MARINE WIFE BY VIVIAN I. BIKULEGE
 
To me, Desert Storm was like a firecracker that fizzled. A long awaited confrontation that lasted maybe the span of three days, sputtered out in an impotent surrender by amateur Iraqi forces. That is how I saw it anyway. If the United States went into Kuwait to defend freedom, and secure our supply of oil through warfare, why not bloody it up real good and assassinate the instigator? I felt bloodied and part of me had died in the “Storm.” I have the hidden scars to prove it. I never hung a yellow ribbon on my door or fencepost like my nextdoor, model Marine wife neighbor. I did not plant a flagpole in my front yard. I was not a patriot but I was doing my part. I sacrificed time with my husband and experienced the stress of the unknown. I watched for Death’s Angel. Jack and I prepared perfunctory wills when he left, and forgot about them when he returned. I was bitter, even hateful of the wartime experience, and had come close to compromising my fidelity. I drank my way through Desert Storm. I never wore my husband’s rank, pretending to be a Captain or Major in status, and I had no respect for women that did. Frankly, I had no respect for authority in general. In our first four disconnected years of marriage, I never really had to be a military wife. I was a thirty-something professional with a brand new MBA, a career in front of me, and all of a sudden, I was stranded in the High Desert of California. I was a chemical salesman for god’s sake. I met Jack in a bar in Savannah six years earlier. Following my move from Raleigh North Carolina, and after having gone into a self-imposed moratorium on any social activity, I decided to venture out one evening in February 1984. Dressed in thick gray corduroys and a yellow, hooded surfer sweatshirt, I was not presentable for the downtown bar scene, so I headed down Abercorn Street, and landed at Doubles, some sad Army Ranger hangout in the local Holiday Inn. There he was, standing beside the only open barstool in the place. I needed a seat, and I guess he was looking for conversation or something else. After a brief exchange, he asked for my phone number. I challenged him to find my number in the local phone book by successfully spelling my Lithuanian last name. With that smartass challenge in place, I left the bar and headed to my car. On the way, I stopped dead in the parking lot, and asked myself why I had gone out that night. I was looking. Jack was not bad in his tan Polo jacket and blazing green eyes, so I turned around to go back into Doubles and retrieve him. We left the bar, jumped into our cars and he followed me as I picked up a pizza and a bottle of vodka. We danced in the street outside my apartment, went to bed, and a week later he sent me a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day. After two years of being together in Savannah and three years of Jack being stationed at Parris Island, he was due for new orders. I was offered a job in New Orleans. He accepted an assignment there as a publicity officer. Living together did not seem like an option. The right thing to do was to get married. Begin to grow up at twenty-eight. Settle down. Settle. And so we did. Get married anyway. I was a Marine wife by association only. I married a Marine but I had isolated myself from that world, and now I needed it to keep tabs on where my husband was. There was no Internet access then, no cell phones connecting us through the miles of cyberspace. The role of Marine wife did not define me, and I failed to emulate whatever model may have existed. I drank. I shot pool and got pretty good at it. I flirted. I disappointed my parents and siblings or so I thought. I disappointed myself in how I handled my lot. I was not around when phone calls came in from overseas. But I looked up at the stars at night, and thought about him thinking of me, looking at the same sky. I wrote letters out of love and anger. I read and saved war articles from the Los Angeles Times. I watched CNN for minute-to-minute reports of foreign and American troops lining up on a desert chessboard, and then, I quit watching. I stayed in contact with Jack’s family. I hosted a dinner or two for company wives. I raked the dirt. I had two of the only trees in the desert, and I watered them, refreshed by the sound of deciduous leaves catching a breeze in a hundred degrees of heat. On Sunday mornings, I drove to Joshua Tree National Monument just up the road and read the newspaper, drinking my personal bottle of Sunday brunch champagne, alone. My loneliness was rewarded by the companionship of the howling winds, as they siphoned through mountain passes, encapsulated in desert grit. Wind and dirt filtered through my window frame crevices at night, rattling the aluminum mini-blinds. The boxes in the garage from the New Orleans move stayed packed and I would ransack them every once in awhile in a desperate attempt to find something only temporarily lost. My company car, a charcoal gray Buick, never saw the inside of that garage. It never saw much of any garage as I did a poor job of routine automotive maintenance. Yucca Valley California is wedged between Twenty-Nine Palms and Palm Springs just above the Morongo Valley. I was lucky. I had a job. I could escape the High Desert with a real purpose. I went to Brawley and Calipatria selling chemicals to geothermal plants. I traveled to Orange County and San Jose introducing my company and myself to independent power producers. I stayed active in my faith and collected money for the pledge drive to build a new church, walking up and down the desert streets introducing myself to total strangers like some missionary in a foreign land. Desert culture and the surrounding environment sent me into a state of shock for about one month after my arrival. People went barefoot at Vons’ Supermarket. I quickly learned of the local Big Lots store where I could buy one-dollar bottles of wine. I found a gynecologist. I took golf lessons at the Blue Skies Country Club in Yucca but never