Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel

by Phyllis Zimbler Miller

  How many deaths will it take till he knows

  That too many people have died?

  The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind

  The answer is blowin' in the wind.

  Maybe she shouldn't have asked her parents to send her stereo with her brother. Some of her favorite songs too closely mirror her current situation.

  Robert and Howard sit on the couch talking while she's preparing dinner. Howard took the train from U of I Thursday night to Chicago to get their father’s car and her stuff. Then today Howard drove straight through from Chicago. After dinner he will drive up to Louisville to spend the night at their grandparents and drive back to Chicago tomorrow to return the car. Then he’ll take the train back to school from Chicago on Sunday.

  "Dinner's ready," she tells them now as she shuts off the stereo.

  "Roast beef. Nice going," Howard says as he and Robert sit down at the table.

  “Had to import it from Louisville.”

  Sharon passes Howard the roast beef platter. “It's just so great to see you. I haven't seen anyone with really long sideburns since we left Chicago."

  Howard laughs and lifts a forkful of roast beef to his mouth. "They are pretty long, aren't they?"

  "You want to see the post?" Robert asks.

  "Hell, no. I'm not setting foot on any military installation – ever, if I can help it."

  Should she ask ... ask Howard if he will go to Canada if he's drafted? She can't do it. She doesn't want to know.

  "It looks more like a resort in the Catskills than anything else," Robert says.

  Howard brushes his long hair out of his eyes. "I'm still not interested."

  "What will you do if you're drafted?" Robert asks.

  Sharon gasps.

  Her brother looks at her. "I've decided not to worry about the draft until I get my notice. Then I'll worry."

  Now she must ask. "You wouldn't ... you wouldn't go to Canada, would you?"

  Howard puts his fork down. "This war is wrong, totally wrong. Yet I'm not sure it's right to run away from my country. I’d first try for a medical deferment."

  "Any particular ailment?" Robert says.

  "Allergies. The sinus headaches I get can be horrendous; sometimes I have to stop studying and lie down. That would certainly interfere with being a good soldier."

  "Allergies? Allergies!" Robert pushes away from the table and strides outside.

  "What's the matter with him?" Howard asks Sharon. "Just because I said the war is wrong?"

  "It's not that." How to explain it to Howard? "It's probably what you said about allergies. Robert has such bad allergies he had to be hospitalized at ROTC summer camp for pneumonia. But he didn’t get kicked out of the program because his training officer said the army needed smart people too."

  Howard laughs, then says, "Is Robert a good soldier?"

  She doesn’t answer, instead getting up to refill the applesauce bowl.

  Is Robert a good soldier? She ticks off a mental list: hair cut the regulation length, brass and shoes shined to a high gloss, fatigues always starched and pressed by the laundry up the road, and follows all the instructions given in class. Yet isn't a good soldier by definition a soldier who's good in battle?

  Robert's father always bragged how good a soldier he was fighting in Europe during WWII. During a Friday night brisket dinner or a lox-and-bagel Sunday brunch he'd retell his war stories for the hundredth time. Neither he nor Robert’s mother ever mention that the war separated them for years soon after they married.

  "My unit saw so much action," he'd say, "that when the war in Europe ended, the army decided to award my unit by not sending us to the Pacific. The irony is that the European units sent back to the States en route to the Pacific got released in the U.S. as soon as the war with Japan was over. And my unit got stuck in Europe another year cleaning up the mess."

  Sharon would help Robert's mother serve the meal while Robert's father talked about being a good soldier. All this recounting of his dangerous exploits – how could Robert not feel obligated to equal his macho father?

  Yet in all the times his father talked, she never heard him express his opinion of Robert's ROTC commitment. He talked only of the past, not of the future.

  Regardless of what Robert's father thinks, Sharon prays that Robert won't have the opportunity to find out if whether he is a good soldier in combat. She can live her whole life without ever knowing the answer to Howard’s question.

  **

  "Yes, Mother. And thanks again for sending everything down with Howard," Sharon says the next morning.

