The Real War by Gay Degani

It didn’t matter if it was 106 degrees out, Ma and I used the patch of green gravel between the asphalt street and our front porch as a refuge for secrets. Ma puffed on her Kent, elbow of her right arm—the one with the cigarette—resting on her left fist, her back to the house, facing the road.

“He slept most of the morning,” she said.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” My father’s liver cancer had cancelled out the few social skills he’d once had.

She pulled a thin blue envelope from her housecoat pocket. “You got a letter from your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Just don’t pin your hopes on a man is all I’m saying.” She dropped her cig onto the blacktop, smashed it with her slipper, the soles so worn I worried about scorched toes.

“I know, Ma. I’m not.”

“But there’s nothing wrong with junior college, Hope. Not one damn thing.”

College seemed a dangerous place to her, I knew. Hippies smoking dope, dropping acid, protesting the war, so I didn’t answer. Instead I poked fingers against the needles of our big Saguaro cactus. I liked to see how far I could push against the spines before I saw blood.

I “met” Frank in the back of a movie magazine. “Write to those serving in Viet Nam” is what the ad said. My friends told me not to because they were against the war, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t Frank’s fault he was drafted.

I sent a letter once a week, each inky word sinking into the airmail onion-skin as if it were etched, giving him my life the way I wished it was, my family living in a rambling hacienda high in the San Jacinto foothills with a view of the desert, not down on the floor in a flat ugly house on Manzanita Street in a post-World War II tract. In Frank’s world, I was going to college, too, some place by the ocean.

Frank sent me pictures of himself and his buddies smoking joints in front of their tent, dog tags on bare hard chests. He told me he was glad my name was “Hope” because he was sick of the humidity and torrential rains, the elephant grass, the smell of rot. I wrote him about warm dry winds across the desert, but left out the part about how they sucked moisture right out of my eye sockets.

My parents met during the real war. He was in the Pacific; she worked for the USO. They barely knew each other when they married. When I told my mother how romantic that must’ve been, she rubbed my hands in hers and muttered, “Forget romance.”

“I’m not bitter,” she told me more than once that winter. She’d pat the sofa and say, “Sit and watch this movie with me.” Sometimes I did, but I most of the time I was too busy sending snapshots of myself to Frank, finishing school, waiting to find out what college would take me. I could almost smell the ocean salt.

In early April, another kind of letter arrived, but my mother didn’t meet me outside when I got home. She’d propped it against the toaster in the kitchen, UCLA emblazoned in the upper left hand corner.

My heart pounded as I ripped it open and read the words that would allow me to escape.

“Ma!” I shouted. “Ma!”

The house was lost in afternoon shadow, the door to my parents’ room closed. I stood in the hallway, sweating in the air-conditioning, listening for their usual bickering. Silence. Maybe they weren’t here; maybe she’d rushed him to the hospital.

A cough from their bedroom got me moving. I rapped on the door, the packet still in my hand, and went in.

He lay on the double bed, covers kicked off, alone in the room. His face was crisscrossed with pillow marks, his forehead creased with hard white lines. I must’ve woken him up.

I tried to keep calm, but couldn’t with that envelope clutched to my chest. “Where’s Ma? I got accepted to UCLA!”

“Get me some water.” Even flat on his back, he had the power to knock me down.

In the kitchen, I put the packet down, got a glass, and held it under the tap. Water sloshed down its sides and over my hand. I grabbed a towel and spilled liquid onto my neatly typed name. I took a deep breath and stared out the window. Something wasn’t right.

Her Ford Galaxie was parked in the driveway as usual, but where was Ma? The only answer was the drone of the air-conditioner.

“Bring me that water.”

I set the glass on his cluttered nightstand. Pulled him into a sitting position, his hot, soft skin causing my stomach to churn. Handed him the water. He watched me do all this, his mouth clenched tight. I waited until he was drinking before shifting my eyes to the closet.

One of the sliders was open, the dark recess emptied.

His voice was hard, his stare harder. “She’s deserted you just as much as she’s deserted me. I’m not the only one she doesn’t care about.”

I don’t remember leaving the room. I don’t remember the week. What’s the term they use for soldiers who return home traumatized? Shell-shocked?

After graduation, I worked at Leelie’s Drugs, ringing up aspirin, flip-flops, and Revlon lipstick before going home to cook my father’s dinners. I chauffeured him to the doctor’s on my days off. I never answered the letter from UCLA, didn’t bother to register for junior college.

At night, when the house was quiet, I’d retrieve Frank’s letters out from their hiding place under the cushion of my mother’s green cut velvet sofa in the living room and wrap myself in their cracking blue tissue paper, their glue barely holding me together.

I waited for my father to die. And for my mother to come home.

Gay Degani has published in journals and anthologies including The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and TWO (2009).  Nominated for a 2008 Pushcart, her online stories can be read at Smokelong Quarterly, Short Story America, Metazen, Night Train, Paradigm, and Emprise Review, as well as other publications.  She’s a staff editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, edits EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles, and blogs at Words in Place.