Blue Stars (5 page)

“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.

4

Fort Hamilton’s farewell party was being held in a local church basement. Banners were hung from rafters:
ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS, ALWAYS IN OUR PRAYERS
and
SERVICE IN THE NATION’S HONOR.
Everywhere were black-and-gold army stars, Reserve insignia, and posters of men and women in uniform.

“For once we get our own digs,” Eddie said. “I lose my appetite when I have to stare too long at the jarhead paraphernalia.” Fort Hamilton served army, Marine, and navy units, so the intraunit slagging was frequent.

“Screw the jarheads,” Otis said, testing the waters. Lacey watched to see if he would get reprimanded, but on this day her uniformed husband grinned and made a
you-got-it
noise.

“But the navy’s okay, right?” Otis went on. “Jon Weible’s dad is in it. So is Ross’s, and—”

“The navy is just fine,” Eddie said. “Don’t let anyone tell you different: they do an absolutely fantastic job”—the other two waited for the punch line—“of getting us real soldiers to where we do the fighting.”

Otis whooped, and Lacey didn’t shush him. The three of them were united in high spirits this afternoon. Eddie was packed and ready; he would ship out day after tomorrow. He looked so fine, she thought, in the dress blues they had carefully pressed and laid out for him. Lacey had never thought she’d be so familiar with an iron, but she now owned four different kinds of spray starch. She caught Eddie patting down the sides of his mustache, a nervous habit—he’d spent forty minutes this morning trimming it in the bathroom.

Early on, she used to tease him about it: how’d he get away with a mustache, given those tight-ass commanders? Until one day he actually showed her a PDF of the Uniform/Appearance reqs, scrolling down until he found the right page. “See? That’s me.” Sure enough, there was a meticulous line drawing of authorized mustache length, shape, and fullness—Eddie’s matched it so perfectly, it could have been a picture of him.

Mustaches are permitted; if worn, males will keep mustaches neatly trimmed, tapered, and tidy. Mustaches will not present a chopped off or bushy appearance, and no portion of the mustache will cover the upper lip line or extend sideways beyond a vertical line drawn upward from the corners of the mouth (see figure 1-1). Handlebar mustaches, goatees, and beards are not authorized. If appropriate medical authority prescribes beard growth, the length required for medical treatment must be specified. Soldiers will keep the growth trimmed to the level specified by appropriate medical authority, but they are not authorized to shape the growth into goatees, or “Fu Manchu” or handlebar mustaches.