Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  Danny reached the end of the aisle and checked both ways, then motioned Liz forward, using the standard field maneuver hand signals taught at Basic School. Angus waited, half visible behind a rack of fall skirts, until she had rolled by, then fell in behind her, covering her rear. As Liz turned left, heading toward the school supplies aisle, she ran into Betty Simmons, who was pushing a cart loaded with smart skirts, crisp blouses, and improbable hair ribbons for her two teenage daughters.

  “Why, Lizzie O’Reilly, as I live and breathe!” Betty exclaimed in the syllable-adding Richmond accent that made it so hard to take her seriously. But Betty couldn’t help herself. It was all real, from the silver-blond bouffant hair stiff with hair spray to the cheeks caked with foundation and the gooseberry-green dress and matching heels.

  Liz tugged her T-shirt down in a futile tidying gesture and said, “Hello, Betty,” trying to not parody the drawl. Danny and Angus had taken up ambush positions nearby, rifles at ready. Before they could open fire, Liz shooed them on toward the school supplies section and turned back to Betty. “How are you?”

  “Same-same,” Betty said cheerfully. This meant “wonderful” Betty’s life was in apple-pie order. Her husband was a bird colonel on track for general, and both her daughters were beautiful, bright, wholesome girls, honors students glossy with noblesse oblige and sublimated sexuality. “Yourself?”

  “Same-same,” Liz echoed, meaning “disordered.” There was no competing with Betty’s impeccable life, and Liz tended to take refuge in irony. “Just trying to get the monsters outfitted before school starts up.”

  “They just keep growing out of things, don’t they?” Betty agreed. She gave Liz’s midsection a frankly appraising glance, then looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Why, Lizzie, pardon my big mouth, but I do believe—”

  “Yes,” Liz conceded, a little resignedly. It had probably been too much to hope her condition would escape Betty’s omnivorous attention for long. “A couple of months.”

  “How wonderful!”

  “Yeah, wonderful,” Liz said, trying to sound sincere. She had school supplies to buy, for God’s sake. She didn’t have time to fake the appropriate maternal emotions on such short notice.

  “We’ll have to throw you a shower, of course.”

  “Oh, no, there’s really no need—”

  “Nonsense,” Betty said firmly, and Liz decided to let it go. There was no swimming against the tide of Betty’s sense of the proprieties in any case.

  “I’m sure Mike is thrilled too,” Betty went on. “How is he doing over there?”

  Liz hesitated, and a wave of dizziness hit her, a darkness swimming with green and purple blotches. Shit, she thought. It wouldn’t do to collapse in a faint at Betty Simmons’s gooseberry-green feet.

  She took a deep breath, and the store came back into focus.

  “Fine,” she said, firming up her grip on the shopping cart. “Last I heard, anyway. I haven’t had a letter since Wednesday.”

  “Well, no news is good news, right?”

  Liz shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Betty’s Maybelline-red lips pinched; such frankness broke the rules of military wife cheerfulness. Liz added, “I mean, he writes almost every day, but the letters tend to show up in batches of three or four, with gaps in between. Something about the way they get the mail out of there.” She caught herself, feeling that she was beginning to babble. They both knew that Mike could already be dead and his letters would keep showing up anyway for a week and a half. It had just happened to Maria Petroski. But pointing that out broke the damn rules too.

  “When’s he due back?” Betty asked, trying to return the conversation to solid ground.

  “God, I don’t know. I can’t think that far ahead. Next August, I think. The eighteenth?”

  “Buy yourself a 1968 calendar,” Betty advised. “Mark the date. It really helps. An anchor in the future. That’s all that got me through while Dick was over there.”

  “I’m not really a calendar person. I’m more of a one-day-at-a-time type. Like an alcoholic.”

  Liz had meant it as a joke, but Betty’s highlighted blue eyes widened into hurt. Too late, Liz recalled the stories. According to the wives’ grapevine, it wasn’t just a calendar that had gotten Betty through her husband’s tour.

  Liz said hastily, “It must be nice, having Dick home safe and sound.”

  “Oh, it is, it is. The girls are in heaven.” Betty hesitated, then confessed, “He’s put in for another tour. He may leave again as soon as January.”

