You Know When the Men Are Gone Read online

  Bonnie sent a steely glance at the whispering women and they immediately stopped, Meg’s cheeks burning as if a priest had caught her giggling during Mass. She didn’t reveal that Natalya’s mother had been killed when she was young, nor did she mention that she had loaned Natalya money. Keeping secrets made her feel as if she was betraying the wives and she felt sweaty and flushed in the room of women. But Carla, not noticing Meg’s discomfort, kept talking, her unearthed treasures would not be silenced. As soon as Bonnie started discussing the different places they could reserve for a welcome home party, Carla told Meg about Natalya’s twins, Peter and Lara, three and a half years old. They didn’t speak any English, Peter still wore a diaper, and the woman who lived directly above them said sometimes they cried the entire night through. Another wife Meg had never spoken to before tapped her on the shoulder and added that Natalya had already used the “My husband would break his heart if Boris gone” and “Please promise refrain from military police” lines on every single inhabitant in the three-floor apartment building. But for all of their complaining about Boris’s apocalyptic bark, none of the wives had contacted the MPs. None of them were willing to make that call, although the reason was not Natalya, nor her twins. No, they would not be responsible for the grief her husband would feel when he came back, having survived the year in Iraq, to a home without a dog. They could not play a role in his disappointment and so they went without sleep, cursed under their breath, banged the ceiling or floor with brooms, and smacked their palms against frail drywall.

  Each day it seemed as if Meg could hear Natalya more and more clearly.

  The layout of their apartments mirrored each other exactly, so if Meg was reading in the guest bedroom, she could hear Natalya singing lullabies to her children in their room, usually one that sounded like “London Bridge,” but not in English, and all day long Meg’s head played the endless refrain, London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady! Or, watching TV, she’d hear the murmur of English language tapes from Natalya’s living room, the voices like a slow mockery of the dialogue of Meg’s Discovery Channel. In bed at night the springs of Natalya’s mattress would whine as she tossed and turned. Meg heard so much she began to imagine what Natalya might be cooking, the clothes she chose from her closet, which magazines she flipped through while her microwave popcorn popped. The children rarely made any noise, and when they did it was their singsong gibberish. Meg imagined them listening at their wall, mimicking her motions and laughing at her, and she would jump back and turn up the radio or open the fridge noisily so they wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping.

  Once or twice a week, Natalya got a call at exactly eleven P.M. These were different from the random calls she got from her husband, when she spoke her slow English, punctuated with “What?” or “Hello? Hello? Are you there?” During her eleven-o’clock calls, she spoke Serbian very loudly, as if on long distance, and she always talked for a full hour. Meg started to look forward to these calls, letting the words lull her to sleep, a welcome distraction. The words were impenetrable and yet so close. She was sure Natalya was revealing her deepest secrets.

  Sometimes, after the late-night calls, Natalya wept in her bed, muffling her sobs in a pillow. These noises pried themselves into Meg’s dreams and she woke from images of an ice-clogged Danube, sluggish and gray, longing for sun. She wondered if Natalya cried for her husband the way Meg cried for Jeremy, or if she cried for something, or someone, else.

  Meg worked at the Craft Realm in downtown Killeen, though she had absolutely no experience with crafts. She did have a B.A. in art history, which seemed to charm the manager. And she liked framing, the silence of it, the exact lines, the unforgiving quality of glass and wood and matting. If the knife slipped, the matting was ruined, and that made every success feel especially deserved. It was absorbing work that helped the days go by while she waited for staticky phone calls, infrequent e-mails, or letters. I miss our life together, her husband would write over and over again, and it made Meg think that there were three lives between them: the life he was leading in Iraq, the life she was living alone without him, and the dim fantastical life of them together, a mythical past and future that suddenly had no present.

