“cover your panties on the flagpole”

Jack wasn’t the only one holding a secret in those eighteen days. I have my own secret.

I AM SICK WITH worry that Jack will catch a whiff and overreact to what I’ve already handled and put to bed. Will jump to the worst conclusion instead of seeing the nuance of the situation and the bigger picture of the Belinda Becks of our life. Belinda hides behind a helpful facade and her binders full of a plan for any situation, from where to store her seasonal wreaths to how to color-code a roster of volunteers. Well beyond my antics of coveting bowling balls. Her attack was well aimed and personal. Clawing, knife-twisting. And when confronted, she met the challenger with mock confusion and complete denial.

I hold my breath during the month leading up to Jack’s eighteen-day R&R. Anticipating fallout from the rumor mill and relieved at Barb Petty’s support and her suggestion that neither Jack nor her husband (the psycho bully) needs even know what happened. But still. Word travels fast. I’ve reveled in a juicy piece of gossip like this too many times to count, but I’ve never been the topic.

The weekend of Mother’s Day, a month before Jack’s R&R, I join two minivans loaded with other perfumed turds heading to dinner and a comedy club in our small harbor town. It is the same place I lived during the months that I waited for Jack to return from Somalia fifteen years ago. The other wives and I falsely tell ourselves that it is safe to get wild and crazy here, that no one knows who we are. Mira and I slug down too many appletinis, a disregard for pacing our drinks, each of us caught up in the excitement of being somewhere besides hidden in our homes with a cocktail in hand. Spring is here and it has been a long, hard winter. We get drunk quickly, each of us sharing war stories of our week, exaggeration fueled by booze. All of us are either just ending our husband’s R&R or bracing ourselves for its nearing impact. Mira is dying to hear the details about how Ben and I fired uncouth and brazen Mallory Bond earlier that week. But Mallory had to go. Ben hated her, and I wasn’t her biggest fan. The girl never learned her place in the food chain. She was guilty of blatant indiscretions, both with her genitalia and with her flapping lips. No pun intended. Rear detachment has devoted weeks to catching Mallory Bond in action. She was rumored to be engaging in not just an affair, but the bigger offense of violating the tight-lipped policy of operational security by yapping about our battalion’s über-secret mission, at Starbucks. She did not go easily; it has been a long week of damage control for our team, and I need to vent and guzzle those sick, too-apple-y drinks.

“Angie, isn’t your rear D single?” a perfumed turd from another brigade asks. “He’s cute. You guys seem to get along really well. I hope my husband lets me have a rear D just like that when we deploy next year.” It doesn’t dawn on me that these women think my rear D is cute, and it feels like these older women are asking to take my younger brother on a date. Weird. I take a hot second to place in my mind where the woman asking the question lives. Yeah, between Eeyore Sweeney and Belinda Beck. Dreadful.

We cut the night short when Mira hurls in the bushes. During the drive home, we debate whether this qualifies her for the porch-pukers’ club. The appletini overindulgence leaves me in a fog the next morning, but my responsibilities to the unit don’t care about my night of escape or the hangover headache clenching my brain when my phone rings at seven o’clock on Mother’s Day morning.

It’s Ben’s REM ringtone. News that one of our lieutenants lost his leg that morning and a sergeant will have a disfigured face for the rest of his life, if he survives.

Two days after the puked appletinis, Belinda “Kiss My Grits!” “Flo” Beck, who has a reputation for vicious gossip and playing superb politics, spreads a rumor that Fort Drum is “buzzing with talk about Angie Hawkins canoodling with Captain Ben Black.” Within two hours on a Tuesday morning, two mutual friends who both live out of state call to tell me that Belinda is spreading the story like the plague. Of course, her story is told under the false pretense of worry that I’ve lost my judgment under the immense pressure of Jack’s command, and what can we do to help poor Angie? All of this because we didn’t invite her out for our night of shenanigans. Inviting her never even entered my mind. Can that woman even have fun?

For years I’ve had Belinda’s number and I’ve known that her motives were never pure, but I also knew she offered a contribution to the team. Is it better to be a barely contributing slug like Regina Sweeney or Liesel Leonard, or be a hard-bitten, backhanded Belinda Beck type? Belinda works her ass off to be the best at everything. She is the first to volunteer to help a comrade, the first to shovel snow from a sick neighbor’s driveway, but she does it all for the credit and brags about her good deeds at every available opportunity. She is what we call a spotlight ranger wife. Her sole goal in life is to claw her way to the top of the turds, fooling herself into thinking that no one sees through her facade of perfection. Those who try the hardest generally have the most to hide and the most reasons for trying. All of this I’ve overlooked in the years I’ve known her, mainly because I feel sorry that she tries so hard. Until now I’ve felt nothing but a sympathetic pity for Belinda. This bullshit is a game changer.

If Jack gets a whiff of the rumor, he will lose his mind. Since day one, he warned me against rumors and the importance of safeguarding our images, keeping a professional distance in my relationship with Ben. Or as Jack refers to him, Captain Black. “Your reputation is all you have.”

