Feature
Literary 2003: SHORT STORY
Oatmeal
by Cathleen Bell; Illustration by Coulter Young

It is May already, and thirty-eight weeks since Mike left. Thirty-eight weeks for Juliet of waiting for her husband at her parents’ house, in Hinsdale, Illinois, the town where she was a girl. On thirty-eight Saturday evenings, Father has washed, Juliet has dried, and Mother has put the dinner dishes away. Mother and Father have trudged up the mud-colored stair runner to bed with their magazines, the refrigerator has hummed, and Juliet has set a tall glass of Old Milwaukee—Mike’s beer—on the wiped-down kitchen tabletop, with its pattern of trapped gold sparkles. The beer, a slip of letter paper, one pen, and two Archway oatmeal cookies—this is her routine.

It’s spring now. The trees are come into leaf, and the cicadas have returned. Their two-note sawing reminds Juliet of August, the month Mike left, and also, of the passage of other noises that have come while the cicadas were gone––the wind against the storm windows in November, the muffled stillness of the last blizzard back in March. It’s hard to believe the year, and with it Mike’s tour of duty, is coming full circle.

The white head on Juliet’s Old Milwaukee sinks into gold. She attempts to construct in her mind the letter she will write. She takes a bite of an Archway, and lays the date across the top of the paper in neat, block lettering.

“Would you look at that?” she says, holding the ballpoint pen before her, watching it tremble, tapping the table’s sparkly surface. She closes a fist around the pen. The shakes stop.

This past month, Mike’s been on ground duty—more dangerous than the bombing runs he had been flying escort on, but a requirement of all marines. Juliet has dragged the ninth grade at the school where she teaches—the school where she and Mike first met—through the conspiracies and triangles of Julius Caesar. She’s barely caught the IDs her students miss on the tests, she’s given extra credit where it isn’t due, she’s ignored the chatter coming from the back of the room because she knows Mike is cutting through kudzu, a radio that looks like an old-fashioned mountaineer’s haversack slung across his shoulder. She listens to the death toll on the news every night—ninety-seven, forty-six, two-oh-one—and pretends she can ignore the connection between her husband and the number that is read. The news that she sees on television, and reads in Time Magazine ought to be disposable, but it has sneaked up on Juliet, and become her life.

“Dear Mike,” she writes. “I hope you are well. I am fine. The last week here has been fine. Spring now, with the leaves out, is fine.” Juliet crosses out her third “fine,” writes “nice” instead, and diligently makes a line of xxx’s through her crossed-out word. She traces over the date at the top of her letter, blacking what she’s already written.

Juliet might have tried to express herself differently in a letter to a different man. In a letter to Hank Riner—the math teacher who isn’t fighting because of his blind right eye—she might have written of the separation pains, the aches she sometimes mistakes for the onset of the flu. This is the kind of letter Juliet might have liked to receive herself. But Mike does not want what she does. Mike flies jets. Mike’s skin does not flush or blemish as Juliet’s does; it retains an even texture, like sand. His hair is straw- colored, obedient, coarse. Juliet loves the feel of the width of Mike’s hands on her back. He is gregarious in a way she never has been. To be his wife, part of him, is all she wants. She looks back at her life before marriage as dry, and empty, missing the crucial ingredients of Mike’s freckled warm arms in the bed. When they were living in tacky officers’ apartments on one base after another, Juliet was filled with the breath of joy, a balloon that could never be popped.

There was a formula at work then and now that the formula is skewed, Juliet is making every effort to correct it. She breathes regularly, and chews deliberately, practicing calm. She does not trap words on paper that could come to haunt her later. It is not her luck to jinx after all, but his.

She writes to Mike that tomorrow, she will start to teach The Odyssey. She’s been re-reading it, thinking of him at the descriptions of the gray-eyed Athena disguised as a man. Every time she encounters a beautiful line, she thinks, “Wouldn’t Mike love this one?” Literature is not Mike’s thing, but she knows he must have read the poem when he was in ninth grade. They all did. Hank Riner has sections memorized.

