Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃
( Chapter Four: ❛ AMERICAN CITY-SLICKERS ❜ ) SEPTEMBER, 1943
▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃
GINNY HAD A NIGHT OFF FROM THE SWITCHBOARDS ABOUT A WEEK LATER, and Jackie asked if she would accompany her to the Railway Motel for another evening of social grievances among some of the city's most riotous Marines. So, that night, dolled up to the gods, herself and her friend spent the evening in a cramped bar filled with live swing music and somber singing voices.
It reminded her of those speakeasies she'd read about in novels, those underground 1920s bars crammed with girls in dropwaist dresses, dancing in feather boas, temples of virtue where the room positively pulsed with roaring light and technicolour music. Bars like this had a certain lull to it, the blonde had found, a drowse of heaviness that hung thick in the air due to intoxication, the dance floor a bringer of sleazy evenings where the corners of her vision faded into blackness. It was Jackie who was on the dance floor that night though, as per usual, her forehead pressed against her tall, dark and handsome soldier's (just as it had told her in the tabloid!) as they rocked around in a circle together. Sitting on the sideline, Ginny couldn't help but wonder how their date had gone — the brunette never hesitated to spill the beans on things, but she'd kept rather quiet on this one.
Jackie had told the blonde she looked like a dreamboat that evening, before they'd left — perhaps Ginny would have been inclined to believe it if she also donned a pretty new dress and such neat finger waves, and perhaps she would have been more confident in herself too. Jackie assured her, though, that girls would die for hair the colour of lace the way hers was — she wondered if the brunette really meant what she'd said, as dreamlike as she herself was.
The Australian girls crowded across the bar from her table were playing a plethora of drinking games with the Marines, and Ginny watched one woman try to drink vermouth from a tall glass from one's head without spilling. In the Railway Motel, girls were outnumbered three to one; even Virginia herself was sandwiched between two Americans. If she'd have believed in fates, she probably would have believed that theirs were absolutely and utterly intertwined, though, she could almost tell that Hoosier didn't want to be there, even more than her — pessimism was almost oozing out of his skin. Despite seeming reluctant, Ginny quite enjoyed the time she was spending away from home, whereas the American man seemed to be in a constant state of lethargy, and had rubbed his eyes more than once since he'd sat down beside her, the curly-haired Leckie in tow.
"So, Ginny, what do you do around here these parts for fun? Day-to-day, I mean, when us Yanks aren't in such overwhelming proportion," asked Leckie, making an attempt at trying to get the young woman to settle into the flow of an actual conversation rather than just sitting there in a numbing silence, that indeed, was glossed over by the jumpy piano music, but still painful all the same, "Do you have a job?"
