1943: Brush Strokes of the War

Chapter One: Emma

April 24, 1943 

“Do you want one, Emma?” Jane whispers, as she takes a cookie out of the cookie jar. 

I start to say no, but Mother quickly nods her head yes, as though she could read my mind. She makes a point of trying to build up everyone’s confidence. She always tells us that if we don’t have anything nice to say, then we don’t say anything at all. Therefore, I get stuck eating a lot of unappetizing cookies. 

“Sure,” I reply. Jane pulls out a second cookie, and hands it to me. Jane flinches as thunder booms, and I see a flash of white behind the black shades over our windows as lightning illuminates the entire sky. We have to draw the shades every night when the sun goes down so that the Germans and the Japanese won’t see the lights from our houses. The clock on the wall says that it’s eleven thirty PM. The storm has kept my mother, my older sister, Jane, and me up late into the night. Despite the continuous claps of thunder, everyone else in my family is miraculously able to sleep. 

I swallow my first bite and muster a smile. “They’re great,” I lie. Our mother is teaching Jane how to cook, even though she’s only twelve, and probably won’t need to know how to for a few more years. But Jane insists, she’s always asking to help bake bread, or chop onions – which always entices her to brag about how onions don’t make her cry – or add spices to our meals. Even with Mother’s help, though, the cookies are still atrocious. They taste bitter and bland, like something’s missing, which of course, it is. But I know that isn’t their fault. Sugar is being rationed, and we can’t afford a lot of it, especially not in a family of eight. I heard my mother and father whispering about it one night when I was coming down the hall towards their bedroom because I couldn’t sleep. They were talking about how tight money was, and how difficult rationing was making things for our family. It was because of it that Mother and Jane could only put a fraction of what they needed for the recipe into the cookie dough. 

Jane likes to put on this charade, and I’ll give her credit for doing a good job of maintaining it most of the time. She likes to act like she’s an adult, even though she’s years away. 

She spends a lot of time learning how to cook, and sew, and crochet, and play the piano. And she’s constantly curling her hair, and painting her nails the same bright red that all the young women wear, and trying to understand the current events in the newspaper. 

“I’m getting better at this,” Jane brags. Usually we’d dunk cookies in a cold glass of milk, but milk is being rationed, too, and Mother’s trying to save it exclusively for coffee and cereal. 

I eagerly await her reaction as she bites into it, smiling gleefully at her false accomplishment. She chews and swallows without a change in her expression, still smiling after eating the entire cookie, and I marvel at how she seemed to find her bitter desserts so delectable. 

When I eye the trashcan, Mother shoots me a warning look, and gives a small, subtle shake of her head. I get the feeling that I’ll be subjected to a brief and secret lecture later about how I should be encouraging of my sister, since she’s so proud of her baking and since sugar rationing isn’t her fault. Even so, manners and consideration don’t make the cookies taste any betterAnother clap of thunder sounds through the air, and Jane flinches again, but the silence quickly returns.  

Alice comes walking into the room with a book in her hands and her index finger between the pages she’s on, taking long strides. It’s obvious that she’s been awake for a while. Her steps are easy, instead of clumsy like Jane’s are when she’s just woken up. 

“Can’t sleep either?” Mother asks her. 

“Not even for one second,” she replies, and then looks at the watch on her own wrist. “I’ve been trying for nearly two hours.” Our cousins arrived from Texas yesterday, and she agreed to sacrifice her bed for Katie and Anna, while George, my oldest brother, slept on a mattress on the floor of his room to let William have his bed. Alice was going to sleep on the couch for the week.