  “Oh, Betty—” Liz trailed off, unable to come up with something sympathetic to say that wouldn’t violate the code.

  “I’ve been looking for a 1969 calendar,” Betty said. “But they’re not out yet.”

  Danny hurried up just then, clutching a box. “Mom, look at this! They’ve got watches with the Marine Corps emblem!”

  Liz gave Betty an apologetic glance. “Not now, Danny.”

  “It’s only eight dollars!”

  “I’ll look at it in a minute, hon.”

  “Please, Mom? I’ve got $17.30 in my bank at home. I’ll pay you back.”

  Betty still looked like she might cry. Liz said, “Just put it in the cart, Danny. Of course I’ll buy you the watch.”

  Danny set the box on top of the sweaters as if it were a soap bubble. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You’d better get one for your brother too,” Liz said, trying not to think of the week’s budget.

  “I’m pretty sure this one is waterproof,” her son said. He ran off, his plastic M-16 cradled in his arm.

  Liz turned back to Betty. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Boys will be boys.”

  “They sure will.”

  They stood in silence for a moment while all around them military mothers pushed loaded carts and shepherded children.

  “Let’s have coffee together sometime,” Liz said.

  Betty met her eyes, a rueful, grateful glance. She’d overpainted her lipstick as usual into a smear of constant smile that gave her the look of a sad clown. “Yes, let’s.”

  AS SOON AS they got home from the PX, Danny rummaged through the bags and dug out the Marine Corps watch.

  “What time is it in Vietnam?” he asked as he pulled out the stem to set it.

  “I don’t know,” Liz said. “We’ll have to look it up in the atlas.”

  Her son ran off into the living room. Liz took the heel of a loaf of Wonder Bread and drowned it in Hershey’s syrup from a freshly purchased bottle. The chocolate and ketchup diet, she thought ruefully, rolling the bread up to stuff it into her mouth. She felt like a hypersensitive tank. She’d gained more weight with every pregnancy and had a harder time losing it. Maybe this time she’d just succumb entirely and turn into one of those sprawled, demoralized women with too many kids. Maybe she already was one of those women.

  With her craving briefly stilled, she took the shiny “USMC: Tradition of Pride” 1968 calendar out of one of the other bags and tore off the plastic cover.

  “Twelve hours, Mom!” Danny called from the living room.

  “What?”

  “Vietnam is twelve hours ahead of us. It’s already nighttime there.”

  “How about that,” Liz said. “I guess your dad’s asleep.” The calendar’s illustration for August 1968 was the famous photo of the Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. She looked at it for a long moment, feeling vaguely defeated, before she circled the eighteenth day of the month in red and crossed to the refrigerator to tape the calendar into place.

  CHAPTER 6

  SEPTEMBER 1967

  from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly

  H Co., 2nd Bn., 29th Marines, 6th Mar Div FMF

  c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602

  Sun 3 Sept 1967

  circa Gio Linh, RVN

  Dearest Lizzie,

  Sorry for the gap in correspondence. I’ve been running around the landscape with the jolly crew of company H
, 2/29—called Heartbreak Hotel, inevitably. More like Half-ass, at this point: the usual USMC-issue array of maniacs, morons, stone-cold killers, and fuckups. They’d been sadly neglected, discipline-wise, by their previous owner. With a little drill and butt-kicking, they’ll learn to wreak proper Marine havoc, but we haven’t had a minute to train.

  To keep us amused, confused, and unprepared for actual combat, the battalion brass in their wisdom have sent us to scenic Gio Linh, which is run by the South Vietnamese army out of the saddest shantytown of inadequate bunkers you ever saw. A real four-star resort, this place. The rats actually own it, the ARVN are just renting. On a clear day—which of course never happens—with good binoculars, you can see the Peace Bridge, which is what they call the bridge across the Ben Hai River, which connects North and South Vietnam. On a very clear day you can even see bad guys over there in their nice Soviet-issue Salvation Army uniforms. On any kind of day at all, they try to kill you. But not very hard, and in any case, they are extremely poor shots.

  Meanwhile, they fly their flag on their side, we fly the RVN flag on this side, just so nobody gets the countries confused. Remember: North Vietnamese, bad guys. South Vietnamese, good guys.

