Elizabeth Hamilton is a writer living in Dallas whose work has appeared in the Dallas Museum of Art, Southern Humanities Review, and Texas Monthly. She has an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University.
The move is short-term even for the military. For six months, they will live on an Army base in the heart of West Texas while he trains to become a military firefighter. Afterwards, if the military sends him to Korea or Germany, she will move to Santa Fe. She has wanted to live in Santa Fe ever since she read that biography of Georgia O’Keeffe years earlier. She has only agreed to live with her husband in West Texas because O’Keeffe herself once lived on these desolate plains, before she met Stieglitz and moved to New York City and became the world’s utmost female painter. She and her husband also lived in New York City, before he joined the Army, and now she is afraid of how ordinary and dull it will be out there in the middle of nowhere. She reminds herself that pain is as fundamental to painting as the oils and brushes, the canvases she stretches until they fit taut on wooden frames.
Her husband parks the car, and she gets out to retrieve their six-month-old daughter before their daughter cries. The night is quiet, and the quiet is so full and real, it seems to her like a tangible object she might stroke with her finger. It is never quiet in New York City, and the suddenness, the completeness of it unnerves her. She hears crickets chirping and wind rustling the tall uncut grass that grows in the empty field across the street. She cannot find the moon, but thousands of stars speckle the sky. Her husband unloads the trunk, removing the pink backpack which carries most of the baby’s things, the overstuffed suitcases, the cardboard boxes packed with hand-me-down pots and pans and dish towels and linens. Somewhere in all that, her painting supplies.
She looks at the duplex, one of a series of identical duplexes that line the street. She is trying to be more observant, to see with the eyes of an artist, someone who can paint both what is there and, through ordinary objects, suggest what is underneath. But the duplex disappoints her, and she wishes she didn’t have to look at it, didn’t have to walk through its nondescript front door. She wants to be the kind of person who sees possibility in everything, beauty in ugliness, healing in pain. But the duplex with its oversized driveway and undersized windows offends her.
Still, she follows her husband inside, her daughter curled in the shape of a comma against her chest. She smells her daughter’s sharp pungent baby smell and then the must of recently vacuumed carpet. Her husband flicks on a harsh overhead light. He sets the bags against one wall. A sliding glass door leads to a backyard. The glass reflects the empty room back at them, a room which on its own is bigger than the apartment they left behind. She sees herself in the glass standing there with her daughter. She does not think she looks like herself, but then, so much about her life has changed, and she’s been wondering: Is she really the same person as before? Who is this woman displaced by her husband? But it is too late to think about this, she is so tired.
Her husband arranges the blow-up mattress and the Pack ’N Play on the floor while she nurses the baby. She wonders which corner of the room will get the best sunlight because that is where she will set up her studio. She tries not to think about the perfect square of margarine light that moved through their old apartment from morning till noon, how she used to sit on the wood floor and soak up that light and drink hot tea and contemplate her life, her work.
In bed, she can’t stop thinking about all the people she left behind: her best friend from high school who followed her to the city, her next-door neighbor with the cat, the older couple who volunteered with her to teach arts and crafts at the homeless shelter. Certainly they will all remain fond of each other, but the proximity necessary for intimacy is gone.
She fidgets on the mattress, first tucking the comforter under her chin because she is cold, then throwing it off because she is hot.
Are you all right? her husband asks.
She feels bad for keeping him awake. He has to get up early in the morning for his first day of training.
He hugs her, his warm breath at the base of her neck and his legs pressed into the backs of her thighs. The heaviness of his arm makes her overheat again, but she likes when he holds her. She feels reassured about her decision to go with him, and eventually the even sound of his breathing and the warmth and stillness of their knotted bodies subdues her.
. . .
Her husband’s stint in the Army will be temporary. For years, he had worked as a substitute teacher, writing his novel on the side, but then their daughter was born and he said, We have to do something. The Army scared her because her mother was a pacifist who canvassed for stricter gun laws, but then he told her about the assignment in West Texas and she remembered O’Keeffe and said, Okay.
Now, she rouses herself off the mattress to nurse the baby while her husband digs around in a box of kitchenware for the coffee pot, the mugs, the half-used bag of ground beans. The sun rises, and she carries the baby to the front window to watch the sky above the field brighten. Dew glistens on the tangled grass and she thinks she sees a prairie dog disappear into the turf.
