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“COME HELP ME,” Sonny Saunders whispered in the late night darkness.
Lucy turned her head on the pillow into a bouquet of Dial soap and Old Spice. The few times her husband had needed to leave like this before, he’d always awakened her as soon as he’d started to get ready. He liked the company, him in the shower and her making coffee and heating leftovers in the kitchen. Something was different this night. The weight of him sitting on her side of the bed pitched her toward him. In the spill-over glow of the bathroom light, she could see the perfect crease of his midnight-blue pants and the sheen of his spotless black shoes.
“Come on,” he said. His touch glanced her shoulder before he stood and walked toward the door.
“What?”
“I have to go in,” was all he said before leaving the room.
Lucy got up and slipped into the fuzz of her chenille robe. Two years before, she and Sonny had been proud to announce to their families his assignment to a base right outside of Washington. It was a plum Air Force post. President Kennedy had just moved into the White House, and Jackie was showing America how to dress and entertain. Lucy wrote letters to her friends, boasting of day trips to monuments and flying kites on the Mall. With the new threat, though, being posted to these ex-tobacco fields near DC had lost their charm, and she would’ve welcomed the arid safety of the old assignment in California.
She shuffled into the kitchen as she looped the pink belt of her robe and pulled it tight. Sonny had taken out the can of coffee and was holding the basket from the percolator. She took them from him and filled the pot with water. He went to the living room and came back with a pack of cigarettes and a brass ash tray he had gotten in Tokyo. Neither of them spoke. She opened the fridge and took out the makings for ham sandwiches while he tapped out two cigarettes and lit both.
Everyone had noticed the extra flights that moved through their base and had felt the unspoken frenzy. The wives had made their own escape plans. They were ready, but was it time already? Lucy wanted Sonny to say something but couldn’t pause in her duties to draw it out of him. She spread Miracle Whip on four slices of bread and opened the mustard jar.
“Is this it? The Big One?” she asked.
“No, of course not. I told you already about the exercises coming up. I’m sure I’ll be back for dinner tomorrow. Or the next day. There’ll still be plenty of ham, right?” Lucy wondered how routine exercises could pull him out of bed in the middle of the night, but she didn’t ask. Sonny tried to give her a reassuring smile, but they knew each other too well, and he didn’t get it right until she gave him her own false face. He moved closer to her as her hands stayed busy with the sandwiches. He held out a cigarette and she took a drag.
She didn’t even smoke, really, and had never touched a cigarette before she met Sonny. Her life had changed so much.
He poured the coffee and took a sip. “You going to be all right?”
“Don’t worry about us.”
He nodded that tight little shake of his that meant there was more to say but he wasn’t going to say it. She took out his lunch box as he launched into his final preparations. What she meant was, don’t worry about me. With the temperament of an artist, Lucy felt unqualified to be a top-notch military wife, but Sonny loved her and never gave up on her. Not when they had scrambled eggs for dinner or hot dogs for breakfast. And not that time after Erica was born eight years prior, when they had just moved, and Lucy had stopped talking.
He had greeted her silence as a joke at first. Then he yelled, just once, and upset the baby. None of that mattered to Lucy. She just sat in his recliner. Though they were newly posted to the West Coast and didn’t know any folks yet, some wife must’ve recognized the desperation of a man looking for emergency care for a toddler and a newborn. Lucy didn’t know where he took the babies that day, but at some point the air pressure changed and the small noises of other inhabitants ceased. Finally she had no burden of taking care. After a while, Sonny returned and sat on the ottoman in front of her.
“Talk to me,” he said.
She didn’t bother to look at him.
“I’m listening now. You can say whatever you want.”
She wasn’t even there.
He left the room and someone with her eyes watched a rectangle of sunlight move across the floor.
When Lucy noticed her husband again, the ottoman bore a tray of pastel sticks and a large tablet of drawing paper that she had bought early in the pregnancy but had never used. He set a cup of tea on the side table. After standing over her a moment, he knelt and picked up the red pastel stick. She returned her attention to the light that crawled across the beige carpet.