  They’ve got us running sweeps toward the border every few days, to assess the strength, movements, and combat readiness of the insect population. The bugs are the real winners so far in this war. The bugs, and the vagaries of cultural exchange. I spent several exciting hours in the rain the other night, on our most recent camping trip, trying to decipher information relayed to me via radio by a South Vietnamese lieutenant. Have you ever heard two excited Vietnamese talking over a radio? It sounds like a head-on collision between Fibber Magee’s closet and a Ringling Bros. circus train. Only more so. All this during a fierce firefight that turned out to not have any bad guys in it. Four friendlies wounded while we tried to bridge the language barrier. What a way to run a war.

  You would like my radio operator, though. He is a cool-headed young fellow named Stinson. The relationship with your RO is sort of like a marriage, without the fights, good meals, or sex. (But picture 180 restless children carrying guns. These half-trained adolescents make the fearsome foursome look angelic.) Stinson is all of twenty, a saxophone-playing music school washout who smokes like a Korean War–vintage jeep and swears in stereo like any good Marine. He may succumb to lung cancer before his tour is up, but meanwhile Juilliard’s loss is Hotel Company’s gain. The kid has an ear like a Mozart-loving bat, can sift the sense out of all manner of static-ridden garble even with people shooting at him, and is fluent in the Vietnamenglish necessary for survival here in Gio Linh. As he and I are joined at the hip by the radio, ’til death do us part, Stinson is also endearingly determined to keep me alive. Definitely an A+ attitude.

  Anyway, Alpha Sierra Sierra Romeo Sierra, as they say on the company net. All Secure, Situation Remains the Same. We’re gearing up for our next jaunt, minutes after returning bloodied (mostly by the mosquitoes) but unbowed from the previous one. I’m sitting here in the bunker I share with an ARVN major and 6,000 rats, sipping a cup of hot tea—instant type, complete with sugar, no lemon, damn the luck. If the letter is a bit sticky, it’s because I stirred the tea with my pen. Usually I’m more civilized, but I didn’t have a knife handy. The only trouble is that now the pen squirts tea when I retract the ballpoint. C’est la guerre de l’Indochine.

  I’m glad to hear your puking is easing off. I’ve been having sympathetic pregnancy symptoms myself, abdominal cramps (possibly related also to the fine USMC cuisine) and severe, no doubt hormonal, irritability, which I take out on the bad guys. Maybe you should start carrying a gun yourself; it is marvelously therapeutic.

  In any case, give my love to the tadpole. If it’s a boy, I think we should name him after Larry.

  I miss you, darling. Wish I was back in our big happy bed. Stinson is all very well, as shotgun marriages go; he keeps the antenna bent down so the snipers don’t drill us, and he is faithful, loyal, true-blue, and concerned for my continued well-being. But he lacks your wit and your perfect ass. There’s nothing in this goddamned country that can compete with either of those, frankly. I can’t wait to survive this nonsense and get home to you.

  Love, your

  Mike

  P.S. Give my love, as ever, to the fearsome foursome—glad to hear you got them outfitted for school. That’s funny that the boys want to take their M-16s. Tell them they can take them, but they can’t have a round chambered and should keep the safeties on until they actually see something worth shooting. Oh, yeah, and tell them, firmly, from me, to not shoot their teachers. Or at least to adhere strictly to the rules of engagement and wait until the teachers shoot first.

  DEB-DEB WAS HAVING a crisis of conscience over the fact that Mike had referred to the baby as a tadpole. Tadpoles grew into frogs; and otters ate frogs. It was like a lion cub learning her mother was pregnant with an antelope, Liz supposed. You spent your early years learning to eat something, and then you had to deal with the thing as a sibling. At least that was the clearest reading of the situation she’d managed so far. Deb-Deb in tears was not entirely coherent.

