Blue Stars (8 page)

Angry and afraid, she cried and washed her hair. She cried and washed her body.

*   *   *

“Screaming at the top of your lungs, you go, ‘Sir! Recruit Kirkson requests permission to speak to Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Michaels!’ And he’ll be like, ‘What the hell do you want, Kirkson?’ ‘Sir! This recruit requests permission to make a head call!’”

“That means, go to the bathroom,” Mike’s friend Tom said, interrupting his own story.

“Duh,” Tom’s little sister said. “We’ve all seen
Full Metal Jacket.
”

“Why do you have to say ‘this recruit’?” Tom’s tall, friendly mother asked. “That I don’t get. You can’t say your own name?”

“You can’t even say ‘me’ or ‘my’ or any of those, what are they called…”

“Personal pronouns,” Ellen mumbled.
Stop it,
she told herself.

Tom blew out his breath. “Oh man, and if you do … Remember Gerhardt that day?” He and Mike cracked up.

“What happened?” the teenage sister demanded. “Did you have to haze him? Was there a blanket party?” To her mom, she explained, “That’s when they pin the guy down and beat him with—”

“Jeannie.”

Tom and Mike just laughed. Whatever they had done or seen done in training they wouldn’t be describing here, at the dinner table with their families in a bunting-swathed room called Chesty Puller Hall. Ellen couldn’t help but be happy, hearing Mike joke around with skinny, amiable Tom—it was clear they were good friends. She’d never met one of Mike’s friends before, but she knew this relaxed goofy manner: it was how he was with Wes. But still, she didn’t like the way his experience, their secrets together, separated him from her. Already today she’d been referred to as a “civilian” one too many times.

“Want to go find Crum? See if his girl showed?” Tom asked. Mike looked at Ellen; she nodded. The boys crossed the room together. Tom said something that made Mike rock his head back, clap sharply.

Tom’s mother scooted her chair next to Ellen’s. She too had been watching them go. “Never thought I’d be here doing this,” she said. “Last time he wore a uniform it was Cub Scouts.”

Ellen smiled.

“All right, now don’t judge me but…” The woman opened her purse to show Ellen—inside, a flask-size bottle of Maker’s Mark. “I was thinking of making my tea into a hot toddy. Will you join us?”

“With pleasure. But will we end up in the brig?”

“They’ve got bigger problems than two moms who could really use a drink. I’m Grace, by the way.”

“Ellen.” She pushed her cup closer, thankful for the generous slug of whiskey Grace neatly tipped into it. It was nice to be with a family. The two women clinked mugs, and Ellen felt her shoulders loosen for the first time since touching down in Georgia. She also let Grace’s “two moms” pass without comment, an omission she couldn’t remember making before.

With that, the two women began to talk, and after mutually testing the waters, started a real conversation about their doubts and fears. Grace, a dance teacher in Connecticut, admitted in a whisper that she was a registered member of the Green Party. Ellen described a few of Serena’s more controversial actions, one involving an effigy of Donald Rumsfeld. She even acknowledged being there. Another round from the purse flask, and they were talking about how dumb the broad-brimmed drill instructor hats were, how much they hated “oo-rah,” and how annoyingly proud the guys were of having cleaned toilets and made beds.

“Okay, here’s a joke,” Grace said, leaning in toward Ellen and her husband. “An Army Ranger is stationed in Louisiana, and really wants a pair of these fancy alligator shoes he sees everywhere. But in all the stores, they’re priced way out of his range—five, six hundred dollars. So in frustration he says to one of the shopkeepers, ‘Maybe I’ll just go over to the swamp and kill one of those suckers myself, make my own damn shoes.’ Shopkeeper says, ‘Be my guest—maybe you’ll run into these two Marines who were in here today saying the same thing.’

“So the Ranger gets down to the river, swamp, whatever … he’s standing onshore and sure enough, he does see two Marines there, up to their thighs in swamp water.”

“How does he know they’re Marines?” Tom’s father asked.

“Because it’s a joke, and he just does.” Grace pushed her hair back and made a face. “Anyway, as he’s watching, a giant gator comes slowly swimming toward the Marines. One of them grabs it by the throat, strangles it to death with one hand, and easily tosses it out of the water and up onshore. They flip it on its back. Lying next to it, the Army Ranger realizes, are several other of the huge creatures.

“‘Goddamn it all to hell,’ one of the Marines says. ‘This fucker ain’t wearing any shoes either!’”

