"I was there at the beginning and the end. And the middle, but no one ever thinks about me in the middle. They only care when they recognize me for the first time, though I have been there from the first touch, building a nest in the space in betwee...
When people saw me during wartime, they either rejoiced or sobbed. Often both. I gave them hope for the future, something to fight for, a reason to go on. But I complicate everything. Always have, always will.
But, this particular instance was one of the first times in a long time that I remember rooting for the people I touched. It was 1944 and the Second World War was in full swing. In Lyon, France, a small group of five flight nurses strolled through grand plazas, taking pictures on the steps. One of them, Veronica Savinski, had already been visited by me. She happily married David Savinski in a happy little chapel in Georgia before he went off to war and she volunteered to be a nurse. Another, Clara Hiscock, pretended to have known me when she sent dear ol' Roy off to war, unwittingly bringing their child to France, along with a bushel of marital problems no one knew about (especially not Roy). The third, happy, flirty Georgie Lutz, had never seen me, but she searched for me desperately in the arms of servicemen. Her lipstick, Estee Lauder's Envious, had accompanied many fine men into battle.
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The final two, Lois Newton and Blanche Davis, both had secrets; the same secret, but neither one would know about the other until later.
Lois, who had been born and raised in Buffalo, Ohio, had never had a serious boyfriend. She chalked it up to disproportionate features that she didn't grow into until she was 21. Privately, her mother thought there was something odd about the way Lois used to lay on the living room carpet, listening to Annette Hanshaw and flipping through Renaissance books, pausing on portraits of Venus. Lois knew me. Indirectly, of course. When she was 8, there was a girl in her class with beautiful, long, straight, blonde hair and freckles over her face and arms. Lois never thought that she loved her; she thought she was simply envious, with her jet black curls and almost transluscent skin.
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Blanche from Brooklyn had more boyfriends waiting for her back home than any girl would know what to do with. Blanche obsessed over anything romantic. In 8th grade, a boy had pulled her hair back and kissed her on the mouth. She almost cried from the poetry of it all. Her sleek brown hair was always perfect, pulled back fashionably even while she was with patients. I mean, God only knows when a handsome solider would come under her careful hands. For all her cliches, she had only kissed two people. The 8th grader and someone no one would ever know about. She had shoved all thoughts of that person into the furthest corner of her mind. At night, she would pull out those thoughts and admire them, like photographs in the back of a junk drawer.
