Long Division

by Jane Berentson

  The rest of the conversation was me accusing and then backing down and then David alternately apologizing then defending what he did. We took turns making a lot of sense and then making none at all. I cried. And I could hear that he was also kind of crying too. And hearing him cry made me feel so horrible and disgusted with myself. Here I am ripping him a new asshole when his buddy was just killed. I’m supposed to be supportive, but I’m raging. What a fucking mess. We reconciled a little bit, admitting that we are each inching a few degrees closer to crazy. David promised to tell me everything from now on, and I promised not to be such a psychopath. I love you. I love you. We said it. (I’m pretty sure) we meant it. We hung up.

  And then I cried more because it kind of feels like I don’t know him as much anymore. And because I’m hurt that he didn’t want to tell me. That he didn’t think I could help. I cried because I can’t help. And because I ate a whole pint of chocolate ice cream without taking Lactaid first. And because that makes me such a fucking typical, fucking miserable woman.

  And here I am back at the stupid computer working on my stupid whine-a-thon, thinking that writing and typing will help make sense of everything. But it’s no fucking tapestry, I’ll tell you that. The time is not zipping by along the strings of my loom or the hoop of my embroidery thingo or the clicking needles of my knitting. This whole year is taking forever. David needs to come home. Soon. Soon. Soon. Soooooooooooooooooon.

  19

  Today I’ve given up writing a book, because it’s likely that every last reader will hate my guts. Instead, I’m writing a suicide note that will hopefully—if my parents permit—be published in USA Today and read out loud by Oprah on a show about the sorts of tumult women go through while their men are at war. Oprah is really good at reading out loud. Just kidding.102

  The day after The Big Annie and David Verbal Showdown of 2004, I went to see Loretta. I didn’t want to tell my mom about the fight or Michelle or Gus or anyone else. It was really just too embarrassing. I sat on the edge of Loretta’s bed, and she pulled her rocker up close so she could hold my hands and periodically squeeze them while I told her everything.103 It took a while to explain the Beanie Baby backstory, but eventually Loretta got it.

  “Of course, you feel deceived, Annie. One time Ron refinanced our home without telling me. I nearly beat him to death with our checkbook. It hurts to feel shut out from the person who is supposed to love you the most.” Ah, Loretta. Making sense. Making Annie Harper look a little less wicked.

  “Yeah. It’s hard enough already to ignore the fact that this whole situation is chiseling its way between us, then something like this happens and I completely lose it.”

  “You haven’t lost it, dear. I’ve seen women in greater distress. You went to school today. You drove over here. Your hair looks very nice.” I laughed a snotty, wet laugh and squeezed Loretta’s hands back.

  The e-mail I had from David when I got home:Dear Annie,

  Again, I’m sorry about not telling you about Flores. I don’t want to talk the issue into the ground, but I want you to know that it had nothing to do with wanting to keep things from you. You know I don’t believe in secrets. God, if the ARMY is reading this e-mail, they’ll have me for that one. But you know what I mean—keeping secrets from you. SO that being said I just want to make sure I get everything out in the open.

  1. I missed a day of work last month because I had the flu. I didn’t tell you I had the flu because I knew you’d freak out and it was just a quick one-day thing and I’m totally fine now, but after all this I felt weird about not telling you. And I promise to tell you about all future physical ailments. Even if it’s lice or something, though I don’t imagine there’s much of that going around here.

  2. When I was in fourth grade I peed my pants while we watched this filmstrip about volcanoes. It was a really sweet filmstrip. I’ve never told anyone outside my family and Mr. Costanti’s class about it.

  3. Now this one might bug you a bit and I totally understand and I want you to know that there’s nothing I can do about it but there is this gal in my company, her name is Austin, Jayna Austin, and I guess she has this big crush on me or something. I guess her and like three of the other women in my company started this immature game about who they would choose to sleep with if they knew they were going to get killed the next day. Which is really stupid because no one here knows what’s going to happen when. It’s just gossipy crap. She and I have worked together on a few projects, but I promise you nothing inappropriate has ever transpired between us. Austin is totally not my type. I know you won’t really care about this kind of lame- ass Army stuff, but I wanted to tell you so that you understand that I am dedicated to telling you EVERYTHING from now on. We’re just a bunch of people who spend A LOT of time together and it’s only natural for us to digress into seventh graders from time to time.