The Odyssey,” he writes—it’s week forty. “Was that the one where they bring in the wooden horse, or was that the boring one with the guy running all over the world? Never got through that one.” He writes about Mr. Fing, the blind English teacher, how they used to hide in the closet during class, how they used to steal his lunch. Juliet better not let any of that go on in her room, he warns.

The truth is, Juliet is having a terrible time with some of the ninth grade boys. She’s been hearing noises, and suspects they are making allusions to her breasts when she turns her back to write on the board. Hank has been counseling her in the faculty room, telling her not to let the boys know she’s bothered, and now Juliet applies this same strategy to Mike, as if he were in league with her tormentors. “Everything’s just fine in the classroom,” she writes, then hears how priggish she sounds, and adds: “I suppose.” She finishes off her letter quickly, with a description of Mike’s sister’s visit to town, a description that she writes as if Mike’s mother is going to read the letter—she doesn’t tell Mike the things she might have let slip out if he were home.

Week forty-one. There is no letter from Mike. This happens on occasion, and Juliet does not let herself feel afraid. She does not tell her parents a letter has not come. She knows that she would get a phone call if anything had happened. A phone call, or a visit, she’s not sure, and has never asked.

The ninth grade is refusing to read The Odyssey.

At Hank’s suggestion, Juliet begins to administer pop quizzes, but instead of bringing the class into line, the quizzes incite her students’ scorn. They are like angry bees—miniature kamikaze pilots willing to lose everything for the sake of a well-placed strike. Juliet finds a piece of paper taped to the door of her classroom. For a moment, she expects it comes from a secret admirer—she received that sort of note once in college. But this note is a drawing. A drawing of her, with exaggerated breasts. The words “I want you boys to stop it” emerge in a bubble from her lips.

Juliet’s father, a chemist who imitates Coke for a living, brings home a new sample cola on Saturday night, and Juliet’s mother laughs, saying “Isn’t this just like old times?” It is like old times, the three of them out on the porch after supper, but Juliet doesn’t want old times. She doesn’t want to see the wheels spinning in her father’s mind as he creaks the slider-rocker—more sugar? Less formula 6? It is always a question of adjusting the numbers, of balance and flavor extraction, as if the principles of scientific experimentation provide a rational guarantee against failure.

Without understanding why she is behaving the way she does, Juliet stands, dumps her glass of cola into the hydrangea bushes just starting to come into bloom, and says, “This tastes wrong. This tastes like metal.” Her mother stares; her father swallows, and does not answer, his eyes fixed on the porch railing. Juliet sees that the skin under his chin is loosening in a way that reminds her of an old man, and she regrets being cruel. “I’m sorry,” she says, but the damage is already done.

And when Mother and Father finally go to bed, and she is alone at the kitchen table where she drew with crayons, learned her multiplication tables, typed her term papers, Juliet cannot do what she believes will bring her relief from all this—she cannot write to Mike. She has the cookies unwrapped, the beer poured, the letter ready to start, but anything she wants to say reeks of complaint. She forces a bite of the cookie.

Sometimes she thinks she can live without Mike. Teach, watch the news with Mother and Father, grade English papers, plan the student government lemonade stands for the baseball games with Hank who, just that afternoon, put his hand on top of Juliet’s when she was unscrewing a jug of lemon syrup, looked at her with his good eye, and told her he knew Mike was going to be OK. He meant, she thought, “I’ll be here if Mike doesn’t come back,” and she said to him, “I should have married you, Hank. You’d never have to go to war.” She laughed, and what would have been “ha ha” in a letter to Mike came out cruel and unfeeling with Hank. He blinked and looked away with his good eye.
As a form of punishment, discipline, whatever the formula is coming to mean, Juliet takes out a piece of paper, dates it neatly in pinched block letters, and retells to Mike the story of his best friend Conrad Bradford’s having too much to drink when they were out watching for shooting stars at the last base before they left. Conrad had dragged his wife Carol into a cornfield (“Conrad? Conrad! Stop it, Conrad! Stop!”), while Juliet and Mike stood by and laughed. Mike had wrapped his arms around Juliet from behind, and she had felt his belly against her back. This is why she likes remembering the story, though she doesn’t write that part of it. She writes it as if she is thinking only of Conrad’s clowning, and as if to confirm that this is where her attention lies, she laughs aloud, a choking guffaw.

