twelve

You Have the Right to Swoon

The door to the men’s bedroom slammed shut. I heard scuffling, then roars of laughter.

What the hell were they doing in there? I shook my head and continued down the hall towards my own room.

The last week of training was reserved for final exams and handing in assignments. As usual, our little gang had met in one of our bedrooms to study together and proofread each other’s work, which consisted of orders for range firing exercise. For appearances’ sake, I always went to one of the guys’ rooms now. Halfway through the course, a warrant officer had found Rheaume sitting on my bed as we reviewed notes for an assignment, and although I had been fully dressed, he’d been wearing just a t-shirt and boxer shorts. It was nothing out of the ordinary. All the guys walked around in their briefs. I thought nothing of it. Plus, the door to my bedroom had been left wide open. We were reprimanded for fraternizing despite our assurances that nothing had happened. Of course, the instructors couldn’t know that there could never be anything between Rheaume and me, even if he was beautiful in every way. Rheaume had a secret.

As soon as I left to head back to my own room, the guys quickly slammed the door, and I heard them laugh like schoolboys up to no good. This little routine of theirs had happened repetitively throughout the course every time I left their room and I was determined to finally find out why.

I approached Fabien later that night as he was sitting in the laundry room polishing his boots.

“Fab, what is it you guys do every time I leave the room? I can hear you fooling around and laughing.” He kept his gaze on his boots and chuckled.

“Can’t tell you. It’s a guy thing.”

“Come on, Fab, it’s not fair. I miss out on so much already, alone in my room all the time.” I purposefully made my voice sound syrupy and whiney so that I could guilt him into spilling the beans. “Just tell me this one thing, or let me join in next time. It sounds like you guys are having so much fun.” I laid it on thick. If there was one of the boys who would give in, it would be Fabien.

“The guys are going to kill me if I tell you and there’s no way in hell you can join in.” That made me even more curious. I could tell there was a small fissure in his armour and so I stared at him, willing him to continue or I’d have to wear him down. We both knew I could.

“It’ll be our little secret,” I whispered.

“Shit,” he said, relenting more easily than I had anticipated. “As soon as you leave we fight and wrestle over who gets to smell the spot where you were sitting.”

“What do you mean smell the spot — Oh my God!” I screamed as the visuals of them scrambling to stick their nose on the place where I’d been sitting on the mattress took form in my mind. “That’s sick! You guys are pigs!” I punched him hard, which was like punching a brick wall, and stomped away disgusted. I could hear him howling with laughter behind me. I walked back to my room, pulled out my journal, and started writing.

I can’t say it enough: thank you so much, Mom and Dad, for giving me only sisters …

The weekend before graduation, Kevin returned from his UN Peace-keeping tour in Cyprus where he had been serving as an observation officer. We could finally spend a few days together. He arrived in Valcartier that Saturday morning and drove the seven hours straight to Gagetown. He’d been very supportive of my decision to reclassify to the infantry, although he knew that it would be nearly impossible for us to be posted together given that we would both be in different regiments: he in the anglophone regiment, and me in the Van Doos, Canada’s only French-speaking regular force regiment. If we both chose to pursue our careers, it was inevitable that we would have tough decisions to make eventually, but for now, we cherished the few precious moments we would have together. The Saturday evening he arrived, I booked a suite in a local Fredericton hotel in the hopes of locking ourselves up until early Monday morning.

After three months apart (I had gone to Cyprus to visit him mid-tour), I was excited at the thought of being held in his arms again, of being loved, coddled, and hopefully even a little swooned over. While waiting for him in our tacky brown-and-orange-coloured hotel room, I took extra care to get ready, indulging in a luxurious hot bubble bath, curling my hair and applying makeup for the first time in months. It seemed so out of character these days for me to pamper myself that it felt exhilarating, empowering.

I heard the door to the hotel room open and waited for Kevin to close it again before stepping out of the bathroom. I stood in front of him nervously, wearing nothing but a lacy pair of underwear and matching bra that I’d specifically bought for the occasion.

“Hi!” I smiled and anxiously waited for him to come sweep me up into his arms. His eyes lit up, but then the huge grin he’d flashed immediately vanished and he gasped. He moved in closer and stared at my arms, my hips, then at my feet.