She remembers O’Keeffe writing somewhere in a letter about a sky so blue it would always be there, even after everything else was finished. She wants to think about this, about whether her husband has done something wrong by joining the Army, about whether the blue of O’Keeffe’s sky refers to permanent eternal things, to God or the Atman, or just a mystery at the heart of the world. But the baby mewls against her chest. Her daughter is full, but somehow, she still wants more.
They only have one car so she drives her husband to work. Outside the Fire Academy, she sees firefighters dressed in yellow hardhats and coveralls practicing on what is left of a charred car. On a tall metal pole above them, an enormous American flag flaps in the wind. A firefighter douses the flames in a gush of water from a thick hose.
Her husband turns to say goodbye to the baby, who is awake and looking around. He rubs her tummy and makes cooing sounds. The baby smiles and gurgles in return. Then, he is gone, and they drive to the commissary, the military’s version of Walmart, where she tries not to think about the farmers’ market she used to walk to for locally grown produce and freshly baked bread.
Adventure time, she says to her daughter, who stuffs her fist in her mouth.
She steps into the hot Texas fall, the sun a relentless orb boring through the overcast sky. It reminds her of that summer when they lived in the apartment with no air conditioning. But that was August, and there was always a party on somebody’s roof where they could soak in a blow-up pool and drink Moscow mules from icy copper cups. Now, it is late October, and there is nowhere to go but the commissary.
She struggles to get her daughter out of the car seat and into the baby carrier strapped to her chest. There is no one around, but she feels self-conscious wrestling her daughter into place, as though a crowd has stopped to watch and judge her for not being able to situate her own child. She hurries through the shopping list, opting for a cheap cut of beef instead of what she craves. But at the last minute, she snags a carton of Blue Bell ice cream because she has heard it is the best, and she believes that is what she deserves.
On the drive back to the duplex, she passes the Academy where her husband must be one of those running drills back and forth on the shimmering concrete, though she cannot identify him. The burnt car is nothing but a drenched and twisted frame.
. . .
Before they moved, she was working on a series of sky paintings. The irony is not lost on her now as she looks out the front window of the duplex at the biggest sky she has ever seen. Why, then, can she not get herself to unpack her supplies? Here is a sky, with pale blue swirls and soft white smears, waiting for her to capture. But she hates the sky over Texas, and she cannot paint what she does not love. So she spends the day unpacking everything else but her supplies and playing peek-a-boo with her daughter, who has an endless delight for this game.
That night, her husband grills hamburger patties on the concrete slab that is their back porch. He has found a small grill and a near empty bag of charcoal in the garage, probably left by the previous tenant. She cuts lettuce, tomato, and onion while the baby crawls around at her feet, occasionally sticking something she has found on the floor into her mouth.
After dinner, her husband offers to do the dishes, but she says not to worry about it and go take a shower. She can tell he is worn out from his first day of training. She wishes she could make him a gin and tonic, his favorite drink, makes a mental note to find a liquor store in the morning. When he returns from the shower, all damp and clean, she hands him their daughter. He says, Hey there, baby girl.
The bathroom is steamy, the mirror fogged and the counters wet. They do not have a shower curtain, and water has splashed all over the floor. The soot washed from his hair has turned the bottom of the bathtub gray.
She stands with her eyes closed and her face upturned toward the scalding water. She does not wash her hair or shave her armpits. She just stands there and lets the water come down. She does not know how long she has stood there, but the water is still hot when her husband knocks on the door.
He closes the toilet and sits on top. Even though they are married and have seen each other naked hundreds of times, she feels self-conscious without a curtain to separate them. The water bounces off her bare skin and sprays his t-shirt. He leans over his knees and stares down at his hands. She isn’t finished, but she turns off the water anyway.
She asks, Is everything okay?
He flips his hands one way and then the other. He says, I don’t know. This job. It’s hard. I thought I wanted to be in the Army.
She isn’t feeling good—is she feeling fearful?—but she goes ahead and wraps the towel around herself, tucks one end snug inside the other. When she steps out of the shower, she places her hand on top of his head and he puts his on either side of her waist. She leans into him and he pulls her close, letting her wet hair drip dark spots on his t-shirt. Her arms circle his neck and her hands cradle his head. He buries his face in the towel at her waist. He feels very real to her then in a way she is not sure he has since they left the city. She feels something tender and quiet and afraid inside of him that only she has the privilege of feeling, and it is something felt, not known, something he can give to her without words, only by gestures. They stand like this for a long time, then he shudders and pulls away.