He picked up her hand and put the pastel on her palm. “It’d be nice to have a picture. Maybe you could draw the house across the road.” When she didn’t reply, he stood and left. She reached for the cooled tea some time later and realized that she still cradled the bright red stick in her hand.
Sonny was a good man, but his request felt like one more order: draw a house. The glare of the California sun bounced off the flat-top duplex across the street, the twin of her own and the duplicate of quarters that lined streets with unrelenting regularity on military bases all over the world. You can let their monotony overwhelm you into neglect, but when Lucy glanced across the street, she noticed that the wife had recently planted asters in a handmade window box. It was the wife’s handiwork because the husband didn’t do anything outside; he didn’t even mow the lawn. The flowers stood out against the pale green aluminum siding. Red asters, a standard cheap decoration. Of course they weren’t the pure red of the pastel. There was blue and orange and maybe a little brown to muddy it. By the end of the thought Lucy had started to sketch.
She never told anyone about that day, so the other wife across the way never knew how her simple flowers had saved a marriage. Sarah was her name. Lucy gave her the drawing when she finished it. Her neighbor giggled and protested, but her delight was evident. She invited Lucy over for coffee with a bunch of other wives the following week. She had mounted the drawing in a used gold frame that made it look substantial, even to Lucy. They all admired what Sarah called her house portrait. One woman asked if Lucy could do a picture of her living room with a Japanese chest and a red wedding kimono on the wall. Of course she could. Other women wanted to place orders also. Sarah stepped in and said, “Lucy has two little ones to take care of. We all know about stretching an Air Force paycheck.”
“I’ll pay,” the woman with the kimono said. “It can’t be much, but I’ll pay. And I’ll babysit while she’s doing it.”
Right there, a new business was born. Sonny had his wife back, and they had extra cash to boot. Her mom had said that her artistic life would die if she married a military man. It almost had, but Sonny wouldn’t let it. When little Erica joined her brother full-time at school, Lucy was able to take more serious commissions and work in oil. She always obliged the military wives, though, in whatever medium they desired. Her art documented their efforts to beautify their uncertain stays in the mobile world of the military.
Now with Sonny about to go in after midnight, Lucy tidied up, carrying a stack of Ebony magazines into the unlit living room and dumping them on her work table. As she went back to the brightness of the kitchen, she passed him frozen in the hallway between the children’s rooms. She left him to his moment, continuing on to sit at the kitchen table. Soon he joined her for one last shared cigarette.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Since I’m going to be extra busy on base the next few days, maybe you want to take the kids to see your mother.”
Lucy knew more than her husband thought she did. Sure, she could’ve said, I can be on the road in twenty minutes, but she didn’t. She answered the way she thought he expected. “What are you talking crazy, Sonny-boy? The kids can’t miss school.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He held up the cigarette again. Coffee drunk, sandwiches made, clothes packed into a flight bag, too many butts in the ash tray for too short a time to say goodbye. A soft knock sounded from the back door.
“Must be Ray,” Sonny said. They both stood. He pecked her goodbye, as always, then squeezed her until it hurt. “Stay by the phone.”
“Why?”
He pressed his forehead against hers and walked the pads of his fingers down her face, as if for the first time. She inhaled his coffee breath and the stink of cigarettes. The sharpness of his after-shave cut through it all.
“Just stay by the phone.”
He picked up his gear and reached for the door. A list of names tacked to the message board halted him.
“New car pool?” he asked.
The key to deception is honesty. “Some of the mothers don’t drive yet. Thought I’d help out.”
“Good,” he said. “Glad I’m not taking the car.” He opened the door and left without another backward glance.