Tom’s father’s laugh rose above the rest of the table’s in a short, sharp blast. Ellen thought about how sourly Jane would have reacted to this joke, and how nice it was—
bad, bad
—not to have to deal with that awkwardness.

The boys came back, bearing slices of cake. Everyone ate dessert as a screen was unrolled and a slide show began. Ellen rolled her eyes at Grace, who giggled. Mike and Tom dragged their chairs into the middle of the hall, with other Marines, so they could hoot together at the various images of themselves in training, covered in mud, doing pull-ups, sweating out a run.

“I’ve been wincing every time I hear another parent say the phrase ‘my Marine,’” Grace whispered, shaking her head. “But I confess it’s starting to seem like it’ll be in the realm of possibility.”

“Don’t do it, Grace! It’s a slippery slope to that T-shirt … You know the one.” Earlier, they had ogled a woman passing by in a spangled shirt that spelled out, in glittery red-white-and-blue:
MY MARINE SON IS
MY HERO
 …
AND YOURS!

Mike’s profile was lit by the projector’s beam. Whatever happens, Ellen thought, quickly ignoring what she meant by
that,
it was good to see him this way, accepted, successful, with friends. Maybe it would be all right. Even though the pendulum had swung too far to the other side, at least she wasn’t worried about him huffing paint and doing 360s in the Goodman pool parking lot.

“Is it possible to imagine some good coming from this?” she asked Grace, eyes on Michael bathed in the film’s blue light. “That at the very least they may have learned how to take care of themselves?”

“And each other,” Grace pointed out. “When they’re over there, that’s going to be the thing that gets them through it.”

A shiver went off deep inside Ellen, a gathering rush.
Over there.
“What do you mean?”

“In … well, in Iraq.”

“But how do you—I mean, it’s not for sure they
will
go there. Is it? Or did you just mean, in case they do.”

Grace was worried. She glanced at Tom’s father. “I thought—well, didn’t Michael tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry, I wish I hadn’t raised it—”

“Tell me what.”

“Tom told us on the phone a few weeks ago … that both platoons heard unofficially but essentially, they’d be going. First to Lejeune for infantry, and then deploy to Iraq right after that. This summer. June, most likely.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s final,” Tom’s father said. For Ellen’s benefit.

“Tom seemed to think it was,” Grace said quietly. “The officers have been talking about it to them all throughout the end of training.”

Ellen pushed back from the table a few inches. If anyone spoke to her she might scream. In a whirl of thoughts, she isolated a surprising anger toward Grace, in all respects a perfect stranger:
What do you mean by sharing this meal and pretending to be on my side?
Also,
How can you do it—chat and joke and have known it all the while?
She had been duped.

Table conversation all but stopped. Mike and Tom came back to say good night. They were off to get rip-roaring drunk with the other graduates. Or so it was implied. Ellen accepted his kiss on her cheek and automatically told him to be careful. Tomorrow they would meet for breakfast before her flight; he had plans to drive up to New York City with Tom to spend the weekend and would fly to Madison from there. Grace and her family got ready to leave and said good night. Ellen brightly fended off the other woman’s awkward concern, her apology.

For maybe she knew more than she would admit about how to behave in this new world. Throughout the hall caterers bunched up paper tablecloths, broke down folding chairs. Ellen put on her coat, took up her purse with its letter inside. She walked calmly to the parking lot. How strange to realize that manners and politeness and social convention held sway even now. One didn’t scream with fury at the Chesty Puller dinner party for one’s newly minted warrior. One didn’t make a scene.

Because that’s all it would amount to, Ellen thought dully as she drove back to the hotel. Her careful plan, her passionate arguments, her letter. It wouldn’t do any good. It was too late. Mike might hear her out but ultimately it wouldn’t matter. A time when Ellen might have been able to change his mind had passed, if one had ever existed. He was in it now, and she was too much of a coward to make a scene.

6

Eddie had been gone five weeks. His division went from Germany to Kuwait to Baghdad. He’d called and e-mailed when they were still in the Green Zone, but now he was out in Sadr City and she hadn’t heard from him in over a week. Lacey wasn’t worried; right now the Mahdi army, controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr, was mostly calm. If Mookie stayed quiet, the army could make progress on stabilizing the slum, which she knew was one of the worst in Baghdad. No plumbing, no electricity, sewage running raw through the streets.

