I was almost a Navy wife. And by almost I mean that I was dating a Navy guy for a while, say two and a half years, and the two of us would talk about our inevitable marriage over and over again, never tiring of the topic. By the time I turned nineteen, we had planned our small, backyard wedding that would take place in my quaint suburban town in New Jersey. Our friends and family would be dressed in their nicest clothing and they’d all smile and give nice speeches, toasting the two of us, the love we’d sustained, throughout miles and years and doubt. He and I would be radiating, filaments of light stretching out from our skin. I’d be barefoot, blades of grass squeezing between my toes and there would be Christmas lights wrapped around the trees and they’d sparkle like fireflies once the sun had set. Our favorite band would be playing underneath the cherry tree, where my swing set used to sit, and we would sway so slightly, pressed together like jellyfish.
Sometimes I would practice my vows in front of the mirror in my bedroom, or I’d jot them down in my journal, writing out what I would say on that distant occasion, how I would proclaim my love for him, to him, before a crowd. I’d proclaim that he was the only person I could count on. He was the only person I wanted and the want for him was stitched so tightly into ever fiber of my body that I could hardly breath without saying his name. Most of the time, I’d end up making myself cry, so I’d stand in front of the mirror, watching tears creep out of my eyes, and I’d usually be holding a pillow, pretending it was him, because he was always so far away, too far away, and I missed him, always missed him, and if I squeezed the pillow tight enough then maybe I’d forget that he was in a distant base in San Antonio, while I was over one-thousand miles away in Chicago.
I joined a group on Facebook called Proud Navy Wives and Girlfriends because I was a proud Navy wife and/or girlfriend and I’d read all of the comments ladies would post about their men: about how much they missed them, about how unbelievably amazing their guys were. And weren’t you just so proud of your husband? Because, you know, he was out there doing things, though we weren’t really ever sure what kinds of things they were doing.
But still, I was so proud that I could puke. And I wrote it to him in every letter I sent while he was in recruit training, which meant I wrote it every day, because I sent him a letter every single day he was gone, since he didn’t have access to a phone or to email. Because I was a good girlfriend. I was a proud girlfriend. As if you should be proud of someone for signing five years of their life away to some ridiculous bureaucracy, just because he fucked up too much in high school and he never really thought about planning for any kind of future. He used the Navy as a cop-out because he had nothing else going for him, because he wasted every other chance he had. And I knew that. I knew all of that, but still, I was proud of him for doing it, proud of him for breaking out of his hometown and his pot-smoking, do-nothing routine.
“I’m your biggest fan,” I would whisper into the phone, as if he was the singer of my favorite band. And I could hear his sighs from miles away, through satellites and long expanses of time, and he would thank me, always sounding tired and kinda sad.
I was proud of him for doing something, but I wasn’t proud of what it was. I didn’t approve of war, of all the money put into the Department of Defense when half of the country didn’t have access to adequate health care and education. But even so, when I saw him in his uniform for the first time, my heart swelled and crashed, white foam slipping down through the cavities in my chest.
I was almost a Navy wife. And when I was fearful about the future that lay before me, that was the thought that grounded me and made me feel safe. I mean, I was getting a degree in writing. I had come to terms with the fact that I would be broke for the rest of my life. I was never going to be one of those people who made a lot of money. But he would be there for me with his big salary and his all-inclusive healthcare. “I’m doing this for you,” he would tell me. “I’m doing this for our future.” As if the future before us was fused together and his future was the same as my future.
I didn’t have to worry about moving back home after I graduated from school, because I had him. I didn’t have to worry about sponging off of my parents or my friends, because I had him.
And that was one of my last thoughts when I broke up with him – Well, I guess there goes my free healthcare – and I almost took it back, swallowed back my words, told him that I didn’t mean it, that I really wanted to be with him. I almost signed myself over to him as if I was some kind of charity and he was my donor.
I could have been one of those Navy wives who lives on a base, on some kind of subdivision of existence, on a road that you can’t find on a GPS, in a development that you need identification to enter, shopping at grocery stores that existed exclusively for “military personnel.” And we would have bought a dog and he would have kept me company as I sat at home alone, because I wouldn’t have any friends or family nearby, because I would have followed him, blindly and powerlessly, wherever he went. And I’d be stranded with him, on a government base somewhere, without anything to call my own. And I had convinced myself that this would be okay and I’d be happy like that.
I was almost a Navy wife, almost married at the age of 21. We were already on the same cellphone plan and we shared a bank account and we’d already agreed to the whole “what’s mine is yours” clause. I had a copy of his credit card and he told me to buy groceries when I was running low on cash. When I went to visit him and we stayed in a hotel somewhere, we told everyone that we were on our honeymoon and the woman at the front desk would smile at us and call us Mr. and Mrs. and we’d giggle about it and say, “Not too much longer…”
I’d tell him how thankful I was that the game was over, that I didn’t need to look around for anyone else because I had him and we were in it for the long run, because why else would you be tearing your way through a long-distance, military relationship if there wasn’t something big and solid on the other side, some sort of tangible light at the other end of the tunnel?
After being apart for over a year, he told me he wanted to move to Chicago and be with me. We started looking at one-bedrooms, way up north, as close as we could get to the base in North Chicago without having to leave the city limits. It’d be an hour or more commute for me to get to class every day, but what did it matter? I’d do anything to close the distance, to merge the miles, to have his body in my bed for more than a few days every other month.
He requested orders for the Great Lakes base, but he was denied.
I sat in my office chair, spinning around and around, holding the phone up to my ear, listening as he sighed over and over. “I just want to be with you,” he said, and I repeated the same thing back to him, almost automatically. And some part of me was disappointed that things hadn’t worked out as we had planned, but another part of me was overwhelmingly happy that I didn’t have to share my city with him, that he wouldn’t come here and infiltrate my life, the life I had constructed, block by block, all on my own.
“We’re too different,” I had told him in May as we stood in my driveway. “We lead completely different lives. You don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“I know you better than anyone,” he protested. And maybe it was true, in a way. He had heard me cry more than anyone else. He knew my fears. He knew the folds in my flesh. He knew all of the nicknames my family members had for me.
But he didn’t know the way I stood on the CTA platform, waiting for the train. He didn’t know how I organized the books on my bookshelf. He never even read any of the books I recommended. He didn’t know the crappy pop songs I listened to when I went to the gym. He didn’t know me from one day to the next. He knew me as a voice on the other end of the phone. He knew me as a finish line.
I couldn’t be a Navy wife. I couldn’t be a name filed into a Homeland Security office somewhere. And when the two of us stood in my driveway, next to the backyard we’d imagined would host our wedding one day, I told him that I changed my mind, that I didn’t want that future anymore, that I wanted something of my own.
I couldn’t be his Navy wife. But three months after our driveway break-up, he found someone who wanted to play that part. I saw the pictures of their wedding, in front of a courthouse with seven family members. No backyard, no Christmas lights, no band playing. He looked nice in his Navy blues. She was smiling. They weren’t radiating or anything, just dimly twinkling.
Maybe he had built the picture up in his mind, drawn up the blueprints so many times, that he couldn’t imagine an immediate future without the Navy wife, even if it wasn’t me. I dropped out of the role, and she took my place. She was married at the age of 20. And she has the free health care. And she lives on a base with him somewhere. And they have a cat.
And that’s okay.
Virginia Baker is a third year Fiction Writing student at Columbia College Chicago. She comes from the land of New Jersey, which may explain her infatuation for Bruce Springsteen. When she’s not reading or writing, you can find her advocating for the environment. Her other interests include: trains and folk music.