He asked me what the hell had happened to me. Self-conscious of my near nudity, I closed the distance between us and hugged him. He hugged me back for a second or two, then pushed himself away and held me at a distance with his hands on my upper arms. He looked terrified. It wasn’t the reaction I’d been hoping for, and as I turned to look in the mirror to see what he was staring at, it became clear to me that I wasn’t exactly a picture of delicate femininity. I was bruised everywhere; huge circles of bluish-black splotches on my hips, legs and arms, made me look like a Dalmatian. I was used to seeing myself this way and hadn’t taken too much notice of the marks on my body. My feet were swollen, the skin pulled taut and also starting to take on a bluish tint. I had lost a lot of weight and now I had about as many curves as a tree trunk. My hands looked like those of a seventy-year-old woman and I knew the heavy makeup I’d applied had not succeeded in hiding the bags under my eyes. My cheeks were sunken and the small scar I’d received from falling off the apc in Wainwright made me look hardened. Kevin stared at me as if he was about to throw up. I instinctively tried to cover myself up with my arms, bringing my long brown hair towards the front where it would cover the red marks left on my shoulders from the rucksack.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I must bruise easily. I got captured by the Demo platoon last Thursday during final exercise and let me tell you, Mike did not make it easy on me. I got executed! But it was incredible …” I forced myself back towards him, put my arms around his neck, and pressed a familiar kiss just under his jaw. He smelled like a blend of coffee and the leather of his Honda Prelude. He gently pushed me away from him and again scanned my body, his brows furrowing when his eyes reached my feet. I grabbed his head and pulled it up, self-conscious of his examination of my body.

I asked him how the drive had been and gestured towards the bottle of white wine sitting in the plastic bucket full of ice. Neither of us was a heavy wine drinker, but it had just seemed like the romantic thing to do. I hadn’t thought of bringing wineglasses, so I unwrapped the plastic cups and filled each one. Kevin sat in silence on the corner of the bed and stared at me. I handed him a cup and sat beside him awkwardly. He told me the drive had been long. We made small talk. I had put the heat on full blast, given my skimpy state of undress, but I felt cold nonetheless and wished for him to take me into his arms.

He looked at my face. I could see the disappointment in his eyes.

I tried to ease the tension by telling him all about the prisoner exercise, how I had been tough, how the “enemy” soldiers had presented me with a framed picture of my exploit with all their names signed on it. I rambled on nervously, fearing his silence and the distance he seemed intent on keeping between us. He just stared at me, with sad, compassionate eyes. I could also see anger building in them. I let my arms drop heavily by my side. “Really, I’m okay, babe. They don’t hurt.” I pressed on a few of the less painful bruises to show him that he could touch me. He continued to sit there, aghast at the sight of me. An overwhelming wave of vulnerability came over me. I stood up, slipped into the bathroom, and wrapped a robe around myself. On my way out, I once again caught a glance of myself in the mirror. I looked tired, abused. Kevin’s concern was justifiable, but only because he couldn’t see how happy I was to be in the infantry. I needed to make him see past all the bruises.

I went to stand in front of him with my arms stretched out and gave him a huge smile. I begged him to hold me, and he finally did so, but with such gentleness that I could tell he was afraid of hurting me. This should have been the passionate reunion between a man and a woman who loved each other and had spent too many months apart but it felt more like Kevin was visiting me on my deathbed.

He whispered into my ear asking me if I was really sure about wanting to be in the infantry, if it was what I really wanted to do. Of course it is, I told him. It’s what I’d always wanted to do, and I was damn good at it too.

the next tuesday morning, i was called into the office of the Infantry School’s deputy commander. Much to my horror, as I stood at atten-tion in the office, both the major and the regimental sergeant major asked me questions about an incident they had got wind of, a prisoner exercise. They promised me that any of the information I shared would be totally confidential. I answered their persistent questions creatively; I told them I’d been captured along with many of my classmates and that we’d been put through the normal rigours of interrogation. For half an hour I was cross-examined. I concentrated my answers on the second of the prisoner exercises to highlight the fact that I had not been singled out.

