Chapter 1

My name is Jennifer. It doesn’t really matter who I am, but every story like this I ever saw starts off with an introduction like that, so there you go.

What matters is that I have a relative in my family tree named Jennifer, too. I don’t think I’m named after her, but I don’t know for sure one way or the other. I believe her official relationship to me is great aunt, because she was my grandpa’s sister.

I can already tell that using the full, proper relationship titles would be really tedious, so I’m just going to call them by their given names, sometimes. I grew to think of Great Aunt Jennifer as just Aunt Jennifer, so if I call her that, don’t get confused.

There were five kids in her family: four boys and one girl, and Jennifer was the girl. From what I understand, she was the middle child, and my grandpa Rick was the youngest of them all.

We don’t know much about them, because all the boys except Rick died in WWII. We didn’t know anything about Jennifer at all until I found her diary. I’d never even heard of her until I found that. Us kids had never heard of any of them, for that matter. That’s not strange, I guess. How much do you know about your grandfather’s sister, or those who died in WWII?

Anyway, her diary, the diary that changed my whole life, was in an old trunk up in the attic of my grandmother’s house, and I wouldn’t have known it existed if my brother, Bobby, hadn’t found it and gotten into it and found a bunch of relics from WWII. He was sixteen at the time, and I was fifteen, and he knew that if he told anybody what he’d found, the adults would take it all and he’d never get his hands on any of it again. At the same time, he just couldn’t hold it in that he’d found an actual Nazi dagger, and a pistol belt with a real, actual leather holster on it, and some metal things he called magazines that hold bullets. There was a cap that had a little embroidered skull on the front of it and some rectangular thick pieces of cloth Bobby said were shoulder tabs. They had two Zs on them, kind of italicized, that he said were actually esses. Even I had heard of the SS in WWII, but all I knew was that they were bad people.

There were also thick bundles of letters. Bobby wasn’t interested in them, but I was. They were letters the boys wrote home during the war, before they were killed.

And, there was Jennifer’s diary.

It wasn’t a diary that covered her whole life, growing up. It started, in fact, when she was sixteen. The first entry was December 7th, 1941.

Her two older brothers, Jerry and Phil, enlisted and were gone from the house within two weeks. The entries for all of December were written in a shaky hand, and they were splotched in places. It was so plain that she was crying when she wrote them that it took me back, even though I’d never been there. I felt like I was her. Maybe that’s because my own older brother, Nathan, was over in Afghanistan, right then.

Anyway, once I saw those tear stains, I was hooked. The language was a little stilted, kind of formal, but the parts that were made with firm, sure strokes of the pen were easy to read. She had wonderful penmanship. I said that diary changed my life, but it was really the story she told that brought about immense changes in the way I think about things. It affected my whole mental process and I can’t keep something that powerful a secret. At the same time, I can’t tell you who I really am. You’ll understand why when you read the rest of this. I still had to share what she wrote, though.

This, then ... is Jennifer’s story.

Before I begin, or get into the meat of the issue, let me say that transcribing her entries verbatim would also be tedious. I will quote her in some places, but not most of the time. So I’m going to use what my English teacher calls narrative license for most of this. When I told her I was going to write a story about what was in my great-aunt’s diary she lit up and said she’d give me extra credit. I asked her if it was okay to summarize and kind of update the writing and she said using narrative license is just fine and dandy. I’ll never get that extra credit, though, because she’ll never read this story. Again, you’ll understand why after you’ve read it.

In early December, 1941, the whole nation was in an uproar. President Roosevelt addressed the country on the radio on December 8th, and asked Congress to declare war.

Jerry and Phil went to the recruiting station together. They had mother and father’s blessings and father actually took them in the car, instead of making them walk. Jerry had always loved swimming in the creek, so he went into the Navy. Phil was an expert marksman, and he chose the Army.

There had been a lot of arguing going on about whether the United States should be meddling in other people’s affairs in Europe. Jennifer didn’t know anybody who’d actually ever been to Europe, much less Japan. To all the kids, those were just words on the big globe at school. They were no different than words like New York City, or San Francisco, which were also words on a map that conjured up no images at all.

