You Know When the Men Are Gone (4 page)

Before Jeremy left, he and Meg had talked about having children. She smiled and blinked and told him,
Soon,
and then ran into the bathroom and checked that she’d taken her birth control pill that day.

She was twenty-eight, it was time to think about procreation, and yet Jeremy’s long absences were hard enough to bear without children. She just managed to get through each day, brush her teeth, go to work, feed her body, sleep. If it was almost impossible for her to live half a life without the man who was supposed to share all of it, how could she be both father and mother for some unfinished and needy little being?

There were days when she imagined going to California, a place of escape with its beaches and wineries, mountains and fog. She could get a job in an art gallery in one of those dreamy, gentle-named coastal towns: Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Big Sur. She’d start over, find a man who was always there, who could take normal vacations, have weekends off, call in sick, accompany her to her cousin’s wedding, her uncle’s wake. She wanted to worry about ordinary things like whether her husband forgot his lunch or got a bonus, not that he might get shot or that he’d be crossing a street in Baghdad and never get to the other side.

She carried her worry night and day. It pulled at her legs and shoulders and tear ducts, always there and ready to consume her, because how could anyone think rationally about a spouse in a war zone? And when Jeremy, late at night those few weeks before he left, had cupped her body against his, kissing her belly and longing to fill it up with his child, she’d thought only of the worry already growing there. She wondered if her belly could carry a life as well, if there was space for both and if the worry would form a stone pillow for her baby’s head. Would it leach into the baby’s bones and blood and tiny cells? Now she thought of Natalya and those eerie-eyed twins, whispering a Serbian pidgin in a language only they could understand. Perhaps Natalya nursed a ghostly worry, too. Perhaps her twins remembered another in their mother’s womb, three of them waiting to be born.

Meg dreamed of ghost alarm clocks ringing, her husband slipping free of the blanket and letting cold air whisper over her legs, then his kiss by her ear turned into a loud bark. She sat up in her bed and glanced at her clock: 1:23 A.M. Her vigilance had failed her, she had dozed off. She went to get a glass of water and to listen all the better, for she had happened upon a spot in the kitchen wall the size of a fist that another long-ago tenant must have punched and then plastered badly. When Meg put her ear against that papery area, she swore she could hear Natalya breathe.

She quickly stepped backward. A man’s voice was audible, just a few inches away, speaking low, as if he had been told to whisper, as if he knew Meg’s ear was pressed close. Knives scraped against plates and liquid was poured into glasses. There was a long silence and then Natalya started to speak, almost whimpering. Meg knew there had been no late-night phone calls for two weeks now, and she wondered if this man had been the voice on the phone that moved Natalya to tears. Had he grown tired of the miles between them and appeared at her doorstep after dark, demanding that she let him in?

Footsteps were leaving the kitchen and Natalya’s front door opened. Meg looked around her own apartment quickly, grabbed her garbage, and dragged it into the hall, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stranger, but she only saw Natalya in her doorway, her hand pressed to her throat, her face devoid of makeup, as pale as the fluorescent light overhead.

Their eyes met and Meg looked away. Natalya went inside, leaving Meg standing there with her trash.

The man returned, always in the middle of the night. Meg heard food being prepared and drinks poured, but never the noises of consumption. And never—though Meg expected to hear the suspicious sounds of squeaking springs—did they enter Natalya’s bedroom.

Still Meg did not confide in the other wives. She imagined asking Bonnie McCormick for advice, pulling her aside and spilling such news into her powerful ear. But she didn’t. And she didn’t get enough sleep. Natalya was going out more and returning later and Meg fought to stay awake, waiting for Boris’s bark, sleeping for a few hours before work. A customer returned a framing job she had done, claiming it was crooked, and her manager, clearly no longer impressed with Meg’s degree, said under his breath, “This isn’t modern art.” And once when she was on the phone with Jeremy, the precious satellite connection full of echoes and clicks, she asked him to hold on while she put her ear to the wall to ascertain if Natalya was still reading her children a bedtime story.

Three days before the men were due back, the wives held a final get-together at Carla’s. Each had made six batches of cookies to distribute into care packages for the single-soldier rooms, and almost every wife who lived in post housing was there, perched uncomfortably on one of Carla’s overstuffed couches.

“Does anyone know if Natalya is coming?” Carla asked sweetly as soon as Bonnie McCormick entered her living room.

