Yes, We Have No Bananas

Columbus, Ohio, lay in the landing circle of Lockbourne Air Force Base, home of the Strategic Air Command during World War II. I was five when my bed roared with the passage of heavy bombers in the night, and my legs ached so hard that I called for Mother. She sat on the edge of my bed and massaged my legs with peppermint oil. The smell of war.

The list of daily tasks taped to the icebox door had changed from “Brush your teeth” and “Make your bed.” “Knead the oleo” was my call to break the orange bubble of dye in the plastic wrap of white butter substitute and massage the mass to yellow. “Weed the vegetables” sent me out to the Victory Garden that filled the corner of the backyard behind the swing set, modeled after Eleanor Roosevelt’s vegetable patch on the White House lawn. “Smash cans and ball the tinfoil” meant I helped build a plane at Curtiss-Wright, where my father wrote technical manuals and had a nervous breakdown.

Afraid that a manual he wrote wouldn’t be clear to a pilot fixing a plane fallen behind enemy lines, Daddy worried himself sick. He worked the night shift in an almost empty Quonset hut so as not to be around people, meeting with his boss in an overlapping fifteen minutes before his work began. At home, tucked into bed, I could hear his voice and Mother’s, rising and falling. Sometimes I heard him crying, her voice soft as a lullaby. The big planes going over covered my ears, and sometimes I cried, too.

Down the street at Beaver & Horne, the specialty grocery where my mother seldom went, bunches of bananas dangled in the window, too rich for the food-stamp allotment of our family, or the budget. A father no longer working, even at night, at home now, healing. My beginning ballet lessons across town cancelled for lack of gas.

Static-covered news of the world slithered through the night, voices of Churchill and Roosevelt and their cabinets cataloging success in battle, or loss. Limit travel, their words crackled, work harder to make ships, tanks, guns. Wad up more foil. Remember, Loose Lips Sink Ships and Uncle Sam Wants You. Contribute to the War Effort. On Friday I carried a dime to school for a War Bond deposit.

Mother embroidered skirts with nursery rhymes—“Ring Around the Rosy,” “A Tisket, A Tasket”--and sold them at a fancy shop. She made us summer dresses with the scraps. She sewed black curtains for the windows and waited for sirens. She closed the house up tight, pulled the black curtains and the drapes, turned off every light, not one lamp on, no candles, no flashlight, no little beam shining through a crack. Planes, our planes, sounded even lower in the dark. It was hard to breathe during blackouts.

More planes flew over our house, all the time now. My humid summertime naps were sleepless. When a tiny Cessna droned over the roof above my bed, that lazy whine of flight was filled, I knew, with bombs. If I slept, I dreamed of my father crawling toward me down the hall, and woke up screaming.

One day while my parents painted my bedroom walls sunny yellow, a message came over the airwaves. VJ Day! The war had ended! Out in the street, neighbor kids were blowing the horns of their family cars. “Can I, too?” I asked my father. He laughed. “Go ahead.” I honked and honked, yelling all the while, “The war’s over!” Down the street, Ronnie and Ernie yelled back. “We know it, Dummy.”

I found the Life magazine my parents had hidden. People like skeletons in striped clothes and piles of shoes, so many shoes. I cried until I couldn’t stop. Mother hugged my hysteria, said, “Yes. Yes. This is war. And it’s over now. The people have gone home again. Don’t cry, little one.”

Long after the ink dried on the treaty of surrender, I remember my father’s tears, the trips with Mother to sell the beautiful dresses, not for me. Overhead, still, the planes. The blackout curtains came down. We kept the Victory Garden. Daddy took a job baling hay on my uncle’s farm, laughing as he told me, “Good hard work like that make me feel really good. How about you?”