Landings

It's been forever since I last posted something, mostly because it would have been the same version of a running theme: I'm sick of this deployment and the wives' club is driving me crazy. I can't really write much about the second half of that statement, but a short summation that shies away from drama is to say that it's like group projects in school have always been for me-- everyone has lots of ideas and then a few people end up doing most of the work, after which everyone has lots of opinions about how it got done. I'm always one of those sucker worker bees, and it turns me evil. As for the deployment, it mostly because like a big sad ache over time that never really felt better. After a while it became a separate kind of insanity to keep track of how many days you've been feeling exactly the same. I'll be frank: I drank a lot, and not even that broke up the monotony.

So instead of trying to write anything thematically cohesive and remotely polished, I have instead gathered some impressions of the fly-in, when most of the pilots and wizzos (weapons officers in the back seat) fly home in formation and reunite with their families at the hangar on base. It happened this last Friday, the day before the Fourth of July, which made for a double dose of patriotism and local news coverage:

I remember needing my dress to be perfect, and getting it tailored by C., who lives like a giant friendly spider in a nest of military uniforms and thread spindles and oscillating fans in her packed house across the street from the library. Her hair is wispy and thin on top, white and thready, and it blows around in the warm currents of fan air. I’ve never seen her out from behind her work counter, and I’ve never seen the piles of back-up work smaller than a soft mountain behind her. Her cat is expansive too, sleepy-eyed and powdery gray, soft like ashes. The thing about C.’s is that you can never tell what’s currently in use and what’s been caked in a fine layer of benign neglect for seasons, or years, at a time. It all feels fine, though, no nervous energy.

I linger on the dress because it was the good and easy part of the fly-in, the last part that felt under my control. We’d decorated the hangar the night before and hung big canvas and butcher paper banners, both of which necessitated my climbing to the far upper reaches of some kind of chain link equipment cage and zip-tying grommets to dusty, spider web-covered metal posts. Our signs felt big and ostentatious next to the two other squadrons, which seemed all out of whack you consider that as always, our group was late and disorganized and any sense of unity had long since fallen apart. Resentment and significant looks run like river currents among this group, and my contribution is an icy weariness, and a sharp yank towards “who the hell cares?”

The morning of the fly-in: I’m trying to imagine how big this American flag is—25 yards? A quarter of a football field, is that accurate? It covers the entire back wall of the hangar, which is tall enough to fit a Super Hornet with its tall tail fins with plenty of room for clearance. I try to imagine running the length of one red stripe and decide I could do it in 10, maybe 12 long paces. Certainly not in these heels I’m wearing, though. I have to be careful where I walk, and not poke a heel through the grating on the floor or catch it in one of the metal loops used for securing a bungee around a jet nose. I have two galvanized buckets full of sexually suggestive treats and snack foods, one for my husband and one for a female officer. Their respective call signs are spelled out in scrolly handwriting on red and black construction paper and mounted on sticks tied with black and white polka dotted ribbon that poke out of the tops of the buckets.

Arrayed on the red and black draped table are trays of sugar cookies shaped like fighter jets and pilot wings and the squadron logo, all individually wrapped and frosted with delicate “Welcome Home!” greetings. A pile is being sorted behind the trays of broken wings and planes with their stabilizers and noses snapped off—damaged in transit from the woman in Oklahoma City who donated them in gratitude “for all that y’all do for the country.” The broken cookies freak me out—bad mojo, or superstition perhaps, but I don’t like seeing broken planes. Nevertheless, I sing the first lines of that 80’s song, “Take…these broken wings…and learn to fly again, learn to feel so free…” This is what I do when I’m uncomfortable, make a joke.

There are also two big buckets of hand-sized American flags for anyone who wants to wave one when the planes come in in formation, and I grab one to have something to fidget with. I consider cramming it into my meager cleavage and saluting the next person who tries to take my picture, but I think better of it.

All the little kids are dressed in red, white, and blue. There are news crews everywhere, and half the wives have hired and brought along personal photographers to capture the moments of this long awaited reunion. I feel dangerously unaccompanied. I have no parents or in-laws to wrangle, and no little kids to bounce on my hip, or whose hair needs smoothing, or to yell at to watch where they poke that flag. H.’s father-in-law, who served two and half tours in Vietnam and wore an awkward and tentative smile the whole weekend, asks me if I’d like him to take a picture of me. I say sure, I guess, and I try to get H.’s little girl to stand next to me but she won’t do it. I stand in front of the hulking American flag and try to smile like this is the most natural thing in the world, spending a morning in three-inch heels in an over-decorated jet hangar and waiting for my husband to roar home after six months of being gone.

