Luke. “Luke!”
“May we go into the house?” he says.
She pushes past the men into the house. Sissy steps back, out of the way, clutching the top of her nightie.
He’s sick. Or missing in action. Or, no, he’s gone AWOL. That’s it. That’s it. Luke’s gone AWOL. Or sat down in the middle of the barracks and simply refused to move. That would be like Luke! He’ll be court-martialed now. Will he go to prison? Or just be given a dishonorable discharge?
But he’s safe! That’s the main thing. Safe.
She turns to the soldiers and points at the living room sofa. “Sit.”
The two men perch on the edge of the sofa, taking their hats off and clasping them between their hands. The younger one starts again, “Ma’am, the—”
She waves her hand. “Can I get you glasses of ginger ale?”
The sergeant major looks at the chaplain. The chaplain nods.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the sergeant major says.
She carries the bottles of ginger ale into the kitchen and sets them down on the counter. She leans over the kitchen sink and vomits.
“Mommy! Do you have my flu?”
She looks up. Sissy is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her. Seeing her face now, Sissy lets out a cry.
She reaches for her daughter and pulls her in tight. Tight, tight, tight, so tight it is hard to breathe.
“I’ll tell them to go away,” Sissy says into her chest.
She lets go and lowers herself down until she’s eye to eye with her daughter. “Listen to me, Sissy. Your brother is with God. He is with God.”
Because she knows. She knows.
She ties on an apron, then rips it off. She fills two glasses with ice cubes.
Back in the living room, the soldiers sip once from their ginger ales, then set them down on the coffee table, carefully reaching for coasters to place them on. She sits stiffly on an armchair in the same room where she relaxed with Sissy last night. So careless. So thoughtless. When her son was somewhere dead, dying.
Luke.
Utopia.
“Ma’am, I have an important message to deliver from the secretary of the army,” the young soldier says. “The secretary of the army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son Luke died in Phu Yen Province in Vietnam on February eighth. Ma’am, Private Gannon was a grounds casualty.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand,” she says.
“He was killed by small-arms fire.”
“No.”
“It was at base camp, ma’am.”
Luke. Luke.
“He’s coming home now,” the chaplain says. “He’ll be arriving at the air force base tomorrow. We need…to discuss arrangements.”
“No,” she says, again.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry.”
“No, he’s not coming home. He’s not coming home ever.”
“Ma’am,” the chaplain says.
“Are you Catholic? You’re not even Catholic, are you?”
“No, ma’am. I’m Presbyterian. But the army will provide you with…”
She stands up with such force that the armchair rocks backwards. “The army couldn’t even send a priest?”
Sissy claps her hands to her head. “Mommy!”
“Never mind. Never mind,” she says. “What does it matter? What could it possibly matter?”
The two men have stood. “Ma’am, should we call your husband?”
“I’m Luke’s only parent.”
“I’ll call Ronnie,” Sissy says in a small, trembling voice.
Sissy leaves the room. She sits down again. The men take out their papers.
“Luke will go to Los Angeles,” she says.
The chaplain lays his hand down on hers. “Ma’am—”
She pulls her hand away.
“Yes,” she says. “Los Angeles. With his father. We already have a place there. Thanks to you, we already have a place there.”
Separation / September 11–12, 1974
Barbara
PATTY ANN AND LEE are arguing in the living room. Again. She turns over the top card on the deck between her and Kenny. The pile underneath slides out over Kenny’s bed, and she tucks the stiff new cards back into a tower, tapping the sides to make them uniform. She and Kenny shouldn’t be sitting on the bed—this is where she’s sleeping while she’s visiting. But Patty Ann and Lee have made the living room and kitchen no-go territory. Kenny’s elementary school is closed for three days, since the janitor discovered a crack from last year’s quake. Or maybe from the one in ’71. Sean should have started at the same school, but apparently after the first day the teacher sent him home and told Patty Ann to wait another year.
Maybe that’s why Patty Ann asked her to come. For help while all three boys are home. Two active little boys can be quite a handful when there’s a new baby.
