Free Finding a Girl in America by Andre Dubus Page A

most of the letter was about the sea. He had never in his life been out of sight of land: a sailor had told him the horizon was always twelve miles away; he wrote that to his parents, and told them to think of him seeing forty-eight miles of the Pacific by standing in one spot and turning in a circle. He wrote that he had won the heavyweight boxing championship in intramurals aboard ship; that in the final match he had won by jabbing and hooking the charging face of a slugging, body-punching sailor from Pittsburgh; that his commanding officer, a captain, had been a corporal in the Banana Wars, was tough and hard, and would throw you in the brig on bread and water if you looked at him wrong. He wrote of inspections, of gunnery, of Honolulu: the strange city and people and food.
    His letters to Sheila were the same. He thought he should write love letters, write of their love on the blanket, but even while a sentence took shape in his mind it seemed false; the abstract words had little to do with what had occurred on the blanket; they had even less to do with how he felt about it. So finally he simply wrote that he loved and missed her. Both were true; but he did not know the extent of their truth.
    He found it even more difficult to write of their future life together. Again, the words in his mind were abstract, for he could not imagine himself performing the concrete rituals of marriage. He did not know what work he would do as a civilian; he did not even want to know; sitting on his foot locker and feeling the roll of the sea, he could not imagine himself as a civilian in Marshall, Texas. And he could not see himself at night and on the weekends with Sheila. His days now were filled: in the normal pattern of the service, on some days he did very little, but because he did it in uniform it seemed worthwhile; on other days, when they practiced gunnery and he imagined actual combat, the work was intense. Either way, during the hours of his work he did not need Sheila, or anyone female. It was at night that he missed her, in the compartment smelling of male sweat and shoe polish and leather; that was when he wrote to her. When he was in port, on liberty, he did not miss her at all; he thought of her, usually after drinking and whoring, with paternal tenderness; and he sent her gifts, knowing they were junk, knowing he was incapable of buying gifts for a woman anyway, incapable of understanding their affinity for things which couldn’t be used.
    She wrote him love letters. They were not scented but they might as well have been; on their pages he felt the summer evening quiet of her front porch, heard the creaking of the chain that held the swing where she sat, where perhaps she had even written the letter; and he smelled her washed flesh and hair, and the lilac bush beside the porch. Reading these letters, touching them, sometimes after reading them just looking at each page as if they were pictures, he deeply loved her. He could have wept. He wanted to hold her. Yet he also felt, and with fear, the great division between them.
    He was afraid because there was nothing wrong with Sheila. There was nothing he could hold against her, nothing he could point to and say: That’s it; that’s why I feel this way. She was pure in a way that excited his love: a good Methodist, she believed that making love with him was a sin. Yet she had sinned with him anyway, and he felt blessed. Betty Jean Simpson was the town punch: anyone who could move suitably as a boy in the world had a shot at her. The only element of challenge was finding a location where he thought she had never been, a fresh spot on the earth’s surface, free of the memory of past and present boys; while at the same time the knowledge of those boys gave him advance acquittal in case she got pregnant. Sheila’s sin was as secret as her parts were; each spot of earth and sheltering tree and concealing bush were new; as her breasts and loins were, eighteen years