Still in the Will

By Bill Teitelbaum

Sarge and Betty were here the other day. Sarge got himself a job finally, managing the pro shop at a club near Tahoe, so they made a bit of a holiday of it, taking the bus into Sacramento and then renting a car for the drive down the coast.

Betty absolutely could not get over the place. “Oh but Sonny, this is fabulous,” she said, beaming at me. “And you’re so tan.”

Poor ageless girl—in my imagination I still see her in a Peter Pan collar. She’s pushing a shopping cart along the Saturday aisles of a PX somewhere, Wiesbaden or Corpus, Benning, Dix, Anchorage, Fayetteville, her head transformed by plastic rollers and a flowered hankerchief into a lumpish polyhedron bound turban style with a small neat bow about an inch above the spot where Sarge had promised once to put the bullet—he showed it to us, a stubby .45-caliber service round, then he pressed it into the magazine, heeled the clip into the butt of his M-11, slid back the receiver to chamber the load, and then pointed the piece at Betty’s head—Sarge’s position being that if he was willing to take the heat then he was entitled to his errors.

Several times he asked in a complaining way why I had elected a civilian facility, as though I might have been eligible for military benefits; this from the same man who had been so contemptuous of the military during his last years in the service that it was all Betty could do to prevent him from taking early retirement. Now though I suppose he was seeing things differently.

“Well, I mean what’s supposed to be wrong with you?”​

I offered the familiar euphemisms, the need for rest, to resolve some confusion. I think we learn this stuff from the movies, but Sarge seemed strangely satisfied, as if it were a relief just to know that not everything was his fault. They seemed to be doing well enough. At least they weren’t dodging sheriff’s warrants. We walked around for an hour or so, and Sarge would pause now and then to draw imaginary beads from one point to another, showing us how, with relatively little effort, the place could be transformed into a decent municipal golf and tennis club. Down market, understand, but not bad. "Those stucco two-deckers’d have to go though," he said. He was pointing at the dormitories.

The Army had trained Sarge to manage officers’ clubs and for as long as I can remember his only ambition had been to apply this experience to civilian enterprise, like one of those mess sergeants who assumes he can manage a diner. He’d always had an office cubicle at the house, with shelves of tax guides and small-business manuals, and during the last years of his thirty he would complain bitterly about the way his talents generated huge cash surpluses in which he had no share. The fact that he failed simply to take his share, the way his colleagues in the mess and motor pool did, should have been some indication of his gifts as an entrepreneur, but the idea never occurred to him and often it seemed as if the marriage had resolved to a single sustained quarrel about his desire to sacrifice some trivial portion of his pension for the sake of the offers he would read about in the classifieds. Good losers were losers, Sarge said. He wanted his ride on that American escalator.

Then Sarge retired and I would come home from classes on break to find Betty holding herself hostage in the laundry room. “Oh Sonny, I’m going to kill myself and die.” Although the next minute she would have me taking the dryer apart and promising to do something about the window screens.

Times like these, with a deal on the line, our little household was transfigured by magic. Suddenly the weather mattered. Only Frank Sinatra records could be played. There were particular automatic teller machines he preferred to use at certain felicitous locations. If Betty had a clean ashtray for Sarge she would have to wait patiently and without speaking until he was finished with the cigarette he was smoking.

It was madness trying to align with a mind like that, but Betty would wonder what he thought of her and how she might please him. “What are you trying to do?” he would scream at her.

I don’t know how much they owed by then. Waves of vertigo supervened whenever Betty ventured an estimate. But the money didn’t seem to bother her as much as the rosy consolations Sarge would find.

“He’ll be sorry when I’m dead.”

Her dreamlife was constructed of certainties like that, as if death might be a kind of future for her. Suddenly it was amazing that I used to worry about these two.

Well, look, I remember telling her—I mean it was none of my business by then but I was trying to be reasonable. Look, if he’s causing you this much pain, I said, then maybe you need to think seriously about living your own life. Well, she fainted. A day or so later, though, she was willing to admit that no one was forcing her to suffer and it seemed that at last she might be ready to be sensible. A year or so earlier her attorney had devised an agreement and now she began to make independent plans. But when the time came to sign the letters of separation she went to pieces on the spot and shrieked that she would rather kill herself and die than be left alone. Give her bondage or give her death. There was even something morbidly cheerful about this resolution. She was willing to make any compromise, any concession, but she had a legal right to Sarge’s companionship.

