Authors: David LaBounty
Chris is sweating.
She smiles upon seeing him and then turns her glance toward the supervisor she is relieving. He tells her little and she sits in the desk assigned to the supervisor and sifts through a pile of messages, sorting them here and there. She doesn’t look at Chris.
He stares at her and is ready to cry. He was hoping for her to say something, so he wouldn’t be the first to speak, as he is not sure he can summon his voice.
But an hour passes and the printers start to print and the day staff starts to arrive. There is work to do, and still she doesn’t talk to him except for words relating to their work. There is no mention of their day together or any future plans.
He is sad, but as the day progresses, he gets angry with himself for getting so worked up over someone who could never possibly be interested in him. Almost as rapidly as the flame of attraction was lit, it starts to fade until there is nothing left but smoke. Chris is exhausted from the emotional journey.
Their shift turns out to be quite busy, and they barely have time to eat.
The activity of the day winds down and the day staff starts to leave around 4 p.m. Chris and Karen have the workspace to themselves and the same sort of familiarity creeps in, as they are the only two who belong here and they belong alone after spending so many hours sitting at opposing desks from one another.
While making entries in the logbook, Karen speaks. “Well, did you have fun the other day?”
His irritation disappears. “Yes,” he says. “I did, thank you.”
She looks up from the logbook and smiles directly at him. He is struck at how different she looks without makeup. He notices the lines around the corners of her eyes and mouth. Suddenly, she seems much older than she did the other day.
“Good,” she says. “Maybe we’ll do it again.”
He nods and asks suddenly, “How old are you?”
She gives a nervous laugh. “Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Well, I’m thirty-three, and you? Eighteen? Nineteen?”
“Nineteen. Just turned nineteen.”
“Well, happy birthday,” she says. “You’re younger than me, but I’m still not old enough to be your mother...” Karen says as her voice suddenly fades away.
“Thank you.” He starts to feel a little uncomfortable with the attention, and a little guilty, as if something he said made her voice change so suddenly. It subconsciously reaffirms his opinion that women do not find him the least bit appealing.
She returns to her papers. “So, what did you get?”
“Get?”
“Yeah, for your birthday. What did you get?”
“Oh,” he says, realizing that most birthdays are celebrated in some fashion, but his have passed unceremoniously for a number of years. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Not even from your parents?”
“Nope.”
“Well, surely they sent you a card?” She looks up from her stack of papers.
He shakes his head. The loathsome feeling he has for his family returns. Petty Officer Freeman can tell by his eyes that there is pain in response to her questions.
“Maybe next break we can do something for your birthday.”
“Really? Like what?”
“You know, maybe we’ll go to the McDonalds in Dundee or something. Nothing big.”
“Okay,” he says. The spark of passion has returned but not as fiercely as before.
The short break in between the day watches and mid-watches arrives, and Karen makes good on her promise. On a Monday afternoon, she picks up Chris outside the base and drives him to Dundee and takes him to McDonalds. He would rather try something different, something more un-American, but he knows not to question the kindness of others.
The thrill of going somewhere, anywhere, is still exhilarating, especially with Karen.
He tells his roommate the truth as Brad watches him get dressed. His supervisor is taking him out to eat. Chris feels bad and Brad gives him the third degree, questioning who his supervisor is and where they are going and at what time will Chris come back. Chris answers the questions as honestly as he can.
The restaurant looks the same on the inside as any back home, except it may be a little smaller. Instead of being a stand-alone building like all the fast-food places he has known, it occupies a storefront in the center of Dundee, tucked in between a pub and a bookseller’s with a simple sign across the face of the building above the door, instead of the monstrous roadside signs that signify their presence in America.
The food is quite the same.
They drive in silence and barely speak until her car is parked in a multi-level garage. They walk the few blocks to the restaurant.
“How much do you want to bet that someone from the base will be here?” Karen asks.
Chris shrugs his shoulders.
“There’s always someone from the base here. It’s like some kind of gastronomical pull, you know? I have a weakness for this stuff. That is one thing I miss about home, the food.”
Chris nods. “I could use a good pizza.”
“Well, you can’t find that here, not even at the Pizza Hut in Aberdeen.”
“I know.”
They enter the restaurant and stand in a long line in front of the counter. True enough, there are several people from the base, and though Chris or Karen don’t know any of them by name, their appearance indicates their nationality. They study Chris and Karen in return, they too being obviously American and from the base.
After a quarter of an hour, they sit down and eat the unremarkable food. Chris is almost shocked at how heartily Karen eats. She notices him watching her. “I’m sorry,” she says while chewing still in between bites. “I love this stuff. I can’t help it.”
He nods. “It’s okay.” She has become more human, not the same occupant of the pedestal of superiority that she once was. Unceremoniously, and rather quickly, they leave. The twilight approaches and the setting sun and low buildings cast shadows upon the pedestrian-only street.
Chris assumes they are going back towards the base, but Karen just stands there and bites her lip. She asks, “How about a drink?”
“Sure,” Chris says. “I didn’t think you did that.”
