Wedding Cake for Breakfast (4 page)

The First Fight

AMY WILSON

I may have been in a little bit of a bad mood, too. It was hard to ignore the slight sense of deflation. After throwing the best party we'd ever attended, with long-lost friends and tears and dancing till the hotel shut us down; after twelve days of lounging on a beach where drink-with-umbrella service started at noon; after the UPS guy stopped visiting each day, his dolly loaded with gifts, only the bills were left, plus a few piles of bubble-wrapped china we hadn't yet figured out where to store.

Still, we were newlyweds. We were supposed to be blissful and giggly. So why was David stomping around in the hallway, throwing down his attaché case with considerably more aggression than was necessary? We knew getting married wouldn't be a thunderclap of change—we'd already been living together in this very apartment for almost three years. We walked down the aisle calm and certain. While engaged, I had felt some smug superiority to those who wed barely knowing each other, who had never had a conversation about how many kids, or if kids, or what they wanted for the rest of their lives. I'd hear those women call in on talk radio, so disappointed and confused that their loved ones hadn't magically changed into different men after they were married. Somehow, to their wives' chagrin, these men had stubbornly remained the same assholes they always were. I thought those women were idiots, thinking marriage could solve everything. Or anything. But I was equally certain that we were different. In our case, marriage really was the solution: the very thing that would mean we never had to fight again, since all we ever fought about was whether we were going to get married.

“Are you mad about something?”

My husband (there it was, that word—still so awkward and formal) paused in his sorting of the day's mail on the kitchen counter. He closed his eyes, as if this question required far more patience than he had to give. As if he had to remain silent lest he scream something hateful. Not that he ever had—he was an almost maddening paragon of restraint. But I felt the silence was worse. It had been three days since he had initiated a conversation with me, three days since he had smiled or patted me on the rear while I was brushing my teeth. Three days since he had acted like he could even tolerate my company.

We had been here before; it happened a few times a year for as long as we had been together. The books all said that it was totally normal male behavior, and that when a man is In His Cave, the last thing a woman should do is stand in the mouth of that cave and yell inside, asking just when he's planning on coming out. The books said I should wait it out, not take it personally. Take a walk, call a girlfriend. And so I would, for three days, five days, a week, and then completely negate all that if-you-love-something-set-it-free claptrap by becoming angry and needy, self-righteous and desperate. I would become the very things most likely to drive him further underground.

“Are you even listening to me right now? Because you're not even acknowledging that I'm speaking. So, uh, it's kind of difficult for me to tell.”

Sarcasm! That was sure to help. But I could never stop myself. Despite all David's after-the-fact assurances to the contrary, I was sure these sojourns inward were about me, a weighing of whether he was committed to me for the long haul. He was testing what life without me might be like by acting as if that's where he already lived. And it seemed to be so easy for him to shut me out, even if I was right there in the room with him, puffed up with hurt feelings and pretty hard to miss. The books all said that if I could just patiently wait out these times in my man's life, our relationship would be the better for it, since my man would eventually reemerge more firmly committed than ever. Maybe they were right; I wouldn't know, since I was never able to be that patient.

Of course, some would say I had been plenty patient, since we were together for three and a half years before we got engaged, four and a half before we were married. My boyfriend (like most men) could be totally psyched about his sister getting engaged, and his roommate, then his other roommate, without noticing that they had all started dating their intendeds well after we had. We got some good-natured teasing about this from family and friends, but deep down I was sure they didn't think it was funny. I was sure they were all looking at me for the reason he still hadn't proposed. It had to be my shortcoming that was keeping us on the sidelines, keeping me single at the blasphemous age of almost-thirty. David, on the other hand, didn't see what the hurry was, and all my tears and upset did not exactly hasten his yearning to yoke his future to mine. As long as I didn't focus on when—or whether—we would have a wedding, we had an easy, happy relationship. But when David went into his cave, sooner or later I would panic. And we would fight.

“Can you not even look at me? Jesus Christ, what is the matter with you?”

But none of that was going to matter now. My husband wouldn't need to withdraw! Our public commitment would ipso facto render any waffling moot. We were married; we were never going to have this fight again. We had walked down that aisle free of second thoughts or cares, so excited, so ready to be married at last.

Yet three weeks after the wedding, here we were.

“You promised you wouldn't push me away! You promised! How can you do this to me? I'm your
wife
!”

