it’s more than just a bowling ball to a renegade bitch like me

I feel better knowing that Jack and I aren’t the only ones acting like raging psychos, but I don’t offer much insight to anyone around me about how bad it’s gotten in my marriage. I can’t even make eye contact with it myself. If I ignore the issues, maybe they will go away. Or maybe he will go away. That’s the more likely outcome. Another deployment is inevitable.

ONE EVENING, I smear a neighbor’s blanket that has been left in my yard one too many times in a giant, steamy pile of dog crap. Each night, she leaves her piles of stuff strewn all over the neighborhood, never even thinking to clean up after her own kids’ messes. Then after dark, I deposit it on her front porch. Her name is Pam Percy, and she reminds me of the mother from Throw Mama from the Train. She talks at a volume that should be considered criminal harassment. Her speaking voice is a yelling voice full of bravado. She also throws the expression “Good times, good times” into almost every conversation, even the ones that have nothing to do with good times at all. Thank heaven she isn’t a close-talker, or I might have to plot her murder instead of smear her blanket in dog poop.

What’s important is that my outrageous behavior really has little to do with Pam herself. Yes, she annoys me daily. But my impulsive act is motivated by collective frustration, not just her. Her blanket is simply my final straw on that particular day. It provides a perfect venue for my nasty, disgruntled, and pent-up anger at all the things that lie far beyond my control. This is before the weariness sets in. In 2006, I still have the energy to feel fury.

Now it doesn’t take a master’s in psych to mastermind shenanigans like a spur-of-the-moment, cathartic squish of a blanket in shit, but that’s an example of the kind of pettiness I devolve into if pushed to the edge of frustration over and over, but too caught in the politics of living in tight quarters to just hash it out like a real woman. Of course I could feign ignorance after the fact, because the horror at my own behavior is probably worse than her horror at discovering the poopy blanket. Normally I plot my actions with a little more subtlety and thought, but on this night, the pile of poop is just too tempting. With the fresh smell of a soft and pungent-on-the-inside dog turd still in my nostrils, I cackle like a madman as I close my front door for the evening, delighted in my debauchery. After I tuck my own kids in bed, I can’t look at myself in the mirror when I brush my teeth. How childish and lame. This isn’t even a little coup I can be proud of. Poop smearing is for psychotic idiots, but damn, it felt awesome in the moment.

Our games of politics and posturing intensify, diversions and smoke screens to mask the fear and trauma that none of us could fully face or grasp. Ironically, the fear also brings us closer and more connected than we’ve ever been. More than before, we spend the evenings standing in the street, talking quietly as our kids whoop and holler on their skateboards and bikes. We crave the presence of one another. Can’t stand going alone into our own homes for the night to think about how close to us the war has finally gotten.

Helen also counsels my close friend Kat Dalisay’s husband, who is an army dentist but spent his year in Afghanistan cleaning up and amputating fingers of bad guys who had botched IED attempts. At least once in Afghanistan, Kat’s gentle-souled husband and a fellow dentist tried unsuccessfully to save a young boy who was blown to bits after playing with his uncle’s stash of IEDs.

Kat Dalisay is a trusted, safe ally, maybe because her husband is a dentist and a mender of even the enemy. We judge each other by what our husbands do. Kat doesn’t try to compete with infantry wives, and the absence of that tension is splendid. It’s not everybody who would be my accomplice in stealing from the post alley a preferred bowling ball of one of our rivals, Donna Hooker. Hooker is a phony try-hard, a one-dimensional gulper of Kool-Aid. She hides her flaws. Doesn’t she realize that everyone roots for the flawed person? No one wants to be friends with a flat mask of perfection. Ick. Tedious and boring. Each Tuesday morning, Donna ritualistically hunts down her favorite electric-blue ball tucked into the fifty-foot shelf of dozens of house balls. It’s a wimpy eight pounds with tiny finger holes that would only allow Donna’s thin, sinewy fingers and no one else’s. It has the name JEANNIE engraved in script on the side. Everyone knows it’s Donna’s ball. One day, my purse is plenty roomy for that ball. I get to JEANNIE before Hooker does. It sits in my closet for the next year and a half. For weeks, Kat and I enjoy watching Donna obsess and scour the bowling alley for her ball. It takes her months before she moves on to a new ball. But her game suffers, without JEANNIE. We place far too much importance and we experience far too much pleasure in such silly, symbolic games. Symbolic because everything for us is symbolic; almost nothing is dealt with as it is. In a real and concrete manner.

A year earlier, the innocuous Hooker beat me by one vote in our race to be the Officers’ Wives Club president. Am I bitter? Nope. What makes you ask? Don’t be an asshole.

Stolen bowling balls and campaigns to be the queen of turds are a safe outlet for rage that we can’t identify or place correctly. Maybe Kat forgot for an hour or so that her husband wasn’t using his dentistry license to do root canals.

