“I’m going to stay out of it.” Ellen could barely hear her own voice over the lunch hour din at Memorial Union, the U’s dining center. Red and pink paper Valentine’s Day decorations were taped to the walls; a flyer on their table urged everyone to attend Sex Week’s different events. Learn about the REAL “Student Body.” She tried a bit of humor. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”
“What?” Serena frowned at her chef’s salad, using a knife and fork to transfer pieces of ham off her plate onto a napkin.
“Isn’t that how he put it, Muhammad Ali?”
“He was about to be drafted,” Serena said. “There’s a difference.” She blew on her coffee before taking a first sip. Ellen wasn’t sure what difference she meant, and didn’t ask. She thought about how similar she and her longtime friend must look to the others, mostly students, crowded at tables in the Rathskeller’s big drafty dining room. They had a standing date for lunch on Wednesdays, after Ellen’s morning lecture and before Serena’s afternoon seminar. Serena was a George Grosz specialist in the art history department. Years ago she and Ellen had served on a committee on student retention in the liberal arts; the two of them had bonded over the pointless academic bureaucracy and the chair’s disgusting habit of slipping off his smelly shoes during the long meetings. Serena wore her silvered hair short, in a bob—not quite as short as Ellen’s crop—and liked severe, modern jewelry and eyeglasses, which she had picked up on sabbatical in Berlin. That said, today she and Ellen were both wearing good leather boots and warm, understated pieces in cashmere and herringbone. Each woman had a stack of files and books on the table next to her tray and, hanging off the back of a chair, a handsome briefcase that she had bought herself in order to celebrate a personal academic achievement.
“I just can’t get involved.”
“You are involved. He’s already over there, isn’t he? I mean, he will be soon.”
Ellen stared. “He’s just in training,” she said. “It’s exercises, classes.”
“It’s boot camp. And then Iraq. Don’t pretend—it’ll make it harder for you.”
Ellen shook her head. “The next step isn’t to go overseas anywhere. They get stationed to a base, and his would be in North Carolina, Mike says. The point is, I’m not going to get all wrapped up in what might happen, or get fixated on the worst-case scenario when for all we know he could get a job driving a truck around North Carolina … or Europe … and end up with a shaved head and a savings account and some new identity after having spent a year or two playing soldier.” She let out a long breath and bit into her turkey and avocado sandwich, trying to steady herself. A year or two playing soldier. How stupid that sounded, how willfully misinformed. Of course it would be more than that. But this was why she couldn’t get into it, what Mike had done, even with someone as close as Serena. There was so much she didn’t understand, and Ellen had the stubborn sense that if she kept herself from knowing too much, then there could exist all other sorts of possibilities for what would happen next. Not all Marines were going to Iraq, surely. And by the time he finished boot camp—Mike’s letters from Parris Island were brief, misspelled, and mostly about food he missed—well, it could be that the entire situation would have changed for the better.
This last thought was so tempting that Ellen made a mistake. “It’s becoming more stable,” she said. “With Saddam Hussein captured, and the Shiites winning the election … most likely they’ll draw down forces until it’s nothing more than policing. A peacekeeping mission.”
“More stable?” Serena stopped, her fork in midair. “This helicopter that was shot down—that happened because of tensions rising around the election! Things are more volatile, if anything. Ellen, thirty-something Marines died on that one day alone—”
“We don’t know it was shot down!” Ellen noticed glances from other tables and modulated her voice. “They think it was just sand in the rotors. Or the motors. I heard it on NPR.”
“All the more reason to agitate against this war in any way we can. Cheney keeps sending them there in droves, unprepared, unequipped—it’s Vietnam but worse. Urban fighting, a civil war that’s going to stretch out for decades. Absolutely no reason for Americans to die there.”
“I know, of course.” Ellen pushed her tray an inch away. They had spoken like this before. She knew how active Serena was in the university antiwar effort; both Serena and her partner, Jill, were on all the faculty-student committees that organized vigils and protests. They wrote defiant letters to the administration whenever the president made moves to quell large gatherings at Memorial Union, or in the quads. Ellen signed every one of these petitions when they were e-mailed to her. She felt like reminding Serena of that now.