But after Pearl Harbor, the arguing stopped.

Her first entry, though, also talked about what happened on December 6th, the day before everything changed.

December 6th was a Saturday and all five kids did what they always did on a Saturday. They went for a bike ride on the dirt roads outside of town. The bike rides were something that had started when they were all very young, and it bonded them in ways that most of us might not understand, these days. They weren’t just bumpy rides along dusty roads. They were explorations of Ali Baba and the den of thieves, or King Arthur and the knights of the round table. Fairy tales (all of them gruesome) were acted out. The boys became John Dillinger, or Baby Face Nelson, and Jennifer played the parts of Ma Barker, or Bonnie Parker. She was a princess who was saved from peril a hundred times. As the bicycles set them free from merely plodding along on two feet, their imaginations flew free, too.

Back then this wasn’t lame, like I’m sure modern teenagers would characterize it, today. Back then it was merely entertainment, and her entries glowed as she described them. December 6th was one of the last two rides they all took together. The 13th was the last, and by then the mood had changed. Jerry and Phil were going to war. It was only the strength of the bond between the siblings that made them ride that day at all.

When Jerry and Phil were gone, suddenly Jennifer was the eldest. She was the eldest by technicality, since she was only fifteen minutes older than her twin, Herbert, but it was clear she exerted seniority. Well ... in all but one thing, which I’ll get to in a bit.

Ricky, my own grandfather, was thirteen when the war started. He itched to “get in the scrap”, but he was too young and everybody in town (including the recruiter) knew how old he really was. Nobody who lived in Oxbow could lie about their age to enlist, like happened in other places. Since he couldn’t go fight, Ricky, as it would turn out, made it his personal mission to find and recycle all kinds of metal. Everybody outside of town had a junk pile, usually in a gully, or dip in the land, and those were places of untold wealth for a boy like Ricky. He spent every Saturday digging through piles of what used to be trash, looking for brass or lead, and collecting rags and paper to turn in at the central recycling point in town.

Which meant that, on Saturdays between January and September, 1942, when Herb enlisted in the Marines, it was just Jennifer and her twin who went on the weekly Saturday bike rides.

And that sets up what she talked about in her diary the most, and which must have been the biggest secret of her whole life.

Back then, girls didn’t wear pants, so when Jennifer went on bike rides with Herb, she wore a skirt and a blouse. The weather in Oxbow was balmy. That’s the word she used. She said it got hot later in the summer, and sometimes it rained. Rain would become important later in the summer, because it meant they did not go for a ride, and spent the day at home.

Jennifer’s father worked in a small factory that, before the war, made little plates that had a machine’s model number on it, and who built it and that sort of thing. Those plates got attached to things other factories made. After Pearl Harbor, the plates they produced all said: “This machine conforms to orders of the War Production Board”. These little plates were sent off to other factories to be put on whatever they made that contributed to the war effort. It didn’t sound very impressive to Jennifer, but her father was proud of his work. Her mother was a school teacher. The kids, of course, went to school. Basically, Jennifer’s diary was about what life was like for an average girl in an average town when America got into the war. It was obvious that things were different, but they also tried to keep things as familiar as possible. That’s why Jennifer and Herb kept going for bike rides every Saturday.

The first entry in the diary that was different from the rest, and which hooked me even deeper, was dated June 6th, a Saturday. America had been at war for about six months.

She had packed a picnic basket, and strapped it to the carrier on the back of her bike. She and Herb rode out by “Old Man Simpson’s Farm” which was, apparently, remote, meaning that the road that led to that area didn’t go anywhere except to farms. In other entries she talked about riding on main roads, where cars had been frequent in the past, but which now had very little motor traffic. Seeing a car on the road was an adventure during those days, because whoever had the gasoline rations to drive around must be an important person.

On this Saturday, when they stopped to enjoy their picnic lunch, Jennifer spread out the blanket on which they would sit, and began to unpack the lunch. She said Herb just stood there, watching her. She said his face looked odd.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“You’re really pretty,” he said.

She thought that was funny, but he didn’t smile when she laughed.

He came toward her, looking down at where she was sitting. Her legs were folded under her, covered by her long skirt.

