Manhattan Beach Read online

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  The next morning, Anna spotted Nell’s pale froth of curls among the roil of hats and caps that flooded the Sands Street gate at a quarter to eight, barely in time to punch in before the cutoff. Once it had gone eight o’clock in your shop, you were docked an hour’s pay whether you were late by thirty seconds or thirty minutes. There were dozens of sailors outside, dressed in the tailored skintight uniforms they bought for shore leave. Anna had heard there were zippers installed in the sides of the trousers so the boys could get them on and off. Judging by their ashen, squeamish looks, most of these sailors had spent their liberty in all-night benders. Two had lurched away from the crush and were leaning against the perimeter wall with greenish faces.

  Nell was in line for Hardy, the middle marine. His line was always shortest because his nose had been seen to drip into thermoses he opened to check for alcohol. The marine guards opened packages, too, untying strings and prying apart layers of paper, checking for bombs. German spies and saboteurs would love to get inside the Naval Yard. And while the idea seemed far-fetched (Anna knew plenty of the fellows around her by sight), it was a fact that there were German spies at large in American cities. Thirty-three had gone to prison last January for telling the Reich the sailing date of an American merchant ship, the SS Robin Moor. The ship was sunk by torpedo off the coast of Africa.

  Three men passed through the turnstile between Nell and Anna, but Nell’s perfume lingered even as Anna showed her ID badge and opened her pocketbook for Hardy to look inside. Nell was not a married. Anna knew that just by the way she paused self-consciously beyond the gate to consult her wristwatch, and by the sculpted slant of her fingernails. Her hair looked done; this was a girl who’d slept in pins, which meant she must have a date after work, since the curls—which had to be covered inside the shops—would serve no purpose otherwise. Anna was not a flirt, but she didn’t mind flirts the way some girls did. She rather enjoyed watching them take charge of men, even as the men believed they were in charge. Anna would have liked to flirt, but she was no good at it; her directness got in the way.

  “You’re Nell,” she said, catching up. The girl nodded, as if being recognized were something she was well accustomed to. “I’m Anna.” She put out her hand and they shook hurriedly, still walking. Anna caught irritation and bemusement in Nell’s expression; like most flirts, she saw no reason to know other girls. Girls were either competitors or hangers-on, and Anna supposed Nell must be wondering which she was likely to be. “I saw you fall off the bicycle yesterday.”

  “Oh. That.” Nell rolled her eyes, but Anna had her attention.

  “Is it yours?”

  “No, Roger’s. He works in my shop.”

  “Do you think he might lend it to me?” Anna asked.

  Nell glanced at her. “He’ll lend it to me. I’ll lend it to you.”

  Now that their talk had settled into Anna wanting something and Nell helping her acquire it, she seemed more at ease. As they hurried along Second Street, Anna asked, “Are there many girls in your shop?”

  “A few with me in the mold loft, but they’re drips.”

  “Married?”

  “You said it. Most of the single girls are welders, but that’s dirty work. I’d never do it.”

  “What happens in the mold loft?”

  “We . . . we make molds,” Nell said, the complexity of the topic apparently having exceeded her interest in explaining it.

  “Of ships?”

  “No, ice cream trucks. Don’t be a boob.”

  Anna was glad they’d reached Nell’s shop; she liked her less the longer they talked. “How can I get the bicycle?”

  “Meet me at the entrance to Building 4 right after the whistle,” Nell said. “I’ll bring it.”

  “Your supervisor doesn’t mind you going out?”

  “He likes me,” Nell said, an explanation Anna guessed she must employ—perhaps correctly—to account for much of what happened to her.

  “Ours likes us to stay in,” Anna said, aware that she was playacting a little, invoking a version of Mr. Voss that was slightly outdated. Hanger-on seemed to be the part she was auditioning for, perhaps the only one available.

  “Try lipstick,” Nell said. “Works wonders.”

  “He isn’t that type.”

  Nell’s face was all sunny curves; she looked perpetually on the verge of laughter. Yet her blue gaze was rife with calculation. “There’s no other,” she said.

