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“Oh,” Safia says and reaches
for it. She pours to the rim, then hands it back. “Careful,” she
says and laughs. Everyone else laughs with her. From a back room,
Paul calls to Safia, “Hey, Doll? Have you seen that yellow
chair?”

“In the closet,” she
says.

“Nope. Not here.”

She touches my shoulder. “He
will find it. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, no problem.” My face is
hot, red. With luck the light is too dim for them to see it. I look
around the table and meet their stares, smile, and wish I’d never
come.

“Please,” Safia says,
opening the oven. “Have something on the table.” Inside,
almost-golden bread bakes in a tin. On the table: chips and dip and
water crackers, and I’m painfully hungry. “No, thanks,” I say. “I
just ate. But, thank you.”

“So, anyway…” A woman with
dyed black hair and a green-stone nosering returns to a story she
must have almost finished before I came in. Something about a girl
and a guy walking across New York state from west to east, but not
making it past Buffalo. The girl, she says, broke off when she
found out their first stop was to be with her boyfriend’s other
girlfriend.

“Did she at least have a
warm meal ready for them?” says a man sitting on the left side of
the table. His face is expressionless, and he wears a red flannel
shirt and glasses and is older than the rest of us by what must be
twenty years.

The girl with the nosering
laughs. “She didn’t say.”

He shrugs. “At least they
didn’t have to pay for a hotel.”

Nosering sighs her relief at
being newly single—“I’ve slept great since he left.”—and asks
Flannel about his recent marriage. “Three weeks, already,
right?”

“I am blissfully happy,” he
says. He sips his wine.

Hands snatch crackers and
lift glasses and I’m still waiting for a chair. I look with feigned
interest at pictures on the walls. Many of the faces in a collage
hanging above a wine rack belong to those at the table. Safia is
absent from most of them; Paul is the one constant figure. I ask
Safia if she needs any help.

“No, thank you. Everything
is done.”

I study the table with a
forced smile to leave no question of pleasantness. Their circle is
palpable and frustrating in its inaccessibility to me; I feel like
I’m standing just outside the reaches of a fire’s
warmth.

Jake was the only one I was
ever truly comfortable with.

Or am I making it up? I was
more at ease with him—this is true—than with anyone else. But, was
it like this? Like them? Strange that I can’t remember.

“I want to know about Mia,”
one of the women—Kim or Joni or Christine—says. She sits directly
in front of where I stand, so her neck twists awkwardly when she
looks at me.

“What do you want to know?”
My stomach burns, nauseous, and I scan the bottles on the table.
Nothing white.

“Well, anything.”

Questions suddenly come at
me from the ring around the table, a barrage of shouts and
reporter-like inquiries that I’m sure they mean to be
playful.

“What do you do?”

“What’s your social security
number?”

“How long have you lived in
the area?”

“Do you like
pickles?”

Safia appears beside me with
a bottle. “Do you need more wine?” I hold my glass under the stream
and swallow half of it, at least, when she pulls away the
bottle.

Safia says, “This is
May
—
Mia
,” she says. “Remember? The girl
upstairs?”

The table falls quiet,
again, and the woman in front of me reaches for a cracker. “With
the husband fighting in the war,” she says. “Right?”

“M-hm,” I say, and the word
“husband”…
husband
…
Saturation is all it is, most likely. One more minute thinking
about Jake, missing Jake, being angry with Jake, loving Jake, and
I’ll either drown in self-absorption or come to fully detest
him.

Paul, still in one of the
back rooms, calls, “Hey, love? I can’t find it,” and Safia excuses
herself.

“Sorry to hear that,” says
the woman. “About your husband.”

“It’s okay.”
Husband!

Flannel laughs. His face
reddens to match his shirt and his eyes water behind his glasses,
and I think of paintings depicting demons I don’t know are demons
until I study the look in the eyes or the mark on the skin. I am
asking him if I said something funny when Paul and Safia arrive
with my chair. The group shifts sideways to make room, and I
squeeze uncomfortably into the space.

