CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

It was a Sunday. Jim and I had gone to church together, and then we went off to see a matinee of Dumbo. When we came out of the movie theater, the news was already all over town: The Japanese had just attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

By the next day, we were at war.

—

Jim didn’t need to enlist.

He could have dodged the war for so many reasons. For one thing, he was old enough that the draft would not necessarily have caught him. For another, he was the sole financial provider of a widowed mother. And lastly, he worked in a position of authority at the hematite mine, which was an industry essential to the war effort. There would have been deferments available in all directions, should he have wished to reach for them.

But you can’t be a man with the constitution of Jim Larsen and let other boys go to war on your behalf. That’s not how he was forged. And on December 9, he sat me down for a conversation about it. We were alone at Jim’s house—his mother was at lunch with her sister in another town—and he asked if he could have a serious talk. He was determined to join up, he said. This was his duty, he said. He would never be able to live with himself if he didn’t help his country in its hour of need, he said.

I think he expected me to try to talk him out of it, but I didn’t.

“I understand,” I said.

“And there’s something else we should discuss.” Jim took a deep breath. “I don’t want to upset you, Vee. But I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought. Given the circumstances of the war, I think we should cancel our engagement.”

Again, he looked at me carefully, waiting for me to protest.

“Go on,” I said.

“I can’t ask you to wait for me, Vee. It’s not right. I don’t know how long this war will last, or what will become of me. I could come back

injured, or not come back at all. You’re a young girl. You shouldn’t put your life away on my account.”

Now, let me point out a few things here.

For one thing, I wasn’t a young girl. I was twenty-one—which by the standards of the day practically made me a crone. (Back in 1941, it was no joke for a twenty-one-year-old woman to lose her wedding engagement, believe me.) For another thing, a lot of young couples across America that week were in exactly the straits as Jim and I. Millions of American boys were shipping off to war in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Vast numbers of them, though, hastened to get married before they departed. Some of this rush to the altar surely had to do with romance, or with fear, or with the desire to have sex before facing possible death. Or maybe it was driven by an anxiety about pregnancy, for couples who’d already begun having sex. Some of it probably had to do with an urgent push to pack as much life as possible into a short amount of time. (Your father, Angela, was one of the many young American men who sealed himself up in swift matrimony to his neighborhood sweetheart before being thrown into battle. But of course you would know that.)

And there were millions of American girls eager to nail down their sweethearts before the war took all the boys away. There were even girls who angled to marry soldiers whom they barely knew, anticipating that the boy might be killed in battle and his widow would receive a ten-thousand-dollar allotment for his death. (These kinds of girls were called “Allotment Annies”—and when I heard about them, I felt some relief in knowing that there were actually worse people out there than me.)

What I’m saying is this: the general trend among people in these circumstances was to hurry up and get married already—not to call off their damn engagements. All over America that week, dreamy-eyed boys and girls were following the same romantic script, saying, “I’ll always love you! I’ll prove my love by marrying you right now! I’ll love you forever, come what may!”

This isn’t what Jim was saying, though. He wasn’t following the script. And neither was I.

I asked, “Would you like your ring back, Jim?”

Unless I was dreaming—and I do not believe I was dreaming—an expression of enormous relief flickered across his face. In that moment, I knew what I was seeing. I was seeing a man who’d just realized he had an out—that he did not have to marry the frighteningly tainted girl now. And he could keep his honor. He looked so nakedly grateful. The reaction lasted only for an instant, but I saw it.

Then he pulled himself back together. “You know I will always love you, Vee.”

“And I will always love you, too, Jim,” I dutifully replied.

Now we were back on script.

I slid that ring off my finger and placed it firmly in his waiting palm. I do believe to this day that it felt just as good for him to get that ring back as it felt for me to shed it.

And thus we were saved from each other.

You see, Angela, history is not so busy shaping nations that it cannot take the time to shape the lives of two insignificant people. Among the many revisions and transformations that the Second World War would bring to the planet was this tiny plot twist: Jim Larsen and Vivian Morris were mercifully spared from matrimony.

—

An hour after we had broken off our engagement, the two of us were having the most outrageous, memorable, backbreaking sex you

could ever imagine.

I suppose I had initiated it.

All right, I’ll admit it: categorically, I had initiated it.

Once I’d returned the ring, Jim had offered me a tender kiss and a warm embrace. There’s a way that a man can hold a woman that says, “I don’t want to hurt your gentle feelings, darling,” and that’s how he was holding me. But my gentle feelings had not been hurt. If anything, it felt like a cork had been yanked from my skull and I was now exploding with an intoxicating rush of freedom. Jim was going to be gone—and of his own volition, better still! I would come out of this situation looking blameless, and so would he. (But more important:

me!) The threat had been lifted. There was nothing more to be pretended, nothing more to be disguised. From this moment onward— ring off my hand, engagement canceled, reputation intact—I had nothing more to lose.

