He doesn’t recognize Karen at first and he is shocked at her appearance. He has only seen her in the dungaree uniform, her thin body continually clad in denim and hidden underneath her blue working jacket. Her long hair has also always been put up into a sort of bun to keep it above her collar in accordance with Navy regulations.
Today she is wearing blue jeans that are slightly fashionable and an argyle sweater, fitting her figure much better than her uniform. Her hair is also down, and she is wearing just a hint of makeup.
Chris sees her as an entirely different person, and despite the difference in years, he finds her attractive. He is as attracted to her as he has been to anyone else in his life.
Still, he sees that same trace of sadness written in her eyes, as if nothing in this world can make her truly happy.
She says hello without taking her eyes off the road. It is Chris’s first time in the front seat of a car for quite some time, and the view is quite different from that of the back seat of a taxicab. The road is spread out before him. They head south on the A92.
“I thought we’d see Arbroath Abbey first,” she says. “It’s close and cheap and there is a bit of history there, fairly important in relation to Scotland.”
They drive in silence. Chris studies the nearby hills and sporadic trees aching to return to the color of green. The same hint and smell of spring that he encountered in the Michigan air is present here. He can feel the world trying to awaken upon the conclusion of the dark winter. Far away, just before the horizon to the west, the higher hills still have a smattering of white on top.
Arbroath is perhaps a twenty-minute drive along a mostly empty highway save the occasional farmhouse or cottage along the road. Chris again looks longingly at the North Sea. Despite the warmth in the air, the sea itself looks very cold.
They arrive in Arbroath, a town not much different in size from Brechin. Karen navigates the narrow streets through the city center confidently and they arrive at the abbey.
It is an enormous and majestic ruin. Chris learns that it was founded in 1178 by King William the Lion. He can’t comprehend an age so far back; his knowledge and imagination cannot perceive the breadth of the elapsed years.
They walk through the grounds, past the walls that are mostly intact, though the roof has long since decayed. Karen speaks indirectly, as if to a classroom, though Chris is her lone listener.
“This abbey,” she says, walking along a wall, her index finger casually grazing it, “is a significant part of Scottish history. The Scots then—almost as they are now—were subject to English rule. Early in the fourteenth century, Robert the Bruce secured Scotland’s independence with a series of victories over the English, but the English king, Edward II, still claimed Scotland as part of his kingdom. The pope then had jurisdiction over all such matters in the Christian world and summoned Bruce to Avignon. Bruce ignored the pope and around 1320, a group of nobles signed a letter and sent it to the pope, stating that they would never again be subject to the dominion of the English. That, of course, changed.”
Chris understands very little of what she says, though he does learn more of the distinction between the English and the Scottish, realizing that they are indeed two separate nations, not like different states in America.
They drive south again.
Chris asks Karen questions about the country, about the things she’s seen. He notices that her mood is as light as it has ever been since he’s known her. She almost seems happy driving through the countryside, briefly illustrating the history of the Arbroath Abbey.
“Do you like it?” he asks while lighting a cigarette and cracking the window and enjoying the novelty of being a passenger in what would be the driver’s side of an American car. “Do you like it here in Scotland?”
“Yes,” she replies, “as well as anyplace I’ve been stationed.”
He knows she has been in the service for almost six years and has never thought to ask her where she’s been. Now he does.
“The first place I went to was Guam. The weather was good, but you can only travel so far on an island, and only see the sights so many times. I’m not big on beaches, anyway, you know, laying around and trying to get tan, never my thing. The next place I went to was Adak, Alaska. Miserable, and thank god it was only a year and a half. It’s this little tiny island at the end of the Aleutian Islands that is treeless and windswept and as bleak as the moon. I read a lot there, took some college correspondence courses, but quit. That part of my life is over. I know I won’t teach again…” And on this last statement, her voice trails off and the trace of happiness she just recently displayed starts to fade.
“After Alaska,” she continues, “it was time to re-enlist or separate. My four years were up. The Navy offered me my choice of duty stations, so I looked on a map and my eye caught the British Isles. I asked if there were any bases in this country and I was given quite a list, more extensive than I imagined. All the way from the northern tip of Scotland to the shores of the English Channel. Even though I wasn’t happy in Adak—it was the longest eighteen months of my life—the possibility of going back to Maryland was even more disturbing. So I re-enlisted, with the condition of being stationed somewhere in the United Kingdom. So here I am.” The faint smile again returns.
They approach the city of Dundee, coming in along East Dock Street, past the cargo ships alongside mighty docks, the tenement towers rising in the distance. Chris is excited at the sight of a city. But they don’t stop; they circumnavigate the city center and continue southward. Chris is burning with curiosity. What was so terrible in Maryland? He is still too unfamiliar with her to ask, sensing that if she wants him to know the privileged details of her life, she will tell him.
The afternoon starts to recede as Chris glances at Dundee in the rearview mirror.
