Doreen Re-Invented

A new who?

Margaret Doreen Boyer re-invented herself and minimized her southern accent. She slipped from sight and disappeared like the moon sliding under the horizon. She climbed into a shiny car at the lane to her house and was a mile away before the first dust speck fell back to earth.

Her family was frantic. During the war years, many young women disappeared. Some, war brides, became freshly pregnant and slipped away with lovers or alone. A few green widows decided to try again somewhere else.

In a few weeks folks stopped fishing for news, but her parents always were aware of traffic on Cartersville highway and stopped stone still if a car hesitated at their lane.

Doreen was bewitched by an engineer from Buffalo, one of the bosses who glimpsed her leaning over a worktable at the Bell Bomber plant in Marietta. Assembling wiring harnesses is repetitive work and can be done nearly by muscle memory while the mind wanders elsewhere.

”Mr. Boss” stopped by Doreen’s table, they shared lunch, met on her only day off and things went from there. It was Mr. Boss’s shiny Packard that drove Doreen away from her three-room house at the end of a dirt lane near Stilesboro.

Mr. Boss lived in one of the hastily thrown-up apartments just off the base. People moved in and out with such frequency that lives and lies were taken at face value. Few questions were asked when a young woman named “Maggie” shared Mr. Boss’s apartment.

“Maggie” had little to add to a conversation but wore new clothes well. The right amount of makeup accentuated a face with high eyebrows. She wore a perpetual half-smile and smoked her Chesterfield cigarettes with elegance.

While another young woman developed fingertip calluses at the wiring harness assembly table, Maggie assembled a narrative for anyone who asked.

“Yes,” she was from the South, Tennessee, in fact.

“College?” Yes, briefly, a small women’s college in Buffalo where she met Mr. Boss.

On Saturday nights Maggie watched men play cards. Smoke hung heavily over the table covered with pennies, sandwiches, ashtrays and glasses.

On Sunday mornings she must have noticed the time and her family’s unshakable habit of worship in the Stilesboro Methodist Church.

Mr. Boss was a Lutheran, whatever that was. Doreen didn’t know anything about Lutherans; she only knew Methodists and Baptists.

It is easy to wonder if “Maggie” missed life as Doreen. Boredom may have set in quickly because she had cut ties to life as Doreen. She could not visit the Bell Bomber plant and seldom rode the trolley to downtown Atlanta at a risk of being recognized.

She might have been relieved when Mr. Boss’s duty at the Marietta plant ended.

They packed their belongings, fueled the Packard with the generous number of gasoline ration coupons he was allotted and headed north towards Buffalo.

I wonder, if on the day she left, she gave any thought to returning to Georgia. She would.

joenphillips@yahoo.com