Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel

by Phyllis Zimbler Miller

  "Kim!" Jim calls from the bedroom. "Are you coming to bed?"

  He's in the mood – she's expected to be responsive.

  She lays her brush down. Maybe he should think about being without her at some firebase in Vietnam. Without her responsiveness. He can rub up next to his rifle.

  **

  It is the next morning. A Saturday. Jim is home.

  "We need some things at the commissary. Want to come with?" she asks him as they finish breakfast.

  "Can't you go by yourself? No one's going to shoot a clerk in front of you there."

  Kim gasps. She hasn't said anything to Jim about the shooting since the night at the store. Why would he bring it up now?

  "I ... I ..."

  Jim walks by her towards the bedroom. "I'll take you."

  Kim picks her purse off the couch.

  He comes back into the living room. In his left hand he has the gun. With his right hand he places bullets in the chamber.

  Pain stabs above her left eye. "Why ... why are you taking that with?"

  "I'm going to go over to the range and practice while you're at the commissary. That way the trip won't be a total waste of time."

  In the car the humid air plasters her curls to her forehead and her dress to her back and thighs. The Turtles sing "Happy Together" on the radio.

  Did she ever go anywhere special with her parents? She doesn't remember any trips farther than their nearest neighbors or the church. She closes her eyes. If she concentrates hard enough she might recall a trip to a swimming hole or some other fun place. She opens her eyes. How childish – there was never such a trip. Her parents clawed a living from their farm. They didn't have time for foolishness.

  At the entrance to the post the MP motions for Jim to stop the car. "What the hell does he want?" Jim says. "Can't he see my sticker?"

  The MP says to Jim, "Please step out of the car and open your trunk."

  Jim gets out of the car. The stabs in Kim's head escalate, an aura of colors skips across her vision.

  A second MP, a young black man, peers through her open window. "Sorry, mam, for bothering you," he says. "I just have to check the interior."

  "Hey, you, get away from my wife!" Jim screams from the other side of the car. He jerks his car door open and yanks the gun from under the seat.

  Oh no. Oh no.

  Jim balances the gun on the car roof and screams again, "Get away from my wife!"

  "Put the gun down, sir." The MP steps away from Kim's window, one hand pointing at Jim, the other reaching for the flap on his holster.

  The pain blinds her. She doesn't need to see to know what's going to happen. Her parents' car skids towards the telephone pole.

  "Jim," she says.

  "Get away from my wife."

  "Jim, please Jim."

  "Put the gun down."

  From behind Jim the first MP yells, "Put the gun down now!"

  Jim turns towards the first MP, then back to the MP near Kim. His gun still in his hand.

  A single shot.

  Her screams detonate, ricocheting inside the car as if they themselves are bullets. She waits for the young soldier to fall, his pool of blood billowing towards her.

  Jim slumps to the ground.

  **

  A nurse gives Kim a sedative and draws the curtain around the clinic bed.

  It's like the killing at the store. A mistake. A terrible mistake. And both because of her!

  On the curtain, like a home movie screen, first Marvin, then Jim, slump over, their pools of blood ballooning.

  Through the open window the smell of honeysuckle pervades the air. Red splotches dot her dress. The Kruger boy shouts over the honeysuckle hedge: "Kim made blood! Kim made blood!"

  She has made all this blood – Marvin's and Jim's. And, unlike her menstrual period, this isn't natural. They have both died.

  A spider crawls up the curtain.

  The itsy bitsy spider went up the waterspout.

  Down...

  She's washed out, her life over. She'll go back to her hometown and stay with her sister, get a job, and never marry again.

  She brings death to everyone she loves.

  DONNA – V – July 4

  Despite Senate's repeal, 81-10, of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, President Nixon says he still has the constitutional right for U.S. participation in Vietnam War ... June 24, 1970

  “To be asked to pour at a tea is a great compliment.” Mrs. Lieutenant booklet

  Donna sits on the front steps of the apartment building. No mail today because it’s a national holiday.