David really had promised not to do this anymore, because he hated how upset it made me, he didn't want that—and what guy wants another where-is-this-relationship-going all-nighter, anyhow? But after thirteen days out of the office, the pressure at his already extremely stressful job was no doubt considerable. He had also recently considered switching jobs and, throughout our honeymoon, fielded increasingly frantic calls from the human resources departments on both sides of that decision. (In the end, he decided to stay where he was.) It was probably all of this, not second thoughts about having married me, that was consuming him. If I had had a day like that, I would come home, flop next to him on the couch, turn off the TV so that I might have his undivided attention, and then keep up a one-sided conversation until bedtime. I could not conceive that he might do things differently.

“Will you just say something? Anything?”

Still leaning against the kitchen counter, David stayed silent. He probably figured that any protest he made that it wasn't about me would only bring a smackdown accusation that he was lying right to my face. But if he was intent on not fighting with me, I was equally intent on flushing him out into the open, on saying whatever I needed to say to make him mad enough to yell back.

“I can't live like this. I'm not kidding! If this is how things are going to be, I want a divorce!”

I didn't mean it, of course. I was trying to make a dent in his armor. Being ridiculous on purpose, lobbing a grenade no one could ignore. There it lay between us. I saw David's eyes widen, but only for a half moment—then he lowered them again, that practiced look of indifference that so infuriated me. He said nothing. Now I really was scared.

“Is that what YOU want?”

He wouldn't answer. Even though I was the one who had brought it up, I was sickened with the sudden certainty that I had hit it on the head. I could see it all laid out before me: returning the presents. Telling our family members, who would be shocked. Shocked! What could possibly have changed in three weeks? And it would all be my fault (even if it was David who wanted it) because I was the one who had said the word in a moment of melodrama, a carelessly powerful word that felt like it couldn't not take shape now that it had been uttered.

Before a couple is married, ultimatums can be bandied about in rocky times: “Maybe I should move out,” or “I just need some space.” And while they're upsetting to hear, they are also, on some level, permitted. It is discourse within the bounds of reason for a couple who has not yet made a solemn lifetime commitment in front of all their relatives and loved ones. Standing there in the kitchen, I saw that this was different: Now we were either in or out. The time for equivocation was over. Saying the word
divorce
carried such a weight of finality and pain that I felt it must have damaged our newborn marriage even to have said it out loud. “Divorce” was not something one said unless one meant it. I understood that. Now that it was too late.

I had expected David to play his part, say that was ridiculous, there I went again. Now neither of us knew what to say. I turned and walked out of the room, gingerly, lest I say or do something that would make things even worse. We retreated to opposite corners of our not-very-big apartment for the rest of the evening, neither one of us sure what had happened, what the other person thought, what would happen next.

By the time I got into bed, I was shaking.

“I don't want—what I said—to happen,” I whispered to my husband's turned back, trying not to cry.

For a few moments, nothing.

“I don't either,” David murmured, already mostly asleep.

I lay awake for a while, trying to remember just what it was that had been worth fighting about.

We were extra polite to each other for a while after that, the memory of the word lingering in the air long after it seemed politic to mention it. Some couples can fight and say things they don't mean and then laugh about it, years later—or even days. Just a funny story to tell at parties. “Paul! Remember when you burned the Thanksgiving turkey and I threw it right at your head? You should have seen yourself duck!” But I live with a certainty that the hurtful things said and done to me are the most truly and deeply meant. I think my husband is the same way. Our hurt feelings do not have a sense of humor. We need to be more careful.

And we are. We have never fought like that again. Perhaps it was only after that fight that we really were married, with a new and tacit understanding that our lives together might go further if we
did
take our relationship for granted, if we never argued the fact of its existence no matter how angry we were. Marriage might not have changed my husband's moodiness, but it could change my insecurity about it. His occasional trip to Eeyore's Gloomy Place wasn't about him deciding whether he wanted to be with me or not. It was just something he did—and something I had known well about when I pledged to spend my life with him. Being married means accepting that your life partner can be in a really shitty mood every once in a while and it might have absolutely nothing to do with you. Except when it's exactly totally about you. And that's okay, too.

The books were right, by the way. Thirteen years later, I can't even remember the last time David went on caveman retreat. I know it still happens, but these days when I can tell my husband is in a bad mood, I stay out of his way. Let him catnap in front of
SportsCenter.
Wait for him to feel like talking, and sooner or later, he does. Maybe my not needling him actually helps him come back to me more quickly; maybe he's just learned to brood more efficiently over the years. But things are easier now. There is a security, a safety, a filing of the edges that comes with marriage—just not with three weeks of marriage. We hadn't earned it yet.