“War, Grandma!”
She snaps her cards down, counting loudly—“One, two, three, jack!”—to distract Kenny from the sound of his parents fighting.
“If you walk out that door, do not bother walking back in,” Patty Ann shouts.
“You’re so uptight, baby. When did you get so uptight? You weren’t like this in high school,” Lee shouts back.
“In high school I didn’t have three brats and a broken oven and a doofus husband saying he was going to dump his latest jack-squat job to drive down to San Diego and then across the desert and then back to Anaheim, Anaheim, in our car-with-the-bumper-tied-on-by-a-shoestring-but-the-only-one-we-have to go to some rock concerts. David Bowie!”
“I’m not ‘going to some rock concerts.’ I’m not going for Bowie. It’s work, man. And if the job’s jack-squat, why you raggin’ about my leaving it?”
“Cause it’s the only fucking one you have. You’re going to get fired again, Lee.”
“I can turn over some good bread like this. Things were crazy at his show here this past week, just like I said they’d be. It’s like a whole new level selling this stuff. This is my new job, babe. I’ll come home with…”
“Shut up. Shut up! I don’t even want to hear about it. That’s fucked up, Lee. That’s fucked up! Are you fucking crazy? My mother will hear.”
My mother will hear? What planet do they think she’s living on? Do they think she doesn’t already know what Lee’s up to? That she doesn’t see his red eyes, his tapping fingers? That she thinks the package wrapped in foil in the back of the fridge marked DON’T TOUCH is a roast chicken? And all the rest of it: the empty bottles under the sink in the kitchen. The filth. Where does Patty Ann get the idea that it is acceptable to live this way, especially with children in the house? There are ways to behave and ways not to behave. It is that simple. Women don’t get to give up. If they did the world would collapse.
Kennedy turns over his last card. “Queen! I win this war, Grandma!”
She hands him her lost cards. “So you did, Kenny.”
The yelling is getting louder.
“You’ll change your tune when I come back in a Cadillac,” Lee shouts.
“A Cadillac? Like my mom’s husband drives? I thought you said they were only for the Man. I thought you said they were only for pimps or fat-ass honkies. So: which one are you?”
Kenny jumps up from the bed. She lassoes him with her arms before he can run out of the room. Grandma. Born when she was not quite forty-one, just a few years after Sissy, he could be her own son. The new baby is sleeping peacefully in a crib in one corner of the bedroom. The little brother, Sean, is playing in another corner with the G.I. Joe she handed him after she’d stepped out of her car, a little dazed from the long drive from Phoenix. Patty Ann appeared behind the screen door, her face a shadowy web, the baby a dark bundle in her arms, and pushed the door open: You’re here. You came. Then, spying the little plastic soldier and snatching it up from the stunned child, her face grew distant, a pale flat moon under the midday Southern California sun: We don’t let him play with stuff like
that.
Don’t let him play with stuff like that? Like what? She gave the G.I. Joe back to the poor kid as soon as Patty Ann left them alone again, and he hasn’t set it down since. He acts as though it’s the only normal toy he’s ever had. Maybe it is. He’s gliding it through the air right now, making loops upon loops, accompanying the motion with soft sounds, almost the only sounds she’s heard him make since arriving. All the boys seem oblivious to the shouting from the kitchen. Ugly scenes clearly are nothing new to them.
Life has taught her that there’s no changing the past—or, really, the future. Free will doesn’t mean free to choose what happens. It means free to be a good sport about it. But she has to protect the boys in what little way she can while she is here. That’s why she’s here, surely—Patty Ann can’t be hoping for her help with Lee. A lot of other fish in the sea, she used to singsong while Patty Ann curled her finger around the telephone cord. Just wait until you get to college. You’ll see!
She should have tied Patty Ann up with that telephone cord.
If only Michael had been still with them. Patty Ann, he’d have said after the very first time Lee came around, that boy undoubtedly has his merits, like all of God’s creatures. But he is not the right one for you. And Patty Ann would have listened. Patty Ann always respected her father more than her mother; Michael was a doctor and a war hero. She herself doesn’t even have a college degree. She could spend her life trying to prove she’s worthy of bearing the name Gannon.
