We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  “So how’s ol’ Uncle Sam treating you, Oscar?” Warren asked. “You glad you risked your life for him? You glad you gave all you got, including your goddamn teeth?”

  Oscar wore a set of VA-provided dentures, though Warren was never clear on whether he lost his teeth during combat or if they had just rotted over the years from neglect. Some nights, when Oscar was in a more contemplative mood, he would pull his dentures out and rest them on a napkin on the bar, his jaw strangely slack while he stared off into the distance.

  “Fuck you, man,” Oscar answered. “We would have won already if it weren’t for you fucking traitors with your nigger marches.”

  “Is that right, Oscar, is that right?” Warren cooed, though really, he wanted to punch the guy in the mouth. “I served, too, you know. Yep. Dedicated my life to the cause I believe in.” He held up his dog tags that had Minh, Ho Chi engraved on each side, twirled them in front of Oscar’s nose.

  Oscar never seemed to remember having seen them before. He squinted at the letters until he could make them out and then slurred, “You goddamn commie!”

  “You’re goddamn right!” Warren answered.

  This was their standard banter. In fact, Warren was pretty sure they had exchanged the exact same lines the last time they saw each other. But tonight Oscar was pissing him off more than he was amusing him, or maybe he was just pissed off to begin with.

  Nigger marches, for fuck’s sake.

  He had always known Oscar to be a reactionary blowhard, sure, but he tried to think of Oscar as a victim of the system, a poor kid from the Midwest who didn’t know any better than to show up at the induction center when his draft number came up.

  But re-upping for a second tour threw a wrench in that theory, didn’t it?

  “So how come you went on two tours, man? They hold a gun to your head?”

  Oscar slurped his whisky. “Nah, man. I liked it. Liked how nuts it was. Shit, it would be out-of-your-skull boring for days on end, and then, suddenly, without even realizing it, you were in the middle of combat and there was shit flying all around you and you were shooting as fast as you could, and then you looked up and you’d killed more gooks than you could count and you were still alive, man. You were still alive.”

  The seed of an idea took root in Warren’s brain.

  “You see any action like what happened in My Lai?”

  “Shit, man. I would have done the same damn thing if I’d been there. I did do the same damn thing, all over that country. I mowed the Vietcong down.”

  “How’d you know they were VC?” Warren asked. He already knew how Oscar would answer, but he wanted to hear him say it.

  “How did I know? Because they had slant eyes. Because they all had fucking slant eyes.”

  “You’re a real class act, you know that, Oscar?”

  “Go on and judge, you pussy. You think you could tell the difference between a peasant and a VC? The peasants were the VC. Shit, they’d offer you a light in the morning and set a booby trap to blow you up at night. Lieutenant Calley is a goddamn hero. The fact that he’s sitting behind bars right now is the real crime.”

  Warren didn’t bother to correct Oscar, to tell him that Calley wasn’t behind bars, was under house arrest in the comfort of his own apartment, in this very state. Instead, Warren got quiet. Quiet and calm. He thought of what Eve once told him when they were frying rice in a skillet full of hot oil. “Be careful when the oil gets still,” she had said. “When it’s still, it’s dangerous.”

  He was becoming very, very still as he mapped out his plan. Most likely Eve would not be at home when he returned from the bar. Most likely she would be spending the night at Jane’s, sipping a cup of herbal tea and plotting her retreat.

  But Warren was still on the front lines. He was in the middle of a battle. A stealth battle, but a battle nonetheless. It was almost funny. Here sat Oscar in some comfortable bar in Atlanta, Georgia, and he didn’t even realize a VC was sitting right beside him, inviting him back to his place, telling him he had a six-pack there, a six-pack and a joint, just ready to be lit.

