Similarly unimpressed with me were the prison system and the tomato factory, which, honestly, was a relief since both would have relied heavily on my atrophied Spanish language skills. When a well-known Southern novelist from the college English department called me one morning two months later, I was deep into an unemployment funk and filling out an application to the local hardware store, knowing I was facing stiff competition from the local teenagers. “I’m sorry it’s taken us a while to get moving on this,” he drawled apologetically. “I was just hoping you hadn’t gone off and gotten a job at McDonald’s already.” We both laughed as though the idea were preposterous and arranged for an interview. In the meantime, I was to send him some writing samples. My plan was to worm my way into the university as an employee, get in-state residency, and then use my employee education benefit to take one graduate class at a time, chipping away at a master’s in rhetoric and composition until I finally had the credentials and experience to teach full freshman seminars, not just writing labs, at community colleges. The novelist, my new boss, waved his hand dismissively at all of this. “You need to be in the MFA program,” he said. “And not in a year. Now.”
And thus did my own training regimen finally start. For three years I had followed Ross across the country as he crammed his head full of weather patterns, the physics of flight, and emergency procedures, three years of wild flight student parties where guys set off M-80s in their rental house bathrooms and smashed watermelons all over the kitchen because they didn’t care if they got the deposit back. I was finally claiming “study nights” of my own, burying myself in mountains of essays and memoirs, and dragging Ross to poetry readings and book signings where the crowd still drank just as hard but also had conversations about the National Book Award. It was exhilarating, finally being the one to introduce Ross to new people and explain shop talk to him instead of the other way around. It also felt like the balance of power in our relationship was shifting into something closer to equilibrium. He had his goal that he was working for and I had mine—not just a placeholder job, not just a means of treading water while I waited for the next relocation—but finally a reason for me to be where I was. It wasn’t just that Ross’s calendar was no longer the only one we lived by, and it wasn’t just that my job neatly covered my tuition with a little left over so that I wasn’t draining the household income to follow my own path. It was the difference between making the best of an accident and deciding there was actually a purpose for my being in California. I found power in that purpose, and it made the weeks Ross wasn’t around easier to bear.
It also meant I was finally making some friends, even if they lived an hour’s drive from the town I was currently calling home. I had an entirely separate community in which I could stake out an identity, one in which it didn’t matter a bit what Ross did, where his call sign was not some kind of required recitation to help people place who I was. In Lemoore, though, I was back at square one, the memory of the awkward party of instructors’ wives in Corpus Christi fresh in my mind. I found myself wondering if I was ever going to fit in among Navy wives.
Jessie, my first best friend in the military community, was hard to find. “Bendy Jessie” was a former ballerina turned podiatrist’s assistant, with ice blue eyes, dark hair, and a freckled, upturned nose and the hilarious and amazing habit of pulling physical stunts like one-armed push-ups and standing splits against the wall when she’d had a few drinks. She was five years younger than me, direct and practical, and wise in a way I sometimes found unnerving. Her boyfriend, Brad, was a gigantic, crew-cut Marine who had gone through advanced training with Ross in Kingsville, throughout which time Jessie had remained back home in Florida where she and Brad had met. They moved in together when Brad moved out to Lemoore, but it was another couple of months before we actually started hanging out.
Brad was keen to get Jessie and me together, and initially I resisted, seeing it as some kind of weird boyfriend-initiated playdate. The feeling, it turned out, was mutual, Jessie being naturally suspicious of Navy wives and still trying to find her bearings in a new town. Our friendship unfolded over dinners and drinks, first at both of our houses and then mostly at hers, and it quickly left the stiff, collegial bond shared by Ross and Brad in the dust. It was liberating, frankly, hanging out with someone whose significant other, as a Marine, wasn’t in competition with Ross for grades or positions, the kind of competition it takes a lot of energy to ignore. Soon it was mostly me going over to hang out with Jessie and Brad, and then just me and Jessie going to the gym, or dress shopping in Fresno for the Hornet Ball, or getting riotously drunk on Tuaca at her house and playing dress-up with her old dance costumes. We could roll our eyes at the awkward encounters we each weathered on base, me as a wife unattached to a club and Jessie toeing the peculiarly sensitive line girlfriends walk, where other spouses tried politely to figure out who you were or where you belonged.