  She believes no news is good news, still she worries. Worries the way she didn't worry about her husband, in the days when she was naive, when she believed men came back to their wives and families as if they had only been off on a men-only camping trip.

  Of course there were men who came back to their families – in pieces. Would she have wanted Miguel to come home in a wheelchair, never to have walked or danced again? It could have been a slow death for both of them. Or would they have overcome his handicap and lived happily ever after?

  Now she knows no one lives happily ever after.

  She goes inside the apartment for a Coke. Perhaps they’ll go to the post tonight for the July 4th fireworks. It seems appropriate to celebrate the founding of the nation if your husband, brother and father are serving in the armed forces that protect that country.

  She reaches to open the refrigerator and shooting pain flashes through her. She staggers to the bathroom toilet. Her abdominal muscles cramp, blood spurts down her legs.

  Is this a spontaneous abortion? Is she losing the baby?

  The hospital. Save the baby. Jerry's at the PX with the car! Wendy lives nearby.

  Donna calls Wendy.

  She’ll come right over with Nelson.

  Donna puts on two sanitary napkins, writes a note for Jerry, and grabs her purse.

  Please, please, let the baby be okay.

  **

  Nelson helps Donna into a folding chair in the clinic's waiting room. "We'll go speak to the receptionist," Wendy says.

  The door to the clinic pushes open with a swing that cracks the door against the wall. Sharon storms into the room, followed by Robert. How could they know so soon?

  Sharon rushes over to Donna. "Where is she? Is she okay?"

  "Who?"

  "Kim."

  "Kim?"

  Sharon stares at Donna. "What are you doing here? Aren't you here because of Kim?"

  Wendy comes alongside them. "What's going on?" she asks.

  "You tell me," Sharon says.

  "I'm bleeding," Donna says. "I may be losing the baby. Jerry's not home so I called Wendy to bring me here."

  "Oh, God," Sharon gasps.

  "Why are you here?"

  "I ... I can't tell you right now."

  "Can't or won't?" Wendy asks.

  Sharon bends over Donna and takes her hands. "Jim was killed today ..."

  Donna falls, falls. Beside her Wendy moans.

  "... by an MP in front of Kim. She's here and the doctor called me to come be with her."

  The hole so big and so black that Donna falls and falls and there is no bottom.

  Sharon straightens up. "I have to find Kim. I hope ... I hope the baby can be saved. I'll come back to see you as soon as I can."

  Wendy grasps Donna around the shoulders. "The receptionist said they'll try to see you as soon as possible. Just hang on."

  Donna closes her eyes. From the end of a long white corridor Miguel beckons. She follows him through a maze of halls, twisting right, left, left, right. He pushes against a concealed door and they enter an enclosed garden. Water spouts from the mouth of a stone nymph. Wind chimes moan as a breeze brushes her face.

  Miguel points to a tiny mound of dug-out earth – a grave for a baby.

  "No!" she screams.

  "What's wrong?" Wendy asks. "Is the pain bad?"

  Donna looks up at Wendy. Miguel and the g
arden have disappeared. Her body trembles.

  The clinic door swings open again. Jerry rushes in.

  He kneels beside her. "I love you, Donna."

  "I think I've lost the baby."

  "We'll make more. Everything will be okay."

  She sobs. "No, it won't."

  Jerry whispers in her ear. "Darling, I'll take the exemption. I won't go to Vietnam."

  The sobs tear her apart.

  SHARON – XIV – July 4

  Corporate Executives Committee for Peace – 100 leaders of major corporations – calls for an end to Vietnam War by December 31, 1970 ... June 24, 1970

  “The pourer should not leave the table until she is relieved by the next pourer.” Mrs. Lieutenant booklet

  Sharon sits by the bed as Kim sleeps. Hospital personnel moved Kim from the clinic to this hospital room, where she will stay for observation until tomorrow.

  Sharon sits alone; Robert stays out in the hall – "It's better for only you to be with her," he said. Tears slide down Sharon's cheeks.

