“That’s debatable.”
“Are you sure you want to come to Key West?” I ask, wantingto give him an out in case he’s actually regretting his decision. “I’ll be okay alone if you’d rather—”
“Yes, I’m sure. I want to be there when you reunite Mrs. Nash and Elsie.”
“But why? You don’t believe in any of this lasting love stuff.” Is he really going to come to Key West with me just to rub it in my face if it turns out Elsie doesn’t care? That seems cruel, and Hollis can be a jerk for sure, but he’s given no sign of being intentionally sadistic.
He glances at me for a second, then returns his attention to the road. “Maybe I’d like to be convinced that I’m wrong.”
Key West, Florida
March 1945
One warm morning in March, Rose and Elsie climbed into a small rowboat. They had borrowed it from the local fisherman Elsie befriended at a local bar when she drank him under the table. Rose told her friends when she returned to her quarters that the fish weren’t biting that day, but she had no way of truly knowing since neither she nor Elsie ever cast their lines. Instead, they spent hours anchored in the Boca Chica Channel, southwest of the air base, letting the gentle sway of the placid water lull them into the illusion that they were alone in the world. Rose would look back on those first few hours in the boat, with hers and Elsie’s legs tangled together as they kissed and laughed and touched, as some of the very best moments of her life.
Elsie twisted Rose’s dark hair in her fingers. “Do you have anyone back home?” she asked, and Rose started at the way the question cracked the protective shell of the moment.
“What do you mean?”
“A fella, maybe? Someone you like. Someone you... love?”
Elsie wrapped her arms around Rose’s shoulders in response to the sudden tension in her lover’s body. She kissed the side of her neck as if in apology, though she continued, “It’s all right, you know. I don’t mind.”
Perhaps it was wrong, but it had been easy enough for Rose to keep Elsie and Dickie in separate compartments in her heart and in her head. Examined apart, her love for Dickie and her love for Elsie seemed so different: Dickie was safe contentment, shared history, and an uncomplicated future. Elsie was all wild joy and passion, the here and now, the thrilling and terrifying full spectrum of possibility. Speaking of her love for Dickie as if it could compete or compare with her love for Elsie somehow cheapened her feelings for both of them. She resented the way Elsie forced her to tear down the dividers and confront her love as a murky, indiscriminate, traitorous thing.
“Tell me about him,” Elsie whispered, and it was something like shame that made Rose comply.
Rose let her eyes flutter closed to better summon the image of the petite boy that years of farmwork had transformed into the broad-shouldered and handsome man with whom she had once been eager to share her body and spend her life. “His name’s Dickie. Dickie Nash. His grandparents own the farm beside our house in Oshkosh. We were very close growing up, and everyone used to joke we’d marry one day. But...”
Elsie raised her blonde brows, summoning Rose to continue.
“The war started and Dickie joined the Army Air Forces. He’s stationed somewhere near Palermo.”
“You don’t keep in touch?” Elsie asked, her fingers brushing up and down Rose’s arm in a hypnotizing rhythm that Rose presumed was supposed to be comforting.
The sun came out from behind a cloud and exacerbated the heat taking over Rose’s face. “He writes to me. Sometimes. When he can.”
“And do you write him back?”
“I don’t know why you want to know this,” Rose said, shifting until she was no longer in Elsie’s embrace. She wrote Dickie weekly at least, even writing of Elsie on occasion—not the truth of what they did together and were to each other, of course, but it was impossible to leave Elsie out of her letters completely when she took up so much of Rose’s days and thoughts. “You know how I feel about you.”
“And you know I feel the same.” Elsie’s hand reached for hers, and Rose let her take it though her guilt made her feel unworthy of touching and being touched. “But I think you should still consider marrying Dickie Nash.”
“You want me to marry someone else?”
Perhaps Elsie heard the heartbreak in Rose’s voice, because she gathered her close again and spoke hurriedly as if trying to get to the end of something painful. “Well, it’s not as if I can marry you. Rosie, I would lovenothingmore than to spend the rest of our days together, just like this. But I know you want other things out of life. You’ve told me how much you want children.”
Rose had feared the moment she would have to choose between traveling the expected path with Dickie and the unknown one with Elsie, but she saw now that she’d been naive to believe that choice would ever be hers to make. Still, she desperately attempted to fight her way through the panic tightening her chest. “I do want children, yes. But we could have children together. You wouldn’t have to give up your dreams of becoming a doctor. You could still work while I care for them. I’m sure there must besome way women... women like us... there must be a way for us to be together. To have everything we both want.”
“Of course there are ways. Women who love women and men who love men have existed forever, formed families of their own. But society isn’t eager to embrace them. It doesn’t hand them their dreams on a platter. They have to fight for their happiness. And what I want for you is happiness you don’t have to constantly fight for.”
Rose thought back to the night shortly after New Year’s when she confessed to Elsie that she joined the Navy in part to escape town after a disastrous and less-than-subtle attempt to determine if her best friend felt the same physical desire toward her. Joan’s rejection left Rose embarrassed and convinced she was some sort of anomaly—like a midnight-colored kitten born of two orange tabbies. Notwrong, perhaps, but certainly notrighteither. Elsie asked her a few other questions—though thankfully had not asked for details when Rose admitted to having sex with a man and rather enjoying it—then explained to her that some people desired both men and women, and that her previous lover was such a person, as was her first. Instead of jealousy toward these other women Elsie had kissed and stroked in the dark, all Rose felt was the surging excitement of knowing she wasn’t such an anomaly after all.
“What about you?” she had asked Elsie. “Have you ever been intimate with a man?”
“No,” Elsie had said with a little laugh. “Nor have I ever wanted to.”
Rose shifted again in the rowboat so that she and Elsie were sitting face-to-face. “But you... You’ll have to fight, won’t you?”