Someone calls my name from across the hangar and I’m asked if I speak Spanish. I say sure, thinking someone’s relative needs directions where to park, and instead I come face to face with a beautiful reporter with a weird little hole in the skin above her lip and off to one side, like she used to have one of those weird mole-looking piercings. She’s lovely in lavender and pink and her shoulder-length black hair is flipped up at the ends. She asks me if she can interview me for Univision, and I say sure, but my Spanish is really, really terrible. She sets me up in front of a cameraman in a red T-shirt with a lizard on it and cargo shorts, and he adjusts his camera for “white values,” which he claims has to do with the flag as a backdrop, and not having the white come off as blue, but I smile and imagine a “gringo” knob on the camera that he’s torquing up to high.

Turns out he needs it—the beautiful reporter’s questions are met with short, simplistic answers in mangled grammar.

“What are you waiting for today?”

“My husband comes home after six months on a boat.”

“How do you feel?”

“Happy. Nervous.”

“What have you been doing to prepare?” She has to ask this one again in English.

“Um, clean, clean, clean.” I furiously try to conjugate verbs for “I haven’t cooked real food in six months” but it doesn’t come. Instead I give a constipated smile and shrug.

“Has anything changed since he’s been gone?”

“Yes, um, I move house because there was a, um [in English: drive-by shooting] at my house. So it’s a new house. He doesn’t know where.”

Her eyes widen and she drops the smile for a second to say, “Wow, really?” Then “Is this is a new dress today?”

“Yes, a new dress.” I feel like the idiot I must sound like, and wonder if this is the curse of being a Navy wife—the only chance you get to explain yourself and it has to be in a foreign language in three-inch heels in front of the world’s biggest flag. They turn off the camera and my IQ immediately raises back to normal levels. I gush promises to her that I did once speak Spanish, long ago, but that my husband speaks much, much more fluently. She says they’ll come find him when he lands.

The fly-over itself is geometrically beautiful, a twelve-plane formation shaped like a broad arrow, like a kite I had when I was little. I know which plane is Ross’s and it appears not to move at all, just grow bigger and louder on the horizon, part of this frozen hieroglyphic against the mild blue of the morning sky. It’s over in seconds. They sweep over us in a wave of noise and without realizing it, I’ve started to cry. It’s not the flags, or the decorations or all the families, it’s not the stress and fatigue of waiting, and it’s not really even the anticipation of seeing him again and having him next to me. It’s that awful and wonderful gap between who we are on the ground and this bigger, scarier, completely mysterious thing he becomes up in the air. After all this time, it still amazes me that that’s actually him up there flying that thing. I have a savage’s understanding of flight, and it’s hard to imagine Ross able to fly that thing and still be a small, separate organic bundle of nerves and skin and bones when he does it. On some level I think I imagine that he turns into something else, that he shape-shifts somehow into part man, part jet when he flies. I’m always both terrified for him and fiercely proud of him, and the mix is powerful and jolting.

When I snap out of it, I realize the Univision cameraman is only a few feet from me and is filming again. I flick tears off my cheeks and look around for someone to talk to but I recognize no one. Half the crowd are photographers and they’re clicking away, backing into each other’s shots and setting up all kinds of tricky, low-angle perspectives and taking light readings. Now we wait while each individual jet lands on the runway behind the hangar and then taxis slowly out in front of us. I’m watching for jet 112, but he’s near the end. Someone’s decided that all the pilots must sit in their cockpits and wait until everyone comes around and gets parked, and then they’ll form a big horizontal line and walk towards us.

This last little choreographed delay infuriates me, but I try to keep it from my face. I don’t want scenes from Top Gun, I don’t want every last reaction documented for all time in soft focus and framed by the overbearing presence of the flag. Most of all, I don’t want this pressure to recreate the sailor/nurse kiss from Life magazine, or to keep eking out that Good War nostalgia from a time and circumstance where it doesn’t fit. I just want him home. My husband. The guy who makes up dirty lyrics to radio songs and leaves his shoes in the middle of the floor.

