by Sarah Smiley
Contents
Prologue DECEMBER 2002
1 I THINK MELANIE IS TRYING TO SAVE ME
2 THAT’S ILLEGAL OR SOMETHING, ISN’T IT?
3 I SHOULD PROBABLY CALL MY PARENTS
4 A WOMAN WITH JUMPER CABLES
5 I THINK PSYCHOLOGISTS CALL THAT TRANSFERENCE
6 YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOURSELF
7 I GUESS YOU COULD SAY I KNOW MY &%$@ NOW
8 YOUR DOCTOR CALLS YOU BY YOUR FIRST NAME?
9 GOD IS GREAT, GOD IS GOOD; LET US THANK HIM . . .
10 THE GIRL IN A COWGIRL SHIRT AND FLIP-FLOPS
11 TAKE A NUMBER AND SIT DOWN
12 DID I SAY IT WAS A STRAY CAT?
13 SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED
14 YOU’LL DO THE RIGHT THING
15 THANK YOU FOR CALLING ME MRS. SMILEY
16 THIS IS IT, LADIES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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For Big Jack,
who always had a trunk full of old books and a writing file with my name on it
This memoir is based on my real-life experiences as a military wife.
However, some names have been changed and details rearranged because, well, because people made me.
Prologue
DECEMBER 2002
Courtney was the only one I could call at a time like this, mainly because she was the only one likely to be up at midnight, but also because she has a wonderful way of putting my life into perspective.
I grabbed the cordless phone and snuck into the room where I conduct my most important business: the closet.
Courtney answered on the first ring.
“Courtney, I’m so glad you’re awake.” I glanced over my shoulder and closed the door behind me.
“Sarah? What’s wrong? Is anyone hurt?”
And then—exactly then—the tears began to flow, reminding me of the way, when I was a child, I could maintain my composure until the moment I heard my mother’s voice.
“Sarah? Is anyone hurt?” Courtney asked again.
“Just my panty hose,” I said, sucking in clumps of air.
“Did you say ‘panty hose’? Sarah, what’s going on?”
I talked between sniffles and sobs. “I threw . . . my panty hose . . . out the front . . . door . . . and my neighbors saw it all!”
Theoretically, this is the part where a best friend is supposed to laugh or remind you that you really are a beautiful person . . . on the inside. This is when it might have been helpful for someone—someone named Courtney—to tell me I wasn’t crazy, but passionate—clever, even!
But no, Courtney was silent.
I bit my lip and picked at a loose piece of rubber on the bottom of my pink bunny slippers.
Then finally Courtney said, “Was it—control top?”
At first I lied, because, well, no one wants to admit to heavily stitched undergarments. “I really can’t remember,” I said, wiping away tears with the sleeve of my flannel pajamas, and then added, “Oh, all right! Yes, it was control top—and all the neighbors saw!”
Courtney was as calm as ever. That’s because (1) I’ve surprised her too many times before, and (2) Courtney is always polite. But eventually she had to ask: “Sarah, why did you throw your panty hose out the front door?”
“Well, it wasn’t just the panty hose,” I said. “I—ah—I kind of threw the entire basket of laundry.”
This was difficult to say aloud, especially to someone like Courtney, who keeps copies of Miss Manners on her bedside table.
“I see,” Courtney said. She was tapping her nails on a counter.
It occurred to me that Dustin might be standing on the other side of the closet door, so I crawled farther into the dark curtain of shirttails and dresses and settled behind a white terry cloth robe, hugging my knees to my chest.
There was a thin, feathery wad of Kleenex in the pocket of my flannel pajamas. I took it out to blow my nose, and when I did, a piece of white prescription paper came out with it.
“Oh, honey, listen to you!” Courtney cried, but I was already distracted. I unfolded the prescription and looked at the signature: Dr. D. Ashley.
“Wait a minute!” she said. “I know what this is about.”
I jammed the paper back into my pocket, afraid I’d been caught. But Courtney said, “You saw that helicopter crash on TV tonight, didn’t you?”
“What helicopter crash?”
“Oh, you didn’t see it? Never mind then.”
“Courtney—”
“So!” she said in a phony upbeat voice. “What time is the Spouse Club meeting tomorrow night?”
“Courtney, you can’t say ‘helicopter crash’ and then change the subject!”
“I don’t want to worry you, Sarah. I mean, you’re not in the best mental state right now.”
I held the ball of tissue to my nose. “Just tell me, was it anyone we knew?”