Week forty-three.
A letter comes from Mike, but its news is so bad, Juliet quickly forgets her relief at having heard from him at all. He writes that Conrad Bradford is dead.

He doesn’t mention how Conrad was killed. But he hasn’t told her what happened to their other base-made friends either. Tick Broder, Joe Swann, and Bill Partridge were unlucky, is all he thinks she needs to know.

That night, when Mother and Father are upstairs in their room where everything—day bed, cedar chest, head board—is upholstered, Juliet reads Mike’s letter again. Mike describes the ice cream he had had as a treat on the ship. Next he talks about cloud cover—it has been overcast. He won a bridge tournament. Conrad was Mike’s best friend, and Mike has written two days after his death, “Gosh, I can’t tell you how great that ice cream tasted. You forget.”

Does he think she can’t share the horror of the war with him? Does he think he can’t spend a whole two pages on the death of his best friend? Why won’t he tell her the truth?

Juliet does not write a word.

On Wednesday, in the period right before lunch, Juliet feels a spitball hit her neck. When she turns from the board, no one will meet her eye. She lays the eraser in its tray, and a second spit ball strikes the collar of her blouse. The room erupts. Wads of paper fly like baseballs. Girls caught in the crossfire raise their arms in front of their faces, watching the fighting through makeshift shields.

“Settle down,” Juliet shouts, rapping her ruler on the desk. She is not surprised no one obeys.

Mr. Muller, the assistant principal, hears the noise and comes to her rescue. At lunchtime, Hank Riner brings her a glass of water in the faculty lounge. He holds her hand. His fingers retain the cold from the glass, and Juliet finds the coolness attractive—he is like a stone she has found in a clean mountain stream. Hank is kind, and his own students never think of disobeying him.

Juliet dreams about Mike and wakes up tangled in blankets, with the fan blowing on her bare arms, raising goose bumps. She lies still, not wanting to disturb the sense of Mike that she holds in her brain—the roughness of him, the squareness of his body, the blunt edges of his fingernails.

Denton Frazier—who was the principal of the high school when Juliet was a student, and now, retired, brings his springer spaniels to home baseball games—hosts a cocktail party for faculty. Juliet wears a lime green blouse with a white skirt that she wishes were two inches longer, and when she is alone with Hank in the kitchen, she brings her face up to his, and kisses him. He is backed up against the counter, and she is thinking that he will be surprised, and pleased, but Hank’s lips are still when she touches them with her own.

He was supposed to walk her home, but Juliet leaves the party early, passing alone under the heavy trees that line the sidewalks. In college, Mike had demanded kisses. He had kissed her in coat closets, on stairway landings. Once, at a dance, he had pulled her behind a ballroom curtain so quickly no one had seen, and he had put his hand into her dress in the muffled closeness of the space. Juliet had never had to ask.

Her parents are surprised to see her but say nothing, and when they have gone to bed, Juliet sits at the kitchen table with her beer, her oatmeal cookie, and writes a letter as dry as she possibly can. She writes of baseball and gardening and the first heat wave of the season. She folds the paper, addresses the envelope, attaches a stamp, and drinks the beer while examining the neat, white package she has made.

After she had backed away from Hank, he had reached for her, but if he had really wanted her, he would have grabbed. He would have made it easy.

Her hands are unsteady as she pours herself a second beer, the first time she’s had a second since the war. She drinks this one, and a third. She wonders what her parents will think when they see what’s been taken from the refrigerator, but doesn’t care in the way she normally would.

