Clutching at her train, and praying she wouldn’t trip and fall on her gown on the way to the bathroom, Miriam didn’t turn back.
* * *
—
Brooke Sanderson, wife of First Lieutenant Billy Sanderson, was applying lipstick the shade of a rotten plum to her pursed lips in the long vanity mirror. She stopped and stared when Miriam walked in. Brooke was dressed in a long, black satin gown with embroidered white gardenias that ran from the one shoulder in a long line down to the hem, her hair curled all over in tight ringlets. The picture of a perfect first lieutenant’s wife.
“Well, where on earth did you get that dress?” she said.
There were two types of military wives, in Miriam’s opinion—those who supported their husbands and those who thought they, too, were Marines. Brooke was squarely in the latter set. Attended every officer’s wife function—high teas and luncheons and charity drives and golf outings. She ran the Camp Lejeune Toys for Tots Christmas program as if she were Britain’s prime minister during the war. Miriam thought her the most entitled white women she had met—uninteresting, her life so intertwined with that of her husband’s that she was no longer distinguishable as a woman.
“Oh, Brooke,” Miriam said with indifference. “Hi. It was my mother’s, actually. Brought it with me from Memphis.” Miriam took her own lipstick out of her matching gold sequined purse and began applying the bloodred color to her full lips.
“Memphis?” Brooke asked. “I didn’t know they had nice things down there. Figured everyone would be running around in overalls.” She shrugged and lit a cigarette. Exhaling, she looked Miriam up and down and said, “You celebrating tonight?”
“Aren’t we all?” Miriam said warily, using a tissue to dot the corners of her mouth.
Brooke rolled her eyes. “Oh please. Making major is a big thing, and my Billy still only a first lieutenant.” She sighed. “But we’ll get there. Major. Whew. I’m sure I’d wear a dress like that, too.”
Major. Jax hadn’t told her. Miriam’s hand froze in midair. The large bathroom shrank to the size of a dollhouse in that moment. Her breath caught in her throat, and Miriam felt as if she were a tiny grain of sand falling into a tightly coiled seashell, never-ending in its brutal swirl. Suddenly, instead of her own shocked reflection and Brooke’s half-surprised, half-smug face in the mirror, she saw the worn pages of the Bront? she’d been reading in the old record store on Cooper Street in Memphis. She saw Jax, too—a tall, dark, beautiful stranger trying to get her attention for the first time.
What had happened to that man? To her marriage? Miriam didn’t rightly know. All she knew was that she hadn’t prepared for how lonely marriage could be. Jax always off at training, months-long deployments God knows where, training for war. And then, one came. And off he went, leaving her alone. Once more. Miriam hated the large Victorian they’d moved into after their wedding seventeen years before, with its spiral staircases and secret nooks and crannies, its creaking floors. She hated the space of it at night, after she had put the girls to bed, how her footsteps echoed in the hallway. She had no one to talk to in North Carolina. She missed Memphis. When Jax returned from the Gulf, he returned even more distant than when he had left. Hardly speaking a word, and when he did, it was to argue. They fought about the phone bill—sky high because of her late-night long-distance phone calls to August. They fought when Jax thought his meat overcooked at dinner. They fought when she found the scraps of napkins with women’s phone numbers scrawled across them in lipstick not her shade. And now this: the fact that some uppity white woman in a bathroom knew more about her husband than she did. Miriam was done. She was done with being unhappy all the damn time.
“You must be proud,” Brooke said, eyeing Miriam in the mirror.
“Ecstatic,” Miriam said and smiled wide.
* * *
—