Dear Michael, When you say tuna packs, what do you mean? Not actual cans of tuna? I found beef jerky and the protein bars. I told Wes how worried I am that they’re not giving you enough to eat but he said you never got enough to eat, so there’s that.
Dear Michael, If you have any time at all to read, I think you might like Slaughterhouse Five. There’s a scene where—
Dear Michael, It’s hard to know what to say at a time like this, when the news here is—
For the past day or two Ellen had abandoned each attempt at a letter to Michael, feeling that she had better keep her mouth shut. And if everyone else would too, she might find a way to recover from yesterday’s news. But it was everywhere, on every computer, every radio: Investigators have determined the identities of at least four Marines said to have been part of the desecration of several corpses of Iraqi insurgents … Names have not been released, although all Marines are said to have enlisted … General Casey orders a top-down review of the incident … Insurgent violence continues to be on the rise in Anbar Province, where the incident took place …
There was no avoiding the horror. Dressing for a colleague’s baby shower, it took Ellen three tries to button her blouse the right way. On the drive across the city, she thought about the most recent letter from Michael. No inkling of the atrocities that everyone was talking about; it was almost as if he was describing an entirely different war in an entirely different place. Or, Ellen thought, though she knew it had been written before that shameful incident (or had it?), as if Mike wanted to deliberately withhold the worst from her.
Dear Ellen, I’ll try to describe what I’m doing right now. I am sitting outside trying to stay in the holes of shade a cammy net provides above me. It is a break from standing watch in the bunker. I am in my cammy pants and a T-shirt it is noon and already about 115 degrees. I can look out and see the Euphrates river 200m to my east with the small lane of Palm Trees on both sides. People might say this is a beautiful place but all I see is on the outskirts of this “city” is a place no humans should have to live. So there’s my little snapshot. Thanks for the letters and stuff. Tell Wes no more candy ’cause I’m trying not to get fat! Hi again—I am now finishing this letter a week later. Love, Mike
In the car, Ellen put on WORT for classical—but stayed alert, for on breaks the announcer still read out the headlines, melding his honeyed bass around words like toilet, corpses, and retaliation. When that happened, she had to lunge to turn down the dial. She left the windows down; it was thick and muggy, with the threat of rain. On the one hand, it was touching the way Mike’s last letter painstakingly tried to paint a verbal picture of his surroundings, something he must have guessed she would appreciate. On the other, it was a detail-filled document that conspicuously avoided the main subject. All windup and no pitch. Then those ominous casual references to standing watch in bunkers and a place no humans should live! Ellen took University west, the traffic so much less bothersome in the summer. She had scoured the letter so many times it wasn’t hard to reconstruct it in her mind’s eye, even if it wasn’t tucked into the purse now riding on the passenger seat next to a badly wrapped baby present.
“Finishing this a week later,” she said aloud. “Why? And why say it?” And what had happened to break off his descriptive letter writing that suffocating day, in the paltry shade of a cammy net, whatever that was. “‘Hi again’?” What had he done between that day and a week later? If they read it in Intro to Literary Theory she would have led the students to a discussion of caesura, that fracture in a sentence or text where breakage provokes emotion, a jarring. Or she would have nudged them toward Derrida, where absence points up and undermines our traditional expectation of presence.
Did she expect him to tell her about what he was really doing there in western Iraq? About whatever those “missions” involved? About the split-second decisions and acts of self-defense and perpetrations of a plan made so far away from his own day-to-day reality, his own single human agency? Did she want to know whether a man pissing next to the corpse of another man was now something Michael could understand?
Ellen turned onto Shorewood, wound her way toward Lake Mendota. There was another absence in that letter, she realized. Jane. Michael hadn’t mentioned Jane, at all.
Here in one of Madison’s upscale suburbs, the trees were older, leafier. There were fewer sidewalks and more double garages. The homes were graceful, large but not ostentatious. Ellen checked the address and dutifully parked last in the string of cars lining the street. She gathered purse and present but wobbled briefly, closing the car door. She hadn’t eaten yet today, or had she? Recently she’d been keeping odd hours, snacking at random, kept at her desk until late at night.