. . .
A woman calls with an invitation. The woman, Louise, is the wife of the sergeant of the Fire Academy, and the invitation is for a weekly Bible study. On her way there, she drives past the Academy, where she sees a man directing a truck with a shed on the back to the spot where the car had been burning. She wonders what her husband will learn today. Maybe he will be at the end of a nozzle shooting water like a machine gun at a blaze.
When she arrives, there are already a lot of other women there. The house is almost twice as big as their duplex, but made of the same brown bricks. The living room where the women are gathered is kitschy, with plush leather couches, several autumnal candles, lots of family photographs and placards with sentimental phrases like “Life is better together” and “Faith Family Fun.” She leaves her daughter with the babysitter and the other children in an upstairs bedroom and comes downstairs where Louise introduces her. The ladies are friendly and attentive, and each of them ask where she is from and whether this is her first deployment and how could she possibly have left New York City? Adjusting to a new deployment is hard, but they help one another. Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything, they say.
She believes them, but she still feels out of place in Louise’s big generic home. She wishes that instead of an “It’s Fall Y’all” sign, Louise had hung a Georgia O’Keeffe over the mantle. She tries to join the ladies’ conversations about prior deployments or how their children are managing the most recent move, but she wishes she were mingling inside the Met instead, wearing a strappy black dress, a glass of champagne in hand. She imagines bringing Louise to the museum with her. Louise would ask to see something patriotic, and she would show her an O’Keeffe original. But Louise would only look at it, and say, simply, Oh.
She excuses herself to go upstairs on the pretext of checking on her daughter, but hides in the bathroom instead. She wants to know the future, whether she will ever do anything except be a mother and a wife, and why those things aren’t enough, and whether they should be. She knows she is lucky that her husband works and has given her all this time to paint. Still, she wonders if instead of staying here she ought to steal her daughter away and take them north to Santa Fe. She wonders if she ought to leave her daughter. She has no remorse about these thoughts, though she will never tell anyone about them, not even a therapist.
She imagines herself speeding up the interstate, and for a moment thinks she might actually go. She can see the adobe buildings and the pine tree mountains and the red desert floor, and she is no longer in Louise’s guest bathroom but free on the open road. Then she goes back downstairs and tries her best to join the conversation. She has a nice chat with Louise about the fall colors in New York City, but in the end, she can’t help it, she doesn’t like any of them. She tried.
. . .
That night, after her daughter falls asleep, her husband retrieves a bottle of red wine and two glasses from the kitchen and they sit outside on the concrete drinking and looking up at the stars. She says, Georgia O’Keeffe liked looking at the stars, and he says, Really?
When did you get this? she asks, and holds up her glass.
I have my ways, he says, and smiles.
I’m glad you got to meet some of the wives today. Sometimes I feel like I’ve taken you away from everything. I’m sorry if you regret it.
The moon casts a subdued light on his face, which looks grave and older than she remembers. She has a general sense that her life ought to be somehow different than it is, but she can’t explain what should change because she loves him, loves her daughter, loves her work even when it makes her sad, and she knows that she will keep on loving them all forever.
She takes his hand. I don’t regret it, she says. But sometimes I do feel a little bit lost.
Me, too, he says, and she remembers his novel.
He intertwines his fingers with hers and leans over and kisses her.
Ever since she had her daughter she hasn’t felt particularly in the mood for sex, but maybe it is the wine, or maybe it is the moonlight, or maybe it is just that she needs to know he is there, not for her, or around her, but in her, a solid fact inside her body that will give her something real to hold her to the earth.
She sets her glass on the concrete and lifts herself until she is in his lap. When he pushes himself inside her she feels the power of everything good and bad come in. She thinks, this would make a lovely painting, with me on him and the moonlight draped around us, peopling what would otherwise be an empty hard concrete porch. She would paint it in unexpected salmon, profound purple. She would make half their bodies flesh, half washed-out bones, the jaw bones interlocked in a kiss. The painting would be a fragmented thing, made of strange shapes that distort their faces. The sky would be anything but blue.
