Out of Love by Hilma Wolitzer

Author:Hilma Wolitzer [Wolitzer, Hilma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8792-7
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-10-25T02:21:00+00:00

12

DEAREST GIRL,

Thirty more days until the Big One! I’m marking them off on the barracks calendar. After that, Jeannie, we’ll be together forever. No more of this weekend nonsense. I can’t tell you how much I miss my own true love ...

Dearest Girl,

Are you counting the days? Fifteen more and I’ll be spending all my nights in much better company than I do now. At least you don’t snore like the guy from Kentucky in the bunk over mine. (And you smell a lot better, too!) In fact, if I shut my eyes right now, I can see your sweet face and hear your voice ...

Sweetheart,

Just a few more days and I’ll be an old married man! It’s hard to believe, but as they say in the song, if I’m dreaming, don’t wake me up. Everything is set at this end. Hey, I passed my blood test with flying colors! ...

Dearest,

I just came off guard duty and I’m half dead on my feet, but I couldn’t go to sleep without saying good night to my own true love. I’ll see you in my dreams, and in just six more days—six, count ’em!—we’ll be together ...

It was awfully warm on the floor of the closet and I was nervous that Mother or Karen might come home early. I had read all the letters by now, right up to the last one just before the weekend pass when they got married. Then I started to read them all over again. I felt pretty guilty about it. I hadn’t looked at them for a long time. In fact, I was hoping they wouldn’t be there when I opened the closet. But the box was in its usual place, way in the back behind some old blankets that Karen used at camp last summer. Even when I saw it, I hoped there would just be some brown suede shoes inside. Of course the letters were still there, each in its own envelope. On the outside of each one, Daddy had written, RUSH or FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP, or SWAK.

I wondered what had happened to all the letters that Mother must have sent him before the wedding. Did men ever save things like that? I remembered that Daddy didn’t seem to save anything. When he still lived with us and we went to look at model homes on Sunday, he always said we’d need an extra room for all the old junk Mother wouldn’t throw away. Of course they joked about it then, Daddy teasing her about being sentimental, and Mother smiling and teasing back.

We rode out into the country on beautiful Sunday afternoons and looked at perfect houses that no one lived in. We looked at bathrooms with silk ribbons across the toilet seats (so no one would use them by mistake), and at kitchens with plastic steaks and rubber tomatoes in the refrigerator. We used to pretend that we lived there, and Daddy complained that the steak was a little too chewy. I remember that we all laughed about a lot of silly things.

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