“Do you realize what a terrible snob you’ve become, darling?”
“I learned it from the best, Mommy,” said Eve, her throat tightening the way it always did when she argued with her mother. “In any event, tell Fig I’m not going to be able to make it to the wedding. There’s too much shit going on up here.”
Eve’s mother immediately hung up the phone. Any time profanity slipped through Eve’s lips, her mother hung up on her, as if bad language simply burned her delicate ears.
“It’s almost comical how outraged your mother becomes over the stupidest things,” Warren told Eve when she relayed their conversation.
He was right. Both of her parents were outraged by the wrong things. They were outraged the previous Christmas when the Driving Club put up a red tree (“So tacky,” her mother had moaned), but they certainly weren’t outraged over Vietnam. Her father had been a medic during the Second World War, and he saw the current conflict as a continuation of the United States’ benevolent presence on the world stage. Besides, his son was not at risk of being sent over there. Charlie had graduated from Emory Law School in 1966, just as he turned twenty-six, placing him outside of any danger of being drafted. Eve had a cousin who was in the National Guard, but so far he had only been sent as far as Houston. She knew of a few boys from Coventry who had enlisted, one in the National Guard and two in the Air Force. She didn’t know anyone who was a ground soldier.
That is, except for Ada’s only son, Albert. He had been drafted in 1966. And unlike Charlie, Pete, and Warren with their student draft deferrals in hand (Warren was getting a master’s in sociology at the New School), Albert had no choice but to serve or face a long jail sentence.
“Can’t you get him into the National Guard?” Eve had pleaded with her father on the phone after he casually mentioned that Albert’s draft number had come up.
“The wait list for the Guard is miles long.”
“Don’t you know someone on the draft board?” she had asked.
“Sweetheart, our country is at war. Albert is of age. It is his duty and responsibility to serve. And you know about the G.I. Bill, don’t you? When Albert comes home he will be able to enroll in college, paid for by his service.”
“If he comes home,” Eve had said.
He did not. Ada didn’t even have the comfort of having his body to bury. Small in stature and quick-footed, Albert had been a “tunnel rat.” A booby trap went off while he was underground, so that he literally walked into his grave.
• • •
Her mother would sometimes mail newspaper clippings, most of them announcing that some person Eve had known a million years ago had gotten married. So Eve was not surprised to receive Charlie and Fig’s wedding announcement, which had run in the Atlanta Journal. The picture of Fig and her ten bridesmaids was in black and white, so Eve was unable to tell if her new sister-in-law had pulled off a successful lipstick match. When she showed the picture to Warren, he commented on how many people could be fed with the money spent on that one lavish reception.
“It’s not like your family is a bunch of pious monks,” Eve said, feeling defensive despite herself.
“Of course they aren’t. Shit, my dad will be the first with his back against the wall when the revolution comes,” said Warren. “But until then, I’m happy he sent me this.”
He showed her the check for a thousand dollars, ostensibly as an early Christmas present, though really, his father sent checks every few months. Eve’s did, too.
Eve hated that they needed money from their parents. It wasn’t as if they were lazy. It wasn’t as if they were “flower children,” dropping out of society and living off the land. They wanted to change society. They wanted to dig out the rot. Their latest project was the founding of a community school in the basement of a Friends meeting house in the Bronx. Called The Children’s Place, it welcomed four- to ten-year-olds. It offered open admission, so that anyone who wanted to enroll could. There were no set classes, but Eve was there to offer instruction in literature and writing if the children so desired, and Jane, a math major from Barnard, was there for numbers and equations, while Warren offered assistance with social studies and history. The kids determined what they did each day, and if what they wanted was to read the funny pages, fine. They’d read the funny pages. Eventually, some of them would get bored and ask one of the adults to teach them something. More and more frequently the children asked her to help them make “story books.” She would ask them questions about their lives and write down whatever they told her. Then she would give them the pages so they could illustrate them as she hovered nearby, in case they needed reminding of what was written on each page. Later she would read their stories aloud during circle time. Three of her kids who hadn’t known their letters when they first enrolled at The Children’s Place could now read.