“You can use this.” Serena leaned forward, over her plate. “Incorporate it into your work. Make connections across the … didn’t Wharton write about World War I? She did, didn’t she? She had the perfect vantage point on the ramp-up to war as an American in England—”
“Paris,” Ellen corrected.
“Well, it’s ideal!” Serena exclaimed. “For an essay, an article. You’ve never written about this aspect before, and you yourself said you’re looking for a new project—”
“I don’t really think—”
“A comparison between then and now. How nothing’s changed. The horror of war, the useless waste of an entire generation of young men—”
“Serena,” Ellen said, more sharply than she’d intended. “Wharton was avidly prowar. She was furious at how long America stuck to neutrality. Her texts around that time are full of borrowed French nationalism, she practically beats the drum for engagement—” Ellen snapped the plastic lid onto her soup container.
“Oh.” Serena’s disappointment shaded into further strategizing. “I suppose you might work that in somehow…”
“Do you actually…”
“What?”
Ellen shook her head, ashamed. Had she really been about to ask if Serena herself knew anyone in the war? As if that would or should temper her friend’s own ideas about the matter, as if it gave Ellen some moral high ground to have Michael away at Parris Island. Her hands went cold and suddenly she wanted him away from there so badly she thought she might cry.
Serena reached out and touched Ellen’s arm. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me about Jane. What is the latest?”
Ellen straightened her back. It was a peace offering. Only with Serena was she comfortable enough to complain—in a loving way—about Jane. Serena herself had no children, but her partner Jill’s daughter, now grown and living in New York, had also been a wild one, and so she could understand.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’m not happy about this place she’s in, that’s for sure.”
“The Friends co-op? On Johnson? They’re not bad kids. I have a couple in my senior seminar.”
“It’s not Friends, it’s a new place. An apartment on Denham Street. She moved there a few weeks ago with … well, how many people I don’t know. Nor who they are. Whenever I ask for details she says, ‘They’re just, like, normal people, Mom.’”
At this, Serena matched Ellen’s expression. “Have you been over there?”
“No, because she says it’s not clean enough for me to visit. Having been over at the co-op when she called it ‘clean,’ I can only imagine.”
“Be grateful.” Serena laughed. “Shudder.”
“But I’ve driven past it. A run-down house, bikes everywhere out front, a ripped-up couch on the porch. None of the neighbors, no one on the block, looks connected to the university. It bothers me, of course. Wes says I shouldn’t pick this battle. He’s right. We’re not on great terms and I get the feeling that one more blowup between us…”
“Oh, they always come back,” Serena said. “Nothing’s irrevocable. It’s a phase. Like the terrible twos.”
“The terrible teens,” Ellen agreed.
What she didn’t say was that she feared this latest from Jane had to do with Michael, with his leaving for boot camp. Jane had come by the house last week with several boxes of her stuff she wanted to store in her old room. Ellen had done exactly what she told herself not to do, even as she was doing it: follow her daughter from room to room, asking ineffectual questions.
“So they’re not the animal rights group?”
“They’re not not into animal rights, if that’s what you mean. They just have broader interests. It’s not like we all have to fit into some little box.”
“What I meant was, how do you know them?”
“Friends. Friends of friends.”
“Do they work at the vet with you? Are any of them enrolled?”
“No. I mean, yeah. This one girl is in the poli-sci program. I think.”
“Jane.”
“What?” Ellen couldn’t believe the way her daughter jerked away from her touch. She looked pale and tired, and her face was puffy.
“Can’t we sit down for a while? I’ll make some tea.”
“I have to get going.”
“Let me give you something to eat. Or to take with you. There’s soup, or—”
Jane had stopped stock-still while tearing through the upstairs hallway, and Ellen almost ran into her. She crouched down and pulled open the flaps of a large brown box. “Is this … this is Michael’s stuff?” She took out objects slowly, one at a time: a handful of CDs, a polo shirt, one enormous Nike sneaker.
“It didn’t fit in the basement closet so I thought I’d put it in Wes’s room.”
“Why not mine?”
Ellen watched Jane, sitting on her heels, take out Michael’s belongings and study each one. “If you wouldn’t mind. It doesn’t matter to me.” DVDs: Harold & Kumar, Mission Impossible 2, and …
“The Notebook?” The cover showed a couple passionately locked in a kiss, in the rain.
