by Maddy Wells
By the time we got back to the reception area, Rick’s platoon was off doing something else so we had to wait again.
“I’ll marry him right here and now,” Alex said, thinking that would solve something. “There’s probably a chaplain around here somewhere. Jesus. What the hell is the delay.” She got up and went to the counter. “What the hell is the delay?” she asked the private who was pecking steadily on an electric typewriter, as if that were his mission in life.
I stood on tiptoe and saw that he was copying a book, On the Genealogy of Morals. At the rate he was going, the project would last him the rest of his tour of duty. Of course, maybe that was the point.
He looked up at her and sniggered, checking out the clock on the wall. “Give the guy a break, lady. He just got here. Let him settle in, huh?”
She sat back down, disgruntled, rubbing her stomach, reassuring Little Rick inside that Big Rick would soon visit them, marry them, make them whole. I felt sick.
It wasn’t until the clerk informed us that Rick’s platoon was in the mess hall again, this time for dinner, that I finally got the idea that we wouldn’t be seeing Rick tonight at all.
“Is that right?” I asked the clerk. I made a point of obviously checking out his nametag, Dougherty, as if I knew something spiteful to do with that knowledge. “We’re not going to see him tonight, are we?”
Dougherty smiled and looked at the clock as if divining the future. “Why do you want to see him tonight? Give the guy a break, huh. It’s bad enough being here, without having a couple of chicks hounding you. He’s got to get his head into it, you know? Or he isn’t going to survive.”
Alex drew a sharp breath and put her hand to her throat dramatically. “Not survive?”
Dougherty grabbed a couple of keys from a pegboard. “You can bunk in the WAC shack. Tomorrow will be a little easier and you can sneak a peak at lover boy.” He threw the keys across the counter and went in the back room, coming back with two piles of linens. “Across the company field.” He pointed in the direction we were to go, put the linens in our hands and went back behind the counter, lit up a cigarette and held it between his lips as if he were blowing up a balloon and continued typing. Peck, peck, peck.
The WAC shack was a dormitory; twelve beds lined up against a wall, housing only one other occupant, the pool shark from the Outer Limits. She was reading. The leg in the cast stretched out across the bed, the undamaged one dangled off the side. She wore her fatigues and her Afro had a huge indentation, as if someone had mowed her hair where her hat had been.
She didn’t look up when we came in, but I knew she saw us. I had seen her in action earlier that day, aware of every movement around her.
“Hello,” I said, loudly. “Mind if we join you?’
She turned a page, making a big show of being in no hurry to acknowledge us.
I looked at the rows of beds. Bare mattresses on old springs. None looked inviting. “Are you saving these for anybody?”
“Anywhere you’d like.” With that she flung her book on the bed, rising with some effort to inspect us. She swung her broken leg like Captain Ahab swinging his wooden peg around the deck.
Alex immediately flopped down on the bed next the WAC’s. “God, it’s hot in here. I don’t think I’ve taken a normal breath in twelve hours. I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to breathe again.”
Alex closed her eyes, knowing she was being admired. We watched her breathe for a while. The girl, whose name was, no lie, Marie Antoinette Bonaparte, was from Los Angeles via New Orleans. She had a master’s degree in English Literature and was allergic to grass, which didn’t make much difference when she was in Los Angeles, but was making her life hell in Fort Jackson. She had joined the army to escape the turmoil that was Los Angeles, hoping for a career in communications. The communications career she had in mind, perhaps a television or radio commentator, was different from the communications job the army actually needed her to do, which was to climb telephone poles and string wire between them. Actually, the army didn’t need her, Marie Antoinette Bonaparte, specifically, to string wire. It was in fact, she admitted, a job she would never get to perform, because women weren’t allowed in combat, the only possible scenario in which wire would need stringing without the benefit of a cherry picker. What the army really needed her to do was to go to the pole orchard every day, strap on her gaffs and shimmy to the top of a pole in order to shame men into doing the same.
“One boy was crying his eyes out, he was so scared to climb a puny telephone pole. When I got out there, he had to do it, or be a fag. He wasn’t the only one, though. All the boys were scared. Men are pussies,” Marie Antoinette said with authority.
I flinched at the word that I had never heard another woman use.
“If they sent us to Nam, we’d show them Cong pussies how to fight. They use their women. I’ve seen pictures of some of the dead soldiers, and they’re women. Tits and everything. Women are vicious fighters, more vicious than men. They fight for keeps, to the death. Not for sport like men. Why do you think this thing is going on so long? We’re not allowed to go in and just wipe them out. It’s a game to those damned pussy generals.”
She looked at me and all I could think of was “pussies” because she had said it so often, and I realized that was just the effect she wanted. She was a lesbian.
“Don’t think I’m a man-hating lesbian,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I like men as much as you do.”
She gave me a sly smile, and I wondered if she could see something in me that I couldn’t.
Alex got up suddenly. “Isn’t there a fan or something in here? I’m going to die.” She took off her blouse. “God this thing reeks.” She flung it to the floor and went latrine.
“What a princess,” Marie Antoinette said, but her eyes followed Alex.
