I am breaking a promise.
I am sitting in a chair with a cushy blue leather seat that sticks to my legs like the summer-hot interior of a BMW, wearing a dress I have never worn before. I am twisting the furry leaf of a rose — every wife here has one — between my fingers, wringing it to a pulp and staining my skin a thin, watery green. I am smiling, red-faced and red-eyed, proud enough to need to keep my eyebrows pensively furrowed to stop from bawling.
My parents tell me that my first real sentence was “daddy fly airplane today”, but the first time I remember knowing that my dad was in the Air Force was after we moved to Germany and our sterile two-bedroom apartment was empty for months. When you move overseas, the military sends your stuff over on a big barge, and it’s free but it takes forever and ever and you know that sometimes the Legos and apple peelers and tennis shoes and wedding albums of other families fall off and sink to the bottom — that could be you. I was very relieved to get my Legos back when the boxes finally made their way across the Atlantic and inland to the big E in Europe, as indicated by my plastic placemat map.
Before our things came and we really moved in, my mom and my dad and my brother and I lived in the Q, which is the name of the hotel for people in our wholly unremarkable predicament on every Air Force base. When we left Germany two years later, we stayed in the Q again for a few days while Legos and apple peelers and wedding albums and new German tennis shoes were loaded into crates and nailed safe and shut. In Germany I had learned my first swear word from an inscription on the underside of a plastic junglegym and the next six or seven from watching Back to the Future, had my first wart, built my first snowman, and had my first bitterly jealous and scheming small female friends. We left at 7:04 in the morning on a Lufthansa flight headed for Virginia.
I thought that Virginia was somewhere in the vicinity of Arizona on an accurate map of America — or “the States”, as the really streetwise first graders in Europe referred to it. That is not where it is. Also, first graders in Virginia are about the same as first graders in Germany. They know the same slightly offensive rhyme games, they wear the same hideous leggings with elastic straps under the soles of their feet to keep the pant legs from riding up, and they are just as bad at geography. I settled in easily at school, as the devoted caretaker of the class guinea pig and one of the brains who did extra math problems and built advanced Lego projects (they moved and picked things up and terrified the guinea pig and did other useful things) with three boys in a back corner of the classroom. My leggings were uniformly hideous and my life went quietly on.
Somewhere, there is a solemn panel of generals deciding the fate of girls who are right in the middle of fifth grade and have a best friend and a good school and have finally stopped wearing those very bad leggings. They decided that my family was moving to Rhode Island, and that we were moving in June, and that I was saying goodbye to my best friend who would write me long letters a few times and then a couple of shorter letters and then nothing at all. I failed to grasp the existence of some higher power in a conference room in the capital moving us across the country like plastic infantrymen on a Risk board, and so I resented my parents as we moved, and resented them as the letters stopped, and resented them as I stepped out into the bitter New England fall wearing my new frighteningly Catholic red plaid school uniform. The panel of generals kept talking and writing and re-writing lists and we were on some of them.
And so I have been a reluctant Catholic schoolgirl who liked her rosary beads but didn’t believe in God, a barefoot hippie brat on the rock beach, a girl lonely in her room full of cardboard boxes and no more letters and an empty address book, a face among thousands at a high school the size of small country (formerly of the USSR), an intellectual stranded in Mississippi, a frustrated kid who couldn’t get her leggings on right, a car receding into the distance. I pressed my face into my dad’s green flightsuit when he came home late, I played Minesweeper on his computer at the squadron and repeatedly injured myself while playing astronaut on the equipment in the gym, I kept my cheap middle school makeup in the leather purse that came back with him from Turkey. I said goodbye to people in batches. I wanted to fall in love and I thought I did and I moved away and tried to hold on.
“I’m not supposed to know yet, so don’t say anything to anyone,” my dad told me, leaning forward as he shifted into second gear, “but there’s some pretty sure word on where we’re moving this summer.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s not Nellis, like we thought it might be, but it’s somewhere close to Nellis,” he said, choosing his words carefully and hesitantly. He knew more about getting his kids’ hopes up than most fathers do.
“Huh. Okay.”
I knew more about getting my hopes up than most teenagers do — specifically, how to avoid doing it. I looked out the window at the streetlights passing like luminous orange fish through the night.
A few weeks later, when the official word was out, my dad told us the name of an Air Force base in Oregon. I made a smiling comment about how I hoped we weren’t walking there because I didn’t want to gather buffalo chips or die of dysentery, and left, making it back to my room and closing the door just in time. My dad left me alone for a half-hour before knocking and coming in regardless of my silence and sitting down on my bed and telling me that he knew what it was like to have secret hopes.
When I was fifteen and my dad was a colonel, my parents invited me to come with them to the graduation ceremony of one of the classes on base learning to fly the F-15E. I wore my mother’s pearls and a dress I had never worn before, and sipped my Shirley Temple while chatting with generals and terrified crew-cut graduates with nicknames like Mr. Bunny and Flex and iPod and Porno. Someone had given me a rose to match those given to the spouses of the graduates, and I looked around at faces above roses — wives, girlfriends, a husband. Some were smiling, some staring blankly, some chewing a lip, many pregnant. All were crazy, in my exceptionally well-informed opinion.
I was bulletproof, knowing exactly what marrying into the military entailed and the life these girls and their trusting unborn children could expect. I promised myself that I would never be at one of these graduations as anything other than the daughter of the wing commander — never as a wife. I knew better than to let the Air Force way of life get a hold of me again once I turned eighteen and existed as something other than a tax deduction.
My husband is not in the room, but he will wander back here to the bar eventually, grinning, watery-eyed, holding the piece of paper that says that he is now certified to fly the F-25. I uncross my legs, wincing as the sticky leather pulls at my skin. We will grow up and live in way too many houses in way too many places: plastic infantrymen tossed across the board. My children — born new recruits — will hate me and wad up letters and cry and go to too many schools and hug a man in a flightsuit and see the world, and I will leave and make it back to my bedroom and close the door just in time.
I am crazy, in my exceptionally well-informed opinion.