“I won’t, but you can. I’ll grab a soda or something.”
“You don’t have to do that. We can go back.”
“No, no, I insist. I have nothing else to do, and it is your birthday, sort of.”
They enter the pub next to McDonalds. It is very clean and modern, much cleaner than the pubs Chris has visited in Brechin. The bar is wood with brass trim and the booths are padded comfortably. The establishment is very well lit, not like the dark pub that masked the drunken squalor in Brechin.
Chris has a pint of lager and Karen orders a soda-like beverage called Irn-Bru. She makes a face upon sipping it. “I’ve always wondered what this stuff tasted like. I guess I should have kept wondering.”
They sit opposite one another in a booth near the front window. Chris faces the street, watching the people walking by. Most are happy and most are with someone else. Seldom does he see anyone walking alone. Most of the faces that he catches merely in profile as they pass quickly in front of the window are pale and smiling. People with lives, he thinks. He realizes that he, too, is starting to have a life. Never in any daydream from his schooldays would he have ever pictured himself sitting in a pub on the other side of the world with a woman almost a generation older than himself.
“So,” Karen says, abandoning her drink for a cigarette, “I guess you’re not close to your parents.”
“No, not really.” He drinks his beer slowly, taking only the smallest of sips. He wants these moments to last. “I guess you could say not close at all.”
He has told her in the past of the emotional distance of his parents, but he’s never been too specific. On this day, he tells her about their living arrangement. He describes how his mother lived upstairs with the run of the house, and his father’s existence in the partially finished basement, coming and going solely through the side door that led directly to the basement stairs. His father’s presence was always visible, but seldom was he seen. When Chris would go down to talk to him, even just to say hello, his father would never look at him. His gaze would never leave the television.
He starts out slowly and starts retelling his family’s problems, as though he were an outside observer and not a part of the situation. His voice is flat and emotionless, but as he continues, his voice changes and he feels pressure behind his eyes that he knows is the start of tears. By the time he tells Karen about finding his house for sale and his mother running to Arizona with a much younger man who didn’t say two words to him, tears are running down his cheeks, but his voice is still steady. However, by the time he tells her of his days and nights without mail in boot camp, he is out and out bawling, too sad to feel embarrassed.
Karen reaches over and pats his shoulder. He is grateful for the contact. He has had no human contact for such a long time. No one has shown him any affection whatsoever, and that probably hurts the most. Everyone needs a hug and Karen placing her hand on his shoulder is the closest he’s ever been to someone—save the tears in Father Crowley’s office—since he was a small child.
“How awful,” she says. She orders him another beer, even though he still has most of one left. “Drink some more. It’s your birthday and you’ve missed too many.”
To distract from the tears, he quickly drinks the remains of his first pint in a fluid motion, as if he is an experienced drinker, which belies his youthful and innocent appearance.
“You know,” Karen says, “there are people who have children that could care less about them. To them, having children is no different than having a dog, if not less than a dog. And there are some people who want children more than anything and they can’t have them, or God takes them away. It makes no sense.”
Her face too, shows signs of strain as if she might cry, but she doesn’t. She stares into space, looking above Chris’s head. She lights another cigarette. Chris does, too.
He is in love with her, but not as fanatically as he was before. And he realizes from her last statement that another piece of her puzzle has been exposed. At some point in her life, she either wanted children or couldn’t have them, or she or someone she knew lost them.
Still, he is afraid to ask. Her face and something in her mannerisms still don’t invite questions about her past.
In silence, he finishes his second beer, and in silence, they drive back to the base. The afternoon started on a happy note, but the emotional downturn has made them both tired and not in the mood for conversation. She drops him off at the gate and gives him a hug in the cramped confines of the Mini.
The hug makes him very happy. And though he hasn’t cried over his mother or father, it somehow feels therapeutic. His heart feels much lighter, and the burden of near-abandonment that he has been carrying isn’t nearly so cumbersome. He finds his room, his bed, and falls asleep, just moments after the sun disappears.
March 25, 1986
Dear Wife,
I think I always assumed you would be my age or probably younger. I think I’ve thought that because I always assumed I would be too immature or inexperienced for girls my age. All through school the girls my age have always seemed older, especially in high school. They started to look like women, a lot of them, and I looked the same since junior high, not a speck of facial hair, but maybe more acne. I would listen to girls talk in class among their friends or with different guys, you know, the more popular ones. They always seemed to have a lot to talk about, and me, I never could say much of anything. They talked about parties and movies and gossiped about different kids in school. Who was dating who, who was sleeping with who. I always pretended to ignore them, during those moments in class when the teacher would be absent or in between classes just as the bell would ring. Those moments were always torture for me. Everyone seemed to have someone else to talk to and I would put my nose in a book without really reading it. Now I know the difference between me and them, my memory has a way of making sense of the past sometimes. They had been living, I now realize, leading lives, having and making friends. Enjoying life. Maybe they found peace? I don’t know. I pretended to hate everybody but I now know I was jealous. I hadn’t and still haven’t done much living, not as much as I would like to or need to.