112 comes around the bend and I can see his helmet there in the cockpit and he’s waving to someone and I raise my hands and wave, the little flag going with them, and my eyes tearing up again, and then the Univision camera is there again, right in my line of sight, and I don’t want to ruin the guy’s shot, but I do feel myself starting to scowl and crane my neck, and mouth the word, “motherfucker.” More awkward moments of waiting. The whirring and clicking and beeping of cameras becomes more apparent as the jets engines spool down, and I’m aware that all the mothers around me are whipping their kids into a frenzy.

“Do you see Daddy? See? Right over there! It’s Daddy! Wave at him!”

The ground crews go around patting down the glass of the cockpits with an oven mitt on a long stick, which is supposed to ground any static electricity, and the cockpits slowly begin to pop open and guys climb out and shuffle around in a group at the end of the runway. When they finally start their walk towards us, the crowd surges forward and people start breaking away to run. Wives in strapless dresses and heels try to manage the run holding little kids’ hands. The camera crews run too, dragging cables and backpeddling and trying to get planted for that reunion kiss shot.

I walk. I can’t find him at first among all the identical flight suits. I hear someone yell our last name, but then I realize that it’s also some little kid's first name. A mother clips me as she runs past, and there’s a lightning second where I wonder if this will be like musical chairs and the song will stop without me finding him and I’ll be left alone out there on the windy runway. And then I see him. He’s further apart at the very end of the line, and he’s laughing. He’s seen me the whole way and he’s walking too. We slow down for a minute, even pause. More people run between us. When I get to him the collision is slow but I grip him tighter and tighter and it’s like everything else has finally stopped for a minute—all the noise, all the people and cameras, and it’s just a sunny day and he’s home and I can cry and no one’s watching. It’s a long time before I realize I haven’t even said anything to him yet. When I pull back, he hands me a rose with a black and red bow on its stem—all the pilots have one—and what I really want to know is, where did he keep it when he was flying? Tucked into his harness? Inside the front of his flight suit? Did my rose get launched off the end of the carrier? Or did they somehow collect them all from somebody at the end of the runway before they started their walk towards us?

The beautiful reporter waited a polite interval before she came up and pointed a microphone at him, and he reacted with grace and poise, stitching together long, melodious Spanish sentences about how fantastic it is see me again after such a long time. She asked him what he would say to other service members who are away from their families, and he advised patience and faith and said the reunion was better than anything, and made everything that came before worth it. I think we were all a little stunned, the reporter, the cameraman, and me. She seemed genuinely dazzled and told him his Spanish was beautiful, and that we'd be on at six.

Disengaging from the crowd at the hangar was more difficult than I'd anticipated. There were forms to fill out and turn in, parents to meet, children to dodge, and all kinds of favors and food to collect. Somehow I hadn't made the connection that everything I'd decorated and assembled for him would then need to come back home with us and find a place in our house. The first thing we did when we got home was take a long nap.

Landings are the toughest part. I’m still waiting for the engines to spool down from ours. Ross is adrift in the new house and many times a day I answer a “do you know where [xyz] is” question. Mostly the answer is “not really.” I’m sick of our base house already for reasons I’m too tired to articulate. I think it’s a general aesthetic fatigue as much as an acute desire for more privacy. There’s only so much one can take of blinding white walls and the same gray carpet and inoffensive linoleum. The flies are oppressive and everywhere and the sun pries open every possible corner. At night, the sky is hazy amber from the streetlights and never truly dark, and it’s an active exercise I have to engage in to come up with ways this is not like Saudi Arabia.

He’s home, though. He’s home and he wakes up every morning with a smile for me, and he ambushes me around hidden corners with hugs. He empties the dishwasher and folds my laundry and fixes the lawn mower. He called me at work this morning to tell me about a gopher-be-gone apparatus and fly traps he got for our lumpy patch of a back yard, and that he hoped I was having a good day. He sings along to the stereo and praises my rusty cooking and tells me the Honda’s going to be OK, that it’s a good car and we’re going to figure out what’s wrong with it so we can make it last. Mostly it's just a complete revelation to have another adult around in my life, and luckily it's one who seems to approve of almost everything I do lately, who proclaims every new outfit I wear his favorite.

I'm hoping we can keep this for a while.