Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [27]
My father, who had been the circus father up until then, suddenly set out dozens of rules for his teenagers facing physical maturity. I couldn’t be outside the house after dusk alone, and whomever I was with had to be acceptable to Dad. I couldn’t go to the snack bar unless I was with my parents or my brother. I could not do more than nod in greeting to an enlisted man. Dad overreacted, but it hadn’t been so long since he had written his mother about the wilder girls at the air station in Pensacola when he was single. He needn’t have worried about me, though. I was deciding whether to quit Girl Scouts—I had already gotten to Curved Bar and there wasn’t anything like Eagle Scout for which to shoot—not deciding which sailor to date. Besides, we all knew that we had to behave—for Dad’s career.
Each officer in the military had regular evaluations, called Fitness Reports, completed by a superior officer; they rated the officer’s performance and conduct. On the Fitness Report forms, there was a place to comment on the conduct of the officer’s family. Everything we did was watched and recorded, and if it was unbefitting an officer, it could hurt Dad’s chance for promotion. That same thing was true in every house, in every service, on every base. When a teenager did something bad enough to be mentioned on the Fitness Report and a family was sent back to the States, we all had an unforgettable lesson in cause and effect. No one talked about it, but everyone knew it. We all had as our first allegiance the professional reputations of our fathers. If someone’s mother was drunk at the Officers’ Club, if a teenager had a fight at the Teen Club, if someone’s daughter got pregnant, all the things that might be talked about for a few days in the States, but here meant a ruined career, a shortened tour of duty, a life spoiled by an indiscretion.
My father didn’t need to have a single rule. We had them for ourselves, and so did our neighbors and our classmates. We knew that getting caught doing something “unbefitting” had consequences beyond being grounded. It didn’t mean anything to us when we were younger, but now that we were in high school, it was different. Alcohol could be—and was—purchased outside the gate or at a thousand places in Tokyo, a short trip by train. We had boyfriends and girlfriends and lots of time on our hands. Those who broke the rules went to extraordinary lengths to make sure they weren’t caught, and no one turned them in because we all appreciated and feared the very real consequences. The result of this shared fear was that, without thinking about it, we developed an intimacy, an alliance, with the people we protected, who protected us. And it wasn’t just the children; it was the mothers, too. One mother used to call our house at least weekly, drunk and crying. My voice sounded like my mother’s on the telephone, and often she would be well into a sobbing rant to Mother before I managed to tell her my mother was not home. Sometimes I didn’t bother; I just listened sympathetically. I never told anyone except my mother. And my mother never told anyone at all.
When I was in college taking a journalism class on reviewing, a fellow named Todd Cohen wrote a review of a soap opera, writing about how, in every scene, someone was drinking coffee—coffee, coffee, coffee. When we lived in Japan, the story of our lives could have been centered on military buses—buses, buses, buses. When I think about what made us so cohesive, what stuck us together in such a way that years and distance and different lives haven’t torn us apart, I think of the Fitness Reports and buses. The bus was more than a means of transportation; it was a meeting place. It was like the bedroom where we told our best friends our dearest secrets, or like the back row of the theater where we would kiss a special boy, or like a pep rally, or a songfest, or a giant sleeping bag at the end of a long trip. I suppose everyone who grew up in a small town can imagine it to some degree—the closeness, the intimacy, the innocence