“Natalya Torres, Staff Sergeant Torres’s wife?” Bonnie placed her extra-high stack of coconut cookies in the center of Carla’s dinner table.

“She lives just down the hall, in 12A,” Carla continued, unable to hide her glee. Bonnie stared at the gathered women, waiting for someone to say something, but they all glanced away; none of them had expected Natalya to show and they were scared of Bonnie’s straight-toothed smile.

“Well, I’ll just run down and knock on her door. Maybe she forgot.” Bonnie jingled her bracelets and walked out.

The wives exhaled and then broke into whispers. “Did anyone tell Natalya?” “Yes, I told her when I saw her in the post office last week. She just asked me not to call the MPs on Boris.” “I saw her yesterday and she said she was busy but would try to come.” “I saw her this morning with that god-awful dog and she let him pee all over the walkway out front—”

Bonnie returned with a plastic plate of cookies in her hand and they all rose in unison. She placed the cookies next to her own on the crowded table and smiled dubiously, not as proud as they expected, which made them gather closer and stare. The cookies were black. Not brown like chocolate or even dark chocolate that was burned. Black like the coal in a naughty child’s Christmas stocking.

Bonnie tore open the cellophane and took one, holding it up to the light, her indomitable smile pushed into a frown. “She said these are a Serbian favorite.”

They all waited as Bonnie put the cookie under her nose and smelled it, her eyes fluttering in surprise.

Carla took one of the cookies as well, putting it between her teeth with a resounding chomp. Then spit it out into her palm. “It tastes like cabbage,” she said.

Bonnie placed her cookie off to the side of the table. “Perhaps Natalya doesn’t realize cookies are desserts. Perhaps in Serbia they are meant to be savory?”

“Cabbage!” Carla looked as if she was about to cry, as if someone had tricked her into eating Boris’s feces. “We can’t put these in the care packages! What if a soldier reaches for one of these”—she threw the cookie on the floor hard where it cracked into tiny scattering pieces—“and thinks
all
of the cookies are bad?”

Bonnie rubbed at her nose as if she could not get the smell of it out of her nostrils. “Some men might like them. Meg, you have the list, are there any single solders with Serbian or Russian last names?”

Meg shook her head without even looking.

“She made us dog biscuits,” Carla whispered. Bonnie picked up Natalya’s plastic plate and shoved the whole thing into the garbage, and began neatly dividing up the other cookies.

Stunned, the wives joined her, carefully placing assortments of cookies into cheerful buckets, the cookies they had labored over, hoping to arrive with the prettiest shape, the most scrumptious combination, hoping to outdo everyone else with chocolate chips and sprinkles and drizzles of peanut butter and caramel. They did not ooh and aah at each other’s works of art the way they usually did. They worked silently, biting their lips, and thought about Natalya.

When Meg returned to her apartment that night, she saw a man silhouetted in front of Natalya’s door for a moment, the bright light of the hallway flashing across his sturdy frame. The thickness of his neck frightened Meg, and when she was inside she took down a biography of Chagall, and listened.

She should have tried harder to teach Natalya to cook, she thought. She should have tried.

There were no sounds of strife from next door, just the opening and closing of bureau drawers. At dawn, just before Meg fell asleep, she heard a woman’s murmur, thick with tears or laughter, and then, for the first time, the bed creaked on its springs twice as if two bodies slid beneath the sheets, but no noises of lovemaking followed. The next morning Meg woke to absolute peace: Boris must have overslept.

The night before their husbands’ arrival, Natalya knocked on Meg’s door.

“Please watch children,” she said, one long-fingered hand on each child’s head. Their matching green eyes peered up.

Meg had been cleaning her apartment and she glanced into her living room, at the pile of unfolded laundry waiting on her couch and the vacuum sitting in the middle of the living room, half of the carpet neatly lined from its sucking groove. It was eight o’clock and Meg was about to say that she couldn’t possibly babysit tonight of all nights, she had so much to do before Jeremy returned. But she hesitated, noticing that Natalya wasn’t wearing a short skirt and heels, rather a white T-shirt, dark jeans, and flats under her long Klimt coat. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her face was scrubbed clean and pink. For the first time Meg noticed the acne scars on her cheeks and suddenly she understood they had all been wrong. Natalya had been too tall and thin in high school, with bad skin and ill-fitting clothes; other students made fun of her. Natalya had no idea how beautiful she was, which was why she wore that long jacket and rarely left the house without her too-bright lipstick and too-long earrings.