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Becoming a Navy wife wasn’t something I had spent much time thinking about. Up until I met Ross, I had been fairly certain that marriage was not in my future, or if so, it was part of a distant future, like maybe after a long and tumultuous life of adventure during which I’d thoroughly established my identity and career, a formidable woman of means in my own right and not just So-and-so’s wife who tags along. I’d seen enough of what work-related separations had done to my parents and I had no intention of repeating the pattern.
On top of that, we were now also talking about war, politics, oaths, service, real danger, and sacrifice. Supporting Ross in joining the Navy at a time when our country was at war in the Middle East, a place I’d briefly lived and still felt conflicted about, was a tall order. To say that I believed we were fighting for something more than oil, and that I was willing to underwrite that belief with the life of someone I loved, was something I couldn’t quite do. The best I could offer was that I honored his dream to fly and that service to one’s country, as a principle and as a profession, is noble. “I can live with that,” he’d said. But I wasn’t sure I could. Whatever the course of the war abroad, he and I would have to find some way to maintain peace at home, both in our marriage and in our chosen community. Would either place tolerate someone with as many reservations as I already had?
At its heart, the question of Ross joining the Navy brought up a feeling in me that had become distressingly familiar long before the depression, the drugs, and the expulsion from boarding school made it official: “I don’t belong here.” I felt it as a white, teenage American girl in Saudi Arabia, I felt it as the daughter of an oil rig worker and a public school teacher living among the rich elite in boarding school, and I felt it as the subject of unspoken scandal when I returned, medicated and disoriented, to my hometown public school. And those are just the most tangible examples—looking back, I can see the beginnings of my sense of not belonging taking root years before my family started moving around. Ross was fully committed to going somewhere I was not sure I could follow.
CHAPTER 2
My sharpest memory is a repeating one, an event that happened so many times and in so many contexts over the years that it has almost lost its meaning from wear. It looks like this: a girl, anywhere from three to seventeen years old, standing at a barrier—sometimes a rope, sometimes a gate, sometimes a giant smooth plate of glass, and sometimes nothing, just an understanding that here you can’t go any farther—and watching a man, her father, most often wearing a gray windbreaker, blend into a crowd of travelers. Realist Dad becomes Pointillist Dad, and finally Impressionist Dad. Is he really: that guy in line, able to see me, waving back? He’s definitely: leaving again, indistinct, already gone.
My dad’s work schedule has been predictably unpredictable since before I can remember. Our kitchen calendars tracked his movements in long color-coded lines labeled with my mother’s loopy, half-capitalized handwriting: “RoycE HOME!” “RoycE GonE.” Shift work usually meant even measures of time on and time off—two weeks on, two weeks off, or a month on, a month off—but often there were training schools tacked on, or extended absences for towing the rig somewhere for repairs, which could mean up to three months away. Even then, weather could delay the helicopters that ferried men to and from the rig for shift change, further cheating the days home. Planning anything required a consultation with the calendar, and if the event—my piano recital, the school play, our birthdays—was too far ahead of his known schedule, the answer to questions of guest lists or permission forms was, “Just put Mom and then save a space just in case.” In response to a work calendar that had no flexibility, we became fantastically rubbery in our accounting for holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas were the only big ones we really celebrated and they slid to the left or right as needed.