He gave me another one of those tender “I’m sorry if you’re hurting, baby” kisses, and I don’t mind saying that I responded by sticking my tongue so far down that man’s throat, it’s a miracle I didn’t lick the bottommost quadrant of his heart.

Now, Jim was a good man. He was a churchgoing man. He was a respectful man. But he was still a man—and once I switched that toggle over to complete sexual permission, he responded. (I don’t know any man who wouldn’t have responded, she says modestly.) And who knows? Maybe he was drunk on the same spirit of freedom as I was. All I know is that within a few minutes, I had managed to push and pull him through his house to his bedroom, and gotten him situated on his narrow pine bed, where I could now tear off both his clothes and mine with unfettered abandon.

I will say that I knew a good deal more about the act of love than Jim did. This was immediately obvious. If he’d ever had sex at all, he clearly hadn’t had much of it. He was navigating around my body the way you drive a car around an unfamiliar neighborhood—slowly and carefully while nervously looking for street signs and landmarks. This would not do. Swiftly it became evident that I would need to be the one driving this car, so to speak. I had learned some things back in New York, and in no time at all, I employed my rusty old skills and took over the whole operation. I did this quickly and wordlessly—too quickly for him to have a chance to question what I was up to.

I drove that man like a mule, Angela, is what I’m saying. I didn’t want to give him the slightest opportunity to reconsider, or to slow me down. He was breathless, he was carried away, he was fully consumed —and I kept him that way for as long as I could. And I will give him this—he had the most beautiful shoulders I’d ever seen.

Christ, but I had missed having sex!

What I will never forget about that occasion was glancing down at Jim’s all-American face as I rode him into oblivion, and seeing—almost lost amid his other expressions of passion and abandon—a look of baffled terror, as he stared up at me in excited, but panicked,

wonderment. His guileless blue eyes, in that moment, seemed to be asking, “Who are you?”

If I had to guess, I suppose my eyes were responding: “I don’t know, pal, but it’s none of your business.”

When we were done, he could barely even look at me or speak to me.

It’s incredible how much I didn’t mind.

—

Jim departed the following day for basic training.

As for me, I was delighted to learn three weeks down the line that I had not gotten pregnant. It had been quite a gamble I’d taken there—having sex with no precautions whatsoever—but I do believe it was worth it.

As for the Norwegian sweater I’d been knitting, I finished it up and mailed it to my brother for Christmas. Walter was stationed in the South Pacific, so I’m not sure what use he had for a heavy wool sweater, but he wrote me a polite note of thanks. That was the first time he’d communicated with me directly since our dreadful drive home to Clinton. So that was a welcome development. A softening of relations, you could say.

Years later, I found out that Jim Larsen had won the Distinguished Service Cross for extreme valor and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force. He eventually settled in New Mexico, married a wealthy woman, and served in the state senate. So much for my father saying he would never be a leader.

Good for Jim.

We both turned out fine in the end.

See that, Angela? Wars are not necessarily bad for everyone.

TWENTYTHREE

After Jim left, I became the recipient of much sympathy from my family and neighbors. They all assumed I was heartbroken to have lost my fiancé. I hadn’t earned their sympathy, but of

course I took it anyway. It was better than condemnation and suspicion. It was certainly better than trying to explain anything.

My father was furious that Jim Larsen had abandoned both his hematite mine and his daughter (in that order of fury, without a doubt). My mother was mildly disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting married in April, after all, but she looked as though she would survive the blow. She had other things to do that weekend, she told me. April is a big time for horse shows in upstate New York.

As for me, I felt as though I had just woken from a drugged slumber. Now my only desire was to find something interesting to do with myself. I gave the briefest consideration to asking my parents if I could return to college, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to get out of Clinton, though. I knew I couldn’t go back to New York City, having burned all my bridges, but I also knew that there were other cities to be considered. Philadelphia and Boston were rumored to be nice; maybe I could settle in one of those places.

I had just enough sense to realize that if I wanted to move, I would need money, so I got my sewing machine out of its crate at last and set up shop as a seamstress in our guest bedroom. I let word spread that I was now available for custom tailoring and alterations. Soon I had plenty to do. Wedding season was coming again. People needed dresses, but that need brought problems—namely, fabric shortages. You couldn’t get good lace and silk anymore from France, and moreover it was considered unpatriotic to spend a good deal of money on such a wild luxury as a wedding gown. So I used the scavenging skills I’d honed at the Lily Playhouse to create works of beauty out of precious little.

One of my friends from childhood—a bright girl named Madeleine— was getting married in late May. Her family had fallen on hard times since her father’s coronary the year before. She couldn’t have afforded a good dress in peacetime, much less now. So we scoured her family’s attic together, and I constructed Madeleine the most romantic concoction you ever saw—made from both of her grandmothers’ old wedding gowns, disassembled and put back together in a brand-new arrangement, with a long, antique lace train and everything. It was not an easy dress to make (the old silk was so fragile, I had to handle it like nitroglycerine), but it worked.