Of course, in real terms, that’s water under the bridge. She’s a McCloskey now.
“…the Man.”
“Oh, fuck you, the Man! If the Man can get me a fucking stove that works, then bless his Man soul!”
“Yeah, that’s just what you are, isn’t it? You’d fuck the Man for a new fucking stove, wouldn’t you?”
“Me? Me!”
She gets up and loudly closes the door to the kids’ bedroom. Children should never hear the things she’s heard since arriving the day before yesterday. It’s worse here than she expected, and she’d expected bad.
Hey, Mom, what’s up? Patty Ann said on the phone three days ago, as though seven months hadn’t passed since they last spoke. How’s the weather in Phoenix? How’s Sissy? Want to come visit for a few days? Want to come tomorrow?
Even before they hung up she was reaching for her suitcase, because if Patty Ann was calling, Patty Ann must really need help. She thought Patty Ann would be forced to see her at Francis’s graduation last spring, but then Francis got the job in a guitar shop and said he wasn’t planning to attend his graduation, so there was no point in her coming. When she tries to call, it’s always Kenny who answers: Mommy can’t talk right now, he says. Which means she hasn’t spoken to Patty Ann since the two-year memorial service for Luke last February.
She sits down on the bed and runs her hands over the sheets.
Two years, seven months, and three days.
Once a woman becomes a mother, the morning never comes when she wakes up, stretches her arms out, and feels light, like a teenager, again. Happy, yes. Weightless, never. The children grow up, they move out, they experience life in a way no amount of Mercurochrome, bandages, and a mother’s kiss can make better. Becoming a mother means committing to a lifetime of worry.
Unless that child is lost. Forever.
And then you wish you could have all that worrying back. God, please, let me have it back! God, please, let me have him back. Why did I waste all that time worrying instead of simply being grateful for this perfect person I put on this earth? Why can’t I just have this perfect person back? Why why why.
She reaches beside the bed for her purse and snaps it open. She rummages for a cigarette before remembering she quit again.
“You okay, Grandma?”
“Am I okay? Ha! You won that battle, but you haven’t got me beat yet!”
They are an American family, and people have to stand by their country. Luke had to go over. It was no one’s fault. Not hers, not Luke’s, not their country’s. Patty Ann is the one who had choices. And made them badly.
She flips over a card.
We’ve moved to a house, Patty Ann said on the phone. At least the last place had other apartment complexes around it, a sidewalk, a row of palm trees. Patty Ann’s new home looks out on a FedMart gas station in a torn pocket of LA, a far cry from the orderly neighborhood where she and Michael brought Patty Ann up. Someone—presumably not Lee—has painted the squat bungalow a dubious blue that has nothing to do with the sky or a robin. The front door is on the side by the carport instead of in front; the interior is a box split in four. The kitchen door opens onto a back patio lined with broken cement. The only semblance of lawn is the scrub out front.
And the state of things inside…In her time, people cleaned their homes before having visitors, especially mothers or mothers-in-law. Wives turned the rugs, men washed the cars, together they hid any sign of desperation. When she first arrived from Phoenix, Patty Ann’s house looked as though the Bomb had hit it. Soiled clothing lay on the beds and floors, dirty dishes on the counters and tables. An ashtray spilled ash and cigarette butts onto the sofa. A stuffed bear, flattened and chewed as though by a dog—although there isn’t any dog—lay on the ragged carpeting. The musky odor of dirty bedding filled the air.
Even with kids popping out of her like Pop-Tarts from the toaster, she kept their house as neat as a pin. The day after Michael died, her heart heavier than an iron, she tucked in the corners of their empty bed, tight enough to pass any inspection. She pushed those sheets in under the mattress, firmly folded back the top sheet by the pillows, smoothed the now-barren land of her private life, then went out to the kitchen and tied on a clean apron.
