The Green Glass Sea (9 page)

The other three girls stared at her.

“Holy Joe, we can't go through
there
, ” said Barbara. “We're not allowed. It's off-limits. ”

“It's not really restricted, ” said Suze. “There's no gadget stuff. It's just trucks. ” She put on her other sneaker.

"But there are still guards, ” said Joyce. “MPs. With guns, ” she added, as if Suze had never seen one.

“They're not going to
shoot
us. We're kids. They only shoot Nazi spies, ” Suze said, trying to sound confident. At least that was what Tom had told her. “C'mon. ”

Suze jumped up onto the chain-link fence, fitting the rubber tips of her sneakers into two diamond-shaped openings about a foot apart. She looked down at the other girls.

“I'm walking around, ” said Barbara. Suze wasn't surprised. Barbara was a year younger, and her father was Navy.

“Me too, ” said Betty. “This is stupid. ” She looked at Joyce.

“Some shortcut, ” Joyce said. She looked at Suze and shook her head. “Show-off, ” she muttered. She linked her arm through Betty's, and they walked away.

Suze felt her face grow hot.
Stupid scaredy-cats
, she thought. It was an adventure. Or had sounded like one when the boys talked about it. But she hadn't counted on doing it alone. The rounded wires of the fence cut into her hands as she clung there a few feet off the ground. Maybe she should jump down? No. It
was
a shortcut. They'd have to admit that when she got to the PX first. She'd show
them
.

Suze climbed the fence.

The top wasn't a rounded bar, like the fence at her school in Berkeley. She'd climbed that all the time. This one ended with sharp, stubby Xs of cut wire. She stood for a second with her right sneaker high up on the fence, secure in a foothold, then threw her left leg over. She felt the edge of her shorts catch, but no skin, and freed herself with a small ripping sound. Her left foot found a grip, and she was over. She climbed down quickly and jumped to the ground between two army-green buses.

Suze felt like a commando, a member of the resistance, sneaking through enemy lines. She edged her way along to the front fender of the bus on her left and peered out. No one in sight. She sprinted across an opening, edged along another bus, then moved to her right, under cover of the bulk of a weapons carrier. She leaned up against its side, her heart racing. She could feel the heat of the metal through her shirt. She took a deep breath and tiptoed up to the front of the vehicle, then pulled back abruptly.

An MP with a rifle was walking up the row, only three trucks away. Suze scurried under her truck and lay facedown in the dirt until she saw his black-booted feet pass by. She counted to twenty, then crawled out. The front of her—shirt, shorts, arms, legs—was a solid reddish brown. Probably her face too. She started to brush the dust off, but that made noise. Besides, she was just going to get dirtier.

She looked behind her. It seemed like a long way, almost as far as going forward. And if she went back now, the other girls would really razz her. She peered around the front of the weapons carrier again. The MP was at the end of the row now, facing away from her, watching the other girls as they turned the corner of the fence.

Suze ran across the open lane and crouched beside a jeep. Sweat dripped off her forehead, and her hair was in her eyes. She jammed it behind her ears, looked around, and said a bad word, not quite out loud. The Motor Pool was bigger than she'd thought. Between her and the other fence was about an acre of jeeps. And she'd have to crouch down the whole way. She was taller than a jeep.

She had duck-walked the length of six jeeps when she heard men talking. She froze and tried not to breathe. The enemy was near. If they captured her, she would not talk, would not reveal the names of the others. She waited what seemed like forever, and the voices stopped. There were still a lot of jeeps ahead, but she could see the front door of the PX through the opposite fence now. She didn't see the other girls. If she ran, she could still beat them there.

Now! Suze ran as fast as she could in a crouch, past one jeep, then another. Only three jeeps between her and the fence, and—

“
Halt!
” said a loud, male voice about ten feet behind her. She turned her head for a second and saw a uniformed man in a white helmet, rifle in his arms, walking quickly toward her down the line of jeeps.

Suze stood up and ran as hard as she could. One jeep. Two.

“HALT!” shouted the MP again. She could hear him running now, his footsteps pounding on the dirt too close behind her.