“No, they were from a different squadron,” she said. “Look, you can’t focus on these types of things right before the guys leave. You know as well as anyone that accidents happen. It’s part of the job, and you knew that the day you married a Navy pilot, right?” She laughed. “My gosh, Sarah, you of all people should understand that!”
Pshaw! So just because my dad was career Navy, I’m supposed to be prepared for anything the military might dish out? I don’t think so!
I made a mental note to check the
newspaper in the morning for the crash.
“Anyway,” Courtney said, a little too eager now, “the meeting is at Kate’s house, right?”
“Yeah . . . No, wait a minute,” I said, shaking my head. She was trying to get me off track. “Are you just going to pretend I didn’t throw my clothes out the front door tonight?”
Courtney sighed. “Sarah, is your mother-in-law involved in any way?”
“What? Why would you . . . ?”
“There are only three things I know of that could make you throw laundry out the front door: Dustin leaving, your mother-in-law, or a bug in the kitchen you’ll swear is five inches long. Am I right?”
How quickly Courtney had turned my crisis into a joke! I gasped out loud and put a hand to my chest. “Well, I never! What makes you think you know every little thing about me, anyway?”
Courtney laughed and then sighed again. “Have you been reading medical stuff online?”
“No!”
“Have you been talking to that doctor of yours?”
Gulp!
I shot upright, knocking my head into wire hangers, which clanked together and fell in a noisy heap.
“Well!” I said sharply. “It’s been nice chatting with you, Courtney. Got to go now. Good night.”
Dustin was already asleep when I crept out of the closet. That’s because he has the maddening habit of being able to fall asleep anywhere—on a bus, at the movies, during dinner. He once took a nap on a bench at Disney World. I, on the other hand, have the unfortunate ability to do just the opposite: I can stay awake for indefinite amounts of time, staring at the ceiling, and working myself up into quite a state over the strange lump on my earlobe, the reason one fingernail grows lopsided, or something very serious like that.
In the middle of the room, a wicker laundry basket was upside down next to two piles of clothes. Dustin must have brought them in from the front yard while I was on the phone, and he’d probably heard me crying through the closet door.
Yet—and this is so like him—he’d gone to bed anyway.
Hmpf!
But, on second thought, wasn’t it just like me to cry in the closet? And in that case, did Dustin have any choice but to ignore my behavior and go to bed? I might as well post a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the closet door for all the times I’ve held telephone conferences in there.
I hung up the phone on its base and the charger beeped, startling Tanner, my sable-and-white Shetland sheepdog curled up next to the pile of darks. When she heard my feet padding across the room, she jerked her head upright, a mass of fluffy white fur sticking out in all directions from her Lassie-like ears, and sniffed at the air.
“It’s all right, Tanner,” I said. “Go back to sleep. Everything will be better in the morning.”
She huffed noisily and laid her head back on the floor.
I slid under the covers next to—but not touching—Dustin. He stirred in his sleep and I turned my head to look at him. Tucked in a swath of blue floral blankets, he was lying on his side, with his arms crossed over his chest. Such an aloof posture, I thought, especially for sleeping. But was he really asleep, or just pretending in order to avoid another argument?
“I’ll miss you,” I whispered and turned to go to sleep.
1
I THINK MELANIE IS TRYING TO SAVE ME
The next night I left my husband. I kissed the tops of our sons’ heads—their wispy baby hair sticking to my lipstick—squared my shoulders, and walked out the front door, only stopping to collect my keys from the bead-board telephone stand in the kitchen.
Well, OK, so I wasn’t really abandoning them, but it must have felt that way to Dustin when I waved over my shoulder and left him with a hungry newborn and a two-year-old wearing a silver colander on his head like his favorite cartoon character.
I was headed to a Spouse Club meeting, which is the Navy’s answer to keeping military dependents occupied and informed. Navy pilots like my husband are organized into “squadrons,” and their significant others are lumped into “Spouse Clubs.” Membership isn’t required, although thirty years ago, when my mom became a Navy wife, service members were “graded” on their spouses’ participation. Back then, it was also called the “Wives’ Club,” but that’s considered politically incorrect today, in case female members of the squadron have husbands who’d like to be occupied and informed.
Besides the name, however, not much else has changed since—well, since never. The Spouse Club is and always has been a cross between a sorority and Habitat for Humanity. On the one hand, there is the group’s notable contributions to the community—raising money for underprivileged families, doing volunteer work, providing meals for single sailors at Thanksgiving—but one cannot ignore the Club’s other side, which is kind of like a Parent-Teacher Association gone horribly wrong.
