The faint at the Lemoore Starbucks counted as different from previous ones because it was the first for which I had no obvious backup to come get me, or laugh about yet another addition to my long history of embarrassments. Ross and I had e-mailed sporadically, but an actual phone call was still a month or more away. In order to release me from their impromptu care, the paramedics insisted that I call someone, and when I insisted back that I was fine, they counterinsisted, for liability reasons. Thankfully, a nearby group of women volunteered to take charge of me long enough for my color to return.
The women turned out to be military wives married to enlisted men in the Army, and as I sat there sipping my water, I learned that their husbands were serving out year-long deployments in Iraq. As in, twelve months in a combat zone for a fraction of the pay Ross was getting. And after two weeks with my husband in the Pacific, a tour I’d been hearing derisively referred to as a “booze cruise,” there I sat with my swollen foot and thready pulse, willing my hands to stop shaking as a thick bar of sunlight painted the back of my neck and spilled onto my lap and the chairs around me, making everything, including the kind and patient smiles of the women monitoring my color, look thoroughly normal and thoroughly fine. I was the sensitive kid again, the one who couldn’t handle it. The women invited me to their evangelical Christian church service the following week, and I wondered briefly if maybe that was the missing piece, a bracing dose of Jesus in my life, but ultimately I finished my water, gushed my profuse thanks and profound embarrassment, and limped back to the truck and my empty house, where I put a bag of frozen peas on my foot and sat down for a good cry.
The most difficult part of the early days of the deployment was this periodic feeling of being vulnerable. Even scarier, though, was the realization that my instincts here, the construction of a front of competency and strategies like toughing it out, were doomed to fail. Stella was offended when I relayed the story to her and showed her the bruise that would have me limping for a week, but would remain otherwise uninvestigated.
“Jesus, what’s the matter with you? Call me.”
“Don’t worry, you’re on my boxcar injury speed dial now,” I joked, but she didn’t laugh. We always kidded, always rolled our eyes at the syrupy lines we heard at the wives’ club meetings about leaning on “your Navy family.” That was part of what made it okay for her to know how messed up my life really was. That, and my determination that I would not have to lean.
“We’re on our own now. You get that, right? We look out for each other.” We’re on our own now. But for the first time since Ross had started leaving, months before the boat actually took him, I felt like that might not be true.
CHAPTER 10
When Ross and I got married, I made a rule: no base living. As much as possible we would live “out in town” wherever we were stationed and work to cultivate a network of nonmilitary friends, a separation of life and work, and a place to be off duty. It was also a way for me to keep the Navy at arm’s length and maintain my own identity and sense of privacy. It all seemed like a good idea, and it worked for five years, from the beginning of flight school and up to Lemoore. Then I discovered that we were living across the street from a meth dealer.
Hip-Hop was what Ross and I called him, and he spent his days mostly in his own half-open garage, where he slouched shirtless in a lawn chair, smoking cigarettes and texting for hours at a time. He wore big, white-framed plastic sunglasses and baggy pajama pants with a loud print of electric green surf company logos. Cars came and went in his driveway all day. They pulled in with windows down and subwoofers thumping and, like a grouchy, pimp-limping carhop, he would stroll over and lean against the driver’s side, blow a blue jet of smoke up over his shoulder, and chat for a moment. Then he would disappear inside his house and return, lean fully inside the window and punch knuckles with the driver and passengers a couple of times, and then off they would go and he would return to his lawn chair. Other characters lived there too, or rotated in and out—a girl I called Two-Tone for her blond-on-top, black-on-bottom hair color; Bulldog, a bald, mashed-faced guy; and Little Pants, an impossibly skinny guy on the cutting edge of teenage fashion in his breathlessly tight pants. Various toddlers came and went, herded by girls with stringy hair and big jackets. The entire cast was white, and at first it was kind of comical, the seriousness with which he took his avocation in this rural farming town. I told Stella Hip-Hop stories when we drank beers on her back porch after she put her kids to bed.