A Woman's Place Read online

  It was late when they finally went upstairs to bed. Jean wrote a letter to her twin brother and was in the middle of writing one to Russell when someone knocked on the front door. She was so afraid it would be a telegram for Patty that she leaped off the bed and ran downstairs to answer the door before her sister could.

  Earl Seaborn stood on the front porch, his arms all wrapped around Rosa Voorhees from work.

  “Hey there, Jeannie Beanie!” Rosa said, smiling crookedly.

  Jean’s first thought was that Earl was trying to make her jealous. Then she saw the worried look on Earl’s face and realized that Rosa was very drunk.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Earl said, “but I didn’t know where else to bring her. I couldn’t take her to my place, and I don’t know where she lives.”

  “Hey, looks like ol’ Jean’s got something to put in her brassiere after all,” Rosa slurred. “Hard to tell in those work-thingies. … What do you call them again? Coverovers … coverups … coveralls!”

  Too late, Jean realized that she’d forgotten to put on a robe over her nightgown. She folded her arms across her chest, embarrassed to be standing this way in front of Earl. He gazed at the floor, politely averting his eyes.

  “She’s very drunk,” he said. “I stopped by the Hoot Owl over on Cass Street after I left here and found her making a fool of herself. I didn’t know what to do. I offered to take her home, but she keeps saying that she lives in Brooklyn. Do you have any idea where she lives?”

  “No, only that it’s with her husband’s parents. They won’t be thrilled to see her in this condition. They’re pretty religious. You’d better come in.” She held the door open while Earl hauled Rosa inside. “Put her there on the sofa. I’ll be right back.” Jean ran upstairs to get dressed. When she came down again, she saw that Rosa had slumped against the couch cushions and was snoring. Earl paced the floor.

  “I’m really sorry for bothering you, Jean, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “That’s okay. It was nice of you to watch out for her.”

  “I couldn’t just leave her there. The place was full of guys—not the best kind, either, if you know what I mean. I recognized three or four of the welders from work. They’re all married and they know that Rosa is, too, but everyone was too drunk to care. It’s payday.”

  “How’d you get her to leave?”

  He smiled shyly. “I had to flirt with her and pretend like I was taking her to my place for a drink. Listen, should we pump her full of coffee? Does that really work?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have much experience with drunks.” Jean decided to try her hand at talking to Rosa. She shook her awake. “Come on, Rosa. Time to get up. You need to go home, okay?”

  “I have to sneak in or my in-laws will have kittens,” she slurred.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Brooklyn, New York.” She smiled and closed her eyes again.

  They let her sleep and went out to the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on to percolate. Patty came downstairs when she smelled it brewing, and they had to explain everything to her. The three of them sat at the kitchen table talking until the baby started crying upstairs.

  “I’d better go up and put him back to sleep,” Patty said. “It was nice meeting you, Earl.”

  “Sorry for all the trouble,” he said. “I never would have bothered you if I had known the baby would wake up.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Patty said on her way out.

  When the coffee was finally ready, Jean poured it into the largest mug she could find, adding milk to cool it off. “Hey, did Rosa have a purse with her?” Jean asked as she carried the coffee into the living room. “Maybe there’s something inside it with her address on it.”

  “Yeah, she did. I hung it on her arm.” Earl sat down beside Rosa and gingerly removed the purse from around her shoulder. He handed it to Jean. “You do it. My mother taught me to steer clear of ladies’ purses.”

  Jean set down the coffee and took the purse from him. “I feel like a peeping tom,” she said as she sifted through it. “Bingo! Here’s a letter from Dirk with his parents’ address on it. And their house is only a few blocks from here. I’ll help you walk her home.”

  Earl nudged Rosa awake. “Come on, Rosa. Time to wake up. We made you some coffee. Drink up.” He held the mug to her lips as she sipped. “Better keep our fingers crossed that she doesn’t ‘whoops’ it up all over your sister’s sofa.”

