November/December 2001

I was only eight when Pearl Harbor was bombed. It was so long ago—back when I had fountains of cranberry-red hair tamed into ragged half-ponytails. Back when I had yellow dresses with hems that danced around my legs, displaying scraped knees; I never did girly stuff. No, I broke the sugar bowls at tea parties and tore the silken gowns of dolls. Besides, my idol was no woman. It was Sammy. He was my brother, eight years older than I, and I worshiped him. I always tried to tag along with him and his gigantic friends—he always tried to avoid this by taking giant steps, scaling treetops, running races, playing ball. So I lengthened my strides and walked like him, confident, big, I-mean-business strides. I took a deep breath and gripped the rough limbs of the oak out front, pulling myself into a palace of emerald leaves and sun-dappled branches. I practiced running by the steaming bog and bony cattails over the golden hilltop behind the baseball field, teaching my legs to move and letting the air roar in my ears like a jet plane, feeling at first as if I were going to topple over, then speeding up and finding I had wings. And in the folds of spangled night, I trudged to the baseball diamond with my brother’s too-big mitt and my brother’s too-heavy bat, and tossed baseballs into the air, watching their vague outline fall where I wanted, then slamming them out of sight. One day, Sammy discovered a gold mine of baseballs bordering the outfield and asked his friends in puzzlement about where they had come from. Nearby, following them as usual, I chirped up. I announced my secret rehearsals, then showed him what I could do. I walked next to Sammy with great, joyous steps. I climbed up the maples, the bays, the twining cypress, the keeling willow. I raced his friends and beat them all. And I showed what a ballplayer I was. “You guys are lucky,” Sammy snorted to his friends. “You guys don’t have a bratty, tomboy little sister that’s one hundred percent bad news.” But I could see in his eyes that he was proud of me. I raced his friends and beat them all. And I showed what a ballplayer I was Probably the thing I’ll remember most about that time was how we played. It was fantastic. We started after our homework was done. School was tough for me—I understood all the subjects, but went around doing them in unusual ways. In poetry I wrote without uppercase letters or punctuation; in math I added up numbers by making faces out of the digits first. My teachers didn’t understand, and as a girl who didn’t act the way girls were supposed to, I had no friends to help me parry their unconcealed disapproval. But I had Sammy. And every day, without fail, we would hastily do our work, then get bats and gloves and join his buddies, split into teams, and get dirty. We’d play until the darkness of purple dusk fell, until Mom trudged up the hill, battling the wind as it billowed out her skirts and ruffled up her auburn hair. And when her call rang round the dugout, Sammy would wave good-bye to his friends and drag his feet back home, holding my slender white fingers in his big, warm hand. I still believe today that if it wasn’t for Hitler, Sammy Corboy could have become a professional ballplayer. We found out about Pearl Harbor when listening to “The Green Hornet” after dinner. Sammy and I were wedged together into the same faded, pink armchair, listening attentively to the radio. Then there was a rush of static, and our program was interrupted. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. This morning, Japanese planes attacked the American military base in Pearl Harbor . . .” We stared at the radio as if it was going to explode in our faces. The distant war was creeping into our home like a tiger closing in on prey. *          *          * Sammy and his friends wanted to fight. They talked of the Japanese and Germans as if they were a cup of something nasty that had spilled and simply had to be wiped up. No need for soap or sponges—just a rag would do. They seemed to think they could just go overseas, kick butt, and be back in time for dinner. One of Sammy’s best friends, a tall boy named Rolando, was two years older and signed up immediately. I watched him leave, happy, determined. He never came back. My music teacher, Mr. Phelps, went abroad as well, abandoning the class to a series of frazzled volunteers. I never saw him again, either, but it never really registered in my eight-year-old mind how grim the situation was and that he was really dead. I guess I thought he had gone away somewhere and, like Rolando, would come back sometime or other. Death is just a word when you’re young. Everything was changing. I grew out of my oxfords the summer following the bombing, and Mom replaced them with some old saddle shoes she found at the “Shoe Exchange” that were much too big and stuffed the toe with newspaper. We collected bacon grease off the griddle in tin cans, and when the cans were full gave them to the fat butcher three blocks away. I was told they were somehow used in the manufacturing of bombs. Gold stars stared from windows everywhere, and adults were tense, stretched thin, looking older, on the verge of breaking. Everything in my world was a roller coaster—except baseball. The sport insisted on keeping the same rules, the diamond still waiting patiently for me every day after school, its popularity never faltering. Hordes of kids would crowd round the makeshift bleachers and watch all the high-schoolers and me play on weekends. The kids my age jeered at me, but it