The money, combined with the sale of the Texas house, was enough to bring Roger and George back to zero. It didn’t leave any extra, but it was enough.
Roger decided to finish his dissertation from Tennessee. He instructed George to quit her jobs and pack up a U-Haul, and it was as if Texas had never happened at all.
As a thank-you to God and his mother, Roger decided to give up his educational career to become a full-time preacher. When he had been in the depths of despair, he had received the calling from Jesus himself, after all. “God will provide,” he said to his wife on the threshold of their new (Fran’s old) house in Buckstop. He liked the sound of these words so much, he said it twice, like someone in a movie: “God will provide.”
George nodded. She went into the foyer, where it smelled like mothballs and urine (or someone trying to cover it up). The house was not air-conditioned, so George opened up all the windows to let the air in and the scent out. Then she went upstairs and did the same. Some of the window sashes were stuck to the stools, as if they hadn’t been opened since whenever they had last been painted. George banged on the window frame with her fist and recalled how much she had always disliked her mother-in-law and, by association, this house.
The last window was over the bathroom sink. George opened it, then locked the door behind her. She sat down on the toilet. Her breasts had felt tender when she woke that morning and it was as she suspected: she had her period.
George looked under Fran’s sink, but all she found was an ancient box of menstrual pads, the kind that involved a belt and skinny strips of double-sided tape. “Fucking hell,” George said and then she started to cry.
September
IN SEPTEMBER, PATSY transferred to the same religious high school where her father had once been vice principal. The school determined that Patsy was academically advanced but morally behind (pants too tight, mouth too loose, etcetera), and she spent most of her senior year in one form of trouble or another. It was not, for instance, a popular act to entitle one’s science term paper, “Creationism for Dummies.”
The college counselor, who was also the girls’ gymnastics coach, suggested the same college he suggested for every student at the high school: Tennessee Adventist University. Patsy thought, No way in hell. She wanted to major in African American Studies or Eastern Religions, topics that did not even exist at TAU.
She ignored the coach’s advice and applied to ten secular colleges, using money she’d saved from working afternoons at the local snack cake factory to pay the application fees. Her essay was a six-hundred-word tract about bigotry and God, the hard-won life lessons of a seventeen-year-old girl who’d seen some things. It impressed its intended audience enough that, despite a somewhat patchy academic record, she received several thick envelopes in the spring, complete with welcome brochures and applications for financial aid.
By summer, she was rejected by all the major student loan companies. It turned out that there was already a flag on her embryonic credit history. March of 1999, someone had opened up a credit card in her name, then gone on to make several late payments. Until this cleared up, Patsy was seventeen years old and a high-risk candidate. Her parents (more specifically, her father) wouldn’t cosign either. For the most part, Patsy and Roger had passed her last year at home peaceably enough. This truce had been accomplished by scheduling their days so that they rarely met. Still, Roger had found it necessary to break their uneasy accord to weigh in on Patsy’s plan to go secular. “I’ve been there,” he said, not quite looking her in the eyes (he never looked her in the eyes), “and nothing good can come of it.” She had expected such a response and had nearly trained herself not to care.
She saw the army poster
MONEY FOR COLLEGE
BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE
inside the financial aid office of the state university, wedged between flyers for the Miss USA pageant, which billed itself as a scholarship competition, and for an ambiguously worded job opportunity that claimed to pay ten thousand dollars to any woman over five feet four in exchange for an unspecified service. My eggs? Patsy wondered. Kidneys? At five feet one, Patsy wasn’t qualified for the vague position anyway, so she briefly considered the Miss USA pageant instead. She concluded that five feet one was probably too short for Miss USA as well. She was pretty enough, but she looked squat in a bikini. In contrast, the military didn’t care what she looked like in a swimsuit, and after speaking with a recruitment officer, she decided that organ donation and scholarship pageants both involved more significant time and moral commitments than becoming a reservist. The pitch went down like cough syrup, easy enough if a bit thick: basic training, you’ll get in awesome shape, one weekend a month and maybe a couple of weeks a year, unless there’s a war, and darlin’, we’re living in a period of unprecedented peace, don’t you know?
PART II
What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a War Like This?
SIX YEARS LATER
NOVEMBER 2006
Patsy at the Airport
SHE DID NOT consider herself to be a political person. She hadn’t even voted in the last election, on account of being overseas at the time and then a misunderstanding with regard to the absentee ballot process. Something about postmarked vs. received by, or maybe it had been ink vs. pencil—she had never been entirely sure. Had her vote counted, it would have been cast for the gentleman who won anyway. At the time, she had found his directive to “stay the course” compelling—to do or believe otherwise would have been the same as saying that the last several years of her life and all its accompanying hardships had signified nothing. And how could a person think that and keep lacing up her boots and strapping on her gun day after day? No, a person could most definitely not believe that and go on. But she hadn’t managed to vote for the gentleman from Texas anyhow, and she was somewhat comforted by the knowledge that, in terms of the bigger picture, if such a thing even existed, her one idiot vote wouldn’t have changed a damn thing. She had also heard, though she didn’t know if this were true, that absentees weren’t counted unless the election was close; she had been told that the election had not been close.