  At last Rosa was conscious enough to function. Earl pulled her to her feet, and Jean helped him support her, each taking an arm. They hooked Rosa’s purse over her shoulder again and ventured outside.

  The sky had grown cloudy, making the streets dark and spooky. The row of homes on Rosa’s street was so dark that Jean could barely read the house numbers.

  “Is this your in-laws’ house?” she asked Rosa.

  “Yeah, that’s it, all right. Home of the most boring people in town.” They led her up the front walk, but she halted in front of the door. “Wait, wait, wait! I can’t go in that way. They’ll hear me. I gotta go in the window.”

  “The window?”

  “Yeah. Dirk’s folks don’t know I’m out,” she said with a giggle. “Can’t wake them up or they’ll have kittens.”

  Kittens seemed much too small and harmless to describe what Rosa was putting everyone through. Jean and Earl dragged her around to the side of the bungalow and found the open window.

  “Is this the right one?” Jean whispered. Rosa nodded.

  Earl slid it open a few more inches and they boosted Rosa up so she could climb through it head first. They had to push her the last few feet. As soon as Rosa thumped to the floor, Jean tossed in the high heels that had slipped from Rosa’s feet, and Earl slid the window shut again. He and Jean hurried away.

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t escape again!” he puffed.

  “Let’s hope we don’t get arrested!”

  By the time they walked up the steps to Jean’s front porch they were both laughing. “What a night,” Jean said.

  “I’m really sorry for bothering you.”

  “Forget it. It was sweet of you to help Rosa out. She might have gotten herself in an even bigger mess with those goons from work, and I’d hate to lose a good worker. At this rate we’ll never get any ships built. See you Monday, Earl.”

  She hurried inside and closed the door before he could say anything else.

  CHAPTER 9

  * Virginia *

  Ginny surged forward with the crowd as they spilled out of the bus on Monday morning, excited to be back. The doors to the huge brick shipyard stood wide open, and they seemed to welcome her with open arms. She was needed here. Her hard work would never go unnoticed.

  “Ginny! You’re back!” Jean said in surprise. “I’m so glad—and very relieved.” She looked as though she wanted to hug her. Ginny couldn’t help smiling.

  “I’m glad, too.”

  “Hey! You escaped!” Rosa said as she hurried over. “Tell us what happened.” Ginny thought Rosa looked a little bleary-eyed, but she seemed interested in Ginny’s life, too. Even Helen stood listening from a polite distance. How wonderful to be around people who weren’t aloof, for a change.

  “How did you talk your old man into it?” Rosa asked.

  “I … um … I didn’t tell him yet.”

  Jean’s smile vanished. “Didn’t he come home?”

  “Oh yes. He came home on Friday night. I made fried chicken for him—his favorite—so he’d be sure to be in a good mood when I broke the news—but he just wasn’t listening to me. Every time I tried to tell him, it seemed like his mind was a million miles away, and before I knew it, he was packing his suitcase to leave again.”

  “How long do you think you can keep it a secret?” Rosa asked.

  Ginny shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to keep it a secret. I got up early on Saturday morning and did all the laundry. Then I went shopping for groceries and cleaned the house a
nd did everything else that I usually do during the week.”

  “Didn’t he ask why?”

  “I thought for sure that he would, and I was working my way up to telling him. I told him that I was going to be very busy this week, that there were plenty of things a woman needed to do with a war on, and that I wanted to do my part. But he didn’t ask for details. As long as his shirts are ironed and his dinner is on the table—” Ginny’s throat tightened as she tried to hold back her tears. It was a moment before she could finish. “Harold doesn’t seem to care about me anymore. That was why I decided to take a job in the first place. Because if he is planning to leave me for another woman, I’m going to need this job.”

  “He has another woman?” Rosa asked, wide-eyed.

  “I don’t know—at least, not for certain. But he travels so much, and he’s so handsome, and he doesn’t seem to know I exist anymore, and I’m so afraid that he …”

  She could no longer control her tears. Rosa and Jean huddled around her, consoling her with hugs and murmurs of sympathy. Ginny might have cried for hours, but she stopped when she overheard some of the men mocking her.

