Once Beyond a Time by Ann Tatlock

Author:Ann Tatlock [Tatlock, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Heritage Beacon Fiction
Published: 2014-12-03T23:00:00+00:00

33

Sheldon

Sunday, August 25, 1968

“IF I’M NOT being too intrusive, do you mind if I ask you what you’re doing with that machine?”

“Why, hello, Sheldon. I didn’t notice you. Have you been here long?”

“No, only a moment.”

Gavan looks from me back to the screen of—what did he say it was? A PC? A personal computer. He had been staring at it intently until I interrupted him. “It’s—well, I’m reading a letter. It’s from my wife, Melissa.”

“A letter?” I lean forward in the wing chair and try to see the words on the screen, but then I realize that if it is indeed a letter, it’s not addressed to me and not mine to read. I look away, settling my eyes on Gavan’s face again.

“It’s called an email,” Gavan explains. “That is, electronic mail.”

“But how did you get the letter into that, um … computer?”

Gavan is frowning in thought. “I didn’t put the letter in there. Melissa sent it to me from the computer where she is. It comes to me through cable modem.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Hmmm. You see, the message is sent from one computer to another, something like—well, say, the way a telegram was once sent from one telegraph machine to another. Melissa types the message into her computer, then sends it to mine where I’m able to call it up and read it.”

The gap between our eras is somewhat too great for me. I can see why people must move forward moment by moment, taking in small bits of life at a time.

“Your wife,” I say. “She’s a soldier, right?”

“Yes, with the National Guard. Her unit has been deployed.”

This to me, too, seems inconceivable. The woman has gone off to war while the man is here on the home front. With the child. And this, not forty years from now. What lies in those individual moments ahead that would bring about this kind of change?

“How is it,” I ask, “that it’s the women now who go to war?”

He chuckles at that. “It’s not as though our troops are made up entirely of women. They’re still far in the minority as far as the military goes. And they aren’t drafted. Well, men aren’t drafted anymore, either. We have a volunteer military, at least for the present. Both men and women volunteer.”

“So the women who go to war, they want to go?”

“I suppose you could put it that way, though it isn’t that they want to go to war. What they want is to be in the military, whether our country is at war or not.”

“And so they become soldiers, just like men?”

“Well, for the most part, yes.”

“Women? Wives and mothers?”

“Yes.”

“They go to war and—get killed?”

Gavan nods solemnly. “Sometimes.”

I am stupefied. I try to imagine Linda marching off to war, and I can’t. She won’t, of course. Not Linda. Though, perhaps, her daughter might if this is indeed what the future holds. “And we as a country—we allow this?”

“We can’t not allow it. That’s what gender equality is all about.”

“I’m not sure I like the idea,” I say.

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