  Is she crying for Kim, for herself, for Donna, or for Wendy? Maybe she's crying for all of them, for their similar and dissimilar reasons: Kim's dead husband, Donna's dead first husband and probable miscarriage, Wendy's husband going Regular Army, and the threat of a Vietnam tour hanging over Jerry, Nelson and Robert.

  Now Jim is out of that. Kim won't have to worry about receiving a telegram announcing he's been killed. Her husband was killed in front of her own eyes, the news telegraphed in less than a second.

  Bile rises in Sharon's throat. She gags.

  At age 10 she and Howard stand in the carpeted hallway of a Jewish funeral home in Chicago waiting for her paternal grandfather's funeral to begin. The rabbi from their synagogue comes up to them. "Let's go down the block to the Jewish book store. You don't need to be here now," he says.

  It is only later, during shiva, the traditional week of mourning, that Sharon asks her father, "Why did the rabbi have Howard and me leave the chapel until the service began?" Her father glances over at his mother sitting on a low stool talking in Yiddish to one of her sisters.

  "Your grandmother is superstitious. She insisted on an open coffin even though it's not Jewish custom," her father says. "The rabbi didn't want you to look into the open coffin so he took you down the street."

  And five years later, when this superstitious grandmother herself dies and her father makes the decisions, there is no open coffin.

  Now Sharon wonders if there will be an open coffin for Jim. Is this a Southern Baptist tradition? Or maybe his wound can't be covered up enough and the coffin will be closed regardless of the tradition.

  She brushes her eyes, her head throbs. Her mother had a first cousin who at seven years of age was struck in the head by a baseball bat. He lay in bed for several weeks before he died. When Sharon's grandmother visited her nephew, the boy whimpered, "Aunt Fannie, it hurts so much."

  That's how Sharon feels – it hurts so much. Jim's death, Donna's probable miscarriage. Kim needed Jim so much and Donna needed this baby in case, in case ...

  Sharon strides across the room and pulls the room door open. Robert jumps off the hall bench.

  "Is she asleep?" Robert reaches out his arms to Sharon.

  She pummels his chest with both fists. "It's all your fault! It's all your fault!"

  Robert grabs her hands and holds them at her side. "Be quiet or we'll upset the other patients. The staff might even call the MPs."

  Sharon shudders, gulps air, and allows him to pull her down onto the bench. He wraps his arms around her.

  "It is your fault," she sobs into his chest. "You and your adolescent dreams of being a war hero, proving to your dad you are as good as he. Why are all you men so hung up on playing war, proving how macho you are? Shooting toy guns when you're little, then real guns when you're older?

  Robert rocks her back and forth. He says:

  The time you won your town the race

  We chaired you through the market-place;

  Man and boy stood cheering by,

  And home we brought you shoulder-high.

  To-day, the road all runners come,

  Shoulder-high we bring you home,

  And set you at your threshold down,

  Townsman of a stiller town.

  Smart lad, to slip betimes away

  From fields where glory does not stay,

  And early though the laurel grows

  It withers quicker than the rose.

  She sobs. The beginning of A.E. Housman's poem "To An Athlete Dying Young." Robert recited it when they first met, minutes after they escaped the ROTC protest.

  Men and war games. She thinks of the times she played cowboys and Indians with Howard when they were little; the fort they built with a blanket over a card table; the time he tied her to a tree so that he could pretend to ride up and rescue her; his collection of metal soldiers that their mother melted down on moral grounds. The movies, the television shows, the books – all glorifying men who go out to fight, their guns strapped to their sides, to protect their womenfolk and their homesteads.

  Robert holds her chin in his hand and looks in her eyes. "I know now it's not a game. It's serious and people get killed. I can't take back what I've committed to, but I can be as careful as possible."

  His chest heaves. "And I pray to God I don't have to go to Vietnam. I don't know whether I believe this war is right. I just don't want to shoot another person, to choose between his life and mine."

  Sharon pulls Robert's face down to hers. She presses her lips against his. Please may she not lose him. She already knows too many widows.

