Free Stage Door Canteen by Maggie Davis

Annemarie was Dina’s canteen “buddy,” pledged to show her around and be a helpful resource for the first week or so. Together they had checked the bulletin board, where someone signing themselves “A Vegetarian” wanted to swap meat and butter points for clothes rationing stamps, the Red Cross Blood Bank announced the hours in the Times Square area for blood donors, and there was a clipping posted of the famous news story about the member of a bomber shot down in the western Pacific who inflated his life raft and had an inspection ticket pop out with his mother’s—the defense plant inspector’s—name on it.
    Annemarie showed Dina the closet with shelves where the striped aprons for the hostesses were stored, and Carmen Thompson’s station where volunteers signed in. They had already been through her catechism, the canteen orientation booklet.
    “It’s the cardinal sin, you know,” she told Dina, “dating any of the fellows who come to the canteen. It’s not actually punishable by death, but that’s the way the committee wants you to think of it. You’re immediately asked to turn in your apron, total disgrace, and you have to leave. But it goes on anyway. One girl even got engaged. That time most of the junior hostesses knew about it, but nobody said anything. After all, how can you rat on one of us? There’s a war on!”
    She said, frowning at her hair in the mirror, “Don’t forget to try to pick out the shy ones when you go outside. The canteen likes you to take the initiative with the GIs that hang back and would never ask you to dance on their own. You just go over to them and say, Hi, the Stage Door Canteen welcomes you tonight, would you like to dance? Most of the time they say yes. Then they step all over your feet. Because what they don’t tell you is the shy ones are the worst dancers. Or they can’t dance at all and pretend they do, and just want to sort of push you around to the music.”
    Their eyes met in the mirror. Dina was freshening her lipstick. She ran her Revlon’s Cherries In The Snow up and down and around her partly-opened lips.
    “But actually dancing,” the other went on, “is better than sitting down and trying to have a conversation with some of them. That’s when you get the Number One Question.”
    Dina, making one last round with her lipstick, lifted her eyebrows inquiringly. The junior hostess sighed.
    “They say, ‘I guess we all look alike to you.’ It makes you so sad, some of them are so sweet, especially the ones that know they’re going overseas. You want to say something that will make them think they’re something special, that you’ll remember them forever. Because that’s important to them, to have somebody remember them. That they were here.”
    Dina said, after a moment’s silence, “What do you say to them?”
    “Oh, you say that of course they don’t all look alike to you, that you will remember each and every one of them. And most of the time they just look at you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I hate it, but I can’t think of anything else to say. Because they all know you’re lying.”
     
    They went out into the main room of the canteen. Dina didn’t have time to look for any servicemen who might be shyly hanging back, because a tall Army Air Force sergeant strode up and took her by the elbow to steer her away from the dance floor.
    “Hi,” he said, his eyes taking her in with considerable interest. “It’s Dina, isn’t it?
    He wasn’t the best-looking man Dina had ever seen but he was up there near the top of anybody’s list, with dark, curly hair and light gray eyes. Very sure of himself, the way he was looking her over.
    “Yes, I’m Dina.” She pulled her arm out of his grip. “I don’t know you, do I?”
    “Tom Weathersley,” he said, still staring, “I’m Tom Weathersley with Eugene’s bomber crew. He couldn’t come tonight, he’s got a busted nose and his eyes are swelled up. He can’t see. He wanted