Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
What else? Live in the present, except that’s easier said than done.
Olivia fell asleep with the pencil in her hand and the light on. Twenty minutes later she woke long enough to turn off the light. In the nest above her window the tiny mockingbirds were shoving one another around, growing and getting ready for the morning’s flights.
S
IX O’CLOCK ON
a Sunday morning. Bells from a chapel a few blocks away were chiming a sweet song. The mockingbirds were in full morning song outside Olivia’s bedroom window. The rain and storms of the past week had left the city as clean as a desert isle. Olivia woke and decided not to think so much for a change. She got out of bed, dressed, made a cup of tea, and drank a few sips of it, then walked out of the house and got into her car and went to work. The church bells were still ringing. Is it Mother’s Day? Olivia wondered. Don’t turn on the radio, she told herself. Wait till you get to the office.
Just drive the car through the clean streets of the good, safe city where I live. Just go to work. Work is my church, work is my savior, work that is valuable and that adds to the store of knowledge and sometimes goodness, work that informs and teaches and tries to tell the truth. What did Judge Arnold name his book?
Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race
? It’s a line from a poem by Tennyson about Ulysses in his old age, after he gets home to Ithaca. “I mete and dole / Unequal laws unto a savage race.” Well, I mete and dole good and bad news unto a careless race, but I do it and I have to keep on doing it even if the Pentagon writes me back and says I can go to work for them. Jim said he didn’t even bother to file my letter; he knew I’d change my mind. What a big, fat, smart doll he is. He doesn’t have to work. He doesn’t have to publish this newspaper. He’s got enough dough to live in paradise the rest of his life, and still he gets up every day and works to make the world a better place.
Drive the car, Olivia. Don’t think so much. It’s Sunday. There’s work to do.
O
N
A
PRIL
1, 2005, Lieutenant Brian Kane, Second Marine Expeditionary Force, Purple Heart recipient with four pieces of titanium and two of plastic in his chin to prove it and two large pieces of his ass now turning into facial skin that would never have to be shaved but wasn’t looking bad (although he was considering letting them work on the scars sometime in what he called the distant future), walked out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and got into the automobile of his late first cousin’s fiancée and was driven to her apartment, where he took off his uniform and his medals and got laid for the first time in what seemed like years but had only been a number of months.
For Winifred Hand Abadie, the wait had been even longer, and she was worried that her triweekly vibrator routine had ruined her forever for the real thing. She didn’t mention that fear, however, as she turned down the bed with the new 450-count percale sheets rinsed in lavender and took off all her clothes
without moving her feet except to kick off her panties. “It’s hard to make me come,” she said. “So don’t worry about it. Just pretend we’re in a garage at twilight while our friends play kick the can, so we have to be in a hurry and get in whatever we can.”
“That’s your fantasy?”
“It is today. I should have opened wine, I guess, or at least made you some tea.”
Brian looked down at her body, and his heart rose with his dick. He walked over to Winifred and kissed her very, very gently and lay her down upon her nine-hundred-dollar mattress and her three-hundred-dollar sheets and began to make love to her. He didn’t have to try or think or worry; all he had to do was fuck this woman, and he did it.
“This definitely feels better than anything in the whole world,” she told him later, when they woke from a nap and lay holding hands. “No one can know what it’s like or even remember it, except when it’s happening.”
“It might not always be this good.”
“And then again it might.”
“I’m going to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in two weeks. I’m going to be assigned to a joint marine–air force group that monitors the satellites that run the Predators and the Global Hawks and all the smaller drones. I want you with me. I want you to marry me as fast as we can, and I want you to go with me to Nevada. Wait a minute.” He got out of the bed and went to his clothes and searched in a pocket and found the ring his sister-in-law, Louise, had picked out for him at a jewelry store.
He had thrown the box away and put the ring into an envelope and put it in his breast pocket. He pulled it out of the envelope and walked over to the bed and knelt by the bed and held it out to her. “If you don’t like it, I’ll get you a bigger one.”
