We Once Had Wings

By Jennifer Shun

Eight-year-old Joy wears her brother’s hand-me-downs and her knees skinned. She befriends the neighborhood misfit and together the two climb trees and dream about traveling to the faraway lands they see in National Geographic. Fifteen years later, the misfit returns from serving in the Second World War, and Joy falls headfirst into the repressing role of a 1950s housewife, of marriage and motherhood. When the death of her newborn son thrusts her into a deep depression, she pledges once and for all to destroy her womanhood or lose herself forever.

Joy’s daughter Susan grows up watching her mother demons, but somehow finds herself trapped in the same cage her mother rails against. When violence threatens her and her family, she chooses to shun independence, focusing on her children and her narcissistic husband instead. It isn’t until she uncovers her grandmother’s dark secrets that she discovers the innate strength the women in her family possess.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Shun
• Release date: May 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997271508

Book preview

Part I

Joy

Chapter 1

1947

Jimmy came back, and he came back for me. The war’s ended, and the men have marched home. How unaware we were, waiting in our Sunday dresses, that they’d forever be soldiers, no longer the smiling boys with combed waves and rolled jeans we’d known. Something now preyed upon them in the darkness; they bounced their legs, waiting to run.

The shrill voices of their blood-splattered officers haunted them. "Men! Serve your country, get a job, get married . . . get laid!"

Our GI Joes yelled, Yes, sir! and threw themselves at their first loves, the first girls they saw, or whoever fell first against the pinup girls tattooed on their sinewy arms.

It’s the last day of June. I tear white cotton gloves from my sticky palms. A stream of tiny caviar beads breaks free and falls to the floor. I exhale from someplace inside the boning of my new girdle, understanding it’s useless to try to pick them up; I can’t bend over. Now if only someone would explain how I’m expected to walk in this evil contraption. From the mirror hanging behind my bedroom door, the girl I was at ten laughs at my satin-and-tulle reflection, all fluffy and white like a meringue in the bakery window. My favorite elm tree peeks in through the window, its branches taunting me with sun-kissed leaves. Inside virgin-white pumps, my toes itch to climb its familiar limbs.

It’s all going to be fine . . . just fine, Momma says, fussing with the yards of pearly fabric pooled around my ankles. The toe of her shoe grinds the scattered beads into dust, snaring my thoughts.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

This isn’t an end, Momma continues, as if reading my mind, but a beginning.

Marriage is all anyone talks about. It’s even traveled across the pond we call the Atlantic; England’s Queen Elizabeth is splashed over our newsreels before Joan Crawford and Cary Grant whisk us away to some far-off, perfect place. Like her notorious uncle Edward, the young queen is breaking tradition and marrying for love. Somehow her union has become the symbol of our future. It’s all a little strange since she’s British and we’re American, not to mention her prince is the furthest thing from a GI. But after years of watching bombs drop and rationing sugar, I suppose it’s a welcome change. Momma reminds me marriage is not about love and romance, but rather our love of obligation. I’ve told her I’m not the Queen of England and she knows I’ve never liked playing follow-the-leader, though today at two o’clock, a letterpress invitation embossed with sweetheart roses pledges my love of duty.

***

James Jimmy Young was the wild child who moved in next door during the third grade. His battered baseball announced his arrival as it rolled across our living room rug after shattering the front window. He didn’t apologize or even ask for it back. He just borrowed another one from a younger kid down the street and took to bouncing it off the redbrick siding long after the day had turned away from the sun. I watched from my bedroom window, taking two weeks to work up the courage to introduce myself.

Looking back, I had discovered two things that year: Jimmy and National Geographic. After the three years of hell we’d waded through, things were definitely looking up, at least to my eight-year-old eyes.

That one’s trouble, Momma said after Jimmy and I had spent a week exploring the alley behind our house. You stick with the girls. There’s no need to be running around with a boy two years older than you—he’s better suited for your brother, Carl.

None of her warnings mattered in the end. Jimmy thought Carl was a bore, and I couldn’t get enough scabs on my knees and dirt under my toenails. Jimmy taught me the proper way to climb a tree, and we’d spend hours poring over black-and-white photos of erupting volcanoes, bare-breasted Africans, or whatever else glared at us from the tattered pages he kept rolled up in his back pocket. We’d found an old box of faded, ripped-up magazines in the alley. We stashed the treasure under Jimmy’s back porch, afraid someone would make us turn it in to the library. When it rained, Jimmy would crawl under the musty deck boards and drape his old wool jacket over the box to keep the pages from sticking together. Momma asked me time and time again to play dolls with my sister Lois, but I couldn’t think of a worse use of a day. This was the most excitement I’d had since we unpacked our own battered belongings the summer before.