  AHhhh. So it feels good to get this out and I promise to tell you everything all the time. And I know you’ve been and will continue to keep doing the same.

  Lots of love from the desert,

  Big D.

  Well, well, well, what have we here? Austin, Jayna. In the real book I will not write that I think hers sounds like the name of a literary porn star. In the real book I will not offensively berate our brave soldiers for casual, who-would-you-rather musings. In the real book I will not Google “Jayna Austin,” “Austin, Jayna,” “Jayna Austin David Peterson,” “Jayna Austin Jane Austen,” “Jayna Austin sex tape,” “Jayna Austin Army Beauty Queen Winner,” or “Jayna Austin stole my boyfriend.” In the real book, I will not imagine David ripping the bodice of another woman’s fatigues to reveal a lacy, olive green bra with a gold bullet ornament hanging from the front clasp. In the real book I will not shed tears of suspicion over the same boyfriend choosing to use the words “nothing inappropriate has transpired” with me, like he’s the HR director at some mega-corporate company I don’t work at. In the real book I will release one good-natured second of a laugh and silently commend dear Austin, Jayna, for her excellent taste in handsome soldiers.

  No, but really, I haven’t decided if this stupid thing even bothers me yet. So far, I don’t believe that it truly does. Perhaps I’m a big girl after all. I appreciate David releasing the information to me. I’m sure he felt like such a junior-high acne clown relating the whole ridiculous thing, but he did it. He did it for me. I start to think that maybe I’m not telling David enough. Do I need to come clean about napping on the Easter Bunny? What if my mom sent him the clip from the newspaper? And though his confessions do help a bit, I’m not entirely sure it’s assuaged the issue104 away to nothing.

  Yesterday at school, about twenty minutes before dismissal, the office aide brought a note into my class. It said that Charese Atkins was going to be about twenty minutes late picking up Lacey and that I could either wait with Lacey in the classroom or send her to the office where she could sit with the secretaries until Charese arrived. The kids were busy coloring maps for a social studies project, and I scribbled on the back of the note that I could wait with Lacey here. I thanked the fifth-grader office aide and sent her away with my reply.

  When the bell rang and the kids scrambled into their jackets and started to plow past me, I simultaneously shouted out a reminder about the night’s science homework105 and managed to make eye contact with Lacey and pull her over.

  “Lacey, your mom called. She’s going to be a bit late picking you up, so you’re going to wait in here with me. Do you want to play computer games or something?”

  “Okay,” she said, and I guided her to one of the machines.

  “So how do you like Tacoma so far, Lacey?” I asked as the computer booted up. It was a weird question to ask a kid, I now realize. Like she’s going to say that the bars are kind of crummy and the r ush-hour traffic is a bitch.

  “I like living with Grandma, but I miss my dad and my friends back in California.” It was a very honest, mature answer and I wasn’t surprised, really, because Lacey is
so bright and articulate. She beeped along in Rainforest Math (a really lame game, I’ll admit), and I busied myself tidying the Book Nook and eventually my desk.

  When Charese arrived she was wearing a sharp skirt suit, pantyhose, and sunglasses. “Thanks so much for waiting, Miss Harper.” She looked down at the front of her dark pinstriped jacket as if it were an explanation. “Job interview. They called me in kind of last minute. Lucky I had this thing ironed, right?” Charese helped Lacey into her jacket and then turned back to me. “You’re looking a bit down, Miss Harper. The kids work you over today?” Hanging out with children and an old lady all the time has depleted my abilities to engage in regular adult small talk.

  “No, they were fine. I’m just exhausted. You know, personal stuff.”

  “Oh, so I heard your boyfriend is in the service.” It’s amazing how well informed this whole community is.

  “Yeah. That’s right. He’s over there.” Pause. Pause. Pause. “In Iraq.”