She sat up in the bed and stuck out her ring finger. “You’re supposed to put it on my finger.”
“So will you, well, marry me?”
“I will, and the ring’s wonderful.”
“Louise and Carl went and got it.”
“I figured that. Hey, lie back down and get over here close to me and tell me stuff like you are always going to be faithful to me and we’ll be able to live on your salary until I get a job and so forth. Come here.”
“I’ve got some money besides my salary. Pretty much, I think.”
“Are you hungry?”
“So much I can’t say it.”
“I think I’ll fix you something to eat. You better try out my cooking.”
“I’m sort of sick of eating in bed.”
“Then get up and put on that bathrobe in your suitcase and meet me at the dining room table in fifteen minutes.”
Winifred went into the kitchen and warmed up a meat loaf she had made the day before and whipped up mashed potatoes with chives. She pulled a wild rice salad out of the refrigerator and added fresh red and yellow bell peppers to it and stuck a loaf of buttered French bread into the oven and then set the
table. Seeing she still had two minutes before the fifteen were up, she called her mother and told her she was engaged and hung up without giving her the details. Then she called her cousin Louise and told her she loved the ring. “And call Olivia and tell her Brian is going to Nellis Air Force Base, where Bobby is, and I’m going too. Good-bye. I have to go.”
S
HE HAD FINISHED
putting the food and plates on the table when Brian came into the room, holding a book he had found and was reading. “Is this your aunt’s book?” he asked.
“One of many. Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful writing. It sounds like you.”
“We’re all pretty influenced one way or the other. She killed herself because she didn’t want to be treated for cancer.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Don’t think about it. Come sit at this table and show me your table manners and don’t turn your nose up because it’s meat loaf. It’s made from prime roast and it has pork in it. It’s delicious, if I may say so, and it’s one of my specialties.”
He picked up a fork and cut a piece of the meat loaf and began to eat the first bites of food the woman he was going to marry had ever given him.
“This is worth the skin off my butt,” he said. “There were days when I didn’t think anything would be worth that. That hurt worse than the goddamn chin.”
She held out the ring, looking at it in the light from the candles. She thought for one small moment about the man this man
had replaced in her heart, and then she moved the thought to her unconscious mind and lived in the pure joy of the present.
“How will we get married?” she asked. “What do you suggest?”
“I already called and found out what to do. We can do it at the base, or we can get the chaplain who married Carl and Louise. I already called him. He said we should get a license and come on over.”
“We have to tell my parents and your parents.”
“No, we don’t. We’ve seen more of our parents in the past year than most married people see of theirs in a decade. I mean, if it’s up to me, I just want to get a license and do it, well, tomorrow.”
“How about Sunday in the Episcopal church, if I can get it going? With our folks and Louise and Carl and maybe a few other people? You ought to invite Dr. Walken, given all you’ve been through with him. He loves you.”
“That’s why I wanted it in the hospital. There’re a lot of people there I’d like to ask. Well, there we go. Now it’s going to be some big deal.”
“We must
think on this
,” Winifred declared in her best Shakespearean voice. “
It must be thought upon
. How’s your meat loaf?”
“The best I’ve ever tasted. Come here to me.” She went around the table and sat on his lap while he finished eating, and then they went back to bed and made love again and slept and then got up and went around being high on endorphins until Brian remembered he needed to take Advil and a low-dose cortisone pill, and that spoiled the evening for a while.
A
T NINE
M
ONDAY
morning they were down at the Human Resources and Services Department of the Pentagon, being speed-processed into a marriage license and a waived waiting period, and at five that afternoon they stood up before a marine chaplain in a small chapel at the Pentagon and were married. Their only attendants were the secretaries in a nearby office and two officers who were in charge of “event resources.”
Winifred was wearing a red silk sheath with a darker red bouclé jacket and three-inch red silk high-heeled sandals, and Brian was wearing his dress uniform. One of the secretaries took photographs with a digital camera and e-mailed them to a list Winifred left with her. There was a message with the photographs: “The couple is expecting guests from two to six on Sunday afternoon at their apartment on D Street. Bring gifts, don’t get mad, and be happy for us.”
