Free Of Time and Memory by Don J. Snyder

her. Failing to penetrate her thoughts. Her deep thoughts. A teacher in her last year of high school told her that she was a girl who hid
inside
her thoughts and
behind
herbeauty. At the time Peggy wanted to deny this, but couldn’t. It has grown worse; at work lately she drifts away without warning, sometimes right in the middle of placing a call. In a room filled with voices and the blinking lights of the switchboards she is able to just vanish.
    Aloof
. That is the word one friend accused her of. She’s too pretty and too independent for the rest of the world. So she acts aloof.
    But she does not feel aloof. She feels inadequate and temporary. Maybe it was the war that had made her feel this way. Or maybe it was just the fear that ran so deep in her, the fear that she might live her whole life waiting for her life to start. This was something she often thought about during the war. How people’s lives ended before they had begun. So many of the soldiers were boys really, young and innocent. And the children killed in the bombed-out cities, not just the children on our side, but the Japanese and German children as well. At work there had been talk about the boy from Lansdale who was killed in France. Peggy had wondered at the time if a beautiful French girl with rouge on her cheeks had kissed him before he was killed. She wondered if God forgives the girls who make love to the soldiers that go on to die in war. If God looks upon this as an act of benevolence.
    They stop at Inky’s ice cream parlor for a cone on the way home. Strawberry for Peggy and even as she is eating it she is planning to take a long ride on her bicycle when she gets home to work off the calories. The diner is packed with high school kids. They all look so sure of themselves to her: Where do they get their self-confidence? Some of the girls, in an act of teenage rebellion, have traded one of their bobby socksand one saddle shoe for a sock and shoe that don’t match. As self-assured and full of themselves as they appear to be, she still wouldn’t want to trade places with these girls; high school had been an endless repetition of long days spent trying to take hold of something meaningful,
anything
that would amount to something more than just words delivered by teachers who had forgotten long ago what it was like to be young, to be desperate to join the real world beyond the classroom walls and windows.
    In a corner booth a baby has begun to cry and immediately Peggy and her friend are rising from their seats to get a look. Her friend says, Have you noticed that there are babies positively everywhere lately? Gosh, I want one, don’t you, Peggy?
    Someday, maybe, she replies. There were other things she wanted to do first, and though she couldn’t name these things precisely, they belonged to an imagined life that was different from her mother’s life of cooking and cleaning up after a family. She hopes to venture far from that kind of hemmed-in life, but in the diner, when the young mother stills her baby’s cries, it is a marvelous thing to observe. The baby, sitting on her mother’s arm like a puppet, is suddenly smiling and looking around the room with a bright and knowing expression.
    How exquisite to be so good at something, to possess a heart that is capable of consoling another human being. This is something real and meaningful in a world of abstractions and uncertainties. A world that Peggy so seldom feels a part of. A world that was proclaiming its heartache in tonight’s newspaper headlines that told how the Russian army had begun entrenching along the 38th parallel in Korea. Picture them!
A whole army of men digging holes!
An interminable line of men in uniform bent over shovels on the other side of the world. And on this side another army of young husbandsdigging up their backyards to make room for bomb shelters with concrete lids that screw shut. What a strange world it was, so difficult to get