Homefront Read online

  HOMEFRONT

  Penxhere Press/May 2009

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2007 Kristen J. Tsetsi.

  Cover Photos by ©iStockphoto.com/Franck-Boston

  and ©iStockphoto.com/sndrk

  Cover Composition by MCM

  This book may not be reproduced in whole

  or in part without permission.

  ISBN: 978-0-6151-3990-6

  Published in the United States.

  Homefront is a Backword Book.

  www.backwordbooks.com

  HOMEFRONT

  Kristen J. Tsetsi

  PROLOGUE

  DECEMBER 31, TUESDAY

  I tug on my jeans, cover up with my bra. He is asleep before I put on my socks, naked on the couch with one bent leg propped against the back, the other flat and angled open. Even drunk, most people would be self-conscious. Most would have pulled something on first thing. Were he anyone else, I would be embarrassed for him, would find a light blanket, or a robe or a bath towel, to drape over him.

  I sit on the floor and run my fingers over his body, the tissue-soft skin of his inner thigh, the sparse hair curls on his lower abdomen, the dark hollow where neck pools into collar bone, and I wonder if I could ever be comfortable enough, trusting enough, to sleep this way, watched, the way I am watching him.

  We kissed at midnight, the way people do, but we must not have had time to say happy New Year before kissing was more than kissing. I don’t remember either of us saying it.

  JANUARY 1, WEDNESDAY

  The phone rings and neither of us moves.

  “What time’s it?” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  He looks at his watch and wipes his face and picks up the receiver. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir." He hangs up. “Date changed again.”

  “Surprise.” I hold my head.

  “By changed, I mean, we’re not going.”

  “For sure? For real?”

  “Not going.” He rolls over to face me and the tags clink on their chain. Toe tags, really, no matter what they call them.

  “Why aren’t you smiling?”

  “I don’t know, M. I wouldn’t get too excited.”

  Chancey jumps on the bed and Jake strokes his tail.

  “Why?” I say.

  “It’s just—there’s a lot in the news, and people are saying things.”

  “What things?”

  “Just…something. I don’t know anything for sure, so don’t get—don’t get the way you get.”

  “Who’s saying it?”

  “It’s not that it’s being said—not by anyone reliable, that is—so much as people think Iraq’s next.”

  “It’s just talk, though,” I say.

  “Yeah. Just talk.” Chancey flattens between us. “It wouldn’t make any sense.”

  FEBRUARY 27, THURSDAY

  From our window, I watch him stuff his bags in the trunk, LAKELAND black-lettered on the sides. He looks up once, then goes back to punching his duffel to wedge it in a side nook. When he finishes, he holds out his arms in the snow and smiles up at me. There’s been a lot of snow, for Tennessee. The first we’ve seen in the year we’ve been here. He writes ‘come play’ in the dusting on the roof and I put on my mittens and hat.

  ________

  He holds me in the kitchen in front of the open refrigerator. His sweater, wool, scratches my forehead.

  “I don’t know if I’ll write you,” I say. “I may not write you at all.”

  “Come on, M.”

  “I won’t know what to say.”

  “Say whatever you want. Say you woke up at seven to go to the bathroom and then went back to bed.”

  “You’re being flippant.”

  “You’d rather fight about it again?”

  “No.”

  “Then write that you love me,” he says.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Well?”

  “Why don’t you…you could write notes like the ones you wrote me in high school.”

  “I hate it when you do this.”

  “It took me two weeks to figure out who you were. Remember?”

  “You’re pissing me off. And you didn’t figure it out. I told you.”

  “And when you told me, I figured it out.”

  “You know it’s not some girl thing, right? That I’m not one of those girls who grew up dreaming of a big, white wedding? It’s just, if we—I can’t help wondering what I’m doing here if you’re not sure.”

  “Oh, no no no. Don’t do th—”

  “Besides you—and not even you, pretty soon—what’s here for me? There’s no work, Jake. Why am I here?”

  He leans into the fridge and pulls out the orange juice. “I guess I don’t know what else I can say.”

  ________

  The curtains billow in the wind and we are under the blankets, neither of us with a foot on the floor. His last breath is quiet and he falls beside me. “I’ll miss that,” he says, and I tangle my legs and my fingers in his. He says, “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself while I’m gone.”

  “We’ve already done this,” I say. “I feel like we’re in a bad movie.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He slides his fingers from the knot. “I’ll show you.”

  ________

  Janis Joplin says there is no tomorrow, that staying up all night means today never ends, so while Jake sleeps, I sit at the kitchen table and listen to the helicopters flying the pattern. Listen to the artillery exploding at the weapons range on post, five, six miles away. I open the window, smell the snow, listen to the cars on the main road, trucks wheezing up the hill, bass rattling in the window-tinted Lincoln that rolls down our street every night at eleven sharp.

  Ten hours.

  Ten hours to count or to enjoy, but not both.

  I close the window.