  As she handled baby pictures, high school diplomas, Thomas Kinkade prints, she imagined framing her husband’s letters. They were coated with fine dust and words full of desire, as if Jeremy and she were courting again, unused to each other, needing those teenage assurances, hearts doodled on the corners of the page, whispers of undying love. She wanted to trap their moments away from each other under glass and wood, as if in this way the distance could be measured and controlled.

  There is a sign at the main gate entrance: WELCOME TO THE GREAT PLACE, FORT HOOD. Its greatness stretches for 340 square miles, from the populated main cantonment of Fort Hood, with its war-themed roads of Battalion Avenue, Hell-on-Wheels, Tank Destroyer, to its vast stretches of pitted firing ranges, the targets wavering with heat in the distance, soldiers slumped beneath the insufficient shade of tent netting, sipping from hot canteens. These ranges are notorious for being halted by cattle. Gates surround Hood, manned by men and women with firearms who check all vehicles and turn away anyone who does not have the proper identification, but Texas law will not banish the cows of neighboring farms from roaming the firing ranges, and soldiers wait hours and hours for the muscled, long-horned beasts to make their way out of the sights of the guns.

  Fort Hood, like most army bases, has stern-faced offices with tiny windows, square apartment buildings and barracks with their crooked air conditioners and metal stairways, everything industrial in the ugliest way, with few architectural flourishes or decoration. Different bases might have different building materials, red brick versus gray concrete, depending on the wartime era of their construction, but it’s always clear that no matter how much money Congress allotted for the army budget, most of it went into the fighting machines rather than the buildings.

  The armories, chow halls, bowling alleys, PXs, dental clinics, libraries, day cares, and schools of Hood are mostly one-story, rectangular creatures of yellowish concrete, and so the taller, glassier buildings, III Corps Headquarters or Darnall Hospital, seem like futuristic and triangular Godzillas standing off at each other. The grass is patchy with tangled cypresses leaching the last of the water from the thirsting earth; the motor pools are picketed by barbed wire; the Burger King and gas station huddle together as the only dabs of color for as far as the eye can see. But when the soldiers deployed, when the eighteen thousand soldiers of the First Cavalry Division went to Iraq, the base shifted from a world dominated by camouflage uniforms to one of brightly colored baby carriages and diaper bags, Mommy & Me meetings at the First Cavalry Museum, women on pastel picnic blankets lounging on the parade field and sharing cinnamon rolls. Though a division of soldiers was far away, the retreat still sounded at five o’clock each evening, blared through speakers across the entire base, and the women stopped their moving cars and got out, stood in the streets with their hands over their hearts, facing the flag just as their husbands would have done, until the bugle’s song was over.

  Wives with lawns quickly learned to mow them or hire the neighbor’s teenage son lest they get a military police citation for letting the grass grow too long. The spouses admired each other’s flower beds, the unit crest banners they hung over their name-tagged doors, the small American flags that they pressed into the edges of the driveways, the yellow ribbons they tied around the trees out front. They shopped together, shared leftovers, watched each other’s kids so they could go to the gym. They attended church and Bible study, baked brownies and mailed them to soldiers, washed cars to raise money for school supplies for Afghani and Iraqi children.

  The women tried to reach out to Natalya, they really did. They invited her to play groups and luncheons and teas, they offered to babysit her children so she could have a break. And all along they were afraid of her. They knew she could happen to any of them. She could be the girl cutting their husbands’ hair right now in Baghdad, shipped in from some economically devastated country, young and lovely and for goodness’ sake a woman in that place of men. Who wouldn’t fall in love with such a girl when he was so far from home and so close to death? A woman’s soft hands along the short ridge of his hair, on his sunburned neck, holding the mirror up for him to see his reflection next to hers.

  But Natalya never accepted any of their invitations. With Boris tugging her wildly, she walked around Hood in that coat you could spot a mile away, her earrings glinting, her lips perfectly painted, making all the other wives assess their figures in the mirror or tug at their shirts self-consciously, touching their hair, rubbing powder into their sweat-shiny faces, knowing it was no use.

