Waters of '82

June 1982

I stood, looking down into the shimmering blue water, the Kansas sky sparkling above and around me. Far below, my parents treaded water in the deep end of the Leavenworth Officer’s Club pool, my mom off to my left, my dad off to my right. I took a deep breath. I was a good swimmer. I mustered all the bravery of my 4 years and 11 months and leaped. I splashed. I came up giggling. I did it again, again, again.
On weekdays in Kansas, my grandpa took me to the stables on post.
Before, we rode regularly at a friend’s horse farm in Kentucky. A few weeks before we left Knox, while the house was sold and my mom’s car was sold and our dog was given away and everything but essentials were packed up into cardboard boxes and then storage crates, Grandpa took me out to ride. Someone left a car door open. The wind slammed the door. The horse, my favorite horse, whose name I have long since forgotten, blocked out, was spooked. Jumped into the air. Landed with a hoof cleanly on one of my feet. I haven’t ridden since, not one time in three and a half decades.
At the stables in Kansas, I kept a safe distance, petting the horses from outside the fence. I kept close to my grandpa, safe near his blue jeans. A Colonel’s wife, with long blond hair like a mane, pressed her large breasts up against my grandfather’s arm, like the horses who pressed their nuzzles into my palm. He was 70 by then, at least 30 years older than her. He had the calm, sturdy presence, the solid, barrel-chested body of a Midwesterner who has spent his life in manual labor.
At night, I pushed a large plastic pink Barbie Camper and its residents around the old wood floors of our sparsely decorated quarters. It wasn’t our furniture. We’d left Knox for a PCS to Camp Darby, Italy, with TDY at Leavenworth in route. My parents were selected to spend the summer at the Combined Arms and Services Staff School. I thought Cas-Cubed was a funny name. My mother was selected, the sole female officer in the class. Her personnel officer finagled, traded, and arranged back-door deals so my dad could tag along.
My grandma’s older brother came to visit and played circus and bowling on my new Atari console. Her sister, who my grandpa called Mrs. Clean behind her back, took dripping wet brillo pads to old Formica counters and plastic tables, leaving scratches in her wake.
Except for when the prisoners escaped from the federal prison and everyone was afraid for a few days, it was a good summer.
It ended abruptly with a knock at the door.
My mother answered. She and my dad were still up, everyone else already asleep. There were two MPs on the stoop under the yellowing porch light. A soldier at Knox, whom my mother evaluated poorly, had retaliated by purchasing a $500 contract on my mother’s life.
My mother laughed in disbelief.
“Ma’am,” one of the MPs said. “For $500, they’ll kill you and dismember you.”
They told her to keep safe. To keep an eye out and report any unusual activity.
My parents slept with their matching loaded handguns on their unmatched Army-owned nightstands.
The next morning, my grandparents and mother got up early. They packed our stuff first, then my grandparents and me into our family van. We were going off on an adventure, to see relatives, visit old friends, and say good-bye before we headed to our next assignment in Italy.
My mother cried as she hugged us, smelled my hair as mothers do. I thought she was sad that she would miss the adventure. I told her she could play with the Barbie Camper if she got bored.

July 1982

In the Dakotas, we went from house to house, sleeping on pull out couches and cots and guest beds. My grandpa took me fishing on little lakes, big lakes, sparkling streams that glittered. I caught a fish so big the rod cracked in half. A relative dove off the boat, into the deep green water, to salvage the pole and rescue the fish. Grandpa skinned it and deboned it lakeside, cooked it over an open fire. My grandma took me to church bingo. I won the grand prize, $300, and everyone patted my head and called me a good luck charm. There was fresh watermelon, fresh corn on the cob straight from the field, lots and lots of my grandma’s chili soup and homemade bread. I had four 5th birthday parties, one every week in July. There was ice cream, firecrackers, fireflies we caught in jars. I used an old-fashioned outhouse, with a moon in the door for light, and washed my hands under water my grandma pumped from an old steel handpump that went deep into the aquifer. We played tag in a pasture and I got shocked on an electric fence. I woke up on my back in the soft, deep, clover grass. In Bismarck, we stayed with another cousin, this one with an inground pool in his own backyard, and I swam with his daughters and dove down deep.

August 1982

We drove East. We met my mother at her wayward sister’s house. My parents had one week of leave plus authorized travel time. Family members were not authorized to travel to Italy until housing was procured. The waiting list for housing was over a year.
My mother registered me for kindergarten at the local school. She paid her sister’s overdue bills, then extra to pay ahead three months for water and utilities and phone. She loaded my aunt’s pantry with mashed potatoes and macaroni, canned fruits and vegetables, sugar and flour and dried milk for baking, tins of salmon and tuna, boxes of cereal. She stocked the freezer with popsicles, orange juice concentrate. She took me shopping for new school clothes, a backpack. She stuffed my grandma and grandpa’s wallets with all the cash she had left.
My parents had to leave for the long drive to JFK Airport in New York on my first day of school. The night before, she cried herself to sleep. She thought about driving south to DC instead of north to New York, resigning her commission. In the morning, she got up, splashed cold water on her puffy face and eyes. She brushed my hair and my grandma braided it. My mom held my hand and walked me to the bus stop. Her eyes filled with tears as she hugged me, breathing my hair, again, as mothers do.
My grandmother, her mother, leaned into her ear. She whispered, harshly.
“You will not make that child cry on her first day of school. You will pull yourself together.”
In the pictures, I am smiling as I climb onto the bus, my chest lifted with pride as I wave goodbye from the top step.