  (end prologue)

  FEBRUARY 28, FRIDAY

  Outside, cool air blows sharp and hard and the snow is sun-bright under flat clouds.

  People brush past, arm in arm, sniffing, blowing, consoling.

  I squint, but it doesn’t help. My eyes ache. Shapeless white-gray clouds go on and on and the sun and the snow and the clouds together are all too white and I don’t remember where we left the car. Jake and I had leaned against the trunk after dropping his duffel in a pile, and we’d talked about something, surely, standing out in the lot. Maybe fast food, maybe the weather, while waiting for the call to go inside, for his mother to catch up from where we’d lost her at a red light. I remember running my finger over the raised letters on his breast pocket and reading the name.

  This must be what it’s like when someone dies. They’re here, and then they’re not.

  “Hon, why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “I’m sorry, Olivia. I didn’t see you.” Her hand grips my arm. I tug free and her long nails zip on nylon.

  “I called your name.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I didn’t hear you,” and when a salt-stained minivan pulls out of its spot I see our car, overdue for a wash, a radio station sticker in the corner of the rear window.

  “Where’s your ribbon, hon?” she says, squinting at our bumper. “I thought you’d have one by now.”

  We—Jake and I—have one bumper sticker: MARRIAGE = LOVE + LOVE. The message was crossed out by a vandal, the streak extending to the bumper, the ink a permanent, ugly smear on white paint. I tell her, “They were out.” Too many—Olivia included—slap on the yellow ribbons in perfect alignment on trunks and bumpers, the more the better. Her SUV boasts six, three on either side of the license plate. She fits right in, in this military town, where a bumper without r
ibbon magnets is a rarity. Jake and I call the people magnet-junkies and even found, online, a bumper sticker reading, I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS MORE THAN YOU DO.

  We didn’t buy it.

  His mother nudges me, pushing me to walk with her across the lot. “There’s your car,” she says. “I parked just a few spots away.” She links her arm in mine and says, “I can come over.”

  “Oh, no. That’s—I’m not going directly home. I have to…” and then I mumble something. I have nothing. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, until Monday.

  “What was that, hon?”

  “I have to pick up cat food.”

  “That won’t take but a minute. Let me go with you.”

  We reach our car—mine and Jake’s—and she stands in front of me, keys dangling from her fist. Dried tears stripe her cheeks.

  “I have so many other things to do.” I wipe my own cheek even though there is nothing there and tell her, “You have something…” and point until she scrubs at her skin.

  “Gone?” she says.

  “Gone.”

  She pulls me to her and clutches me tight—so tight my nose is stuffed into the fake fur lining of her hood and the perfume collected there makes me sneeze—and then releases me. “Well. Call me, hon.” I watch her go, wait for her to close the heavy door of her SUV and disappear behind tinted glass. She honks when she passes.

  Cold wind cuts through my sweater.

  I zip my coat.

  My head hurts. All that brightness.

  I check my coat pocket for the keys, hoping Jake has them. Maybe he held on to them and they’re in his—

  —but I find them in my jeans.

  Denise—I’d looked for her in the hangar after Jake and William and the rest of them were marched away—now pulls out onto the street and rolls down her window. I see her light a cigarette.

  ________

  I drop my keys on the floor and stand in the middle of the living room. We left the tree lights on. It wouldn’t matter if the tree were fake, but it’s real, and I don’t remember the last time we watered it.

  The last time I watered it. Jake didn’t water the tree because he wanted it gone. “Even New Year’s was almost two months ago,” he said, but it was doing well, staying green. “Not yet,” I said.

  Chancey rubs against my ankle. I didn’t feed him this morning, I remember. Breakfast was rushed. Jake had wanted eggs and pancakes and bacon and grapes, anything he wasn’t likely to have for a while, and we’d forgotten about the cat.

  He leads me to his bowl in the kitchen. Jake’s coffee cup sits near the window on his side of the table, his cream and sugar spoon ready on the edge of the sink for the second cup there wasn’t time to drink. I pull the cat food from the cupboard and pour some into the bowl on the floor.

  Chancey’s crunching sounds loud.

  I leave the bag on the counter and go to the bedroom. Jake’s towel from his shower half-covers a torn condom wrapper on the unmade bed, sheets and comforter flung to the center. I pull up the blankets so Chancey doesn’t drag litter where I sleep and throw the towel in the closet.

  Jake’s blue flannel pants lie on the floor, knees bent, running, his dirty socks on top. I pick them up and fold them, then drop them back on the floor and, sweating in my coat, kick and drag the legs and waist, slide them around on the floor until they look the way he left them.

  I sit on the bed and pull out the letter he handed me before walking away.

  Don’t let it ruin us, M. You know I love you. You know it. Take care of yourself and know that even if you don’t write me, I’ll be writing you. -J

  I read it, then read it again.

  Some time later, still wearing my coat, I fall asleep.

  FEBRUARY 29, SATURDAY — MARCH 19, WEDNESDAY

  The news is on, the anchors’ dramatic and rolling inflection reduced to gibberish while I wait for something to happen.