• • •
One early December afternoon Eve arrived home from teaching exhausted. The kids had decided to have a naked day, which was always tedious because it meant sorting all of the clothes they tossed on the floor and making certain they didn’t run outside to dance in the snow. For starters, she didn’t want them to catch a cold, but also, she had to be careful not to do anything that would attract the attention of the authorities, who might come barging into the school demanding licenses and other bureaucratic bullshit. Walking into the apartment she shared with Warren and a rotating parade of others, she went to the kitchen sink, overflowing with dirty dishes, and got herself a glass of water. Then she went to the living room, pushed the sleeping bag off the sofa (some guy who’d gone AWOL from basic training was staying with them for a few days), and pulled her stash out from the rosewood box that sat on the coffee table. Last year she had bare-knuckled her way through quitting tobacco, but pot was a different story. With great care, she rolled herself a well-deserved joint. Just as she was bringing a match to its tip, the phone rang. She ignored it, lit the joint, and inhaled. The phone rang five times, stopped, and then a minute later started up again. She sighed, answered.
It was her mother. “Eve, I have some bad news. Mother has died,” she said. “A sudden heart attack. She was absolutely fine yesterday and now—gone.”
“Oh no,” said Eve. “I’m so sorry.” How could Grandmommy no longer be alive? It seemed impossible that such a formidable person could have succumbed to something so ordinary as death.
“How soon can you get home?”
“Oh, Mommy, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it. I’ve got a class of twenty kids that need me up here. But I’ll be with you in spirit, I promise.”
“God dammit, Eve, if you don’t come to this funeral I will see to it that your father never sends you another check again. I swear I will.”
She had never heard her mother curse. She brought the joint to her mouth, thinking. The last thing she wanted was to return to Atlanta, even to bury Grandmommy. It was just too hard, too disorienting. It was like being the guest of some hausfrau during World War II, being fed schnitzel while you knew that, a few miles away, innocents were being gassed. But without her parents’ money she could not do her work at the school. She could not do her work to end imperialism. As embarrassing as it was to rely on their largesse, in an exploitive, capitalist system what other option did she have?
“Warren’s coming with me,” she said. “We’ll need two tickets from JFK. Nonstop.”
• • •
They had gotten high just before boarding their flight. As their plane started its final descent into Atlanta, they raced up and down the aisles grabbing drinks off people’s trays, like crazed stewardesses. Indeed, passengers must have mistaken them for overly zealous employees of the airline, for no one said a word to them about their crazy-motherfucker actions, even though their actions were intentional, political: White Bread America went along with all sorts of atrocities, from Jim Crow in the South to the war in East Asia. Acting like crazy motherfuckers was a form of resistance.
They walked off the plane,
attracting only a few glances. Eve’s father was waiting for them at the gate. It had been a long time since Eve had seen him. He looked older, heavier, the bags under his eyes prominent.
“What happened to your hair?” he asked as he took her duffel bag from her.
She had cut it short, as short as Jean Seberg in Breathless, only she was not trying to be chic but rather utilitarian.
“It’s easier,” she said. “No fuss, no muss. Saves on shampoo, too. This is Warren.”
This was her father’s first time to meet—not her boyfriend exactly; they weren’t exclusive—her lover. She wondered how Warren would appear to her if she were meeting him for the first time. Her father probably assumed he was a hippie, but he resembled a hippie only in that his hair was a little long. Otherwise he looked like a manual laborer in his uniform of jeans, work boots, and flannel shirt, a small SDS button pinned to it.
Warren held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said.
“The pleasure is mine,” said Eve’s father, shaking Warren’s hand heartily.
Eve gave Warren a hard stare. Sir?