  Sharon hangs up the phone as Robert comes up behind her and hugs her. "You know what?" Robert asks. "After breakfast, let's go over to Kim and Jim's for a few minutes."

  "They might be at the PX. Why?"

  "Because I have to qualify on a pistol, and I'm not very good at it. Jim has his own pistol at home – he keeps it next to the bed – and I want to practice holding it and aiming it."

  Sharon pulls out of Robert's arms. "I'm not going. I don't want you to practice with a loaded gun."

  "Honey, it's not loaded. No one keeps a loaded gun next to his bed."

  KIM – V – May 30 (Memorial Day)

  Communist forces shell over 60 allied positions to commemorate 80th anniversary of Ho Chi Minh's birth ... May 19, 1970

  “An officer leaves one card for each adult member of the family (and house guest) and a lady leaves one card for each adult lady (over 18 years of age), but neither leaves more than three.” Mrs. Lieutenant booklet

  Kim answers the knock on the door to find Sharon and Robert outside.

  "Is Jim here?" Robert asks. "I need to ask him something."

  "Come on in," she says, then goes towards the bedroom to get Jim.

  "Hi," Jim says as he follows Kim back into the living room. "What can I do you for?"

  "Could I practice a little with your pistol – just getting the feel of it – to help me qualify?" Robert says.

  "Just a sec,” Jim says. “I'll unload it."

  "Unload it! You keep it loaded!" Sharon says.

  "Of course it's loaded," Jim says. "What good would it do otherwise?"

  Kim looks at Sharon’s face. "Would you like to sit down?" Kim says.

  "No thanks. I'll stand."

  Jim comes back out of the bedroom and hands the gun, handle first, to Robert. Robert points the gun at the base of the ugly ceramic green table lamp, pulls the trigger a few times, then hands the gun back to Jim. "Appreciate it."

  “That’s it?” Sharon asks him. Robert nods.

  "Would you like some Coke?" Kim asks.

  "No, thanks, we have to go," Sharon says.

  Outside the door Kim hears Sharon say, "I told you so!"

  Jim goes into the bedroom once more to return the gun, then comes back into the living room. He sits down cross-legged on the floor next to his military strategy game.

  Kim sighs. Jim will be occupied for hours. She might as well write to her sister now.

  Thinking of her sister Diane brings a throb to Kim’s temples. Kim had done well in school. She had tried hard, grasping at anything as a possible means of escape from their miserable lives. Diane, two years younger, found school harder. She needed as much help as Kim could give her: "Please, Kimmie, please help. Pretty please with sugar on top." Sometimes Kim wished she and Diane had been sent to separate homes so she wouldn't always feel so responsible. Yet they had never been separated until now.

  Come on, Kim tells herself, she left town and went off to live at college with Jim when they married. Yet they had been only an hour away from Diane and they saw her almost every weekend. She came to visit or they went back to stay at Jim's parents' and saw her then.

  Diane's letters describe the customers at the grocery store where she works full-time now that she's finished high school. At 18 she moved out of the last foster home into a tiny one-bedroom apartment. "It's a relief," Diane wrote, "not to have to do any ironing except
for myself." Yet Kim can tell her sister's also lonely, so lonely.

  What could Kim do even if she were home now? Have Diane live with them? Kim wonders what Jim would say to that. Try to find young men to introduce to Diane?

  Kim closes her eyes and imagines herself and Jim living in a pretty white-frame house on a quiet street. She pictures her sister married and living a few blocks away in an equally pretty house on an equally nice street.

  She opens her eyes. Is it so wrong to want this?

  She picks up the pen.

  **

  "It's sort of spooky here," Kim says two days later. She stares out the window of Sharon's car as they drive the winding back road to Louisville. They’re taking the Fiat to be checked by a mechanic who works on foreign cars. Sharon hasn't been able to find anyone around the post who knows anything about a Fiat, so Kim offered to drive with her to Louisville. Sharon wanted to avoid driving Dixie Highway so they’re on this back road.