  Chapter 9

  GHOSTS

  Atlanta, 1972

  That afternoon, Norah Pringle, a junior from White Oak, a new progressive high school in Druid Hills, had come to Daniella’s office at Henritz & Powers to interview her. On the phone Norah had said that she wanted to talk to Daniella about being a “barrier-breaking female attorney in the Deep South.” Daniella corrected her, saying that Atlanta was not the Deep South, it was the New South, and if Norah didn’t know the difference between those two concepts, then White Oak was not doing its job when it came to teaching social studies. Daniella forced a laugh after that, hoping to soften her words. She knew that among the secretaries at the firm she had a reputation for being a bitch, a fact she hated but did not know how to avoid, not if she wanted to have any authority at all.

  Daniella had greeted the girl in the lobby and introduced her to Miss Betty, who was in her sixties and had run the front desk since she was widowed after the Second World War. Miss Betty was professional as always, despite Norah’s outrageous outfit—bell bottoms pressed so tight against her pelvis they revealed the dip of her vaginal lips, and a Rolling Stones T-shirt with its arms cut off, the better to show off her armpit hair. As Daniella raced the young woman to her office, trying to avoid any of her colleagues (in particular Bob Powers, known as a stickler for office decorum), she tried to suspend her judgment of the girl. After all, it had only been two years since she was dismissed by the judge her first day in court for wearing a pantsuit instead of a skirt.

  Still, Daniella couldn’t help but find the girl irritating. It didn’t help that Norah’s first observation, upon seeing Daniella’s office, was to remark that it wasn’t a corner one. Or that she dropped into the chair across from Daniella’s desk and kicked her feet up over its side, as if she were in the high school smoking lounge, ready to shoot the shit. Or her compulsion to yell “sexist pig!” at every anecdote Daniella shared about being the first female attorney at the firm—how clients were always assuming she was the secretary, how clients would go behind her back and ask to be switched to a male attorney after meeting with her.

  Daniella didn’t want to come across as a scold, but she did try to impress upon the girl that shouting “sexist pig!” at stories of discrimination wasn’t really going to change anything. Instead, Daniella explained, you had to work for change at both the institutional and the individual level. For Daniella this meant pushing for Georgia—and every state—to ratify the ERA and continuing to be superlative at her job, so good that Henritz & Powers would suffer were she driven out, so good that some of the clients who had initially asked for a man to work on their case ended up requesting Daniella specifically.

  “Yeah, but aren’t you just falling into the trap of tokenism?” the girl asked. “Like, if you’re five times better than anyone else at the firm, sure, maybe they’ll let you stay, but will that really change anything about the system, about how women are treated in general? And you won’t ever make partner, will you?”

  “It matters to have a woman in the room who isn’t just taking notes or bringing coffee,” Daniella said. “As for making partner, I don’t think that’s an impossibility.”

  Daniella was not bullshitting; she believed every word she said. Change would not happen without women who held power in the workforce. She knew this. Yet the girl’s words still bothered her, hours after the interview concluded. Was she simply a token? Did her presence at Henritz & Powers matter? Daniella had decided to go to law school because of her time in Mississippi, realizing that the only way to change the system was to change the laws. Then the sweet old judge she had clerked for during her first year out of Emory Law had suggested she apply for the position at Henritz & Powers, assuring her that ultimately she would make real and lasting change by being the first female associate they ever hired. And of course the money was good, which mattered, since Pete was still in grad school. But
other than a pro-bono case now and then, most of Daniella’s work consisted of writing contracts for big companies when they decided either to merge or to dissolve.

  Pete had managed to hold on to his ideals more solidly than she had her own. The dissertation he was writing helped tear a hole in the myth of Reconstruction after the Civil War: That it had been a terrible time of scalawags and carpetbaggers come to take advantage of the broken South, using the newly freed Negroes as pawns who didn’t know any better than to be used. Instead, Pete was documenting what a time of great hope and democracy it was for those formerly enslaved, until the compromised election of 1876, when the white southern Democrats agreed that Rutherford B. Hayes could take the presidency if federal troops left the South. After the federal troops retreated, God help the black people left behind as white terror began once again, a terror that continued through that summer she had spent in Mississippi, nearly ninety years later.