A
FTER THE CEREMONY
they walked around the city for a while and then went out to dinner and then went home and went to bed. “I think I’ve been married to you for years,” Winifred said. “For twenty years my mother was the best wife and mother on the planet earth. Then she had a relapse, but in the end she went back to my daddy. I’ll try to break her record.”
“If you have a relapse, I’ll shoot the bastard,” Brian said. “So don’t plan on having one.”
O
N
A
PRIL
13, 2005, Brian flew to Nellis Air Force Base to begin his training. Three days later, Winifred drove to Nevada in a brand-new Ford Explorer packed to the gills with clothes and bedding and household supplies. Someone had rented them an apartment near the base; it was time to start a life.
“What will you do?” Louise asked Winifred. “Are you going to work?”
“Not for a while. I’ll play tennis and do Pilates and cook dinner for my husband. I don’t know how long he’ll be there. They might send him back over.”
“They haven’t sent Carl yet. It’s all changing, Winifred. The midterm elections are coming up. The Republicans aren’t going to risk letting Americans get killed, right now anyway.”
“I hope to God the decisions aren’t based on that.”
“Of course they are. That’s how the world is done, sweet Cousin. Ask Olivia if you don’t believe me. Is she going out there too?”
“She said she’d come for a few days as soon as I got settled. She’s running a newspaper. She can’t just leave any time she wants to. She can hardly get away at all. She told me she flies out sometimes at ten at night and goes back the next day.”
Winifred hung up the phone and went to work unpacking boxes in the small, clean two-bedroom condominium that was their new home. She had packed the minimum necessities for running a house, and she liked what she had chosen. There
weren’t many things, but they were her favorites: her favorite dish towels; her favorite unbreakable white china; four sets of Gorham Chantilly silver, which had belonged to her grandmother; a new eight-pack of water glasses from the spring Martha Stewart collection at a Kmart she had passed on the road when she was driving; four sets of percale sheets with extra pillow-cases, which she had bought when she was in Italy.
“We’re camping out,” she told people. “I’m leaving things behind like the pioneers did.” She made up the bed in the guest room and found a place to hide the lightweight Oreck vacuum her mother had stuffed in her car. “I could buy one there,” she had argued.
“But Julia Leigh has a dealership. Why should you pay full price?” Her mother had hoisted the box into the backseat and laid it down on a stack of coats.
Winifred finished the bedrooms, threw the boxes onto the back porch, made notes for colors she wanted to paint the bathrooms, and then wandered into the living room to set up the desk and computer station she was making out of folding tables purchased from Wal-Mart.
Her land phone started ringing. Before she could reach it, her cell phone began to play Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D major. She answered both of them. The land phone was Olivia’s secretary, Callie. The other was Olivia.
“I have a job for you,” Olivia said. “I interviewed a physician here who just got back from Iraq. He’s a pioneer of the new
regional pain management they’re using for battlefield wounds. He’s setting up a training program at Nellis. It’s open to anyone affiliated with the troops, wives and so forth. It’s work they’ve been developing at Walter Reed. It’s a spinal block that can be used quickly for even the worst wounds. They’re training teams of field medics in the techniques. I told him about you, and that you were getting ready to apply to medical schools. This would look great on a résumé, Winifred. Besides, I can’t think of anyone who would be better at it.”
“But I don’t have an MD. All I have is a degree in science.”
“They’re training teams, Winifred. There are all sorts of jobs. You can’t go to medical school for at least a year, and you need something to do. You’d have the chance to work with cutting-edge technology. I talked to the guy about you. He thought you sounded like what they need.”
“I guess I could do it. I was making up beds.”
“What?”
“I was making up beds.”
“Well, now you’re going down to the base medical center and putting in an application for this training. Callie’s going to fax you the information. You might have a chance to go over there if you really got in on this. Could you do that?”