  The scenery outside the windows looks as remote and inhospitable as the backwoods of the South. Blackened junked-out cars and trucks surround the crumbling houses. Scrawny dogs bark at the car from the edge of the road. The scents of wild flowers mix with smoke from small bonfires. Few cars pass them on the road.

  "Why is the car jerking so much?" Kim says.

  "I'm sorry," Sharon says. "I wanted to see something."

  "What?"

  "There's a car behind us. The driver seems to be keeping pace with us. Whenever I speed up, he does. And when I slow down, he does."

  Kim twists her head to see behind her. All she can see is a cap on the driver's head. "He can't pass you on this road, so he has to keep pace. You're just imagining things."

  Sharon frowns. "You're the one who said it's spooky out here."

  "We should have brought the gun."

  Sharon gasps. "I wouldn't have let you. It's too dangerous."

  Kim knows from first-hand experience that guns are dangerous. She still wakes up nights dreaming about the pool of Marvin's blood growing larger and larger. Yet while the soldier used his gun to kill a poor soul who wouldn't have harmed anyone, Kim wants Jim’s gun for self-defense.

  Kim looks out the window as they pass more dismal little houses, so like the one with the peeling yellow paint she lived in with her sister and parents before ... How can you ever depend on someone's love?

  "What are you so scared about?" Sharon asks, breaking into Kim’s thoughts.

  Kim twitches in her seat. She looks at Sharon, unclear to what Sharon is referring

  "The loaded gun next to your bed and everything?" Sharon says.

  "Rape."

  "Rape?"

  Kim nods, her eyes glued to the road ahead. "If I were ever raped, I'd kill myself."

  "Even if you had children to take care of?" Sharon asks.

  "I wouldn't want to live anymore,” Kim says. “It would be too shameful."

  Sharon pushes her sunglasses further up her nose. "Why are you Southerners obsessed with rape?"

  Southerners! Surely all women are terrified and horrified of being raped, of being violated! "Obsessed? We're not obsessed. We just know what's right and wrong."

  Sharon doesn't turn to look at her; her eyes straight ahead on the winding road. "Then you're obsessed with sex. Always seeing sexual motives lurking behind every tree – or door."

  Kim clasps her hands together. "I was just trying to explain about rape – that’s why I wanted the gun with us."

  “I don’t understand living in fear all the time,” Sharon says.

  Kim doesn’t reply. Can Northerners really be so unconcerned about the terrible things that can happen to women?

  A mile further down the road Sharon says, "Kim, when did you first learn about sex?"

  Again Kim says nothing.

  "My mother bought a book for me," Sharon says. "Something about not being taken advantage of by men. She told me not to read the book until I was ready. So I didn't read it."

  Sharon pauses. "Then one day I was at a girlfriend's house with another friend – either 9th or 10th grade. The girl whose house we were at had a book she found on her parents' bookshelves. The three of us walked over to a nearby park and read the book together. We were so surprised."

  Kim nods in agreement. "I ... I was surprised too when I read about it in a book."

  Sharon laughs. "I was still so naive. When I was a freshman in college I went to this foreign film – Swedish I think. After the couple had sex the woman used a towel to wipe her legs. I didn't understand why. Another freshman girl explained to me about the semen dripping down the woman's legs afterwards." Sharon hesitates, then says, “If the man had been using a condom, the towel wouldn't have been necessary."

  "Is that what you and Robert use?" Kim asks.

  Sharon shakes her head, her eyes on the road. "I take birth control pills. My brother Howard always lectures me on the dangers."

  "I take them too."

  Kim smiles. They’re back on safe ground again.

  **

  That evening Kim and Jim enter the Officers Club and head for the tables occupied by the AOB class members. They find two chairs at the end of one table and Kim sits down while Jim stands over her.

  ‘"Would you like something to drink?" he asks.

  "No, thanks, I'll wait."

  The band hits the opening chords of the Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup" as Sharon and Robert walk in. Kim waves them over to the table. Jim is talking to some single officers off to one side of the room, so Kim gives Jim's chair to Sharon while Robert goes off to join Jim.

  "Lots of people here,” Kim says. “Some have been dancing."