My childhood passed as childhoods often do—long and lazy. Then as quick as the front door slamming shut, it was gone. One October around the time Jimmy started shaving, his parents filled the backseat of their Buick with suitcases and drove off. As the road dust settled, I found my friend sitting on the concrete front steps throwing rocks onto the brown lawn. I tore down the staircase and met him on the sidewalk.

Want to check out the alley? I asked. Tomorrow’s trash day.

No . . . not this week, Jimmy said, throwing a stone at my shoe. His lean face looked splotchy around his cheekbones. You eating dinner soon?

Not sure, want me to ask? I smiled.

Nah . . . I changed my mind, he said, standing up. Let’s go for a walk.

I kicked the leaves scattered on the sidewalk and pushed my fists into my pockets, fighting the urge to hold his hand.

I think Jimmy’s parents have left, I said later that night, tossing a fork and knife next to each of the plates laid out on the kitchen table.

Careful, Joy. I don’t have money for new dishes, Momma snapped, stirring day-old milk into a pan of potatoes.

Why wouldn’t they have taken him with them? I asked, straightening the cutlery.

I doubt they’re gone. They probably just went away for a while, she said, poking at something in the oven. Enough about Jimmy. Call your sister, dinner’s getting cold.

By December, the lawn was carpeted in white snow, and we were sure. Jimmy’s family had split. Like true snowbirds, they said they would return in the spring, having left a forwarding address in Florida and a hundred dollars tucked away in the kitchen drawer.

Jimmy wasn’t surprised. He had been waiting for this day all his life. His mother, Lillian, had up and left his half brothers when she married his father, Walt. She liked to say she wasn’t sure where the wind would blow her, and life on the road wasn’t suitable for school-age boys. Her beauty had given her the chance to abandon the mundane routine of a wife and mother, and she never looked back when she jumped in the front seat of Walt’s Nash 690 with an eye-catching diamond on her ring finger.

She’d left her simple gold wedding band on the dining room table as she packed her suitcase, resolving to figure out her divorce when the opportunity arose. Walt was thrilled with her unique sense of detachment. Her three sons felt differently when they returned home after school to an empty house. They found a note scratched on the back of a diner napkin where their snack usually waited. It simply said, I’ll see you soon. Love, Lil.

Jimmy thought a lot about his older half brothers as he wandered through his parents’ two-story house with its three empty bedrooms. After a couple of years of solitude, he jumped at the chance to join the war. With too much energy and not enough discipline for high school, he couldn’t wait to have someone to talk to. Lying about his age and forging Lillian’s signature, he enlisted in the navy at sixteen. I said good-bye the day he left and meant it with all my heart. I wanted to kiss him on the cheek, but lacked the courage. I’m sure he would have pushed me off anyway. So I punched his shoulder, figuring I had nothing to lose. If Jimmy made it out alive, what reason would he have to come back here? Detroit was a city you settled in only if you had no other place to go.

***

Momma always said I was late to blossom. At fourteen, I still owned my boyish gait and was gangly from top to bottom. I didn’t see this as a problem as long as I could still outrun the boys in my class. After my friend sailed away, my body took advantage of the sudden lapse in testosterone. Overnight, I sprouted breasts and padding. I tripped walking down the sidewalk as my thighs filled out my pants, and for the first time since I could remember, I felt the cold rush of fear climbing the tree in the backyard. The scabs on my knees fell off and were replaced with a paranoia of anyone whispering. Momma, her friends, the neighbors: I knew they were all talking about me, just like the boys at school. I wanted to punch them all, breasts or no breasts. Beauty, or whatever they called it, was a curse.

It didn’t get any better through high school. Late spring of my senior year, my best friend, Irene, loaned me a white halter bathing suit and a pair of peep-toe sandals.

You’re gorgeous, don’t you see it? she said at my apparent disgust. I’ve snagged Daddy’s camera. We’ll send Jimmy a photo, and if he doesn’t like it, I’m sure one of his crewmates will!

Irene’s red fingernails matched her devilish grin. I’d known this girl for over a decade—mischief was on her mind.

You know I prefer pants, I argued, feeling naked and uneasy in a way I couldn’t explain.

Forget your pants. Jimmy needs to see you’re no longer a scabby kid. It’s been three years, and you’ve grown up. Now stop digging your toes in the sand, you’re messing up the polish.