The major then asked about my bruises, how I got them, all the while staring directly at my face, then moving his eyes to my hips, my stomach, and my shoulders, as if he could see through my combat shirt. I realized at that moment that Kevin had betrayed me. He’d reported the incident to his chain of command, without understanding that the consequences and the backlash could be the end of my career. I was devastated. I couldn’t tell if the major, who was from Kevin’s regiment, wanted to get to the bottom of his inquiry because he was sincerely concerned about attitudes towards my presence, or if it was just because the complaint was against a Van Doo. Knowing that Kevin would have sought out someone he trusted, I could only hope that the deputy commander’s motivation lay in doing the right thing for all his candidates. Regardless, nothing good could come out of this interrogation.

“Yeah, well, I pepper-pod like I mean it, sir,” I told him, downplaying the gravity of the incident. “You know how it is. The ground isn’t exactly covered in three inches of moss. No harm done. We all survived.” I gave them both a look that clearly said they would get no information out of me. I managed to dodge the rest of their questions, to reassure the deputy commander that the incident had been a valuable training exercise, and then I was dismissed.

That night, in the privacy of his room in the officer’s quarters, I confronted Kevin about why he had ratted me out. He didn’t deny the accusation.

“It’s not right, Sand. You make it sound like it was something to be proud of, but you look like someone used you as a punching bag. And look at your feet for fuck’s sake!” Even through the white cotton sport socks, it was obvious my swollen feet were bluish black now. We were attending a friend’s wedding that weekend, and I’d had to buy a size ten pair of pumps, when I normally wore size seven. I would probably lose toenails. He repeated that he had no choice but to report the incident, and that he felt there was something I was not telling him.

I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out the best way to get to him. “No, Kevin. I’m not hiding anything. It was really hard and my feet did freeze. But it wasn’t malicious. It was a test, to see if I could handle it, and I passed! Well, in reality I failed, but I think I passed the real test.” He sat beside me and held my hand.

He responded that whether I had passed or failed was irrelevant. Kevin was an infantry officer. He knew, more than most, the obstacles that would be laid in my path, both intentionally and unintentionally in the normal course of training. But in his eyes, the prisoner exercise was beyond that. It had been wrong and he felt no one should have to go through that. He apologized for blowing the whistle, but admitted that someone needed to answer for what had happened.

I yanked my hand from his and stood up to face him. “You don’t understand! They’ll get their revenge on me if they think I complained. It will be ten times worse! Besides, it wasn’t that bad. You suffer just as much when you do your Ironman races. I’m in the goddamn infantry, Kevin, not hairdressing school. You, of all people, should get that.” I was furious. If he jeopardized my career, I would leave him. That was clear as day. “Kevin, if I was a male buddy of yours, you’d be respecting me for having gone through that. You’d be thinking, Wow, this guy is one tough son of a bitch. But because it’s me, you think I’m some feeble damsel in distress needing a knight in shining armour to come to her rescue.” I paced back and forth in front of him. “I’m not and I don’t need you to be my goddamn hero! I love this! I am happy, excited, proud! This is exactly what I wanted and I am kicking ass!” He was silent for a moment, his eyes searching. My voice would be carrying into the rooms next door, so I lowered it before continuing.

I turned to him and pleaded. “Kevin, baby, I need you to be on my side. I’m alone here, and I have no one to confide in. You have to trust my decisions.”

“Your side? Your decisions?” He uncrossed his arms and the danger in his eyes told me he was finally ready to unfurl his anger. “Your decisions? Sandra, it’s always been about your decisions! We never decided you would be in the infantry, we never decided to get a cat, we never decided to buy a convertible Mustang. The only decision we made was to not have that baby and you’ve been making me pay for it ever since.”

I gasped. Kevin had never been angry with me. I’d never heard him raise his voice to anyone. Unable to respond, I ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the toilet lid with my head in my hands. I cried at the fury of his words as they slowly sank in. They wounded me more than any of the bruises that covered my body. They hurt because they were true. I inevitably let the flood of tears come as I realized how unfair I had been to him, how I had made so many decisions without ever consulting him, inviting him in only after the fact. I thought of the colours I’d painted in the different rooms of our house, the plans I’d made for most of our holidays together, the name I’d chosen for our cat. Some seemed like insignificant decisions, but now I viewed my behaviour through his eyes. I could easily understand how he’d feel excluded. It had grown much worse since the abortion. Physically, I had pushed him away repeatedly in fear that my body would betray me again; and emotionally, he’d been tossed carelessly aside as if the loss had been mine alone. I thought he’d been pulling away from me because I chose to be an infantry officer instead of being a mother, but now I realized it was I who was pushing him out.