I could tell she was already hooked. “She’s my sister.”
She didn’t say anything about that. “You guys trying to get out?”
“Out?”
“Of the service.”
“We’re not in.”
“Want to go shoot some pool?”
“I saw you this afternoon.”
“Was that you?” She sat down on the bed, the flop causing the bed to move a couple of inches on the highly polished floor. Involuntarily, she tried to stop the skid with her cast and winced. “Damn.”
We made Alex put on her soiled blouse and dragged her to the Outer Limits, despite protests that if she couldn’t see Rick, she’d rather curl up in a ball and die. Marie Antoinette marked a couple of recruits at the bar. She nudged me and showed me with her eyes that she had them in her sights. We took stools next to them, and within minutes the boys were explaining to a prettily befuddled Alex what the chalk was, what the stick was for and some laws of physics that ruled the world of spinning balls and their impact on each another.
“They’re so stupid I almost hate to do this.” Marie Antoinette hobbled over to the boys and suggested that playing for money would make things more interesting, and within minutes she had appropriated all the money they planned to use to go home with the next weekend.
Alex and I looked down into our drinks, cherry colored wine of the cough syrup variety and swirled them as if they were cocktails at the Ritz in New York.
“She’s nice,” Alex said.
“Who?”
“Marie Antoinette.”
“Oh.” I was surprised that Alex even remembered her name. “Well, she certainly likes you.”
“What do you mean, ‘like?’” Alex asked.
“You like girls now?” I asked, snorting my derision.
“No! I was just asking what you meant by ‘like.’ I mean, I like her too.”
“Not like that!”
“Did you ever think to try it?” Alex asked. She eyed the other patrons.
“No!” I rotated the glass madly.
Alex smiled and I wanted to choke it out of her. She had gone down avenues I hadn’t even considered and
she wasn’t going to tell me unless I begged. Which I refused to do. I suddenly yearned to be rid of her, and I caught my breath at the thought. I could just run from this place, take the first bus back home. Wherever that was. And that was what stopped me. My home had always been Alex. Who was it now? Lance? Was home, for me, always going to be other people, the most unreliable real estate on earth?
A moan came from the boys at the pool table as they realized that Marie Antoinette had fleeced them. A low murmur as they negotiated the next game, trying to win back what they had lost. They were betting money they hadn’t even earned yet. They wouldn’t have enough for a beer for months if they kept playing. But the balls cracked, fell, and soon our Marie was sitting on the stool next to Alex, grinning, treating us to more vile refreshment.
“It was almost a shame to do it to them,” she said. “This is what boredom will do to you.” The boys were two months in hock to her.
“You should have left them something. Money, dignity,” I said.
“Like hell. When you have the enemy on the ropes, you got to finish him off or he’ll rise up later and kill you.”
“Is that something you learned in the army?” I asked.
“Los Angeles.”
We walked slowly back to the barracks, aware of and trying to ignore, Marie Antoinette’s limp. The air was stifling and I undressed self-consciously in front of Marie, who whipped off her clothing without thinking. I thought of the strip tease I had done for the store detective in Macy’s, the poses for Mr. Thwaite, and even the session with Star, the artist. I had been blissfully aware that my body, however imperfect, was more than adequate to them. But when in close proximity to Alex, whose body was a work of breathtaking perfection, I felt defeated.
Marie Antoinette watched Alex undress and I could see her fingers trembling, wishing they were on that body, as she put her crutches in her wall locker and hopped back onto her bed. Alex, nude and beautiful, lay on top of the sheets, it was so hot there was an excuse other than the sheer exhibitionism. She was asleep almost immediately. I sat next to Marie Antoinette her on bed.
“My sister’s name is Jean D’Arc,” she said as if I had asked about her family. “She’s even more beautiful than her.” We looked at the slumbering body that was impossible, really, to ignore. “Black girls are more beautiful than white girls. There’s nothing pretty about all those blue veins showing through skin. And those skinny lips. They’re like chickens.”
“I never said there was,” I said, as if I had to defend white womanhood. I hadn’t realized there was a competition.
“It’s more competitive than you think,” she said, once again reading my mind.
“What’s more competitive?”
“Jean D’Arc had more lovers than anybody I’ve ever known, male or female. It was as if she wanted everyone to enjoy her beauty. It was like this treasure that had been dropped in the middle of everything, and she wanted to share. It was very cool, really. She was so non-possessive with it.”
“How many lovers have you had?” I asked.
“I never counted.”
I didn’t believe her, knowing that if I rifled her belongings I would find something with notches carved in it.
“You’ve had two,” she said, “And they’ve both been disappointing.”
“Why did you join the Army?”
“To get away from Jean D’Arc.”
“I thought you loved her.”
She sighed loudly. “Love. Sure I loved her. I just couldn’t be an introduction to her forever. At some point, you want someone to say, you know, you’re not so bad yourself. People are fucking lemmings in love.”
We swung our feet off the side of the bed, said goodnight. I waited to hear soft breathing coming from my bunkmates then I pulled my jeans on and slid soundlessly out the door, nervously fraying the napkin with Jeremy’s number on it, looking for a phone booth in the moonlit Carolina night. Finally, I saw one outside the orderly room. I dropped a nickel in the slot and dialed his number, feeling how warm I imagined his skin to be when the phone picked up and a woman’s shrill voice answered.
