Chapter 89
IN A CONTINUED EFFORT to give myself more to do, I enrolled in a biology class that the Human Resource Management Office was offering through the University of Maryland Extension Program.
There were four of us in the class, and the instructor was none other than Lieutenant Bobby Carpenter.
Angela had recruited him to teach the class because he’d been a biology major at SUNY Binghamton before joining the navy.
I suppose she figured that if he was smart enough to work on a nuclear reactor, he was smart enough to teach three sailors and me basic cell theory.
I liked learning about the origins of life, about organic molecules that had managed to grow into membranes and teeny-tiny microorganisms before becoming these complex multicellular organisms that could walk and talk and fight and fuck.
Bobby talked a lot about adaptation and how animals, big and small, were always responding to their environment.
This worked for me, because I had this sense that I, too, was changing.
I wasn’t the same person I’d been five years ago, or even one year ago, and I convinced myself that maybe all this change was going to lead me somewhere good.
Paul wasn’t big on change, and he had so many problems with me taking the class that I lost count of them all.
First, he thought it was ridiculous that the HRMO would try to offer a lab science with no lab or lab equipment to speak of.
Second, he thought Bobby wasn’t qualified to teach the course. “Professors are meant to have PhDs,” he argued when I told him that I thought Bobby was doing a great job.
Paul’s third and perhaps most significant complaint was that the class took me away from him.
Two nights a week, I picked him up at the pier and dropped him off at home, then made a mad dash over to the community room at the HRMO while he heated up leftovers.
Paul claimed he would have been fine with this arrangement but for the fact that the class wasn’t going to “do anything” for me.
I needed about sixty more credits to get my bachelor’s degree, which translated to something like twenty classes.
“You going to take a class a semester for the next ten years?” he asked me on multiple occasions, and I’d get a little belligerent and say, “Maybe,” when what I was really thinking was that I might at some point go back full-time.
Honestly, it kind of offended me that he hadn’t thought of that himself.
My parents were pleased I’d gone back to school, even in such a limited capacity, but they were also distracted.
In mid-September, an Eastern Airlines plane carrying eighty-two people had taken off from Charleston International Airport and crashed just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.
All but ten people on the plane had died, and the news had sent Charleston reeling.
It seemed that everybody knew somebody on the plane, or at the very least, they knew somebody who knew somebody on the plane.
For my parents, thank goodness, their connections to the dead were tenuous.
A customer of my dad’s, the daughter of a woman who used to teach with my mom.
But news of the crash and its aftermath dominated my mother’s letters for a time, and I got the impression that she’d become almost obsessed with it.
There were so many memorials and funerals and so much eulogizing that I think, in some way, my mother began to feel less alone in her own grief.
I invited my parents to La Maddalena for Christmas, but when they declined, citing the high cost of plane tickets, Paul and I were persuaded to register for an MWR trip with Laura and Bobby.
We went to Munich, where we attended a bunch of Christmas markets and drank far too much mulled wine.
Well, all except Laura, who told us on the first night of the trip that she was pregnant and due in July.
We were thrilled for her, of course. And Bobby, too.
But the announcement didn’t help things with Paul and me.
That night in Munich, when we were getting ready for bed, he started talking about having kids, and I couldn’t figure out if it was because he really wanted them or because he had some kind of competitive thing going on with Bobby.
“I thought we decided to wait?” I said to him from my side of the bed, and he reminded me that that was what I had decided.
“Okay,” I said, slowly. “But since it’s my body, doesn’t it make sense that I should get the final say?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, and turned over. “Whatever.”