  The research and analysis Pete was undertaking was both necessary and important, and it demanded nearly all of his attention and time. All spring he had spent his nights working late at Emory’s Woodruff Library. In the earliest days of their marriage, she would bring him cookies from Rhodes Bakery when he stayed late working, and he would do the same for her during exams, though he usually brought her a burger and fries from George’s, which they would eat on the steps of the law library, enjoying the night air, the brief break. But now when Pete worked late, she tended to stay at the office and work late, too. She liked the quiet, when no one else was around except for the night janitor, emptying trash cans.

  • • •

  It wasn’t until she had put away her brief and was walking through the underground lot to her car that she realized why the young girl from White Oak had left her feeling so agitated: She reminded Daniella of Eve. Physically, the girl was Eve’s opposite: dark haired, wiry, sharp featured. But her arrogance, her perpetual sense of outrage, the way she just threw herself into a chair without asking if it was okay for her to sit there, she was Eve all over again.

  Daniella started up her green Volvo 142, a gift from Pete, with help from his parents, when she graduated from law school and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. The last time she had seen Eve was several years ago in New York, when she and Pete met Eve and Warren for Chinese food. Eve spent the entire night either complaining that the restaurant wasn’t authentic enough or nodding along with whatever nonsense Warren spouted, even fawning idiotically over the ring he wore, which he claimed was made from the metal of an American fighter jet, shot down by the North Vietnamese. Later that night, in their small hotel room at 96th and Lexington, Pete had told her that he almost walked out of the restaurant when Warren started boasting of his ring, staying only because he knew how important Eve’s friendship had once been to Daniella.

  Back then Eve was teaching at a newly formed “free” school in the Bronx, and Daniella could tell just from listening to Eve talk about her students that she was an excellent teacher, observant, empathic, and effective. But she was pretty sure Eve was no longer teaching. She had heard from a mutual college friend that Eve was now completely entrenched in some militant faction of the antiwar movement, the Weathermen, or something like them. Pete called such groups “Hoover’s Favorite Radicals,” as he believed that their ilk did more damage to liberal causes than J. Edgar Hoover could ever possibly do himself.

  When Daniella graduated from law school, she somehow convinced herself that since her own life was progressing, Eve’s must be, too, and so she had phoned Eve’s childhood home in Atlanta, looking up the number in the white pages. Eve’s mother had answered, and while she exclaimed in all of the right places when Daniella reintroduced herself and informed Mrs. Whalen of her new last name, Daniella detected emptiness behind the manners. When she finally asked about Eve, Mrs. Whalen’s response was cold: “We have not heard from her in a year.”

  Daniella was driving down Peachtree now, past the Fox Theatre and the Georgian Terrace. Normally she would cut over on Tenth to make her way to Morningside, but instead she continued north on Peachtree, thinking she might drop by Oxford Books, which had recently opened in Buckhead. She was not ready to go home to an empty house. Better to find a new novel to read and maybe have a coffee at the bookstore’s café, The Cup and Chaucer, which reminded her a little of the Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York, where Eve once worked.

  Oh, Eve. Why was she preoccupied with thoughts of her old friend, and why did it still hurt to think of her? Perhaps because she had yet to find anyone to fill her place. As the only female attorney at her firm, she had to be careful in her dealings with her male colleagues, lest one of them think she was interested. And she couldn’t really befriend the secretaries, even though her formality with them had earned her a bad reputation. Her old friend Kitty was in Atlanta but was now the mother of four children, ages one, three, four, and five. While Daniella and Pete enjoyed the occasional supper at Kitty and Jim’s house, it was a noisy place where adult conversation was impossible, with one child after another constantly interrupting. For her part, Kitty seemed happy as a clam, the central figure in all of those young people’s lives, living in her picturesque two-story house on a quiet street near Emory, where the window boxes were filled with seasonally appropriate flowers and tricycles and bicycles littered the driveway.

