You Know When the Men Are Gone (26 page)

Carla walked out of the room, then stood in the hallway and listened to the crying. She was almost glad Mimi’s gasping sobs did not abate. Glad until her breasts, tortured by the cries, began to leak. She didn’t have the energy to get out the pureed pears and carrots, bib and high chair, and let Mimi go Jack-son Pollock on the white linoleum, but she also couldn’t nurse in front of Ted after his “I will never touch those mammary glands again” looks of horror. So she defrosted some of her pumped milk, warmed it and put it in a bottle, taking her time while Mimi bleated away.

She brought the bottle into the living room. Ted was unsuccessfully tossing Mimi up in the air, which just made her cries bounce louder against the ceiling, only silenced when she landed in his arms and the air was momentarily knocked out of her.

“It’s easier if you sit down to feed her,” she said, handing him the bottle and then quickly crossing her arms over her T-shirt, hoping she hadn’t leaked through the padding of her bra. Ted sat on the couch and inserted the bottle into Mimi’s mouth. Her red lips seized it, the gums working, gnawing away at the pain of her hunger, and with a few wet gasps her cries were silenced.

Carla blinked, amazed, the way she was each and every time, at how easily Mimi’s riotous fury was extinguished by a little bit of milk. She turned to leave. Just because Ted made Mimi stop crying once didn’t mean anything. He didn’t know what it felt like to have been sliced open in order to get the baby out, the ripping and stinging and healing that took too long, and then Mimi’s all-consuming need for her every day and in the middle of the night until there was nothing left but the crooked sudden smiles and those eyes seeking Carla and only Carla. Ted had missed all of the baby’s life. Carla just needed to pick her child up, walk out of the room, show Ted that she had had enough, that she was finally finished. She didn’t want a man with memories that made him shout at a television set, flinch in his sleep, kick strollers, and now this battered cheek, swollen eye, prison urine stench. Mimi was her family now, not this stranger whose past year was nothing to Carla but fragmented e-mails and phone calls with a three-second delay of overlapping voices and too long silences, waiting for the other to speak, then both starting to speak at the same time. The hesitation and nervous laughter, the echoes of their own voices like ghosts of what they used to be.

“I never know what to do,” Ted said quietly, as if he were talking to himself, as if he thought that Carla had already left the room. “Whenever I touch her, whenever I hold her, I’m afraid I’ll break her.”

Carla turned and looked down at her child’s flushed face. Ted was holding the bottle crooked, angled too low, letting air bubbles into the baby’s sucking mouth; there would be gas pains later.

She reached out and lifted his hand so that the milk would flow unhindered.

Ted glanced up. “Thank you, Carla.”

The words surprised her, and she stood absolutely still, not moving her hand from his wrist. She didn’t know if he was thanking her for picking him up at the jail, for being there when he got home from Iraq, for creating this baby in his arms, or for something as simple as moving the bottle.

“You’re welcome,” she said, staring at him. She could lift Mimi from his arms and breast-feed her properly, or she could remain like this, her fingertips on Ted’s pulse, and suddenly it seemed as if this was the most important moment of her life, that either small gesture was larger than any decision she had ever made. Their fate depended on whether Carla walked out of the room with the baby or stood next to her husband. She bit her lip and wondered if this was the sum of a marriage: wordless recriminations or reconciliations, every breath either striving against or toward the other person, each second a decision to exert or abdicate the self.

“Hold it just like that,” Carla whispered. Mimi’s eyes moved slowly from mother to father and back again in a blissful state of half consciousness, utterly calm now and sustained. Ted smiled down at the baby and Carla could feel herself smiling, too, as she leaned closer, something tight inside of her coming loose. She didn’t move her hand even though she could feel milk start to seep through her shirt, that internal heat spilling out into the open.

She thought suddenly of the Grays—Leslie alone and weeping, Jimmy in an anonymous barracks room—separated by an irrevocable act. She wondered if their every future caress, argument, and apology would contain the taint of that violence, would contain the realization of how easy it was to move from the ordinary to the unthinkable.

Carla kept her fingers steady on her husband’s veined wrist, she kept the stillness between them, kept the televised news and the memories and the anger at bay for just a little while longer. She didn’t know what would happen the following morning, month, or year, but, even if it lasted only as long as it took Mimi to finish her bottle, she and Ted were together. For this small moment, reflected in their child’s eyes, they were happy.

GOLD STAR

J
osie Schaeffer drove around the commissary parking lot looking for a space. She had forgotten it was payday. She
never
shopped on payday—when the biweekly paycheck was automatically deposited into every soldier’s account in the United States Army at the same instant, and therefore into the checkbooks of the forty thousand soldiers’ families here at Fort Hood. The parking lot was a tangle of women pushing overflowing shopping carts, kids hanging on to the back or skidding around in wheeled sneakers, pickup trucks with their beds weighed down with toilet paper and diapers.

Checking her watch again, she finally pulled into the empty Gold Star Family designated spot in front. She waited a moment, peering at herself in the mirror, composing her face into what she imagined an ordinary face looked like, tugging her mouth into a smile but then giving up. She knew the spouses walking by with their loaded carts were hesitating, trying not to stare into Josie’s window, trading lifted eyebrows with the other women passing. As she got out and locked her car, a white-haired veteran paused by his truck in the Purple Heart Recipient space a few feet away. He was wearing a black baseball cap with VIETNAM embroidered in block letters across the front. He stepped across the yellow line between them, his ropey-veined hand outstretched.

“I’m grateful for your sacrifice,” he said. “Our country can never thank you enough.”