Outside of the unrest in our home, I find relief in the shenanigans and drama of the wives on our street. My next-door neighbor and across-the-street neighbor are at war over the current presidency of the wives’ club, each believing that the other is not only unfit to rule the roost, but engaged in efforts to sabotage the other’s credibility and reputation. They are both self-important loons, Tammy Crocker and Pam Percy. This is familiar territory. Pam leaves her kids’ toys and towels and whatever-else in everyone’s yard each night. The rest of us have the courtesy to go around the neighborhood and police our kids’ piles of crap. Not Pam. This screams entitlement. Officially, I will never admit to the poop-smearing episode. Though I doubt I am the only one who feels driven to do something so stupid after a long day of mothering our flocks of children and mothering our flocks of wives.

I have my own issues with Tammy Crocker, who called 911 and wrecked Bridget’s sixth birthday, something I’m still trying to forgive. It was just weeks before Jack came home this time and weeks after Macklin was killed. I was trying to mask my exhaustion with a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday” and a few guilt gifts wrapped messily by my bitter and distracted hands. Tammy appeared red-faced and slovenly in my doorway with her toddler, insisting hysterically that she’d been stung by a bee and was going into some sort of dramatic and imagined shock and her throat was closing. She smelled like old spaghetti and perfume from the mid-1990s. I wanted to punch her and remind her that if she was standing there ranting about her throat closing, then it was not closing at all. But I didn’t. I opened the door and allowed her to flop her dramatic ass on my sofa and wait for the ambulance and the MPs and the barrage of chaos that would come blazing into my dilapidated duplex within 180 seconds. Stealing my well-intentioned and exhaustive effort to recognize Bridget’s birthday—Bridget, who was ever-polite, poised, and kind-hearted. Tammy’s discarded toddler immediately stuck his hands into Bridget’s pristine store-bought cake, and my gall seethed beneath my quiet mask of helpful neighbor. Tammy had broken a huge unspoken breech of army wife protocol.

“Your husband is hoooome!” I wanted to scream at her. He wasn’t home literally, but figuratively. “Home” meant “not in a war zone.” My moments of good intention were perpetually thwarted by someone else’s drama. Something as simple as not answering the door in these tight quarters was just not possible. Her massive breech of protocol stung at me: The un-deployed wives never call on the help of the deployed wives. Unless it’s to borrow an egg or a cup of sugar. That’s totally within reason.

It’s important to understand the echelons, from the wife of an infantry battalion commander to the handful of wives senior to me and down to the sea of wives under our chain of command. The entire wives’ food chain. Most importantly, the complexities of dealing with peers. Our competitors.

Senior army wives, like me, are often underestimated and presumed to be innocuous and tired, a presumption that we use and take advantage of. Our political prowess and deep savvy allow us to exploit the assumptions of others, because in truth we are often the ones with the widest base of knowledge and information. I am privy to my husband’s pillow talk, but also, over cocktails, I hear others’ pillow talk. I carry on small talk with Belinda Beck in the commissary, not listening to her blathering story, but suspecting that her husband downloads porn to his government computer and noisily jerks off behind the door of his office. Isn’t that a government offense, Belinda? Hmm?

One-upping about where our husbands are deployed is one of many unspoken games of the wives. Being in Iraq has street cred; Afghanistan, not so much at this point. Just like my husband’s Kosovo mission was overlooked when Afghanistan was central in the media. Deployment locations go in and out of fashion quickly.

The death of Rob Macklin does something to our entire group that spring and early summer. It brings our crazy to right below the surface. It starts to show up like a disease spreading among the senior wives, displaced resentment and grief. Screaming profanities at snow plows that absently leave a trail of snow across the front of pristinely shoveled driveways. Yelling at housing personnel who don’t move fast enough to fix a leaky faucet. In a fit of displaced rage, smacking our kids on the back of their heads for being too mouthy, when the kids are likely just trying to find someplace, any place, in the pecking order of mom’s attention. Those on the edge take out their aggression on safe people, those on the periphery of our group. Direct fights among wives are rare, but juicy and cathartic on the few occasions that anger places itself where it belongs. I have a master’s degree in a study close to social psychology—a degree I’ve never used for much besides mind games with the wives. Observing people and trying to figure them out, even playing with people’s heads on occasion, I’ll admit that I enjoy that talent a little too much once in a while. That’s one of my little sins I will have to explain to Saint Peter someday. My cunning. My flaw. I can be both passive-aggressive and downright mean when provoked. I keep score. But at least I admit it. We can all be mean girls. Denying that there is, within each of us, a little mean girl to some extent is being dishonest with ourselves. The trick is to own that little mean girl and make her your bitch. Don’t let the mean girl take over. Keep that little monster on a leash, and use her when you must. That’s unfortunately where some of us go wrong. A lack of self-awareness.

Politics, friendships, and competition form naturally in the work environment. At the end of the day, those folks go home and escape until the next day. Many never meet their coworkers’ families or know where they live. Now imagine that everyone in this workplace lives in one neighborhood, in close quarters. In addition to knowing how a work project is going, they’ve seen who slacked in cutting the grass. They’ve heard the screaming match with your wife or husband. They get pissed if you park a little too close to their driveway. They are a collection of type A control freaks who need to lead every situation and control its outcome. They’ve seen the pile of butts from the closet smokers. They wonder why some people always keep their blinds drawn. There is no line between work and life to balance; there is no escaping.