The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (42 page)

The wives spent every day by the pool at the Miramar, not far from the base, waiting for word about their men. The rents were cheap and nobody bothered them, which meant that no one came to patch the rotting stucco or kill centipedes for them or pull out the weeds growing up through the cracks in the cement. They were surrounded by lush undergrowth and bright flowers nobody knew the names for, and although they talked about going into town to shop or taking off for home, wherever that was, they needed to be together by the pool because this was where the men had left them and they seemed to need to keep claustrophobia as one of the conditions of their waiting.

On good days they revolved slowly in the sunlight, redolent of suntan oil and thorough in the exposure of all their surfaces because they wanted the tans to be
right
for the homecoming, but they also knew they had plenty of time. If it rained they would huddle under the fading canopy and play bridge and canasta and gin, keeping scores into the hundreds of thousands even though they were sick of cards. They did their nails and eyebrows and read Perry Mason paperbacks until they were bored to extinction, bitching and waiting for the mail. Everybody took jealous note of the letters received, which never matched the number of letters sent because mail was never forwarded after a man was reported missing. The women wrote anyway, and every day at ten they swarmed down the rutted drive to fall on the mailman like black widow spiders, ravenous.

Most of the letters were for the wretches whose husbands had already come
home
, for God’s sake, whisking them away to endlessly messy kitchens and perpetual heaps of laundry in dream houses mortgaged on the
GI
Bill. Embarrassed by joy, they had left the Miramar without a backward glance, and for the same reason they always wrote at least once, stuffing their letters with vapid-looking snapshots of first babies, posting them from suburbs on the other side of the world.

At suppertime they all went into the rambling stucco building, wrenching open the rusting casements because it seemed important to keep sight of the road. Just before the shadows merged to make darkness they would drift outside
again, listening, because planes still flew out from the nearby base every morning and, waiting, they were fixed on the idea of counting them back in. Most of their men had left in ships or on foot but still they waited. To the women at the Miramar every dawn patrol hinted at a twilight return, and the distant Fokkers or P-38s or F-87s seemed appropriate emblems for their own hopes, the suspense a fitting shape to place on the tautening stomachs, the straining ears, the dread of the telegram.

They all knew what they would do when the men came back even though they had written their love scenes privately. There would be the reunion in the crowded station, the embrace that would shut out everybody else. She would be standing at the sink when he came up from behind and put his arms around her waist, or she would be darning or reading, not thinking about him just for once, when a door would open and she would hear him: Honey, I’m home. There would be the embrace at the end of the driveway, the embrace in plain view, the embrace in the field. None of them thought about what he would be like when they embraced, what he must look like now, the way he really smelled, because their memories had been stamped with images distilled, perfected by the quality of their own waiting, the balance they tried to keep between thinking about it and not thinking about it.
If I can just not think about it
, Elise still told herself,
then maybe he will come.

Watching the sky, even after all these years, she would be sure she heard the distant vibration of motors drumming, or maybe it was the jet sound, tearing the sky like a scythe; she had been there since Château-Thierry, or was it Amiens, and she knew the exact moment at which it became too dark to hope. “Tomorrow,” she would say, and because the others preferred to think she was the oldest and so was the best at waiting, they would follow her inside. They all secretly feared that there was an even older woman bedridden in the tower, and that her husband had sailed with Enoch Arden, but nobody wanted to know for sure. They preferred to look to Elise, who kept herself beautifully and was still smiling; she had survived.

They were soft at night, jellied with anticipation and memory, one in spirit with Elise, but each morning found them clattering out to the chaises with Pam and Marge, hard and bright. Pam and Marge were the leaders of a group of self-styled girls in their fifties, who had graying hair and thickening waists. They liked to kid and whistled songs like “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” through their teeth. They shared a home-front camaraderie that enraged Donna, who was younger, and who had sent her husband off to a war nobody much remembered. She and Sharon and a couple of others in their forties would press their temples with their fists, grumbling about grand-standing,
and people who still thought fighting was to be admired. Anxious, bored, frazzled by waiting, these two groups indulged in a number of diverting games: who had the most mail and who was going to sit at the round table at supper, who was hogging all the sunlight. They chose to ignore the newcomers, mere slips of things who had sent their men off to—where was it—Nam, or someplace worse.

