Page 25
Story: The Briar Club
Grace waggled a hairpin in a lock-picking motion and slid it back into the knot of her hair, switching on the nearest lamp. She looked down at the howling Angela, at Fliss’s crumpled skirts and twisted stockings—the same clothes she’d been wearing upstairs at noon to watch the nuclear test—and her mouth crimped. “Oh, my.”
Fliss cringed, waiting for the contempt. BadmotherbadmotherBADMOTHER—
“So you’re human after all, Bubble and Squeak.”
Grace reached down, picking up Angela with a soothing pat. “Let me mind the goblin. You change into something comfortable.”
Fliss didn’t think she had the energy to get up, but it seemed like it would take more energy to resist Grace. She managed to wash up and pull on a pair of pale blue pedal pushers and a checked blouse, then tied her limp blond hair up in a bandanna and came out to see Grace feeding Angela some cut-up strawberries, or trying to. “It’s early but I’m betting she’ll sleep if we put her down,”
Grace said. “All tuckered out from yelling, this one is.”
Fliss took Angela, flushing dully as she noticed Angela had on a fresh romper and knickers. Of course she’d wet herself; Fliss hadn’t taken her to go potty for hours. “Just... just say it, Grace.”
“Say what?”
“I’m not fit to be a mother.”
Finally it was out. Finally people knew . It was almost a relief.
“Oh, honey. She’s alive, she’s plump, and she’s got lungs to tell the whole world how much she hates strawberries. You’re doing fine. I don’t know what lofty ideal of motherhood you were sold, but let me tell you: there isn’t a mother born who doesn’t want to drop her two-year-old out a window from time to time.”
She sounded so unworried, as if it were nothing for a mother to have such thoughts. Grace never seemed to worry about anything—even if everyone else was irritated or snapping, even if there was a literal nuclear blast on the television, she just calmly carried on. I wish I could be more like that , Fliss thought, taking Angela back. I wish I could have a gift for not worrying. But she worried all the time...
“Don’t yike,”
Angela said as Fliss carried her to the white-painted cot with its fluffy pink blankets and wriggled her into a tiny nightdress. “Don’t yike ,”
she insisted, but fell asleep almost midword. Fliss looked down at her, peevish and tossing, clutching the stuffed elephant Dan had bought her right before shipping out to Japan. Feel something , Fliss begged herself, looking at her daughter. Feel something. Feel anything .
Still that gray, endless nothingness.
“When does your husband come home?”
Grace asked.
It burst out of Fliss, nearly a shout. “I don’t want him to come home.”
Grace steered her out of the bedroom, shutting the door carefully. “Like that, is it?”
There was a whole host of questions behind those noncommittal words. The kind of unspoken questions Fliss had thought herself when the beautiful Mrs.Sutherland said her husband made her account for every penny he gave her and expected her doctors to report to him about her appointments. Like that, is it?
“I want Dan to come back. Of course I do. He just can’t .”
Fliss clawed a curl of hair out of her eyes, retying her bandanna. Retying it just right, so the ends fell perfectly even. “I can’t bloody keep this up in front of him.”
The satisfaction of saying bloody was visceral, violent. Americans thought it was so cute when she said that; they didn’t know it was real swearing in England. Fliss’s mum considered it just a step removed from fuck . “I can barely keep the act up in front of the Briar Club ,”
Fliss said tiredly.
“Keep what act up?”
Grace asked.
Fliss opened her mouth, closed it. Flapped a hand around the room, the ironed tablecloth and the baseboards she’d scrubbed at two in the morning and the row of Angela’s perfectly sterilized jars of homemade applesauce. The stack of flawlessly ironed skirts and blouses with their starched Peter Pan collars. The letters neatly addressed in her curly script, to Dan in Tokyo and her mother in Buckinghamshire, assuring them she was really! Just! Fine!
She could only keep up the act of really! Just! Fine! if there was an ocean between her and the people who knew her best.
“All of this,”
she finally screamed, only in a whisper, because Angela was asleep and she’d really explode if her daughter woke up. She whisper-screamed again: “ All! Of this! ”
Fliss expected Grace to click her tongue, tell her she was exaggerating. Or tell her to buck up; did she realize how lucky she was, handsome husband and beautiful baby and everything in the world to be grateful for? Bad mother. But Grace just looked Fliss over thoughtfully, letting the moment stretch, and Fliss’s eyes filled with tears.
“Do you know what you need?”
the older woman said at last.
Oh, marvelous. Advice. Just what she absolutely did not want, which so many people seemed determined to give her anyway. “What?”
Fliss snarled, scrubbing at her eyes.