practiced in between. I just drank at the club bar. Two weeks after Jack left for Kuwait, our anniversary rolled around. He had left behind the gift of a Movado Museum watch. Now as I think back, time was what stood between him and me. Time to pass, time to worry, and time wasted. I fell into the companionship of three women also living in Yucca Valley and off base—Jess, Marti and Jacqueline. Jess was the most hard core of the four of us in her attitude concerning our circumstances. She wanted to be tough on the outside but pulled out her eyelashes in some sort of anxiety-ridden response to our plight. Her house was decorated in an Indian desert motif of dream catchers and western depictions of coyote and Native American symbols. Marty was single and was living with her Marine at the time of his deployment. To this day, I do not know why she did not pack it up, and get the hell out of Yucca Valley. She was the smartest of any of us and probably the prettiest too. She was definitely the youngest. When I was in town, Marty and I would spend weeknights watching Wheel of Fortune, eating macaroni and cheese, and drinking wine, trying to outguess each other as Vanna spun letters for middle-class morons trying to win a car, a trip, or some lump sum of cash. And then there was Jacqueline. While Jess picked out her eyelashes, Jacqueline offered soliloquies on privilege, décor and proper behavior, all the while sinking into booze and depression. She was beautiful but big, tasteful but sloppy. I loved each of these women for who they were, and what they offered to me. I wonder if they ever really loved me back. I believe they did. My brother and I coined a phrase for this foursome. We were the Yucca Sluts, and not because we were all that promiscuous or loose, but more of a slang term of endearment for four women alone on a man-less raft, shipwrecked against the rounded boulders of the Monument. It was as close as I ever got to war and as close as I ever want to get. On a sun-drenched and lonely day in August 1990, I sat on a wooden porch swing built for two, surrounded by a landscape of stark blue skies and sandy, brown dirt. There was no grass. Prickly fingers of sprawling cacti scraped the earthen floor scratching the crusty ground in a search for water. A bottle of cheap André champagne was nestled between me and the armrest of the swing, and I held tight to a fluted crystal champagne glass, a wedding present from my college roommate four years ago this month. On a wooden fence post in the front yard, a black and grey roadrunner stood like a desert sentinel alternating his view between the mountainous horizon and me. He was an alien to me just like my surroundings, and he shared no resemblance to the robins or cardinals I had been used to seeing back east. He was not ugly but he was not the cartoon character I had grown up with on Saturday mornings either, beep beeping as he outwitted the conniving coyote, and sped through an animated desert leaving behind a puff of comic strip smoke. He was quiet with terse spiky feathers and wild black eyes. The black quill plume on his head rose and sank as he surveyed the landscape that included me. I think we stared at one another, or at least I had fixed my gaze on him between rolling tears and gulps of alcoholic effervescence; half out of wonder, the other half in disbelief. I wanted my husband and it slowly dawned on me that another, faraway desert, and this conflict or war or whatever the hell it was, separated us after we had just completed a nine-month separation, Jack in Okinawa, me in New Orleans. I wanted what I had not had for almost a year, him, his body and intimacy. I wanted to be made love to, and even something as commonplace as companionship—what I thought was common—those were the things I wanted, the ingredients of a spicy marriage rue. I had sacrificed time with Jack, given away a year of our marriage to finish my MBA from Tulane. I had begun my degree the day after our honeymoon and confirmed with Jack that I would finish school no matter where the Marines took him. I would not follow him until I was done. Maybe I had made selfish choices. My decisions separated us for the last nine months of my schooling and now the call of a government, to a part of the world I did not recognize, made choices for us that I had not anticipated when I chose to marry a Marine. We had sacrificed our union to each other in response to promises we had made, and oaths taken but not fully understood. It seemed as though tragedy loomed, and at night when desert winds threw sand against the bedroom window, I had only the darkness and cold metal of our brass bed available to my touch. When Desert Storm ended, my husband returned home skinny and dried out. Tears for time lost found a home on his cheeks. I was filled with anger. Saddam was still alive but Kuwait was liberated. Give me a break. Eventually, the troupe of Yucca Sluts disbanded moving to places like Camp Pendleton, St. Louis, Charlotte and Massachusetts. Our men returned home in a disjointed order, and our camaraderie disappeared as we retreated into marital bedrooms of safety, reacquainting ourselves with intimacy and touch, and the strangers that were our spouses. The roadrunner returned the day I picked my husband up from base. I had not seen him but once or twice during the time Jack was in Kuwait. But the sentinel returned to the very same fence post with the same black eyes. He was like God’s messenger. I believed he had secretly watched my exploits and now, he heralded Jack’s return. He was a mute that had seen everything but did not judge, and I trusted him. Vivian I. Bikulege writes the column “Whatever,” a collection of personal essays for THE LOWCOUNTRY WEEKLY in Beaufort, SC, and can be heard reading select pieces on ETV/NPR radio in the Carolinas. Vivian was a 2005 winner of the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open, and is published in the MILSPEAK anthology. BACK TO V4.08-10-09 V4.08-10-09.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0