“I gave it to him,” Jane said. “Inside joke.”
Inside Ellen a ticking alarm went off; she wished she could see Jane’s face more clearly. She and Michael weren’t … They hadn’t ever … Had they? Off and on throughout the years she had wondered if there was more to their relationship than quarreling and ignoring. Certainly it had been a concern when she allowed Mike to sleep in their basement, when she gave him a set of keys. Jane had been fifteen then. Ellen had kept a sharp eye on all their interactions, with the intention of throwing him out at the first sign of misbehavior. Satisfied that Michael wasn’t showing any signs of interest—and by Jane’s eye-rolls and “meathead” comments—she mostly gave up worrying. But now …
Jane flipped through a stack of photographs she had taken out of an envelope. Ellen held herself back from telling her to stop going through his things. Instead, she sank onto the hallway carpet next to Jane.
“So basically,” Jane muttered to herself, “I’m bringing boxes of stuff to keep here and he’s left boxes of stuff here. Perfect.”
Ellen stroked Jane’s head, tucked a dreadlock behind her ear. “It’s hard,” she said quietly. “And confusing. Why does he want to do this? I’m incredibly angry at him but I—”
“You are?” Jane shot her a look. “Did you tell him that? Before he went?”
“Well, not in so many words.”
“I knew it.” Now she was slamming Michael’s things back in the box. “I knew you hadn’t even said anything. Right? Because Big Mike can do no wrong. Even when he couldn’t be wronger.”
Startled by Jane’s sudden fury, Ellen couldn’t respond. And then in a flash Jane was up and off, leaving her mother to wonder what she had done this time.
In the restaurant now, Serena was reviewing the notes for her seminar. Ellen took both of their trays to the cleanup area and emptied them. She said hello to several students, colleagues. Slowly walking back to Serena at their table, Ellen felt the space around her expand; she had a mental image of the tall-ceilinged beer hall, the rest of the Union building, the spreading ice-covered Terrace with its gray stone steps leading down to placid Lake Mendota.
How could the fate of Iraq matter here? How was it possible that decisions and reversals in that desert country half a world away, a suffering place, steeped in wholly other languages and customs, whose history stretched back through the rise and fall of empires, could touch Mike’s life? That a boy from the frozen upper Midwest should play any part in Iraq’s woeful current mess was absurd to the point of existentialism. What did Mike’s life mean, what did anyone’s, if it could be hurled around the planet like a marble in a sandstorm?
For a moment, she had to hold on to the back of a chair. Then she found her stride again.
Serena had gathered up her things, put her coat on. She held a thin paperback in her hands.
“I took this off my shelf on the way out to meet you. You know it, I’m sure, but it just seemed necessary for what you’re going through.”
How do you know what I’m going through? Ellen heard herself think. She told herself to shut up.
“What is it?”
Serena handed her the book. “Simone Weil. ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.’”
“Ah.”
“I’m sorry about the markings inside. I must have years of margin scribbles in there. What she begins as literary criticism turns into a pacifist polemic of such—”
“Yes, I’ve read it, but years ago.” Ellen put the well-worn book in her briefcase. “Thank you.”
Serena stood and pulled her in for a tight hug. Her friend’s embrace was familiar, her sharp scent of tobacco and French perfume. “You don’t have to stand by while this happens,” she heard Serena whisper urgently. “There’s time still. I can help you get him out of it before—”
Ellen pulled away. “I have to run.” She covered over apologies and protests with have a good class and lunch was lovely and I’ll talk to you soon. And then she fled.
* * *
That evening at home, Ellen graded essays and wrote a recommendation for a former student. She made her nightly phone call to her mother in the nursing home downtown, and ordered a belated wedding gift online for one of her nieces. She ate a little chicken salad while reading The New Yorker, then watched a Seinfeld rerun with Maisie’s head on her lap.
All the while she fumed. At Serena, for acting like a thoughtless prig. At Jane, for selfishness. At herself, for feeble efforts and unkind thoughts. At Michael, for enlisting.
Finally, around eleven, she took a small glass of bourbon on the rocks up to bed and read a new novel until she could fall asleep.