“A night off,”
Grace said, surprising her. “A night off, away from babies.”
“Are you sure this is all right?”
Fliss asked.
“The dress? No. You look like you’re going to the final of the Pillsbury Bake-Off, not out for a night of martinis and dancing.”
Grace shook her head at Fliss’s kitten heels, string of pearls, and dress of fluffy yellow dotted swiss. “But it’ll do,”
she concluded, unbuckling the broad red patent-leather belt from around her own red sheath dress and whipping it around Fliss’s waist. “Better.”
“Not the frock. Leaving Angela for the night.”
“Nora said she didn’t mind babysitting.”
“Yes, but—”
Fliss looked back up the steps of the house. I can’t leave my baby , she knew she should say, but the words wouldn’t come out. They just wouldn’t. She gulped instead, letting Grace snag her arm. “Let’s go.”
“Good girl,”
said Grace. Fliss was used to seeing her neighbor padding about Briarwood House in print skirts and straw wedges, but in her snug red sheath with her hair set in waves, Grace looked unexpectedly glamorous. Fit for Hollywood rather than Foggy Bottom. A pale blue Studebaker Starlight coupe made the turn onto Briar, and Grace waved at the driver.
“Your date?”
Fliss said, trying not to pat her upswept hair.
“That depends on the state lines.”
Fliss was about to ask what that meant when she saw the Studebaker’s driver: Claude Cormier, looking very sharp indeed in a gray fedora. “Grace, chère , you didn’t say you were bringing your English friend,”
he said in his Louisiana drawl.
Fliss looked at Grace uncertainly. “Where are we going?”
Because mixed couples were one thing in a private home, but going out in town... Where on earth could Grace and Claude sit down together in this city, much less get served?
“You’ll see.”
Grace slid into the Studebaker’s back seat. “Best sit in back with me, if we want to arrive without getting pulled over.”
“...Right.”
Fliss slid into the back beside Grace, thinking that there were some things about the States she would never get used to. Though really, could you say it was only the States? Look at Crazy Aunt Beth back home: one of the things that had firmly cemented her as the family black sheep was when word went round that she’d taken up with what Fliss’s grandmother called an Ay-rab . “Have you seen him?”
all the younger women in the family had whispered, goggle-eyed. “He looks like a film star!”
But that hadn’t stopped the nasty whispers when they went by...
“Where are we going?”
Fliss ventured, looking back up at Briarwood House, already worrying that Nora would let Angela have too many sugary biscuits. Cookies , she corrected herself.
“Just over the District Line to Capitol Heights in Maryland.”
Grace lit up a cigarette as the Studebaker pulled out into the square. “The Chickland Club.”
A long, gleaming bar, a row of pinball machines, small tables clustered together under low lights, the sound of Leroy Anderson warbling “Blue Tango”
over the jukebox—none of that surprised Fliss as they entered the Chickland Club. What surprised her was the crowd: Negro couples, white couples, and a few mixed like Grace and Claude. “Chickland is one of the only unsegregated establishments around here,”
Grace explained, winding her way easily to one of the small tables, Claude’s arm around her waist. “Try not to look like you’re at a church social, Bubble and Squeak. And don’t you dare order a lime rickey.”
A Negro couple were dancing on the tiny dance floor, and a mixed couple joined them—Fliss saw mutterings from the men jostling around the bar when the Black woman began a jitterbug with her white partner. Some of those glances came Grace’s way, too, when she leaned in close to Claude to laugh at something he said. “Is there going to be trouble?”
Fliss asked uneasily, doing her best to cram her full skirts under the tiny table as she eyed that cluster of men and their beers. There had been a crowd around the club entrance, too, restless and shoving.
Claude threw his head back and laughed. “If I wanted to stay out of trouble all my life,”
he said as if speaking to someone Angela’s age, “I’d never leave the house.”
Fliss flushed again, looking down into her martini glass. Claude’s fingers were tapping out a rapid rhythm on the edge of the table as if he had his drumsticks in hand—“You musicians,”
Grace laughed. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”
“Never.”
He grinned, a quick flash of white teeth. “We are what we do. You see books around here, you’d start shelving.”
“I would not. Shelving books and painting the odd sign, that’s what I do , not what I am.”
“Same thing,”
Claude decreed. “What do you say, Mrs.Brit? Are we what we do?”
“I think we are. I always ended up fixing people even when I wasn’t on shift as a nurse.”
Funny, Fliss had forgotten that—forgotten whole slabs of her life that came before Angela, as if exhaustion had wiped everything clean like an eraser over a chalkboard. “People know you’re a nurse, they’re always running to you with their bloody noses and scraped knees.”
