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I received this story, or the essentials of it, from two persons
who say they were present at the time of the events described.
I don’t have permission to repeat it, so please promise
you won’t tell that I have shared it now with you.
WAC Corporal Lynnette Peterson, twenty-one years of age
and assigned to Fort Sam Houston, went home on the train, on leave,
to Jersey City, New Jersey, in the fall of ’43. On a Saturday, she and
her two teen-aged sisters rode the trolley to Journal Square for a day of
play and relaxation. On the way back to their parents’ home, they stopped at
a malt shop, sat in a booth by the window, and ordered sundaes with “the works.”
Someone put two nickels in the Wurlitzer, and Frank Sinatra sang.
Corporal Peterson, a wasp-waisted, full-bosomed brunette,
was wearing civvies—a long-sleeved, form-fitting wool dress of
navy blue, with a neckline that gave the boys a glimpse of something nice.
The younger girls—
well, never mind the younger girls for now, just let me say what happened next.
Chattering and laughing all the while, the three sisters
had nearly finished off their sundaes, when the waiter came to
offer them their check. He, too, was young, a year shy of draft-age, a
skinny lad, with dark Italian eyes. He wore a bow tie and an apron; he
wore slicked-and-scented hair. The waiter, standing opposite the seated
woman soldier, noticed something the girls had overlooked: A splash of
rich vanilla ice cream—a streak and a spot, like a mark of exclamation—
rested on the blue wool weave at the forward limit of Lynnette’s left breast.
“Oh, jeez, lady, you’re leakin’!” the boy helpfully announced. The girls, perplexed,
looked up at him. So he pointed with his order pad, and of course they got the giggles.
Lynnette blushed scarlet—scalp, forehead, cheeks, and chest. And, according to my sources,
the girls, in rhyme with the last of the Little Piggies, went hee, hee, hee, all the way home.
When they got off the street car, they were so weak with hilarity that they had to lean on
one another as they made their way up the hill to the house. And Lynnette—bless her sweet,
soldier’s heart—left a trickle of wee-wee on the walkway. So, we can say, if the malt-shop boy
was not unequivocally correct in the moment that he spoke, his words had, by then, come true.
♦
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