  At midday, when they met again, they were both wearing blue coveralls. Every last one of Nell’s curls was swaddled inside a bulging scarf, and she wore the steel-toed safety boots they were all encouraged to buy. Though the Shipworker often ran little stories about disasters averted by those boots, Anna hadn’t bought a pair. There seemed no point, when nothing she handled was larger than a quarter.

  “You can leave it right here when you’re done,” Nell said, passing a beaten-looking black Schwinn to Anna. “I’ll pick it up coming back. There’s a lady just outside the Cumberland gate who sells swell egg salad sandwiches. Right out of her apartment—you’ll see the line on Flushing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You can’t pack egg salad. Gets soggy.”

  “I wish there were two bikes,” Anna said, feeling a rush of affection for this vain, generous girl.

  “Not on your life. I’m all finished with that,” Nell said. She added, smiling, “Besides, we’d cause a riot.”

  Anna had ridden bicycles before. You could rent them in Prospect Park for fifteen cents, and cycling there had been a popular weekend activity among boys and girls from Brooklyn College. This was different. It was a man’s Schwinn, first of all, with a bar inconveniently placed so that Anna had to pedal standing up to be sure she wouldn’t land on it. Maybe standing was what made the difference. Whatever it was, from the instant she pushed down on the pedals and the bike began to bump over the bricks, Anna felt as though lightning had touched her. Motion performed alchemy on her surroundings, transforming them from a disjointed array of scenes into a symphonic machine she could soar through invisibly as a seagull. She rode wildly, half laughing, the sooty wind filling her mouth. That first day she was too excited to eat, too worried about being late to take any chances on egg salad. She was back on her stool at 12:10 and starved the rest of the day, hands trembling as she held her micrometer, a strange electric joy swerving through her.

  The next morning she worked furiously to make the time go faster, and had finished three quarters of her tray when the whistle blew. Nell was waiting with the bicycle. Anna rode that day in the direction of the building ways, cycling past their porous iron latticework several times and glimpsing, within shadowy vectors, a hull so vast it looked primordial. The USS Missouri. Having heard its name murmured since she’d arrived at the Yard, Anna found it uncanny, almost frightening, to actually see it. The thing itself.

  Now that she was measuring more quickly, she began helping some of the slower girls to finish their trays when hers was done. One afternoon, Mr. Voss brought her a roll of blueprints and asked her to deliver them to the office of the captain of the Yard, in Building 77. Buoyed by the marrieds’ pantomimed stupefaction, Anna hurried south along Morris Avenue and then Sixth Street to the faceless new building, which had no windows except at the very top. She rode an elevator to the fifteenth floor and found herself surrounded by walls imprinted with maps. The windows showed only sky, but a chilly glance from a secretary in street clothes stymied Anna’s impulse to help herself to the view. The next afternoon, Mr. Voss sent her to the same office to retrieve a parcel. This ferrying of packages imbued Anna with a frisson of secrecy, even subterfuge, that she couldn’t fully account for. She felt like a spy.

  Without exchanging more than salutations as they passed the bicycle back and forth, Anna and Nell became friends of a sort. It was nothing like Anna’s friendships with Stella Iovino or Lillian Feeney, girls from her building and block with whom she’d played paper dolls and jumped rope and hel
ped to mind each other’s younger siblings. Nor was it like her college friendships with studious girls from Crown Heights and Bay Ridge. Nell was not a good girl. Her secrets weren’t for Anna to know, and this made her feel easy in Nell’s presence—released from a scaffolding of pretense she’d been unaware of having to maintain with other girls.

  When Nell was late, Anna waited by Building 4, dodging the cranes that slid in and out of its barnlike doors with giant metal flats suspended on ropes from their serrated jaws. She liked to peer inside at the welders with their heavy gloves and flaming rods. Sometimes, when a welder pulled off a protective mask, Anna was astonished to find that it was a girl. These girl welders ate their lunches sitting on the floor against a wall, steel-toed boots jutting into the room. Watching them, Anna felt her own grating distance from something urgent, elemental. Even before Pearl Harbor, this feeling had dogged her. It was what had drawn her to the Naval Yard last summer, when word first went around that girls would be hired. Yet even here the war seemed maddeningly abstract, at too great a distance to be felt. Anna longed somehow to touch it, and sensed she wasn’t alone. Once she’d spotted Rose furtively scratching a nail file against a copper tube from her measuring tray. As they were changing back into street clothes in the locker room, Anna asked what she’d been doing. Rose flushed. “You sound like Mr. Voss.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Anna said. “I’m just curious.”