  “You ladies are gonna rust our ships with all your boo-hooing.”

  “Yeah, or else cause a short circuit and electrocute yourselves.” The other men roared with laughter.

  “Get lost!” Rosa shouted back at them. “Mind your own business!”

  “Thanks. I’m okay now,” Ginny said, pulling herself together. “We’d better get to work.”

  “I’m very glad you’re still with us,” Jean said, giving Ginny another pat on the back. “Anyway, today we’re going to start wiring consoles.”

  Ginny pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her coveralls and blew her nose, determined to concentrate on her job. What Jean was calling a console looked like the dashboard of a car, covered with gauges and dials. Maybe it was the dashboard of the ship. Then Jean turned it over, and Ginny saw dozens of wires dangling from it. How in the world would she ever keep them all straight?

  “It isn’t as hard as it looks,” Jean said, as if reading her mind. “There are a lot of gauges on this thing, but they all get wired one at a time. You’ll do fine.”

  Ginny settled down to work beside Rosa, who seemed very subdued today. Her dark hair hung from a limp ponytail, and she hadn’t done her face all up with her usual rouge and bright lipstick.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Ginny asked her.

  “I’m beat. I had a rough weekend. Hey, you look as tired as I am.”

  “I did a mountain of housework over the weekend and it’s finally catching up with me,” Ginny admitted. “And I haven’t been sleeping very well. I keep having nightmares about making a mistake and causing a ship to sink to the bottom of the ocean. On days like today this job seems overwhelming.”

  “I know what you mean. I always I tell myself, ‘One step at a time, Rosa.’ That’s what Lorraine, back home, used to say. Sometimes the diner would get so full that I thought I was going have a nervous breakdown, with everybody yelling for more coffee and things. Lorraine taught me to just take one table at a time, and don’t let ’em razz you.”

  “That’s good advice,” Ginny said, smiling slightly. “I suppose it’s just like any other task I might face—turning a cupboard full of groceries into a meal, for instance. Or tackling a mound of laundry that has to be sorted and washed and folded and ironed. I’ve handled fund-raising events for the Stockton Women’s Club and organized elaborate charity dinners for hundreds of people. And I’m the best bridge player in the club.”

  “That’s the spirit! You can do this, too!”

  Jean came over to survey their work a little while later, and it lifted Ginny’s spirits when Jean praised her accomplishments. She complimented Rosa’s work, too.

  “Hey, Jean,” Rosa said, pulling her aside, “I’m really sorry about getting so drunk on Friday night.”

  “Please, don’t mention it.”

  “I was—”

  “I mean it, Rosa,” Jean said in a harsh whisper. “Don’t talk about it—especially here.”

  “Is Mr. Seaborn mad at me?”

  “He was more worried than mad. But he will be mad if we waste time talking when we should be working.”

  “Sorry.”

  By the end of the day, Ginny had already gotten the hang of this new task. She felt so happy and proud of herself that she wanted to send up fireworks. If only she didn’t have to go home to the nagging worry of how to tell Harold.

  As she stood at the stove that evening, frying liver and onions for dinner, it occurred to her that tomorrow was the one-week anniversary of her new job. Seven days had passed, and Harold still didn’t have a clue that she was now an apprentice electrician. If he could completely ignore her for one week, then why not two? Or three? He had no idea what her days had been like before she’d started working at Stockton Shipyard, so why should anything change?

  She watched Harold and the boys devour their dinner and calmly asked each of them what his day had been like, what he was learning in school, how Harold had fared at work. When they’d eaten the last bite of her pineapple upside-down cake and excused themselves from the table, she realized that not one of them had bothered to ask about her day. She didn’t have to keep her life a secret from them—nobody cared! The thought should have upset her, but she felt oddly satisfied. Besides, Harold obviously kept secrets from her, such as the origin of the two ticket stubs, so why couldn’t she have secrets, too? At least hers was for a good cause.