It doesn’t help that our husbands, in their professional lives, are segregated by rank, a notion that is supposed to be overlooked in the Spouse Club but never ceases to be an irritant. Every so often an argument breaks out about “seniority,” which none of us spouses are supposed to have anyhow.
In fact, there’s an urban legend in military-spouse culture about an Admiral telling a group of wives to arrange themselves according to rank. The women shuffle around murmuring things like “I think my husband is senior to yours” and “My husband is a Commander. Isn’t yours just an Ensign?” but once they are lined up from the “most important” to the “least important,” the Admiral says angrily, “Wrong! None of you have rank! Only your spouses are in the military.”
Alas, this story, admonishing as it may be, hasn’t stopped the constant bickering among some wives about whose husband bosses around whose. It’ll take someone higher than an Admiral to change the natural instincts of women.
Basically, imagine drinking wine and playing truth or dare—while planning a bake sale—with your husband’s boss’s wife, but having to pretend she is “just another friend,” and that her husband doesn’t have any influence over yours. That’s what the Spouse Club is like.
Of course, the Spouse Club’s primary function is to be a support system for family members left behind when the troops are deployed. In this way, friendships formed within the Club are truly indispensable and border on the familial.
But the Spouse Club is also an excellent source of information for questions ranging from “Can I call my husband while he’s on the ship?”(No) to “Why do the other guys call my husband ‘Dancing Bear’?” (You don’t want to know).
Love it or hate it, the Spouse Club is one of Uncle Sam’s necessary evils. When your husband is leaving for six months and he’s just penned his social security number on the elastic of his last pair of clean white briefs, there’s nothing like a bickering Spouse Club to cheer you up and make you feel ordinary.
It makes sense, then, that on this night, three months before the men were to leave for a six-month deployment, attendance at the meeting was expected to be phenomenal. Wives would flock together with lists of questions about the upcoming assignment. They would gather for support and encouragement and, of course, to see who had gained (or lost) the most weight during the holidays.
Oh, all right, we were also flocking to see if Rhonda showed up or if she truly did ask her husband for a divorce the day after Christmas.
The point is, with the clock counting down the days until our husbands’ departure, it was important for us to be together to commiserate and swap stories. In the interest of bonding, of course.
Melanie would be the only exception.
Opposed to any form of gossip, Melanie was truly going to “help out” and “get information.” And she was my ride to Kate’s house that night, because she had the directions. Melanie always had the directions.
I waited for her on our short concrete driveway, trying to make O’s with my breath and wishing I had taken down the Christmas decorations because now they just looked drab. The red front door, once so cheery and festive with a green holiday wreath, lo
oked dirty and dusty. The wreath, in fact, had turned brown and most of its needles were on the stoop below, where they’d probably stay until they disintegrated and became dust, which I’d never sweep up.
Our house wasn’t large by any means. I think our builder affectionately called it a “starter home,” but it suited us just fine. Our children, Ford and Owen, shared a room, we had a bed next to the computer for guests, and if we parked carefully enough and climbed through the rear hatches of our automobiles, we could fit both our pickup truck and Explorer in the garage.
What sold me on the place, however, was the large picture window in front. Staring at it now from the driveway, I admired, once again, the perfect way the rectangular panes framed our one bold red wall (my idea) and my grandmother Doris’s baby grand piano (my mom’s idea). Warm light coming from a metal lamp on the piano’s ledge reminded me of something out of a Dickens novel.
Who would think such a horrible fight had happened in there the night before? Who would picture “Dustin and Sarah: the world’s cutest couple who had known each other since birth” standing inside that very doorway shouting? Who would imagine me throwing laundry out onto the grass and then dusting my hands in good riddance? Who would know that I spun around on my heel and ran into Dustin’s chest like an animal flailing against the steel bars of its cage? And who could guess that Dustin grabbed me by the forearms and said flatly, “I can’t wait to get out of here”?
I groaned, blowing more frosty air out of my mouth. “The neighbors, that’s who.” Many of them were standing in the cul-de-sac when our front door flew open and bits of laundry wafted to the ground like clumsy parachutes.
“Oh, well,” I sighed, taking in the sight of the living room once more, my chest filling with pride; Mom was going to be so proud of that red wall next time she visited!
Melanie’s Suburban rounded the corner and pulled into the driveway. I waved at her and went to gather my purse from the front steps. I was nearly running down the sidewalk, excited about a night out—even if it was for a Spouse Club meeting. (One’s standards are so low after two children.)