  Liz was sitting in her ob-gyn’s office waiting for her monthly check-in, trying without much success to comfort her daughter, who was sobbing. It was just one of those days. Liz had just had lunch with Betty Simmons at the Officers’ Club and was feeling particularly inadequate anyway. She had accepted the invitation hoping Betty would drink too much and commiserate over her husband’s imminent return to Vietnam, giving Liz room to complain too, but Betty had apparently regrouped as a model military spouse after her brief moment of humanity in the PX and spent the meal drinking French water and singing the praises of her exemplary family. The older Simmons daughter, Miranda, a high school senior, had gotten early acceptance and a full scholarship to the University of Virginia. Betty’s other daughter, Bernadette, was the something-something of the Honor Something as a sophomore, sported astronomical PSAT scores, and had received a citizenship award from the Kiwanis. Meanwhile, Liz was forced to concede, Danny and Angus were being hauled down to the principal’s office for carrying plastic weapons to school and conducting search-and-destroy missions along the unsecured borders of the playground; Deb-Deb’s kindergarten teacher was concerned that all her artwork was otter related; and Kathie had burst into tears at her second grade class’s most recent current events discussion, when asked what her daddy did for a living. Kathie was afraid to say her daddy shot people, which was her understanding.

  Liz had managed to disarm the boys for the moment, and she was resigned to Deb-Deb’s watery reality sense, but she had no idea what to tell Kathie. She knew that Mike would have laughed and said, “Better Daddy shoots them than they shoot him, sweetie.”

  In retrospect, the lunch had been a mistake. Liz could see that she’d been lonelier than she’d realized. She’d even, apparently, been desperate. But Betty sober was no fun at all, even without the relentless gung ho. Liz had ordered a chicken salad sandwich and ignored it in favor of the french fries, triple-dunking every fry in a deep puddle of ketchup and feeling as if she had “I am pregnant and mad for greasy carbohydrates” written on her plate in lurid red. She dreaded having to discuss her maternal ambivalence, but Betty seemed mercifully oblivious. The baby on the way was a good thing, and Betty said all the right things cheerfully and got on with ordering Liz’s universe properly. Over her own severe salad, dressing on the side, no wine, she advised Liz to tell Kathie, “Daddy’s job is defending our country,” but only Betty could pull that off with a straight face. Hence the flourishing teenage daughters on bright tracks into adulthood. The O’Reilly kids would have to deal with shades of gray: Daddy was a Marine, for better and for worse, but Mommy had married an English major. Mike at twenty-two, just back from Korea and deceptively reticent about his weakness for heroism, had been the smartest, funniest man Liz had ever met, a lean, laconic, deliciously tender man with an unerring eye for the absurdity of human inst
itutions and a beautiful head of curly black hair. He still saw through the human comedy, more keenly than ever; and he was still brilliant, funny, lean, and tender more often than not; but somewhere along the line her husband had decided he was willing to die for the goddamned institutions anyway. She really hadn’t seen that coming.

  And the hair, of course. The hair was gone.

  At the end of the lunch, Betty had frankly pulled Marine-wife rank and grabbed the check, putting it all on her husband-the-colonel’s O-Club tab with an initialed flourish. Had Liz known it would come to that indignity, she would have ordered the wine anyway and drunk the bottle alone.

  Worse, she had somehow ended up promising to use Miranda Simmons as a babysitter, should she need one. Betty, smarmily sympathetic over the antics of Danny and Angus at school and the imminent pressures of another child, had managed to imply that Miranda might be a helpful influence.

  Sitting in the ob-gyn’s now, trying to comfort her sobbing daughter, Liz resolved to die before calling on Betty’s helpful daughter. Not that she had anywhere to go in the evenings anyway; but she’d rather leave the kids home alone, if it came to that, defending the house with plastic M-16s. Danny was perfectly capable of dialing a telephone if the place started to burn.

  “It’s not really a tadpole, sweetie,” she told Deb-Deb as the latest wave of tears ebbed enough for conversation. “It just looks like a tadpole for a while. Daddy was joking around.”

  Deb-Deb snuffled dubiously. “Why does it look like a tadpole, not a baby?”

  Because ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Liz thought, but she couldn’t come up with an immediate translation of that and offered instead, “Because my womb is full of water and it’s happier swimming around.”

  “The baby is swimming?”

  “Yes. It’s more like an otter than a frog, really. I think it has hands already. Little teeny hands and feet.”

  “How does it breathe?”

  “It’s connected to me by a tube. Like a deep-sea diver.”