Suze lunged for the front bumper of the last jeep and launched herself onto the fence. Her left foot slipped, and she scraped against the metal mesh for a moment, wrenching her arms in their sockets as she fought to hold on. She scrambled, found a foothold, and climbed, fast.

“Got you!” the MP shouted, and grabbed at her foot. Suze jerked her leg, and in a desperate effort, threw herself over the top, just missing the sharp fence ends. She half fell, half jumped the last five feet to the ground and landed on the hard dirt on the other side of the fence with a
whump
that knocked the air out of her for a few seconds.

She got up and looked behind her. The MP stood glaring on the other side of the fence. Then he said something under his breath and shook his head. He turned and walked away.

She'd done it! The MP couldn't touch her. On this side of the fence, the scientists were more important than the army. The MPs were here to protect
them
.

“Later, alligator, ” she whispered. She was not quite brave enough, or foolish enough, to wave.

By the time the other girls arrived, a minute or two later, Suze was leaning against the wooden sign that said POST EXCHANGE. Her shirt and shorts were ripped and a little rivulet of blood trickled slowly down her dirt-covered leg from the knee she'd skinned coming off the fence. But she'd beaten them there.

“See, ” she said, triumphantly. “I
told
you it was a shortcut. ”

SUZE GRINNED AND
waited for one of the other girls to say something—“Hey, you were right” or “That
was
a good idea. ” But Betty just stared at Suze for a moment, then sniffed. “Some people will do
any
thing for attention. ” She brushed by her and held the screen door open for Joyce and Barbara, letting it bang shut just before Suze reached it.

Suze stood there for a moment, stunned. She thought about leaving, but now she was so thirsty she almost didn't care. She opened the door and went in. The PX was full of soldiers and older kids, high-school boys and girls who played the jukebox and giggled too loud. Betty and the other girls stood in line at the counter. When they got their Cokes, Joyce turned and looked at Suze. She wrinkled her nose, as if something smelled bad, and Betty laughed. Suze felt her face flush.

She gave the clerk her nickel and took the green glass bottle, icy cold and beaded with condensation in the hot, dry summer air. She got a paper napkin from the chrome dispenser and used the damp rectangle to wipe some of the dirt and blood off her knee. It would have a good scab.

Suze had felt like a hero, returned from a dangerous mission. But when she got out to the wooden porch and saw the backs of the other girls, just disappearing around the corner of the PX, on the road to the Tech Area, the feeling faded. She barely tasted her Coke, and went back into the PX to console herself with a new comic.

She walked back slowly—around the Motor Pool. In front of the Lodge, she passed a group of dark-haired women chattering in Spanish. One of them was Carmelita Martinez, a woman in her early twenties, with jet-black hair that hung halfway down her back and blunt-cut bangs. She cleaned their house two afternoons a week, and had been teaching Suze a little bit of Spanish.

“
Buenos días
, Carmelita, ” Suze said.

“Ah,
buenos días
,
Señorita
Suz. ” Carmelita paused as the rest of the women walked on.
“Hoy, su casa está muy limpia.
”

That was a word Suze didn't know. She held out her hands, palms up.
“¿Qué?”
she asked.

“
Su casa está
clean. ”

"Oh.
Gracias
. ” Suze thought for a minute. "Uh,
¿ Su camino to el pueblo?
”

Carmelita nodded.
"Sí. Sí. Y muy pronto. ”
She held up her wrist, with its silver and turquoise bracelets, and mimed looking at a watch.

“Oh. Okay.
Adios
, ” Suze said.

Carmelita nodded and trotted off to catch up with the other women. Every weekday morning, women from the pueblo of San Ildefonso boarded an army bus that brought them to the Hill to clean the apartments of women who worked in the labs. They returned on the same bus each afternoon, the only commuters on the Hill.

Suze got back to the apartment a little after 5:00,
Wonder Woma
n in hand. Six days a week, the siren from the Tech Area went off at 5:30, the official end of the work day. That didn't mean much, since many of the scientists stayed in their labs until late at night, if they came home at all. But Suze knew her father wouldn't be home
before
the siren, and that gave her time to clean up. She was too dirty for him not to notice, and she wasn't in the mood to answer any questions.