Herb reached for the hem of the skirt and slid it up, exposing one calf. She said she was so shocked that she froze. Herb’s hand kept moving the skirt until one hip, encased in cotton panties was exposed. He said nothing, and she just sat there, stunned. Eventually, her skirt was folded back around her waist until her entire lower body was exposed to his view.

“Leave it that way while we eat,” was all he said.

That was odd enough that it gave me pause. I had tried to imagine what that must have been like back then, with things like sugar and coffee being rare and rationed. People were worried all the time, about the war, and about their loved ones who were off fighting it. I only have two siblings, Nathan and Bobby. Nathan is four years older, and basically ignored me for the last five or six years. Bobby is a year older than me, so I understand what it’s like to be a little sister, but it’s not really the same. Life was too different for them for us to really grasp it. Trying to imagine riding a bike out into the countryside with Bobby, and then him exposing my panties ... it’s just crazy!

Anyway, she said she was “flummoxed”, a word I had to look up, and she just sat there like that, until he pushed a sandwich toward her mouth and she finally began to eat. She said he kept looking at her legs, and that it made her get butterflies in her stomach.

They packed up and finished their bike ride that day, and Herb didn’t say another word about what had happened. He acted like nothing had happened. He kept acting normal all week, until Friday night, when he asked if she’d prepare another picnic for them for their ride on the 13th. I guess it never occurred to her that he might do that again, or to suggest they not ride. I’m not sure what I would have done.

On the 13th, Jennifer packed meatloaf sandwiches and apples, along with a mason jar filled with water, and off they went. Again, Herb took the lead and, again, he led them to a secluded area outside of town. She said she knew, somehow, that he would “do something” again.

That sounds ominous, today, but I didn’t get the impression she was worried. Her writing made it sound as if she merely anticipated her twin’s behavior.

Again, when they sat down on the blanket, he moved her skirt to expose her legs.

“You’re so pretty,” he said.

“You know Father would stripe your butt if he knew you did this,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “It would be worth it.”

Again, all he did was stare at her bare legs and panties while they ate.

And, again, when they resumed their ride and went home, nothing else was said.

Her entries for the following week mentioned that Herb was more affectionate toward her than usual, but otherwise were just like her earlier descriptions of life.

I got the feeling that both she and Herb felt isolated by what was going on in their family and the country at large. So much attention was being directed toward the war effort that nobody was paying any mind to them. They did their chores and their homework and their parents didn’t worry about them.

On the 20th, there was no picnic lunch, but Herb put the blanket in the basket on her bike. This time he told Jennifer to choose where they went.

She chose to go back to Old Man Simpson’s pasture, where there was a pond. Once there, she said she asked Herb if he wanted to go swimming. Of course they didn’t have swim suits, and when he eagerly agreed, she stripped down to her bra and panties, while he removed all but his boxer shorts.

She said they “frolicked” in the water. They talked about Jerry’s most recent letter, in which he said he’d finished his training and was waiting to be assigned to a ship. They knew that Phil was in Britain, but that was all.

When they came out of the water to lie on the blanket and dry off, Jennifer realized her cotton panties were semi transparent and clinging to her body in a way that obscured almost nothing from her twin’s gaze. She also observed that the front of Herb’s wet boxers were tented, making it plain he was excited. Even though she didn’t spell it out, it was apparent from the way she wrote about this that she understood what “excited” meant.

As I read this I wondered what sex ed was like back then. I doubted that there was any formal education about things sexual, certainly not in a school setting. I imagine most of that was learned from parents, at home. That was difficult for me to picture, since my own parents had never mentioned anything to me at all about sex, other than that it was banned until I got married, and that I was to allow no boy any “liberties” on dates. Now, with years of experience behind me, I know they were worried, because I was “well endowed”. I had (in my opinion) big, ugly breasts, that drew attention I didn’t want. Now I understand that my parents remembered their own teens, and what they did, back then. But I avoided attention. I didn’t use a lot of makeup, like most of my friends did, and I didn’t have movie star heart throbs, like they did, either. I think my parents wanted to believe that, because I didn’t have a boyfriend, or talk about boys, or ask questions, I wasn’t interested in sex.

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