Airforcewife is constantly coming up with these embarrassing stories about herself. I don't know if she really is a disaster magnet, or if she only imagines that the whole world is staring at her in horror when really no one has noticed the hole in her skirt or the pee her son deposited in the pool. In all the times I've been around her, I have never seen her in all her mortifying glory, but she does have quite a reputation for being accident and embarrassment prone.
So much so that I've begun to imagine her face on literary characters who find themselves in airforcewife-ian situations.
For Christmas, one of my good friends from our last duty station gave me the book There's a (Slight) Chance I Might be Going to Hell. It's not a military-themed book, but she thought that it was a funny story that paralleled one aspect of our lives: moving and having to make new friends. In the book, the main character moves to a new town with her husband. She has high hopes of a wonderful life full of new friends, but she realizes that she's having an awful hard time fitting in. The book is quite charming, and who wouldn't be tempted when the cover says "a novel of sewer pipes, pageant queens, and big trouble"?
The thing is, the more the main character, Maye, found herself in awkward positions, the more she began to start to look in my mind like airforcewife. For example, at a dinner party, a horribly rude woman (who reminded me a lot of the icky Lenore Baker on Army Wives) tells Maye that her pink sweater is not appropriate for a formal evening event. Maye is mortified, and takes off to find a bathroom to hide in. She ends up ducking into the formal dining room and decides that she can take the sweater off and just wear the oxford shirt she has on underneath it.
Maye crossed her arms, grabbed the hem of the sweater on either side, and pulled up swiftly, as fast as she could, pull, pull, pull, up over her torso, over her boobs, quickly, quickly, hurry, over her head, and just as the sweater released Maye's face and got to her forehead, it stopped there and froze. The sweater was stuck. She pulled harder, but the sweater, now wedged around her skull like a nun's wimple, tugged on either side of her face, which was growing increasingly red and puffy. She pulled again as she grimaced and grunted. And then, for some odd reason, her belly felt cold. Chilly. Somewhat breezy. As if it was exposed. She gasped and looked down, and the oxford was gone. It had vanished. The only thing that was there was Maye's bra, and Maye's belly, and the waistband of Maye's girdle, which from girth pressure had now rolled itself downward into the shape of an enchilada and width of the rings of Saturn.
The book goes on to describe in hilarity how Maye struggles with the sweater around her head, until
Maye realized abruptly that unfortunately, due to her hearing being muffled by layers of pink wool and polished cotton and by her cricket thighs but predominantly by her very own grunting, she had neglected to hear that dinner was about to be served.
And as I laughed, I imagined our darling airforcewife flailing around the dining room with a sweater above her head as her husband's colleagues entered the room for dinner.
The book is very funny and captures how hard it can be to meet the right friend when you move to a new town. But it held an extra layer of humor for me, since it just seemed like something that would happen to airforcewife.
Art imitates life in this case.
Please don't kill me, airforcewife.