Today our marriage feels safe as sweatpants, blessed in its calmness. But when we hear about people getting divorced, whether friends or friends' parents or people we met once seven years ago, we lie in bed and wonder how it happened. We are human, of course: we always search for that one difference, a forgotten unlocked side door, that proves we can still consider ourselves safe from such intrusion in our own lives. I have never totally lost the fear of divorce, the sudden understanding I had the night of our first fight. There is something about divorce that can come in unbidden through the keyhole, taking away the one you love right in front of you, a little bit at a time. It's the leaver who sees it coming; afterward, it seems, the left swear they never had the slightest warning. By the time one smells the gas, it is already too late.

Marriage is two people promising to keep that danger from the doorstep together, or at least to say they see it coming, even when (especially when) their loved one doesn't. It's a balance between knowing when to give your loved one a break, or space, or time, and knowing when you really do need to speak up. That part is something we are still figuring out. But after thirteen years, our worst trials would seem risible to some, and even though we have never taken the bubble wrap off our wedding china, life without each other has become unthinkable. That means we are very lucky. Maybe that first fight needed to be fought—but it was also, in some ways, our last.

Love in the Time of Camouflage

MARGARET DILLOWAY

One evening, not long after we were married, my husband did not come home from work.

I waited. Dinner grew cold. No phone calls came in. I grew anxious. Was he lying by the side of the freeway someplace? Had he been called away? Or was he simply inconsiderate? I had no idea.

I was alone in Tacoma, Washington. My family and friends were down in San Diego.

The day after my husband and I met, which was New Year's Eve, 1996, standing on a wall in Las Vegas, drinking cheap beer out of plastic token cups, he told me he wanted to marry me. I thought he was nutty. I'd just gotten out of an ill-advised young marriage, I was twenty-two years old, and I had plans.

We spent a few months apart, writing letters, calling, visiting when possible. I loved his single-minded devotion to me, his long letters filled with cartoons, poetry, and odd short stories. If the world ended, he'd be the one I'd want around. I decided to ignore just about every Dear Abby advice column I'd ever read. Keith had only enlisted for a total of three years, and perhaps had only two more to go, but it seemed too long. I moved to Washington and we married in October 1997, in a ceremony only our parents knew about.

Finally, three hours later, Keith arrived home, still in his camouflage military uniform. His battle-dress uniform, or BDU, daily wear, they called it; starched so stiff it could almost stand alone. “Where were you?” I asked.

“Being punished,” my husband said, taking off his black Ranger beret. “My platoon sergeant said you made his wife cry.”

I was confused. I'd never met the sergeant's wife. I hadn't met any of the wives except for the few in my husband's immediate small group, or squad. “I did not.”

“Apparently you yelled at her.” My husband smiled wryly. “The sergeant said, ‘Dilloway, I had to listen to my wife crying about your wife, so now I'm going to punish you.'”

Oh. I swallowed a hard lump, trying to read Keith, figure out if he was mad at me. I'd probably be furious at him if our positions were reversed.

The wife in question was the family support coordinator, the one who organized the activities designed to provide support to the Ranger families. She had not invited us to the family picnic. I had found out about the picnic after it happened, during some wives' meeting where everyone talked about it. It felt like being the only kid in the class not invited to a birthday party.

So I called her and asked her to please let me know about events in the future, because I would like to go. I may have added that though I understood it was unintentional, if I had her job, I'd remember how lonely it was to be new, try to include everyone. I didn't yell.

I explained this to him as he unlaced his boots.

“I'm sorry,” I finished, finally, thoroughly confused. “I don't know what I said.”

He enveloped me in a hug, crushing me deliciously against him. Two-hour daily workouts and twenty-mile road marches with heavy packs will do that. “It's not your fault,” he said.

I blinked away tears. I didn't know anyone in the unit. My husband's immediate squad-team members were mostly unmarried, so I only saw other wives during larger general meetings. If I were the family coordinator, I would want to know who needed support and welcome them.

It wasn't that simple.

This was my first clue that married life with an Army Ranger was going to be very different from being married to a civilian.