  “Well, at least you know that over there he’s not chasing some other girl’s tail. My ex had full beaches of pretty ladies to distract him from me. From us.” Her hands made their way to Lacey’s shoulders, and I found it weird that she was doing all this daddy bashing in front of her daughter. I said something like yeah, I guess, and then Charese went on this huge tirade about how the military breeds infidelity. You just keep all these men together all the time talking about who bangs what how often, and it’s like a giant locker room with guns. And then they take couples away from each other for months on end. You know, the wives can be just as bad. There’s this code on base where if a woman whose man is deployed is getting lonely and wants a piece of action, all she has to do is lean a mop upside down outside her back door and that tells all the hungry dudes passing by that she’s looking for a little bit of service, if you know what I mean. Horrible, really. Happens all the time. Just the other day I read about this guy who came back from Iraq and found out his wife was pregnant with some other dude’s baby, and he shot her, the other guy, and their two kids. His very own two kids. Talk about post-traumatic stress. Right? And then there’s all the guys that volunteer for these eight-month deployments in Korea so they can get a break from their fat wives and indulge in poor Russian and Filipina women who get their passports stolen and are forced into prostitution. Hear that all the time.

  As she said all this I just sat there on the edge of my desk, mouth hanging open, eyes darting back and forth to Charese and then Lacey, who started playing with this beaded key chain on her backpack like she’d heard her mother give this same terrible speech a hundred and fifty times.

  And I thought I was pessimistic about military life.

  I left the school thinking about Charese and how wounded she is. Here I am feeling betrayed because David didn’t tell me about Flores’s death, a tragedy he was still struggling to swallow, and there’s Charese shit-talking her way through a real one. A real-deal-Holyfield betrayal. David barely betrayed me. It might not even count at all. Throw his offense into the BetrayalCalcutron2004 and what does it say? Cannot compute. Unsubstantiated evidence. Please terminate raging bitch behavior immediately. What in the world is wrong with you, Annie Harper? He did not betray you. He even gave you an escape clause so you could back out of this game if you somehow felt too threatened or weakened or defeated. Baby baby babyface, Miss Harper. Buck up. Buck the fuck up. Jayna Austin, Hottest Soldier Ever, is ten million times tougher than you.

  I stopped by the grocery store on the way home because it was payday and I like to buy myself treats when I’m feeling kind of rich. A nice jar of olives. A fancy slab of cheese. I was walking by the dried fruits when I remembered a ridiculous scene from the camping trip.

  We were all sitting around the edge of Hobo Lake eating lunch and talking about how birds feed their young. We were giving Stephen crap because—despite his fancy East Coast education—he didn’t know that most birds regurgitate food for their babies. Stephen thought it was both hilarious and disgusting. We were all sharing a bag of dried apricots (except for Gina, who doesn’t care for them because the texture reminds her of biting into someone’s tongue), and then Gus said, “Do you think that if you eat something dehydrated and regurgitate it back up that the juices from your digestive system will have replaced the original liquids in the same places and rendered the something back into its original texture?”

  “Seems like kind of a stretch,” Gina had said.

  “Yeah. The something would be all masticated,” added Stephen, the future dentist.

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out,”106 I had said. And so Gus had to try. He took an apricot, chewed it twenty-four times, per Stephen’s instructions, and proceeded—I had to turn away several times—to swallow and regurgitate the thing back up. He spun away from us as he urged the final cough out of his body, and we could see him messing with the contents of his hand before turning around to present it.

  The color was the same; Gus had effectively prevented any other recently consumed foods from tagging along for the ride north. And the texture of the goop did kind of look like the flesh of a fresh apricot, but the shape was off. While his back was turned, Gus had quickly molded the fruit wad into the shape of a heart. And then he took a step toward Gina and extended his hand in offering, “My lady,” he had said in a tone fit for the most dignified, noble prince of the most dignified, noble kingdom ever.