  **

  Sharon has brushed her hair and put on some lipstick in the hospital bathroom. Kim still sleeps.

  "Let's go visit Donna now," Sharon says.

  "Are you up for this?" Robert asks.

  She nods. She has to see Donna, who's also being kept overnight for observation.

  "She's one floor down," Robert says. The soles of their shoes squeak on the wooden stairs.

  On the lower floor Wendy and Nelson sit on a bench halfway down the hall talking to Jerry. Wendy runs to Sharon and flings her arms around her. "Is Kim okay?" she asks.

  “For now.”

  "What really happened?" Nelson says as he and Jerry come up beside Wendy.

  Robert shakes his head. "Apparently Jim pulled a gun on an MP and another MP shot Jim."

  "Jim pulled his gun on a black MP," Nelson says. "That's what I heard."

  "Why did he do that?" Wendy asks.

  All three of them look at Sharon. "He ... he was obsessed. He thought men were looking at Kim. He must have thought ..."

  "He needed help," Robert says. "After what he said at the club about Nelson I should have known he was coming unglued. I'm the one who spent the most time with him. I failed him."

  Jerry puts his arm around Robert. "It's as much my fault. I was at the club too. I should have realized his reaction was way out of line from his usual behavior. I'm supposed to be sensitive to others' feelings – I didn't realize what was going on."

  Jerry's eyes blink. "And now Donna has lost the baby. It was a spontaneous abortion. Doctor told her it happens often."

  “She can still have children, can't she?" Sharon asks.

  Wendy nods. "It's just that she wanted this baby so that if ... if ..."

  Jerry puts his hand on Wendy's arm. "There will be no if. I'm going to use the Vietnam exemption I'm entitled to."

  "What exemption?" Nelson asks.

  Oh, no, Wendy doesn't know.

  "Donna's first husband was killed in Vietnam. That gives me ..."

  Wendy slumps to the floor. Her body sags against the wall, her head on one side. "Wendy, Wendy," Nelson yells.

  Sharon bends over Wendy, holding Wendy's head down between her knees. "Take it easy," she says.

  Nelson crouches next to Wendy and strokes her head.

  Jerry looks at Sharon. "I thought you all knew."

&nb
sp; "Robert and I do. I didn't tell Kim or Wendy."

  Jerry leans over Wendy. "I'm sorry, Wendy. This has been a terrible day for you."

  Wendy raises her head. Tears plop onto her lap. "And Nelson's insisting on going Regular Army!"

  "Honey!" Nelson puts his arms around her. "I've explained it to you. Regular Army is a great opportunity for us. I'll have the same chances for promotion as everyone else."

  "Not if you're dead."

  **

  Sharon stands behind Wendy, who sits in the only visitor's chair in Donna's room. Both Kim and Donna have single rooms, aren't forced to share with cheerful or depressing roommates.

  "I'm sorry you had to find out this way," Donna says. "I thought Sharon would tell you."

  Sharon shrugs. "I didn't know whether you wanted me to. And I thought Kim especially would be upset. I didn't want her more worried than she already was."

  The three of them look at each other. No one says the obvious: Kim needn't have worried about Vietnam. Jim didn't even make it through AOB training.

  "Jerry's going to take the exemption," Donna says. "He told you, right?"

  Sharon nods.

  "We're still going to sign up for vol indef. He wants to go to Europe."

  Sharon smiles. "Robert told me. Maybe we'll be stationed near each other. And, Wendy, you'll have a European tour if Nelson goes Regular Army."

  "If he survives Vietnam," Wendy says, crushing tissues between her hands. "He'll probably go in a couple of months."

  Sharon hugs her. "I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm betting on Nelson. Robert says he's a terrific soldier."

  SHARON – XV – July 5

  Secretary of State Laird affirms U.S. plans to continue bombing raids inside Cambodia after June 30 ... June 26, 1970

  “Unless she can be positive that her pocketbook will not slide from her lap, the pourer should place her bag under the skirt of the table or under her chair, making sure that the other guests will not trip over it.” Mrs. Lieutenant booklet