Long Division (23 page)

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Authors: Jane Berentson

BOOK: Long Division
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“I know. Isn't it funny?” I ask lightly, hoping this won't be a big deal and the kids will settle enough for me to get them peacefully sorted into their reading groups. “Did everyone have a nice spring break?” I ask. There's some high-pitched muttering about ski trips and boring older sisters and a movie about aliens that I've heard nothing about. Then that nosy brat Caitlin Robinson pipes up.
“Isn't your boyfriend going to be mad at you because you cheated on him with the Easter Bunny?” Oh, the roar of laughter! Caitlin has just achieved a very high position on the Miss Harper's Class Humor Hall of Fame. She got the language and the tone of her accusation just right, like she spent the entire spring break watching Maury and Jerry Springer.
On today's show: Lovers torn over bizarre infidelities.
I'm sitting in a cushioned chair wearing my pink cardigan, looking all innocent and non-kinky. David is fuming beside me in his fatigues. And Gus Bunny is slouched in his costume in this carefree, confident way, as if to say, “I can't help that I got what she wants.” It's really fucking absurd.
“Jeez, Caitlin. No. I was just helping the Easter Bunny at the egg hunt, and we were simply resting there.” I can't believe I'm defending myself in front of nine-year-olds.
“Well, my mom said that you two look pretty intimate.”
Intimate!
Reason number forty-nine to hate Mrs. Robinson. I take a deep breath that is meant to dissolve my burning desire to wallop Caitlin all the way to the kindergarten wing. The class is still Giggletown, USA, and I resent the fact that I can feel myself blushing. It's all so very ridiculous.
“The Easter Bunny and I are old friends. And I can assure you that our relationship is purely platonic.” Someone asks what platonic means. “It means when you love someone, but it's not romantic. It means you love them just as a friend.” The class seems to accept this answer, and I switch gears
98
by asking Garrett Wagner to come adjust the felt weather symbols on the front bulletin board. He moves the sunshine to the side and overlaps a few clouds on each other. “It might rain later,” he says.
I say, “Oh, really.”
 
The next day I'm driving Max Schaffer to his violin lesson and he says, “It was your friend Gus, wasn't it?”
“What about Gus?” I ask, trying not to look over at Max while I drive.
“He's the Easter Bunny from the picture.” Damn kid is so f-ing perceptive.
“Yep,” I say. “It was Gus. And I take it you don't believe in the Easter Bunny, Max.”
“Well duh,” he says. “I never have. And I know Gus is your best platonic friend.” I can't help but smile at how Max inserts the vocab word into his speech.
“Yeah, Max,” I say. “I guess he is.”
18
T
oday I'm calling my book
Shout Across the Ocean
, and I just got off the phone with David. And boy, am I mad at that guy. I feel like someone has lit my ear on fire and implanted a series of ten-pound dumbbells in each of my internal organs. The organs are stretched out—heavy and saggy—and the tips of my fingers are all tingly and sweaty as I type this. And it's not a good kind of tingly.
So two days ago after school, I was goofing off on the computer when I was supposed to be grading social studies tests. I hadn't read the paper that day, so I pulled up the
New York Times
online. I read the headlines, the Science Tuesday section, and then I clicked around to the Names of the Dead. There were two names. One of them was Private Francisco A. Flores, age twenty-four, of Denton, Texas. It took a second for my brain to stir and process the name. I thought: Flores, Flores, Flores, Ray Flores, Polar Bear Flores,
Ray Flores, Saved by a Beanie Baby!
Then I remembered that Ray was the name I made up for David's friend Flores and that David's Flores was in fact from Texas, and could it be the same Flores? I typed and searched and Googled.
Francisco Flores was killed during a convoy inside Baghdad. Their jeep ran over an IED, and though the driver suffered only minor injuries, Flores, the passenger, died on the site. The local paper from Denton showed Mom Flores standing outside a church with a swarm of middle-aged ladies sporting black blouses and fallen faces. I remembered that it was the church ladies who gave Flores the Beanie Babies, and even though Flores is a common name and there could be two hundred Texan Floreses in the army, I knew.
99
I totally knew that it was David's friend. I guess a Beanie Baby can only save you so many times.
I read that the accident had happened eleven days earlier—as in two days before I talked to David about Alden's death. We'd spoken twice since, and David had mentioned nothing about losing a guy in his company. But I asked, didn't I? I explicitly asked that day on the phone, and David had acted so quiet and somber. Why couldn't he tell me? If the news hadn't been delivered to the family yet, David wouldn't have been able to use the phone at all. So he knew. He'd known. And he hadn't told me. And then I started to feel all weird because my emotions were leaning in the “rage against my boyfriend's dishonesty” direction and not in the “holy shit, a friend of his was killed” or the “poor Flores and his family” directions. That's top-grade selfish, evil
100
Annie Harper for you. But I couldn't help it.
Driving home from school, I tried to level my reactions down to something more reasonable. First: It must be another Flores. David would have told me about his Flores. Second: Maybe he's trying to protect me. Maybe he thinks withholding devastating information will keep my twittering nerves and spastic fits of anxiety from completely consuming me. But can't he see I've actually been kind of fine? I go to work every day. I continue to pay all my bills and cook for myself and keep in touch with my parents and friends and Loretta. I've raised a fucking chicken, for Pete's sake! He can't possibly think I'm too weak for this.
It's the not talking about things that squelches human warmth. Take Stevens from
Remains of the Day
. He was too busy not talking about how he felt for people and only making comments about the weather and the conditions of table linens that he nearly died in complete loneliness.
David is my boyfriend. He absolutely must share with me.
So today he called and I couldn't keep anything in. After the first usual exchange of pleasantries, I jumped at it. I was already weeping stupid drama tears before I said it.
“So David,” I said. “Will you please tell me how your friend Flores is doing?” Silence. Silence. Silence.
“Flores?” His voice wavered, almost cracked on the second syllable.
“Yeah, Flores. Beanie Baby Flores. I haven't heard you talk about him in a while.”
101
Silence. Silence. Silence.
“Oh, Annie. I meant to tell you.”
“Don't you know by now that I read everything? I scour every bit of news I can get my eyes on to keep track of how you are and how your coworkers are and what the fuck it is you're doing over there!”
“I don't know, babe. I was upset. I was grieving. You were grieving about Brother Alden. The timing was all off. I was tired. Of course, I was going to tell you eventually.” These were all very reasonable excuses now that I think about it. I can't understand the gimongous strain of being a wartime soldier, so I shouldn't expect to understand the effects it has on him, and furthermore, I shouldn't blame him for what those effects were making him do. But I was tired too. Tired of feeling so in the dark about David's life. Here I am, reduced to that lame cliché.
“Fine,” I said, because I'm really horrible at fighting.
Silence. Silence. Silence.
And then I got this second wind. I harnessed it and used it to jab below the belt. “Anything
else
you're not telling me?”
“No. I don't think so.”
“You don't think so?!!” By this point I was pacing back and forth in my living room. I'd grabbed a slipcover from the arm of my couch and I was whipping it around like some sort of floppy nunchucks. “Don't we have some sort of understanding to tell each other everything? I mean, Flores dying doesn't fall under the Vagueness Pact. It was in the fucking newspaper! You could have told me.” And then I lowered my voice a bit. “And maybe I could have helped.”
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
T
oday 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.

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