  “What?” Gina was appalled. “You want me to eat that? I’m not your baby bird.” Stephen and I laughed because Gus wasn’t breaking. He was serious. At the time, I didn’t think anything less of Gina for not wanting to eat the regurgitated apricot. It was really quite gross. But as I stood there with my shopping cart amongst the raisins and dried peaches and rings of apples—all stiff and brittle, robbed of their natural juices and original textures—I realized what Gus had really done. Gina didn’t like the texture of dried apricots. And he took what started as a ridiculous joke—the musings of bored fishermen—and changed the food to suit her. For her. And she didn’t even recognize it. None of us did. But now I get it. Had it been me, I like to think that I’d have eaten it. And for a moment in that grocery aisle, I kind of wanted to eat Gus’s regurgitated apricot. (ICK!ICK!ICK!, I know.) Not really. Mostly I just wished I could tell him that I now understood how thoughtful the gesture was. It’s kind of like his old gum mosaic for that Valentine-hating girl in college. When you care about someone, you want everything to be the best for that person. You go so far as to harness the bits of the universe that he/she finds disagreeable and manipulate them into something that the person can at least tolerate, or, maybe, enjoy. What does it mean that I’m the only one who seems to find Gus’s saliva-laced acts of romance admirable? Enviable, even. What kind of weirdo am I?

  The kind of weirdo who combats emotional crisis with emotional spending. I bought three flavors of fancy sorbet and got the heck out of that supermarket.

  20

  Today I’m calling my book Dreams from the Homeland, and the cover has an embossed shiny font and a painting of a rolling country-side. The entire book takes place on my back porch as I sit in my rocking chair, sipping whiskey from a chipped mason jar and recounting everything that has happened this year. I’ve taken the artistic liberty to write Loretta out of Violet Meadows, and she sits next to me correcting my “whos” and “whoms” and slapping my wrist if I start to curse too much.

  So I stopped writing again. This time it wasn’t because of blahgers. It was because of Private Lynndie England, the Most Disgusting Human Being on the Planet. Well, close at least. Her and her torturing, soulless cohorts of the 372nd Military Police Company at the Abu Ghraib prison. It was a few weeks after Easter when that whole big 60 Minutes II episode on the scandal ran. I hadn’t heard anything of it yet, and I was sitting down to dinner when the program began. I had made stir-fried vegetables with shrimp, and I was very proud of the fact that I hadn’t burnt my rice for once. But as the scandal was revealed and discussed, and as those ho
rrifying images kept flashing on my TV screen, I couldn’t eat even one broccoli floret. Yeah, I felt sick. But I was totally raging. These are the kinds of things I was yelling out loud in my living room:Who are these monsters?

  What the fuck is wrong with people?

  What the fuck is wrong with the U.S. military?

  Holy fucking shit!

  Humanity is doomed!

  I fucking hate her! And him! And him! And him!

  And then the rage settled into a profound sadness that made my limbs sink into my sofa as I whispered things like this between heavy, wavering breaths:No no no no no no no no no.

  Those poor, poor men.

  What’s the matter with the World?

  Nothing will ever change.

  Nothing will ever get better.

  The universe is doomed.

  Humanity is doomed.

  Everything is doomed.

  A few days later Gus had tipped me off about the article that would run in the next week’s New Yorker and that was already posted online. I printed out a copy once I got to school and turned the first hour of class into surprise silent reading time while I sat at my desk reading and resisting the urge to weep.

  And as the days went on and news remained plastered with the details of the accusations, the kinks in chains of commands, and those horrible, horrible images, I slowly became consumed with guilt. Even though David’s army people have absolutely nothing to do with those army people, and even though I don’t think most of them should even be over there at all, and even though I didn’t vote for George W. Bush, my hands were still sweating with guilt. Shame. Shame. Shame. After the Guilt Phase came my Obsession with Lynndie England’s Fetus Phase. After hearing of her pregnancy and the child’s father being a fellow torturer, I died a thousand deaths for that baby. Would she be allowed to keep it? At what age would it stumble upon the photographs? Can I please please please Mister Bush, adopt it and nurture it into a normal, loving child? Will you promise that Mr. and Mrs. Evil will never have a hope of taking it back?