September 1982

In hot afternoons after school, my cousin and I ran through sprinklers on the scorched brown grass in the front of the apartment complex. My grandma stirred packets of Kool-Aid into large plastic pitchers and we drank until our tongues were purple, orange, red. My cousin and I made Shrinky-dinks in the oven, listened to Rick Springfield and Juice Newton, played hide and seek in a dark basement with flashlights. At night, my aunt filled one bathtub. She told me to sit on the faucet side where the hot tap drip, drip, dripped.
“Mommy says I’m not allowed to sit by the tap,” I said.
When my mom called on Saturday, I told her.
My aunt filled the bathtub twice each night.

October 1982

The week before Halloween, my mother found a house, two blocks from the winter grey waves of the Mediterranean.
That Saturday, we screeched to a landing on the tarmac in Rome.
I held my grandma’s right hand as we made our way through the cavernous airport, trying to navigate via arrows and signs we couldn’t read. My grandma’s left arm wrapped around a giant plastic pony. My favorite toys were large: the Barbie Camper, a stuffed bear bigger than me, a wooden rocking horse. When I was 18 months old, my favorite baby doll disappeared in a move. I’d learned to love large things that could not be lost. I dragged my red cloth Snoopy suitcase behind me. My grandfather struggled with several suitcases in each hand; there were no roller bags in 1982. We came around a corner, approaching the hallway of the customs terminal. Through a wall of bulletproof glass and behind that a wall of blue-suited bodies, compact men with black boots and black machine guns nonchalantly slung across their shoulders, we saw my mom. She was jumping up and down, waving her arms frantically, like the monkeys we’d seen in the Kansas City Zoo.
The men in blue were Carbonari, Mussolini’s descendants. A few weeks later, shopping in a market with my grandmother, I would see them beat a man with the butts of their guns, stomp his head into the concrete with the heels of their boots, then leave him in his own blood and urine on the pavement. They would go for a caffe across the street, tiny china cups in doll-sized saucers balanced on their large sweaty palms.
We cleared customs and entered the mass of the airport. My mom hugged us all tightly. I know my father was there, but I don’t remember him. The room was noisy, the audio clutter of thousands of people speaking a language I couldn’t understand. The air was thick, hazy with a dense fog of cigarette smoke. There were smells beyond the smoke that I couldn’t recognize, foods and drinks I didn’t yet know. Everywhere in the airport, people mingled with those tiny cups and saucers. I would learn, soon, that they drank espresso for afternoons and energy or after-dinner conversation. In the mornings, caffe con latte, half-milk and half-coffee in big soupy cups with toast or cookies on the side. With dessert, cappuccino, frothed and foamy and sweet. We were far away from Folgers and Maxwell House and diners where my grandma ordered regular, black.
I was thirsty. My dad (I remember him with us, by this point) took a handful of coins to one of the counters where people gathered with their tiny cups. He bought a small bottle, green, heavy, glass. He used the bottle opener attached to the counter, and the bottle fizzed like pop. It tasted different than the water I’d grown up with, water from a tap in a glass or a paper Dixie cup at the bathroom sink.
We had to buy water here, my dad said, we shouldn’t drink or even brush our teeth from the tap. My dad bought cases of sealed water at the commissary, carried them into our house in heavy cardboard boxes that he stacked against the kitchen wall. When we were out, we had to buy carbonated water, acqua con gas. We couldn’t trust plain water, even in the bottle. Plain water could be filled at the tap at the back of the restaurant.
We reached the dark of the parking garage, then the faded blue Alpha Romeo my dad bought from an officer headed back across the ocean, stateside. The rectangle USA plates stood out in contrast to the long, thin strings of numbers on the other cars.
My mother put her arms out wide to stop us.
My parents half-walked, half-crouched, squinting their way around the car, looking for shapes and shadows. There were five bombing attacks against the American military forces in Europe in ‘81. USA plates made the car a target everywhere. Even at our new home, where we would have a six-foot fence and a metal gate and two German Shepherds, we’d check the car every morning before touching the doors. My job was looking for fingerprints in the exterior grime, a job better suited to the small size and flexible back of a five-year-old than to my grandparents. When we returned to the states in ‘85, we sold the Alpha Romeo with a three-year-layer of dirt.
My dad unlocked the trunk, loaded the suitcases. He unlocked each car door. I climbed into the back, between my mom and grandma, leaning my head on my mom’s shoulder. The seats were soft orange felt. There was a cigarette burn directly in the middle of the back seat that left a hole all the way to the hard frame. I could fit my index finger exactly in the hole without pulling on the fabric.
My father drove fast along curving highways. Through green farmlands and fields so different from those I’d seen back home, in Kentucky and Kansas and the Dakotas. Green grape vines spreading across hills, gnarled olive trees crawling along, lush spreads of purple lavender. Buildings rose in front of us, square marshmallows of pink and coral, with sparkling red tile roofs that gleamed in the mid-morning sun. The land cut away, the road seemed to drop straight into bright blue water. Nine months later, I would splash in the Mediterranean, warm and still as a bath. I would learn the American Crawl in a seaside pool that had once been Mussolini’s private resort. Diving deep into another body of water.

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Kimberlee Bethany Bonura is an Army brat and Army wife. Her mother served over 30 years in the Navy WAVES, Naval Reserves, Women’s Army Corp, and US Army, retiring in 1995 as a Lieutenant Colonel. Her husband is an active-duty Army Colonel with 24 years of service. Bonura spent two years as a civilian instructor at the US Military Academy – West Point. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from UT – El Paso.