  "I love to dance."

  A good-looking guy across the room looks familiar. "Sharon," Kim whispers, "there's Mark Williamson. He's heading straight towards us."

  "Hello, ladies," he says as he comes up to them. Then he bows at the waist and says to Sharon, "May I have this dance?"

  Sharon hesitates. Kim can’t believe this! Kim wouldn't hesitate. She’d know to say no. But Sharon stands up, following Mark onto the dance floor.

  The band plays Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline." It's a fast dance so Mark isn't touching Sharon. Kim glances at Robert but he has his back to Sharon talking to another man.

  The song comes to an end and the band switches to a slow dance, the Lettermen's version of "Goin' Out Of My Head." Mark sweeps Sharon into a tight embrace and dances with his body pressed against hers. Mark leans his head down and says something in Sharon's ear.

  Kim looks over at Jim. If he sees Sharon dancing with Mark like this he might think Sharon a bad influence on Kim and not let her be with Sharon anymore. Thank heavens Jim stands at the bar getting a drink, his back to the dance floor.

  The song ends. Sharon steps out of Mark's arms, curtsies, and walks back by herself to the table.

  "I love dancing," Sharon says as she sits down again, her face flushed. She pushes a strand of damp hair out of her eyes.

  Before Kim can ask wasn't Sharon ashamed to dance that close with another man, Jim and Robert return from the bar with their drinks and stand behind the two women.

  In unison the AOB men raise their glasses and shout to the theme song for the Mickey Mouse Club:

  Mickey Mouse, AOB!

  Forever let us hold our banner high!

  Oh, no! How can the men be so reckless? They'll be lucky not to be arrested for conduct unbecoming an officer. And if they are arrested, Kim is sure their punishment won't be "Mickey Mouse."

  WENDY – III – June 2

  1,000 New York City lawyers converge on Washington to convince congressmen to support anti-war measures ... May 20, 1970

  “Do not call an older woman or senior officer’s wife by her first name until she has invited you to do so.” Mrs. Lieutenant booklet

  "We're doing pretty well, aren't we?" Nelson says, his fingers circling Wendy's erect nipples. "I'm accepted by the men in my class. Robert Gold even maneuvered to be on my tank for the night
training exercise. Said he wanted to be with someone competent."

  Wendy wiggles her toes underneath the top sheet. She and Nelson have just made love and she feels terrific – but not just because of the good sex.

  Today Mrs. Donovan actually called! "We would like to extend an invitation, Mrs. Johnson, for you to be a volunteer visitor at the hospital. So many young soldiers are at Ft. Knox by themselves," Mrs. Donovan said, "and no one visits them when they are in the hospital. The volunteer group is organizing regular visiting days. Could you take Monday afternoons?"

  Wendy has been ecstatic since the phone call.

  Won't Nelson be impressed that she is on a visitors rotation just like everyone else – like all the white women. Her offer of help has been accepted! She waited till now, the right moment, to tell him the news.

  "Guess what?"

  "You're pregnant?"

  "No, Nelson, you know that's ..." She blushes and pulls away from him, hiking the sheet over her breasts.

  "Joke, joke."

  She smiles. "Remember that meeting I told you about after I attended – the one about volunteering at the hospital?"

  "You didn't know if you'd get to do anything?"

  "Mrs. Donovan – the head of the committee – called me today. She wants me to be a hospital visitor!"

  Nelson leans over and kisses her. "That's the good part about the army," he says. "They may not like us but they're good soldiers – the wives, too. And the orders are: all second lieutenants are created equal – equally low. Except for the RA guys. They're more equal."

  He looks down at the sheet, then up at her again. "In five weeks we have to give our answer about going vol indef. I've been thinking ... about going Regular Army – making the army a career."

  Pain jabs between her breasts. Regular Army!

  "What do you think?" Nelson asks.

  "Why?" She inhales. Tries to force the pain away. "Why would you do that?"

  "It could be a good opportunity," Nelson says. "I could do pretty well as an officer, be treated fairer than outside the army."