Pam and Marge were tugging back and forth with Donna and Sharon this particular morning, wrangling over who was going to sit next to Elise, when Peggy walked in. Her shoes were sandy from the walk up the long driveway and her brave going-away outfit was already rusty with sweat. Bill had put her in a cab for the Miramar because, as he pointed out, he wasn’t going to be gone for long and she would be better off with other service wives, they would have so much in common.

“Bitch,” Marge was saying, “look what you did to my magazines.”

Donna dumped her makeup kit and portable radio on the chaise. “It serves you right.”

Marge was red-faced and hot, she may not even have heard herself lashing out. “I hope it crashes.”

Even Pam was shocked. “Marge!”

“It would serve her right.”

Peggy dropped her overnight bag. “Stop it.”

Donna had gone white. “Don’t ever say that.”

“Stop.” Peggy set her fist against her teeth.

“Girls.” Elise stood between them, frail and ladylike in voile. “What would Harry and Ralph think if they could see you now?”

Donna and Marge stood back, pink with shame.

“What is the new girl going to think?”

“I’m sorry,” Marge said, and she and Donna hugged.

Elise saw that Peggy was backing away, ready to make a break for it. The perfect hostess, she put a hand on her arm. “Come and sit by me, ah …” She inclined her head graciously.

“Peggy.”

“Come, Peggy.” She patted the chaise. “I want you to meet Donna, her Ralph is in the Kula gulf, and Pam and Marge both have husbands at, yes, that’s it, Corregidor.”

“But they couldn’t.”

Elise said, serenely, “Won’t you have some iced tea?”

Peggy was gauging the distance between her and the overnight bag, looking for a gap in the overgrown greenery. “I can’t stay.”

“You’ll have to excuse the girls,” Elise said. “Everybody is a little taut, you understand.”

“I don’t belong here, I’m …”

Elise spoke gently, overlapping, “ … only here for a little while. I know.”

“Bill promised.”

“Of course he did.

Later, when she felt better, Peggy let Elise lead her inside the cavernous building. She unpacked her things and after she had changed into her bikini she went out to take her place by the pool. She thought she would join the other girls in bikinis, who looked closer to her age, but they sat in closed ranks at the far end of the pool, giving her guarded looks of such hostility that she hurried back to her place by Elise.

“Don’t mind them,” Elise said. “It takes time to adjust.”

Going down to dinner, Peggy understood how important it was to be well groomed. The room was bright with printed playsuits and pretty shifts in floral patterns chosen in fits of bravery. Although there were only women in the room, each of them had taken care with her hair and makeup, pressing her outfit because it was important; if they flagged, the men might discover them and be disgusted, or else the word would get out that they had given up, and there was no telling what grief that would bring. Either way they would never be forgiven. Whether or not the men came they would face each dinner hour tanned and combed and carefully made up and no matter what it cost, they would be smiling.

That night Pam and Marge were never better; they had on their sharkskin shorts and the bright jersey shirts knotted under their breasts to expose brown bellies, and when Betty joined them at the end of the dining room they went into their Andrews Sisters imitation with a verve that left everybody shouting. Jane played the intro again and again, and even though they were spent and gasping, they came tap dancing back. There was a mood of antic pleasure which had partly to do with the new girl in the audience, and partly with the possibility that the men just might come back and discover them at a high point:
See how well we do without you. Look how pretty we are, how lively. How could you bear to leave us for long?
They imagined the men laughing and hooting the way they did for
USO
shows; at the finale, the women would bring them up on the stage.

