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Authors: Jane Berentson

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BOOK: Long Division
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I stand up and go, leaving the tests, the fork, the pen, my dignity, and the remaining hunks of my spaghetti. Looking oh so
dilishus
.
 
From the teacher's lounge, I call Gus to pick me up. All nine of the admin staff are fussing over me, bringing cooling creams in paper packets and those blue fake-ice pouches. Each of them has offered to drive me home. “Oh, Annie, even with one good eye, your peripheral vision will be all sorts of crazy.” But I don't think I can handle it. Gus works for a linen service, swapping bags of bleached, pressed aprons and towels for soiled, nasty ones from restaurants and bars. Because he's so charming and scrawny he gets free food everywhere he goes, and I'm pretty sure that's why he took the job as his first employment back in the diverse USA. He's eating sushi one minute and Ethiopian food the next. He drives a sweet van and maintains a flexible schedule conducive to philosophizing and taking power naps. He agrees to pick me up. With the blue ice to my eye, I wonder what David will say. I wonder if this is a story worthy of precious phone-call time or if I should simply type it out in an e-mail. If I should even tell him at all. Will it seem completely absurd compared to his stories of shrapnel in skulls and lower-body lacerations?
19
But I don't care. I just want him to be home when I get there. Maybe dumping fruit in the blender for smoothies. Or finding a nice animal program on On Demand cable for me to watch with one eye. He'd say, “Oh, Annie,” but not in the way my mom says it. He'd say it in a way that tells me that whether I stab myself with a fork or a pen or a gold-plated letter opener, it doesn't really matter.
“Well now, matey. Hop in.” Gus's van smells like bleach and Chinese food.
“Thanks for coming, Gus.”
“No problem, kiddo. I was around this area anyway. Mind if I make a stop at Pete's Kitchen before I take you home?”
“No. But can you score me some gravy fries?” I ask, half meaning it. Defeated, I slump over to the window and press the closed lid of my busted eye against the cool glass.
“I'll try.” We pull into the parking lot of the diner and Gus jumps out with a sack of laundry over his shoulder like some sort of sanitation Santa Claus. He turns around and motions for me to roll my window down. I moan and do it anyway. “Hey, look in the glove box, Annie. I think there might be something in there you could use.” He turns and runs into the building.
I rummage through papers, a spilling bag of sunflower seeds, Ovid's
Metamorphosis
, a box of condoms (gross!), and then I fi nd it. A black felt eye patch, the cheap, costumey kind with the elastic stapled on. I laugh for a moment and put it right on. I tilt my head to see my reflection in the rear view mirror. The good eye even looks awful. Smeared makeup. Streaks of red like lines from my teacher's pen. I make a tough, grimacing face that starts as forced but becomes real as the weeping resurrects in my lungs. A voice in my head says,
Arrr. Poor wench! Her man be shot in a nasty skirmish!
I just want to go home.
 
So I told David a Reader's Digest Condensed Version of this story tonight. He called on a “chow break” (I hate it when he talks that way) and I gave him the quick, embarrassing facts. Scratched cornea. At least one week of a beige medical eye patch. I could tell that he felt really bad for me. Sympathy dripped from his voice that usually sounds so scratchy from what I imagine is sand or damage from shouting. “I'm sorry, babe. You taking any time off school to rest?”
“No, I'm fine. It's really not that bad. I can still see and everything. Not like I have glaucoma or anything.”
“What's glaucoma?”
“You don't know what glaucoma is? Never mind, I'll tell you later,” I said. “How are things with you and the U.S. Army?”
“The same. We might be getting some more phones in soon. And then I can call more. I think my great-aunt had glaucoma. Wait, maybe it was her cocker spaniel.”
“Don't worry about it, hon. Just tell me a story or something. Did you get my package?”
“No, not yet. The super-duper-fancy, ultra-delicious brownies have yet to arrive.” He chuckles a bit. “Hey, did you write to Henderson's wife about the knitting group?”
“Oh, yeah. I did. I'm going on Thursday.”
“Well, you don't sound very excited.” I was trying to. I'm a terrible actress.
“I don't knit, David. What am I supposed to do, bring a crossword puzzle or a pile of math quizzes to grade?” I'm trying to sound reasonable, but I know I just sound whiny.
“No. You socialize. Tell stories and laugh and bond and stuff. They seem like cool ladies.” I agree, and then I say something about how it might help me feel less alone to be around people who are also alone in the same way. I don't really believe this, but I could tell it's what David wanted me to think. He shouldn't even be worrying one tiny worry about me anyway. He needs to be looking both ways before crossing the convoy path and double knotting the laces of his boots. He's barely been gone at all; I'm really doing fine. I don't need knitting strangers at this point. And as I write this, I can't help but think about how before he left he really emphasized that the ARMY was his JOB and that he was going away to do some WORK. Now, here he is trying to foist a bit of his JOB onto my LIFE. I've never asked him to sit in on parent/TEACHER conferences. Am I being a bad understander? Do I not want to meet the knitters because I'd rather wallow in my own loneliness than feel like I'm just one in a kabillion women who are doing the same?
I could feel the exasperation swelling on both sides of our conversation, so I steered us away from the knitters, hoping that by the time I reported back to David regarding Mrs. Angie Spice Henderson and Co., I'd have something more positive to say. We spoke for a few more minutes about normal things—life, lust, when I should change the oil in my car. It was really pretty nice. And as I was hanging up the phone I knocked the bed lamp over onto the floor. It broke with a loud snapping sound and a flash. Not fazed by my complete clumsiness, I left it on the floor and rolled into sleep position—just happy that the boom of the crash sounded nothing like a gunshot.
4
T
oday my book is called
Dear John,
but it's not a book anymore. It's a reality television show on Fox. I just got off the phone with my friend Monica from college, who works for them in development. You see, she was helping me write this proposal for a new series that documents the lives of wives and girlfriends of soldiers at war. And it was accepted to film a pilot episode! Angie Spice Henderson and I are flying to L.A. tomorrow to talk to the producers and sign the contract. Aside from The 301st Company Stitch Bitches, we're going to find three or four other women (and maybe one man) in similar situations. Some will have children. Maybe one will be the wife of a private contractor. One will have to be pregnant, maybe even due in the next few months. Camera crews will follow us around while we cry and change diapers and obsessively flip through news channels. They'll zoom in on the photographs of uniformed men on our refrigerators. They'll pan the still-masculine areas of our closets and the vacant men's soft-ball cleats in our garages.
And there will be funny moments too. Annie Harper composing letters to the White House about her therapy reimbursements. Little kids discovering pretend weapons of mass destruction in their tree forts and saying things like
No, I'm Saddam this time. It's my turn.
Hopefully, they'll abstain from a gross patriotic soundtrack and anything too political.
I'm pretty sure America will love it. We can sell ad time to companies like Ford and Oscar Mayer and Coca-Cola. My students will get to be on TV, and they'll love that. They'll love me even more than they already love me. And maybe that could spawn a whole spin-off series:
Miss Harper's Class: A Reality Show for Kids
.
20
People will start to send me mail and presents. A kind billionaire may even offer to fly me in his private jet out to Qatar to meet David when he's on his five-day leave. That episode can be an hour-long special. Commercial breaks just after the cameras watch us giggle and close our hotel room door. So I guess you could say things are looking up.
 