  She was baking cookies for their lunchboxes after dinner, trying a recipe she found in the newspaper that used less sugar, when her friend Sandra telephoned.

  “Virginia! I’ve been trying to reach you all day. We missed you at Women’s Club last week. I should have phoned to remind you. Anyway, I wondered if you needed a ride to Women’s Club tomorrow. It’s at Gloria’s house.”

  In an instant, Virginia’s old life came rushing back to her with full force. It differed so greatly from her new life at Stockton Shipyard that she nearly told Sandra she had the wrong number, the wrong person. It took Ginny a moment to gather her wits and formulate a reply. “I’m sorry, Sandra, but I won’t be able to go tomorrow.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  Ginny didn’t know what to say. The gossip would surely fly if she didn’t explain her absence. In the past she had been afraid to miss a meeting, because any woman who did was certain to be the subject of gossip. Ginny could almost hear them whispering, “I wonder if she and Harold are having problems?” … “Ginny always seemed a little high-strung, if you know what I mean … .”

  She had hated all that backstabbing and had tried hard not to get involved in it, but now she worried about what they would say about her behind her back. Should she lie to Sandra and say she was sick? No, they’d send some snoop over with a casserole or a pot of chicken soup to find out if she was pregnant.

  For the first time, Ginny realized how much she disliked her so-called friends in her social set. She had joined the Women’s Club because Harold had wanted her to, but she hadn’t missed their meetings in the least. The committees did some good work, raising funds for Stockton Hospital, sponsoring luncheons for war bonds, holding blood drives, and so on. But the women also wasted a great deal of time, turning the organization into an exclusive social club and gossip mill. Wasn’t there more to Ginny Mitchell than that? For the second time that day she was reminded that it was exactly what she had set out to learn.

  “I’m taking a break from club activities for a while, Sandra. I have too much work to do.”

  “A break? How long do you—”

  “You know what, Sandra? I’m right in the middle of something,” Ginny said as the timer she’d set for the cookies began to ring. “I really can’t talk. But thanks for calling.”

  She hung up, smiling to herself as she took the finished batch out of the oven and slid in a new batch. Then she pulled the ironing board out of the pantry closet and began
pressing the boys’ school clothes while she waited. She could manage to do only a little each night, and the basket of ironing never emptied the way it used to when she could tackle it all on the same day.

  Twenty minutes later, Ginny’s neighbor, Betty Parker, arrived at her back door. “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?”

  Ginny stifled a groan. The club women must have batted the gossip from house to house like a tennis ball in a championship match, since she’d hung up on Sandra. They’d obviously decided to send over Ginny’s closest neighbor to find out the score.

  “Come on in, Betty.” The invitation was unnecessary. Her neighbor was already through the door, nearly tripping over the pile of shoes that needed to be polished.

  Ginny tried not to grimace as Betty took in every detail of the kitchen as if recording it on film for later viewing. The Mitchell home was clearly a mess, from the floor that needed waxing to the dirty dishes towering in the sink: cereal bowls from breakfast and plates from dinner, pots and pans and lunchboxes, mixing bowls and measuring cups. Ginny had decided to wait and wash them all after the cookies finished baking. A basket heaped with ironing sat on the floor by Ginny’s feet. Harold’s laundered shirts hung on hangers from a doorknob. Betty Parker observed it all with a gleaming, critical eye.

  Keeping up with the Joneses was a competition that Betty took seriously—and one in which she excelled. She was the first woman on the block to get her laundry on the line on Monday morning, the first to buy the latest kitchen gadget, the first to sport the latest fashion accessory or hairstyle. In the past, Betty had never failed to make Ginny feel inferior, but now a slow smile spread across Ginny’s face. Betty Parker didn’t know how to wire an oil-pressure gauge to a ship’s console. Betty Parker wasn’t building landing craft for the war effort.

  “So what’s really the matter, Ginny?” Betty’s face wore a look of phony compassion, as if to say, Confide in me … you can trust me.

  “Nothing,” Ginny said calmly. “What makes you think something’s the matter?”