He made it sound as if she had willingly offered Eddie up; Josie shuddered but gave the man her hand. This is why she avoided the Gold Star spot: “Gold Star,” with its imagery of schoolchildren receiving A’s and stickers for a job well done, was the military euphemism for losing a soldier in combat. Family members received a few special privileges like this lousy parking space, but that meant the pity rising from the asphalt singed hotter than any Texas sun. Josie blinked to keep her eyes dry and the vet took a step back, seeing he had inflicted pain. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Inside, the commissary was even more packed than the parking lot; shoppers inched their carts forward, each aisle a halting four-car pileup. Josie moved through the crush, keeping her oversized sunglasses on, hoping no one would recognize her. She glanced at the shelves and tried to remember how to feed a man. It was easier than she thought it would be—the items that her husband once craved stood out and she carefully filled her basket: a loaf of crusty French bread, a package of Swiss cheese, a wand of salami, half a pound of roast beef, a bag of tortilla chips, a jar of hot Tex-Mex salsa.

A soldier had called her about an hour ago, leaving a nervous, rambling message on her machine. “This is Specialist Murphy, ma’am. You don’t know me but I was hoping I could come and see you sometime, if that’s convenient with you. It’s just, um, you see, I knew your husband.” At that point Josie lifted her head from the couch. “Sergeant Schaeffer, your husband, well, I was with him the day the IED went off,” the voice continued as she reached for the phone.

“Come over for lunch. Can you do that?” she asked abruptly.

“Ma’am? You mean today?”

Josie nodded into the phone, as if he could see her. “Today, as soon as you can.”

“Um, okay—I mean, yes, ma’am. I’ll be finished with my physical training at thirteen hundred hours. Is that all right?”

Josie looked around at the cluttered kitchen with its unwashed dishes, the stacks of newspapers and books covering her dining room table, the laundry she had washed the week before and piled up on her couch, still not folded. She had two hours before one o’clock and no food in the house.

“That would be fine,” she said.

Back from the commissary with her groceries, Josie heaved all the rumpled clothes onto her bed and then did the same with the piled books and newspapers. She hesitated in front of the mirror over her bureau. Grief had disfigured her. There were bags under her eyes that never faded even when the crying finally did; her shoulders were curled into themselves as if she were trying to keep something fragile and cracked safe inside her ribs; and the weight she’d lost in the past three months had exacerbated the creases in her forehead and around her mouth. So aged at twenty-six. She brushed her bangs down over her eyebrows, pulled her dark hair into a ponytail, and checked her T-shirt for stains. She couldn’t remember if she had showered yesterday, but at least her hair wasn’t greasy and her clothes seemed relatively clean.

In the first weeks after Eddie’s death, there had been visitors, soldiers who came to her apartment and sat uncomfortably on the edge of her chairs. She almost hated the smooth-faced boys, each one of them alive, able to run their five-mile physical training at dawn, go to a Burger King drive-through, catch a movie, get picked up for a DUI. Able to do anything. They seemed to sense her blame, never accepting her offers of coffee or potato chips, afraid to look her in the eye, rarely speaking to her other than the army requisite “ma’am.” But they stayed in her home for hours, waiting to be relieved by another soldier, as if acting on direct orders from their chain of command to keep guard. She knew they were there to ensure that she didn’t starve to death or slit her wrists in the shower; they also ensured that she didn’t stay in her bedroom with the covers over her head, weeping and compulsively remembering every moment of Eddie that she could. She had to exist because the soldiers sat on her couch and watched Fox News. They had known her husband, how disciplined and focused he was, and so she changed her clothes each day, vacuumed the rugs, wiped cola spills off the countertops.

There were also wives who timidly knocked on her door, first the CARE team led by the chaplain’s wife, then wives from the FRG whom she recognized from past military balls and barbecues. But Josie had always kept herself apart, sure that she and Eddie would be out of the army soon and any military friendships would be a waste of time. The wives, too stunned to smile or speak, had stared at Josie, seeing their own worst nightmare. They made up for their silence with food, tons of it, exquisite meals or simple casseroles that Josie couldn’t stomach, and they left bereavement cards on her table that Josie wouldn’t read. She wanted to tell the women to go home and be kind to their husbands instead of wasting their time with her.
Take care of your man,
she would have liked to say, whispering,
Take care before it’s too late.

But the soldier coming over today was someone she wanted to meet. She wanted him to talk about her husband, to tell her a story so she could picture Eddie again, his wide mouth, his square fingers tapping his knee, his blond hair catching the sun as he tipped his head back in laughter. Already the Eddie in her mind was looking too much like the photos in the apartment, frozen and posed and still.

It was the moments in between that she was the most afraid of forgetting, the moments that were too ordinary for photographs, the small memories, like waking up with him in the morning, how he held his knife and fork when he ate dinner, the concentration in his blue eyes when he did a crossword puzzle, his feet propped up on the coffee table. Or the way he walked in after a week-long training exercise and sat down on the couch to take off his boots. She would climb up into his lap, put her arms around his neck, and press her face into his chest and stay there as he rubbed his stubbled chin over the back of her head. She could smell all the days he had been away in his uniform, the dirt from the field and the burned smokiness of his sweat, the thin smell of gasoline from his Humvee and the oil he used to clean his rifle. He would put his big hands around her back and she felt enclosed in his strength and knew he was hers again, at least for a little while. But now she had forgotten the texture of his uniform under her cheek, the sound of his boots slipping off his feet and hitting the floor, the feel of his fingertips on her back. She was losing him all over again.

“Hello, ma’am,” the soldier said. He held a bouquet of carnations and his face didn’t know whether to grin or look somber. “I’m Specialist Murphy. Kit Murphy, ma’am.”