Lucy wandered into the living room. There she turned on lights and sought out a distraction. She turned on the jumbo goose-neck lamp on her work table and flipped open the box of pastels. The red was missing. She wondered if Erica had gotten into the box again, because she liked to use what she called Mommy’s crayons. None of the mothers of her friends had their own colors. Lucy scanned the room and spied the missing pastel. Moving closer, she discovered the phone bill’s envelope underneath it, covered in big, red block letters. “LOVE YOU, S.” she read. He hadn’t said those words out loud before he left. She folded the rough paper into the pocket of her robe and crept back to her worktable.
Lucy woke again five hours and seventeen minutes after Sonny had left in the middle of the night. She had fallen asleep at her worktable and now found her latest drawing pushed to one side. The living room was lucent in the dawn as she looked out the front window. The early morning street was empty but for a few yellow leaves gliding through the crisp air. Her mind lit on the emergency evacuation plan that was disguised as a car pool schedule. The camouflage was brilliant—Sonny had seen nothing unusual about the roster of mothers, but then, he had other lists on his mind.
She opened the door onto the bright promise of her tree-lined street to retrieve their two glass bottles of milk. She carried them into the kitchen. Sonny’s cup sat in the drain alone and the percolator still held the dregs of the coffee she had made the previous night. She emptied the overflowing ashtray. The aluminum canisters with copper tops needed to be wiped down and filled, but she didn’t have time for that yet. She took out two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in wax paper from the fridge and put in the milk. She checked the ketchup bottle and noted that she would need more for that evening’s meatloaf. Housework sometimes made her want to hurt someone, but now she appreciated her mundane tasks.
Then it was her turn to check 31L. She wouldn’t have to wait like a good military wife for a phone call or a telegram. That day she was the messenger. She would gather the children with Betty Ann and run, flat out, if it came to that. She checked the kids one more time. If all went well, they wouldn’t miss her for the few moments she would be away. She donned a red sweater as she walked into the living room. She reached for her pocketbook but drew back. Stay near the phone, Sonny had said. The phone’s mute presence and the quiet comfort of the armchair invited her to stay, to obey. The drive to the end of Cedar Street would take two minutes, but so much can happen in no time at all. What if Sonny called, the phone ringing and ringing, her sleepy-eyed son bewildered by its unanswered insistence? Betty Ann could take a risk like that. She could cover the assignment. Lucy knew her number by heart.
No.
Lucy reached past the phone and picked up her pocketbook. She went out to the carport and got in the Rambler station wagon. Even though the day would warm up, the cool night had left a chill inside the car. As she settled into the driver’s seat, her breathing slowed and her shoulders dropped. She was ready for this, whatever it was. Her mission took her along the fence at the end of 31L. Three choppers huddled as if for warmth. A truck sped away from them, but the blades remained still. The threat still existed but it hadn’t come to blows. Not yet, anyway.
As she looped back onto her street and rounded the bend at the far end, Betty Ann’s porch light went on, then Gladys’ and Debbie’s. Lucy stuck her arm straight up out the window and waved broad sweeps. The lights went off, one by one. She imagined a snapshot of her mission, her brown hand sweeping above the white top of the Rambler. She decided to sketch out a painting of it after the kids left for school. The title of the piece would be “Woman Waving to the Future.”
After returning home and parking, she went inside to the hall. “Tony! Erica! Time to get up.”
She knocked on her daughter’s door and waited until she passed, trailing her blue blanket. It wasn’t a security blanket—she was too old for that—but she used it as a pillow because, she said, a regular pillow got too hot. The blanket slipped to the floor but she didn’t seem to notice. This girl was not a morning person.
Lucy went to the blue heap and pointed down at it. “Hey. Come pick this up.”
Erica turned at the bathroom door and gave her a look of pure annoyance. “Mommy, can’t you pick it up? You’re right there.”
Lucy didn’t move. Her daughter stomped over and swiped the blanket away with her foot. She hobbled down the hall, sweeping the blanket.
“I said pick it up.”
“Okay.” At the entrance to the living room, Erica kicked her foot and sent the blanket sailing into the air. “It’s up.”
