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they must have felt real to themselves, as I felt real to myself. A wave of astonishmentpassed through me, a wave of disturbance; I didn’t want to know this surpassingly strange thing, but the picture was growing, for the parents must have felt real too, and the people in the bombed cellars of London and Rotterdam, the soldiers lying dead in the snow with their arms sticking up like iron, and in the jungles, rotting. They had all been real inside, important. Frank Garibaldi in his green apron, coming up the steps whistling his complicated tunes, he must have been important to himself, the shining center of everything. He must have hated to die. He must have cried out and covered his eyes.
    They all must have, and it was too much to know, too painful, too pitiful, too huge and boundless, and why should I have to see such a thing now, just when I knew we were safe, and I had found happiness again? I pressed my hands to my ears, as if that would squeeze me back into my happiness, but I felt like a pond when a stone has been dropped, and ripples spread out as though set in motion forever. For these terrible ripples would go on forever, would be with me forever, even if my own yard were never bombed, even if only good things happened to me for the rest of my life.

Chapter 9
    G OOD THINGS WERE NOT TO HAPPEN , in any case. Soon after, we had our first blue alert in months. A rash of torpedoings broke out in coastal waters. Rumors began spreading that Jap balloon bombs were floating inland. Sheriff O’Toole reported in his column that those who had been lulled into a false sense of security should take heed.
    Chastened, I took a long step back into the shadows.

    When Karla moved to San Francisco, we drove her there and saw her settled into a rooming house. She was excited and happy, but when she kissed us good-bye, she didn’t seem quite as excited and happy, and I wondered if she would feel as lost in a room of her own as I would now feel. I tried to console myself with the fact that she was far better off here in San Francisco. People often said San Francisco was a safer place to be in than Mendoza.
    On the way home, sitting with me in the back seat, Peter began talking to Dad and Mama about his own plans after graduation next year. He was hoping he might squeeze a couple of months of college into the summer.
    â€œWhat about afterwards?” I asked, with my calm, interested expression.
    â€œBasic training, kiddo.”
    I was silent for a moment. “If you practiced your drum, maybe they’d put you in the band and you could just go around in parades.”
    â€œNot a chance. That would be too logical. They don’t put musicians in the band, they put cooks in the band. Musicians they put in the kitchen. Swimming instructors they put in, let’s see—desert training.” He laughed.
    But I saw nothing funny about the Army.

    Over the back of a chair hung a new plaid skirt and yellow sweater. A pair of saddle shoes, my first, stood underneath. I sat at Karla’s dressing table, carefully slicing the calluses from my palms with a razor blade. Then, after sweeping the pieces of hard skin into the wastepaper basket, I climbed into bed, where my feet encountered a cool vastness on Karla’s side.
    The next morning, in my new clothes, my hair brushed to a green gloss, I set off for the unknown. It was a hazed, sultry morning, and I walked past the creek and gravely alongside the garrison storm fence, behind which stood a stark scene of army trucks, artillery, brown rows of barracks. A troop of soldiers was drilling with rifles. The barked commands echoed all the way to the entrance of the junior high.
    I pulled the door open on a sea of unfamiliar faces, the girls with high pompadours like Miss Bonder’s, the boys with pointed Adam’s apples and deep voices, everyone yelling, waving, shoving, sweeping me along in a mad tide to the auditorium.
    There, as soon as the hubbub died down,