“chicken piccata: what an economical choice for an army wife”

A new wife arrives in the battalion, a brand-new bride of our new soft, pretentious major. Jack won’t like him, I can tell. The major tries too hard to be intellectual, when Jack values hard work, standards, and grit far above intellect.

ONE OF MY favorite men, a major, in the unit is leaving the task force and heading to a job on brigade staff. He has been our suspiciously single major, which would have seemed more bizarre ten years ago, but now we have dozens of career officers who haven’t had time to find a bride. This is not one of those. I think he prefers being single. This fellow is so unlike the others in our unit, snarky and lacking in typical bravado, not effeminate, but scholarly almost. Not like a typical soldier. Once before the army he was almost a priest, is a Yale grad, and is older than my husband. He quotes Thoreau. In the year that I’ve gotten to know him before the deployment, he fascinates me and I like him. And he doesn’t like me, I can tell. I set up a Girl Scout table to sell cookies in the battalion one afternoon last year, and he came at me with an open wallet, asking, “How much will it cost me to get you to leave?”

His departure leaves a vacancy in our command group, and a new major is assigned in his place, this one just married. His new bride, Jodi Horatio, kept her own name—very rare in our world, a definite sign that she will not play ball with the rest of us. She has an axe to grind and numerous preconceptions about army wives. She has her “own” job and will not be defined by her husband. I suspect she will be lonely very soon if she keeps up this pretense. I invite Jodi and her husband over for dinner before he leaves to join the battalion in Iraq. He is soft and out of shape, just as Ben described.

I serve homemade chicken piccata. She makes a snotty comment that I’ve chosen an economically friendly meal and brags about being antiwar, and furthermore, why do we not have troops in Darfur if we are so concerned about human rights? Oh boy, does she have a lot to learn. I feel the eyes of the other guests on me, waiting for me to unleash on her. These are the things we don’t say, and if we do, we don’t do it in an open forum. We say them drunk and to our trusted confidantes. We earn the right to say those things. She needs to take a step back and learn from what happened to Mallory Bond. I hope the war stories of how we made an example of Mallory will make their way to her.

The brigade hosts a huge party for the families in celebration of marking a year of deployment. I feel like I’ve aged ten years. I attend FRG meetings and Sunday dinners, and it all becomes a blur. I am constantly revved up for more banality. We host a craft night to make elaborate care packages to send to Iraq. As I stand there contemplating evil thoughts of what I could put into that box, Mira tells me she might fill her husband’s box with the piles and piles of shit from his beloved dog that she’s been left to clean up after. We eye Audrey-Jill in the corner, looking bone-weary but still smiling. That baby of hers never stops crying.