The irony, I guess, was that Betty had been better suited to military life than Sarge had been. He was not a bad man really, or a cruel man, but ambitious as he was, he seemed unable to understand how things could have turned out so badly. It was as if he bought into that pathetic myth of the noble enlisted man, that in the service only the officers were the fools. No noncom, after all, could have been responsible for a Little Bighorn. I remember him trying to convince me what a good talent booker he was. You would have thought his ability to book talent was the issue. It was only a matter of having a clear mind, he assured me. If his mind was clear, he could book Las Vegas.

So he would cut himself a break, as he put it, he would believe his own business plans, treating pro-forma extrapolations as if they were capital, speculating on borrowed money, and when the burdens of confusion, failure, debt and self-doubt pressed the air from his lungs as they tended to do with a sinusoidal regularity, he would take off somewhere, looping golf tournaments, driving a taxi.

“Tell him what you’ve been up to,” she said.

That was the last time I had seen them together, winter break of my junior year. Family HQ at the time was a two-bedroom brick rancher in a desert subdivision of quarter-acre lots in Lockwood, California, about ten minutes from Fort Hunter Liggett in Jolon in the middle of the Los Padres National Forest where the Army conducted field exercises for units scheduled for scrub-land deployments and Betty worked as a civilian clerk. She’d had a nap after breakfast but her eyes were swollen and the chenille bedspread had impressed her face as if she had passed a night wrapped in chicken wire.

“Oh Sonny,” she bleated.

“Hi,” I said. No need to ask after Sarge. As his wife it was one of Betty’s responsibilities to see that Sarge had no secrets. She wept, complaining of her helplessness and desolation, and catalogued her most recent symptoms while we decorated the tree. She was suffering fatigue and muscular weakness, insomnia, high blood pressure, tachycardia, free-floating anxiety, asthma, cramps, GERDS, nausea, bursitis, auditory hallucinations consisting mostly of people yelling at her, and inexplicable visual impairments such as a tendency for things to look yellowy.

And she truly was in pain, I think. At rest her face stretched gauntly downward as if the skin were being drawn at the corners of her jaw. But in motion abruptly her symptoms would vanish, alternately she would be coy or truculent and querulous, or stuperous anddisoriented, or hostile and defensive, and then in a shift that would take your breath in its fist she would turn cheerful, cooperative, flirtatious, optimistic, then burst into tears and beg us not to pay her any attention, the whole time puttering like a wind-up toy, dusting the end tables and straightening the knick-knacks, flouncing the window curtains, fluffing the sofa pillows. 

“But who’s going to do it if I don’t do it? At least I can keep things looking halfway decent-looking. That isn’t too much to ask, for a house to look a little cheerful. I don’t know how some people live like they do.”

Sarge couldn’t stand it. He’d arrived toward lunchtime and at least to me he seemed amenable to one of those Christmas cease-fires, but within an hour Betty had managed to get his attention. They would bicker, then cool down, bicker then cool down, by dinner you could have danced to it, finally Sarge said the hell with it, and with a little cry she threw her arms around my neck and told me how glad she was to see me.

On our way back to the parking area she took me aside to confide that Sarge still got the itch. Opportunities kept arising that Sarge had to forego because he couldn’t establish credit. “I tell him he should count his blessings instead of taking it out on me.”

I asked, “You tell him this?”

“Of course,” she said. “What else can I do?”

Also she had to get something for her kidneys, the burning was killing her, and something else for her feet, which were numb, she said, and strangely colored. It was that same tone of disconnected urgency people use when reviewing their vacation plans.

Then she had to see her lawyer, something about being involved recently in an accident, someone rear-ended her in the Hunter Liggett parking lot and the lawyer had assured her that she would probably have to undergo a whole series of operations on her neck. The suit would go on for years, she sighed. She was missing work because of it and the men at her office were harassing her. “They only have one thing on their minds.”

Somehow, she said, God alone knew how, they found out at work that she was having problems with Sarge. “That’s how I got into that accident.” Someone had made an indecent overture and when she stopped to give him a piece of her mind a delivery truck had run into her.

We paused at the car and Betty suddenly took me in one of her fierce embraces. “Nothing’s changed, you know.” She whispered this in my ear, under pressure, as if it might come as a horrible surprise, then she got into the car and I shook hands with Sarge across the roof.

I guess the important thing with parents is not to seem ungrateful.

[Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event; common in veterans. Those suffering with PTSD experience behavioral and psychological changes including agitation, hypervigilance, anxiety, insomnia, and hostility. This disorder challenges relationships and home life.]