Rearranging Chaos

For the rest of the evening, the two of us ignored our own dates and kept on talking. I'd never done anything like that before. But growing up in the Midwest, I'd always thought of the South as the most romantic place on earth. When I was a kid, I always used to lie in bed late at night listening to radio broadcasts from Nashville.

Maggie wasn't even that beautiful, her features were too large, her face rather plain, but what she lacked in pure beauty, she made up for with liveliness. She bubbled. My roommate was pissed, of course. I didn't blame him, but I still asked her out on my own the next week. Two weeks later, we were practically living together.

At the time we met, Maggie was teaching music at a small private school in Northwest and going to night school at American U. I divided my time between Headquarters on Nebraska Avenue and Ft. Meade out in Maryland where I had a room in the BOQ.

For us, it was an idyllic time, not really like being in the Service at all, we spent most of our weekends at her apartment in Georgetown. Half the time, I didn't even wear a uniform. We had few social expectations and obligations, plenty of time to pay attention to each other.

Her mother objected, of course, she felt we were 'living in sin', she was always calling Maggie on the phone from Tennessee to read scriptural quotes. But for Maggie, it was time to assert herself, make the break. Her father had died recently after years of illness, during our first few months together, I quickly became an important pillar of strength.

I still questioned my own choice of career. What perverse twist of fate had ever led me to defy what other talents I so clearly and to choose instead a society which I obviously had little innate understanding or natural inclination for? But looking at the bright side, if I hadn't been in the Marines, I would never have met her.

Weird. My family was even antimilitary. One of the stories I always remembered hearing while growing up in Indiana, at least, as long as my mother’s father was alive, was how his father - my great-grandfather - spent two years in a Confederate prison during the Civil War. When he got out, my great-grandfather swore that none of his sons would ever fight again. When one of my grandfather's older brothers tried to enlist in the Spanish-American War, my great-grandfather locked him in the barn for a week until he recovered his senses.

My father always wanted me to a lawyer, he even used to take me to local political meetings, hoping I'd fall in love with politics. But listening to all those men drone on about all the things they were going to do when I knew damn well they weren't had never interested me.

My great love was music. In high school, I even played in a dance band, but the vagaries of the artistic life - unpredictable money, weird hours - didn't appeal to me either. When I went away to college, I majored in mathematics, then joined ROTC on a work/ study program after my second year.

A little clumsy, a little soft, I still felt like an imposter. I was the constant brunt of jokes for my clumsiness, my marching instructor was always yelling at me to straighten up or get in step. The war was just heating up as well, but everyone was saying it was going to be over in a few months. Of course, that was years ago now, and the war was still grinding relentlessly.

After getting my commission, I’d gone into computers and would have been perfectly happy to spend the next twenty years in Washington, working to my heart's content on codes at NSA. But I also knew I knew if I were going to have a viable career in the service, I had to get out in the field.

A few months after I met her, when a billet opened up suddenly in the Philippines, I jumped at the chance. Now, I had to convince her, I knew, if she didn’t go with me, no matter how many promises we made, even if we did ever see each other again, it would be merely to sit down, have a few drinks, talk about the good old times, then go our separate ways again. But neither one of us was ready to get married. I still couldn’t admit I actually volunteered. She would have killed me if she knew.

We fought about the decision for weeks. Sometimes, in the midst of arguments, I wondered if we should ever get married. In many ways, no two people could have been less alike. Maggie probably would have been much better off marrying someone more like herself, preferably someone rich, someone who could give her everything she wanted. She wouldn't make a good wife for a busy man anyway, I told myself. She demanded too much attention for herself. I forgot about all my questions when she finally acquiesced.

Thank God, her mother intervened, planned everything. Before Maggie even said her final yes, she was so glad that we would no longer be 'living in sin' she even had the invitations printed. Of course, mother and daughter were still at each others' throats five minutes after we walked in the front door. But I’d long ago realized it was a much older battle that had nothing to do with me. I had my hands full fending off her rabidly antimilitary teenage brother anyway. For me, having grown up in a family where no one ever really expressed his feelings, it was a real baptism of fire.

The afternoon before we were married, Maggie took me up to an old family graveyard on land that used to be the family farm before TVA made a lake of half the spread and a housing subdivision out of the rest. The hill was overgrown with wild scumpernong vines and ivy, we spent the afternoon looking at old gravestones carved with her family names. I was feeling rather nostalgic and horny when, suddenly, out of the blue, she asked,

"Darling, promise me. Please."

"Promise you what?" I didn’t know what she was talking about.

"Promise me you won't come back to me like this, will you?"

"Like what?" She pointed at a gravestone. Suddenly, I realized that was anxiety all our arguments had masked. It was fear.

"Maggie, I'll be okay, I promise." I knew there was no way I could really make such a statement, and I also knew I had to say something, even if I could not allay her fears. "This should be the happiest time of our lives."

"All I can think of are all those flag-draped boxes the TV announcers are always calling the symbol of a nation's sacrifice." There was a hint of anger in her voice. I pulled her close.

"I'll be okay. I promise. I'll be careful." Of course, we never had been able to discuss the war rationally, even back in Washington, every time the subject came up, we’d end up shouting down each others’ throats. Now, we just had to go through the paces, pray that everything would work out once again for the best in the end.