  She certainly understood Kitty’s draw toward hearth and home. Didn’t she spend what little free time she had decorating their Morningside Tudor-style cottage that she and Pete had bought for a song? (Twenty-six thousand dollars, to be exact, the entire sum given to them by Pete’s parents.) She and Pete had gone to Danish Modern on Piedmont and purchased a teak sideboard and dining room table, along with eight Eames dining room chairs. In the living room was the old upholstered recliner from Pete’s childhood home and a Pfister modular sofa Daniella had paid too much for, but she didn’t care because she adored it, loved its clean lines and handsome leather.

  Their light brown ceramic dishes came from Heath, purchased direct from the factory in Sausalito during their honeymoon in the Bay Area. In Sausalito, they also bought a copper sculpture that hung on their kitchen wall—three figures standing by a bus bench, holding umbrellas.

  Pete did most of the cooking during the week, that or they would go to George’s for a burger. But on Saturday nights she liked to embark on culinary projects, making something complicated from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking or Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food. Too often it was just Pete and her eating their boeuf bourguignon or lamb tagine. Pete had good friends from the history department, and she liked them fine, but they all had wives with babies, with whom she felt obligated to chat about vegetable purees and Montessori preschools, all the while girding herself for that awkward moment in the conversation when one of the women would ask Daniella when she and Pete were going to have kids. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to become a mother; indeed, she very much wanted to meet the child she and Pete would make. But she could not fathom how she could have a child and stay at the firm. She was already working impossible hours, and if she had any hope of making partner she needed to keep it up. And even though she was ambivalent about the very nature of the work she was doing, the idea of being kicked off the partner track because of biology filled her with rage, a rage so intense she tried to avoid feeling it at all. Better to leave the wives in the kitchen and go join the men, as they tackled the weighty subjects of the day—Nixon, Kissinger, the upcoming retrial of Daniel Ellsberg—not to mention the respective subjects of their dissertations.

  Of course, most gatherings usually ended with everyone sitting around the living room smoking a joint, but that presented its own set of problems. The last time they had entertained three couples at their house, Bernie Fisher, outrageously stoned, had suggested they do a “partner swap” for kicks. If Pete hadn’t been so stoned himself he would have been aghast. Instead, he just leaned back against the couch and laughed, while shaking his head “no.”
Absolutely not.

  • • •

  She pulled into the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center parking lot, hoping the lights of the bookstore were still on. She did not want to go home alone to an empty house. She did not want to simply do her nighttime rituals, get into bed, and then wake up in the morning to face the same routine all over again. She wasn’t unhappy, exactly, but she wasn’t exactly happy, either. Was adult life supposed to be happy? Mostly she was just uncertain how she had gotten where she was, the sole female attorney in a prestigious Atlanta firm, married to a rising academic star to whom Emory would surely offer a tenured professorship. Was this success? Surely this was success. Did loneliness always accompany success? Probably.

  Oxford Books was a respite. And the store was still open, thank God, open until 10:00 p.m. according to the sign on the door. She took in the wood chip smell of all of those new books. She stood still for a moment before detouring from her usual destination—Fiction and Literature. Instead, she found the Poetry section. Still on a nostalgia trip, she wanted to thumb through Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen. She had left her copy in Mississippi with Hattie Lewis. She wondered how Hattie and James were doing. They had kept up with each other through letters for a few months after Daniella returned to Barnard, but after a while their correspondence petered out.

  She picked up a collection by Denise Levertov titled Relearning the Alphabet. Norah from White Oak had mentioned it that day, had said the poems were “far out.” She was flipping through the pages when she noticed, out of the corner of her eye, a thin woman with short dark hair, the color so monotone it appeared to be dyed. She, too, was holding a book of poems, The First Cities, by Audre Lorde. Daniella kept looking. That nose, those long fingers. The woman looked like Eve. But it couldn’t be Eve—not in Atlanta, not in Buckhead.

  “Eve?” she asked. She could not help herself.