“Where are we going?” he asks, starting to feel very far away from the base, though they are still less than fifty miles away.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just driving. It’s kind of nice not driving alone for a change.” She too lights a cigarette and the drive continues. They approach the town of St. Andrews and park in front of large and ancient and luxurious building with a vast beach leading to the North Sea behind it. Chris can make out a golf course surrounding the building, a dull green and bleak and treeless golf course. Even the low grass seems to perpetually bend in the wind.
They get out of the car and stand shivering in the wind, the day much cooler now than it was when they started. “Do you golf?” Karen asks Chris.
“No, I never have.” Golf is a sport Chris has given little thought. He has always thought it to be the province of the rich. No one in his family has ever played golf.
“Well,” Karen relates with a little tinge of disappointment, “this is where it started.” And she sweeps the golf course with her hand.
“Really?” Chris says with an equal tinge of interest. This is a bit of history he can understand, standing in the birthplace of a sport.
“But if you don’t golf, then there is very little to appreciate.” She climbs back in the car and they drive up a hill leading into the center of St. Andrews, a picturesque university town, the main street laid in stone, the older and ornate gray buildings well maintained and warm looking.
They find a Chinese restaurant. Karen tells Chris that most of the fast food to be found in this country is either from Chinese restaurants or kebob houses run by families from the Middle East. Chris is surprised to learn of the foreign presences in Scotland. He assumed only America was a country of immigrants. He thought the rest of the world consisted of its own ethnic enclaves: Italy only home to Italians, Russia home to only Russians, Japan strictly Japanese.
He tells Karen of his surprise upon finding a Chinese restaurant, especially with employees that appear to be solely Chinese.
“The Chinese are across the world—Europe, North and South America. The world is smaller than you think.”
Chris orders a Szechuan meal, ch
icken and rice, and Karen eats something similar. It is spicy, spicier than the carryout storefront Chinese restaurants of his childhood in suburban Detroit. He drinks glass after glass of water and orders soda, the Coca-Cola cans much smaller than those in the States. The can fits neatly in the palm of his hand. The daylight still persists as they leave the restaurant, an almost fancy establishment with cloth napkins, the tables pre-set with gleaming silverware and crystal glasses.
Chris still needs to see a castle. The solution is easy; Lutherkirk supports such a structure. They head north back to the base and Chris feels fulfilled somehow, the day being wrought with experience and a sort of friendship that he didn’t expect and Karen taking on a less gloomy countenance than he expected.
Still, her past, her personality, remains a mystery. The conversation they have as the Austin Mini points north centers on their common workplace, the idiosyncrasies of the chief and the ensign, their poor leadership, the disorder of the message center, the permissible laziness of the other watch members, who constantly leave piles of messages for Chris and Karen to sort and deliver, even after the most quiet mid-watch. Their complaints are common, no different from any other insubordinate in a situation that can’t help but be bureaucratic.
As the signs loom on the A92 indicating that the village of Lutherkirk is near, Chris asks Karen a simple question. “Why did you join the Navy?”
She is silent for more than a moment. Lighting a cigarette, she answers, “I was married, once upon a time, and then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t. I hated my job, I had no special place in my heart for the state of Maryland, nor was I especially close to my family or my former husband’s family. I saw an ad in the back of a magazine. It was a glossy sort of ad, you know, an aircraft carrier steaming off into the sunset, a Mediterranean port with whitewashed quaint buildings in the background. I thought ‘Why not?’ I love to travel, I love a challenge, so why not? Of course, they wanted to make me an officer, suggesting that the enlisted life is somewhat sub-par to that of an officer, but I would have had to wait for an opening at Officer Candidate School. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to go right then or not go at all. So I signed the same stack of papers that you did, took the oath, and away I went. It was less than a week between my first visit to the recruiter’s office and my trip to Orlando.”
They turn off the main highway and travel on a secondary road that forks, one fork leading to the base and the other going to the village of Lutherkirk. The road is unmarked and shrouded in trees. Karen turns her headlights on as the dusk becomes even more imminent on this road that is always in the shadow of trees.
Despite being only a few miles away, it is Chris’s first visit to the village that the base is named after and is inexorably linked with.
Karen continues her thumbnail sketch of her entrance to the Navy, which leaves Chris craving more information.
“At first,” she says while exhaling a cloud of blue cigarette smoke that splashes against the windshield of the Mini, “I regretted my decision. Boot camp was not fun, as you know. The barracks stank with the scent of women. Having been married, I know that an unhygienic woman smells more than a sweaty man. Hopefully you will never have to endure that smell, but take my word for it, it’s bad.” She draws on her cigarette and Chris studies her lips adorned with lipstick that he has never noticed before, her eyes squinting shut as the smoke enters her lungs. “I had never been thrust into the midst of so many different types of people. I expected something like college, more like a dorm, you know? But college put me with girls like me, girls who grew up the same way I did. But boot camp, they came from all over, and I realized more fully than any cross-country trip had ever taught me how vast and different our country is from state to state and region to region. After the shock wore off, I stopped looking down my nose at everyone and decided to fit in as quietly as I could. I made a few friends, girls I smoked with outside when the smoking lamp was lit, but I chose to remain somewhat anonymous. It was hard. I was older than everyone else in my company, and the company commander kind of singled me out. She probably wasn’t much older than me, a first-class boatswain’s mate, and she looked it. She was tough. She was from New England somewhere, I think, because of her accent, probably Boston. She hated me. She knew I went to college and I think she resented me, figuring I was a loser for joining the Navy relatively late in my life, as if I couldn’t handle it in the outside world. Which is somewhat true.”