The breeze coming off the lake accosted the curls Irene had tortured my hair into that morning. The water lapped around my ankles as I waded in higher. I ran my hand over a tangle of pondweed floating by. Momma once told me you can’t make a lady by dressing someone up in fancy clothes.

"He’s not my man, I reminded her. We’re just friends."

Friends don’t write letters every week. Irene smiled. Besides, we’re graduating soon. It’s time to start thinking about a husband.

Why would I need to do that?

There aren’t any husbands around, I told her. In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a war going on.

When the boys and men first left, we kept track of the days, slashing through every twenty-four hours on the kitchen calendar. Eventually December 31 arrived and we didn’t buy a new one. The wall remained empty as the days turned into years. A jagged hole in the plaster reminded us how optimistic we used to be. Now, after so many years, it was hard to remember what it was like when they were here, and I didn’t think any of us wanted to think about what would happen when they returned.

Irene kicked off her sandals and ran down the beach in her polka-dot bikini like an air-raid siren blasting against the muted sand. The wind carried her closing argument back to me: "If not for Jimmy, then do it for the troops!"

I ignored her and dove under the water.

***

I wound my way through the city on a crowded streetcar. It was the fall after my graduation, and my familiar commute rushed past in shades of gray. Clouds camouflaged the sun, and towers of limestone lined the concrete streets. Steam billowed from the manholes, veiling the city in a post-combat haze. We seemed to be fighting a different war. One day at a time. I glanced at my watch and crossed my ankles under the seat like Momma harped on me to do. It was 8:05 a.m. I needed to be at my desk by 8:30. This bus was so damn slow. Mrs. Burns was stern with us typing girls. I didn’t mind, though; I loved the challenge.

She’s evil, Shirley said, leaning into the space between our desks later that morning. I heard her husband’s been fighting in Europe for two years, and she doesn’t even write. She says she’s too busy working. Shirley shook her head. What kind of woman would put a job before love? It just doesn’t seem natural.

The mousy girl on the other side of me looked up and nodded. Those two and their chatter.

What would she have if she sat around writing letters all day? I asked, not looking up from my typing. Both girls snapped their carriage releases and continued transcribing, ignoring the question hovering unanswered above us.

I was buying time behind this black Smith Corona, but I was not waiting for a husband. I was waiting for a life. Someday the war would end, and the world would once again be ours. I’d explore and wander its landscapes, like flipping through one of the old magazines hidden next to Jimmy’s letters in my underwear drawer.

Come out with us tomorrow? Irene asked on Friday night. We’re going to the movies.

I’m at the hospital, I answered. Maybe next week?

Isn’t it depressing? she asked, twirling a piece of her blond hair. I don’t know how you do it. I’m scared to death I’ll see someone I know.

I couldn’t explain how scrubbing bedpans and rolling bandages brought him back to me. My fingers had rolled cotton from here to the iron latticework of the Eiffel Tower, all the while not knowing if he’d be the unlucky one to need my handiwork. Every weekend, I chose a Red Cross apron as my uniform. I was a soldier with sore feet, raw hands, and a keen eye. I scanned the beds for his brown hair and linebacker frame. It had been so long, I wondered if I’d recognize him. This war had changed us all—maybe he knew something I didn’t, and I wasn’t the girl for him after all. I hadn’t received a letter in months. I wondered if he was writing someone else.

***

Ready? Momma asks, drawing my gaze back to the mirror in my childhood bedroom. She tucks a worn handkerchief into my palm. It’s embroidered with faded blue flowers. Momma has very few things from her youth. This delicate silk square is one of them. I squeeze it tight.

That’s the thing about marriage, she says, resting her lips on my forehead. You bring the old with you.

I lay my head on her shoulder as she rubs my back. The comb securing my veil digs into my scalp. I ignore the sting as my mother’s floral perfume fills my lungs. For a split second, I feel like

Reviews for We Once Had Wings

[linda.marsheells · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I know it might sound a bit exaggerated but i truly feel like Jennifer Shun has what it takes to be a modern day Virginia Wolfe. We Once Had Wings describes all of us "none of us see things for what they really are,but rather, what we wish them to be." This is a generational book but it doesn't matter what era the reader is from, deep inside we all want the same thing, run for and from the same things, and hope, we hold on to hope till the day we die. Secrets, love and truth. Joy...Susan...Margaret.She described me perfectly when said that we are all still little girls with scabbed knees looking for someone to climb trees with.....could NOT have described me better.