Her colleague Debbie Masterson was a second-year assistant professor they were all trying to rally around. She’d been on a streak of bad luck: her husband, a scientist at UW, had lost his funding and then his job; she’d been on bed rest since May; they’d had to give up their apartment and move in here with her mother. Not to mention she’d be going up for tenure next year, with infant twins and a job-hunting husband. Ellen breathed deeply and paused for a moment on the paved entrance path, trying to clear her head. You’re not the only one in pain, she told herself. Snap out of it.
“You look wonderful,” she told Debbie, who was laid out regally on a living room couch, surrounded by friends and plates of food. A quick glance let her know that most of those attending were young women she didn’t know, probably friends of Debbie’s from grad school. One or two familiar faces from UW looked up and waved.
“I feel like a pasha greeting her minions. A pasha in nude compression stockings.”
“Here, let me take that for you.” Debbie’s mother relieved her of the present and gave her a cup of punch. Ellen tried not to notice that the woman was only a few years older than she herself was. That would only lead her to think about …
“Just the person I was looking for.” Mark Carroll, department chair. Damn. Wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be for women only? “You’ve been hard to get ahold of this summer, Professor. Is your e-mail on the fritz?”
“Really? I don’t think—”
“College Committee on Retention?” Mark leaned back against a sofa armrest. “Dean Welter says she hasn’t seen you at either of the meetings so far.”
Ellen took a big drink of sugary punch. “It’s very difficult to align people’s schedules over the summer. And some research has recently taken up a lot of my time.”
“Hmm.” Mark considered the excuse, tilting his head up to the ceiling. He was such an officious prick. In a department that was 90 percent women, they’d been stuck with this micromanager as chair for the past four years. (Not, Ellen shuddered, that she would want the job.)
“When you agreed to serve on the committee, I was under the impression—”
“I’ll be at the next one for sure, Mark.” The man had once published a book on 1980s sitcoms, Ellen consoled herself.
“That would be great. So what’s this new project? Another Edith exposé? I have to say, I really admire you for sticking to your guns—refusing to branch out to any other subject, you know. It’s so deliciously old-fashioned.”
“Let’s not talk shop at Debbie’s party,” Ellen said, smiling tightly. “I’ll catch you around the office and fill you in.”
“Yes! Actually, Jim and I are off to Beaver Island next week—irony noted—but you could just e-mail me your notes and any updates from that next Retention meeting. And someday I’d love to hear how things are with good old Edith.”
Ellen threaded her way to a chair off to the side. Debbie began opening presents that were carried to her, one by one. It’s just Mark, she told herself, sliding a Danish onto a paper plate. He’s annoyed; he’s being petty.
Meanwhile, women of all ages were advising Debbie on baby care. Don’t let them sleep in your bed, you’ll never get them out. Join a multiples group. Steal all the free stuff they’ll let you take in the hospital. Then, when it was clear the few men in attendance had drifted off to the dining room, hushed and triumphant, the real war stories began.
“Twenty hours in, and they’ve been measuring me at seven centimeters. Then this one resident barges in, snaps on a glove, and sticks his hand up me. No kidding. He says, and I quote, ‘You’re only at six centimeters, and if you don’t progress I’ll need to section you in the next hour.’ I’m like, what are you talking about, six. I’m at seven, everyone else says so! He gets all, ‘measuring the cervix is obviously subjective,’ and I shout EXACTLY SO WHAT MAKES YOUR FAT FINGERS THE ONES THAT ARE GOING TO DETERMINE A C-SECTION OR NOT.”
“Apparently when they’re inverted you’re supposed to draw them out. Yeah. So they give you these ‘shields,’ and there I am, getting stitched up after a thirty-hour labor, holding the baby and frankly just trying not to pass out, and the nurse is like, I’m just going to put these pieces of plastic on your breasts because your nipples are the wrong shape.”
“She screamed from six to twelve, every single night. Up every two hours for nine months. Literally nine months. The first week I was on the phone with the pediatrician, I’m sobbing of course, and I’m holding this screaming baby, and they start giving me that routine about colic and I’m like, well no shit but would you listen to this?”
Could she tape this and replay it for Jane? Ellen caught a pained expression from Debbie’s mother, upright in a side chair. Even Debbie looked unsettled, behind her mock-dismay.