Worse, I had probably never let him in to begin with.

I sat there for a long time, feeling horrible that I was so lousy at relationships despite having had such loving parents as examples. I was screwing it all up. I needed to do better because Kevin was a wonderful man and he deserved more. I wiped my eyes with the stretched sleeve of my grey US army sweatshirt, left the bathroom and went over to sit beside him on the edge of the bed, where he’d been patiently waiting for me to come to terms with his comments. I put my head on his shoulder. He apologized, saying that he had not meant for it to come out the way it did.

“Oh, Kevin, it’s me who is sorry.” Tears began once again to flow down my cheeks. “I don’t deserve you. I’m selfish, wanting what I want and going after it without consideration of others.”

“I’m not others, Sand,” he said softly. “At least, I don’t want to be. I want to be your partner, in everything.”

“You are, and you’re my best friend. Which means I get to support your dreams of being an Olympic athlete, and you get to support mine of being in the infantry, even if you don’t approve of the way it’s going. I’m sorry I pushed you out, I’ll try harder to include you in my life, Kevin.” I weighed the risks of that nervously. “But, I need to know that you won’t betray my secrets, because I’m sure there will be many more to come. I’ll make an effort to make decisions with you, but if you don’t approve of the way I deal with my own stuff, you can’t ride in and save me.” I sniffled, wiped my eyes with an already soaked sleeve, and took his hand in mine. “Please, you have to trust me, babe. I’ll raise the flag if I need to, I promise. Trust me to do that on my own, okay?”

I could tell he was struggling between doing what he felt was right, and what I wanted him to do. His anguish was palpable and I could understand it. He’d been raised with the belief that men take care of women, men protect women, men hit men who hit women. How could I ask him to go against everything he’d been taught, and to sit by idly while the woman he loved went through incomprehensible trials that left her scarred and seemingly broken?

I tried to lighten the mood. “It’s either that or you’ll never see me naked again.” He didn’t laugh.

He told me that he was on my side, that he didn’t agree with everything that had happened to me, but that he would be there for me. He let go of my hand and put his arm around me. I felt closer to him at that moment than I had ever been with anyone. “In the future I’ll keep my mouth shut, but I’m telling you right now, the next time I see Mike it won’t be pretty. He’ll be sporting a few of those bruises himself.” Mike and Kevin had been good friends back in Valcartier. They had skied together and had occasionally gone out for beers.

“No, please don’t do anything, Kevin. Mike is on my side too. He had a lot of pressure to make sure I failed this course any way possible. He chose instead to show them what I was made of and now I am sure I did well, or at least I was until you ratted on me.”

“I didn’t rat on you, I ratted on him.”

“Well, the consequences will be the same. I know you don’t get it, Kevin, all you see are the bruises. But because of Mike, I know exactly whom I can rely on within the platoon, I know who my allies are, and I know what I’m capable of too. He knew exactly what he was doing. And because of that exercise, a few guys from the enemy force are now convinced that maybe it’s okay for women to be infantry.” They would tell two friends and so on.

He told me how hard it was for him to see me this way. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with women in the infantry, but rather that he wasn’t sure if he could endure seeing his girlfriend go through all of that. He took my face and gently turned it towards his. He looked so sad, so tormented. “It’s very painful to see you like this.”

“It will get better.” I was lying and we both knew it. The career path I had chosen would have more than its share of bruises, scratches, and cuts, possibly even worse. I couldn’t imagine any man who would enjoy seeing the woman he loved get hurt. But to me, the cuts and bruises I sported were trophies I’d earned by taking life head-on, by forging ahead despite my fears of failing, and they made me feel powerful, even beautiful.

