The Janitor Who Came to My Graduation

Four Years of Too Many

I never told my mother about Mr. Varga. I do not fully know why.

Part of it was that she would have been embarrassed. She was proud, and she was tired, and she would have heard “the janitor is feeding your daughter” as “you are not feeding your daughter.” That was not true and it was not fair.

Part of it was that it was mine. Every morning there was one person in the world who knew I would be at that side door, and who had already decided what to do about it.

He did not talk much. Sometimes he asked about a test. Sometimes he told me about the boiler, which he spoke of like an old horse with a bad temper.

Sophomore year I learned he had been in the Army. I saw a framed photo in the custodian’s office of a skinny young man in an old green uniform, squinting into the sun.

“Is that you?”

“That was me. Nineteen seventy-six. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. They shaved my head and I’ve kept it that way ever since. Saves on shampoo.”

“Did you like it?”

He thought about it a long time, the way he thought about everything.

“I liked who I was when I got done,” he said. “That’s not the same as liking it.”

He served eight years. First Infantry Division, the Big Red One, at Fort Riley, then two tours in what was West Germany. He got out as a sergeant, married Ardith, and came home to Brown County.

Junior year, I started asking him real questions. What basic was like. What the drill sergeants were like. Whether a girl from a small town with no money could do it.

“A girl from a small town with no money is exactly who does it,” he said. “Most of the people I served with didn’t have two nickels. That’s not a weakness in there. That’s a head start.”

The Day I Signed

I enlisted in May of my senior year, a few months after I turned eighteen. I wanted to be a combat medic.

I have never said out loud to my mother why. It is because of the scale house, and the trucks backed up on the road, and the twenty minutes my father lay there with nobody beside him who knew what to do.

I wanted to be the one who knows what to do.

The Army would train me, pay me, and help me pay for college later. My mother’s answer was that the Army would also send me somewhere far away, and maybe not send me back.

“I already buried one,” she said. “I’m not doing it again.”

I said that was not fair. She said nothing about any of this was fair. We were both right, and we both went to our rooms and shut the doors.

She did not come to the swearing in. She said she could not get the day off. Maybe she could not. I let myself believe it.

The morning after I signed, I told Mr. Varga at the side door. He set down his mop and did not say anything for so long I thought he was angry.

Then he wiped his hand on his pants and held it out to me. I shook it. He shook my hand like I was somebody he respected, like I was a grown woman who had made a grown decision.

“Private Dorrance,” he said. “Well, I’ll be.”

That afternoon, Ardith called the house and asked for me. She had never called before. She said, “Otis came home and sat in his chair and didn’t turn on the ball game. That’s how I knew it was something. Honey, we are so proud of you.”

I cried on the phone. My mother was at work. I never told her about that call either.