She was not a political person, but had she been or even known anyone who was, the first or second thing on her agenda most certainly would have been The State of American Airports.
Though it was not a major holiday, nor was the weather notably inclement, the security line stretched all the way to curbside check-in. In two hours, she had gone through the usual spectrum of emotions that a person waiting in a long line experiences: the degradation of being in the back followed by the elated, irrational superiority of those who had waited their way to the front. She was a mere eight people from the X-ray machine (and only two from taking off her shoes) when she began to feel rumblings that she would, in all likelihood, be throwing up in the not-too-distant future. She debated: should she attempt to get through the line first and then vomit, or should she immediately shift her focus to exit strategies? Ahead of her: a pair of old-timers in matching sweat suits and a girl near her age with five little children. (The girl had been busy, she thought.) Neither party was built for speed. She decided that her stomach wouldn’t make it. She flagged security and asked in the same deferent voice she had once reserved for girlhood prayers, “Would it be possible for me to go to the bathroom and then return to my same place in line?”
NO.
“’Cause I’m not feeling all that well—”
NO.
“’Cause my plane’s in, like—”
NO.
“’Cause I’m not wearing my uniform, but—”
NO.
Over and eff’n out, y’all.
The last several times she had flown domestic, she’d been in uniform. This time, having been discharged, she was dressed in civilian attire, and she suspected that her civvies might have made a difference in her treatment.
Missing her flight was not an option, so she began to consider throwing up right there, in media res and
ideally on security’s shoes. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had had to do jobs like that herself—i.e., the management of the ungrateful masses in exchange for a minimal amount of compensation. And besides, she hadn’t been reared that way. Which is to say, she had not been reared to make a spectacle of herself in public.
She asked the man behind her in line if he’d save her place. He reminded her of her father, and this was not necessarily encouraging. He had thinning blondish gray hair and Perma Press khakis, and there was something about the eyes, too—clear and blue, but the hue not very deep, perhaps.
“I can’t promise you nothing, sweetheart,” he said. “If the line moves on, I go with it.”
Though it was the best she could do, she suspected his commitment level would not be sufficient to get them down the aisle. She was right. By the time she returned from the bathroom, her mock dad, along with everyone else she’d been with, including the jerk from security, was gone and replaced by a whole new generation of anxious waiters and security jerks, who didn’t know her from Adam and who were most definitely not going to let her cut.
Basic goddamn clusterfuck, she thought. Back of the line for Patricia Pomeroy French. She had been there before.
Eventually, it got so late that they started pulling people from her flight to Chattanooga to the front of the line. Again, it had been a while since she’d flown domestic, and she was not completely familiar with all the protocols. (It did occur to her that no one else, including the people running the show, seemed all that familiar with the protocols either ...) But she did the dance as best she could: duffel on the conveyor, plastic Baggie of products into the bin, et cetera, et cetera. She took off her boots and her belt, which caused her pants to slip down a little. They were low-riders, and she was thicker through the middle than whenever she had bought them. As she shuffled through the metal detector, she thought, Airport’s turning into a goddamn strip club.
BEEP BEEP BEEP.
“STEP ASIDE.”
She tried to explain how she had a little shrapnel in her foot, and sometimes, but not consistently, it set these things off.
“TAKE OFF YOUR SOCKS.”
Apparently she was supposed to have documentation—which she thought she may have known about at some point, but maybe not. Lacking such documentation, they had to see the injury.
“YOUR SOCKS, MA’AM?”
This has gone too far, she thought. She had served her country, and people who had served their countries should not be forced to have bare feet in public! On or about the same time she had gotten the shrapnel in her foot, she had ended up losing her second toe, the long one, the supermodel of the foot. While she knew there were people—good men, men she had served with—who were far more screwed than her, and that she was one of the lucky ones, the absence of toe still looked odd, or more precisely, remarkable. To strangers, a missing appendage was a story, and she was not always in the mood for telling that story. It would almost have been her druthers to have had a more heroic injury, not something she could have gotten from a mildly intense day of gardening. The point was, she didn’t like to call attention to her toe (or lack thereof).
And yet, she didn’t want to make anyone’s job or her life harder, so she took off the socks. Security ran the handheld metal detector over her foot, and they all concluded that it was exactly like she had said in the first place.
“You’re lucky you don’t have a limp,” security said.
“Sure.” It’d be luckier still if I had my toe, she thought.
“How’d you lose that toe, anyhows?”
She had saved up a few stretchers for situations like this: (1) “born that way,” (2) “stubbed it real bad,” and (3) (her favorite) “What? I lost my toe?” But she wasn’t in the mood for an impromptu round of grab-ass. What she was in the mood for was making security feel as bad as possible about harassing an amputee. So she told the truth. “In the war,” she said, as she was pulling her sock back on.
