Wedding Cake for Breakfast by Kim Perel Page A

freelancing on the side.
    A few months after we married, our names came up on the base housing waiting list. We moved into a brick town house across the street from an airfield, planes landing early in the morning with thundering din. These would be condemned shortly after we moved out, with the white linoleum of schoolhouses for the living room floors.
    All the lower-enlisted families lived together, from all sorts of jobs. In the middle of the night, I awakened to the sounds of the soldier next door shouting at his wife. “You don’t know how much stress I’m under! My job is hard!” the husband yelled once. He was a file clerk who worked in an office between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., with a ninety-minute lunch every day. The day started at five or earlier for my husband, and went on until after six in the evening or into the night. Other times, he was called into work at night, and wouldn’t return for days.
    Though I now lived among soldiers’ families, it was still hard to make friends. We were different. When my husband, in the black Ranger beret that was then exclusive to them, walked across the yard to his car, the neighbors stopped what they were doing and watched. If he waved, they waved back. If he didn’t wave, no one spoke.
    One morning, I looked out into the common backyard to see two four-year-olds engaged in a full-on fistfight, the mothers watching. I banged open the screen door. “What’s going on?” I asked as calmly as I could.
    â€œThey were arguing,” one mother answered, “so we decided to let them fight it out.” Both of them were perhaps twenty, maybe younger. “Do you think we shouldn’t?” Her question was genuinely earnest, her brow wrinkling as she waited for my answer.
    I blinked at them, wondering if I’d landed on another planet. “Probably not.” Later, I found it wasn’t unusual around here to judge force as the best way to own another human being. At a picnic, a first sergeant’s son ran around punching the Rangers who ranked lower than his father in the testicles as his father watched with amusement; the men couldn’t say anything to their superior.
    I worried Keith would change, turn into someone worse than that clerk next door; or that maybe he was the type of person who thrived on violence, and I simply didn’t know it yet. Whenever he was home, it was like a strange honeymoon, each of us careful to spend as much time as possible with each other, figure out our boundaries. I always dropped whatever I had managed to get going on to spend this time with him.
    When he could, he went to plays with me, local productions. I went to everything in the area: high school productions, community college productions, community plays. Inevitably, in the dark, tired from spending multiple days awake, he would fall asleep. I’d only poke him if he snored.
    One morning, he asked if I wanted eggs. He made me an omelet, a thing so large it wouldn’t fit on the plate. “How many eggs did you use?” I asked.
    â€œThirteen,” he said. “Why?” He finished off what I couldn’t.
    At Thanksgiving, he brought home his buddy—one of the soldiers he’d just been away with for three weeks. Without telling me. The guy in question wasn’t the problem; he was a gangly eighteen-year-old, far away from home; it was that Keith brought him back without asking.
    â€œDon’t you want to spend time with me?” I asked. “I missed you.”
    â€œOf course I do,” he said. “I should have called. But he doesn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving. Don’t worry. I’ll cook.”
    I couldn’t negate my husband’s kind heart. As we progressed through the weekend, the young man chuckling at Keith’s raw turkey, sleeping on the couch, playing us at video games, I had an epiphany. There was another entity in this relationship. Not this young man