I didn’t cook for Ross’s Murderboard. That’s the sound of hurdle number one smacking right into my knee. Instead, homesick and exhausted, Sam and I fled to Texas for two weeks. I often brought store-bought frozen lasagnas to MiG Killers, and I showed up to wives’ club meetings unshowered and with chewed-up baby food on my shirt, which I scrubbed at furiously with a baby wipe in the seconds before I got out of my car. Hurdles two and three, smack, smack. Presenting what I considered a sane and competent face to the world was a project that kept getting put off for another day when Sam napped better or when our dog, who had suddenly developed diabetes, hadn’t puked or peed all over the carpet again or when Ross was finally home to help out with some of the housework or figure out why the smoke alarms kept going off or why there was water building up in the crawlspace under the house. When that day arrived, then I could start having people over and work at forming some friendships. Until then, we were in triage mode.
A TOPGUN wife must also deal with the often-negative perception that comes from being associated with the club within a club. A wall exists, and it is built—sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose—by hands on both sides. Just as a largely inaccurate outside perception of elitism or snobbery follows her like a foul scent, so does her own idea of what she must live up to as an instructor’s wife. The Patch, after all, casts a long shadow, and its inescapable presence can distort reality. In my case, it cast everyone else I met in association with TOPGUN in the honeyed light of utter perfection, and me, alone in a perfect, Patch-shaped shadow of Not Quite Measuring Up.
Buying a house before Ross had actually completed the course he was intended to instruct was a bit of a risk, one I worried made us look overconfident. Though the social divide between the wives of actual instructors and the wives of students slated to become instructors is actively spoken against in the TOPGUN SSG, it tends to get honored anyway. I told myself that the weeks, and then the months, I spent cloistered in the house mooning over my infant were temporary; that I was erring on the side of caution initially and that later I could find and hire sitters, make friends, get back to writing; and that as soon as I got caught up on some sleep and starting working out again I’d start to feel more human and less completely nuts.
Our first house. Every room, every window, every shelf, every closet, the play of light and shadow at every hour of the day and every season of the year, will likely remain burned into my memory for the rest of my life. I spent entirely too much time in my house. This was easy to do because it was obnoxiously beautiful, defiantly so in the face of everything that surrounded it. It was the kind of place we never would have been able to afford were it not for the housing crisis. The backyard alone made it hard to leave—every window across the back of the house gave out onto a carefully designed garden oasis with roses, lilac bushes, daylilies, wild primroses, juniper and cherry trees, and a little burbling stream fed by a circulating pump. According to the real estate agent, the whole thing had been designed by the previous couple when the wife began battling cancer, and I could see how nice it must have been, on days when she felt awful or exhausted, just to sit and watch the butterflies and birds that seemed to exist nowhere else in the windswept bleakness outside the fence.
Our house sat at the base of Rattlesnake Hill, directly across the street from the cemetery and separated from the funeral home next door by a thin irrigation canal. Through the living room windows and across the canal, I could see a parking lot full of mourners every couple of days and a periodic delivery of new caskets arriving by eighteen-wheeler. Our lot was a little spur hanging off of a proper neighborhood, and our house huddled with its back to the tidy, enclosed streets behind it, instead facing the (relatively) busy intersection of a road that looped around one side of Rattlesnake Hill to a dirt racing track and then around the other side to a small Paiute-Shoshone colony with its attached administrative offices, the local pound, the trap club, and a small civilian airstrip. The view out our front door was of headstones to the left and alfalfa to the right, with about fifty head of Black Angus cattle shuffling around in the winter, and a low range of bluish purple mountains beyond. At night, from the top of the hill, a white neon cross and a small stand of red-lit radio towers watched over it all.
—
By June, Ross had finished the class and embarked on his Murderboard preparation. Sam was nearly eleven months old. Ross and I had been on opposite schedules for nearly six months and had discovered something else about our house—it was possible to live together in it and rarely run into each other except in a few conflict zones, like the kitchen and the laundry room. I began to feel with an increasing keenness just how isolated we had become, both from a larger community of friends and from each other. I had met a few of the other wives, and had even had a couple over to the house, but without a job, proper sleep, or much regular adult contact beyond the checkers at Walmart, I found it almost impossible to come up with things to talk about. Instead, I listened. I heard just enough background on some of the running conflicts and history among and between the TOPGUN wives’ group and the larger NSAWC OSC to become thoroughly intimidated by it all and convinced they would immediately out me as a fraud, and that any missteps I might make had the potential of torpedoing Ross’s reputation and possibly his career. Default house arrest with an exemption for diaper runs didn’t seem that bad in comparison, but luckily, we were fast approaching an opportunity for Ross and me to get out of town altogether, just the two of us, the first such opportunity in more than two years: a date to the Tailhook Convention.