DEAREST GIRL,
Thirty more days until the Big One! I’m marking them off on the barracks calendar. After that, Jeannie, we’ll be together forever. No more of this weekend nonsense. I can’t tell you how much I miss my own true love ...
Dearest Girl,
Are you counting the days? Fifteen more and I’ll be spending all my nights in much better company than I do now. At least you don’t snore like the guy from Kentucky in the bunk over mine. (And you smell a lot better, too!) In fact, if I shut my eyes right now, I can see your sweet face and hear your voice ...
Sweetheart,
Just a few more days and I’ll be an old married man! It’s hard to believe, but as they say in the song, if I’m dreaming, don’t wake me up. Everything is set at this end. Hey, I passed my blood test with flying colors! ...
Dearest,
I just came off guard duty and I’m half dead on my feet, but I couldn’t go to sleep without saying good night to my own true love. I’ll see you in my dreams, and in just six more days—six, count ’em!—we’ll be together ...
It was awfully warm on the floor of the closet and I was nervous that Mother or Karen might come home early. I had read all the letters by now, right up to the last one just before the weekend pass when they got married. Then I started to read them all over again. I felt pretty guilty about it. I hadn’t looked at them for a long time. In fact, I was hoping they wouldn’t be there when I opened the closet. But the box was in its usual place, way in the back behind some old blankets that Karen used at camp last summer. Even when I saw it, I hoped there would just be some brown suede shoes inside. Of course the letters were still there, each in its own envelope. On the outside of each one, Daddy had written, RUSH or FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP, or SWAK.
I wondered what had happened to all the letters that Mother must have sent him before the wedding. Did men ever save things like that? I remembered that Daddy didn’t seem to save anything. When he still lived with us and we went to look at model homes on Sunday, he always said we’d need an extra room for all the old junk Mother wouldn’t throw away. Of course they joked about it then, Daddy teasing her about being sentimental, and Mother smiling and teasing back.
We rode out into the country on beautiful Sunday afternoons and looked at perfect houses that no one lived in. We looked at bathrooms with silk ribbons across the toilet seats (so no one would use them by mistake), and at kitchens with plastic steaks and rubber tomatoes in the refrigerator. We used to pretend that we lived there, and Daddy complained that the steak was a little too chewy. I remember that we all laughed about a lot of silly things.
But on some Sundays, no one laughed or teased. In fact, there was hardly a word said in the car on the way back, and Mother sat close to the door on her side, and Daddy looked straight ahead at the road. When they finally did speak they were very polite, the way you are when you ask directions of a stranger in the street. I leaned forward from the back seat, wishing I could think of something funny to say that would make everybody laugh and relax again. I wished that Daddy would go around a curve in the road very quickly so that Mother would fall over against him and not sit so far away. Daddy once said that when he was younger his friends called those curves “C.O.D.’s,” meaning, “Come over, dear.”
He could just say it. “Come over, dear.” Or she could. Instead, we drove and drove until we came to a hamburger stand and then both of them talked only to Karen and me. “Do you want a hamburger?” Mother said, even though I always had the same thing each time we stopped: a hamburger, French-fried potatoes, and a strawberry shake. I guess she just wanted to talk to somebody.
“You know,” I said, feeling angry with both of them. Everything was spoiled when they were like that. Nothing was any fun and I didn’t even feel hungry when Daddy came out again with the bag of food.
Then they started acting that way at home too and it was very quiet most of the time. Once in a while a door slammed and I could hear words, angry and loud, and then water ran in the bathroom, or the toilet flushed, so I couldn’t make any sense of what they were saying. How did they start being so angry with each other in the first place? I couldn’t remember and I wondered if it was my fault somehow, or Karen’s.
We stopped going to look at model homes on Sunday. Daddy went out by himself sometimes, and Mother sat and read the newspaper, dropping pages at her feet and sighing. Then one Sunday they spoke to us, to Karen and me, about what was going to happen. I crossed my fingers throughout the whole thing, to make it a big lie, but that didn’t work. Daddy put one arm around each of us. “You’re two wonderful kids,” he said. “You both know how much I love you, don’t you? And your mother does too, of course. Well, that’s not going to change.”
Mother smiled at us and nodded her head. “That’s right,” she said. “Nothing could ever change our feelings for you.”