The first thing she did at Patty Ann’s—after pouring herself a glass of water and sizing up whether Patty Ann might possibly be pregnant again, which, thank God, doesn’t seem to be the case—was to gather up those filthy sheets and take them to a Laundromat. For Christ’s sake, Mom, Patty Ann said, lifting her shirt to feed the baby right in front of her, like some woman in National Geographic magazine. You just got here, and already you’re criticizing my housekeeping?
Yes, Patty Ann. Yes, I am. You live in a pigsty. And look at you—you act like a suckling sow. On the way back from the Laundromat, she stopped at Sears and bought a vacuum cleaner. The abandoned Electrolux in Patty Ann’s carport clearly would never hum its hum over anyone’s floor again, probably stopped working months ago. Maybe it never worked.
Patty Ann is twenty-seven now, with three children. Lee’s family was never much, but she brought Patty Ann up to be better than this.
Kenny turns over a card and rubs a sunburned knee. He fiddles with the edge of his shorts. “Mommy doesn’t like it when we close the door to our bedroom, Grandma. She says it’s sneaky. She says she can’t keep an eye on us.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “You just concentrate on your hand.”
“Oh, Grandma. Everyone knows war’s just a game of luck.”
“You say that because I’m winning.”
“No, you’re not!”
They compare piles.
The front door slams.
“Okay, okay. Your pile is bigger,” she says. “But it’s not over till it’s over. I’ll whip your butt yet.”
“Grandma!”
The front door opens and slams again. Patty’s voice carries in through the windows: “That’s it. That’s it, Lee. I mean it!”
The old Dodge’s engine turns over, stalls, turns over, catches. A roar fills the air, and then quiet.
“I guess Daddy’s gone,” Kenny says. He turns over a card.
“Keep your eyes on your cards. Never mind about your father.”
“Mommy says we shouldn’t play war, anyhow. She says we should play peace instead and make it so whoever turns over the lowest card wins the pile.”
“Right. Well, never mind about your mother right now, either.”
Two, three, four minutes
pass. The freckles on her grandson’s nose spill down its bridge and onto his wide cheekbones. His bright eyes become smaller with concentration.
The screen door slaps shut again. Patty Ann’s footsteps are heavy in the kitchen. She lays down her last card and loses it to Kenny.
“Well,” she says, “that’s that. Time to get started on lunch.”
* * *
Sunset spills Hi-C colors over the cracked backyard patio, warming the bland beige into something richer, almost rosy. She and Patty Ann sit on the two wooden garden chairs, towels thrown over the seats to keep splinters from entering their tushes, and sip burningly sweet lemonade mixed in the old white pitcher that once belonged to Michael’s parents. Patty Ann has slipped some vodka into her own, as though she won’t notice. The baby is down for the night, inside the house. The two boys—bathed and in clean pajamas-–sit cross-legged on the scraggly lawn on a beach towel, eating Popsicles she walked across to the gas station to buy. It’s peaceful now, without any chance of Lee stumbling back in.
Maybe Patty Ann will finally explain the phone call and why she was summoned.
“Don’t drip on yourself,” she says to the boys.
“Oh, let them be, Mom.”
Kenny is licking the multicolored pop slowly, preciously, and the melting is getting the best of him. “There’s a fresh roll of paper towels on the kitchen counter,” she says.
Patty Ann waves her glass, creating an explosion of tinkling ice. “You see, that’s just so typical. First you give a treat. Then you spoil it by nagging.”
She takes a long drink. The air is soft and dry at this hour. Back in Phoenix, Ronnie will have his feet up on the footrest of the leather recliner, the remnants of dinner on a tray, a napkin neatly folded in his lap. Ronnie likes to eat in front of the television, a habit sprung probably from years as a bachelor. Sissy will be in her room, nose in a book or one of her journals.
Kenny looks up at her. A trembling Technicolor drop of liquid courses down a finger. “What did you say, Grandma?”
Patty Ann jingles her glass again. “You just can’t let sleeping dogs lie.”
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