I'd never intended to marry someone in the military. Military wives must be strong and independent, and while superficially I appeared to be so, in fact I was a morass of deep neediness (see: early marriage). Keith, my husband, had decided to join for the adventure and for the experience; he wanted to be in the FBI or U.S. marshals. He had a bachelor's in classics and was working at a going-nowhere desk job when he enlisted. Except, on his way to airborne training, he met me.

Actually, we'd first met when I was fourteen and he was eighteen. Keith was a friend of my brother's. My brother had knocked on my bedroom door one morning, opened it, and said, “Hey, this is my little sister. This is Keith.” I have little recollection of this meeting. I remembered him for calling my pet cat “Big Cat” and that my mother liked him. Keith remembers me as a little kid wearing thick glasses.

And now here I was, learning that, indeed, military life was different from civilian life, and there was something like a secret rule book being passed around. Not only was there a defined hierarchy, there was an unwritten one, too.

Keith was in the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, a part of special operations, which includes, among others, the Green Berets and Navy SEALs. Army Rangers are a light and quick force, an all-male commando unit that jumps out of airplanes. They're the ones who went up Point du Hoc on D-Day; liberated Grenada; they were the subject of the book
Black Hawk Down.
Their unit compound is walled in, topped with barbed wire, and signage that says
Use of Lethal Force Authorized.
Which means they're allowed to shoot if you look suspicious.

The Rangers themselves had, it was rumored, the same general psychological profiles as serial killers. Hair-trigger tempers were encouraged. These men tended to settle personal disputes by hand, fighting in a sawdust fight pit, where the Gracie brothers had taught submission holds. When another soldier called a painting I'd made crappy, my husband told him they could settle the question in the “pit.” The other Ranger refused.

Disputes between Rangers and non-Rangers, however, aroused the wrath of the entire Ranger Battalion, much like an older brother rising up to protect his little brother. Once, a Ranger dating a female soldier from another unit had gotten beat up by a group of men when he went to pick her up; his unit returned to the barracks in the middle of the night, locked the exits, and pummeled the entire group. No one reported it.

The main goal for a newbie like my husband was to go to Ranger school, a three-month-long course at Fort Benning, Georgia. Once you went through this, then you didn't have to be punished by doing things like clipping the grass with nail scissors. You would be promoted. Until then, you were treated sort of like a newbie at an especially unruly fraternity—except for the whole deadly weapons part.

Shortly after the wife incident, the entire battalion went away for a month to train. While everyone's spouses were gone, I tried to figure out where I fit in with the wives. Some rules were easy to comprehend. There are, of course, ranks in the military. Officers hold four-year college degrees and get saluted. Everyone else is enlisted. My husband, despite his college degree, had enlisted as a specialist, which meant that his pay almost qualified for food stamps, except that he got extra called “jump pay” for his jumping out of airplanes, pushing us just over the salary limit.

During our first year, Keith was away three-quarters of the time—my husband went to Panama, Germany, the East Coast, California, Nevada, and various other undisclosed locations for training. Though this was pre-9/11, when no one flew American flags and everyone believed we were safe, the Rangers were always ready to go at a moment's notice. Sometimes my husband could not be more than an hour away from returning to base, in case he had to be deployed.

His job was a forward observer, someone who sneaks ahead and radios airplanes to tell them where to drop bombs. He came in first on the forward-observer tests, and was optimistic about his chances to go to Ranger school.

Meanwhile, I'd just graduated from a liberal arts college in Claremont, an ivory tower of political correctness. As I was trying to navigate this new Darwinian world, I got a temporary job at a place that produced two weekly newspapers, one a city paper for Tacoma and one for the army. I did bulk mailings and entered classified ads. I intercepted a fax asking for reporters to fly on a C-141B; timidly, I asked the editor if I could go, and he said yes. I took Dramamine and was the only reporter who didn't throw up. Before long, I was freelancing on the side.

A few months after we married, our names came up on the base housing waiting list. We moved into a brick town house across the street from an airfield, planes landing early in the morning with thundering din. These would be condemned shortly after we moved out, with the white linoleum of schoolhouses for the living room floors.

All the lower-enlisted families lived together, from all sorts of jobs. In the middle of the night, I awakened to the sounds of the soldier next door shouting at his wife. “You don't know how much stress I'm under! My job is hard!” the husband yelled once. He was a file clerk who worked in an office between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., with a ninety-minute lunch every day. The day started at five or earlier for my husband, and went on until after six in the evening or into the night. Other times, he was called into work at night, and wouldn't return for days.