  Rose confessed that she’d been scratching her baby son’s initials onto the tube, moved by the thought of his name out at sea, a tiny part of an Allied ship.

  Whatever direction Anna went—as far as she could go and still get back in forty-five minutes, allowing for a brief pause to wolf down lunch—she was drawn inevitably onto the piers: A to the west; G, J, and K across Wallabout Bay to the east, far from her own building. She bicycled onto them hesitantly at first, hair jammed under a cap, determined not to be singled out for mockery, as Nell had been. But it turned out that Anna’s brown hair was unobtrusive even when it came loose. Her complexion was “Italian,” and years of carrying Lydia had given her the flinty, taut-shouldered bearing of a man. With her eyes under the brim of a cap, she could cycle the piers incognito.

  A familiar smell engulfed her: fish, salt, fuel oil—a brackish, industrial version of the sea that was so complicated, so specific, it was like the smell of a particular human being. It evoked an earlier time that she no longer quite remembered. Her father’s suits still hung in his wardrobe, lapels sharp, shoulders brushed, painted neckties reinforced with whalebone. They looked like the suits of a man who would return at any moment to put them on. He’d left behind an envelope full of cash and a bankbook for an account her mother hadn’t known about. These preparations had made them believe at first that he was merely girding them for a longer than usual trip—he’d begun to travel for work. For months his absence had remained volatile and alive, as if he were in the next room or down the block. Anna had awaited him acutely. She would sit on the fire escape, grinding her gaze over the street below, thinking she saw him—trusting that thinking so would force him to appear. How could he stay away when she was waiting so hard?

  She had never cried. When she’d believed he was about to return, there had been nothing to cry about, and when at last she’d stopped believing, it was too late. His absence had calcified. When she caught herself wondering where he might be, doing what, she forced herself to stop. He didn’t deserve it. That much, at least, she could deny him.

  She presumed her mother had made a similar passage, but she wasn’t even sure. Her father had slipped from their conversation as ineffably as he’d dropped from their lives. It would feel odd to mention him now. And there was no need to.

  One lunchtime, as Anna was taking the bicycle from Nell, she said, “Say, you can keep it sometimes and ride it yourself.”

  “Not for all the tea in China.”

  “Because of one fall?”

  “Have you fallen?”

  “You looked as if it didn’t bother you a bit.”

  “That was the idea.”

  Anna walked the bike alongside Nell toward Pier C, though whether she was following Nell or the reverse, she wasn’t sure.

  “So,” Nell said with a sly look, “the snapper’s letting you go out, even without lipstick.”

  “So long as I’m not late.”

  “Think what you might get if you wore some.”

  Men’s voices fell away as they ambled past. It was very different, walking with Nell—what must it be like to be Nell? There was no ship berthed at Pier C today, and when they reached the end, Nell pulled a silver cigarette case from the pocket of her jumpsuit. It flashed in the sun; a gift from a beau, Anna supposed. “Is smoking allowed here?” she asked.

  “Men smoke on the piers. I don’t see any ‘Danger’ signs. I mean—mmm, good, you’re blocking the wind—we’re surrounded by water, for Pete’s sake!”

  With a coarse expertise that contrasted sharply with her general air of slinky refinement, Nell struck a match on the bottom of her boot and used it to light a narrow white cigarette pursed between her lips. The smoke she exhaled looked creamily delicious, as if she’d found a way to eat the chocolate wind. “If they’re going to make us wear these plug-ugly outfits, they’re going to have to let us smoke,” she said. “Care for one?”

  Only boys had smoked on Anna’s block—the girls had thought it dirty. “Thank you,” she said. “I will.”

