The Wives: A Memoir - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Simone Gorrindo’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Longreads, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Self, and others. She holds an MS in journalism from Columbia University, and has received fellowships and grants for her writing and reporting from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Georgia Council for the Arts, and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. She lives in Tacoma, Washington, with her husband and two children. The Wives is her first book.

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Chapter 1: A Rapidly Deployable Combat Unit

CHAPTER 1 A RAPIDLY DEPLOYABLE COMBAT UNIT

November 2012, Columbus, Georgia

In the photo Andrew had texted, the little brick house looked out of another time. Just call me June Cleaver, I’d captioned the shot when I’d sent it to my oldest friend, Reina. In person, though, the 1940s home looked more like it had been forgotten entirely, the front lawn patchy, no shrubs or flowers bordering the foundation, not even a small porch to sit on. I hadn’t realized that I’d hoped for these things, but I’d lost an apartment next to a reliable subway line in the only city I had ever loved. A porch swing would have softened the blow.

“Maybe we should have gone with base housing?” I asked Andrew, who was standing next to me on our new driveway in the dusk. I didn’t have a driver’s license, had never had a need for one in New York City, so he’d driven all one thousand miles here. Over the course of two days, we’d had six hours of sleep and lukewarm showers at a Motel 6 in southern Virginia, but he looked untouched by exhaustion, his dark hair combed perfectly into place.

“Trust me, at my rank, it would’ve been worse,” he said, rolling up the back door of our U-Haul. “Plus, this place is $700 a month. We get to pocket a little bit of that BAH.” He looked at me with a mischievous grin, the evening light catching the flecks of gold in his green eyes, and I felt a surge of excitement. We were going to live in a house. We had never lived in a house before.

The Army issued you a “basic allowance for housing” to cover rent and utilities, calculating the amount allotted by looking at the cost of living in your area, your rank, and whether you had any dependents. Ours was $1,100 a month. After utilities, we probably wouldn’t be pocketing much. Still, I could not get over this number. $700. That had been my rent for a basement bedroom in Brooklyn when I was twenty-one. My view had been a brick wall.

“I wish we could leave this stuff out here for the night, but I don’t think it’s a great idea,” Andrew said, looking around. Getting off the freeway, the roads we’d driven had been lined with used car lots and fast-food restaurants. Then, when we got close to our street, a neighborhood park had appeared like an oasis, shaded by tall oaks, maples, and southern pines. The old homes bordering it were in good shape, even stately, but they had become smaller and more run-down as we’d driven up the hill toward ours. We were just two houses in from an intersection, after which the neighborhood dissolved into a wasteland of empty lots and old warehouses. Among them was a small clapboard church with an old marquee in front, one of its letters gone—SIN ERS ARE WELCOME.

“Oh, look,” I said to Andrew, pointing. “They knew the New York heretics were coming.”

He laughed as he picked up a box. I grabbed it from him and turned away from the truck.

There was a woman standing at the end of our driveway.

She looked about my age, late twenties, thin and freckled, her face red as though she’d been out all day in the wind. She wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. Her long chestnut hair looked dry at the ends, like it needed a cut.

“Let me get that!” she said, rushing toward me and grabbing the box from my arms. “I’m Rachel, it’s so nice to meet you, can we help you unpack?” The words trailed after her, rushed and breathy, as she walked up to our front door and placed the box on the stoop. It was like she had been waiting for us.

“Maybe we should let them get settled in, babe,” said a guy standing at the curb. Rachel was so excessively friendly, so overwhelmingly there, I hadn’t even registered him until now.

I looked over at Andrew. A smile was spreading across his face.

This had to be Boyd.

Or Daniel, as Rachel introduced him now, rejoining him at the end of the driveway, her hand curled around his forearm in a way that was both tender and possessive. Wisps of blond hair peeked out from under his Mets cap.

“Dan,” he gently corrected, and shook my hand. There was something old-fashioned about Dan or Daniel or Boyd, with his ruddy complexion and white sneakers and big, toothy smile. Andrew had met him at Fort Benning, the Army base ten miles from our new house, at a selection process for an elite, rapidly deployable combat unit that was part of the Army’s Special Operations. After they’d made it in, both of them had gotten stationed here, and when Dan found the nearly identical brick house across the street from ours, he told Andrew about our place. The landlord, a plumber named Frank, had bought both for cheap during the height of the Recession. Theirs was nicer, I noted with some jealousy. It had a covered porch, some well-kept bushes, a feeling of having been recently loved.

That was where June Cleaver actually lived.

“Well, if you need anything, anything at all, we’re right here,” Rachel said, pointing at their house as Dan practically dragged her off our driveway. Even their walkway was lined with petunias. I had never before wanted petunias, but suddenly I was painfully envious of Rachel and her tidy flowers.

“Apparently, the last tenants trashed the place, but it’s been renovated, sort of,” Andrew said as he fished the keys out of his pocket, unlocking the front door as we reached the stoop. He turned on the overhead light, illuminating a small, box-shaped living room with shiny wooden floors. The smell of fresh lacquer hung in the air.

“There’s even a mudroom,” Andrew said, opening a windowed door just off the living room. I peeked in. On one of the walls were appliance hookups. “We’ll need to get a washer and dryer,” he said, pointing.

“We won’t have to go to the laundromat,” I countered before walking back through the living room to the dining area and turning on the light, bringing to life a chandelier that hung from the ceiling. It was plastic, but it shimmered beautifully. At the back of the house I found three bedrooms. 1,300 square feet. Just being inside it made me feel like someone had opened a window in my mind and let in the breeze.

Once we’d brought in every last item from the truck, Andrew and I lay down on the living room floor. My body ached. The last week had been a conveyor belt of boxes to pack and goodbyes to say and a thousand loose ends to tie up at my office in the Flatiron District, where I’d worked as an editor for the digital division of a publishing company. By the time we’d finished loading the U-Haul, we’d probably walked a half-marathon up and down the four floors of our Harlem building.

Reina had helped us move out of our one-bedroom. I’d known her since I was twelve. She was like my sister. I didn’t know when I’d see her again, when I’d even next be in New York. Would I ever get another chance at an editing job like the one I’d just given up? It seemed unlikely. I’d only had it for a year and a half, still couldn’t believe I’d even landed it.

And now, here I was, twenty-eight years old, an Army wife.

Andrew found my hand and fingered my wedding ring, a tiny diamond that had belonged to...