I Follow Her Between War and Not War
by Gail Hosking
I always begin telling anyone who asks about my mother with the images I have memorized. She is wearing her favorite cork sandals that she bought in an open-air Italian market while on vacation with my father, a life-long soldier. She stands under a sign for Milan and Genoa, and later near a rock wall with grapevines behind her as my father takes her picture. The Mediterranean Sea air blows gently across her face, and on this sun-drenched day, the camera reveals her loveliness—legs shapely and lean and a head of rich, brown curls. I use the word innocent to describe my mother because that was who she was in so many ways—“the most innocent young woman I had ever laid my eyes on,” an old family friend once said. My mother had no idea what life would be for a soldier’s wife. She wanted only adventure and love.
My mother, daughter of a farmer, a coalminer and a preacher, slips her sexy naked feet into cork sandals as she stands on the Riviera with my father in towns like San Remo, Nice or La Spezia, or sips espresso with him at outdoor cafes as the moon rises over the Apennines. In another picture she wears these same sandals to a picnic in a Bavarian field on the edge of a hill with other army families. The summer grass is dotted with olive drab wool blankets—army style—and occasionally someone brings a silk camouflaged bedspread made from an old military parachute. Campbells Soup cardboard boxes from the Commissary and coolers of food sit in the background. I am a five-year-old blur wearing a Davy Crockett sweatshirt as I run toward a fellow army brat with a stick for roasting marshmallows. There isn’t a sign of this Meisbach location, nor does the photograph reveal that a war was fought on this soil ten years before. The Cold War surrounds the air my mother breathes here, so palpable with the tension of imminent fighting as I run freely across the grass behind her.
My father stands off to the right with a bottle of beer in one hand while the other hand tugs to pull down his civilian shirt. His crew cut and tattooed arms give him away as a soldier even though he isn’t in uniform. He stares at my mother and looks like he is ready to call out her name. She holds a jar of iced tea in one hand and a glass in another. She wears her favorite striped shorts. Her hair is cut short, her nails are painted, and she looks happy. The only shadow of any poverty on this luxurious summer afternoon is my mother’s childhood scar on her left leg, caused by boils that came from malnutrition during the Depression. I can almost feel its smooth indent, the way it tucks like a secret into the middle of her slender white leg. Something about that look between my parents reminds me that she will do anything for him, follow him anywhere.
I tell anyone who asks that if my mother wanted to be an army wife, then she had to pose with her three blond little girls for a passport, wear dog tags, and carry an identity card. These were her tickets from one country to another, one base to another, one life to another, though it was much further between these places than she ever said. My father is not inside her passport. He has his own, which is to say the army separates him from his family.
The music of Brenda Lee from one of the many 45s that my mother collects folds into these familiar images. I’m Sorry or All Alone Am I play repeatedly while my mother changes my brother’s diapers or makes meatloaf for dinner. When this music is over, she puts on the records of Elvis Presley—her favorite—and then Chubby Checker’s twist, and we dance together in our enlisted men’s housing until my father comes home from the base across the street where he teaches everything there is to know about heavy weapons, whatever that means.
While he spends his days with other soldiers, my mother lingers around a kitchen table with other women, listening to the details of someone else’s life, even if it takes all afternoon. When we are stationed outside Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and she sits in Doris Ladacini’s trailer near other military nomads. My mother and Doris smoke cigarettes, sip sweet iced tea and give each other a Tony perm or paint their nails red. There is always talk of their men, the ones they do not wholly understand, the ones who are often gone on maneuvers or preparing for the next possible war.
She will tell you that she just wants to have some fun and forget that the world is falling apart, so she pulls taffy with us when my father is away, shows us how to make banana pudding, or sleds down the hill between identical military apartments at midnight in Germany. She gets her ears pierced so she can wear earrings and look beautiful. Beauty is all she has to offer. That and her loyalty, along with her capacity for accommodation, something she will pass on to her daughters.
My mother teaches my sisters and me how a day could be filled with talk and other women and still be worthwhile. The smallest events mattered, and the longest conversations weren’t about wasting time, but were instead what life was about. A good story took time, people you cared about took time, and time was something she had. As a child I took her pace for granted, thought that the whole world lived this way, and at the same time wanted life to be something else. Something more. When her sister Lorraine turned my hand over and contemplated my future while she brushed her nails along my palm lines, my mother might think for hours afterwards what it was that Aunt Lorraine meant by a divided lifeline. She’d get up for more iced tea, pull the curtains back to let in more light, and then return to the subject knowing it demanded serious attention.
Eventually the images of my mother shift, no matter how hard I try to freeze time. As though from another lifetime, I see my mother and me, many years later, by the kitchen window, eating lunch in a housing project. My father is gone to war again—this one in Viet Nam—and though neither of us know it yet, he will not return. I am sixteen and my mother thirty-two. The Illinois sunlight comes through the window and reveals a stack of unwashed dishes at the sink. My mother is drunk when she leans forward on her elbow and slurps her soup. I have come to depend on politeness and manners to cover over a multitude of failings; but here is my mother in the afternoon stillness after another long drink, and nothing can hide that fact. I want to take the spoon from her, want to throw it against the wall. “Stop drinking!” I want to say. “Stop looking so helpless. Be someone else!” But instead, I swallow my words and mimic the way she moves the spoon to her lips. I roll my eyes with disgust. Tears well up in her eyes like a child who has been reprimanded. She blows her nose and looks over at me.
This is who I am, Gail, she says. Leave me alone.
Stories that jump back and forth between these two worlds are caught in my throat just like my mother was caught between the world of the military and the world of the family she wanted. Between war and not war. Between love and its loss. Clutched between the way things were and the way things were supposed to be sits the public and the private, her ability to say yes and her desire to say no. The material of my mother’s life insists on claiming me even though I have wanted to forget it all. But I cannot put these pictures away, and like the army in war, I cannot leave her body behind.
“I’ve been working on a memoir about my mother off and on for twenty years because a mentor insisted, because a wife of a VN vet said she really wanted to know about ‘that woman,’ and because it seemed natural to write the other half after publishing a memoir about my father, a recipient of The Medal of Honor. I finally finished it just as the pandemic was coming to a close and my cancer treatments were finished. It’s traveling out there in the world now looking for a home. This essay comes out of that work.” —Gail Hosking
Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (University of Iowa Press) and a book of poems, Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). She has an MFA from Bennington College, and her essays and poems have been published in such places as Timberline, Post Road, Iowa Review, Reed Magazine, Chattahoochee Review and Consequence Magazine. Several of Hosking’s pieces have been anthologized, the latest in Proud To Be: Writing By American Warriors (Southeast Missouri State University Press). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.