Read Online Isabel’s War by Lila Perl - Free Book Online

Army?” my father, who has just entered the room, wants to know. He turns to my mother, not waiting for an answer. “I think we should leave in five minutes, Sally. A Thursday morning on the Concourse, there could be traffic. I don’t want my boy to be late. This is the Army.”
    Arnold emerges from the bathroom. He looks pale and there’s a film of perspiration on his forehead. I can’t help wondering if he’s been throwing up. He refused the scrambled eggs our mother offered him for breakfast, and ate only buttered toast. But still...
    We all go down in the elevator together, and even at this early hour there are people in the lobby, most of them setting off for work. Quincy is there, too. “Mos’ every day now,” he tells us, “they is somebody in the buildin’ takin’ off for the service.”
    In the few minutes that we’re standing on the sidewalk waiting for my father to pull the car in front,a larger knot of people gather. Some, I swear, are just passersby who’ve spotted Arnold with his suitcase. I wish we’d said our final goodbyes upstairs.
    My mother is red-eyed, although I can’t see any tears on her cheeks. My father is stern-faced, his jaw set, as he comes toward us to collect my brother. As my mother reluctantly lets go, Arnold turns to me and gives me the tightest hug I’ve ever received. “Be good, Iz,” he whispers, “and hold down the fort. I’m depending on you.” I now know from the faintest yet sourish whiff of his breath that my brother has been sick in the bathroom. But I kiss him ferociously somewhere in the vicinity of his ear, and the next moment, I erupt into a fountain of tears.
    Even before school begins, you can tell that the entire country is in a wartime frame of mind. The 1942 fall fashions in the shop windows that Sibby and I examine on our leisurely early September afternoons are full of “victory” clothes. The new suit trousers for men have no cuffs, and the lapels on the jackets are much narrower. All this, of course, is to save woolen and cotton cloth for Army uniforms and blankets.
    â€œAnd the skirts!” Sibby exclaims. “Short and getting shorter...above the knee. What are girls with fat legs like Sue Ellen Porter going to look like?”
    â€œNo pleats,” I notice. “And no ruffles. Skirts and even dresses look like two hankies sewn together, same thingfront and back. Girdles! We’ll soon have to start wearing rubber girdles like Harriette Frankfurter and my mother. Mrs. F., you remember, the aunt of that girl Helga.”
    â€œUh-uh,” Sibby cautions. “Positively no girdles. Remember the rubber drive that started back in June? It’s still on, you know.”
    I glance at Sibby’s carrot-colored freckles, which probably won’t fade until the late snows of winter—and then not much. “You’re right.”
    Back in June, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt got on the radio and said to the American people, “I want to talk to you about rubber.” Seems that right after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over important Pacific islands where rubber trees grow, so the U.S. started making long-term plans to manufacture fake—well, artificial—rubber. Meantime, the country needed scrap rubber and there was this huge drive—old tires and garden hoses, rubber raincoats and galoshes, rubber gloves and bathing caps. You could take the stuff to the local gas station and get a penny a pound for it.
    Kids all around the country started collecting rubber bands and looping them tightly over one another to make rubber balls, as big and heavy as possible. Sibby and I were working on one, too, but had run out of rubber bands. We were also making balls out of tinfoil from chewing gum wrappers. They were supposed to help with the scrap metal drive. I could see melting down oldaluminum pots and pans, everything from double boilers to