Bernice was next with “I’ll be seeing you,” and they were all completely still by the time Donna took the microphone and sang, “Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane.” Then it was time to go outside.

“Tell me about him,” Elise said, leading Peggy through the trees.

Peggy said, “He has blue eyes.”

“Of course he does. Gailliard has blue eyes.”

“Who?”

“Gailliard. He crushed my two hands in one of his, and when I cried out he said, Did I hurt you, and I had to let him think he had pinched my fingers because I didn’t want to let him know I was afraid.” She whimpered. “I’m still afraid.”

This old lady?
Peggy wanted to support her.
Oh Lord.

“Harry always kisses me very sweetly,” Pam was saying to Marge. “He only opens his mouth a little.”

Marge said, “Dave promised to bring me a dish carved out of Koa wood. Have you ever seen Koa wood?”

Donna and her group muttered together; they had been schooled to believe it was important not to let any of it show.

None of the young things seemed to know what they thought about the parting. Still they came out into the evening with all the others, straining as if they too were convinced of the return. Marva knew they didn’t even speak the same language as the old ladies, who would talk about duty and patriotism and, what was it, the job that had to be done. She and Ben and a whole bunch of others had been together in the commune, like puppies, until they came for him because he had thrown away the piece of paper with the draft call, the mp kicked him and said, Son, you ought to be damn glad to go. Now here was this new girl not any older than Marva but her husband was what they called a career man, she probably believed in all that junk the old ladies believed in, so she could learn to play canasta and go to hell.

At first Peggy was afraid of the shadows; then the figures in the field sorted themselves out so that she could see which were trees and which were women running across the grass like little girls, stretching their arms upward, and she found herself swallowing rage because this place was worse than any ghetto. The women were all either stringy and bitter or big-assed and foolish and Bill had dumped her here as if she were no better than the rest of them. When Elise tried to take her hand she pulled away.

“It’s going to be all right.”

“This is terrible.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Listen.” Marge’s voice lifted. “Do you hear anything?”

Waiting, they all stood apart because each departure shimmered in the air at this moment of possible return.

Elise remembered that Gailliard had taken her to the balcony at the Officers
Club. He had set her up on the rail in her gray chiffon with the gray suede slippers and then he stood back to regard her, so handsome that she wanted to cry out, and she remembered that at the time they were so steeped in innocence that each departure of necessity spelled victory and swift return. She wondered if old ladies were supposed to feel the hunger that stirred her when she remembered his body. She wondered if he was still loyal, after all these years. In retrospect their love was so perfect that she knew he would always be beautiful, as she remembered him, and true.

Pam and Marge had said goodbye in peacetime; when Harry and Dave flew out from Pearl in April of that year it had seemed like just another departure. Marge could remember dancing with Dave’s picture, relieved, in a way, because the picture never belched or scratched its belly, although she and Pam stoutly believed that if they had known there was going to be a war they could have surrounded the parting with the right number of tears and misgivings, enough prayers to prepare for the return. Their fears would have been camouflaged by bright grins because, when you were a service wife, you had to treat every parting like every other parting. Still …

Bernice’s husband Rob enlisted in the first flush of patriotism after Pearl Harbor. “Go,” she said, clenching her fists to keep from grabbing him. He looked back once: “At least I’m doing the right thing.”
He’s off there accomplishing things with a bunch of other guys, they’re busy all day and at night they relax and horse around while I am stuck here, getting older, with nothing to do except sing that song on Saturday nights
… Donna remembered her and Ralph on the bed, wondering what sense it made for him to go into the mess in Korea. There was no choice and so, laying resignation between them like a knife blade, they made love one last time. Marva remembered being stoned in that commune near Camp Pendleton, Ben would come in looking like Donald Duck in that uniform and all the kids would laugh, but the last time he made her pick up her bedroll and he brought her here, he told her he would be back and maybe he would.