Ben is more than my rear detachment commander; that much is true. He’s become like a girlfriend, or maybe a little brother. Jack wouldn’t understand that the nature of our relationship has nothing to do with canoodling or a romance. It’s survival. Our closeness is a product of what we endure together. He makes me laugh, he makes me feel safe. He gets me and can put me in my place. Isn’t that the goal? To work well together? How could we not be tight? It pisses me off that Jack would expect me to work so closely in support of his mission with someone, to navigate our ugly waters and not be close to the person he left back here to be my partner. Jack doesn’t expose himself to anyone, not even me. He is autonomous, and my nature is diametrically different. I have a fundamental motivation to be understood—a motivation Jack lacks. I still am unclear about what his fundamental motivation is, exactly.

After I as nonchalantly as possible tell Ben of the rumor the day after Mother’s Day, it takes me days to talk him off the ledge. He knows Jack and his reactions nearly as well as I do. He shouts into the phone, “This is my career! Don’t you assholes have anything better to do than gossip about each other and make shit up? One of our soldiers lost his eyesight this weekend, and another his legs. And this is what she’s talking about?”

Barb Petty calls Belinda and chews her a new asshole; I love Barb, despite the fact that her husband is a raging wacko. Barb always has my six. I got your back.

That night I call Belinda for the fifth time, and she finally answers.

“Hay-lloooo, Beck quarters. Beliinnda speaking.” She drips with molasses, her words sound sugary, but trail off with a subtle bitterness. Kiss my grits.

“This is Angie. How are you?” We exchange a few back-and-forth pleasantries. I want her to sweat a little.

“Belinda, you’ve told people I’m canoodling, whatever that means, with my rear detachment commander”—don’t say his name, don’t establish intimacy—“Don’t even deny it. Why would you do that?”—I know why, duh—“We have a history. Jack and I have known you and Larry for years. Belinda, you have a terrible reputation. But guess what? I always stick up for you, try to convince people that you are well-intentioned and that your heart is in the right place.” My heart is racing and my blood is pounding in my head, the head that has barely recovered from yesterday’s appletini hangover.

She’s been stammering and interrupting since I started my speech. Now I let her speak. “Angie Hawkins! I have done no such thing! Where on earth did you ever hear that? I am too busy with my own battalion and planning a bridal shower to worry about you and your silly nights of shenanigans.”

Is she really denying it? Okay. Let’s go to the mats.

“I heard it from Paige Evans. And Gwen Bautista. And Lindsey Grundy.”

A gasp. One that I will never forget. It screams of Flo from Alice. “Why would thaaaay tellll youuu thaaaaaat?” Feigned indignation. I almost laugh. That weird character flaw of mine again.

Now I’m screaming, not giving a shit that my windows are wide open. She is busted, and her gasp is the closest I will come to a full confession.

“Because they know you for who you are. And they know me for who I am. You are a back-stabbing, opportunistic, marinated-in-jealousy, white-trash, social-climbing bitch!” Thank you. No, I didn’t preplan that insult. It came naturally and it begged for a grand genuflect at the end. I stood in my dark kitchen with the phone in my hand and bowed deeply, so proud of my perfect put-down. My inner mean girl is off her leash.

“I will not be verbally abused by youuuu, Angie Hawkins. This is not over! You better watch yerself, missy! The higher Jack climbs the flagpole, and Larry is gonna climb higher for sure”—never a missed opportunity to one-up—“you better know that more people can see your panties!”

And the phone slams down, maybe both of us at the same time, neither of us with the firm sureness of who hung up on whom first.

Am I overreacting a bit? Displacing outrage? Not this time. Despite our earlier small insults and eye rolls at each other’s words, behavior, and postures, we have been sisters. I feel punched by Belinda. Punched by her blatant kick when I am down and vulnerable, weakened and stressed by the deployments and our casualties. That night, I learn two lessons: One, discerning between friends and frenemies is a critical skill, and recognizing the fluidity of everyone between those two extremes is even more critical. Two, Jack never needs to know a word of this. He will think Ben and I have given an air of unprofessionalism, and we probably have with our level of comfort and the familiar way we speak in public. We bicker. We finish each other’s sentences by now. He is my brother. Of everyone in this equation, Ben is the least deserving of the potential fallout from such a rumor. Hasn’t he taken enough shit already?

Belinda? Karma caught up to her. A year after our fallout, her husband had a full chickenshit meltdown in Afghanistan. Larry Beck locked himself buck naked in his hooch; those outside heard him alternate between singing dirty cadences and sobbing. Larry is a severe alcoholic and porn addict and had never made it through an entire deployment. Alcohol withdrawal always got the better of him. The rumor mill swirls with whispers that Naked Larry was lured out of his tent by MPs, and in front of his troops, the general in charge relieved Larry of command, the army’s version of you’re fired! He was handcuffed and carried off in a helicopter and eventually back to the States and finally a psychiatric evaluation in Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Normally I would hesitate to believe rumors so seemingly far-fetched, but somehow I could picture the exact scenario the rumors painted.

For months after Larry got home, we worried that Larry or Belinda’s mental state might lead to more drastic outcomes. To this day, Larry still serves on active duty as an army colonel. He’s even a graduate of the elite war college, through some tiny glitch in the system that left his peer group, and me, baffled. Somehow he escaped the media attention that others weren’t so lucky to avoid.