At the drive-in we waited in a long line filled with carloads of teenagers and families. We felt a little superior to some of the younger kids since we were still wearing our bathing suits and they were in their pajamas.
There was a playground under the huge movie screen: monkey bars, swings, teeter-totters, all made of candy-striped pipes and set in sand. While we waited for dark, we played with the kids we knew and challenged the ones we didn’t. I was getting real excited. It was turning darker and darker. We were with the older kids and no adults were watching us.
Suddenly the lights blinked on and off rapidly. One hundred kids swooped in a sprint toward their cars. Row after row of elevated blinking lights stretched out before us. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t feel my body. I was swept up in a wave of kids. To my left Joyce’s blond hair was streaming behind her, her legs churning gracefully beside me. I saw kids running ahead of us, being drawn back to our side and then vanishing behind us. We were flying, aware of each other and euphoric in effortless speed. David passed us in a T-shirted, sunburned animal burst, followed by a wake of struggling friends. Joyce and I held our own. Two men were leaning against the side of a car, smoking. As they watched the flock of kids fly by, I heard one say to the other, in a voice with warmth, amusement, and admiration, “Jesus, look at those kids run.”
My energy doubled and my strides barely hit the ground. My arms cut through the warm summer night. I felt a bursting pride and love of my own life, and for what I would later understand as my generation.
The older kids crammed into one of the Fairlanes. The huge Plymouth settled under the weight of the men. The women spread out in the other Fairlane. Joyce, David, and I shared a Chevy with the three oldest girls. Our Oldsmobile sat empty. We watched the first war movie and fell asleep during the second, film explosions and Asian screams giving way to exhausted dreams. A long time later, we heard voices gently untangling us in the back seats and carrying us to our own cars. Our parents were stumbling out of the cars they shared. We heard loud voices and laughter as Joyce’s father backed over one of the speaker stands. Joyce’s mother and father yelled at each other for a few seconds, until my mother cursed them and everyone laughed. Our fathers gunned their engines, and we squealed and rocked our way out of the drive-in and onto the black strip of asphalt leading to our colony on the Indian reservation in the woods.
The next morning I woke up and found my father sitting with several adults and two Military Police. My mother was at the stove making coffee and voices were very low. I walked down the hallway and out the screen door. No car was parked in front of the Airstream. It was quiet as a tomb. One of the kids standing in a knot in front of the shining silver home waved me over secretly.
“Did ya hear what happened to Joyce?”
My heart hit a huge beat and froze as she said, “Last night she got killed in her dad’s car. He hit a tree. David broke his arm and his leg and he’s in the hospital. So’s his mom. His dad is in jail.”
None of the kids on that base ever went to Sunday school again. And our parents never even mentioned it.
THE WIVES TOOK TURNS
The wife of a shell-shock victim in the trailer park is usually young, and a long way from home. Exhausted, often publicly abused and battered, she tries to keep alive enough spiritually to love some of her several kids as much as possible. Which is not easy. The father’s influence over her first son is poisonous. She watches her son agonize, from infancy on, as he is taught to reject the substance of her affection. Affection has no place on a battlefield. If she interferes, she is punished for weakening the boy.
Despite her efforts, including the beatings she must endure when she takes a stand in the boy’s interest, she loses contact with him as he struggles to catch up on the trail of his father’s violent footsteps. She watches helplessly as her son gradually develops a deep seething rage, which takes the place of the love he feels, but is forced to deny her. A confusing rage that will be submerged, yet extended to his sisters, and eventually to all women. If she has a second son, he will be lost to her even quicker than the first.
She turns to her daughter, whom she finds struggling not to repeat her mother’s bleak existence. They argue constantly, confused by the need they have for each other, and the self-loathing they feel as their love becomes a mockery in this world ruled by the Army. Eventually the wife accepts her fate, shuffling within the trailer in a semi-stupor of silent compliant slavery. She is heartbroken as she watches the blind desperation of her daughter grow into a perverted attraction for men with the same essential qualities as her own brother and father, beginning her journey toward her own enslavement, and perpetuating the cycle.
In childhood the siblings develop a lifelong communion of fear. They are kept apart by the associations of submerged horror and forgotten cruelty. They are bound by their blood and the memory of their flickering souls, long ago extinguished in the airless childhood of those trailers.
They are afraid to see their mother take another beating. Afraid to take another beating themselves. Afraid of the temporary quiet that in a moment can explode in another unpredictable scene of Father’s hysterical, blind, hallucinating, medicated panic. Afraid of the catatonia that fills the low ceiling of the trailer like a storm cloud. They creep around, watching Father as he sits on the edge of his bed in the dark, far end of the tunnel, saying nothing, hearing nothing, responding to nothing.
The trailer stinks of terror when Father begins his sixteen-hour confession, filled with the struggling revelations of his broken soul. He tortures his wife with his self-deprecations. Why is she so afraid? Because she knows that in any instant she will see the flip side of her husband’s illness. The deprecations will become accusations, the confessions will become denials, the denials will become rationalizations. His rumbling voice will storm in the close confines of the metal tube, and threats and weird plots will hiss into his wife’s face. Father will change from a pliant and hopeful invalid into a monster of cold, hard, hopeless cruelty. Father will make the dependents suffer. Then the military man will make the wife and children feel a little bit of the fear and pain and rage that is at the heart of his regimented insane world. They’ll learn well — because he’ll teach them.
The wife will take her turn, in her own desperate need. You’ll see her in a scarf, hiding the lumpy cheeks and jawline. Almost glamorous in her sunglasses hiding her bloody eyes. She goes to the hospital to arrange an appointment with the base doctor, the highest in command. She tells him she can’t take any more, and asks if they can please take her husband back on the ward. Sometimes they do. But usually the request has to come from her husband or his superior officer, because this is an important decision, a man’s decision.
Sometimes the husband discovers the wife’s visit and then the wife is hospitalized for a couple of days. The children remain buried under sheets in their bunks, forcing themselves to sleep with high temperatures, unable to set their feet on their father’s linoleum floor. They dream of dinosaurs mating in blood and mud under black skies as their drunken father careens against the thin trailer walls muttering, “What did I do — oh baby — what did I do to you? I’m sorry — I’m so sorry. You BITCH! You CASTRATING whore.”
Normally the doctor just feigns a sympathetic voice and tells the wife the old story. How her husband is in bad shape from the war, and that she just can’t understand what he has been through. How much he needs her support, and that he’ll be better when he gets back his confidence in himself and the world again. The doctor might even read her husband’s war record, and he embellishes it a little. The confused wife wants to believe that her husband is a war hero, that somehow all this slaughter is not in vain. She makes an effort to believe the lie that his sacrifice somehow belittles her own. She starts feeling proud of her man, and guilty about complaining after all he’s been through.
Slowly she reaches for her handbag, as she begins to see the image of the young man she married. She walks down the steps of the hospital, adjusts her scarf and sunglasses, and fights bravely the flow of her tears.
She returns home, chilled to the bone in her cold nervous sweat, seeing an old photograph of her husband before her eyes — the farmboy from Lawrence, Kansas, with the funny grin, the 4H president from Tacoma, or the football hero from Amarillo.