She pulls out a new sheet of paper, and writes again to Mike. She writes: “Come home, Mike. Come home. Come home.” She writes it over and over in every sentence and between the words that seem to flow from her hand of their own volition. She tells him how she misses him. She tells him she has often imagined him inside the plane, loving the thought of the clean cockpit, the controls that he understands so well. Juliet explains that every inch of Mike’s skin is the most precious to her in the world. She tells him that her only use for God is the bargaining she can do with him: ten years of her life for Mike to come back whole. She tells Mike she lies awake thinking of the ways she could have kept him with her before he left. She thinks, Why didn’t I poke out one eye while he slept? Why didn’t I take an ax to an ankle? She tells him what he doesn’t want to hear: That she did want a baby, that she wants to have something of him when he’s dead.

She walks the letter to the mailbox as soon as she writes it and drops it in. She guesses she will be sorry, but this is the only thing she can do.

The next morning, in church, between her mother and father and before what she tries to make herself feel is God, Juliet is sorry. She realizes what a mistake she has made. She should not have drunk the beer. She should not have sent the letter. And Hank—she’s lost control.
Before Mike left, he spent a week with Juliet, at her parents, sleeping in the other bed in her girlhood room. Once, to be alone, they walked the sidewalks when the air cooled after dinner, through Juliet’s neighborhood and out of it, crossing Western Avenue, and making their way along a deserted Main Street to the high school. They broke into the football locker room, where Mike could still find his way around the maze of lockers and showers, even in the dark, and they made a bed of coarse white towels—they had found them baled with twine, which Mike cut through with his car key. In the dim evening light coming through the slotted windows, Juliet could see a light bulb covered by a small cage, and when she stood, and felt the reassuring damp settling into her underpants, she laughed aloud. “I can’t believe we’re doing it here.”
On the walk home, Mike told her joking stories of the torture he had both inflicted and endured in the locker room—the toilet bowl drowning, the stolen clothes, the merciless taunting, the towels twisted into whips.
“Were you afraid?” Juliet said. “Didn’t you sometimes feel sorry for the freshmen?”

Mike shrugged. “It’s part of the experience,” he said. “It would be an insult to a kid to act like he couldn’t handle it.”

Week forty-four.
Juliet waits for a letter, certain she’ll never hear from her husband again. Mike is not safe in his plane—he is a tiny man hanging in an enormous sky. He could fall for miles, resisting all the while, pressing every button in the plane’s console to no result. He could be not ready, he could be his same lucky self, and still he could disappear.

And it would be her fault. It is her letter—her own carelessness, not his—that will send the instruments in the cockpit out of whack, that will skew whatever formula has been keeping him alive. There was so little she had to do, why hadn’t she simply forced herself?

Juliet forces herself now. She fails two boys who would have passed her course with a stricter teacher. She writes ‘F’ on their papers, and when they sulk out of the room, she tells herself it is not her fault.
She writes to Carol Bradford, tells her how sorry she is, tells her she’ll have her memories, and sends the letter though she would prefer to throw it away. Carol already had her memories. The only true comfort Juliet could imagine would be, At least you know where you stand.

On Saturday afternoon, there is a letter from Mike.

It sits among the other mail that Juliet pulls from the box bolted next to the front door—a bill from the hardware store, the church newsletter, a letter from a friend of her mother’s who lives in Minneapolis. Juliet has imagined the appearance of Mike’s thin blue envelope in this pile so many times during the last week, she wonders how she can be sure this one is real.

But it is real. She tears open it open on the porch, not caring that she might be interrupted by a neighbor. Then, before she reads a word, Juliet stops herself, deciding to quell her impatience, to practice being the woman she should. She carries it in her pocket to the baseball game. She does not meet Hank’s eye. She speaks to him in a cheery, confident voice—not shy, not ashamed—behaving as she thought Mike would if he had kissed a girl he didn’t really want.

After early church and supper—her mother has made Juliet’s favorite, spaghetti with meatballs, but Juliet cannot eat—she sits down at the sparkle-top table, her beer and her cookie laid out as usual, opens the envelope, and sees that Mike has mailed her a photograph.

Her first guess is another picture taken with his tourist’s instamatic: Mike in his jumpsuit, holding his helmet, so dwarfed by the plane behind him his face is nothing, two dots and a slash. But it is not a picture of Mike. The man in the picture is littler, browner, and he’s frozen in a way Juliet can tell right off is permanent.