Once at the car, Eve insisted that Warren take the front seat while she rode in the back. It would be easier to avoid being questioned by her father that way, should he want to hit her with some version of “What exactly are you doing with your life?” Of course, he might interrogate Warren, but she doubted he would. Her father was known as a “consummate gentleman.” In his study was a framed quote by Theodore Roosevelt: “Courtesy is as much the mark of a gentleman as courage.” They zipped up I-75, the interstate so empty it almost seemed as if they were driving through a ghost town. As they drove, her father told them there would be a viewing that night at Patterson Funeral Home and then the service itself would be at All Saints’ the following afternoon at 1:00 p.m.
“Your mother asked that I suggest you shave your legs,” said Eve’s father. “But I believe I’ll leave that between you and your God.”
“My god doesn’t give a shit about hairy legs,” she said.
“Hmm,” murmured her father. “Well, I guess that settles that.”
• • •
How could it feel both so good and so awful to be back home? Her mother had freaked out about her hair, of course, actually shrieking when she first saw it. But she pulled herself together pretty quickly, probably helped by the fact that Warren was, inexplicably, acting like an Upstanding Young Man. In addition to calling her father “sir,” he referred to her mother as “ma’am” and even pulled the chair out for her when they sat down at the kitchen table for a very early supper of hamburger soup and biscuits. (Was Warren just fucking with them? Was he hoping to get something out of her dad, money maybe?)
Casual though the meal was, her mother still put out silver flatware, not her ornate pattern, but the Fairfax, whose simple design paired well with the simple food. The weight of the sterling soup spoon felt good in her hand. She hated that it felt good in her hand. She hated that earlier, after unpacking, she had stood underneath the showerhead in her childhood bathroom for thirty minutes, just luxuriating in the hot water. At their New York walk-up they never got hot water for more than five minutes, and never with so much pressure.
Her mother had hung a robe for her on a hook on the bathroom door, and she had set out lotions and cotton balls and nail scissors, along with a new razor blade and shaving cream. She was anything but subtle. God forbid Eve embarrass her mother with unshaved legs at Grandmommy’s funeral. God forbid her mother give serious thought to anything other than how things appeared.
• • •
They gathered in the vestibule before heading for the viewing. Eve did not know Warren owned one, but there he was in dark suit and even a tie. When she asked about it, he told her it was left over from his boarding school days. Fig and Charlie, the very newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Whalen, arrived at the house, even though their Garden Hills starter home was closer to Patterson’s than The Compound.
“Sister!” Fig said the moment she saw Eve, arms outstretched to embrace her. Fig wore a little black-and-white tweed suit. Her hairstyle was not dissimilar to how Eve used to wear hers, back in the days when she had added height with a teasing comb and lots of hairspray and then curled the ends so they flipped out. Now she didn’t even have enough hair to fit around the rod of a curling iron. Eve wore a black turtleneck and a long black skirt, her feet tucked into a pair of clogs, an old pea coat, bought cheap from the army surplus store, draped over her arm—the same coat she had worn to countless demonstrations against the war.
“Hi, Fig,” she said, hoping her sister-in-law’s embrace wouldn’t last too long.
“Oh, it’s so good to see you!” exclaimed Fig. “And I love your darling haircut. It looks like Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby. Did you see that movie? I had nightmares for weeks!”
“Nothing that happened in that movie is worse than what’s going on right now in Vietnam,” said Eve.
Fig stared at her for a moment. Then she blinked, linked her arm through Eve’s, and whispered, “You might just be right.”
• • •
At the viewing Eve spent a long time looking at Grandmommy’s waxy face, her rouge applied in two round circles on her cheeks. She had always been so careful to look put together, elegant. Eve felt a shiver and put on her coat, grateful that she had thought to bring it with her.