“Who’s there?” she demanded. I had expected Jeremy’s molasses voice and was struck dumb, literally, by the feminine voice. There was a party going on in the background. Jazzy music and female laughter. “What do you want?” she asked.
I slipped the phone back into its cradle and walked back towards the barracks, thinking of Jeremy and the party I was missing. Was that his woman who answered the phone? A man like Jeremy would have several women, but only one that he let answer his telephone. “What do you want?” that woman had asked.
I strolled outside the gates and climbed up a hill outside the post and sat down beneath a row of pines, enjoying, if not exactly a breeze, at least the freshness of the green trees. The needles were like a mattress.
I thought of the women who would be at that party, dark and sultry women wearing too-tight satin dresses that showed off curves that would be considered vulgar by white standards. Jeremy was dancing with the woman who answered the phone. She was wearing a red dress that dipped around her breasts and draped her hips in a suggestive way. I pictured that she didn’t shave under her arms and the sight of that hair drove Jeremy into a frenzy of desire for her. She wasn’t very pretty, I knew. Jeremy would never like a pretty woman, because a pretty woman had too many options and Jeremy wanted to keep all the options for himself. The thought that Jeremy had the options would keep that woman in the red dress hanging around, hungering for him. “What do you want?” she had asked me.
I lay down under the tree and put my hand between my legs, moving it until I came and felt sleepy. Under the trees was peaceful and as good a place to sleep as any. I said aloud to Jeremy’s woman, as if she were still on the phone, talking to me, waiting for me to reply. “I want the same thing as you.”
Chapter Ten
I woke just after dawn. The sun was already so hot under the trees that sweat rolling into my eyes tickled me awake and I wandered back down to the post, brushing the pine needles off my backside. The guard, same boy as yesterday, didn’t say anything, as if he was used to women coming in looking as if they had slept in the woods. He gave me a half-assed salute.
I wasn’t really surprised to see a particular dark-skinned lemming in bed with my sister. Outside, platoons of recruits sang in a call and response cadence as they ran through the early morning, getting their exercise before the sun burned all the ambition out of them.
“Jody was there when you left.”
“You’re right!”
“Bubba was there when you left.”
“You’re right!”
“Sound off!”
“One, two.”
“Sound off!”
“Three, four.”
“One, two, three, four. One, two….three, four!”
The song had lines about how Bubba stole your girlfriend, your Cadillac, your job, your life while you were busy doing this silly-assed Army stuff. One drill sergeant sang the cadence while another one brought up the rear of the formation, taunting by name the soldiers who were having a hard time keeping up.
The singing woke Alex and Marie Antoinette, and they moaned as they let themselves be dragged awake. I met my sister’s eyes and she let me know, without saying a word, that what had happened was none of my damned business. When Alex went into the bathroom to shower, I hurriedly slipped off my jeans and sandals.
“You can borrow my stuff. Soap and shampoo,” Marie Antoinette said. “Alex is using them now. But when she’s finished.”
When she’s finished, I get her crumbs. Marie examined her fingernails as if her fortune were revealed there.
“What happened to Jean D’Arc,” I asked, snapping her out of her happy reveries.
“Pregnant. She got pregnant and couldn’t figure out who the father was. Not that that was a big deal.” She glared at me lest I think less of Jean D’Arc for sleeping around. “But being pregnant was. It sort of made her feat
ures all go down to the ground, like they had run out of energy. And her hair lost its luster. It just wasn’t the same. I read once that the only difference between great beauties and normal people is a matter of centimeters. A few centimeters one way or the other is what makes some people mesmerizing and the rest of us forgettable.” She made a swirling motion, making sure to include us both among the damned.
“Well, being pregnant couldn’t have altered that,” I said, “those centimeters. She must still have that.”
“She just looks tired. She is tired. Always running after Darlin. Her baby.”
We looked up at the same time to see Alex standing naked in the aisle holding a towel in one hand as if she didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t want to just drop it on the ground, her other hand cupping her tummy, where her own Darlin was lurking, waiting to rob Alex of her beauty, her youth, her future, because Darlin was the future and once she was born it would no longer belong to Alex.
The idea that people are mere receptacles for the next generation is perhaps the cruelest knowledge that youth can have. That you count for nothing except as a propagator of the species. Who wants to know that the universe regards you as a Matryoshka doll holding a smaller, and slightly dissimilar for genetic purposes, version of yourself? The answer is no one. Our egos are way too big to take in both our desires of the moment as well as a picture of the grand plan. Unfortunately, the light doesn’t illuminate that particular map until a little bugger is tugging at your intestines and pulling stretch marks down your hips, like ropes from which he will swing from tree to tree, yelping his victory cry of life.
We dressed in silence. Marie Antoinette had to report to the Commanding Officer before she was free to waste the day in the Outer Limits. The Army at least had to know where she was. Marie Antoinette had quite a racket going, all for the pain of a broken leg.