Isabel’s War Read Online Free PDF Page B

of dark blue cloth folded up under her arm, and I reach out to touch it.
    â€œOh yes.” She turns. “Only this one pair left. It’s a small size, though.”
    â€œWhat are those?” Helga wants to know, as I grab the dungarees and head toward the curtained-off fitting room just across the floor. My mother is there even before I’ve gotten out of my shorts. I start pulling the stiff, coarse blue denim pants up my legs. They’re fine until I try getting them over my backside.
    â€œWhat on earth...” My mother is standing there with one hand under her chin and her lips pursed. “Are you crazy, Isabel? You’ll tear them. There is no way you can get into them, much less zip them up. Take those things off this minute.”
    I don’t answer her. I’m too busy tugging away. But I know it’s hopeless. Even if I got the pants zipped up, mymother wouldn’t buy them for me. And if I could somehow buy them myself, she wouldn’t let me wear them.
    The minute the dungarees have dropped to the floor, my mother is off to give them back to the saleswoman. Why, oh why, couldn’t the store have had them even one size bigger? I take my time putting my shorts back on and, just as I’m about to leave the fitting room, the curtain flutters and Helga comes hopping in, the dungarees slung over her shoulder.
    â€œI’m not talking to you,” I mumble to my mother as we follow Helga and Mrs. F. out of the store. They are carrying a number of purchases for Helga including, of course, the dungarees that I couldn’t fit into. “You had no business giving them to her .”
    â€œI didn’t,” my mother protests. “When she saw me carrying them, she asked if she could try them on. What was I supposed to say? Why are you holding such a grudge against that poor girl? What did she ever do to you?”
    I take a vow of silence where my mother is concerned and we spend the rest of the afternoon traipsing around town. Mr. F. joins us and goes to the blood bank to donate blood for the troops. Mrs. F. and my mother go into a yarn store and buy olive-colored wool to knit scarves and mittens and socks for the soldiers. Mrs. F. also buys extra knitting needles and promises to teach me to knit as soon as we get back to Moskin’s.
    My mother suggests we get some supplies from the Red Cross for making up first-aid kits. We’ll roll bandages and stuff during our vacation at Shady Pines and then return the kits when they’re ready for use in case of an enemy attack at home or on the front lines. Finally we get into Mr. F.’s car with all our packages and head back to Moskin’s.
    For the rest of the afternoon, Mrs. F. and I sit under a tree and she teaches me how to cast the yarn onto my two long knitting needles and how to knit and purl, the two basic stitches. I’m making, Mrs. F. tells me, a scarf for some G.I., a soldier in the U.S. Army, who will one of these days invade Europe and take it back from Hitler and the Nazis, who have been grabbing everything they can from Russia to France.
    With all the stitches I’m dropping and all the help I need from Mrs. F., it’s just as well that an invasion of Europe is going to take a couple of years at least. I’m terrible at the “womanly arts” and I’m afraid it’s going to be a very long war.
    Meantime, my mother and some of the other ladies are sitting nearby rolling bandages for the Red Cross. Helga, after her shopping spree in Harper’s Falls, has of course been sent to our room to rest.
    â€œHelga, Helga, psst .”
    It’s late that night and I’m dreaming of an endlessskein of olive-colored wool that is threatening to strangle me, when my sleep is pierced by a soft whistle-like sound. I have no idea what time it is, only that it’s dark out and that I seem to have been asleep for hours. As I toss over onto my right side, I hear the sound again,