Long Division (24 page)

Well, well, well, what have we here? Austin, Jayna. In the real book I will not write that I think hers sounds like the name of a literary porn star. In the real book I will not offensively berate our brave soldiers for casual, who-would-you-rather musings. In the real book I will not Google “Jayna Austin,” “Austin, Jayna,” “Jayna Austin David Peterson,” “Jayna Austin Jane Austen,” “Jayna Austin sex tape,” “Jayna Austin Army Beauty Queen Winner,” or “Jayna Austin stole my boyfriend.” In the real book, I will not imagine David ripping the bodice of another woman's fatigues to reveal a lacy, olive green bra with a gold bullet ornament hanging from the front clasp. In the real book I will not shed tears of suspicion over the same boyfriend choosing to use the words “nothing inappropriate has transpired” with me, like he's the HR director at some mega-corporate company I don't work at. In the real book I will release one good-natured second of a laugh and silently commend dear Austin, Jayna, for her excellent taste in handsome soldiers.

No, but really, I haven't decided if this stupid thing even bothers me yet. So far, I don't believe that it truly does. Perhaps I'm a big girl after all. I appreciate David releasing the information to me. I'm sure he felt like such a junior-high acne clown relating the whole ridiculous thing, but he did it. He did it for me. I start to think that maybe I'm not telling David enough. Do I need to come clean about napping on the Easter Bunny? What if my mom sent him the clip from the newspaper? And though his confessions do help a bit, I'm not entirely sure it's assuaged the issue
¹⁰⁴
away to nothing.

 

Yesterday at school, about twenty minutes before dismissal, the office aide brought a note into my class. It said that Charese Atkins was going to be about twenty minutes late picking up Lacey and that I could either wait with Lacey in the classroom or send her to the office where she could sit with the secretaries until Charese arrived. The kids were busy coloring maps for a social studies project, and I scribbled on the back of the note that I could wait with Lacey here. I thanked the fifth-grader office aide and sent her away with my reply.

When the bell rang and the kids scrambled into their jackets and started to plow past me, I simultaneously shouted out a reminder about the night's science homework
¹⁰⁵
and managed to make eye contact with Lacey and pull her over.

“Lacey, your mom called. She's going to be a bit late picking you up, so you're going to wait in here with me. Do you want to play computer games or something?”

“Okay,” she said, and I guided her to one of the machines.

“So how do you like Tacoma so far, Lacey?” I asked as the computer booted up. It was a weird question to ask a kid, I now realize. Like she's going to say that the bars are kind of crummy and the r ush-hour traffic is a bitch.

“I like living with Grandma, but I miss my dad and my friends back in California.” It was a very honest, mature answer and I wasn't surprised, really, because Lacey is so bright and articulate. She beeped along in Rainforest Math (a really lame game, I'll admit), and I busied myself tidying the Book Nook and eventually my desk.

When Charese arrived she was wearing a sharp skirt suit, pantyhose, and sunglasses. “Thanks so much for waiting, Miss Harper.” She looked down at the front of her dark pinstriped jacket as if it were an explanation. “Job interview. They called me in kind of last minute. Lucky I had this thing ironed, right?” Charese helped Lacey into her jacket and then turned back to me. “You're looking a bit down, Miss Harper. The kids work you over today?” Hanging out with children and an old lady all the time has depleted my abilities to engage in regular adult small talk.

“No, they were fine. I'm just exhausted. You know, personal stuff.”

“Oh, so I heard your boyfriend is in the service.” It's amazing how well informed this whole community is.

“Yeah. That's right. He's over there.” Pause. Pause. Pause. “In Iraq.”

“Well, at least you know that over there he's not chasing some other girl's tail. My ex had full beaches of pretty ladies to distract him from me. From us.” Her hands made their way to Lacey's shoulders, and I found it weird that she was doing all this daddy bashing in front of her daughter. I said something like
yeah, I guess
, and then Charese went on this huge tirade about how the military breeds infidelity.
You just keep all these men together all the time talking about who bangs what how often, and it's like a giant locker room with guns. And then they take couples away from each other for months on end. You know, the wives can be just as bad. There's this code on base where if a woman whose man is deployed is getting lonely and wants a piece of action, all she has to do is lean a mop upside down outside her back door and that tells all the hungry dudes passing by that she's looking for a little bit of service, if you know what I mean. Horrible, really. Happens all the time. Just the other day I read about this guy who came back from Iraq and found out his wife was pregnant with some other dude's baby, and he shot her, the other guy, and their two kids. His very own two kids. Talk about post-traumatic stress. Right? And then there's all the guys that volunteer for these eight-month deployments in Korea so they can get a break from their fat wives and indulge in poor Russian and Filipina women who get their passports stolen and are forced into prostitution. Hear that all the time.

As she said all this I just sat there on the edge of my desk, mouth hanging open, eyes darting back and forth to Charese and then Lacey, who started playing with this beaded key chain on her backpack like she'd heard her mother give this same terrible speech a hundred and fifty times.

And I thought I was pessimistic about military life.

 

I left the school thinking about Charese and how wounded she is. Here I am feeling betrayed because David didn't tell me about Flores's death, a tragedy he was still struggling to swallow, and there's Charese shit-talking her way through a real one. A real-deal-Holyfield betrayal. David barely betrayed me. It might not even count at all. Throw his offense into the BetrayalCalcutron2004 and what does it say?
Cannot compute. Unsubstantiated evidence. Please terminate raging bitch behavior immediately.
What in the world is wrong with you, Annie Harper? He did not betray you. He even gave you an escape clause so you could back out of this game if you somehow felt too threatened or weakened or defeated. Baby baby babyface, Miss Harper. Buck up. Buck the fuck up. Jayna Austin, Hottest Soldier Ever, is ten million times tougher than you.