* * *
The rest of the night at the movies, after Jane had whispered that she was pregnant, was now a bad blur Ellen tried not to bring into focus. At first Ellen, in shock, continued to watch Batman flirt with a saucy brunette and fight a pale-eyed villain called Scarecrow. Then she picked up her coat and left the theater, Jane hurrying behind. And so it was on the edge of a giant parking lot, Ellen having no idea where her car was, that she had to have an unthinkable scene with her daughter. How could you tell me something like that, like that? In the middle of a movie? Is that really the main issue, Mom? How do you know … are you sure? When did you—? I took a test, all right? I took two of them. Jesus, can you dial it down? But—who’s the father? I don’t want to get into that.
It was Jane’s demeanor there on the curb in the shadows under the theater awning, sullen and secretive, insistently casual, selfish, that sent Ellen into a panicked diatribe. She hated to think of how she reacted: she lectured her daughter, she used words like irresponsible and self-destructive. The more Jane withdrew, staring off to the side and chewing on a shirt cuff, the more vehement Ellen got. She tried to staunch her disappointment, she tried to be more sensitive, to modulate her tone of voice. But it was too late. Jane said she had to go, she couldn’t deal with this right now. When am I going to see you again? We need to figure out what’s next, have you made an appointment, of course I want to be there—and I know it must be expensive, that’s nothing you have to worry about …
“You don’t know what I’m going to do about it!” Jane burst out. “I might be keeping it!” At that she ran off while Ellen called after her, and passersby stared.
Since then, she had called Jane almost daily, leaving countless messages but had received nothing back except for the occasional grudging texts. It’s fine. Not in the mood to talk.
Ellen had fought to manage her worry, her dismay—keep it?! “Keep” “it”?? Where would she “keep” a baby, in that firetrap co-op? On a part-time receptionist’s pay? She had done such a good job of managing, in fact, that it wasn’t until she was at a coworker’s baby shower that Jane’s infuriating situation truly hit her. These women, the ones competing to outdo each other’s birth drama, they were all women. Not girls—women. They had educations, life experience, husbands. And still they had been knocked flat by how hard it all was. What was Jane thinking? Obviously she couldn’t have a baby. She could barely put together a coherent life for herself, let alone be responsible for a child. The absolute impossibility of it reassured Ellen. She remembered the advice given in a “parenting your spirited teen” workshop she’d attended once, during the tempest of Jane’s high school years: push them and they’ll run the other way. Jane would have to believe that getting an abortion was Jane’s idea. Ellen could wait it out.
“Everyone always talks about, you know, pooping while giving birth—” This from a young woman to her friend, both sitting just behind Ellen. Slices of cake had been handed around; conversation broke into smaller pockets. “But that’s nothing. I swear I peed every time I stood up, for at least a year after Jackson. There were two of us in diapers.”
Ellen ate tiny bites of her cake, an unwilling eavesdropper. She wanted to be in favor of women’s openness and honesty around the birth experiences—if woman-positive Serena were here she’d be urging them all on, cheering every bodily disclosure, the messier the better, even though Serena herself had not the least personal interest in pregnancy and children—but really, wasn’t enough enough?
“Speaking of bathroom stuff,” the other woman said. “You saw those headlines, right?”
Ellen froze.
“I know. So disgusting, so absolutely despicable. If this alone isn’t an indictment against us for this war, I don’t know what could be. Those men are laughing. You can tell, you can see it.”
“What I want to know is, which one of them decided to take the pictures? Like, how did that even cross his mind?”
“Which one decided to do it first? How did it start? Did they just”—the woman’s voice dropped—“kill that guy and then need to take a leak? And put the two things together and think, hey why not—”
“Inhuman. They’re thugs, plain and simple. Bloodthirsty thugs. No better than any terrorist. Do you ever wonder, when something like this comes up, what we aren’t seeing? What we don’t know about? As if there are a dozen other incidents like this every month.”
“Massacres. Taking My Lai into the digital age.”
“The thing is, the Pentagon, all those old men in charge, they know this is what happens in war. They’ve probably seen it a thousand times. The only reason they’re flipping out is because it got out, not because it happened. Because it might threaten their budgets, not because it’s morally abominable. A-bomb-in-able. I always have trouble pronouncing that.”
“I hate this fucking ‘support the troops’ no-matter-what mentality. No. I won’t be co-opted into pretending it isn’t our guys doing this. We train them to be like that. We tell them it’s okay to kill children and defile human bodies. Just as long as—”
“They get the oil for us.”