  This is what they all knew and whispered about Natalya: She didn’t bake or make posters, and she never offered to wash a car. She didn’t take her children to any of the parks on post. She shopped at the commissary and filled her cart with odd foods, always cabbages and onions and potatoes, sometimes a gallon of chocolate milk or ice cream, but never anything nutritious enough to feed a pair of three-year-olds. She went out a few nights a week, dressed to cause a scandal: high heels, plenty of rouge, earrings long enough to touch her collarbones. She went out alone, and if the wives met her on the stairs and tried to ask where she was headed at ten o’clock at night, she would smile as if she didn’t understand the question and continue tottering down to the parking lot below. No one ever saw a babysitter enter her apartment, even though plenty of wives had volunteered, eager to get a look at the interior of her home and refrigerator. They had all seen Natalya lock the door behind her when she went out, and they all imagined those children inside with the television
on, alone, the apartment’s sharp corners waiting for their soft heads. But no one ever called Family Services. Instead they thought of her husband coming home to discover both children gone.

  Meg was spending more and more time alone. She would rush back to the apartment building when her shift finished at Craft Realm, run up the stairs, lock the door behind her. She would take a deep breath, move through her rooms as quietly as possible, and listen.

  She listened to Natalya in her kitchen, smelled cabbage simmering through the walls, and heard the scrape of spoon against plate as she fed her children, knife clumsily chopping against a wood board, Boris lapping from his water bowl. Later, she listened for the chime of Natalya’s keys, the whine of Boris signaling good-bye, the protest of children who didn’t want to go to bed, sharp heels pinging on the steel steps outside. She knew Natalya would be gone for hours. Then Meg would try even harder to hear through those walls, to listen for a child’s scream, to be ready to finally call the MPs if need be. More and more often she tried to stay awake with a book until Natalya came home. She listened for the same click of heels, the keys against the front door, the muted thud of shoes kicked off. She always returned very late, usually around two A.M., and Boris yelped with joy that she’d come back to him.

  Meg didn’t tell Carla about her eavesdropping, though Carla was always asking Meg if she had learned anything new about Natalya. Nor did Meg admit that she was relieved to stay awake listening for her neighbor’s children, happy to worry about something other than her husband, or that she fell asleep as soon as Boris finished barking and slept soundly until her alarm went off. Then she was off to work, grateful to have so little time for her own silent thoughts.

  One night there was a knock on Meg’s door. Natalya stood outside, moving from foot to foot as if her high heels hurt her.

  For a moment Meg thought Natalya was going to ask her to go out with her, that they would go to some underground Serbian bar and drink vodka martinis while strange men watched them from the shadows.

  Instead Natalya handed Meg three crumpled twenty-dollar bills.

  Meg took the money and hesitated, waiting, but Natalya just stared as if she wanted a receipt. She was wearing an orange lipstick that made her cheeks gray. Meg smiled through her disappointment and said softly, “You know, I could watch your children for you. I only work days, and could watch them at night, that way they wouldn’t be alone. In case something happened.”

  The skin of Natalya’s pale neck turned red, but Meg couldn’t tell if it was from anger or embarrassment.

  “A woman must go out sometimes, yes?” Natalya asked softly. “Husbands do not understand. The babies sleep, nothing will happen. It is common in my country—we do not worry so much.”

  Meg folded the money into a back pocket. “Still. I could watch them.”

  “Perhaps,” Natalya said, lifting her shoulders slightly in annoyed acquiescence. Before Meg could nod in reply, Natalya turned away.

  Before Jeremy left, he and Meg had talked about having children. She smiled and blinked and told him, Soon, and then ran into the bathroom and checked that she’d taken her birth control pill that day.

  She was twenty-eight, it was time to think about procreation, and yet Jeremy’s long absences were hard enough to bear without children. She just managed to get through each day, brush her teeth, go to work, feed her body, sleep. If it was almost impossible for her to live half a life without the man who was supposed to share all of it, how could she be both father and mother for some unfinished and needy little being?