“You a soldier?”
There wasn’t time for her to answer because a different member of the Department of Homeland Security was standing over her duffel.
“This your bag?”
“Yessir, something I can help you with?”
“We just need to open it up.”
As they rifled through her bag, she was put in mind of the time she had been accused of shoplifting at the mall in Big Rock, Texas. Though she had been guilty of nothing but being young and looking something like a particular girl who had been a habitual shoplifter, she had felt like a criminal. Seeing the innards of her backpack spilled out on the concrete floor—crumpled note papers and a waterlogged history book and gum wrappers and fuzzy mints and pens chewed on one end and permission slips she hadn’t given her mother—she felt exposed and inclined to confess. She had actually begun to doubt her own innocence. Was it possible, she wondered, to steal something and not even know about it?
From her duffel, Homeland Security produced a tiny glass snow globe. The globe had been a token from a war buddy and was of sentimental value. Inside the dome was a pile of rocks, and instead of snow, there was sand. On the dome it read, WISH YOU WERE HERE? and then something else on the back in Arabic, which she had never bothered to have translated. She had speculated that it was an answer to the question WISH YOU WERE HERE? Something like, ‘CAUSE WE SURE AS SHIT DON’T.
“You can’t take this on board.”
“Why?”
“’Cause of the liquid. Snow globes aren’t allowed on planes.”
“Well, this ain’t the liquid kind,” she said. “Just rocks and sand.”
Procedure was procedure. No snow globes over a certain size on planes. There’d been a snow globe memo. There’d been a directive: Stay the course, folks: no snow globes on domestic flights. They weren’t heartless, though. They were willing to make accommodations. They would let her take it aboard if she was willing to find a way to unscrew the dome from the base to prove there wasn’t water. That was the best they could do.
“I’m no engineer,” she said, “and there’s no time on account of that course I just took in remedial line waiting, and eff that anyway—it would destroy the thing.”
But that was the best they could do.
She decided to abandon the sand globe in security. “Use it in good health, shitbags,” she muttered as she ran to her departure gate. No one heard her. In point of fact, she hadn’t really wanted anyone to hear her.
She needn’t have bothered rushing. By the time she got to the gate, they’d announced that the plane was delayed, and they didn’t anticipate leaving for at least another four hours. In the service, they referred to such a situation as a serious case of hurry up and wait. She nudged the man sitting next to her. “A serious case of hurry up and fucking wait, you know?” she said.
He smiled noncommittally, nodded, and turned back to his laptop screen. With his blue chambray button-down, the kind that had enjoyed its heyday around 1994, and his black rolling suitcase, he, too, reminded her of her father. “Sorry about the cussing,” she said.
He nodded again but still said nothing.
She felt like buying something to read so she asked him if he would watch her duffel bag.
“Um,” he said, “I think that’s against the rules. You know.” He scanned the room to see if anyone was listening then whispered a single word: “Terrorists.”
“Come on, man,” she implored. “I’m no terrorist. I’m a soldier, if you want to know.”
She went to the gift shop, but all the books were about dying, loving, screwing, or fighting, subjects that had ceased to hold any entertainment value for her. She finally bought an Us magazine, which she considered below her intellectual pay rate but sufficient to meet her meager needs: kill some time, stop thinking.
“Thanks for watching my bag,” she said upon her return.
The second man who looked like her father nodded and said nothing.
She began reading the magazine. “Jesus,�
� she exclaimed, “Britney Spears is getting divorced!”
“Seems so,” said the man.
“Jesus, I have the same birthday as her—December second, same day though I’m two years younger—and we’re both from the South, so I, like, feel this girl, you know?” And she did. She liked to hear her news, the same way people appreciated occasional updates about the homecoming queen from high school.
“Uh ...,”
“God, poor Brit. Married to some shitbag and two kids and divorced and not even twenty-five yet. Makes me wonder what the hell I’ve been doing with my time, you know?”
“I’m kind of doing something here,” said the man who looked like her father.
“Oh, hey, sorry!”
She turned back to her magazine, but it only took her about a half hour to finish the whole thing. She decided to tell the man who looked like her father about the situation back in security. “You know the really funny thing? I was also packing a Twin Towers lighter. You ever seen one of those? OK, it’s in real bad taste, so of course we all who was over there had to have one. The Twin Towers are engraved on the front and when you flip the top to ignite it, it looks like the buildings are on fire. I could have done a hell of a lot more damage with my lighter than with my sand globe, right? Fucking clusterfuck is what it was.”
The man closed his laptop screen. “Um, it was ... nice talking to you.” He placed the computer almost lovingly into his black vinyl valise, then zipped the bag shut. “Good luck.” He rolled his suitcase into the men’s room. She didn’t notice when or if he ever came out.
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