Grace studied her, as Claude rose and sauntered off to pick a tune at the jukebox. “Seems a messy profession for someone as pristine as you.”
“When I was fifteen, I used to volunteer at the local clinic near Bletchley,”
Fliss heard herself saying. “The war, you know. I didn’t do much more than stock supplies and clean floors, but I liked seeing the way the nurses could come into a room where everyone was having fits, and just—impart order.”
Grace smiled. “So what pushed you to do it? Nice English girl like you, surely you were supposed to settle down, not get a degree overseas.”
Fliss began her usual answer about being lucky enough to come to the States with her mother and new stepfather and realizing she could apply to the Cadet Nurse Corps. But Grace waved that away. “That’s the opportunity, not the push. In my experience, if a girl attempts a career, she needs more than the opportunity. She needs someone giving her a nudge.”
A smile. “Quite often another woman.”
Fliss blinked, realizing she was right. “I suppose mine came when I was sixteen.”
“You’re Edna’s oldest, aren’t you?”
Aunt Beth had said after church in Bletchley village one sunny morning while the war was still raging. “Felicity?”
“Yes,”
Fliss said, trying not to gape too much at this aunt who was only ten years older than she, but who had so comprehensively thrown the traces over and sent the entire extended family into a tailspin. This was before she’d taken up with the Ay-rab, but the fact that Aunt Beth had told her own mother to go to hell, moved out, and got an actual job —not something seemly like serving in a wartime canteen or rolling bandages, but night shifts working on something unbelievably secret at nearby Bletchley Park—was quite enough to send the family into hysterics. “Yes, I’m Fliss. We don’t see the rest of the family often, being one town over. Not that it’s far away, but...”
Fliss trailed off. Aunt Beth didn’t really do small talk, or even eye contact. She just nodded and stood there, nibbling one of those rocklike wartime scones, staring absently into the distance. She and Fliss had the same blond hair. “You’re the one who put a stitch in the knee of Helen’s youngest when she tore it open on the swings?”
“Yes!”
Pleased her aunt remembered that. “I wish I could be a nurse, but that won’t happen.”
“Why?”
“The war will be over before I’m old enough. And Mum thinks only fast girls become nurses in peacetime.”
“Don’t ask her,”
Aunt Beth advised, already wandering away. “Just do it. That’s what I did.”
“I think I’d like your aunt Beth,”
Grace said with a laugh, hearing this memory.
“Yes, well, I won’t say it was much in the way of an inspirational chat, but it lingered in the memory.”
Fliss shook her head, sipping her martini. “And when my mother brought me over to the States, I had the application in to the Cadet Nurse Corps before she realized a thing.”
“Who knew you had it in you?”
Grace perched her chin on her hand. “Do you miss it? Nursing.”
“I-I don’t know.”
Fliss didn’t seem to have the energy to want anything these days.
“Go back to it,”
Grace said, “because that Fliss, the one who sneaked around her family to get herself a career? I like that Fliss. She interests me.”
A grin and Grace got up to dance with Claude as he came back snapping his fingers to a Glenn Miller riff.
Fliss ordered another martini, the world getting pleasantly numb. At least when you were staring into a glass you were allowed to be numb, she thought. You could permit the smile to slip. There was something very refreshing about letting that persistent smile swirl away down the drain... One of the young men at the bar weaved over to ask her to dance; she refused politely and was startled by his answering glare. “Think you’re too good for a white man, like your friend there?”
he demanded, jerking his chin out at Claude and Grace, who were cutting a rug with considerable panache.
“I know I’m too good for a bloody drunk,”
Fliss snapped back, using her most clipped British tones, the voice that really cowed pushy Yanks. He glared again before stamping off back to his friends shoving around the bar.
Claude and Grace came back from the dance floor, laughing. “—picked up since Mr.Byrne’s back at the Amber Club,”
Claude was saying. “You’d never think he spent a year in the clink, he’s back at the poker table raking it in, cool as a pitcher of iced tea.”
“Still eating his heart out over—”
“Oh, he’s got it bad. She quit the Crispy Biscuit and now he comes back from every lunch in a foul mood—”
The bar crowd was definitely getting rowdy now, not to mention bigger. Forty deep, at least. A firecracker went off somewhere outside, making Fliss jump, and the men around the bar cheered. An ugly sound to it, like dogs baying. “Should we be going?”
she whispered. It had to be past eleven now. She saw the Negro couple at the next table exchange wordless glances and reach for their coats.
Table of Contents
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- Page 25 (Reading here)
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