listening.