  The news is always on, at home and in stores and in bars and everywhere, while everyone—guessing and second-guessing— waits for something, for anything, to happen.

  Talks go on and deadlines leapfrog, and I expect Jake to be home before the end of March. I expect he’ll call any time, now. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t do it?” he’ll joke. “Now we’re stuck.”

  Shellie tells me I don’t have to come back to work until I’m ready, and that my cab is out for a new fuel pump, anyway. She says she and her dog, Puddin’, are thinking of me.

  ________

  I wash one plate and one glass and either watch television or stare out the window at the snow and then the rain and sometimes the sun. Rarely the sun. I vacuum the throw rugs and wash the gray ring around the bathtub and drag the sponge behind counter appliances. Microwave. Coffeepot. A pile of dried and burned crumbs have collected under the toaster, enough to make a mound the size of a small anthill. I sprinkle them over Chancey’s hard cat food, and he sniffs them, then eats them.

  ________

  A helicopter whomp, whomp, whomps over the apartment and my chest thuds. I go to the window to watch the Chinook’s dark, flat underside pass over the trees. “Apaches have to fly in the back forty clear on the other side of post,” Jake said when I asked why I never see his helicopter—only Chinooks and Blackhawks—pass over the apartment. “I’d fly over, if I could. Drop a message in a bottle, or something. A hamburger, maybe. No one’s done that before.”

  ________

  Denise and I sit—breathing, waiting—on the phone while we watch the first bow of white light streak across our screens and land somewhere in the center of the city. Beautiful, if there’s no real thinking about it.

  “That’s it,” she says. Something goes clink on her end, reminding me to refill my glass. “We just watched the beginning from our living rooms. Hey—what do you think they were doing in their living rooms?”

  I stay up long after we get off the phone, until the bottle’s empty, and check the line every now and then for a dial tone.

  ________

  March 19

  Jake,

  Howe area yhou righkt now;?

  Don’t type trunk. Drunk/

  Howareyouhowareyouhowareyou

  Alive,righat? Alive, I hope. I’ma sure you war.

  Are!

  What the hellk.

  Lksdoihoagfnlkaglkd

  MARCH 23, SUNDAY

  Denise’s kitchen window blinds slap in the wind and midmorning sun catches floating skin and dust and particles. A fruit fly dives into my cup of tea, no longer steaming.

  She fiddles with an arrangement of fat daisies in a vase on the counter, cutting stem-bottoms and twisting stalks so the faces point outward. Her black hair shines blue and she might have forgotten to close a shirt-button.

  “You could have told me you don’t like tea,” she says, and when the flowers fall the way she likes, she sets the vase on the center leaf and tucks in her shirt with one hand and sips from a cup with the other. “I have coffee. Soda. Water. Anything?”

  I say, “Tea’s fine.”

  She tells me she’ll be right back and her hips carry her out of the room.

  Her apartment is warm. She doesn’t have the air on. It’s cool for late March, but not that cool. I make a streak on the table with my finger, then another, the wood shiny and lemon-scented. Through the archway, in her living room, vacuum cleaner stripes make a palm-leaf pattern on beige carpet.

  She calls from somewhere, “Are you going back to work tomorrow?”

  “Probably.” I try to picture her bedroom. Jake and I were here only once before, for a battalion party. Someone was leaving or someone new was coming, and they grilled ribs and burgers in the light of tiki torches speared into the lawn at the edges of their patio. Coolers held the beer, so no one went inside unless it was to use the bathroom, and because their toilet paper has—or had, for the party—one piece of trivia per square, every return trip was announced by the sharing of a new question. Jake jumped through the sliding patio door and quizzed me on the state flower of Alask
a, and when I had exhausted my guesses, someone else—Ben? some B name—said, “Forget me not.” Denise looked at him and shook her head, just a little, and then cheered loudly and said, “Good job!” William kept his eyes on the grill and flattened burgers with a spatula, making grease drippings pop in the fire.

  I fish the fly out of my mug and drop it on her table. Dead, probably. I scoop it from the puddle with my longest fingernail.

  “You must drive some interesting people,” she says, but her consonants sound funny. Must be putting on mascara.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Sometimes.”

  “Anyone ever hit on you?”

  “They’re really only interested in a ride.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Well, there was this one time when…” But I stop. I’m not interested enough to follow through with whatever story would come.

  “What?” she says.

  “Nothing.”

  She comes out, feeling her clothes and touching her hair. “Ready?”

  I pick up my cup to bring it to the sink, but remember the fruit fly and first check the tabletop. The tea puddle is still there, but at some point, the fly had dried off and flown away.

  ________

  “It’s like summer already, isn’t it?” Denise rolls down her window, then closes it after the crosswinds blow her hair in her eyes. Low, roadside cliffs support ashy, leafless trees. Water drips from crevasses, and weeds bust green from the rockface. The loveliness of it, the fresh smell of damp soil and—somewhere—fresh-cut grass makes me feel sick.