Though I now lived among soldiers' families, it was still hard to make friends. We were different. When my husband, in the black Ranger beret that was then exclusive to them, walked across the yard to his car, the neighbors stopped what they were doing and watched. If he waved, they waved back. If he didn't wave, no one spoke.

One morning, I looked out into the common backyard to see two four-year-olds engaged in a full-on fistfight, the mothers watching. I banged open the screen door. “What's going on?” I asked as calmly as I could.

“They were arguing,” one mother answered, “so we decided to let them fight it out.” Both of them were perhaps twenty, maybe younger. “Do you think we shouldn't?” Her question was genuinely earnest, her brow wrinkling as she waited for my answer.

I blinked at them, wondering if I'd landed on another planet. “Probably not.” Later, I found it wasn't unusual around here to judge force as the best way to own another human being. At a picnic, a first sergeant's son ran around punching the Rangers who ranked lower than his father in the testicles as his father watched with amusement; the men couldn't say anything to their superior.

I worried Keith would change, turn into someone worse than that clerk next door; or that maybe he was the type of person who thrived on violence, and I simply didn't know it yet. Whenever he was home, it was like a strange honeymoon, each of us careful to spend as much time as possible with each other, figure out our boundaries. I always dropped whatever I had managed to get going on to spend this time with him.

When he could, he went to plays with me, local productions. I went to everything in the area: high school productions, community college productions, community plays. Inevitably, in the dark, tired from spending multiple days awake, he would fall asleep. I'd only poke him if he snored.

One morning, he asked if I wanted eggs. He made me an omelet, a thing so large it wouldn't fit on the plate. “How many eggs did you use?” I asked.

“Thirteen,” he said. “Why?” He finished off what I couldn't.

At Thanksgiving, he brought home his buddy—one of the soldiers he'd just been away with for three weeks. Without telling me. The guy in question wasn't the problem; he was a gangly eighteen-year-old, far away from home; it was that Keith brought him back without asking.

“Don't you want to spend time with me?” I asked. “I missed you.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “I should have called. But he doesn't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving. Don't worry. I'll cook.”

I couldn't negate my husband's kind heart. As we progressed through the weekend, the young man chuckling at Keith's raw turkey, sleeping on the couch, playing us at video games, I had an epiphany. There was another entity in this relationship. Not this young man specifically, but the army. A mistress who would always come first. I was the second wife to his primary wife, only having custody of him on off days. And on those off days, the men he worked with would almost always be included. By necessity; these were the men he depended on to save his life. And I had better treat them like brothers.

At work, a full-time writing position opened. I got to do things civilians never do. Once, the Rangers had a family Range Day. We went out to a firing range, where I hunkered down with a machine gun and a rifle. The hot shells hit my side, and I'm scared of guns, but I didn't dare flinch.

It wasn't long before I figured out if I was going to write anything critical, it had better be under a pen name. Every time there was an article vaguely critical of the army, even if I didn't write it, Keith would get flack. I mostly wrote happy articles about the military. One of the new columns featured an inspiring military family member. I looked for Ranger wives doing interesting things. Once I picked a first sergeant's wife, who earned extra income helping a shut-in. Her house was cinder blocks on the outside, but on the inside it was a homey woman's domain that could pack up and move at a moment's notice. She had a nearly wall-to-wall fluffy pink carpet she took on each move. “My husband knows this is my space,” she said proudly, her husband being a notoriously difficult guy, with his name tattooed across his knuckles. After his wife was featured in the newspaper, the first sergeant was, grudgingly, nicer to my husband. The wives became, if not friendly, polite to me. They invited me to picnics and the Christmas party.

I, in turn, never got over my abject terror that somehow I'd say the wrong thing and my husband would be spit-polishing someone's shoes for six months. The officers' wives did not hang out with the enlisted wives; that would be even more fearsome. I still kept to myself. I learned how to be polite, not complain.

And, for the first time, I learned I could get along alone. The independence required for a military life, it seemed, could be acquired. “I love it when my husband's gone,” one woman confided to me. “I let the house go and I can do whatever I want.”

Finally, my husband's turn came up for Ranger school. He did the tests—push-ups, pull-ups, a run—and passed. He came home happy, ready to pack. Then, when he returned to work, he got this news. “You didn't do all the pull-ups,” a sergeant told him abruptly. His squad sergeant was away training, and wasn't there to speak up for him. “You're not going.”