On Friday night, I wore my TOPGUN Wife shirt, accidentally dropped my phone in the toilet, and spent most of the night looking for Stella and other friends I’d lost touch with outside of Facebook and not finding them. Ross and I spent Saturday subdued with hangovers in a little TOPGUN clot by the pool, but by evening, we had recovered and were looking for adventure. The early part of the evening was frittered away on cab rides back and forth across town, again trying to figure out where we belonged and with whom and not agreeing. Finally, Ross and Jake got in touch and arranged a time for us all to meet up with Stella and her sister and brother-in-law, also a Navy pilot, who were in from the East Coast. We ended up finding what looked like a tiny country and western bar hidden way back in the corner of the hotel, a giant, mirror-covered boot glittering over the dance floor. It was sparsely populated. Our group of six was the only Navy presence.
Stella and I hadn’t talked much in the year I’d been gone, apart from a few scattered text messages, though she and her kids had been on my mind pretty much constantly. She was busy with a new consulting venture that relied heavily on recruiting a network of military wives, and at first she seemed “on” and connected in a way that made me feel small and boring, holed up in the boonies with my baby and a husband who was never home. But the more we talked, the more I just let it all out. With Stella, I wasn’t afraid to say that I was a mess, or that I was afraid my writing would never amount to anything, or that I didn’t have any friends. I missed her terribly and told her so.
“Don’t worry—it’s hard when your kids are babies, but it gets better. And you’ll make friends. You’re my Roxy, God damn it,” she said, referring to my nickname from our drinking days during deployment. “Show them all how awesome you are.”
By the end of the night I had resolved to find my footing in Fallon. I had found Jessie before and I had found Stella. I could find other friends if I looked hard enough. After all, we finally had the Murderboard behind us and Sam was close to being fully weaned. In another couple of months he could be walking, and then, who knew? Maybe Ross would be home more, maybe I could have some time to myself, get back to writing, and regain a sense of who I was outside of an exhausted mother and subpar housewife. This alienated, off-balance feeling was all in my head, a holdover from the bout of postpartum depression and my fluctuating hormones from coming off breastfeeding. Time to shake it off and get my head back in the game.
The DJ switched from country standards to old Michael Jackson songs and I strutted out on dance floor, vodka confident. I love to dance, and as I shook the stiffness from my muscles and felt the beat drown out all the chatter in my head, old feelings of freedom and possibility started to come back. A stranger appeared out of nowhere, a young man in a fedora who squared off in front of me and initiated the first honest-to-God dance battle I’d ever been in. Heart pounding and covered in sweat, I eventually conceded to him, but I felt lit up and visible in a way that I hadn’t in years. By now, the floor was filling up with people and we danced—Stella and I, Jake and I, Stella and Ross, all of us together, and finally Ross and I, his grip on my hands and waist strong and forceful, as if at last we remembered who we were.
CHAPTER 19
Back in Fallon five months after Tailhook, I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom weeping into a bright yellow hand towel while Sam sat chest deep in bubbles and whacked away at his Fridge Farm and Ross put a tray of wedge french fries into the oven. Periodically, I leaned forward and retched into the toilet bowl, a move Sam watched with interest before going back to his whacking, only now with the added sound effect of his own version of my gagging and moaning. The imitation was one he had perfected from mornings in his high chair as he watched me scrambling eggs and then lurching to the kitchen sink. He’d even learned to top it off with an “oh, God.” That evening, however, I was unable to give him the usual weak smile and say, “Thanks, buddy.” I was pregnant again, the result of the night we’d been on the dance floor, and the morning sickness this time around was much worse and continuing well into my second trimester.