The too-sweet, powdery frosting curdled in Ellen’s mouth. The women behind her were on to another subject, but she had a paranoid sense they’d wanted her to overhear, that they had been whispering just for her benefit. Did they know? Did they know about Mike being a Marine, that he was there? Had anyone seen that service flag—stuffed in a bottom drawer for weeks but recently attached to a kitchen window in a stupid moment of superstition that it would bring him back safe? Its blue star burned her now, a flagrant sign of her complicity … one that she’d hung out herself! Ellen’s vision wavered, and the group of women gathered together in the room strung out as if they were all far away from her; their voices shrunk to a thin stream of babble. She wanted to put her plate down but she couldn’t reach the coffee table.
It’s all right, she heard herself think. These people don’t really know you. They don’t know him. Not to mention, he’s not even your real—
The shock of this half thought brought her up short. The others at the party snapped back into view, their chatter roared. It was as if Ellen didn’t exist.
“She never learned to crawl, not really. She’d just line up a spot across the room and then roll her way across the rug to get there.”
“Oh, totally. Mine did the wounded soldier crawl.” Ellen stared. The woman talking mimicked movement with her bent arms held up in front of her, her face distorted to show pain and effort. “You know, on his stomach, dragging his body behind him like dead weight. Got—to make it—under—this barbed wire fence.”
The room laughed appreciatively.
Ellen stood and dropped her plate onto the seat of her chair. Snaking through chairs and love seats, she made her way quickly and quietly to the kitchen, where whatever expression she must have had on her face caused the startled caterer to point to the hallway without Ellen even needing to ask. If she could only have a moment alone, and some cold water for her face, she could fight down this rising upsurge of horror and nausea.
With a perfunctory knock, Ellen pulled open the door. Mark Carroll, stunned, legs spread, facing the toilet. His shout and hers overlapped. She closed the door again, mortified, repelled, the echoing thunder of his streaming urine still in her ears. She dropped all pretense and fled. Down the hallway, through the front hall, up the stairs. Vaguely aware of someone calling her name. Ellen’s only thought was to get to a bathroom before … She tried one room, and then the next, making it safely into the right one, and even had a few seconds to spare in order to ensure this door was shut and locked, open both sink faucets, and kneel carefully on the clean blue-tiled floor before throwing up, twice, neatly, into Debbie Masterson’s mother’s toilet.
* * *
“Just a splash. It settles the stomach.”
“The ginger ale will settle my stomach. The rum will do something else.”
Serena shrugged, tipping a healthy portion of brown liquid into her own glass. Ellen had her shoes off, was curled up on their couch, after it had been cleared of newspapers and shooed of cats. Serena had spread a light cotton blanket over Ellen’s legs and put a pillow behind her head. The open windows behind her let in occasional gusts of damp wind, but that felt good on Ellen’s head. Being here felt good, in general. The rain and the early evening darkness lent Serena and Jill’s messy apartment a cozy safeness. Serena bustled around, switching on lamps and shifting piles of books and papers into new piles of books and papers. Jill passed through with a raincoat over her arm. She whispered hello to Ellen and kissed Serena good-bye. Here were three women, each in her fifties—or older—each with gray hair and progressive-lens eyeglasses and quiet lives.
“I don’t understand,” Ellen said. “Why now? Why now that we’re older? How can war, real war, be a part of life now?”
“How could it not?” Serena said.
“Because our turn’s over! We had our war. I walked out of classes in the fall of my sophomore year. I cried when they showed footage after Tet. There was a boy from my hometown who never came back, was never even found. Their house had a POW/MIA flag up for years afterward, even during Reagan, my mom said. What was their name…”
“There was a woman holding this sign at our last action—wait, let me get the photo—it was genius, you have to see…” Serena clicked around on her laptop and brought the computer over to Ellen. A photo of a grandmotherly type, covered in PEACE & JUSTICE and NOT IN MY NAME buttons, with a sign that read I CAN’T BELIEVE I STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS SHIT.
Ellen smiled wanly. “It’s a good one.”
“So you don’t want to play this part.” Serena sat in the armchair across from her, feet up on the coffee table. “It’s not what you’d planned on.”