She tossed her sneakers under her bed and went into the tiny bathroom. In Berkeley they'd had pink-and-gray tiles and a big claw-foot bathtub. This one had wooden walls—green, but a paler green than the outside paint—and linoleum that pulled up at the corners, revealing sticky caramel-brown glue. A stall shower with iron pipes and dull black knobs stood in one corner. The army didn't believe in bathtubs.

The water always came out of the pipes boiling hot, too hot to even touch to test the temperature. So Suze turned on the cold first, and kept one arm in the stream of water while she very slowly turned the hot tap. Thin brown mud dripped off her arm. When the water was just warm, she climbed into the shower and let it sluice most of the dirt off her shirt and shorts, waiting until it ran pretty clear before pulling them off.

They lay in a wet ball in the corner of the stall while she soaped the parts of her she could see. Even Ivory stung the skinned place on her knee, and a couple of other scrapes she hadn't known she had. The shampoo was on top of the medicine cabinet, so she washed her hair with the soap, which left it feeling clean but a little rubbery.

She dried herself off and put a Band-Aid on her knee, in case she bumped it. She squeezed as much of the water out of her clothes as she could, and her bare feet made shiny transparent footprints on the hardwood floor when she walked to her bedroom. She draped her wet clothes over the windowsill to dry and put on a clean blue shirt and a pair of seersucker shorts that were on their way to being too small but would last the rest of the summer. She was sitting on the back steps, four pages into
Wonder Woman
, when her father came around the corner of the identical shoebox-shaped building across the curving road, through a clump of pines that shirred and whispered in the late-afternoon breeze.

“Hi, Daddy!” she called, and thudded down the steps to greet him.

Philip Gordon was a tall, square man in his late thirties, with receding sandy-blond hair. He was dressed in his usual work clothes for summer on the Hill—gray twill pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, open at the neck. Two pens and the stem of his briar pipe protruded from his shirt pocket. He was carrying a small sheaf of letters and a newspaper.

“How's my girl?” he said. He reached down and patted Suze's damp hair. “Hey, you're actually clean, ” he said.

“I took a shower. It was
really
hot outside. How was work?” she asked, changing the subject. She followed him up the white Z of the steps to the second floor.

He frowned. “You know I can't tell you. ”

“
Daddy
, ” said Suze, a little annoyed and stung at his tone. “I didn't ask what you were doing. Just how was your day?” Her father was a metallurgist. In Berkeley, he used to bring lumps home for her. Gray lumps, dull lumps, smooth and lustrous lumps. He'd sit down at the kitchen table and drink a beer and tell her how this one cracked when it got too cold, and this one melted too soon, and showed her how this one would snap right in two if he slapped it flat on the table.

Suze was never sure what he
did
with his lumps, and had pretended that gray lumps were interesting presents, because she liked it a lot when he sat and talked to her. But now all his lumps belonged to the government and were classified, which meant he couldn't bring them home, or even talk about them. She sort of missed them.

“Sorry, ” he said. “I didn't mean to bark. ” He opened the round-shouldered refrigerator and took out a brown glass bottle of Coors beer. He popped off the cap with the metal opener on a string nailed to the side of the cabinet, and sat down at the table. He took a deep swallow, then put the bottle down on the yellow-and-white-checked oilcloth.

“It was all right, ” he said. “Frustrating in parts, but we're making progress, I think. Is your mother home yet?”

Suze shook her head. “She's still at
her
lab. She says she'll try to meet us at the Lodge for dinner, but she doesn't know how late she'll be. ” She sat down in the chair across from him.

“Oh. Okay. ” This was not unusual. He took another sip of beer and looked at the clock. “Then we should head over in a few minutes. It's steak night, and the Lodge'll be crowded. We don't want to be late. ”

“How come we get steak every week?” she asked. “At home the butcher sometimes didn't even have hamburger, and we had to have the coupons. ”