Things would change between the two of us as well. I had helped Ross memorize data and procedures for the small trainer propeller plane everyone flew in the beginning of flight school, and then in his first trainer jet, and that little bit of shared effort had made me feel like I had a small but important role to play. But when Ross moved on to the F/A-18 Super Hornet, his training manuals were classified and locked in a vault, where he had to check in with an intelligence specialist, leave his cell phone outside, and keep his written notes in a binder that stayed in the vault. I was shocked to discover how keenly I missed our repetitive study sessions, and how much it felt like a door had been closed in our relationship and what we could share of this job that affected the both of us so profoundly.
Finding an identity for myself during flight school was like trying to plant a garden in a highway median. Every time I landed a job and built up some relationships in it, another relocation order would come plowing through it. After the retail bookstore job in Pensacola, I found a part-time job teaching community college writing labs in Corpus Christi, Texas, while Ross worked his way up to the selection to jets, and I held on to that job tenaciously when we moved an hour south, to Kingsville. Between the commute and my limited hours, I barely broke even on the endeavor, but it was hard enough to convince someone to hire a military spouse who would definitely relocate. Also, it felt vital to hold on to something of my own, some reason, no matter how tiny, for me to be in a particular location beyond just following Ross.
Once, in Corpus Christi, I showed up at a gathering of Navy spouses that had been mentioned in an e-mail chain I’d received. I was there for a half hour, fielding a flurry of polite but obviously confused questions about where I had come from, before someone finally said, loudly, “Oh, you’re a student’s wife!” The unspoken understanding, at least for this place—which was patiently and politely explained to me as I stood there trying not to let the drink in my hand shake with my humiliation—was that so many students came through the class, and stayed so briefly even if they didn’t wash out and get eliminated from the pilot program, that, though the e-mail list included everyone, the wives’ club was really open to only the instructors’ wives.
I had a friend, Annie, who taught labs alongside me at the community college in Corpus Christi and was married to her college sweetheart, another student pilot. She and I got along well and it saddened me when she quit the job to have a baby and move with her husband to Kingsville, where he had been assigned to the E-2 pipeline, command and control planes. When Ross selected for jets, the silver lining for me was that we’d be moving to Annie’s town, since both the jet and the E-2 communities trained there. It was a few months after she’d had her baby when she invited me to start attending the weekly brunch of a few of the other wives she was getting to know in the E-2 community, and I jumped at the chance to reconnect.
“I don’t think they’ll mind, even though you’re a jet wife,” she said jokingly.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t marry the plane,” I replied. But Annie’s veiled warning turned out to be true. It did matter that I wasn’t one of them. They would all be cycling through the same set of cities in the future, their husbands all on a timeline that meant they would be hitting career landmarks simultaneously. It seemed obvious to me that Annie and I really had more in common as friends than she did with the other E-2 wives, one of whom was downright nasty to her, but what I was learning was that our friendship had an expiration date that was rapidly approaching. She and I might never see each other again, but she would need to find a way to make peace with the other women for years.