Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons

Author:Kaye Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

My MOTHER had been right in one regard, when she said to me all those times, “Every young person is getting married, or just got married, or is looking to be married.” After Pearl Harbor, Raleigh seemed like a huge pocket turned inside out, shaking thousands of draftees and enlistees and their giddy brides out onto the train platform at the Seaboard Coast Line station. If I had cared to, all I would’ve had to do was walk out into the world with my hand out, ring finger ready. These were the years for standoffish wallflowers to step out from the wall and for the too heavy and the too thin to take a chance and put their feet forward as well. A sort of rabbity girl I had gone to school with stood absolutely no chance of marriage until she moved in with her sister in Norfolk and met a Navy enlistee who happened to go for her skittish type, and they were married quickly. They have enjoyed a long and happy life, or so it would seem from their holiday cards. In a port town such as Norfolk or Pensacola, shy stay-at-homes who closed their eyes and stepped out into the rush and thick of life probably found it all but impossible to stay single. Even the most mediocre seamstresses in port towns must have made mints overhauling Easter dresses, adding shoulder trains, and scalloping hemlines. Every magazine taught how to dye pumps and attach veils and Prince of Wales feathers to hats. The bottom requirement was that the couple like each other just a tad more than average. Prolonged court-ships were generally chopped off and pared down, so that a couple engaged on the first furlough was expected to be married on the second. As I overheard someone say, the world had never seen such marriages and multiplyings.

In October of 1942, I met Dr. Charles Nutter, whom I might have paid a nice sum to marry me had he not been twenty-seven years older and already married to a bright and truly kind woman whom he adored, pampered, and deserved. This idea aside, I more or less tortured myself with thoughts of how fine a father he would’ve been. He had just been appointed administrator of the Veterans Hospital in Durham when he called and invited my grandmother to volunteer for whatever nursing task suited her, promising her a highly coveted C gasoline ration card, free meals in the cafeteria, a uniform and orthopedic shoes. She didn’t want to accept any of these things, but my mother finally persuaded her to take the priority card. She told her, “Senators’ wives are scratching each other’s eyes out over C cards. You should get it.”

My grandmother called Dr. Nutter back and agreed to work three days a week, and then, without consulting me, she said, “And I’ll be bringing my granddaughter. Give her something to do, too.” He was happy to have me, he said; he had heard regular reports of my academic work from my grandmother since I had been in first grade.

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