The man is dead. Dead in dusty, colorless clothes, sprawled on his back by a clump of tall grass, a rifle on the hard packed dirt beside him. Black blood trickles from the man’s crooked white teeth to his sharp cheekbone. The blood is the only sign of harm.

Juliet is surprised this picture made it past the censors. Mike writes: “I killed this one and there have been others.” Mike shot a man in the face. He shot a man in the groin. He watched a man he shot bleed before dying. He has flushed an ambush on a hunch. Sometimes, he cannot control the fear, the fast-flapping, clawing bird inside him. “Trust me,” he writes. “You don’t want to know and I don’t want to tell you.”

“Conrad died making a landing onto an aircraft carrier,” he continues, explaining that Conrad made his approach one, then two, then three times, on each occasion missing the angle, being waved off by the deck. He was waved off a fourth time, but ignored the signal out of bull-headedness and fatigue a nd crashed into the carrier, killing himself and four other men.

Conrad was impatient, Mike writes. “He was always acting on impulse. I guess he could have been a lousy insurance salesman and lived, but that’s war. In the meantime, there are enough V.C. wanting to tear me to pieces out here, the last thing I need’s my wife chopping off my legs when I go home. Ha ha.”

The gold flecks of the table swim before Juliet’s eyes. She gulps down a sip of beer, then another, staring at the photo of the little man with his sharp bones and dusty green uniform.

Ha ha? She’d expected anger, she’d expected censure. Or worse, anger and no censure. Silence. But ha ha? Mike was laughing?

Juliet hates the photograph. She hates the pain and humiliation of the little man’s pose. He should have closed his eyes, at least, in death. Death, even a violent one, should have left his face in peace.
Is he in heaven? Juliet wonders. She has always told herself she believes in heaven because why not? But she’s never thought she’d see anyone but Americans up there.

Juliet breaks off a piece of her cookie, and covers the man’s face. She breaks off more pieces, and begins to cover the man’s body, sizing the pieces with little nibbles so that she ends up with an outline of the man in oatmeal. Splayed legs, bent knees. She even fills in the extra long gun.

She sips her beer. With the man covered up as he is, Juliet notices other objects in the picture for the first time—there is a hut with a grass roof, a helmet lying on the ground, and there is shadowy jungle behind. Seeing the details that Mike may not even notice, she feels connected to him in the way that she has been missing, and understands what is wrong.

It’s simply that they are apart. She’s been blocked and grounded by the heavy head on the beer, the thick give of oatmeal she’s been packing into her system since August. This is what anchors her in Hinsdale, Illinois, a spot wrapped around the other side of the world from Vietnam, Southeast Asia. And Mike—no matter how high he climbs in his F-4 Phantom, no matter how hard he looks, all Mike can ever see is trees, then clouds, then space. Juliet looks into books, she looks at Hank, Juliet reads Mike’s letters over and over, and sees nothing. The earth will spin and spin, and they will remain as far apart as they have ever been. It is impossible to pretend the world is shared.

Juliet finishes the beer, and eats the cookie off the dead man little by little. She ends with the head, returning to the shock of the bloodied cheekbone and the glassy, black eyes. She stares back at the man, hard. She hopes to see in his eyes a glimpse of Mike. She hopes for a reflection of what she is waiting for, what the man saw at his end, a mystery should it appear and another kind of mystery should it not.

At first, Juliet sees nothing. But as she looks and looks, she sees more. It is hardly anything, but it is just enough, an eggy white, a marbled black, one fleck the color of transparent light. She writes to Mike without even thinking, words that weave together to form something, she doesn’t care what. It is a tapestry of nothing, of baseball and lemonade and cola and oatmeal, code language she has worked into letter after letter, perfecting the art of stasis, creating noise that must be recreated at weekly intervals to work its magic. She understands now that she is only responsible for holding a place; it is for Mike to make time move.

Cathleen Bell is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction writing, and has received fellowship awards from the Vermont Studio Center and the Writers at Work conference in Salt Lake City. Ms. Bell is currently working on a novel.