“No, it’s not! I know you’re going to disapprove, but I’m okay with the protesting, and I vote and I pay attention and I donate to the right places … I just don’t see why I have to be tied to it with my heart. Why it has to come into my home, all this fear and—” All this fear. It wasn’t just the swooshing wave of inner vertigo whenever she thought of Mike hurt or killed, whenever she remembered how close he was to that possibility. Or her thrumming, irregular pulse, the cold crawliness on her skin. Recently new symptoms appeared, and even though they weren’t directly attached to those bursts of dread, Ellen knew where they came from: that twitch in her left eyelid, the one that hadn’t gone away in a week. Sleeplessness at night, exhaustion during the day. Sudden bouts of unexplained diarrhea and now, unfortunately, surprise attacks of vomit.
Ellen sighed. An aging woman, complaining about her aches and pains. “‘Why me, why me.’ Ignore me.”
“Let me think.” Serena steepled her hands against her face, pensive. Ellen was warmed by her concern—that her own devastation should be a worthy problem to be turned around in her mind. “Why do we have this now, why war now, women our age…” Serena muttered to herself. “Putting aside the inherent solipsism of the question, and your privileged first-world status, that is.”
“Naturally.”
“Well, I think I know.” Her friend took a deep drink, organizing her thoughts. Ellen waited. “You’re given this burden now because you can tell the truth about it.”
Ellen laughed. “I can barely stand to admit to people who know and theoretically like me that my—whatever, my ward—is a Marine. Is fighting a war I despise. Let alone speak out and make some kind of statement about it all. I’m no Cindy Sherman.”
“The photographer? I’m not sure I follow…”
“Cindy Sheehan, I meant. The mom, the antiwar activist. Oh, God.” Ellen covered her face. She’d just compared herself to someone whose son had died.
If Serena noticed her anguish, she didn’t mention it. “Well, they both make a kind of sense to me. In any case, think about it. There is a logic for us in having this happen now, when we’re old, when we’re in typical grandmother position. We have the perspective, the wisdom, the distance to be able to see it clearly, when almost no one else in society can.” Serena stood and paced around the room. “The younger men are fighting the war—or avoiding it—and the older men are plotting it, or reliving their own wars. Younger women are caught between the terror of losing a husband there and the raising of children—they have no space in which to think. But we—” Serena sank onto the couch near Ellen’s feet. “We’re the secret weapon.”
“Older women.”
“Write about it. Put it into the work.”
Ellen studied her old friend, who was nearly vibrating with intellectual force, a lock of silvery hair dipping down her forehead. This wasn’t what she wanted, an academic senior-citizen call to arms. It wasn’t assuaging her shame at the feelings she’d had earlier at Debbie’s party, that instinct to disown Mike. But despite herself, she was drawn into Serena’s excitement. It’s what she had been doing, in a way, writing to Michael—those pages of stories about his life, with readings selected just for him. A correspondence course he didn’t know he’d signed up for.
But first, she had to find something out. “How did it affect you?” she asked Serena, who was lost in thought. Ellen nudged her gently with a foot. “What did you think, when you heard?”
“When I heard?”
“The Marines, that … the bodies. What they did.” Ellen could barely say the words.
To her shock, Serena’s face creased and she began to cry. “Oh—oh, I’m sorry,” Ellen said. “I didn’t know. I’m—”
“It’s unbearable.” Serena ignored the tears coursing down. “I’ve been wrecked about it all weekend. What we do to them.”
“Despicable,” Ellen whispered. She forced herself to face the shaming that would come.
“They’re so young,” Serena went on. “So deluded. And what we’ve done … first we ask the unbearable and now we scorn them for submitting. And then we make them live with both.” Ellen realized that Serena was talking about the Marines. With sympathy, with real sorrow. She reached over to hold her friend’s hand.
They stayed like that for several minutes, a soft steady rain against the window screen, a car swishing by on wet pavement.
“Two of my grad students are building an online archive of citizens’ responses to the war.” Serena tucked back her loose strand of hair. “Half interactive art site, half journalism project. It has a lot of potential. Would you speak to them? They’re doing interviews, and I know it would mean everything for them to have your perspective—a family member’s, that is. They haven’t found any yet, from what I understand.”
“I don’t think so, Serena.”
“You can be as conflicted as you want. You wouldn’t have to do anything other than give your honest expression of what this is like.”
If only it were that easy, Ellen thought. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t. But…” And here she did allow herself to think about Jane (not about her situation, which was a matter to be solved soon), Jane the passionate activist, with a heart as big and angry as Serena could ever want. “I think I know someone perfect.”