Written in the Stars - Lois Duncan

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of this leave together before I have to go back. Please, Mary!”

      She pulled away from him and looked at his serious face.

      “Bill,” she said nervously, “Don’t be silly. I couldn’t stop college and get married now. Daddy would have a fit if I even suggested such a thing. And what good would it do? You’d be away all the time.”

      Bill released her and leaned back against the seat.

      “Yes,” he said wearily, “of course, you’re right. It would be a nutty thing to do. It’s just that you’d belong to me then, and I’d belong to you. Right now I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. Everything’s so different from when I left.”

      “I’m not different,” Mary said.

      “Yes, you are. We used to not even have to talk, we understood each other so well. Now it’s like we didn’t know each other at all.”

      “You do have another girl,” Mary said miserably. “I can tell.”

      This time Bill did not try to deny it. He started the motor.

      “It’s getting late,” he said. “I’d better take you home.”

      When they reached the house Mary opened the car door and started across the lawn.

      “It’s all right,” she said, “I can walk to the door by myself.”

      “Mary!” Bill caught her.

      She stopped and turned back to him; there was no anger in her face, only unhappiness.

      “Mary, there isn’t any girl!”

      Mary said, “I know there isn’t any other girl. I almost wish there were. At least then we’d know what was wrong!”

      Bill stood in the yard and watched the hall light go off and later a light go on upstairs. Then he got back into the car. He started it and pressed the accelerator to the floor and watched the needle creep up across the speedometer. He drove out along the river road again, faster and faster until the sound of the wind past the window was a dull roar. He had driven like this once before, in a Jeep, but suddenly the road had ended and the Jeep had gone off into the underbrush where a man was sleeping. Bill and the man had stared into each other faces, and the man had groped in the bush beside him for his gun, and Bill had picked up his bayonet …

      Bill slowed down and drove quietly back to town. He drove home, because there was no place else to go.

      He crossed the yard and went up the porch steps and opened the door. It was like going into a stranger’s house, a house that was oddly familiar as from a dream, but not a place where he himself had lived. In his mind were other houses, tumbled masses of houses without walls and without roofs and with all their life gone from them. He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him, but he could not shut the ghost houses out.

      The light was on in the living room. His mother looked up when he came in.

      “There’s a piece of cake for you in the kitchen.”

      He hesitated.

      “Were you waiting up for me?”

      “Yes,” his mother said. “I know it’s silly, but I couldn’t sleep until I knew you were in.”

      Bill thought, how old she looks! Why, Dad and I always used to think she was the prettiest lady in town!

      “It hasn’t been easy with Dad gone, has it, Mom?”

      It did not sound the way he had meant it to sound.

      She said, “No, dear, it hasn’t been easy. But we’re getting along.”

      He wanted to go to her and put his arms around her in a protective gesture, the way his father would have, the way he himself would have so short a time ago. He wanted to say, “Oh, Mother, I’m glad to be back!” He wanted to hug her and say, “Mother, you’re still the prettiest lady in town!” But the shadows of the past two years were all about him, close and real and a part of him.

      He looked at his mother, and they could not reach each other.

      He said, “Mom, have I changed so very much?”

      “It’s the war, Bill,” she said slowly, carefully. “War makes boys grow up too fast. It turns them into men before they are ready and teaches them things they should never know.”

      “But why?” he demanded unreasonably. “Why? What’s the matter with me? What in God’s name has happened to me?”

      His mother was startled by his outburst.

      “Don’t look that way, Bill! Everything will be all right, dear. Just give it time and everything will be all right.”

      He hadn’t cried much when he was a child. Now, when he cried, it was the way a man cries when he is lost and afraid.

      “Mother,” he sobbed, “oh, Mother, I want to come home!”

      She went to him and put her arms around him the way one comforts a child. But he was no longer a child.

      “There, there, son,” she said helplessly. “You are home.”

      She went out to the kitchen to get his piece of cake.

       (written at the age of 18)

      First Place Winner in Seventeen Magazine’s

      Creative Writing Contest, 1953

      What was it about this story that caused it to win a national award?

      I wish I knew. I have a feeling there was some reason other than the quality of the writing. Perhaps it stood out from the competition because of the male viewpoint and therefore got an especially careful reading. Perhaps one of the judges had a son in the service. Perhaps the story seemed more important because it was about war and death instead of proms and parties.

      Perhaps it was the ending. The ending doesn’t follow the rules of plotting that most youth publications of that day adhered to. It differed from “Written in the Stars” in that I did not have an all-wise mother solve the problem, because the problem is unsolvable. The mother’s pathetic token gesture of bringing in a piece of cake is symbolic of the futility of any loving woman’s efforts to undo the emotional damage done to her son by war. If this story had been submitted by an adult writer, I doubt that Seventeen would have bought and published it. They would have thought it too depressing for their vulnerable young readers. The fact that it was one of those vulnerable readers who wrote the story altered the situation.

      I named the young man in the story Bill, not because it was my brother’s name (which it was), but because it was solid, down-to-earth and all-American. The Bill in the story had no personality quirks to set him apart from the rest of humanity.

      He was Every Man.

      Jane slumped on her bed. “Oh,” she moaned, “why did I ever say I would go!”

      Downstairs she could hear the clatter of supper dishes being washed, her father’s radio, her mother and Alice laughing together in the kitchen.

      Jane had told them at dinner. Alice had said, “I think I’m going to take a night off and get to bed early for a change,” and their mother had answered, “Good for you, dear; you’ve been out too many nights this week as it is.” Their father had nodded.

      Jane had said, “I have a date tonight.”

      There was a moment of silence. Everyone stared at her in surprise.

      “It’s with a boy named Kent,” Jane continued matter-of-factly. “Kent Browning.” She was pleased with herself for the way

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