“‘It’s okay’, you said.” He
takes a slow drag from a cigarette and exhales a white cloud into
the yellow-brown light falling out of the shade. The table is
circular, so there is no escaping their eyes, all of which rest on
me, waiting. “It was the look on your face that made me laugh. It
was clearly not okay.”

“It was,” I say quietly to
her, now sitting next to me, and she whispers that she meant
nothing by it.

He still smiles, his eyes
shining. He raises his glass to me and I take a drink without
returning the toast. He laughs again, his mouth opening wide and
his face turning even redder. “She hates me already.”

Nosering, whose mashed,
chewed cracker clings between her top and bottom teeth, says,
“Beth’s husband was going to join, remember? Last week, sometime,
he said he was thinking about it. Guilt, or some such…” She looks
at me. “Or something. But now he thinks this will all be over in no
time, and he doesn’t want to waste three years of his life for
nothing.”

“It would be for nothing
either way,” says someone else. “Things will just go back to the
way they were. People can’t be forced to change.”

Safia bends through
shoulders to place a wood cutting board of cheese and bread in the
center of the table, then takes a seat next to Nosering.

“I don’t know,” I say, and
they all stare at me, the authority on such things. I hold my glass
tighter. “I mean, it seems like maybe they just needed a little
help to change.” It doesn’t even sound genuine to me.

“A boost over the wall, you
might say,” says Flannel.

“Yes.” I ready my glass for
tossing. Whatever I might think of the war, I dare any one of
them—Flannel Demon or Nosering or anyone—to say something about
Jake, the military, their brav—

“You can’t believe that,” he
says, and instead of throwing my wine, I drink it.

The woman sitting to my
right says, “I don’t know how any of you can think it’s almost
over. A statue falls and you think the President will withdraw the
troops? The government didn’t spend all the money to send them over
there just to bring them back less than three months later. They’ll
be there for years. Bet on it.”

“And like little toys,” says
Safia, “they follow mindlessly, the winding knob on their back
twisted until it cannot twist more.” She walks her fingers on the
table, the ‘feet’ kicking straight up.

“You don’t know what you’re
talking about,” I say, but they’re laughing and don’t hear me. I
yell “Shut up!” and Flannel’s smile turns kind toward me as the
rest of them fall quiet. He says, “Hey, now,” and I say, “Never
mind,” because I’m already back to being too weak to argue for
something I don’t believe. And Safia might have a point, even
though I know—I
know
—she doesn’t, not in the way she intends. Nazis, she meant,
with her little finger-boots. But then I remember Brian, who didn’t
follow, didn’t go. He found a way out. If being sneaky and cunning
isn’t successful, there’s always Canada or conscientious objection.
I once taught an excerpt from a Tim O’Brien novel…the excerpt was
anthologized as an essay, and it was too long ago, so the title
won’t come…about bravery, or at least one understanding of it. Was
it bravery that turned his narrator’s boat around, away from Canada
and back to the States for his trip to Vietnam? Or would he have
been brave to continue to Canada as frightened as he was about what
his family, his country, would think of his desertion?

“I give it a month,” says a
man I haven’t really noticed until now. He leans back in his chair,
stoned-looking, and his hands, covered by the stretched-out cuffs
of his long-sleeved shirt, are folded loosely on his stomach.
“You’ll be out there like monkeys, screaming and pounding your
chests, and with or without you, the end is already
here.”

“Are you going next
Thursday?” Waiting for me to answer is a set of bright blue eyes
like painted glass set in a pale, porcelain face. A living Pierrot
clown with an orange scarf holding back frizzy brown hair, loops
and twirls springing out, falling along her cheek to her
shoulders.

I ask her what’s happening
on Thursday.

“Not this Thursday. Next.
You don’t—? The campus protest. You haven’t heard?” She slaps the
table and the stoned one turns his head. “See, Safia? I told you no
one knows about it.”

