“Sure,” Marian said. （The other girls had warned her about this idiocy, so she’d been prepared to keep a straight face and blandly agree, as if obeying wouldn’t mean being grounded half the time.）
Mostly her job was to wait. Jackie’s girls had been crossing the Atlantic just four or five per ship so they couldn’t all be blown to smithereens by the same torpedo. In the meantime they hung around the airport and the Mount Royal. Usually Marian drank at night in the hotel bar with the other pilots, the Atlantic ferry boys and Jackie’s girls. She wasn’t used to so much company, and while the others grew more boisterous as they drank, she got quieter, sat nodding along with the conversation. At some point she couldn’t anticipate until it was upon her, she would get up and leave without saying good night.
She especially wasn’t used to the company of women. Yes, the girls all loved to fly and wanted to take this chance to get out and do something, and most were basically all right, but they tended to have only ever lived with their parents or perhaps in a ladies’ dorm at college or perhaps with a husband. She had hoped she would feel more like she belonged than she did. She told them little about herself. （“Aren’t you the mysterious one,” said a girl whose father had bought her a plane for her sweet sixteen.）
Thank goodness for Ruth.
Ruth Bloom. From Michigan. She’d arrived two weeks after Marian, and they’d met in the lobby of the Mount Royal, Marian pushing in through the revolving door still in flying clothes, Ruth at the front desk in a blue dress and pumps, her hem on the short side. The beat-up brown suitcases at her feet gave her away as a flyer with their patchwork of gum-backed stickers advertising aircraft manufacturers and air races. She spotted Marian at once, called out, “You must be one of Jackie’s girls.”
Ruth was short and busty with strong, plump calves and a small but solid waist, a shrewd sort, gregarious, mischief wrapped around her like a feather boa. Her husband was in navigator training in Texas, she said. He was hoping for heavy bombers. She and Eddie had met in a government-sponsored civilian pilot training course open to undergraduates; not enough men had signed up so there’d been room for her—at least, there was once she’d made it clear she wouldn’t leave anyone alone until she was let in. Eddie had joined up right after Pearl Harbor, washed out of pilot training, got slotted as a navigator instead. Ruth said she couldn’t just sit around twiddling her thumbs while he was off doing his part. She’d gotten the telegram from Jackie, and so here she was.
“Are you married?” she asked Marian.
“No.”
“Ever get close?”
Marian looked away. “No.”
“I’m nosy,” Ruth said without apology. She studied Marian. Something about the appraisal reminded Marian of Miss Dolly’s girls. She half expected Ruth to start putting lipstick on her. But Ruth’s air of barely contained mirth, her confidence in Marian’s friendship from the first instant of their acquaintance, reminded her of Caleb, too. “You’re striking,” she said, “even though you’re trying hard to hide it.”
Marian ran a hand over her hair, which had been tidied in the Saks salon but was flat now from the helmet she wore while flying the open Harvard. She had been instructed to grow it out at least into a bob. “I try not to stand out.”
“But you draw attention by making yourself so plain. You must have worked out that much.” A small soft hand darted up and grasped Marian by the chin. Obediently, Marian allowed her head to be turned from side to side as though she were a horse for sale. Ruth seemed to be suppressing a smile. “Bashful,” she said.
“Not really,” Marian said, pulling free.
Ruth’s smile broke out fully. “If I buy you a drink, will you tell me everything I need to know about this place?”
* * *
—
They finally left Montreal in midsummer, four of them together in a cramped cabin on a small Swedish freighter: Marian and Ruth and Sylvie-from-Iowa and a girl from California who went by Zip. Marian had tried to conceal the depth of her happiness that she and Ruth would travel together and begin their training together because she wasn’t sure how important any particular friendship should be in these times. But Ruth must have been pleased, too, because she’d clinked her beer against Marian’s and said, “Thanking my stars we won’t be wrested apart, Graves.”
Marian hadn’t seen Caleb or written to him for the better part of a year. Jamie hadn’t heard from him, either, didn’t know if he’d married the schoolteacher. Her silence wasn’t out of anger; she was trying not to meddle. She’d always kept a distance from him, really, afraid of what would happen if they put more weight on their long, old love than it could bear. With Ruth, she feared overstepping, taking their friendship too seriously, but mostly she felt a pleasure in her company that was tender and heady, almost embarrassing in how much it resembled infatuation. Not only did Ruth understand, without need of explanation, how Marian felt about flying, but she understood what it meant to be a woman who flew, all the frustrations and indignities, the skepticism that buffeted like a headwind.