I didn’t tell my friends my plan. I started doing push-ups, pull-ups, and running along the East River. I took the ASVAB test, it was not too hard. I signed the six-year contract to join the army. Then I packed what the army said I needed in a duffel bag, put the rest in a black garbage bag, and left it with the friends whose couch I had last slept on. Then there was the long, long, silent bus ride to Fort Jackson, pulling up in the dark, our drill sergeant sticking his head into the bus yelling at us to get off. As I stood in line holding my paperwork in one hand and my duffel in the other, the sergeant said to me, “Ma’am, I recommend you fix your face because you need to make your attitude less visible.” I thought that it was interesting he didn’t want me to change my attitude, just make it less visible. Then he told us to give him some push-ups and as I did those he said something I loved: “We make it so you do not have to think. We tell you everything you need to know. We tell you the whos, the whats, the wheres, and the whens.” I stood up and dusted myself off and the sergeant said, “If I wanted you to dust yourself off, I would have told you.”

I met my husband in the army. Once when I was setting out the pizza on a ping-pong table at Fort Jackson, he came up behind me and pretended to hump me and all the guys laughed. That was embarrassing but I could take a joke. There was a lot of razzing then for the women. When we were deployed, JP and I didn’t see each other for a few years. when we met up again I reminded him about the fun at the ping-pong table and he had forgotten. He liked my ginger-head hair and matching pubic patch. Brown eyes. A fairly big wide nose. I look like my mother and she was French. Some men prefer plain girls who, from a distance, seem pretty. Or if you squint. I did fine in the army.