The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

36: Everyone's Favorite Surgeon

Charlie's birthday fell on a Saturday this year. Blessedly so, because that meant she didn't have to wake up at the crack of dawn the next day for work, and the other nurses were not taking no for an answer about going out.

All day long Charlie had been trying to convince them to let her have a low-key birthday, and all day long they'd been fighting her on it.

"This is your twentieth birthday, Charlie!" Boo was exclaiming from the other side of the kitchen table. "The end of your teenage years! You have to do something!"

"Staying in with my closest friends is something," Charlie grumbled, though by now she knew she was fighting a losing battle. They'd all be going out, whether she liked it or not, so she'd better get used to the idea.

Boo, Mabs, and Autumn wore Charlie down eventually, and a compromise was reached. They would go out just the four of them and no one was to tell any of the paratroopers, because Charlie didn't want them to know and make a big deal out of it. She hated her birthday, always had, and hated how everyone always insisted she do something special on it. Now, on her first birthday away from home, she'd hoped to have a little bit more control over the entire affair, but it was not to be. Still, a quiet night out she thought she could handle. In her eyes, it just really didn't need to be a big deal.

The next losing battle she found herself fighting was over what to wear. The second she'd finally surrendered to the plans, Mabs had been insistent on the dress.

"It'll be so weird if I'm the only one not in uniform," Charlie claimed as she threw herself back on her bed. Autumn and Boo came to sit on either side of her while Mabs rifled through her wardrobe for shoes.

"We won't be in uniform, either," Mabs said airily. "But you ain't wearin' your dress uniform on your twentieth birthday. That's a damn crime - especially when your mama went to the effort of sendin' you a dress like this all the way across the ocean!" Momentarily, Mabs turned away from her digging to run a reverent hand down the skirt of the dress hanging from the wardrobe door. It was a deep blood red, made of crushed velvet with a voluminous skirt and an off the shoulder neckline which plunged lower than anything Charlie had ever worn - or owned - in her life. She wasn't sure what on Earth had possessed her mother to buy it, other than perhaps the fact that Charlie had been away from home for long enough that her mother may have forgotten her daughter's personality and wardrobe entirely, and couldn't imagine even trying it on, let alone going out in it.

"Oh, to have money," Mabs sighed wistfully, swishing the dress around and rustling the tulle underskirt.

It was guilt, eventually, that made Mabs win out. Mabs went on and on and on about how much she would have given to have had the opportunity to wear a dress like that even once, and how lucky Charlie was to have parents who not only could afford to buy her such a dress and send it all the way across the Atlantic to her, but parents who cared enough to. Boo remarked with an uncharacteristic amount of solemnity that there were an awful lot of people who weren't lucky enough to have either of those privileges, and suddenly Charlie found herself unable to say no.

Later on, when she'd allowed Mabs to style her and Autumn to do her makeup and Boo to do her hair, Charlie stood looking at herself in the mirror and didn't know whether to smile or frown. She almost couldn't recognise herself. The dress was so much bolder than anything she'd ever worn, so much more mature and womanly, that suddenly the shape of her body was different to what she'd thought; usually she was all straight lines and hard angles beneath the girlish dresses she wore, but somehow she'd now become all elegant curves. Even the locket she wore everyday seemed less maidenly and more sophisticated.

And her face was a different matter entirely. She was struck by how much older she looked with her freckles covered, how much more striking. She'd never liked her freckles but covering them everyday hadn't been an option with makeup rationing, but now she was thinking perhaps she should cover them all the time. How much more distinguished she looked without them! How much more elegant!