 

I stopped by the grocery store on the way home because it was payday and I like to buy myself treats when I'm feeling kind of rich. A nice jar of olives. A fancy slab of cheese. I was walking by the dried fruits when I remembered a ridiculous scene from the camping trip.

We were all sitting around the edge of Hobo Lake eating lunch and talking about how birds feed their young. We were giving Stephen crap because—despite his fancy East Coast education—he didn't know that most birds regurgitate food for their babies. Stephen thought it was both hilarious and disgusting. We were all sharing a bag of dried apricots (except for Gina, who doesn't care for them because the texture reminds her of biting into someone's tongue), and then Gus said, “Do you think that if you eat something dehydrated and regurgitate it back up that the juices from your digestive system will have replaced the original liquids in the same places and rendered the something back into its original texture?”

“Seems like kind of a stretch,” Gina had said.

“Yeah. The something would be all masticated,” added Stephen, the future dentist.

“Well, there's only one way to find out,”
¹⁰⁶
I had said. And so Gus had to try. He took an apricot, chewed it twenty-four times, per Stephen's instructions, and proceeded—I had to turn away several times—to swallow and regurgitate the thing back up. He spun away from us as he urged the final cough out of his body, and we could see him messing with the contents of his hand before turning around to present it.

The color was the same; Gus had effectively prevented any other recently consumed foods from tagging along for the ride north. And the texture of the goop did kind of look like the flesh of a fresh apricot, but the shape was off. While his back was turned, Gus had quickly molded the fruit wad into the shape of a heart. And then he took a step toward Gina and extended his hand in offering, “My lady,” he had said in a tone fit for the most dignified, noble prince of the most dignified, noble kingdom ever.

“What?” Gina was appalled. “You want me to eat that? I'm not your baby bird.” Stephen and I laughed because Gus wasn't breaking. He was serious. At the time, I didn't think anything less of Gina for not wanting to eat the regurgitated apricot. It was really quite gross. But as I stood there with my shopping cart amongst the raisins and dried peaches and rings of apples—all stiff and brittle, robbed of their natural juices and original textures—I realized what Gus had really done. Gina didn't like the texture of dried apricots. And he took what started as a ridiculous joke—the musings of bored fishermen—and changed the food to suit her. For her. And she didn't even recognize it. None of us did. But now I get it. Had it been me, I like to think that I'd have eaten it. And for a moment in that grocery aisle, I kind of wanted to eat Gus's regurgitated apricot. (ICK!ICK!ICK!, I know.) Not really. Mostly I just wished I could tell him that I now understood how thoughtful the gesture was. It's kind of like his old gum mosaic for that Valentine-hating girl in college. When you care about someone, you want everything to be the best for that person. You go so far as to harness the bits of the universe that he/she finds disagreeable and manipulate them into something that the person can at least tolerate, or, maybe, enjoy. What does it mean that I'm the only one who seems to find Gus's saliva-laced acts of romance admirable? Enviable, even. What kind of weirdo am I?

The kind of weirdo who combats emotional crisis with emotional spending. I bought three flavors of fancy sorbet and got the heck out of that supermarket.

T
oday I'm calling my book
Dreams from the Homeland
, and the cover has an embossed shiny font and a painting of a rolling country-side. The entire book takes place on my back porch as I sit in my rocking chair, sipping whiskey from a chipped mason jar and recounting everything that has happened this year. I've taken the artistic liberty to write Loretta out of Violet Meadows, and she sits next to me correcting my “whos” and “whoms” and slapping my wrist if I start to curse too much.

 

So I stopped writing again. This time it wasn't because of blahgers. It was because of Private Lynndie England, the Most Disgusting Human Being on the Planet. Well, close at least. Her and her torturing, soulless cohorts of the 372nd Military Police Company at the Abu Ghraib prison. It was a few weeks after Easter when that whole big
60 Minutes II
episode on the scandal ran. I hadn't heard anything of it yet, and I was sitting down to dinner when the program began. I had made stir-fried vegetables with shrimp, and I was very proud of the fact that I hadn't burnt my rice for once. But as the scandal was revealed and discussed, and as those horrifying images kept flashing on my TV screen, I couldn't eat even one broccoli floret. Yeah, I felt sick. But I was totally raging. These are the kinds of things I was yelling out loud in my living room:

And then the rage settled into a profound sadness that made my limbs sink into my sofa as I whispered things like this between heavy, wavering breaths:

A few days later Gus had tipped me off about the article that would run in the next week's
New Yorker
and that was already posted online. I printed out a copy once I got to school and turned the first hour of class into surprise silent reading time while I sat at my desk reading and resisting the urge to weep.

And as the days went on and news remained plastered with the details of the accusations, the kinks in chains of commands, and those horrible, horrible images, I slowly became consumed with guilt. Even though David's army people have absolutely nothing to do with those army people, and even though I don't think most of them should even be over there at all, and even though I didn't vote for George W. Bush, my hands were still sweating with guilt. Shame. Shame. Shame. After the Guilt Phase came my Obsession with Lynndie England's Fetus Phase. After hearing of her pregnancy and the child's father being a fellow torturer, I died a thousand deaths for that baby. Would she be allowed to keep it? At what age would it stumble upon the photographs? Can I
please please please
Mister Bush, adopt it and nurture it into a normal, loving child? Will you promise that Mr. and Mrs. Evil will never have a hope of taking it back?