“What happened, if I can ask, to your husband?”
She doesn’t answer. The car pulls in front of Lutherkirk Castle, a well-kept ruin, the courtyard adorned with manicured hedges, the face of the castle lit with floodlights as the twilight approaches.
“I don’t know much about this castle. It’s always been a little too close to home to be interesting to me, maybe not glamorous because no real drive is required and no decisive moment in this country’s history took place here, at least not that I’ve read about.”
She doesn’t get out of the car. They sit facing the castle as the Austin idles loudly. “The best time to come here is in the summer,” she continues, “not now, when all the flowers are dead and the grass isn’t really green. The garden here is fantastic, very colorful for a country that always seems so dreary.” Chris nods, feeling awkward that his question remains unanswered. He won’t ask anything about her past again. He notices that she no longer looks at him while speaking during her brief monologue about Lutherkirk Castle. She stares blankly out the window and he realizes how good it made him feel to have her looking at him while she talked, even while driving, casually glancing at him with a smile on her face, looking him in the eye.
He misses that, even though it’s only been gone for moments.
No woman, not even his mother, has ever looked him in the eye in a friendly way, as if there were interest in his attentiveness. He has never seen feminine eyes twinkle in response to his gaze, to his questions.
He feels something in his stomach that he has never known upon recalling that sensation. A fluttering in the base of his stomach that is more intoxicating than any beer he has ever drunk. Butterflies. His lack of experience doesn’t know what to call this feeling.
He does know that he is maybe in love. Maybe. Infatuated, definitely. And this emotion surprises him. Karen has always been a figure of authority, not unlike a teacher, and though she is not nearly old enough to be his parent, she is maybe twelve years older than he is. The space in years seems vast, as if a lifetime separates them.
Still, he realizes he has developed a sort of crush, but different from the ones he had in school. In school, the girls were unapproachable and probably didn’t even know his name. He stared at them across cafeteria and library tables and from lonely desks in classroom corners. Never has a girl talked to him so candidly and intimately.
Maybe this is the start of finding peace, Chris thinks as Karen reverses the car and heads towards the base.
She drives Chris all the way to the barracks as the Ministry of Defence Police at the gate wave her onto the base.
“We’ll have to do this again,” she says while extending her hand.
Chris takes her hand to shake it. “Yes,” he says. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” And he leaves his hand in hers until she takes it away.
Chris is miserable in the first hours of his separation from Karen. The day has been exhilarating and he feels somewhat clean for having done something leisurely without resorting to drinking, and he actually learned something in the process. His vision of the world has increased by a little more.
He returns to the barracks just after the galley has closed for the evening. He finds Hinckley moping about in the room, wondering where Chris has been. He knows Chris’s schedule and expected him to be back when he got off work so they could eat supper together.
“Where ya been?” Brad asks Chris, who enters the room with a silly grin on his face. His tone is confrontational.
Chris senses Brad may be jealous if he realizes Chris has befrien
ded anyone else.
He lies.
“I was at the site, studying some of my job qualification requirements. I want to be ready, you know, to get promoted.” Hinckley is satisfied with this explanation. “Ya eat yet?”
“No, have you?”
“Yep, but if you want to go to the club, I’ll go with ya.”
Chris isn’t really hungry. He ate a late lunch in St. Andrews and he is too gleeful to eat, but he agrees anyway and they wander off into the early evening darkness.
At the club, Chris absentmindedly eats a burger and fries and Hinckley slurps a milkshake loudly, sucking the straw obnoxiously as the cup quickly empties.
Brad prattles on about his usual subjects: football, the poor quality of life on the base and in Scotland, and his hatred of the Navy.
“Any damn fool can make it in the service,” he says. “Black, white, yellow or brown, you can make it. Shit, even me.”
Chris ignores him. His thoughts are on the past day and Karen. The next day watch is still two full days away. He glances at the clock above the bar and calculates the hours.
He asks Hinckley a question, an abrupt one, and it takes him by surprise.
“You ever have a girlfriend?”
Hinckley doesn’t answer. He swirls his straw in the empty milkshake cup.
“Well, yeah, sure, of course.” And Chris knows he’s lying. There is a certain air and lack of confidence that tells Chris that like himself, his roommate has never had a girlfriend.
“Really, who?”
“Well, hell, lots of them.” He forgoes the empty cup for one of Chris’s cigarettes. He lights it somewhat nervously between two of his chubby fingers. He stares at the table.
“A couple, ya know, in school. Nothing serious, just had some fun.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
The Trinity Page 18