Career talk wasn’t the only subject that seemed to bring up an invisible wall between the brunch wives and myself. Though they were all at least five years younger than me—I was twenty-seven at this point and two years married—three out of four of them had children. The hard part was that I wanted very much to have a baby, but I couldn’t imagine how we would manage it with our current lifestyle, and this actually had less to do with Ross’s job and more to do with my own stalled career goals. Some kind of advanced degree, I had decided, would be my way of shoring up a credential before I took the plunge into motherhood, but that would require us to stay in one place long enough for me to get it. Until then, I sat glumly stuffing quiche into my mouth, listening to the impossible challenges of chafed nipples and episiotomy stitches, and realizing I had nothing appropriate to say. The extra years I had on these women had been spent answering phones for a living, dating without any sense of purpose, and getting blackout drunk on the weekends. I hadn’t planned for this life. Ross and I seemed to occupy this weird middle ground between the single pilots we knew who were dating and partying and the married ones with babies and full sets of matching furniture. We had a foot in both worlds, but belonged wholly to neither.
When I finally found my own sort of community, it was in the wives’ club in Kingsville, Texas, while Ross was going through the advanced syllabus in flight school. The Lady Redhawks were exactly the type of group I never would have joined if I hadn’t married Ross. I didn’t consider myself a “club person” even for my own passions, and couldn’t imagine becoming one for a group that existed because all of its members’ husbands worked together. Nevertheless, the Lady Redhawks surprised me. Even going to the first meeting took lots of psyching up. I made Ross double-check with his instructors that I was welcome before I risked another humiliation.
What made the Lady Redhawks different as a group started with its leadership—the commanding officer’s wife, Mariah, was a jeans and beer woman who took the unorthodox approach of encouraging the group to elect a president and a vice president, and a whole board, and then treat her as its very laid-back trustee, as opposed to the more common model of taking on the presidential role, and all the activity planning, herself. The result was a blurring of the lines of rank and seniority among all of us, a more relaxed atmosphere in which it was actually possible to let go, for a moment, of the awkwardness of hanging out with someone whose husband was helping decide the fate of my own. By far, though, the most helpful part about the wives’ club I belonged to in Kingsville was Lady Redhawk Day, an interactive tour of the flight simulators, radar room, control tower, and paraloft for which we were encouraged to borrow one of our husbands’ flight suits. The finale was getting to strap on a helmet, mask, and ejection seat harness and take a brief but thrilling full-speed trip down the runway in the backseat of a trainer jet before the pilot, a very patient instructor who coached us on a few radio calls and warned us to keep our hands off the ejection handle, taxied back to the hangar to pick up yet another wife. Mariah encouraged us all to attend by warning us, “You’ll never get another opportunity with the Navy like this again.”
Throughout Ross’s three-year tenure in flight school, this was one of two official indications I had that the Navy knew I existed. The other was a brief form he brought home just after we first arrived in Kingsville. Where could I be located in the event there was an “incident” on the flight line? The form suggested: “Bridge club, dancing, other service clubs?” Did I have any medical conditions that might make hearing unpleasant news particularly dangerous? Would I like a clergyman present when they notified me? In Kingsville with the Lady Redhawks, I learned to appreciate the comfort of camaraderie with the other women who’d had to fill out such a form, even when it was clear we had very little else in common.
—
By the time Ross earned his wings and we were ready to leave Kingsville and flight school behind, I was sad to see it go. I’d managed to make a few more friends and my job was ready to promote me, plus it had been nice being a mere four-hour drive from my family in central Texas. I had hoped for us to be assigned to Virginia Beach, Virginia, next, a city big enough to have a few universities within striking distance, and a variety of programs I had been researching—teaching, writing, maybe American literature, maybe even something like history or Middle Eastern studies. There were summer workshops, museums, art festivals—many more places I felt I had a likelihood of finally finding a niche, a purpose. We listed Virginia Beach as our first choice and crossed our fingers, but then the orders came through: Lemoore, California. The next stage was a stint in the FRS, or Fleet Replacement Squadron, which everyone still called by its old acronym, the RAG, or Replacement Air Group, a giant training squadron to teach the newly minted pilots to fly the F/A-18 Super Hornet. After Ross completed his time in the RAG, there would be another opportunity to try for Virginia Beach, for the next three-year stage in his career. Maybe grad school could wait until then. After three relocations in three years of flight school, I was confident I could do anything for twelve months.