Blue Stars (14 page)

*   *   *

The rest of the night at the movies, after Jane had whispered that she was pregnant, was now a bad blur Ellen tried not to bring into focus. At first Ellen, in shock, continued to watch Batman flirt with a saucy brunette and fight a pale-eyed villain called Scarecrow. Then she picked up her coat and left the theater, Jane hurrying behind. And so it was on the edge of a giant parking lot, Ellen having no idea where her car was, that she had to have an unthinkable scene with her daughter. How could you tell me something like that, like that? In the middle of a
movie
?
Is that really the main issue, Mom?
How do you know … are you sure? When did you—?
I took a test, all right? I took two of them. Jesus, can you dial it down?
But—who’s the father?
I don’t want to get into that.

It was Jane’s demeanor there on the curb in the shadows under the theater awning, sullen and secretive, insistently casual,
selfish,
that sent Ellen into a panicked diatribe. She hated to think of how she reacted: she lectured her daughter, she used words like
irresponsible
and
self-destructive
. The more Jane withdrew, staring off to the side and chewing on a shirt cuff, the more vehement Ellen got. She tried to staunch her disappointment, she tried to be more sensitive, to modulate her tone of voice. But it was too late. Jane said she had to go, she
couldn’t deal with this right now
. When am I going to see you again? We need to figure out what’s next, have you made an appointment, of course I want to be there—and I know it must be expensive, that’s nothing you have to worry about …

“You don’t know what I’m going to do about it!” Jane burst out. “I might be
keeping
it!” At that she ran off while Ellen called after her, and passersby stared.

Since then, she had called Jane almost daily, leaving countless messages but had received nothing back except for the occasional grudging texts.
It’s fine. Not in the mood to talk.

Ellen had fought to manage her worry, her dismay—
keep it?! “Keep” “it”?? Where would she “keep” a baby, in that firetrap co-op? On a part-time receptionist’s pay?
She had done such a good job of managing, in fact, that it wasn’t until she was at a coworker’s
baby shower
that Jane’s infuriating situation truly hit her. These women, the ones competing to outdo each other’s birth drama, they were all women. Not girls—women. They had educations, life experience, husbands. And still they had been knocked flat by how hard it all was. What was Jane thinking? Obviously she couldn’t have a baby. She could barely put together a coherent life for herself, let alone be responsible for a child. The absolute impossibility of it reassured Ellen. She remembered the advice given in a “parenting your spirited teen” workshop she’d attended once, during the tempest of Jane’s high school years: push them and they’ll run the other way. Jane would have to believe that getting an abortion was Jane’s idea. Ellen could wait it out.

“Everyone always talks about, you know, pooping while giving birth—” This from a young woman to her friend, both sitting just behind Ellen. Slices of cake had been handed around; conversation broke into smaller pockets. “But that’s nothing. I swear I peed every time I stood up, for at least a year after Jackson. There were two of us in diapers.”

Ellen ate tiny bites of her cake, an unwilling eavesdropper. She wanted to be in favor of women’s openness and honesty around the birth experiences—if woman-positive Serena were here she’d be urging them all on, cheering every bodily disclosure, the messier the better, even though Serena herself had not the least personal interest in pregnancy and children—but really, wasn’t enough enough?

“Speaking of bathroom stuff,” the other woman said. “You saw those headlines, right?”

Ellen froze.

“I know. So disgusting, so absolutely despicable. If this alone isn’t an indictment against us for this war, I don’t know what could be. Those men are
laughing
. You can tell, you can see it.”

“What I want to know is, which one of them decided to take the pictures? Like, how did that even cross his mind?”

“Which one decided to do it first? How did it start? Did they just”—the woman’s voice dropped—“kill that guy and then need to take a leak? And put the two things together and think, hey why not—”

“Inhuman. They’re thugs, plain and simple. Bloodthirsty thugs. No better than any terrorist. Do you ever wonder, when something like this comes up, what we
aren’t
seeing? What we don’t know about? As if there are a dozen other incidents like this every month.”

“Massacres. Taking My Lai into the digital age.”

