The Future Homemakers of America. Laurie Graham
We were down at the commissary, just for something to do, me and Lois, pushing Sandie in her stroller. Breath puffing out like smoke every time we laughed and just hanging there in the air. The cold hadn’t killed the scent of the beet harvest, though. All my born days, I never knowed such a sickly smell.
‘I swear,’ she said, loud as you please, ‘this place is colder than a gravedigger’s ass.’ Lois always did have a mouth on her.
‘Uh-oh,’ she said, ‘here comes the Pie-Crust Queen.’
And sure enough, there was Betty running after us, flagging us to wait till she could catch her breath and tell us the big story.
‘Peggy!’ she said, gasping and wheezing and hanging on to my arm. ‘Have you heard the terrible news?’
When your husband flies F-84s, sitting up there on 3,000 gallons of jet fuel, cruising – now there’s a word – cruising at 510mph, hoping to get his tail waxed by some Russki so he can be Jock-of-the-Week back at the base, there’s only one kind of Terrible News, but we both knew, me and Lois, that it wasn’t that.
That kinda news comes quiet, on flannel feet. The base chaplain brings it to your door, and the CO’s wife follows through with a few brisk words about courage and dignity. After that, you better hope you got some friends. Some squadron wives to take turns answering your phone and feeding your kids and keeping you from falling into a thousand pieces.
When Terrible News comes to married quarters, there’s no pulling down of blinds. Military don’t hold with closing the drapes. Word gets round, but you’d never know, looking in from outside, that anything was happening, because heck, if air force wives went around yelling ‘Have you heard?’ the whole thing could run out of control. Next thing you know, every girl on the base’d be out there screaming, ‘His poor wife! His poor orphaned children! It’s so tragic. It’s unbearable. But I’m okay. I’m okay. It’s not me. Not this time!’ And that would never do.
Still, I guess we both missed a beat. Terrible news?
‘His Majesty King George of England,’ she said, ‘died in his sleep at Sandring Ham Palace.’
Betty always had a thing about royalty, clipping photos, pasting them in her albums, specially anything about that Princess Margaret, or the royal babies.
‘Princess Margaret had tea with General and Mrs Eisenhower,’ she told us one time. ‘She was fifteen minutes late, but it wasn’t her fault. They had angel-food cake and dainty little sandwiches, but the princess probably didn’t do cake, watching her lovely figure an’ all. She wore a yellow shirt and the cutest black dirndl skirt.’
‘Well, I’ll be dirndled.’ Lois was always taking the rise out of Betty, but she took it in good part. When you’re in a hole you gotta stick together and USAF Drampton was a hole, no two ways.
I knew Betty from way back, at Topperwein High, Class of ’42. I was captain of the softball team and she was president of Future Homemakers, stuffing toy bears for needy children and selling lunch-boxes for Healthful Living Week. We really didn’t run with the same crowd. But then she married Ed Gillis and I married Vern Dewey which made us both 96th Bomber Wing wives. By the time we were posted from Travis, Texas, to some frozen salt-marsh, East Anglia, next stop Siberia, we were blood-sisters, near enough. Never would have thought I’d be so glad of Betty’s everlasting cheerfulness. That’s homesickness for you.
‘He was found by a servant,’ she said. ‘That’d be a footman or a pageboy, taking him his coffee. Imagine. He’d put down the tray, all beautiful silver and jewels, and say, “Good morning, sire” and baboom, the king’s dead.’
Gayle Jackson was parked, waiting for us.
‘Y’all wanna come back to my place?’ she said. ‘Get a coffee or something?’ Time hung heavy for Gayle, poor kid, stuck out in a rental waiting for her darling Okey to come home.
Lois said, ‘Sure. You won’t mind if I bring along something, give it a little lift?’ She had a liquor bag hanging from the back of Sandie’s stroller.
Gayle’s face lit up. I guess there always was that weakness in her.
Betty said, ‘Honey, did you hear? About the king?’
‘He’s dead,’ Lo chipped in. ‘Ba-boom.’
‘Course,’ Betty said, ‘it had to be a servant found him, not the queen. They’d have separate bedrooms. Kings and queens always do.’
‘Jeez,’ Gayle said. ‘How come?’
‘Why, because they have such palatial homes, of course!’ We relied on Betty for that kind of inside information. ‘They have separate closets, separate everything.’
Sounded fine to me.
‘And poor Princess Elizabeth is thousands of miles away in Africa, having the news broke to her by her courtiers. She’s just going to have to pack her bags and fly right back here and get coronated.’
She leaned down to rub Sandie’s frozen little cheeks. ‘Hi, sweetie pie. Have I been ignoring you today? My, you’re so cold. Lois, is this child warm enough?’
Sandie gave Betty a big smile. ‘Told,’ she said. ‘Digger’s ass.’
So we all headed down to Gayle’s place, and Audrey came in from next door, for coffee and a little something from Lois’s bottle, just to warm us through and wish the old king God speed. Even Betty came along and that didn’t happen too often, on account of Ed keeping her on a short tether. Betty was allowed to go any place she liked, as long as it was the PX, the chapel or the school gate.
‘I’m just fine,’ she always said. ‘If Ed Gillis is happy, Betty Gillis is happy. Anyways, I don’t have time for gallivanting. My babies keep me busy. Caring for my home and my babies.’ Her babies were Deana and Sherry, but she included Ed too, for some reason we could never fathom, so that made three whining brats, leaving their skivvies for her to pick up and generally giving her the runaround.
Gayle and Audrey were off-base, on account of they didn’t have kids. The rest of us were in quarters. They weren’t much more than cabins, with flat asphalt roofs, but at least we had each other. At least inside that perimeter fence we were one Nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.
Audrey didn’t seem to mind being outside. She was of a pioneering disposition. They could have put her in a mule wagon and she’d have made the best of things.
‘When in Rome,’ she always said.
Well, when in Rome, maybe, but not when you’ve been posted to the asshole of the universe.
Lois said, ‘Aud, you’re wasted here. Can’t they send you some place you’d have to live in a pup tent? I may just have a word to the CO’s