•••

that friday evening, kevin invited me to attend his regiment’s traditional tgif beer call in the Royal Canadian Regiment Officers’ Mess. For a Van Doo, this is like going into hostile territory. The two regiments are famously competitive with each other, although when deployed outside the country they act as a united front. It’s all healthy competition. I wasn’t badged a Van Doo as I had not graduated yet, but there was no mistaking my affiliation with the Royal 22e Régiment, even if I wasn’t wearing the Van Doo beaver insignia on my beret.

Being an excellent officer and a world-class biathlete, Kevin was really appreciated by his peers, and everyone in general. Even Van Doos liked him, despite his affiliation with the “Run Chicken Run” regiment. He was an all-round good guy, and lately he’d been on the receiving end of much teasing about his infantry girlfriend. Luckily, he took it all in stride.

I arrived at the officers’ mess and nervously went to stand beside Kevin around one of the tables. As if I was a work buddy, he put his arm around me and squeezed, flashed me a very happy grin, then introduced me to the men around the table.

Kevin offered me a beer and before I could respond he poured me a draft from the pitcher on the table. My capacity to absorb alcohol was non-existent. After one beer I would start to feel giddy, so I rarely had more than just a few sips unless I knew I was in a safe, preferably gender-balanced environment. Consciously, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t trust the people around me, it was more that I felt I needed to have total control over my actions — and alcohol seriously impeded my judgment, leading me to quickly let my guard down. It was already challenging to spar verbally with these men without having to do so while being intoxicated.

Traditionally, there is no sitting down during tgifs because we are meant to move around to meet and greet our colleagues. Around our table were lieutenants and captains from the rcr. Also beside me stood a captain from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Regiment, who was easily six foot four and would have made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Homer Simpson.

Since Kevin had just returned from his six-month peacekeeping tour in Cyprus, he was the centre of attention. I was grateful for the diversion from questions about my training. He told stories about the ceasefires between the Greeks and the Turks that never lasted, the stash of antique copper kettles they’d found in the basement of an abandoned store, and the view of the Mediterranean Sea from Saint Hilarion Castle in the Kyrenia mountain range. Then, he shared an anecdote about my visit to Cyprus for his vacation. He’d taken me to a topless beach and had challenged me to do like the locals, saying that it was safe to take off my top given that no soldiers ever came to the beach because it was too far from the military base in Nicosia. Always up for a challenge, I had removed my bikini top, only to have three soldiers come over five minutes later when they had recognized Kevin.

“You should have seen her scramble to get her top on!” He laughed and the other officers did too. Once that curtain was lifted, I knew the stage had been set for “let’s tease the infantry girl” to begin, especially since they’d had a few beers by then. And so it did.

“So, Kevin, eat much beaver since you’ve been back from Cyprus?” asked one of Kevin’s colleagues and the boys roared with laughter. His vulgar reference to me was well understood in this crowd.

Kevin laughed, looked at me apologetically, but before he could respond I answered in his place.

“Not nearly as much as I’ve had chicken,” I said straight-faced, but with just a hint of humour in my voice. As soon as the comment left my mouth, I knew that this was probably the fastest way to alienate a whole regiment against me. Calling the rcr chickens is all good fun amongst seasoned soldiers, but doing so is suicidal if you haven’t even earned your stripes yet and you happen to be in their officers’ mess.

However, to my stunned surprise, the captain from the Princess Patricia’s Regiment slammed his hand down on the table, put his huge arm around me, and laughed so hard that soon everyone else was laughing too, including Kevin. He winked at me, and I could tell he was pleased. One of the guys grabbed the pitcher of beer and topped my glass, the ultimate sign that I had just been accepted into the sanctity of the infantry brotherhood. Even if the jokes were loaded with sexual innuendos, for those precious moments, I wasn’t a woman, I wasn’t Kevin’s girlfriend, I wasn’t the enemy. I was just another officer who had proven she could bear the brunt of verbal wit and dish it out in equal parts.

“You should spoil yourself and try a Patricia,” said the captain from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Regiment, still red in the face from laughing so hard.

“She’s not vegetarian,” responded Kevin and laughter erupted once again. The banter continued, eventually shifting to teasing each other about their respective regiments’ battle prowess, or lack of, during one battle or another.

“If the Black Watch hadn’t been there to save your regiment’s sorry ass in the Rhineland …”