Pilots of the Purple Twilight
a short story
by Kit Reed
The wives spent every day by the pool at the Miramar, not far from
the base, waiting for word about their men. The rents were cheap and
nobody bothered them, which meant that no one came to patch the
rotting stucco or kill centipedes for them or pull out the weeds
growing up through the cracks in the cement. They were surrounded
by lush undergrowth and bright flowers nobody knew the names for,
and although they talked about going into town to shop or taking off
for home, wherever that was, they needed to be together by the pool
because this was where the men had left them and they seemed to
need to keep claustrophobia as one of the conditions of their waiting.

On good days they revolved slowly in the sunlight, redolent of suntan
oil and thorough in the exposure of all their surfaces because they
wanted the tans to be right for the homecoming, but they also knew
they had plenty of time. If it rained they would huddle under the fading
canopy and play bridge and canasta and gin, keeping scored into the
hundreds of thousands even though they were sick of cards. They did
their nails and eyebrows and read Perry Mason paperbacks until they
were bored to extinction, bitching and waiting for the mail. Everybody
took jealous note of the letters received, which never matched the
number of letters sent because mail was never forwarded after a man
was reported missing. The women wrote anyway, and every day at
ten they swarmed down the rutted drive to fall on the mailman like
black widow spiders, ravenous. Most of the letter were for the
wretches whose husbands had already come home, for God's sake,
whisking them away to endlessly messy kitchens and perpetual heaps
of laundry in dream houses mortgaged on the GI Bill. Embarrassed by
joy, they had left the Miramar without a backward glance, and for the
same reason they always wrote at least once, stuffing their letters with
vapid-looking snapshots of first babies, posting them from suburbs on
the other side of the world.

At suppertime they all went into the rambling stucco building,
wrenching open the rusting casements because it seemed important to
keep sight of the road. Just before the shadows merged to make
darkness they would drift outside again, listening, because planes still
flew out from the nearby base every morning and, waiting, they were
fixed on the idea of counting them back in. Most of their men had left
in ships or on foot but still they waited. To the women at the Miramar
every dawn patrol hinted at a twilight return, and the distant Fokkers
or P-38s or F-87s seemed appropriate emblems for their own hopes,
the suspense a fitting shape to place on the tautening stomachs, the
straining ears, the dread of the telegram.

They all knew what they would do when the men came back even
though they had written their love scenes privately. There would be
the reunion in the crowded station, the embrace that would shut out
everybody else. She would be standing at the sink when he came up
from behind and put his arms around her waist, or she would be
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