A few hours later she was lying awake, listening to the wet swish of an occasional car going up Willow, or Maisie’s toenails clicking along the floor downstairs. No one in Ellen’s family had ever served in any branch of the military, as far as she knew—she counted back generations to be sure, and then went sideways along her own cousins, their children. No friends, none of their children. Her husband, Don, had been slightly too young for Vietnam; Paul West was just slightly too old. During the Gulf War in 1990, she remembered photos in the Wisconsin State Journal of tree trunks tied with yellow ribbons, but she had never seen any in her own neighborhood. There was ROTC on campus, it was true. Cadets occasionally wore the camouflage uniforms to class, during their training periods. But Ellen realized she had only ever considered the program a good way for lower-income students to pay for college. She hadn’t thought about what happened afterward, when the students accepted commissions for active or reserve duty.
How foolish it seemed now, in the middle of the night, her blithe lifelong assumption that war would never reach her personally. That it was the business of other people; that what happened on the news was only theoretical. It might have continued that way, she thought, had it not been for Michael.
Ellen flung off the covers. In the dark bathroom she drank a full glass of water and then pressed wet fingers against her hot cheeks.
At her study desk she opened her laptop and found the Web site she had only glanced at once, weeks ago, to get the address: Marine Corps Recruit Depot. This time she settled in, clicking through each page and each series of photographs: young men in green T-shirts and camouflage pants, lined in formation, crawling under an obstacle course, clinging upside down to a beam. Maisie trotted upstairs and covered Ellen’s bare feet under the desk. Ellen read about Honor and Courage and Commitment. She read about no sending of care packages (she hadn’t been) and the necessity of writing upbeat, encouraging letters (hers had been, mostly). Military history and customs. Swim/water survival qualification. Rifle range. The Crucible.
None of it really scared her, though. It was too easy to deconstruct the jingoism. This is how they get them, she thought. The ones, like Michael, who don’t have the luxury of higher education, the skills to see through this rhetoric. Only one part of the Web site gave Ellen pause: graduation. The day a Marine graduates from Basic Training is one of the most important in his or her life. A Formal Ceremony establishing your Marine as one of “The Few, The Proud” is held Friday morning on the Depot’s Parade Deck …
“But he never said anything!” But then of course he wouldn’t. Mike had never asked her to do anything, because he already felt beholden enough. Even when she and the kids came to a few of his football games that last year he was in school, she could tell it made him uncomfortable. Did he want her to come? Did he not? Was he waiting to see what she would do? Ellen zipped past pictures of parents hugging stern men in dress uniforms to find the dates. Two weeks from now. She sat back, closed the computer.
Long past the point of sleeping again, Ellen wrapped herself in a blanket in her reading chair. She dug in her briefcase for the Simone Weil, willing to take Serena’s test, willing to dare herself into facing it. If not now, at 4:00 a.m., then when?
The act of reading literature didn’t fail her, as it hadn’t ever, in life. Drawn in by Weil’s fierce intelligence and bold insight, Ellen understood how Homer’s ancient war poem must have given impetus and urgency to the French intellectual’s essay, published just as world war approached again. Weil announced that The Iliad’s true subject is force, and the way force, throughout the poem, turns men into things. Human beings become torn flesh, corpses, garbage: “Dearer to the vultures than to their wives.” Logical and inexorable, Weil wrote of the blind qualities of force—first the Greeks advance, and then the Trojans, and back and forth until specific meaning slips away from the conflict. Whoever tries to wield force will inevitably be brought down by it. This is the very nature of war, its “geometrical rigor.”
Ellen read the following lines, then made herself reread them.
“For other men death appears as a limit set in the future; for the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him. Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence.”
No sun yet, but a thin gray light began to contrast the black shapes of trees and the houses across the street. Ellen stood stiffly and turned off the reading lamp. She put Serena’s book away; she wouldn’t need it again.
“Hungry, Mais?” The dog raised her head. “Yeah, me too. Just give me one more minute up here, okay?”
Back at her computer, Ellen bought a round-trip air ticket to Savannah/Hilton Head International. Professor Silverman had never missed a graduation ceremony in her life, and she wasn’t about to start now.