t’s a fine iron, no doubt about it. Forget fiddly demineralizer kits; it takes tap water straight, and it’s so agreeable to have all the settings on one dial. And it comes with a wall mount; that’ll be handy once her ironing board has a permanent place. For now, she’s set up in the living room in front of the TV. This is how her army-wife friends in Orlando did their housework. Lainie had always resisted. Once during Richard’s Amazon mission, she’d tried listening to Young Doctor Malone and Perry Mason on the radio while ironing and the distraction had been too potent. She got through a whole laundry basket without memory of having done so, and it bothered her. That’s how unchallenging your daily tasks are, Lainie. That’s how repetitive.

But last night in bed, insomnia had hatched an obvious but invigorating thought. The channel dial: She can change it. She doesn’t have to watch I Love Lucy, Guiding Light, and Password like the other wives; she can watch Today, NBC News, and ABC Early Afternoon Report. It’s a fresh idea, and it inspires her. So far, everything about Baltimore inspires her.

Getting dressed this morning—why, it’d felt like she’d been dressing for a cocktail party of intellectuals! She’d set her beehive before unfolding the ironing board, and by the tight ache at her temples, she knows it’s holding. What unravels, however, is her attention, ten minutes into the first newscast. Khrushchev is visiting the Berlin Wall. Just the word Khrushchev makes her blush; she mispronounced it three years ago at a function packed with Washington bigwigs, and Richard’s jaw had throbbed in embarrassment. And the Berlin Wall. Why does she know the name of every single character on Captain Kangaroo but not a thing about the Berlin Wall?

Lainie toggles the iron’s selector, unable to decide which setting will best eradicate wrinkles. Is it possible Westinghouse has given her, and every other woman in America, too many choices? She examines the face of the iron, counts seventeen vents, one for every month Richard spent in the Amazon. She blasts the steam, dips her face into the draft, and imagines that it’s the jungle’s heat.

This must be how the world felt to Richard when he’d called her from Brazil. It had been like hearing a ghost. One second, she’d been cutting crusts off peanut-butter sandwiches and reaching for the ringing phone. The next, she’d dropped the knife and let loose a shriek. She’d wept, insisting to him that it was a miracle. She’d had to force the tears, though, hadn’t she? Well, who could blame her? She’d been in shock. Richard had replied that he’d missed her, too, but his deadness of voice persisted; he sounded slow and mealy, as if he’d forgotten English. There was a crunching sound, too, like he was chewing something. Why would he be eating while talking to his wife for the first time in seventeen months?

It was easy to excuse. Maybe he’d been starving out in that jungle. He’d told her that they’d be moving to Baltimore, and before she could ask questions, he gave her his flight number to Orlando and gotten off the phone, still crunching. Lainie sat down, gazed at the home that, for a year and a half, had seemed so comforting and functional. Now it looked like a bachelor’s disaster. Nothing shone from spray or scrub. The iron that had died eight months ago she hadn’t even replaced. Oh, how she’d cleaned for the next two days, her scrubbing fists bursting through dishwashing gloves, her mopping hands weeping with blisters, her grouting knuckles trailing blood. A phone call from Washington rescued her, if not her marriage: Richard was being rerouted by sea to Baltimore. He’d meet her there in two weeks at a house of government choosing.

Lainie replays, almost hourly, the sight of Richard first walking through the door of the Baltimore house. The crisp, buttoned dress shirt he wore bagged about him like a druidic cloak. He’d lost weight and was pure, knotty muscle. His posture was wary and vulpine. He was shaven to a rubbery gleam, his cheeks milky white from being hidden by a jungle beard while the rest of his face had cooked bronze. For a long moment, they’d stared at each other. He squinted as if he didn’t recognize her; her fingertips flew to her beehive, her lipstick, her fingernails. Was it too much? Too dazzling after he’d seen nothing but raw, filthy men for so long?

Then Richard had gently lowered his bag to the ground and a single quake had rolled through his shoulders. Two small tears, one from each eye, rolled down his smooth cheeks. Lainie had never seen her husband cry, had even suspected he didn’t have the capacity, and to her surprise, it frightened her. She knew, though, that it was proof that she meant something, that they meant something, and she ran to him, bound her arms about him, pressed her own crying eyes into the stiff folds of his shirt. Several seconds later, she felt his hands on her back, but cautiously, as if his instinct had become to hurl off creatures that attached themselves to him.

“I’m … sorry,” he’d said.

Lainie still wonders about this. Sorry for being gone? Sorry for crying? Sorry for his inability to embrace her like a normal man?

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “You’re here. You’re here. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“You look … you feel…”

She wonders about this, too. Did she look as strange to him now as South American fauna did seventeen months ago? Was her softness the softness of sucking mud, of boar carcasses, of other sorts of jungle rot she couldn’t begin to imagine? So she’d shushed him, told him not to speak, just to hold her. It’s something she regrets. Whatever lost well of emotion his two tears had indicated was crusted shut by the following day, impervious to her gentle prods. It was Richard’s protective instinct, perhaps, against the disorienting assaults of the city.

It was only when Timmy and Tammy rollicked down the stairs to greet their father did Lainie break from Richard, turn around, and consider the empty, unfurnished house behind her. Her knees wobbled with a terrible suspicion. What if she’d had nothing to do with Richard’s tears? What if it had been the perfectly clean, virtually silent rooms behind her that had moved him?

She wrangles the same dress shirt Richard had worn home around the ironing board’s nose. It’s best not to think such thoughts. It’s best to concentrate on what she can do now to be a better wife. Maybe it’s not Today-worthy, but Richard’s Occam job is important. Imagine what would happen if she left a burn mark on his shirt. It would hint at problems at home. And there aren’t any. Her job is to help Richard by taking the mess of warfare, however it hits him, and to scrub away the dirt, the grease, the oil, the gunpowder, the sweat, the lipstick if it comes to that, and to iron it tidy again, for her husband and family, of course, but also for her country.