They smiled at each other and they kept agreeing about everything as if they were good friends again. They said that Daddy would come to see us often and we could go to see him whenever we liked.
“Are you listening, Teddy?” my mother said once, because by then I was looking at my shoes, so that I wouldn’t have to look at them again, at their eyes. I remember that I didn’t want to cry.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I’m listening.”
But I must have looked very unhappy. Maybe I was actually crying a little, because Daddy pulled me onto his lap suddenly and held me close. “It just worked out this way, honey,” he said. “But I’ll be here when you need me. You’ll see.”
Then Karen, who had been rubbing her eyes and acting cross, became really restless. She acted like a baby, trying to push me off Daddy’s lap, and pulling on his sleeve and whining about going out for ice cream. Ice cream!
But that’s what we did. We went out and had big ice-cream sundaes, as if everything was settled, as if we all had something to celebrate. It was two years now. Two years ago on May 17. That was the last day Daddy lived in our apartment. I remember that date as if it were some important national holiday. Sometimes crazy little things stay in your head forever, and other things that you try to remember fly right out. Like real historical dates and the names of all the generals in famous battles. I really have to work very hard before a Social Studies test, saying those names and dates to myself over and over again. But I still remember my father’s car being driven away from the front of our house on May 17 two years ago. I remember going to the corner and then going to the next corner, running so that I could keep it in sight. But the car picked up speed and I was running so hard my heart thumped, and the car was only a spot of blue on the very edge of my eye, a little toy wind-up car disappearing around the last corner.
Dearest Girl, Are you counting the days?
I read the words over and over again. How could you believe anything anyone says? I put the last letter back into its envelope, and then the telephone rang. I was so startled that I jumped. I jammed the letters back into the box and shoved it behind the camp blankets in a hurry. Then I crawled out of the closet and answered the phone.
At first I thought it was a wrong number or a crank call. Somebody with a very peculiar voice said, “Dollink? Is dot you, dollink?” Then someone else, whose voice sounded familiar, said, “Hey, quit that! Give me that phone, you guys!” There was giggling and then scuffling sounds and a blast of music.
“Hello,” I said. “Hello? Hello?”
I was going to hang up when the voice said, “Teddy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“This is me. Steve.” There was a sound of banging in the background.
“What’s all that noise?” I asked, wondering why in the world he was calling.
“Oh, that’s just some of the guys. You know. Fooling around.”
“Where are you?”
“In a phone booth, down in the candy store.” There was another sudden blast of music and then some yelling. “Hey, cut it out! I can’t hear anything. Hey, you guys!” And all the noise stopped abruptly.
“That’s better,” Steve said. “Hello. I’m back again. I closed the door.”
“Hello.”
“Hello to you too.”
“We said that already.”
“Right. So what’s new with you?” he asked.
“Nothing. What’s new with you?”
“Nothing. Say, did you get a new deck of cards yet?”
“No,” I said, trying to think of something else to say.
“How’s your friend? What’s-her-name?”
“You mean Maya?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Maya.”
“She’s okay.”
“That’s good.”
“How’s Bruce?”
“Old Brucie? He’s A-Okay.”
Pause. Silence. “Who do you have for Social Studies?” I asked.
“What?”
I cleared my throat. “Who do you have for Social Studies?”
“Lanahan.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know him. He was a new teacher.
“Who do you have?” Steve asked.
“Mr. Haberman.”
“He’s okay,” Steve said. “I had him last year.”
I could hear the dime dropping into the coin box. “There goes your dime,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, the guys are waiting for me anyway.” As if to prove it, the terrible noises started again in the background. “Maybe I’ll see you one of these days, Teddy.”
“I guess so.”
A recorded message cut in, warning that the call would be interrupted unless five cents was deposited.
“I guess I’ll hang up now,” Steve said.
“Thanks for calling.”
“Give my regards to what’s-her-name, your girlfriend.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you around, Teddy.”
“Goodbye,” I said, but I think he had already hung up. I had just enough time to straighten out the box of letters and tuck it neatly back in place before Mother came home from the bank. A few minutes after that, Karen came in too.
“What’s for supper?” I asked Mother. I really wanted to ask her how people ever manage to fall in love in the first place, but I didn’t know how to say it.
“Franks and beans,” Mother said.