“She does not leave her
apartment,” Safia says and smiles apologetically at me. “How is she
to know?”

“She lives right upstairs.
You could have told her.”

“People know. Trust me. Many
will come.” She tugs at the end of one of her braids and studies
the colorless hair flattened between her fingers. “Mia will come.”
She smiles at me.

The war has become a worn
subject. Conversation turns more personal, and the music coming
from the living room changes from Middle Eastern to American
sixties folk. Flannel has a name—Frank—and he says, when asked
about the progress of his new wife’s pregnancy, that he can’t wait
for the baby to be born. The frizzy-haired one—Rose—is in the
middle of finishing her master’s in art and complains about her
unsuccessful formal appeal to change a ‘C’ to a ‘B’. “I can’t get a
fucking C. But, of course, since he can’t be
forced
to change my grade, he won’t.
The asshole. Now what am I going to do?” Frank suggests—without a
hint of humor—that she try sleeping with the professor. “Or are you
still waiting for marriage?”

“Oh, Safia, I forgot!” says
Nosering, whose name I discover is Jennifer. “You just had your
first anniversary. How was it?”

Safia gets up for more
cheese, and Paul, smiling at his wife’s back, says it couldn’t have
been better.

I finish my wine—I can
barely taste the red in it, at this point—and ask Safia if there’s
more.

The next few hours pass
slowly. I can’t get rid of the nausea—the wine isn’t helping—and
group familiarity pushes me out unless I’m reaching into the middle
for cheese or a cracker, but I stay, anyway, drinking free wine and
veiled in enough drunken confidence to eat the free food. I listen
with waning interest to inside jokes and anecdotes, hoping for more
information on the protest. I’ve never been to one and would like
details about time and location—if they mentioned them, I’ve
already forgotten—but it doesn’t come up again. I wonder what I’m
supposed to wear and if I’m supposed to make a sign, but I don’t
ask. I don’t want them to know it will be my first time.

If the one in the sleeves is
right, this will be my only protest because the war
will
be over soon, and it
could be years before there’s another one.

Over.

Hot tears come and my breath
catches and a scream builds in my neck.
Over.

Frank catches me smiling and
smiles back. I hurry around the table and squeeze him tight and he
smells like sandalwood. I fill my glass with the last of the wine
on the table and light a cigarette and thank Safia for inviting me,
then run upstairs.

Chancey rubs his side
against my shins under the desk while I wait for the internet to
come up, then trots to the bedroom when my cigarette smoke drops to
cat-nose level.

There’s been no opportunity
to check email for the past few hours, so there must be something
waiting by now.

“No new messages” appears in
the screen’s bottom corner. The nausea crests and I shove my
cigarette in the ashtray and run to the toilet.

Afterward, I pour out the
wine and mix a drink I can handle and open a page to begin a new
message. My fingers move like they’re cold, landing on the wrong
letters, and strands of my hair fall into the small, black
crevasses when I lean in to better see the keys.

To:
[email protected]
09
May / 10:23pm

Subject: You!

Jake,

You haven’t written back,
so you must beb on a mission. You can’t be that mad, can you? You
would’nt ignorn me, would you? Sometimes I thingk you’re lying when
we say “I love you’. Are you ever think we stayt toghethr because
we’re all we know anymore? Your lasst letter—letter, not emoil—you
seemed I dno[tn know. Ih thought you dind’t agree with us ebeing
over there/? Oh well! Diesn’t matter bercuase the wir is overl!
Jake, you hear me? OVER! I finally feel like I can breathe and like
smiling without caoution won’t get you shot. They didn’t sayk on
the news that it’s over, but you can tellk by the stories. I cant’n
wait to seew you agai, Jaike. We’ll gfet a new houske with no trees
and nop spiders and live happilyyj evern after,. You wnt new, you
got new. You want wall to wall carpting? You got well to weall
carpetingl. You want a bababy? You gotr a babay. Antyhing youi
watn, Jake, because you fought in a war. A WAR. Aand I didn’t
nothing but sit here.