The End of Men(58)

“So.” She looks so excited. She must have gossip. Here we go. “The army’s introducing a draft and we’re going to be drafted first!”

“You and I?” I ask stupidly. I don’t understand. Susan rolls her eyes and raises an unplucked eyebrow.

“No, stupid. Army spouses. We’re already on base, and we have ‘an understanding of what the job involves,’” she says, in air quotes as though this is ludicrous. “Isn’t it outrageous!” She’s looking at me expectantly. In the old days, before Daniel died, I would have gone, “Yes, outrageous. Wow,” and played along, but I can’t be bothered now. Daniel’s dead. It doesn’t matter to him or the other men in his unit if Susan and I get on. And I never gave a shit.

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”

Susan purses her lips and cocks her head to the side as though I’m a toddler who just peed on the floor.

“What’s going to happen to my kids, huh? There’s no one to look after them, and after all we’ve been through, why would they pick on us like this?” She pauses to catch her breath. “It’s not the same for you. You childless wives, it won’t affect you.”

I don’t snap or lose my temper. I know exactly what I’m about to do and I’m not proud of it. It’s not going to be my finest moment, or actually, maybe it is. If I’m being really honest, Susan is lucky I don’t punch her repeatedly in the mouth. I get up from the table, take her coffee cup out of her hand, and pour the glass of water I’ve been drinking over her head in such gloriously slow motion I can see her expression shift from bland surprise at the absence of her coffee to disbelief to total horror at the cold and the wet.

“Go fuck yourself, Susan, and, while you’re at it, get the fuck out of my house.” The joy of saying those words I’ve cradled at the back of my tongue for years is particularly sweet.

Susan gapes at me, scraping her chair back. Her badly dyed hair is plastered against her cheeks. “You’re insane! I always said you were crazy, I warned everyone: That lady’s about to crack.”

“I said out, Susan. Now.”

Susan’s still blathering as she makes her way out of my house and slams the door behind her. Good riddance, to Susan and to part of my identity. Calming, pleasing, careful, placating army wife. My husband and I met in a nightclub in Madison, Alabama, which is possibly the tackiest way in the world to meet the love of your life. I didn’t know it then, but when you marry someone in the military it’s not just a partnership. It’s an identity, and one I’ve always rebelled against. Whenever he was deployed, I would leave the base and go home to Maine for a fortnight and, if he was away for over a year, I would move in with my parents and transfer to a hospital there. He never seemed to have the kind of deployments that meant a wife could move too. He was sent to dangerous places, faraway places, terrifying places. So I did my best to survive without him and I worked and stayed away from the base. It was too hard to see the other wives waiting for a man to come back in the way we all feared.

Then the Plague came and Daniel had just come back from a posting in Germany. The number of times I’ve wished I had just gone with him to Europe. He’d never been told his wife could move with him before but I wouldn’t have been able to work in a hospital there. We could have had six more months together before the world fell apart. He had only been home for three days when the call came in that all active military personnel were to return to active duty, but this time, in the States.

Daniel’s unit was one of the most successful in terms of surviving, and that’s not just the rose-tinted view of a lonely widow. I don’t know how or why but Daniel survived all the way until May, the last in his unit to die. Not a single one of them was immune. Every phone call I had with him I begged him to desert. What would they do—shoot him? He was going to die, probably. We had hoped he would be immune but the army tested for immunity and he was negative. I just wanted more time with him. I wanted to be a wife for a little while longer.

But when you marry a man with the integrity to go into the army—for patriotic reasons glistening with valor and honor—you can’t be surprised when he stays at his post until his last, dying day. “I’m helping people,” he would tell me, always patiently, when I cajoled and cried and begged. “Help me,” I would reply. “Please help me.”

So now, I’m a widow, and the one silver lining is that I don’t have to be liked anymore. The other wives always found me weird and now I’ve confirmed all of their suspicions. We’re all widows, supposedly supporting one another, but “widow” is the most common title in the world now. It’s still unbearable. Just because lots of people are experiencing something alongside you doesn’t make it any better. If anything, it’s harder because you’re not special. There are no allowances or respect for grief. The whole damn world is grieving. What’s one husband when almost all the men are dead? What’s one woman’s grief in the face of billions of lost sons, fathers, brothers and, yes, husbands?

But I didn’t throw the water over Susan because of grief. No. I did it because I’m childless and Susan knows that it’s the one weakness I can’t bear to have poked and she just rammed the knife in. I know we’re meant to use the term “child-free” now but, let’s face it, that’s bullshit. Most of us are childless and not by choice. Daniel and I started trying for a baby as soon as we were married. By the time he died, we had been married for five years. I have been pregnant eight times and miscarried every single time.