Madeleine was so grateful, she named me as her maid of honor. For the occasion of her wedding, I sewed myself a snazzy little kelly green suit with a peplum jacket, using some raw silk I’d inherited from my grandmother and had stored under my bed years earlier. (Ever since I’d met Edna Parker Watson, I tried to wear suits whenever possible. Among other lessons, that woman had taught me that a suit will always make you look more chic and important than a dress. And not too much jewelry! “A majority of the time,” Edna said, “jewelry is an attempt to cover up a badly chosen or ill-fitting garment.” And yes, it is true—I still could not stop thinking about Edna.)

Madeleine and I both looked splendid. She was a popular girl, and a lot of people came to her wedding. I got all kinds of customers after that. I also got to kiss one of Madeleine’s cousins at the reception— outside, against a honeysuckle-covered fence.

I was beginning to feel a bit more like myself.

—

Longing for a bit of frippery one afternoon, I put on a pair of sunglasses I’d purchased many months earlier in New York City,

purely because Celia had swooned over them. The glasses were dark, with giant black frames, and they were studded with tiny seashells. They made me look like an enormous insect on a beach vacation, but I was mad for them.

Finding these sunglasses made me miss Celia. I missed the glorious spectacle of her. I missed dressing up together, and putting on makeup together, and conquering New York together. I missed the sensation of

startled—the way they were always startled when something even slightly disturbed their routine.

“Dinner hour,” my father said, managing to form those two words into a grim lecture about the inevitable collapse of civilization.

I answered the door. It was Aunt Peg. She was red-faced and sweaty in the summer heat, she was wearing the most deranged getup (an oversized men’s plaid Oxford shirt, a pair of baggy dungaree culottes, and an old straw farm hat with a turkey feather in its brim), and I don’t think I’ve ever been more surprised or more happy to see anyone in my life. I was so surprised and happy, in fact, that I actually forgot at first to be ashamed of myself in her presence. I threw my arms around her in flagrant joy.

“Kiddo!” she said with a grin. “You’re looking choice!”

My parents had a less enthusiastic response to Peg’s arrival, but they adjusted themselves as best they could to this unexpected circumstance. Our maid dutifully set another place. My father offered Peg a cocktail, but to my surprise she said she would rather have iced tea, if it wasn’t too much trouble.

Peg plunked herself down at our dining-room table, mopped at her damp forehead with one of our fine Irish linen napkins, looked around at the lot of us, and smiled. “So! How’s everyone faring up here in the hinterlands?”

“I didn’t know you had a car,” my father said by means of a reply.

“I don’t. It belongs to a choreographer I know. He’s gone off to the Vineyard in his boyfriend’s Cadillac, so he let me borrow this one. It’s a Chrysler. It’s not so bad, for an old clunker. I’m sure he’d let you take it for a spin, if you’d like.”

“How’d you get the gas rations?” my father asked the sister whom he had not seen in over two years. (You might wonder why this was his preferred line of questioning, in lieu of a more standard salutation, but Dad had his motives. Gas rationing had just been mandated in New York State a few months earlier, and my father was in fits about it: He didn’t work as hard as he did in order to live in a totalitarian government! What would come next? Telling a man what time of night he might go to sleep? I prayed that the subject of gas rations would quickly change.)

“I cobbled together some stamps with a bit of bribery here and a bit of black-market elbow grease there. It’s not so hard in the city to get gas stamps. People don’t need their cars as much as they do out here.” Then Peg turned to my mother and asked warmly, “Louise, how are you?”

“I’m well, Peg,” said my mother, who was looking at her sister-in- law with an expression I would not call suspicious as much as cautious. (I couldn’t blame her. It didn’t make sense for Peg to be in Clinton. It wasn’t Christmas, and nobody had died.) “And how are you?”

“Disreputable as always. But it’s nice to escape the general mayhem of the city and come up here. I should do this more often. I’m sorry I didn’t let you folks know I was coming. It was a sudden decision. Your horses are well, Louise?”

“Well enough. There haven’t been as many shows since the war started, of course. They haven’t liked this heat, either. But they’re well.”

“What brings you here, anyhow?” my father asked.

My father didn’t hate his sister, but he did hold her in rather violent contempt. He thought she’d done nothing but revel about recklessly with her life (not unlike the way Walter perceived me, now that I think of it), and I suppose he had a point. Still, you’d think he could have ginned up a slightly more hospitable welcome.

“Well, Douglas, I’ll tell you. I’ve come to ask Vivian if she’ll return to New York City with me.”

At the sound of these words, a dusty old doorway in the center of my heart blew open, and a thousand white doves flew out. I didn’t even dare to speak. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, the invitation would evaporate.

“Why?” my father asked.

“I need her. I’ve been commissioned by the military to put on a series of lunchtime shows for workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Some propaganda, some song-and-dance numbers, some romantic dramas and such. To keep up morale. That sort of thing. I don’t have enough help anymore to run the playhouse and also handle the Navy commission. I could really use Vivian.”