  There were days when she imagined going to California, a place of escape with its beaches and wineries, mountains and fog. She could get a job in an art gallery in one of those dreamy, gentle-named coastal towns: Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Big Sur. She’d start over, find a man who was always there, who could take normal vacations, have weekends off, call in sick, accompany her to her cousin’s wedding, her uncle’s wake. She wanted to worry about ordinary things like whether her husband forgot his lunch or got a bonus, not that he might get shot or that he’d be crossing a street in Baghdad and never get to the other side.

  She carried her worry night and day. It pulled at her legs and shoulders and tear ducts, always there and ready to consume her, because how could anyone think rationally about a spouse in a war zone? And when Jeremy, late at night those few weeks before he left, had cupped her body against his, kissing her belly and longing to fill it up with his child, she’d thought only of the worry already growing there. She wondered if her belly could carry a life as well, if there was space for both and if the worry would form a stone pillow for her baby’s head. Would it leach into the baby’s bones and blood and tiny cells? Now she thought of Natalya and those eerie-eyed twins, whispering a Serbian pidgin in a language only they could understand. Perhaps Natalya nursed a ghostly worry, too. Perhaps her twins remembered another in their mother’s womb, three of them waiting to be born.

  Meg dreamed of ghost alarm clocks ringing, her husband slipping free of the blanket and letting cold air whisper over her legs, then his kiss by her ear turned into a loud bark. She sat up in her bed and glanced at her clock: 1:23 A.M. Her vigilance had failed her, she had dozed off. She went to get a glass of water and to listen all the better, for she had happened upon a spot in the kitchen wall the size of a fist that another long-ago tenant must have punched and then plastered badly. When Meg put her ear against that papery area, she swore she could hear Natalya breathe.

  She quickly stepped backward. A man’s voice was audible, just a few inches away, speaking low, as if he had been told to whisper, as if he knew Meg’s ear was pressed close. Knives scraped against plates and liquid was poured into glasses. There was a long silence and then Natalya started to speak, almost whimpering. Meg knew there had been no late-night phone calls for two weeks now, and she wondered if this man had been the voice on the phone that moved Natalya to tears. Had he grown tired of the miles between them and appeared at her doorstep after dark, demanding that she let him in?

  Footsteps were leaving the kitchen and Natalya’s front door opened. Meg looked around her own apartment quickly, grabbed her garbage, and dragged it into the hall, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stranger, but she only saw Natalya in her doorway, her hand pressed to her throat, her face devoid of makeup, as pale as the fluorescent light overhead.

  Their eyes met and Meg looked away. Natalya went inside, leaving Meg standing there with her trash.

  The man returned, always in the middle of the night. Meg heard food being prepared and drinks poured, but never the noises of consumption. And never—though Meg expected to hear the suspicious sounds of squeaking springs—did they enter Natalya’s bedroom.

  Still Meg did not confide in the other wives. She imagined asking Bonnie McCormick for advice, pulling her aside and spilling such news into her powerful ear. But she didn’t. And she didn’t get enough sleep. Natalya was going out more and returning later and Meg fought to stay awake, waiting for Boris’s bark, sleeping for a few hours before work. A customer returned a framing job she had done, claiming it was crooked, and her manager, clearly no longer impressed with Meg’s degree, said under his breath, “This isn’t modern art.” And once when she was on the phone with Jeremy, the precious satellite connection full of echoes and clicks, she asked him to hold on while she put her ear to the wall to ascertain if Natalya was still reading her children a bedtime story.

  Three days before the men were due back, the wives held a final get-together at Carla’s. Each had made six batches of cookies to distribute into care packages for the single-soldier rooms, and almost every wife who lived in post housing was there, perched uncomfortably on one of Carla’s overstuffed couches.