  Nell placed a fresh cigarette between her lips, held the smoldering tip of her own against it, and drew on it until both tips crackled orange. The sight of her dewy face arrayed around the burning cigarette was jarring, exciting to Anna. The end of the fresh one Nell handed her was moist, red with her lipstick. “Don’t inhale at first,” Nell said. “You’ll get dizzy. Although I like being dizzy.”

  Anna drew on the cigarette, enjoying the dry heat inside her mouth, and let the smoke scatter into the wind. It was dirty, but a dirtiness she liked—akin to the girl welders eating their lunches sitting on the floor. She and Nell smoked in silence. Anna looked across Wallabout Bay at the hammerhead crane bent against the sky. A few days before, she’d watched it lift a cement truck off the ground as if it were a die-cast toy. Beyond the crane sprawled the Williamsburg Bridge and then the low buildings on the shore of Manhattan, windows like gold flakes in the dusty sky.

  “You should come out with me some night,” Nell said.

  “Where do you go?”

  “Shows, pictures. Restaurants. Don’t you ever go to supper in the City?”

  Anna had sipped beer with Brooklyn College boys at the Fraternity House, on Third Avenue, but she sensed that college watering holes were not what Nell had in mind. “I’ve led a sheltered, virtuous life,” she said.

  Nell rolled her eyes. “Too bad. You won’t know how to dress.”

  “I’ll manage something. I won’t damage your standing, I promise.”

  Nell’s blue eyes curved with delight. “How about tonight?” she said, tossing the end of her cigarette into the bay. “It’s Friday, after all—even if we have to work tomorrow.”

  As they walked back along Pier C, Anna noticed a barge off the end of Dry Dock 1 that was different from the usual dredging barges with their hooks and tackle and filthy lean-tos. This one was bare. At one end, two men were helping a third into a heavy canvas suit, like squires fitting a knight for battle. Nearby, two more men turned cranks on a large upright rectangular box.

  “Say, what are they doing?” Anna asked.

  “That one in the big suit is a diver, I think,” Nell said. “They work on ships from underwater. Maybe he’s learning—I think they train them on that barge.”

  “A diver!” Anna had never heard of such a thing. She watched, spellbound, as the helpers lifted a spherical metal helmet over the diver’s head, encasing him within it. There was something primally familiar about the diving suit—as if from a dream or a myth. Nell watched, too, persuaded by Anna’s riveted attentio
n that something worthwhile was taking place.

  “How did you know he was a diver?” Anna asked, not taking her eyes from him.

  “Roger, from my shop. They’re looking for civilian volunteers. He wants to do it for the hazard pay.”

  The diver rose onto his feet and moved hulkingly toward the edge of the barge, then stepped backward onto a ladder leading into the water. The bay looked impenetrable as stone, yet he lowered himself into it until only the bulbous helmet showed above the waterline. Then he was gone, leaving behind a coruscation of bubbles.

  At some point, Nell had gone to the canteen and returned with two boxed lunches. She handed one to Anna. “You’d better eat fast.”

  Anna ate her spaghetti and meatballs with her eyes fixed on the water. She was waiting for the diver to surface, but he did not. He was breathing underwater. She tried to picture him at the bottom of the bay—would he walk or swim? What was down there? Jealousy and longing spasmed through her. “Would they ever let us do that?” she murmured.

  “Would you want to?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Nell gave a disbelieving laugh. “They’d never let us. But they might just make us. If the men keep leaving in droves.”

  Anna’s mind closed around this notion like a lucky coin. Two hundred seventy Naval Yard workers had been furloughed for the draft in September, according to the Shipworker. More men were leaving every week.

  “That will be the day I walk out for good,” Nell said. She’d removed a compact from her jumpsuit and was powdering her nose and applying lipstick.

  As Anna returned their cutlery to the canteen, she felt a seismic rearrangement within herself. It was clear to her now she had always wanted to be a diver, to walk along the bottom of the sea. But this certainty was fraught with worry that she would be denied.

  After lunch, Mr. Voss sent her to Building 77, so routine by now that the marrieds no longer even remarked upon it. On the fifteenth floor, Anna asked the captain’s secretary whether she might look out the windows, in hopes of glimpsing the diving barge.