ainie strickland smiles at her brand-new Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam iron. Westinghouse built the atomic engine that fueled the first Polaris submarine. That says something, doesn’t it? Not just about a product, mind you, but a company. She’d been sitting at the back of Freddie’s, her beehive inserted into the pink plastic of the flip-top dryer hood, when she paused, right in the middle of an interesting and, she thought, important story about a place called the Mekong Delta, where a group called the Viet Cong had shot down five US helicopters, killing thirty Americans, soldiers just like her Richard, so that she could instead linger upon the full-page advertisement. It depicted a submarine unzipping the white ocean on its dive down. All those brave boys. The intrinsic danger of water. Would they die, too? Their lives depended on Westinghouse.

The image had resonated enough that she’d resolved to ask Richard what sort of brand of submarine a “Polaris” was. An army man since age nineteen, Richard’s reflex to any question about his job is to clam up, so she’d waited until he was well fed and pacified by the popcorn gunfire of The Rifleman before asking. Without breaking his appraising gaze of Chuck Connors’s ambidextrous gunmanship, he’d shrugged.

“Polaris isn’t a brand. It’s not like one of your breakfast cereals.”

The word cereal snapped Timmy from his television stupor. Electricity crackled between the shag carpet and his corduroyed knees as he turned to resume a two-day-old conversation. “Mom, could we please get some Sugar Pops?”

“Froot Loops!” Tammy added. “Oh, Mommy, please?”

Richard has always been gruff. It’s just his way. Before the Amazon, though, Richard didn’t let her dangle from the cliff of her own ignorance like this, watching her flail without offering a hand. Lainie had yet to figure out the right reaction and chose to laugh at herself. Then Chuck Connors had been replaced by a Hoover Dial-a-Matic with variable Suction Control, operated by an actress who looked a bit like Lainie. Richard chewed his lip and looked down at his lap in what might have been remorse.

“Polaris is a missile,” he said. “Nuclear-armed ballistic missile.”

“Oh!” She’d wanted to soothe him. “That sounds dangerous.”

“Better range, I guess. More accurate, too, is what they say.”

“I saw it in a magazine and I thought, ‘I bet Richard knows all about this,’ and I was right.”

“Not really. It’s Navy shit. I avoid those bastards the best I can.”

“That’s true. You do. You’ve told me many times.”

“Submarines. You wouldn’t catch me on one of those death traps, I’ll tell you what.”

He’d looked at her then and smiled, and Richard, that poor, powerful man, hadn’t any idea the pain his smile conveyed. Lainie senses that he’s seen too much, in Korea, in the Amazon. There are things he’ll never share. This is a sort of mercy toward her, she tells herself, even as it makes her feel as if she’s all alone and floating away like a helium balloon.

No man who’s spent seventeen months in the South American jungle can reacclimate to civilian life just like that. Lainie knows this and tries to be patient. But it’s challenging. Those seventeen months changed her, too. Overnight, Richard had been stolen away by the ghastly General Hoyt and dropped into a world without telephones or mailboxes. Household decisions had to be made, all the time, and they’d hit her like a spray of buckshot. Where to take the car when it broke down. What to do with that skunk carcass in the backyard. How to stand up to plumbers, bankers, other men who thought a lady alone was ripe to be rooked. All while herding two kids bewildered and hurt by an abruptly vacated father.

And she’d been good at it. Yes, she’d spent the bulk of the first two months envisioning her new life from behind a gloss of tears: a widowed mother of two terrors who’d grow up shredding drapes and crayoning walls as she gulped down cooking sherry. Soon, though, her evening collapse had begun to feel like satisfied exhaustion. Gradually, tentatively, in private nooks of her mind, she began to shape a plan for when Richard was declared missing in action and the army ceased sending her checks. She scribbled figures on matchbooks, Timmy’s school reports, the back of her hand, calculating estimated wages versus concrete expenses. She knew she could handle a job. It even sounded exciting. It also made her feel like the world’s worst wife to find any spark of enthusiasm at all in the vanishing of her husband. But there would be a sort of peace without Richard, wouldn’t there? Hadn’t he always been a little hard? A little cold?

It’s fruitless to rehash. After all, Richard did come home, didn’t he? A full week now they’ve been back together, and doesn’t he deserve the same wife he left behind? Lainie works up a smile until she believes in it. If those submariners trusted Westinghouse’s nuclear whatsits, why, she should be proud to stand in her living room and use the Spray ’N Steam, the very first item she’d bought in Baltimore. Richard needs to look sharp for his new job, a place called Occam, and that makes ironing a priority. With so much wardrobe still boxed up, the children’s clothes need ironing, too. Timmy looks feral in his ragged playwear, and Tammy’s favorite velveteen jumper is dishrag thin. A housewife, she insists to herself, has plenty of interesting, important jobs to do.