“The thing is, the Pentagon, all those old men in charge, they know this is what happens in war. They’ve probably seen it a thousand times. The only reason they’re flipping out is because it got
out,
not because it happened. Because it might threaten their budgets, not because it’s morally abominable.
A-bomb-in-able.
I always have trouble pronouncing that.”

“I hate this fucking ‘support the troops’ no-matter-what mentality. No. I won’t be co-opted into pretending it isn’t our guys doing
this.
We train them to be like that. We tell them it’s okay to kill children and defile human bodies. Just as long as—”

“They get the oil for us.”

The too-sweet, powdery frosting curdled in Ellen’s mouth. The women behind her were on to another subject, but she had a paranoid sense they’d wanted her to overhear, that they had been whispering just for her benefit.
Did they know?
Did they know about Mike being a Marine, that he was there? Had anyone seen that service flag—stuffed in a bottom drawer for weeks but recently attached to a kitchen window in a stupid moment of superstition that it would bring him back safe? Its blue star burned her now, a flagrant sign of her complicity … one that she’d hung out herself! Ellen’s vision wavered, and the group of women gathered together in the room strung out as if they were all far away from her; their voices shrunk to a thin stream of babble. She wanted to put her plate down but she couldn’t reach the coffee table.

It’s all right,
she heard herself think.
These people don’t really know you. They don’t know him. Not to mention, he’s not even your real
—

The shock of this half thought brought her up short. The others at the party snapped back into view, their chatter roared. It was as if Ellen didn’t exist.

“She never learned to crawl, not really. She’d just line up a spot across the room and then roll her way across the rug to get there.”

“Oh, totally. Mine did the wounded soldier crawl.” Ellen stared. The woman talking mimicked movement with her bent arms held up in front of her, her face distorted to show pain and effort. “You know, on his stomach, dragging his body behind him like dead weight.
Got—to make it—under—this barbed wire fence
.”

The room laughed appreciatively.

Ellen stood and dropped her plate onto the seat of her chair. Snaking through chairs and love seats, she made her way quickly and quietly to the kitchen, where whatever expression she must have had on her face caused the startled caterer to point to the hallway without Ellen even needing to ask. If she could only have a moment alone, and some cold water for her face, she could fight down this rising upsurge of horror and nausea.

With a perfunctory knock, Ellen pulled open the door. Mark Carroll, stunned, legs spread, facing the toilet. His shout and hers overlapped. She closed the door again, mortified, repelled, the echoing thunder of his streaming urine still in her ears. She dropped all pretense and fled. Down the hallway, through the front hall, up the stairs. Vaguely aware of someone calling her name. Ellen’s only thought was to get to a bathroom before … She tried one room, and then the next, making it safely into the right one, and even had a few seconds to spare in order to ensure this door was shut and locked, open both sink faucets, and kneel carefully on the clean blue-tiled floor before throwing up, twice, neatly, into Debbie Masterson’s mother’s toilet.

*   *   *

“Just a splash. It settles the stomach.”

“The ginger ale will settle my stomach. The rum will do something else.”

Serena shrugged, tipping a healthy portion of brown liquid into her own glass. Ellen had her shoes off, was curled up on their couch, after it had been cleared of newspapers and shooed of cats. Serena had spread a light cotton blanket over Ellen’s legs and put a pillow behind her head. The open windows behind her let in occasional gusts of damp wind, but that felt good on Ellen’s head. Being here felt good, in general. The rain and the early evening darkness lent Serena and Jill’s messy apartment a cozy safeness. Serena bustled around, switching on lamps and shifting piles of books and papers into new piles of books and papers. Jill passed through with a raincoat over her arm. She whispered hello to Ellen and kissed Serena good-bye. Here were three women, each in her fifties—or older—each with gray hair and progressive-lens eyeglasses and quiet lives.

“I don’t understand,” Ellen said. “Why now? Why now that we’re older? How can war, real war, be a part of life now?”

“How could it not?” Serena said.