Grandmommy was being buried in a pleated pink silk dress, with a small cream-colored Bible—just the New Testament—in her manicured hands and her Fleur pin attached to the dress slightly above her bosom, close to her heart. Eve wondered if Grandmommy’s belief system would soon be buried, too, if the old world had to die before a new one could burst forth into being. She thought of how her grandmother used to invite her over to her “cottage” for tea parties when she was a little girl, how she would serve Earl Grey from a sterling pot, and then dilute the black tea with lots of milk and sugar for Eve. She would serve petits fours from Henri’s bakery, too. Eve used to love those cakes. She remembered how her grandmother would sometimes even have an extra cake for Eve’s cherished doll, Annabelle, and how she and her grandmother would secretly nibble at it and then praise Annabelle for eating her confection all up. She felt tears well in her eyes. She couldn’t believe her grandmother was no longer on this earth.
And yet it was time for the old woman to go! It was time for the world she lived in, the things she believed in, to be rendered to dust.
Wiping away her tears, Eve left the coffin to look for Warren. He was standing with Charlie. She wondered what in the name of God they might be talking about. The war, probably, as Warren didn’t speak of much else. Her brother was almost a head taller, but he looked gangly and almost goofy next to Warren with his simmering intensity. She walked over to them. They were discussing Hank Aaron and the Braves. Eve could care less about sports. She found herself tuning out until she realized Charlie was talking to her.
“Sorry?”
“Fig and I saw your old friend from college a few months ago. We ran into her at Moe’s and Joe’s. Dani something?”
“Daniella. She mentioned running into y’all when I saw her in New York. She’s in her third year at Emory Law, you know.”
Even though Charlie had been the one to pull Eve into the conversation, he looked past her while she spoke, scanning the crowd, a habit that had always driven her crazy.
“Help me out with something,” said Charlie, making brief eye contact with her before continuing to scan for people more important to talk to. “Why, exactly, is she in law school?”
“Um, so she can be a lawyer?”
“Sure, but how is that going to work? I mean, I suppose she could be an associate at a firm for a few years, but what happens when she wants to start having babies?”
“Are you kidding? Mom could have had a full-time job for all the time she spent with us when we were little. Daniella will just hire someone like Ada to take care of her kids—if she has them at all.”
“I told you, she’d hire someone like Ada.”
“Ada might have helped out when we were little, but when we were sick, Mom was there.”
She thought of the chicken and rice soup her mother made every time either she or Charlie had a bad cold.
“Chuck’s got a point,” said Warren. “I mean, isn’t becoming a mother sort of the pinnacle of a woman’s life? Is Daniella really going to skip out on that? Isn’t her Young Republican husband going to want a brood of rug rats all his own?”
Warren still referred to Pete as “the Young Republican” even though it had been years since Pete claimed loyalty to the GOP.
“All I’m saying,” Charlie lectured, “is that I think it’s dangerous when we get away from our innate roles. Daniella’s bright, no doubt, but she essentially stole a spot in her class that should have gone to a man who will one day need to provide for his family.”
“You’re a chauvinist pig,” said Eve. She pointed at Warren. “You, too.”
“I would be willing to bet one hundred dollars that she quits five years into whatever job she gets in order to start pushing out babies,” said Charlie.
Warren laughed.
“Hilarious,” muttered Eve, and she walked away from both of them, toward the other side of the crowded room. Several people cast sideways glances at her as she made her way through. These were people she once knew, but she had no intention of talking to any of them. What would she say? “Hi, Mrs. Calhoun! I find your entire way of life offensive!”
She imagined that most people in this room felt the same as Charlie did about women pursuing serious careers, not to mention nearly every man in Daniella’s law class. God, poor Daniella. For a moment she ached for her old friend, who must be under such scrutiny so much of the time. But then she reconsidered. The truth was Daniella probably deserved whatever shit she got. Not because she was “stealing” a spot in her law school class, as Charlie claimed, but because she was of the erroneous belief that she could change the system from within. When it came to the system, the only thing you could “change from within” was yourself. Entering the system would change you. You would acclimate to its norms.
We Are All Good People Here Page 9