August
She will have told you how it ended: that I said I would not ask her to wait and she said she would not have. Under it is that I enlisted in the Navy before anybody could call me, and told myself it was a trade. I wanted, God help me, to be a man who could pull somebody out of something. I wanted to be even.
I stood at the depot in Elmcrest on Monday the twenty-third of August with a duffel and my mother’s lunch in a sack and her scarf wrapped in a pillowcase. I had decided I would hand it to her and say, I know, and thank you, and I love you, all in one breath. She did not come to the depot. I got on the train with the scarf still in the pillowcase and told myself that was my answer.
I wrote her four letters from Great Lakes. I said nothing in them that mattered, because I was afraid to say the thing that did, and she answered none. Both of us, I think, thought the other one had decided. That is the whole of what pride is, Marvene says. Two people waiting politely for the other to be sorry first.