That was all obviously a lie. Tonight, after a thrilling two hours with the knitting group, I passed up karaoke with Gus and his new girlfriend to sit at home waiting for David to maybe call. All the knitting wives were really very nice and really very cool and only spoke in army-abbreviation-speak for about half the time. They are mostly a few years older than myself, except for this raging goth chick, Danielle, who got married when she was eighteen and is now a whopping nineteen. She's from Texas and said she was so ready “to get the hell out of there” last year when she married her high school sweetheart and moved to Tacoma where he was stationed. Now she's going to beauty school, loves the Tacoma music scene, and misses her husband, Chuck, desperately.
“At least I have our two pit bulls,” she said at one point.
“Dogs are great,” I responded. It was my first contribution to the conversation in several minutes. DOGS ARE GREAT. Wow, David. This is so rich and stimulating.
Angela Henderson has a beautiful home and made these delicious biscuit-wrapped baby cocktail sausages with four (4!) different dipping sauces. And although varieties of mustards do impress me very much, and although it was
kind of
a release to rant about the scratchy sound quality of our phone calls from Iraq and sadly shake our heads about a recent helicopter crash, in the end, the women were still strangers and Miss Harper did not have fun. The night would have been better spent with Gus. Or even my own sweet mother. Maybe if I'd known the women before and we were already invested in each other's lives somehow, I would feel better; trying to muster up a connection with them now just feels contrived and artificial. Angie baby, your honey dill sauce blew my mind, but I don't think I'm quite ready to start that cabled scarf.
21
So I came home instead of joining the knitters for a drink downtown. I ended up watching the season finale of
The Bachelor
on TV, where the dude totally made it seem like he was going to pick Rachel but ended up giving Sharon the final rose. What a load of shit! Sharon is a vapid slut whose boobs will probably drop with that rose's first petal. What was he thinking? I was so mad I batted an empty yogurt cup with my spoon at the television. And I actually hit it! I started thinking about how fake all those people seem. How everything they say seems so scripted and generic. They talk about “deep connections” and “sharing genuine moments,” but then the camera just shows them saying things like,
Yeah, I love spending time with family
, and
Communication is sooo important to me.
Then they giggle and do something gross like put food in each other's mouths. Then they make out. Maybe I'm just jealous because I haven't made out in a while. But mostly I'm mad because I know my life (and probably Angie Spice's and Danielle's lives too) is crispier, heartier, more amusing, and more real. Just two seconds of me slapping my own sleepy hand as it accidentally reaches for the triangle of David's perfect toilet paper would show people. I'm real. This is life.
I'm real.
This is life.
I'm real.
This is life.
Wipe carefully.
Dip carefully.
Eat carefully.
Give roses carefully.
Do everything carefully.
22
5
T
oday I'm calling my book
Don't You Call Me a Hero.
 
My mother took me to a quilt show. She likes to plan little mother/ daughter outings for us. Many of these events are rife with girliness—things that she cannot drag my father to. There are some outings that I enjoy (opening nights of Jane Austen movies) and others (scrapbooking workshops) during which I work very hard to conceal my distaste. We often go to lunch at cafés where they ask you, “Would you like to sit in our tea garden?” To which I usually say something like, “Oh, you grow tea out there?” and the waitress, who is surely told to perform with unfaltering cuteness, says something like, “Oh no, dear, the garden is for drinking tea.” Then I order black coffee. Then my mother gives me a look.
BOOK: Long Division
5.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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