Page 2 of Cocky Origins: May and Jerald Cocker

After I change, I walk out for our bathroom and hear Hank downstairs with laughter in his voice. “Sure, he’s coming! I said I was worried about losing him to the war. You know he believed me? I should be in pictures!”

I pause, surprised.

He pulled a fast one on me!

And I fell for it.

Hank, you dog, I’ll get you back for this!

Our father’s weak chuckle makes it upstairs.

Well good, his ticker needs a laugh.

With a frown I go brush my teeth.

Hank deserves my desertion after the stunt he just pulled. I’ll stay five minutes and ditch him when he finds a girl.

A high school dance at my age. What’d I get myself roped into?

2

MAY

I groan, “Why must you be so stubborn?”

Ignoring me, Mother sews a new button onto Father’s best shirt, her back straight in a chair made for posture, not comfort. I pull back the curtain, aghast to find twilight looming.

I’ve no time to waste!

I fall at her feet, grabbing a stockinged leg. “Please let me go to the dance! I simply must go. If I don’t, I’ll die!”

Children run through our living room as she reminds me, “I said no and no it stands. You’re too young!”

The needle stretches long before diving down. I stare at it, and clutch her knees, “But I’m eighteen!”

“May Eloise, the way you carry on! You’ve only just last month turned seventeen, a fact I know better than anyone.”

I lay my head on her lap. “I despise how a silly number confines me.”

“Yes, well, welcome to womanhood.”

I close my eyes, knowing all too well this particular gripe.

I’m doomed.

World War II has left a mark on everyone. But her mark is of a different sort.

Millions of able-bodied men have enlisted or been drafted, and they left good jobs behind, opportunities wholly unavailable to women before now. For the first time wives are earning paychecks while their husbands serve.

Women have been secretaries, telephone operators, and the like, before. But factory jobs are the manly-labor type. They’re better paying and more fulfilling for a change.

The trouble is that my father is 4F — unable to enlist on account of his bad left leg. He was born with the affliction and hadn’t paid it much mind until it kept him out of duty. That broke his proud heart.

Mother and her friends say — whenever he’s not around — that many husbands don’t want their wives to earn the money in the house. That’s a man’s job.

She so wants to get her hands dirty in a new way. It sounds exciting to her, and I agree. She implored him to relent, but he wouldn’t budge. Not her friends, not the government, not even Rosie the Riveter could convince him to let her have a factory job like he has.

Instead, she cooks more meals and does more housework, watching the children of neighborhood women who drive far distances to work at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, where they rivet patches of aluminum over bullet holes, on real airplanes! That’s awfully exciting.

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