“Because our turn’s over! We had our war. I walked out of classes in the fall of my sophomore year. I cried when they showed footage after Tet. There was a boy from my hometown who never came back, was never even found. Their house had a POW/MIA flag up for years afterward, even during Reagan, my mom said. What was their name…”

“There was a woman holding this sign at our last action—wait, let me get the photo—it was genius, you have to see…” Serena clicked around on her laptop and brought the computer over to Ellen. A photo of a grandmotherly type, covered in
PEACE & JUSTICE
and
NOT IN MY NAME
buttons, with a sign that read
I CAN’T BELIEVE I
STILL
HAVE TO PROTEST THIS SHIT.

Ellen smiled wanly. “It’s a good one.”

“So you don’t want to play this part.” Serena sat in the armchair across from her, feet up on the coffee table. “It’s not what you’d planned on.”

“No, it’s not! I know you’re going to disapprove, but I’m okay with the protesting, and I vote and I pay attention and I donate to the right places … I just don’t see why I have to be tied to it with my heart. Why it has to come into my home, all this fear and—” All this fear. It wasn’t just the swooshing wave of inner vertigo whenever she thought of Mike hurt or killed, whenever she remembered how close he was to that possibility. Or her thrumming, irregular pulse, the cold crawliness on her skin. Recently new symptoms appeared, and even though they weren’t directly attached to those bursts of dread, Ellen knew where they came from: that twitch in her left eyelid, the one that hadn’t gone away in a week. Sleeplessness at night, exhaustion during the day. Sudden bouts of unexplained diarrhea and now, unfortunately, surprise attacks of vomit.

Ellen sighed. An aging woman, complaining about her aches and pains. “‘Why me, why me.’ Ignore me.”

“Let me think.” Serena steepled her hands against her face, pensive. Ellen was warmed by her concern—that her own devastation should be a worthy problem to be turned around in her mind. “Why do we have this now, why war now, women our age…” Serena muttered to herself. “Putting aside the inherent solipsism of the question, and your privileged first-world status, that is.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, I think I know.” Her friend took a deep drink, organizing her thoughts. Ellen waited. “You’re given this burden now because you can tell the truth about it.”

Ellen laughed. “I can barely stand to admit to people who know and theoretically like me that my—whatever, my
ward
—is a Marine. Is fighting a war I despise. Let alone speak out and make some kind of statement about it all. I’m no Cindy Sherman.”

“The photographer? I’m not sure I follow…”

“Cindy
Sheehan
, I meant. The mom, the antiwar activist. Oh, God.” Ellen covered her face. She’d just compared herself to someone whose son had died.

If Serena noticed her anguish, she didn’t mention it. “Well, they both make a kind of sense to me. In any case, think about it. There is a logic for us in having this happen now, when we’re old, when we’re in typical grandmother position. We have the perspective, the wisdom, the distance to be able to see it clearly, when almost no one else in society can.” Serena stood and paced around the room. “The younger men are fighting the war—or avoiding it—and the older men are plotting it, or reliving their own wars. Younger women are caught between the terror of losing a husband there and the raising of children—they have no space in which to think. But we—” Serena sank onto the couch near Ellen’s feet. “We’re the secret weapon.”

“Older women.”

“Write about it. Put it into the work.”

Ellen studied her old friend, who was nearly vibrating with intellectual force, a lock of silvery hair dipping down her forehead. This wasn’t what she wanted, an academic senior-citizen call to arms. It wasn’t assuaging her shame at the feelings she’d had earlier at Debbie’s party, that instinct to disown Mike. But despite herself, she was drawn into Serena’s excitement. It’s what she had been doing, in a way, writing to Michael—those pages of stories about his life, with readings selected just for him. A correspondence course he didn’t know he’d signed up for.

But first, she had to find something out. “How did it affect you?” she asked Serena, who was lost in thought. Ellen nudged her gently with a foot. “What did you think, when you heard?”

“When I heard?”

“The Marines, that … the bodies. What they did.” Ellen could barely say the words.

To her shock, Serena’s face creased and she began to cry. “Oh—oh, I’m sorry,” Ellen said. “I didn’t know. I’m—”

“It’s unbearable.” Serena ignored the tears coursing down. “I’ve been wrecked about it all weekend. What we do to them.”