At the computer in her kitchen, Lacey clicked past a photo of young boys jumping up and down in their blue rubber sandals. They were waiting for the food trucks to arrive. She focused on the next series of pictures—Second Brigade, First Army guys out there with new Iraqi soldiers. These were taken before Eddie’s unit arrived, but they showed what would be his main mission: training Iraqi soldiers to find explosives, quell insurgent fire, and provide on-the-ground support for any coalition movements.

“What a nightmare,” Lacey muttered, thinking about Eddie’s anal-retentive nature in contrast to the haphazard Iraqi discipline and organization. One photo showed an Iraqi man getting a retinal scan. He was applying to be a neighborhood guard. But so many of these guys had untrustworthy backgrounds—connections to insurgents, hostile to Americans—it was a risk just letting them do the grunt work. They were broke, desperate. They’d say anything to get a job. And then turn tail, inform to the Mahdi army, if that would get them more money. Lacey glared at the man holding open his eye for the camera. She checked a couple other threads, but not much was going on. Weekends tended to be slower on the boards.

“Otis!” she yelled in the direction of the bathroom, shower still running. “Let’s go already!” Was he masturbating in there? But that would take two minutes, not twenty—wouldn’t it? Lacey wished someone could have a talk with him about all that guy stuff, with pointers for when and where. She was fine with male hormones in theory, she just didn’t want to think about them in her bathroom.

Before she shut down the Internet, Lacey swung through the chat rooms at www.marriedtothemilitary.com, an anonymous online forum for military wives, girlfriends, and anyone else who had the army in their business. Most of the questions were about care package protocol (no sweets, no glitter, hide the porn) or on-base questions about housing and paychecks. There was one thread, though, that Lacey couldn’t stop thinking about. It had started several days ago when a poster who called herself “InfidelGirl” confessed that she was thinking about cheating on her Marine boyfriend. The board had erupted with outrage and scorn, blasting InfidelGirl as a homewrecker, a bitch, a slut, and a thousand more epithets that had brought the board moderators in several times to remind everyone to keep it civil.
I haven’t done it yet,
InfidelGirl wrote.
And maybe I won’t. I’m just lonely, and at least I’m honest enough to say it. He’ll never know, anyway.

She just wants attention,
Lacey told herself. No update from InfidelGirl. Probably it’s all fake. Some people have nothing better to do, right? Lacey shut the computer, feeling vaguely dirty.

Finally Otis was out and dressed. Lacey noticed he was wearing a short-sleeve shirt over a long-sleeve one. Was that a thing now? But with his short-sleeve tighter and the long sleeve one baggy, the look came out bunchy and weird. She gave his head a kiss and made a mental note to check Marshalls for shirts with the right proportions.

Her car stalled twice before they could pull up the ramp leading out of the apartment’s garage. Lacey’s face grew hot as she motioned people behind her to go around. She jammed the clutch, pumped the gas, and cursed a lot.

“Is it the battery again?” Next to her Otis was flipping through a Legos catalog. He didn’t sound all that concerned.

“I think it’s the hoses or something,” Lacey said. “Better be.” Last time, though, the mechanic had murmured something ominous about the carburetor before she shut him up. She did
not
have an extra seven hundred bucks lying around. Finally they were out, on a cloudy warm spring day, windows down and Z100 on the radio. Mother and son both sang along to “Hollaback Girl” with Gwen Stefani. Otis had a little thing for Gwen Stefani, and Lacey couldn’t deny she was cute. And extremely athletic: what was up with all those push-ups during her shows? They took the Hutch South through Pelham, crossed the New England Thruway, and went around a series of clover turns as they entered Pelham Bay Park, a confusing mix of parkland and public beach. Lacey missed the first turnoff so they went around again, finally pulling onto the dinky little two-lane that led over a bridge into City Island.

“The Seaport of the Bronx,” Otis intoned. The sign made them crack up every time.

“We’re late.” Lacey sighed. She hated to give Lolo anything else on her. It was still weird to her that Eddie had grown up here, on this seedy spit of land in the Eastchester Bay. While she had spent her teenage years strolling every mall in Yonkers, he’d worked in the fading boatyards in the putt-putt, driving weekenders out and back from their docked fourteen-footers. You’d think he would have joined the navy. And it was white, white,
white
here—Irish, Italian, a little Greek. Eddie claimed he hadn’t been the only Puerto Rican kid at P.S. 175, but as far as Lacey could tell, his mother Lolo cornered the market on color.